Assessing the values of archaeological heritage

The main aim of this paper involves contributing to the discussion around the value of archaeological heritage through the lens of an economist. The path taken to achieve this main goal included three objectives. Firstly, there is the contribution towards clarifying the concept of archaeological heritage benefits by highlighting the complexity that stems directly from its holistic characteristic. Secondly, this also contributes to assessments of archaeological heritage economic and social benefits and values by demonstrating how they may be captured by means of a single variable measured in monetary units. Furthermore, and thirdly, this then helps explain how such a monetary variable may prove of use both to cultural heritage management for sustainable preservation and conservation improvement, and to the appraisal of the total private and public benefits arising out of preservation and conservation archaeologic heritage programs

Tackling the multidimensional characteristics of archaeological heritage with preference based approaches

The main aim of this paper involves contributing to the discussion around the value of archaeological heritage through the lens of an economist. The path taken to achieve this main goal included three objectives. Firstly, there is the contribution towards clarifying the concept of archaeological heritage benefits by highlighting the complexity that stems directly from its holistic characteristic. Secondly, this also contributes to assessments of archaeological heritage economic and social benefits and values by demonstrating how they may be captured by means of a single variable measured in monetary units. Furthermore, and thirdly, this then helps explain how such a monetary variable may prove of use both to cultural heritage management for sustainable preservation and conservation improvement, and to the appraisal of the total private and public benefits arising out of preservation and conservation archaeologic heritage projects.peer-reviewe

EFFECTIVE COLLEGE TEACHING AND STUDENTS’ RATINGS OF TEACHERS: WHAT STUDENTS THINK, WHAT FACULTY BELIEVE, AND HAT ACTUAL RATINGS SHOW IMPLICATIONS FOR POLICY AND PRACTICE IN TEACHING QUALITY ASSURANCE AND CONTROL IN HIGHER EDUCATION IN OMAN

This study examines the extent to which teachers’ (N=248) and students’ (N=968) perceptions of effective teaching and students’ evaluations of teachers in six colleges of technology in Oman match or mismatch. It also investigates Omani students’ (N=922) ability to identify the teaching dimensions underlying a widely used American instrument used for collecting students’ evaluations of teachers and the extent to which the teaching dimensions found in Oman are similar to or different from those found in America and elsewhere in the West. In addition, the present research assesses the reliability of students’ ratings in Oman and the effect of a number of course, teacher, and student background characteristics on these ratings. Results showed that while teachers and students matched in their perceptions of various characteristics of effective teaching, they significantly differed in their valuation of many criteria of effective teaching. Differences were also observed between the two groups’ perceptions of the validity and utility of students’ ratings and the role of the student as an evaluator of teaching. The results also showed that Omani students are capable of identifying most of the teaching dimensions underlying the standardised American rating instrument. A few factors, however, appear to be inseparable in the Omani context. The inter-rater reliability of students’ ratings collected from Oman was analysed and found to be of good standard and only slightly lower than what was found in North America and Australia for the same instrument. Consistent with previous research, it appears, however, that students’ ratings are affected by various student, teacher, and course background characteristics. The evidence on the differences between teachers and students in their perceptions of quality college teaching and their criteria for judging teaching effectiveness calls for more investigation and verification. It is argued here that many of the mismatches in perceptions can be traced to students’ educational upbringing in pre-college education. Therefore, the assumption that quality can be improved in higher education irrespective of what learning styles and habits students bring with them from schools may be unrealistic. Contrary to the prevailing stance in Oman’s higher education, which generally views students’ ratings with distrust and suspicion, the present study results appear to provide preliminary support for the use of students’ ratings in Oman’s universities and colleges as a source of information in teaching evaluation and improvement. It is argued that involving students in the evaluation of teaching is an essential tool in implementing, institutionalising, and enhancing the newly introduced standards in teaching and learning

