7,968 research outputs found

    Educating Sub-Saharan Africa:Assessing Mobile Application Use in a Higher Learning Engineering Programme

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    In the institution where I teach, insufficient laboratory equipment for engineering education pushed students to learn via mobile phones or devices. Using mobile technologies to learn and practice is not the issue, but the more important question lies in finding out where and how they use mobile tools for learning. Through the lens of Kearney et al.’s (2012) pedagogical model, using authenticity, personalisation, and collaboration as constructs, this case study adopts a mixed-method approach to investigate the mobile learning activities of students and find out their experiences of what works and what does not work. Four questions are borne out of the over-arching research question, ‘How do students studying at a University in Nigeria perceive mobile learning in electrical and electronic engineering education?’ The first three questions are answered from qualitative, interview data analysed using thematic analysis. The fourth question investigates their collaborations on two mobile social networks using social network and message analysis. The study found how students’ mobile learning relates to the real-world practice of engineering and explained ways of adapting and overcoming the mobile tools’ limitations, and the nature of the collaborations that the students adopted, naturally, when they learn in mobile social networks. It found that mobile engineering learning can be possibly located in an offline mobile zone. It also demonstrates that investigating the effectiveness of mobile learning in the mobile social environment is possible by examining users’ interactions. The study shows how mobile learning personalisation that leads to impactful engineering learning can be achieved. The study shows how to manage most interface and technical challenges associated with mobile engineering learning and provides a new guide for educators on where and how mobile learning can be harnessed. And it revealed how engineering education can be successfully implemented through mobile tools

    Quantification of epigenetic bases and oxidative lesions in lung tissues

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    Political Rights during the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Slovak Republic

