599 research outputs found
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Understanding the Impact of Covid-19 on Ethnic Minority Students: a Case Study of Open University Level 1 Computing Modules
As reported in [1] ‘Of the disparities that exist within higher education, the gap between the likelihood of White students and students from Black, Asian or minority ethnic backgrounds getting a first- or upper-second-class degree is among the starkest’. In the Open University (OU) for example, a recent research [2] found students from ethnic minorities to be at least 20% less likely to achieve excellent grades and to spend 4-12% more of study time to achieve the same performance as white students. Moreover, with the advent of COVID-19, a growing body of research suggested that students from these groups of the population, suffer disproportionally from the impacts of the pandemic [3], which inevitably impacts on their study experiences. However, recent research in the OU found that some COVID-19 arrangements such as the change of examination mode and change in work-life patterns have impacted students from ethnic minority backgrounds differently. In this paper we present findings from a project aiming to understand the impact of COVID-19 on ethnic minority students’ study experiences and performance. By means of a combination of qualitative and quantitative data analytics we first analysed the study performance and the patterns of progression, then by conducting focus groups with the teaching staff we assessed the impact of COVID-19 on the lived experiences of the students.
[1] Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Student Attainment at UK Universities (2022). Available at: https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk.
[2] Nguyen Q., Rienties B. Richardson J.T.E. (2020) Learning analytics to uncover inequality in behavioural engagement and academic attainment in a distance learning setting, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 45:4, 594-606.
[3] Arday, J. and Jones, C. (2022) “Same storm, different boats: The impact of covid-19 on black students and academic staff in UK and US higher education,” Higher Education. Available at:
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00939-0
Digital agriculture: research, development and innovation in production chains.
Digital transformation in the field towards sustainable and smart agriculture. Digital agriculture: definitions and technologies. Agroenvironmental modeling and the digital transformation of agriculture. Geotechnologies in digital agriculture. Scientific computing in agriculture. Computer vision applied to agriculture. Technologies developed in precision agriculture. Information engineering: contributions to digital agriculture. DIPN: a dictionary of the internal proteins nanoenvironments and their potential for transformation into agricultural assets. Applications of bioinformatics in agriculture. Genomics applied to climate change: biotechnology for digital agriculture. Innovation ecosystem in agriculture: Embrapa?s evolution and contributions. The law related to the digitization of agriculture. Innovating communication in the age of digital agriculture. Driving forces for Brazilian agriculture in the next decade: implications for digital agriculture. Challenges, trends and opportunities in digital agriculture in Brazil
Rethinking Education Theft Through the Lens of Intellectual Property and Human Rights
This Essay problematizes the increased propertization and commodification of education and calls for a rethink of the emergent concept of “education theft” through the lens of intellectual property and human rights. This concept refers to the phenomenon where parents, or legal guardians, enroll children in schools outside their school districts by intentionally violating the residency requirements. The Essay begins by revisiting the debate on intellectual property rights as property rights. It discusses the ill fit between intellectual property law and the traditional property model, the impediments the law has posed to public access to education, and select reforms that have emerged both inside and outside the property regime. The Essay then turns to the debate on property and education in the human rights context. It argues that the norms and practices relating to the human right to education provide important insights into the debate. It also states that the discussion in the human rights forum will help evaluate the effectiveness and limitations of introducing positive rights to foster public access to education. The Essay concludes by applying the insights gleaned from the debate on property and education in the intellectual property and human rights contexts to the phenomenon surrounding so-called “education theft.” Specifically, the Essay calls for the development of a more sophisticated understanding of property rights in their historical and socioeconomic contexts, a careful evaluation of the expediency of criminalizing residency requirement violations, and an exploration of potential technological solutions to address problems raised by these violations
The efficacy potential of cyber security advice as presented in news articles
Cyber security advice is a broad church: it is thematically expansive,
comprising expert texts, user-generated data consumed by individual users via
informal learning, and much in-between. While there is evidence that cyber
security news articles play a role in disseminating cyber security advice, the