Multidimensional Knowledge Flow Dynamics in Context

Knowledge is a sustainable advantage and knowledge assets can increase value with use. A snowball effect of knowledge advantage advocates effective knowledge management and fosters its continual growth as it flows. Knowledge, however, flows unevenly throughout an organization and the problem is that the fundamental dynamics of these flows are still not well characterized in theoretical and computational models. This study built on existing work—knowledge-flow theory, need knowledge generation, and the critical success factors for enterprise resource planning implementation—to examine the multidimensional knowledge-flow phenomenon in context, and used the case study methodology for knowledge-flow theory building. The research question was two-pronged: how can need knowledge and its flow across stakeholders within an organization be explained using a multidimensional knowledge-flow model and how can Nissen’s five-dimensional knowledge-flow model be validated using a real-life immersion case? The researcher relied on three sources of evidence for this case study: project-related documentation, archival records, and interviews. Data triangulation yielded three results components: (a) a chronology of key events that obstructed knowledge flow, (b) a logic model depicting themes that contributed to knowledge-flow obstruction, and (c) explanations of the knowledge-flow patterns. This case study suggested enabling need knowledge determinants and obstructing conditions are in play that determine the path of need knowledge flow. These two research artifacts should be considered together to provide a fresh research avenue towards better understanding of knowledge flow dynamics

Theoretical and Practical Advances in Computer-based Educational Measurement

This open access book presents a large number of innovations in the world of operational testing. It brings together different but related areas and provides insight in their possibilities, their advantages and drawbacks. The book not only addresses improvements in the quality of educational measurement, innovations in (inter)national large scale assessments, but also several advances in psychometrics and improvements in computerized adaptive testing, and it also offers examples on the impact of new technology in assessment. Due to its nature, the book will appeal to a broad audience within the educational measurement community. It contributes to both theoretical knowledge and also pays attention to practical implementation of innovations in testing technology

A multi-dimensional trust-model for dynamic, scalable and resources-efficient trust-management in social internet of things