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    The article is a result of the APVV–17–0561 project ‘Human-legal and ethical aspects of cybersecurity’.Political rights are an essential part of modern states’ constitutions as certain means through which power is exercised in the state. The article points to the existence and exercise of political rights in the Slovak Republic at the time of extraordinary circumstances related to the global COVID-19 pandemic. It analyses the options of their restriction within the sense of the Constitutional Law no. 227/2002 Statutes on State Security in Time of War, State of War, Extraordinary Circumstances and State of Emergency, and it also points to the decision-making activities of the Constitutional Court of the Slovak Republic related thereto.Alena Krunková - [email protected] Dobrovičová - [email protected] Krunková – doc. JUDr., PhD at the Department of Constitutional Law and Administrative Law, Faculty of Law, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia. Since 2019 Chairwoman of the UPJŠ Commission for VVGS – Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice.Gabriela Dobrovičová – prof. JUDr. at the Department of Theory of the State and Law, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia. From 2011 to 2019 she held a position of the Dean of the Faculty of Law, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice. Member of the Slovak Section of the International Association for Legal and Social Philosophy (IVR).Alena Krunková: Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, SlovakiaGabriela Dobrovičová: Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia, SlovakiaAct No. 83/1990 Coll. on the Association of Citizens, as amended.Act No. 314/2018 Coll. on the Constitutional Court of the Slovak Republic.Antoš M. and Wintr J. (eds.), Constitutional Law and Coronavirus, Prague: Leges, 2021.BayVGH, Beschl. v. 27.04. 2020 – 20 NE 20.793 –, Rn. 45.Bílková V., Kysela J., Šturma P. et al. (eds.), States of Exception and Human Rights, Prague: Aditorium 2016.Bujňák V., The Prohibition of Exercising the Right to Peaceful Assembly at Christmas in the Context of Developments to Date, Comenius blog,: https://comeniusblog.flaw.uniba.sk/2020/11/12/zakaz-uplatnovania-prava-pokojne-sa-zhromazdovat-pocas-vianoc-v-kontexte-doterajsieho-vyvoja/.Burda E., State of emergency, restriction of the right to assemble and legal risks connected with disrespecting it, https://comeniusblog.flaw.uniba.sk/2020/11/15/nudzovy-stav-obmedzenie-zhromazdovacieho-prava-a-pravne-rizika-spojene-s-jeho-nerespektovanim/.Buštíková L. and Baboš P., Best in Covid: Populists in the Time of Pandemic, ‘Politics and Governance’ 2020, Volume 8, Issue 4, pp. 496–508.BVerfG, Beschl. v. 15. 04. 2020– 1 BvR 828/20 – (www.bverfg.de).Called based on the Decision of the Speaker of the National Council of the Slovak Republic No. 187/2020 Coll. of 4 July 2020.Called based on the Decision of the Speaker of the National Council of the Slovak Republic No. 54/2021 Coll. of 9 February 2021.Called based on the Decision of the Speaker of the National Council of the Slovak Republic No. 235/2021 Coll. of 8 June 2021.Čič M. et al., Commentary to the Constitution of the Slovak Republic, Bratislava: Eurokódex, s.r.o., 2012.Dobrovičová G., A few notes on the measures of the Public Health Authority of the Slovak Republic, https://comeniusblog.flaw.uniba.sk/2020/11/09/niekolko-poznamok-k-opatreniam-uradu-verejneho-zdravotnictva-slovenskej-republiky/.Domin M., Elections in a Time of Pandemic (Constitutional Law Perspective), https://comeniusblog.flaw.uniba.sk/2020/03/18/volby-v-case-pandemie-ustavnopravny-pohlad/.Domin M., Isolation in the Home Environment and the Exercise of the Right to Vote, https://comeniusblog.flaw.uniba.sk/2020/07/28/izolacia-v-domacom-prostredi-a-vykon-volebneho-prava/#_ft n1.Domin M., What to do with an assembly held in violation of the state of emergency conditions?, https://comeniusblog.flaw.uniba.sk/2020/10/22/co-robit-so-zhromazdenim-konanym-v-rozpore-s-podmienkami-nudzoveho-stavu/.Drgonec J., Basic Rights and Freedoms according to the Constitution of the Slovak Republic, Volume II, Bratislava: MANZ, 1999.Drgonec J., Fundamental Rights and Freedoms and Derived Jurisdiction of the Constitutional Court of the Slovak Republic, (in:) L. Orosz and T. Majerčák et al. (eds.), Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms by the Constitutional Court and International Judicial Bodies – III –Constitutional Days, Košice, 2014.Drgonec J., Constitution of the Slovak Republic, Th eory and Practice, 2nd Revised and Supplemented Edition, Bratislava: C.H. Beck, 2019.Engler S., Brunner P., Loviat R., Abou-Chadi T., Leemann L., Glaser A. and Kubler D., Democracy in times of the pandemic: explaining the variation of COVID-19 policies across European democracies, ‘West European Politics’ 2021, vol. 44, nos. 5–6, 1077–1102.Finding File Ref. PL. ÚS 11/2010 of 23 November 2010.Finding File Ref. II. ÚS 439/2016 of 27 October 2016.Finding File Ref. II. ÚS 307/2014 of 18 December 2014.Finding File Ref. PL. ÚS 4/2016 of 10 May 2017.Finding File Ref. PL. ÚS 15/98 of 11 March 1999.Finding of the Constitutional Court of the Slovak Republic PL. ÚS 4/2021 of 8 December 2021.Fisherová I., Forejtová M., Klíma P. and Kramář K. (eds.) Tribute to Karel Klím on His 70th Birthday. Constitutionality as a Criterion of the Legal Order (National and European), Prague: Metropolitan University Prague Press, Wolters Kluwer ČR, 2021.Forejtová M., The Constitutionality of Restrictions on Freedom of Movement in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic.Holländer P., Stories of Legal Concepts, Pilsen: Aleš Čeněk, 2017.Jovičič S, COVID-19 restrictions on human rights in the light of the case-law of the European Court of HumanRights, ERA Forum (2021) 21:545–560, Published online: 6 October 2020.Košičiarová S., Right and Duty to Associate (Public-Law Aspects), Prague: Leges, 2019.Kysela J., Constitution between Law and Politics – Introduction to Constitutional Th eory, Prague: Leges, 2014.Lysina R., Imposing quarantine on Roma settlements – Fast and Furious Ride of the Regional Public Health Authorities?, https://comeniusblog.flaw.uniba.sk/2021/02/26/karantenizacia-romskych-osad-rychla-a-zbesila-jazda-regionalnych-uradov-verejneho-zdravotnictva/.Ondřejek P., Proportionality of Measures Adopted in Emergencies, ‘Journal for Legal Science and Practice’, XXVIII, 4/2020.Ooyen van R.Ch. and Wasserman H., Recht und Politik. Supplement 7. Zeitschrift für deutsche und europäische Rechtspolitik. Corona und Grundgesetz, Berlin: Duncker & Humboldt, 2021.Ruling File Ref. II. ÚS 105/07 of 24 May 2007.Slovák I., A few remarks on criminal liability of persons spreading conspiracies during the COVID-19 pandemic, https://comeniusblog.flaw.uniba.sk/2020/10/28/niekolko-poznamok-k-trestnej-zodpovednosti-osob-siriacich-konspiracie-v-case-pandemie-COVID-19/.Svák J. and Grünwald T., National Systems of Human Rights Protection, Volume I, Structure of Systems and Protection of Political Rights, Bratislava: Wolters Kluwer, 2019.Thomson S. and Eric C. Ip., COVID-19 emergency measures and the impending authoritarian pandemic, ‘Journal of Law and the Biosciences’ 2020, Oxford University Press, 1–33.Venice Commission, CDL (2020)018, Interim report on the measures taken by the EU Member States as a result of the COVID-19 crisis and their impact on democracy, the rule of law and fundamental rights, 8 October 2020, point 58.2729110

