5,532 research outputs found

    Undergraduate Catalog of Studies, 2023-2024

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    Making change against the odds:Entrepreneurial pursuits among young professionals in South Africa

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    Global middle classes appear to be on the rise: more and more people live or aspire to the associated consumptive or professional lifestyles. At the same time, entrepreneurialism has become mainstream in international development discourse and -practices, yet income security and financial stability have diminished for most people. Together these trends present a complex historical situation for current generations trying to build their lives. In this study I analyze how pressures for middle-class ways of living, the proliferation of entrepreneurialism, and pervasive insecurity intertwine in the lives of young professionals in South Africa, and how they grapple with the inherent tensions. I present an ethnographic case study of participants in business incubators, startup hubs and entrepreneurial events, based on eleven months of fieldwork in Johannesburg and Cape Town between 2015 and 2019. How to understand their entrepreneurial aspirations and continued engagement despite volatile and uncertain outcomes? I argue that young professionals’ uptake of entrepreneurship is a situated, cultural practice through which they renegotiate the aspirational legacies of apartheid and the promises of the transition amidst deepening inequalities, rather than the effect of hegemonic neoliberalism. Foregrounding entrepreneurship’s positive potential and the incompleteness of reality, I argue that it offers a practical mode of becoming, of realizing social changes and of changing in itself. In short, this dissertation shows how the appeal of entrepreneurship in the case of Johannesburg’s young professionals makes sense as a way to realize the possibilities for success and the conditions of respectability in post-transition times

    Energy storage design and integration in power systems by system-value optimization

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    Energy storage can play a crucial role in decarbonising power systems by balancing power and energy in time. Wider power system benefits that arise from these balancing technologies include lower grid expansion, renewable curtailment, and average electricity costs. However, with the proliferation of new energy storage technologies, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify which technologies are economically viable and how to design and integrate them effectively. Using large-scale energy system models in Europe, the dissertation shows that solely relying on Levelized Cost of Storage (LCOS) metrics for technology assessments can mislead and that traditional system-value methods raise important questions about how to assess multiple energy storage technologies. Further, the work introduces a new complementary system-value assessment method called the market-potential method, which provides a systematic deployment analysis for assessing multiple storage technologies under competition. However, integrating energy storage in system models can lead to the unintended storage cycling effect, which occurs in approximately two-thirds of models and significantly distorts results. The thesis finds that traditional approaches to deal with the issue, such as multi-stage optimization or mixed integer linear programming approaches, are either ineffective or computationally inefficient. A new approach is suggested that only requires appropriate model parameterization with variable costs while keeping the model convex to reduce the risk of misleading results. In addition, to enable energy storage assessments and energy system research around the world, the thesis extended the geographical scope of an existing European opensource model to global coverage. The new build energy system model ‘PyPSA-Earth’ is thereby demonstrated and validated in Africa. Using PyPSA-Earth, the thesis assesses for the first time the system value of 20 energy storage technologies across multiple scenarios in a representative future power system in Africa. The results offer insights into approaches for assessing multiple energy storage technologies under competition in large-scale energy system models. In particular, the dissertation addresses extreme cost uncertainty through a comprehensive scenario tree and finds that, apart from lithium and hydrogen, only seven energy storage are optimizationrelevant technologies. The work also discovers that a heterogeneous storage design can increase power system benefits and that some energy storage are more important than others. Finally, in contrast to traditional methods that only consider single energy storage, the thesis finds that optimizing multiple energy storage options tends to significantly reduce total system costs by up to 29%. The presented research findings have the potential to inform decision-making processes for the sizing, integration, and deployment of energy storage systems in decarbonized power systems, contributing to a paradigm shift in scientific methodology and advancing efforts towards a sustainable future

    Antecedents, Moderators, Mediators and Outcome of Open Innovation: A Study Among Manufacturing Firms in the UK

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    This thesis integrates the resource-based theory, the capability-based view, and the contingency approach to examine the key antecedents, moderators, mediators, and outcomes of open innovation. Based on a rigorous systematic literature review, using a comprehensive set of survey data from 206 UK manufacturing firms, this thesis integrates three interrelated papers on open innovation. The first paper examines the current state of knowledge in open innovation literature. Nine hundred and forty-four (944) articles from leading journals on open innovation were reviewed and synthesised. Overall, the findings identify common themes in the literature and highlight research gaps that, if pursued, could enrich the literature. The second paper examines the influence of technological capability and marketing capability on inbound and outbound open innovation, and the moderating effect of government support. The study shows that technological capability enhances inbound and outbound open innovation, while marketing capability hinders inbound and outbound open innovation. In addition, the study shows that the interaction of government support and technological capability is significant and positive for inbound open innovation, but insignificant for outbound open innovation. Furthermore, the interaction of government support and marketing capability is significant and negative for both inbound and outbound open innovation. The third paper examines the internal mechanisms between inbound and outbound open innovation on firm performance. It was found that both inbound and outbound open innovation were not significantly related to firm performance. In addition, strategic flexibility negatively mediated the relationship between outbound open innovation and firm performance, while innovation performance did not mediate this relationship. Furthermore, strategic flexibility and innovation performance were serial mediators in the relationship between outbound open innovation and firm performance. In addition, organisational relearning positively moderated the relationship between inbound open innovation and firm performance