L'internet des Objets (IoT) est un paradigme qui a rendu les objets du quotidien, intelligents en leur offrant la possibilité de se connecter à Internet, de communiquer et d'interagir. L'intégration de la composante sociale dans l'IoT a donné naissance à l'Internet des Objets Social (SIoT), qui a permis de surmonter diverse problématiques telles que l'interopérabilité et la découverte de ressources. Dans ce type d'environnement, les participants rivalisent afin d'offrir une variété de services attrayants. Certains d'entre eux ont recours à des comportements malveillants afin de propager des services de mauvaise qualité. Ils lancent des attaques, dites de confiance, et brisent les fonctionnalités de base du système. Plusieurs travaux de la littérature ont abordé ce problème et ont proposé différents modèles de confiance. La majorité d'entre eux ont tenté de réappliquer des modèles de confiance conçus pour les réseaux sociaux ou les réseaux pair-à-pair. Malgré les similitudes entre ces types de réseaux, les réseaux SIoT présentent des particularités spécifiques. Dans les SIoT, nous avons différents types d'entités qui collaborent, à savoir des humains, des dispositifs et des services. Les dispositifs peuvent présenter des capacités de calcul et de stockage très limitées et leur nombre peut atteindre des millions. Le réseau qui en résulte est complexe et très dynamique et les répercussions des attaques de confiance peuvent être plus importantes. Nous proposons un nouveau modèle de confiance, multidimensionnel, dynamique et scalable, spécifiquement conçu pour les environnements SIoT. Nous proposons, en premier lieu, des facteurs permettant de décrire le comportement des trois types de nœuds impliqués dans les réseaux SIoT et de quantifier le degré de confiance selon les trois dimensions de confiance résultantes. Nous proposons, ensuite, une méthode d'agrégation basée sur l'apprentissage automatique et l'apprentissage profond qui permet d'une part d'agréger les facteurs proposés pour obtenir un score de confiance permettant de classer les nœuds, mais aussi de détecter les types d'attaques de confiance et de les contrer. Nous proposons, ensuite, une méthode de propagation hybride qui permet de diffuser les valeurs de confiance dans le réseau, tout en remédiant aux inconvénients des méthodes centralisée et distribuée. Cette méthode permet d'une part d'assurer la scalabilité et le dynamisme et d'autre part, de minimiser la consommation des ressources. Les expérimentations appliquées sur des de données synthétiques nous ont permis de valider le modèle proposé.The Internet of Things (IoT) is a paradigm that has made everyday objects intelligent by giving them the ability to connect to the Internet, communicate and interact. The integration of the social component in the IoT has given rise to the Social Internet of Things (SIoT), which has overcome various issues such as interoperability, navigability and resource/service discovery. In this type of environment, participants compete to offer a variety of attractive services. Some of them resort to malicious behavior to propagate poor quality services. They launch so-called Trust-Attacks (TA) and break the basic functionality of the system. Several works in the literature have addressed this problem and have proposed different trust-models. Most of them have attempted to adapt and reapply trust models designed for traditional social networks or peer-to-peer networks. Despite the similarities between these types of networks, SIoT ones have specific particularities. In SIoT, there are different types of entities that collaborate: humans, devices, and services. Devices can have very limited computing and storage capacities, and their number can be as high as a few million. The resulting network is complex and highly dynamic, and the impact of Trust-Attacks can be more compromising. In this work, we propose a Multidimensional, Dynamic, Resources-efficient and Scalable trust-model that is specifically designed for SIoT environments. We, first, propose features to describe the behavior of the three types of nodes involved in SIoT networks and to quantify the degree of trust according to the three resulting Trust-Dimensions. We propose, secondly, an aggregation method based on Supervised Machine-Learning and Deep Learning that allows, on the one hand, to aggregate the proposed features to obtain a trust score allowing to rank the nodes, but also to detect the different types of Trust-Attacks and to counter them. We then propose a hybrid propagation method that allows spreading trust values in the network, while overcoming the drawbacks of centralized and distributed methods. The proposed method ensures scalability and dynamism on the one hand, and minimizes resource consumption (computing and storage), on the other. Experiments applied to synthetic data have enabled us to validate the resilience and performance of the proposed model

Cultural impacts on web: An empirical comparison of interactivity in websites of South Korea and the United Kingdom

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel UniversityThis thesis explores cultural differences on interactive design features used in websites of South Korea and the United Kingdom from the perspective of both: professional website designers and end-users. It also investigates how the use of interactive design features from different cultures change over time. Four interaction types on websites; User to Interface (U2I), User to Content (U2C), User to Provider (U2P), and User to User (U2U) interactivity, and three interaction types on blogs; Blogger to Interface (B2I), Blogger to Content (B2C) and Blogger to Blogger (B2B) interactivity have been identified. Four cultural dimensions were used for the theoretical base of this study based on which four hypotheses were proposed in relation to the interaction types identified above; (a) High versus Low Context cultures for U2I, (b) High versus Low Uncertainty Avoidance for U2C, (c) High versus Low Power Distance for U2P and (d) Individualism versus Collectivism for U2U interactivity, in order to discover the effects of national cultures on interactivity in websites. We derived our own interactivity dimensions and mapped them to the four interaction types for websites and three for blogs. Interactive design features were derived from interactivity dimensions and examined in our studies. The findings revealed that there have been some changes towards homogeneity in the use of interactive design features on charity websites between South Korea and United Kingdom although there is still evidence of some cultural differences. With regard to end-users’ perspective, the result show that the use of interactive design features of blogs may be influenced by culture but this is only within a certain context. The findings also provide a valuable indication that users interacting within the same blog service can be considered as being shared concerns rather than shared national location, thus create a particular type of community in which bloggers are affected by social influence so they adopt a shared set of value, preferences and style that would indicate almost a common social culture. As a result, the cultural differences derived from their country of origin do not have that much impact