    Hunting Wildlife in the Tropics and Subtropics

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    The hunting of wild animals for their meat has been a crucial activity in the evolution of humans. It continues to be an essential source of food and a generator of income for millions of Indigenous and rural communities worldwide. Conservationists rightly fear that excessive hunting of many animal species will cause their demise, as has already happened throughout the Anthropocene. Many species of large mammals and birds have been decimated or annihilated due to overhunting by humans. If such pressures continue, many other species will meet the same fate. Equally, if the use of wildlife resources is to continue by those who depend on it, sustainable practices must be implemented. These communities need to remain or become custodians of the wildlife resources within their lands, for their own well-being as well as for biodiversity in general. This title is also available via Open Access on Cambridge Core

    Balancing the urban stomach: public health, food selling and consumption in London, c. 1558-1640

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    Until recently, public health histories have been predominantly shaped by medical and scientific perspectives, to the neglect of their wider social, economic and political contexts. These medically-minded studies have tended to present broad, sweeping narratives of health policy's explicit successes or failures, often focusing on extraordinary periods of epidemic disease viewed from a national context. This approach is problematic, particularly in studies of public health practice prior to 1800. Before the rise of modern scientific medicine, public health policies were more often influenced by shared social, cultural, economic and religious values which favoured maintaining hierarchy, stability and concern for 'the common good'. These values have frequently been overlooked by modern researchers. This has yielded pessimistic assessments of contemporary sanitation, implying that local authorities did not care about or prioritise the health of populations. Overly medicalised perspectives have further restricted historians' investigation and use of source material, their interpretation of multifaceted and sometimes contested cultural practices such as fasting, and their examination of habitual - and not just extraordinary - health actions. These perspectives have encouraged a focus on reactive - rather than preventative - measures. This thesis contributes to a growing body of research that expands our restrictive understandings of pre-modern public health. It focuses on how public health practices were regulated, monitored and expanded in later Tudor and early Stuart London, with a particular focus on consumption and food-selling. Acknowledging the fundamental public health value of maintaining urban foodways, it investigates how contemporaries sought to manage consumption, food production waste, and vending practices in the early modern City's wards and parishes. It delineates the practical and political distinctions between food and medicine, broadly investigates the activities, reputations of and correlations between London's guild and itinerant food vendors and licensed and irregular medical practitioners, traces the directions in which different kinds of public health policy filtered up or down, and explores how policies were enacted at a national and local level. Finally, it compares and contrasts habitual and extraordinary public health regulations, with a particular focus on how perceptions of and actual food shortages, paired with the omnipresent threat of disease, impacted broader aspects of civic life

    The company she keeps : The social and interpersonal construction of girls same sex friendships

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    This thesis begins a critical analysis of girls' 'private' interpersonal and social relations as they are enacted within two school settings. It is the study of these marginal subordinated worlds productivity of forms of femininity which provides the main narrative of this project. I seek to understand these processes of (best) friendship construction through a feminist multi-disciplinary frame, drawing upon cultural studies, psychoanalysis and accounts of gender politics. I argue that the investments girls bring to their homosocial alliances and boundary drawing narry a psychological compulsion which is complexly connected to their own experiences within the mother/daughter bond as well as reflecting positively an immense social debt to the permissions girls have to be nurturant and ; negatively their own reproduction of oppressive exclusionary practices. Best friendship in particular gives girls therefore, the experience of 'monogamy' continuous of maternal/daughter identification, reminiscent of their positioning inside monopolistic forms of heterosexuality. But these subcultures also represent a subversive discontinuity to the public dominance of boys/teachers/adults in schools and to the ideologies and practices of heterosociality and heterosexuality. By taking seriously their transmission of the values of friendship in their chosen form of notes and diaries for example, I was able to access the means whereby they were able to resist their surveillance and control by those in power over them. I conclude by arguing that it is through a recognition of the valency of these indivisiblly positive and negative aspects to girls cultures that Equal Opportunities practitioners must begin if they are serious about their ambitions. Methods have to be made which enable girls to transfer their 'private' solidarities into the 'public' realm, which unquestionably demands contesting with them the causes and consequences of their implication in the divisions which also contaminate their lives and weaken them