nature and extent of that role are not clear. We present a corpus of cyber
security advice generated from mainstream news articles. The work was driven by
two research objectives. The first objective was to ascertain what kind of
actionable advice is being disseminated; the second was to explore ways of
determining the efficacy potential of news-mediated security advice. The
results show an increase in the generation of cyber security news articles,
together with increases in vocabulary complexity and reading difficulty. We
argue that these could present challenges for vulnerable users. We believe that
this corpus and the accompanying analysis have the potential to inform future
efforts to quantify and improve the efficacy potential of security advice
dissemination
4th Industry Revolution Digital Marketing Adoption Challenges in SMEs and its Effect on Customer Responsiveness
4th industrial revolution of cyber-physical technologies (4IR) intersecting digital technologies and entrepreneurship serves as an external stimulus in fostering a new method of venture creation transforming customers’ purchasing and consuming behavior. Large corporations are leading in leveraging on 4IR digital marketing for their marketing strategy but SMEs are lacking behind. This study explores the conundrum using an exploratory sequential mixed method. Semi-structured interviews were carried out on a sample selected using non-probability purposive sampling and determined through attaining thematic saturation of discursive patterns. Scale development for quantitative instruments performed using SPSS statistical software. A quantitative study was carried out on a sample size of 153 SME respondents. Analysis was undertaken by paired-sample T-test. Kuskal-Wallis H test and Spearman’s rho correlation test due to the nonparametric nature of data distribution. The outcome reveals that although SMEs are increasingly reliant on DM for their marketing strategy, most of these SMEs are only willing to invest in building low-level DM capability citing a lack of financial budget, inadequate technology infrastructure to support such setup, cyber security issues and lack of DM knowledge. Financial budget and technology infrastructure are considered the most critical concerns by SMEs with low and moderate DM adoption. However, these concerns are less pronounced in SMEs with high DM adoption. Finally, the weak but significant correlation between SMEs’ DM adoption and customer responsiveness infers the significant role of 4IR technology as an enabler of digital marketing strategy that also depends on other critical contributing factors such as price and qualit
Smart contract and web dapp for tracing sustainability indicators in the textile and clothing value chain
Mestrado em Engenharia Informática na Escola Superior de Tecnologia e Gestão do Instituto Politécnico de Viana do CasteloNa sociedade atual, o têxtil e vestuário é um dos maiores setores de mercado do mundo. O rápido crescimento desta indústria está a ter impactos sem precedentes na sustentabilidade do planeta, respondendo por consequências negativas ambientais, sociais e de saúde. As tendências da fast-fashion, juntamente com a falta de transparência na cadeia de valor têxtil global, somam-se a cenários desfavoráveis para o mundo, à medida que os níveis crescentes de poluição e consumo de recursos
dentro da cadeia de valor atingem máximos históricos a cada ano que passa. O ciclo de vida de uma peça de roupa precisa de se adaptar a um modelo económico regenerativo em vez de linear, que acaba no equivalente a um caminhão de lixo de produtos têxteis sendo descartado num aterro sanitário a cada segundo [1]. Não só as indústrias precisam de reformular os seus processos para circularizar as suas cadeias de valor e promover ações sustentáveis, mas também os consumidores precisam de participar
do processo de manter os produtos no círculo da cadeia de valor, pois cabe a eles decidir o destino final de um produto vestuário aquando o seu fim da vida útil. Com estas questões em mente, esta dissertação visa desenvolver duas soluções que possam mitigar os problemas a cima mencionados e promover ações sustentáveis rumo a uma economia circular na cadeia de valor do têxtil e vestuário. Uma solução business-to-business baseada em smart contracts do Hyperledger Fabric para gerir a cadeia de valor do têxtil e vestuário com funcionalidade de rastreabilidade foi desenvolvida
como prova de conceito para apoiar as reivindicações de sustentabilidade dos participantes na cadeia de valor, da fibra à peça final de vestuário. A actual funcionabilidade de rastreabilidade desenvolvida no smart contract fornece aos operadores da cadeia de valor a capacidade de rastrear um lote até à sua origem, contudo, também limita a escalabilidade devido ao aumento exponencial do tamanho do bloco, especialmente se considerarmos uma cadeia de valor circular. Para os consumidores, foi proposta
uma aplicação descentralizada business-to-consumer-to-consumer com elementos de eco-gamificação para promover o envolvimento e motivação do utilizador para a realização de tarefas que contribuam para a adoção de uma economia circular na cadeia de valor do têxtil e vestuário. Após testar a usabilidade da aplicação com o questionário AttrakDiff, concluiu-se que o sistema precisa de focar a sua usabilidade em prol de um produto orientado à tarefa em vez da orientação pessoal atual da aplicação