    1st Design Factory Global Network Research Conference ‘Designing the Future’ 5-6 October 2022

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    DFGN.R 2022 -Designing the Future - is the first research conference organised by the Design Factory Global Network. The open event offers the opportunity for all like-minded educators, designers and researchers to share their insights and inspire others on education, methods, practices and ecosystems of co-creation and innovation. The DFGN.R conference is a two-day event hosted on-site in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands. The conference is organized alongside International Design Factory Week 2022, the annual gathering of DFGN members. This year's conference is organized in collaboration with Aalto University from Helsinki Finland and hosted by the NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences

    The opinions of science and mathematics teachers about beliefs, practices, and implementation of meaningful learning in Israel. A case study of Arab middle school(s)

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    Wydział Studiów EdukacyjnychWiele badań pokazuje, że przekonania nauczycieli dotyczące nauczania i uczenia się silnie oddziałują na ich praktykę zawodową. Celem tej pracy było zbadanie przekonań i praktyk nauczycieli przedmiotów ścisłych i matematyki w arabskich szkołach średnich w Izraelu w obliczy wdrażania nowej reformy edukacyjnej w tym kraju, silnie osadzonej na koncepcji meaningful learning. Zgodnie z tą koncepcją, uczniowie powinni być aktywni i zaangażowani w proces rozwiązywania problemów, którego rdzeniem jest szeroko ujmowany dialog pomiędzy uczestnikami procesu uczenia się. W badaniach wykorzystano strategię badań jakościowych. Prowadzono obserwacje w klasie, częściowo ustrukturyzowane wywiady oraz analizy dokumentów (m.in. planów lekcji, testów, arkuszy roboczych) i notatek terenowych. Uczestnikami badania było dwudziestu nauczycieli z trzech szkół średnich w społeczeństwie arabskim. Uzyskane dane pozwoliły zarysować obraz przekonań tych nauczycieli na temat meaningful learning oraz zidentyfikować sytuacje, które nauczyciele postrzegają jako realizację tej koncepcji. Praca kończy się rekomendacjami dotyczącymi dalszych etapów wdrażania reformy edukacji w Izraelu.The introduction of a new reform potentially challenges teachers’ beliefs and practices about teaching. This case study explores these challenges in the context of a new reform in Israel, where major educational reform has been undertaken. A considerable body of research, alternatively, advocates that teachers’ beliefs about teaching and learning affect their teaching practices and many aspects of their professional work. These beliefs and practices influence many factors on the contextual and teacher levels. Thus, this study aimed to investigate and understand Arab middle school science and mathematics teachers’ beliefs, practices, and implementation of meaningful learning in Israel. The resulting data served to construct a background picture regarding teachers’ beliefs on meaningful learning, classroom practices, and identifying situations that teachers perceived as the implementation of meaningful learning. The study found also that curricular demands, teacher perceptions of their students, pressures of time, assessment, crowded classrooms, lack of resources, workload, and inadequate teacher understanding of the components of meaningful learning inhibited student- centered instruction. Thus, along with the reformation of teachers, there should also be a reformation in the context of the learning atmosphere and infrastructures in tune with the new reform’s intentions

    Safe Collaborative Filtering

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    Excellent tail performance is crucial for modern machine learning tasks, such as algorithmic fairness, class imbalance, and risk-sensitive decision making, as it ensures the effective handling of challenging samples within a dataset. Tail performance is also a vital determinant of success for personalised recommender systems to reduce the risk of losing users with low satisfaction. This study introduces a "safe" collaborative filtering method that prioritises recommendation quality for less-satisfied users rather than focusing on the average performance. Our approach minimises the conditional value at risk (CVaR), which represents the average risk over the tails of users' loss. To overcome computational challenges for web-scale recommender systems, we develop a robust yet practical algorithm that extends the most scalable method, implicit alternating least squares (iALS). Empirical evaluation on real-world datasets demonstrates the excellent tail performance of our approach while maintaining competitive computational efficiency

    2023-2024 Catalog

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    The 2023-2024 Governors State University Undergraduate and Graduate Catalog is a comprehensive listing of current information regarding:Degree RequirementsCourse OfferingsUndergraduate and Graduate Rules and Regulation
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