Digital Immigrants, Digital Learning: Reaching Adults through Information Literacy Instruction Online

As information literacy programs become more robust, finding methods of reaching students beyond the traditional undergraduate has become a priority for many institutions. At [institution name], efforts have been made to reach adult learners in an accelerated program targeted to nontraditional students, much of which is provided online. This article will detail how theories of adult learning have helped the authors to create a multimodal approach to information literacy instruction online for adult learners in both undergraduate and graduate programs

A Feverish Spring: A Comparative Analysis of COVID-19 News Framing in Sweden, the UK, and Egypt

Based on framing and the social responsibility theoretical frameworks, this comparative study analyzes the dominance of frames in the media coverage of the COVID-19 global pandemic across three countries that have adopted different preventative measures: Sweden (herd immunity) the United Kingdom (full lockdown) and Egypt (partial lockdown ‘curfew’). While several studies have investigated the media’s role during COVID-19, few have analyzed the frames used by the media. The analyses that were made here, for the most part, is on individual countries. The current study bridges a gap by using a comparative approach to interpret the frames discovered in news articles and the tone of these stories across six media outlets in three different countries: Sweden (Dagens Nyheter and Aftonbladet) the United Kingdom (the Guardian and the Daily Mail) and Egypt (Youm 7 and Al-Ahram). Furthermore, this paper enriches scholarly studies on media framing and public health crises in Egypt that suffer from limited research. Using a quantitative content analysis over a time frame of five months and 10 days (from January 31 to July 9, 2020), a total of 585 news stories from six media outlets were analyzed. The findings of the story discovered that the morality, human Interest and fear frames were the dominant frames presented in the media across the three countries, while the Blame frame was the least common. A closer examination revealed significant differences among the three countries in six out of the seven frames analyzed. These frames excluded the morality frame and included: the attribution of responsibility frame; the human interest frame; the economic consequences frame; the conflict frame; the fear frame and the othering frame. Moreover, the study found statistical differences in tone of news stories across the three countries

A case study of life cycle inventory of cotton curtain

Cradle-to-grave Life Cycle Assessment is used to estimate the potential environmental impacts, from the manufacturing to disposal of any product, process or activity. One of the main difficulties concerned with Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) is the lack of LCI data from developing or emerging countries. Production phase of textile is delocalized to these countries, and this fact has to be taken into account in the frame of a Global Production-Consumption chain. In this study, production location country is Pakistan and consumption takes place in France. Another scope is the textile product selection: cotton curtains were selected as a product to focus on diverse prospective in the production-consumption chain. Lastly, the assessment of environmental impacts consists in tracking all the inputs (including energy, water, etc.…) and the outputs of each step of the production-consumption chain. For example, major atmospheric pollutants such as CO2, SO2, NOx, and other particulates, are quantified

Global Consumption of Flame Retardants and Related Environmental Concerns: A Study on Possible Mechanical Recycling of Flame Retardant Textiles

Flame retardants (FRs) have been around us for decades to increase the chances of survival against fire or flame by limiting its propagation. The FR textiles, irrespective of their atmospheric presence are used in baby clothing, pushchairs, car seats, etc. The overall FR market in Asia, Europe, and the United States in 2007 was around 1.8 million metric tonnes. It is estimated that the worldwide consumption of FRs will reach 2.8 million tonnes in 2018. Unfortunately, a sustainable approach for textile waste, especially in the case of FR textiles, is absent. Incineration and landfill of FR textiles are hindered by various toxic outcomes. To address the need for sustainable methods of discarding FR textiles, the mechanical recycling of cotton curtains was evaluated

Convexity corrections via a Markov-functional approach

In this thesis, we study convexity corrections in the context of pricing exotic European products whose payoff is a function of some forward swap rate, with Constant Maturity Swaps (CMS) being a relevant example we will focus on. To do so, we proceed in two stages: firstly, we develop and implement a Markov-functional model at a single time (single-time MFM) that is calibrated to an appropriate set of market-implied distribution of the swap rates in their own swaption measures. Knowledge about these marginal distributions can be recovered from actively-traded swaption prices. We want to incorporate this information into the pricing model and study the problem, specifically allowing for long payment dates. We use this model to analyse the properties of the (joint) distribution of the forward swap rates that matter when pricing a CMS. The single-time MFM is however too computationally expensive to be used as a practical pricing model, but it provides a flexible framework through which convexity corrections can be studied. Using the insights obtained from the single-time MFM, we move on to the second stage of the thesis: the development of a fast, efficient pricing model, which we label as the ‘MF-Lite model’ that is viable in practice, and takes into account the market features of the joint distributions of the swap rates that matter most when pricing convexity-related products. We develop the model first in a one-factor context, starting the setup under the swaption measure. We observe that the model is numerically close to the one-factor single-time MFM. We then reconfigure the approach to allow for a second factor. We propose a two factor MF-Lite model set up in the forward measure