a fim de promover ações que contribuam para a economia circular da cadeia de valor do têxtil e vestuário.In today’s society, Textile and Clothing (T&C) is one of the biggest market sectors world wide.The sheer size and fast growth of this industry is having unprecedented impacts on sustainability, accounting for negative environmental, social and health consequences. The fast-fashion trends along side the lack of transparency in the global T&C value chain add up to unfavorable scenarios for the world as the increas-
ing levels of pollution and resource consumption within the value chain reach historic highs with every year that passes. The lifecycle of a clothing item needs to adapt to a regenerative economic model instead of a linear one that ends up in the equivalent of a garbage truck full of textiles being disposed into a landfill every second [1]. Not only do the industries need to revamp their processes to circularize their value chains and promote sustainable actions, but the consumers also need to partake in the process of keeping the products in the value chain loop as it is up to them to make the final decision upon the end-of-life of an item of clothing. With these issues in mind,this dissertation aims to develop two solutions that can mitigate the aforementioned problems and promote sustainable actions towards a circular economy in the T&C value chain. A Proof-of-Concept (PoC) Business-to-Business (B2B) T&C value chainmanagement smart contract solution builton Hyperledger Fabric with traceability features
was developed to support the sustainability claims of participants in the value chain, from fiber to garment. The current traceability feature developed into the smart contract provides value chain operators the capabilities to trace a batch back to its origin, however, it also constraints scalability due to the exponential in crease in block size specially if considering a circular value chain. For the consumers, a Business-to-Consumer-to-Consumer (B2C2C) Decentralized Application (DApp) was proposed
with eco-gamification elements fo rpromoting the user’s engagement and motivation to complete tasks that contribute for the adoption of a circular economy in the T&C value chain. After testing the consumer DApp’s usability with the AttrakDiff survey, it was concluded that the system needs to focus it susability towards a task-oriented product instead of the current self-oriented results in order to promote actions that contribute to the circular economy of the T&C value chain
Digital agriculture: research, development and innovation in production chains.
Digital transformation in the field towards sustainable and smart agriculture. Digital agriculture: definitions and technologies. Agroenvironmental modeling and the digital transformation of agriculture. Geotechnologies in digital agriculture. Scientific computing in agriculture. Computer vision applied to agriculture. Technologies developed in precision agriculture. Information engineering: contributions to digital agriculture. DIPN: a dictionary of the internal proteins nanoenvironments and their potential for transformation into agricultural assets. Applications of bioinformatics in agriculture. Genomics applied to climate change: biotechnology for digital agriculture. Innovation ecosystem in agriculture: Embrapa?s evolution and contributions. The law related to the digitization of agriculture. Innovating communication in the age of digital agriculture. Driving forces for Brazilian agriculture in the next decade: implications for digital agriculture. Challenges, trends and opportunities in digital agriculture in Brazil.Translated by Beverly Victoria Young and Karl Stephan Mokross
Commons in Design
The scarcity of resources, climate change, and the digitalization of everyday life are fuelling the economy of swapping, sharing, and lending—all of which are in some way linked to a culture of commoning. In this context, we understand commons as community-based processes that use, collectively manage, and organize generally accessible resources—referring to both goods and knowledge.
Commons in Design explores the meaning and impact of commons—especially knowledge-based peer commons—and acts of commoning in design. It discusses networked, participatory, and open procedures based on the commons and commoning, testing models that negotiate the use of commons within design processes. In doing so, it critically engages with questions regarding designers’ positionings, everyday practices, self-understandings, ways of working, and approaches to education
Exploring Factors and Impact of Blockchain Technology Adoption in the Food Supply Chains
Globalization has also increased the complexity and difficulty of addressing these issues and enhancing efficiency in FSCs. The adoption of blockchain technology (BCT) has been proven to have the potential to transform the FSC based on its potential benefits. BCT promises to improve FSC processes. However, little is known about the factors that drive blockchain adoption within the FSC and the impact of BCT supply chain processes, as empirical evidence is scarce within the existing literature. This study, therefore, explores key factors, impacts, and challenges of blockchain adoption in the FSC
Jornadas Nacionales de Investigación en Ciberseguridad: actas de las VIII Jornadas Nacionales de Investigación en ciberseguridad: Vigo, 21 a 23 de junio de 2023
Jornadas Nacionales de Investigación en Ciberseguridad (8ª. 2023. Vigo)atlanTTicAMTEGA: Axencia para a modernización tecnolóxica de GaliciaINCIBE: Instituto Nacional de Cibersegurida
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