3,085 research outputs found

    Graduate Catalog of Studies, 2023-2024

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    Communicating a Pandemic

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    This edited volume compares experiences of how the Covid-19 pandemic was communicated in the Nordic countries – Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. The Nordic countries are often discussed in terms of similarities concerning an extensive welfare system, economic policies, media systems, and high levels of trust in societal actors. However, in the wake of a global pandemic, the countries’ coping strategies varied, creating certain question marks on the existence of a “Nordic model”. The chapters give a broad overview of crisis communication in the Nordic countries during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic by combining organisational and societal theoretical perspectives and encompassing crisis response from governments, public health authorities, lobbyists, corporations, news media, and citizens. The results show several similarities, such as political and governmental responses highlighting solidarity and the need for exceptional measures, as expressed in press conferences, social media posts, information campaigns, and speeches. The media coverage relied on experts and was mainly informative, with few critical investigations during the initial phases. Moreover, surveys and interviews show the importance of news media for citizens’ coping strategies, but also that citizens mostly trusted both politicians and health authorities during the crisis. This book is of interest to all who are looking to understand societal crisis management on a comprehensive level. The volume contains chapters from leading experts from all the Nordic countries and is edited by a team with complementary expertise on crisis communication, political communication, and journalism, consisting of Bengt Johansson, Øyvind Ihlen, Jenny Lindholm, and Mark Blach-Ørsten. Publishe

    Reshaping Higher Education for a Post-COVID-19 World: Lessons Learned and Moving Forward

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    ‘Inner qualities versus inequalities’: A case study of student change learning about Aboriginal health using sequential, explanatory mixed methods

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    Racism and lack of self-determination in health care perpetuate injury and injustice to Aboriginal people. To instil cultural safety at individual, organisational, community and systems levels, a key site of action has been health professional education that seeks to elicit reflexivity, cultural humility and a working understanding of Aboriginal health concepts. Studies in Aboriginal community settings show Family Well Being (FWB) empowerment education is effective in supporting personal and collective reflexivity and transformation through empowering life skills development. Implementation of FWB within educational settings shows early signs of effectiveness among students. Yet knowledge of the steps and processes of student change is lacking. This mixed methods explanatory case study sought to measure and understand change in postgraduate students of a leading Australian university learning about Aboriginal health and wellbeing through blended delivery, including through face-to-face immersion in FWB in an urban classroom. Three interrelated studies investigated fidelity and acceptability of the program, measured and analysed growth and empowerment in students, and explained processes of change observed, through thematic analysis of asynchronous online discussions using lenses based on transformative learning and empowerment. Researcher reflexivity was promoted by Aboriginal supervision. Over six years, 194 students enrolled in two different Aboriginal public health courses, 85 of them in the FWB course. As well as achieving program fidelity and acceptability, pre/post-course change in students across a range of emotional empowerment, personal growth and life-long learning processes was measured in the FWB group. Thematic analysis revealed students’ fluid and recursive processes of transformative learning in their professional selves and capacities to act in domains important to Aboriginal health. This case study contributes new knowledge critical to strengthening health professional capabilities for ever more complex, uncertain and emotionally demanding sites of practice, and to work in empowering ways—with, not for, Aboriginal people and communities

    Tradition and Innovation in Construction Project Management

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    This book is a reprint of the Special Issue 'Tradition and Innovation in Construction Project Management' that was published in the journal Buildings

    Corporate entrepreneurship in public sector: a systematic literature review and research agenda

