Assessing regional digital competence: Digital futures and strategic planning implications

Understanding strategic decisions aimed at addressing regional economic issues is of increasing interest among scholars and policy makers today. Thus, studies that proffer effective strategies to address digital futures concerns from social and policy perspectives are timely. In light of this, this research uses strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis tool to frame a regional strategy for digital futures to enhance place-specific digital connectivity and socio-economic progress. Focus group discussions and a structured questionnaire were conducted to examine a SWOT for a digital economy strategy in the Southern Downs Region in Queensland, Australia. The findings show that while the proposed regional strategies for digital futures are susceptible to internal and external forces, strategic planning makes them manageable. The study’s findings also reveal that adaptive strategic planning can help regulate the effects of internal and external factors that shape individual and organisational responses to digital transformation, and that these factors promote regional competitiveness

Phase field model of premelting of grain boundaries

We present a phase field model of solidification which includes the effects of the crystalline orientation in the solid phase. This model describes grain boundaries as well as solid-liquid boundaries within a unified framework. With an appropriate choice of coupling of the phase field variable to the gradient of the crystalline orientation variable in the free energy, we find that high angle boundaries undergo a premelting transition. As the melting temperature is approached from below, low angle grain boundaries remain narrow. The width of the liquid layer at high angle grain boundaries diverges logarithmically. In addition, for some choices of model coupling, there may be a discontinuous jump in the width of the fluid layer as function of temperature.Comment: 6 pages, 9 figures, RevTeX

QCD Sum Rules, Scattering Length and the Vector Mesons in Nuclear Medium

Critical examination is made on the relation between the mass shift of vector mesons in nuclear medium and the vector-meson $-$ nucleon scattering length. We give detailed comparison between the QCD sum rule approach by two of the present authors (Phys. Rev. {\bf C46} (1992) R34) and the scattering-length approach by Koike (Phys. Rev. {\bf C51} (1995) 1488). It is shown that the latter approach is mortally flawed both technically and conceptually.Comment: 16 pages, latex, 4 figures appended as uu-encoded fil

LO-MATCH: A semantic platform for matching migrants' competences with labour market's needs

Citizens' mobility and employability are receiving ever more attention by the European legislation. Various instruments have been defined to overcome lexical and semantic differences in the descriptions of qualifications, résumés and job profiles. However, the above differences still represent a significant constraint when abilities of non-European people have to be validated either for education and training or occupation purposes. In this work, a web platform that exploits semantic technologies to address such heterogeneity issues is presented. The platform allows migrants to annotate their knowledge, skills and competences in a shared format based on the European tools. The resulting knowledge base is then used to enable the automatic matchmaking of job seekers' abilities with companies' needs. The platform can additionally be used to support students and workers in the identification of their competence gap with respect to a given education or occupation opportunity, so that to personalize their further trainin

GROWING UP IN IRELAND. KEY FINDINGS: COHORT ’08 AT 9 YEARS OLD. NO. 2 SCHOOL AND LEARNING. Cohort '08 November 2018

This series of Key Findings draws on information provided by the Cohort ‘08 9-year-old and his or her Primary Caregiver (usually the mother, and henceforth in this report referred to as the mother). The series is based on the 7,563 9-year-olds whose families participated in the study at ages 9 months, 3 years, 5 years and 9 years old. This Key Findings report is the second in a series from this latest round of data collection from Cohort ’08 at 9 years of age. It looks at children’s attitudes to school and specific school subjects and relates these to their family context and to their skills and dispositions at the age of 5. At the time of the survey, almost all children were in school. Of these, 9% were in second class, 66% were in third class and 24% were in fourth class.1 Out-of-school learning is also examined and mothers’ reports of their support for, and involvement in, their child’s education are discussed

GROWING UP IN IRELAND. KEY FINDINGS: COHORT ’08 AT 9 YEARS OLD. NO. 3 HEALTH AND PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT. Cohort '08 November 2018

This series of Key Findings draws on information provided by the Cohort ‘08 9-year-old and his or her Primary Caregiver (usually the mother, and henceforth in this report referred to as the mother). The series is based on the 7,563 9-year-olds whose families participated in the study at ages 9 months, 3 years, 5 years and 9 years old. This Key Findings report is the third in the series from the latest round of data collection from Cohort ’08 and is the first report on the health and physical development of these children. It covers key health indicators as reported by the mother, such as general health, longstanding conditions and diet. It examines the children’s own reports of their physical activity as well as their measured weight status. In addition, it looks at how the health of the 9-year-olds varies by family circumstances and by the children’s health status at ages 3 and 5

GROWING UP IN IRELAND KEY FINDINGS: COHORT ’98 AT 20 YEARS OLD IN 2018/19 NO. 3 SOCIO-EMOTIONAL WELL-BEING AND KEY RELATIONSHIPS AT AGE 20

This Key Findings report presents summary information on the lives and circumstances of the 20-year-olds from the fourth wave of interviews with Growing Up in Ireland’s older Cohort ’98 between August 2018 and June 2019. It focuses on life satisfaction, stress, depressive symptoms, self-reported aggression and coping strategies. It also describes key relationships for the young adult, including relationships with parents and friends, and dating relationships

STAN4 : a hybrid planning strategy based on subproblem abstraction

Planning domains often feature subproblems such as route planning and resource handling. Using static domain analysis techniques, we have been able to identify certain commonly occurring subproblems within planning domains, making it possible to abstract these subproblems from the overall goals of the planner and deploy specialized technology to handle them in a way integrated with the broader planning activities. Using two such subsolvers our hybrid planner, stan4, participated successfully in the Fifth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling (AIPS'00) planning competition