    Recent Hong Kong cinema and the generic role of film noir in relation to the politics of identity and difference

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    This thesis identifies a connection in Hong Kong cinema with classical Hollywood film noir and examines what it will call a 'reinvestment' in film noir in recent films. It will show that this reinvestment is a discursive strategy that both engages the spectator-subject in the cinematic practice and disengages him or her from the hegemony of the discourse by decentring the narrative. The thesis argues that a cinematic practice has occurred in the recent reinvestment of film noir in Hong Kong, which restages the intertextual relay of the historical genre that gives rise to an expectation of ideas about social instability. The noir vision that is seen as related to the fixed categories of film narratives, characterizations and visual styles is reassessed in the course of the thesis using Derridian theory. The focus of analysis is the way in which the constitution of meanings is dependent on generic characteristics that are different. Key to the phenomenon is a film strategy that destabilizes, differs and defers the interpretation of crises-personal, social, political and/or cultural-by soliciting self-conscious re-reading of suffering, evil, fate, chance and fortune. It will be argued that such a strategy evokes the genre expectation as the film invokes a network of ideas regarding a world perceived by the audience in association with the noirish moods of claustrophobia, paranoia, despair and nihilism. The noir vision is thus mutated and transformed when the film device differs and defers the conception of the crises as tragic in nature by exposing the workings of the genre amalgamation and the ideological function of the cinematic discourse. Thus, noirishness becomes both an affect and an agent that contrives a self-reflexive re-reading of the tragic vision and of the conventional comprehension of reality within the discursive practice. The film strategy, as an agent that problematizes the film form and narrative, gives rise to what I call a politics of difference, which may also be understood as the Lyotardian 'language game' or a practice of 'pastiche' in Jameson's terminology. Under the influence of the film strategy, the spectator is enabled to negotiate his or her understanding of recent Hong Kong cinema diegetically and extra-diegetically by traversing different positions of cinematic identification. When the practice of genre amalgamation adopts the visual impact of the noirish film form, the film turns itself into a playing field of 'fatal' misrecognition or a site of question. Through cinematic identification and alienation from the identification, the spectator-subject is enabled to experience the misrecognition as the film slowly foregrounds the way in which the viewer's presence is implicated in the narrative. This thesis demonstrates that certain contemporary Hong Kong films introduce this selfconscious mode of explication and interpretation, which solicits the spectator to negotiate his or her subject-position in the course of viewing. The notions of identity and subjectivity under scrutiny will thus be reread. With reference to The Private Eye Blue, Swordsman II, City a/Glass and Happy Together, the thesis shall explore the ways in which the Hong Kong films enable and facilitate a negotiation of cultural identity

    Towards the development of care management in community care for elderly people in Korea

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    This study is concerned with the feasibility of several forms of care management in the development of community care for elderly people in Korea. Chapter one introduces the background of community care in Korea in the light of demographic, socio-economic, and political realities. This chapter reviews the changing Korean society as a barometer to understand the scope, size, and speed of social needs, especially community care for elderly people, over the last few decades. Chapter two explores various definitions, concepts, and theories of community, community care, and care management by building upon trends previously established in the research. This helps to identify the different models of care management and the pre-conditions necessary for the application of different models in Korea. Chapter three explores what factors have affected the development of community care, and what community dare has achieved for elderly people in the UK. Especially, care management in community care for elderly people in the UK is examined in detail. Chapter four details the findings of field research on community care for elderly people in Korea. This covers the needs of elderly people and their carers, and the social worker's tasks and available resources. The potential for the use of care management based on the findings of field research is assessed. Chapter five investigates whether the UK models of care management are suitable for Korean society, which interventions are useful for developing care management, and the strategies, and principles involved
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