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    After the financial crises of 2008, the contemporary public sector urged public managers, public administrators, and policymakers to consider alternatives to privatization in order to decrease government participation. This new approach to public management sought to enhance the government's performance and fulfil public needs resourcefully. The concept of corporate entrepreneurship (CE) in the public sector, i.e., public entrepreneurship (PE), was therefore introduced. This study aims to synthetize the literature on this topic and establish a research agenda on the PE field. By adapting hybrid approach based on a systematic and bibliometric literature review, the paper presents the results of four main bibliometric techniques: citation and co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, and co-word analysis, all of which were used by means of VosViewer software and the Bibliometrix (including Biblioshiny application) package for statistical program language R. This theme-centric review of 84 publications published in flagship journals reveals the intellectual domain of CE in the public sector, highlighting key theoretical concepts, principal research topics, the methodologies employed, the geographical span of the domain, and proposed future research avenues. This paper offers a comprehensive review of CE in the intellectual domain of the public sector. It presents fruitful research avenues with regards to the ways in which public entrepreneurial success is related to adjustability to broader political and institutional perspectives; how territorial innovation theories deal with increased resource mobility; and how a lean government could enhance civil engagement and public involvement.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    IMAGINING, GUIDING, PLAYING INTIMACY: - A Theory of Character Intimacy Games -

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    Within the landscape of Japanese media production, and video game production in particular, there is a niche comprising video games centered around establishing, developing, and fulfilling imagined intimate relationships with anime-manga characters. Such niche, although very significant in production volume and lifespan, is left unexplored or underexplored. When it is not, it is subsumed within the scope of wider anime-manga media. This obscures the nature of such video games, alternatively identified with descriptors including but not limited to ‘visual novel’, ‘dating simulator’ and ‘adult computer game’. As games centered around developing intimacy with characters, they present specific ensembles of narrative content, aesthetics and software mechanics. These ensembles are aimed at eliciting in users what are, by all intents and purposes, parasocial phenomena towards the game’s characters. In other words, these software products encourage players to develop affective and bodily responses towards characters. They are set in a way that is coherent with shared, circulating scripts for sexual and intimate interaction to guide player imaginative action. This study defines games such as the above as ‘character intimacy games’, video game software where traversal is contingent on players knowingly establishing, developing, and fulfilling intimate bonds with fictional characters. To do so, however, player must recognize themselves as playing that type of game, and to be looking to develop that kind of response towards the game’s characters. Character Intimacy Games are contingent upon player developing affective and bodily responses, and thus presume that players are, at the very least, non-hostile towards their development. This study approaches Japanese character intimacy games as its corpus, and operates at the intersection of studies of communication, AMO studies and games studies. The study articulates a research approach based on the double need of approaching single works of significance amidst a general scarcity of scholarly background on the subject. It juxtaposes data-driven approaches derived from fan-curated databases – The Visual Novel Database and Erogescape -Erogē Hyōron Kūkan – with a purpose-created ludo-hermeneutic process. By deploying an observation of character intimacy games through fan-curated data and building ludo-hermeneutics on the resulting ontology, this study argues that character intimacy games are video games where traversal is contingent on players knowingly establishing, developing, and fulfilling intimate bonds with fictional characters and recognizing themselves as doing so. To produce such conditions, the assemblage of software mechanics and narrative content in such games facilitates intimacy between player and characters. This is, ultimately, conductive to the emergence of parasocial phenomena. Parasocial phenomena, in turn, are deployed as an integral assumption regarding player activity within the game’s wider assemblage of narrative content and software mechanics

    A Cybersecurity review of Healthcare Industry

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    Antecedentes La ciberseguridad no es un concepto nuevo de nuestros días. Desde los años 60 la ciberseguridad ha sido un ámbito de discusión e investigación. Aunque los mecanismos de defensa en materia de seguridad han evolucionado, las capacidades del atacante también se han incrementado de igual o mayor manera. Prueba de este hecho es la precaria situación en materia de ciberseguridad de muchas empresas, que ha llevado a un incremento de ataques de ransomware y el establecimiento de grandes organizaciones criminales dedicadas al cibercrimen. Esta situación, evidencia la necesidad de avances e inversión en ciberseguridad en multitud de sectores, siendo especialmente relevante en la protección de infraestructuras críticas. Se conoce como infraestructuras críticas aquellas infraestructuras estratégicas cuyo funcionamiento es indispensable y no permite soluciones alternativas, por lo que su perturbación o destrucción tendría un grave impacto sobre los servicios esenciales. Dentro de esta categorización se encuentran los servicios e infraestructuras sanitarias. Estas infraestructuras ofrecen un servicio, cuya interrupción conlleva graves consecuencias, como la pérdida de vidas humanas. Un ciberataque puede afectar a estos servicios sanitarios, llevando a su paralización total o parcial, como se ha visto en recientes incidentes, llevando incluso a la pérdida de vidas humanas. Además, este tipo de servicios contienen multitud de información personal de carácter altamente sensible. Los datos médicos son un tipo de datos con alto valor en mercados ilegales, y por tanto objetivos de ataques centrados en su robo. Por otra parte, se debe mencionar, que al igual que otros sectores, actualmente los servicios sanitarios se encuentran en un proceso de digitalización. Esta evolución, ha obviado la ciberseguridad en la mayoría de sus desarrollos, contribuyendo al crecimiento y gravedad de los ataques previamente mencionados. - Metodología e investigación El trabajo presentado en esta tesis sigue claramente un método experimental y deductivo. Está investigación se ha centrado en evaluar el estado de la ciberseguridad en infraestructuras sanitarias y proponer mejoras y mecanismos de detección de ciberataques. Las tres publicaciones científicas incluidas en esta tesis buscan dar soluciones y evaluar problemas actuales en el ámbito de las infraestructuras y sistemas sanitarios. La primera publicación, 'Mobile malware detection using machine learning techniques', se centró en desarrollar nuevas técnicas de detección de amenazas basadas en el uso de tecnologías de inteligencia artificial y ‘machine learning’. Esta investigación fue capaz de desarrollar un método de detección de aplicaciones potencialmente no deseadas y maliciosas en entornos móviles de tipo Android. Además, tanto en el diseño y creación se tuvo en cuenta las necesidades específicas de los entornos sanitarios. Buscando ofrecer una implantación sencilla y viable de acorde las necesidades de estos centros, obteniéndose resultados satisfactorios. La segunda publicación, 'Interconnection Between Darknets', buscaba identificar y detectar robos y venta de datos médicos en darknets. El desarrollo de esta investigación conllevó el descubrimiento y prueba de la interconexión entre distintas darknets. La búsqueda y el análisis de información en este tipo de redes permitió demostrar como distintas redes comparten información y referencias entre ellas. El análisis de una darknet implica la necesidad de analizar otras, para obtener una información más completa de la primera. Finalmente, la última publicación, 'Security and privacy issues of data-over-sound technologies used in IoT healthcare devices' buscó investigar y evaluar la seguridad de dispositivos médicos IoT ('Internet of Things'). Para desarrollar esta investigación se adquirió un dispositivo médico, un electrocardiógrafo portable, actualmente en uso por diversos hospitales. Las pruebas realizadas sobre este dispositivo fueron capaces de descubrir múltiples fallos de ciberseguridad. Estos descubrimientos evidenciaron la carencia de certificaciones y revisiones obligatorias en materia ciberseguridad en productos sanitarios, comercializados actualmente. Desgraciadamente la falta de presupuesto dedicado a investigación no permitió la adquisición de varios dispositivos médicos, para su posterior evaluación en ciberseguridad. - Conclusiones La realización de los trabajos e investigaciones previamente mencionadas permitió obtener las siguientes conclusiones. Partiendo de la necesidad en mecanismos de ciberseguridad de las infraestructuras sanitarias, se debe tener en cuenta su particularidad diseño y funcionamiento. Las pruebas y mecanismos de ciberseguridad diseñados han de ser aplicables en entornos reales. Desgraciadamente actualmente en las infraestructuras sanitarias hay sistemas tecnológicos imposibles de actualizar o modificar. Multitud de máquinas de tratamiento y diagnostico cuentan con software y sistemas operativos propietarios a los cuales los administradores y empleados no tienen acceso. Teniendo en cuenta esta situación, se deben desarrollar medidas que permitan su aplicación en este ecosistema y que en la medida de los posible puedan reducir y paliar el riesgo ofrecido por estos sistemas. Esta conclusión viene ligada a la falta de seguridad en dispositivos médicos. La mayoría de los dispositivos médicos no han seguido un proceso de diseño seguro y no han sido sometidos a pruebas de seguridad por parte de los fabricantes, al suponer esto un coste directo en el desarrollo del producto. La única solución en este aspecto es la aplicación de una legislación que fuerce a los fabricantes a cumplir estándares de seguridad. Y aunque actualmente se ha avanzado en este aspecto regulatorio, se tardaran años o décadas en sustituir los dispositivos inseguros. La imposibilidad de actualizar, o fallos relacionados con el hardware de los productos, hacen imposible la solución de todos los fallos de seguridad que se descubran. Abocando al reemplazo del dispositivo, cuando exista una alternativa satisfactoria en materia de ciberseguridad. Por esta razón es necesario diseñar nuevos mecanismos de ciberseguridad que puedan ser aplicados actualmente y puedan mitigar estos riesgos en este periodo de transición. Finalmente, en materia de robo de datos. Aunque las investigaciones preliminares realizadas en esta tesis no consiguieron realizar ningún descubrimiento significativo en el robo y venta de datos. Actualmente las darknets, en concreto la red Tor, se han convertido un punto clave en el modelo de Ransomware as a Business (RaaB), al ofrecer sitios webs de extorsión y contacto con estos grupos

    Hybrid human-AI driven open personalized education

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    Attaining those skills that match labor market demand is getting increasingly complicated as prerequisite knowledge, skills, and abilities are evolving dynamically through an uncontrollable and seemingly unpredictable process. Furthermore, people's interests in gaining knowledge pertaining to their personal life (e.g., hobbies and life-hacks) are also increasing dramatically in recent decades. In this situation, anticipating and addressing the learning needs are fundamental challenges to twenty-first century education. The need for such technologies has escalated due to the COVID-19 pandemic, where online education became a key player in all types of training programs. The burgeoning availability of data, not only on the demand side but also on the supply side (in the form of open/free educational resources) coupled with smart technologies, may provide a fertile ground for addressing this challenge. Therefore, this thesis aims to contribute to the literature about the utilization of (open and free-online) educational resources toward goal-driven personalized informal learning, by developing a novel Human-AI based system, called eDoer. In this thesis, we discuss all the new knowledge that was created in order to complete the system development, which includes 1) prototype development and qualitative user validation, 2) decomposing the preliminary requirements into meaningful components, 3) implementation and validation of each component, and 4) a final requirement analysis followed by combining the implemented components in order develop and validate the planned system (eDoer). All in all, our proposed system 1) derives the skill requirements for a wide range of occupations (as skills and jobs are typical goals in informal learning) through an analysis of online job vacancy announcements, 2) decomposes skills into learning topics, 3) collects a variety of open/free online educational resources that address those topics, 4) checks the quality of those resources and topic relevance using our developed intelligent prediction models, 5) helps learners to set their learning goals, 6) recommends personalized learning pathways and learning content based on individual learning goals, and 7) provides assessment services for learners to monitor their progress towards their desired learning objectives. Accordingly, we created a learning dashboard focusing on three Data Science related jobs and conducted an initial validation of eDoer through a randomized experiment. Controlling for the effects of prior knowledge as assessed by the pretest, the randomized experiment provided tentative support for the hypothesis that learners who engaged with personal eDoer recommendations attain higher scores on the posttest than those who did not. The hypothesis that learners who received personalized content in terms of format, length, level of detail, and content type, would achieve higher scores than those receiving non-personalized content was not supported as a statistically significant result
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