Technological literacy reconsidered: a model for enactment

The final publication is available at: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10798-009-9108-6.This paper presents a model to describe technological literacy as enacted by individuals in the course of shaping their lives and the world around them. The model has two interrelated facets – the potential for and enactment of technological literacy – where enactment and potential mutually constitute each other. This potential is made up of knowledge of a particular situation, personal engagement with a situation, and social engagement in the world. Enactment requires a particular set of competencies in action, which together helps shape the situation: recognizing needs; articulating problems; contributing towards the technological process; and analysing consequences. The implications of this model for technological literacy in the context of the individual and society, and the role of technology education in developing technological literacy, are discussed

An instrument to determine the technological literacy levels of upper secondary school students

In this article, an instrument for assessing upper secondary school students’ levels of technological literacy is presented. The items making up the instrument emerged from a previous study that employed a phenomenographic research approach to explore students’ conceptions of technology in terms of their understanding of the nature of technology and their interaction with technological artefacts. The instrument was validated through administration to 1,245 students on completion of their 12 years of formal schooling. A factor analysis was conducted on the data and Cronbach alpha reliability coefficients determined. The results show that a five-dimension factor structure (namely, artefact, process, direction/instruction, tinkering, and engagement) strongly supported the dimensions as developed during the original phenomenographic study. The Cronbach alpha reliability co-efficient of each dimension was satisfactory. Based on these findings, the instrument has been shown to be valid and reliable and can be used with confidence

Effects of Once-Weekly Exenatide on Cardiovascular Outcomes in Type 2 Diabetes.

Abstract BACKGROUND: The cardiovascular effects of adding once-weekly treatment with exenatide to usual care in patients with type 2 diabetes are unknown. METHODS: We randomly assigned patients with type 2 diabetes, with or without previous cardiovascular disease, to receive subcutaneous injections of extended-release exenatide at a dose of 2 mg or matching placebo once weekly. The primary composite outcome was the first occurrence of death from cardiovascular causes, nonfatal myocardial infarction, or nonfatal stroke. The coprimary hypotheses were that exenatide, administered once weekly, would be noninferior to placebo with respect to safety and superior to placebo with respect to efficacy. RESULTS: In all, 14,752 patients (of whom 10,782 [73.1%] had previous cardiovascular disease) were followed for a median of 3.2 years (interquartile range, 2.2 to 4.4). A primary composite outcome event occurred in 839 of 7356 patients (11.4%; 3.7 events per 100 person-years) in the exenatide group and in 905 of 7396 patients (12.2%; 4.0 events per 100 person-years) in the placebo group (hazard ratio, 0.91; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.83 to 1.00), with the intention-to-treat analysis indicating that exenatide, administered once weekly, was noninferior to placebo with respect to safety (P<0.001 for noninferiority) but was not superior to placebo with respect to efficacy (P=0.06 for superiority). The rates of death from cardiovascular causes, fatal or nonfatal myocardial infarction, fatal or nonfatal stroke, hospitalization for heart failure, and hospitalization for acute coronary syndrome, and the incidence of acute pancreatitis, pancreatic cancer, medullary thyroid carcinoma, and serious adverse events did not differ significantly between the two groups. CONCLUSIONS: Among patients with type 2 diabetes with or without previous cardiovascular disease, the incidence of major adverse cardiovascular events did not differ significantly between patients who received exenatide and those who received placebo. (Funded by Amylin Pharmaceuticals; EXSCEL ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT01144338 .)

Taking advantage of tumor cell adaptations to hypoxia for developing new tumor markers and treatment strategies

Cancer cells in hypoxic areas of solid tumors are to a large extent protected against the action of radiation as well as many chemotherapeutic drugs. There are, however, two different aspects of the problem caused by tumor hypoxia when cancer therapy is concerned: One is due to the chemical reactions that molecular oxygen enters intoin therapeutically targeted cells. This results in a direct chemical protection against therapy by the hypoxic microenvironment which has little to do with cellular biological regulatory processes. This part of the protective effect of hypoxia has been known for more than half a century and has been studied extensively. However, in recent years more focus has been put into the other aspect of hypoxia, namely the effect of this microenvironmental condition on selecting cells with certain genetical pre-requisites that are negative with respect to patient prognosis. There are adaptive mechanisms, where hypoxia induces regulatory cascades in cells resulting in a changed metabolism or changes in extra cellular signalling. These processes may lead to changes in cellular intrinsic sensitivity to treatment irrespective of oxygenation and furthermore, may also have consequences for tissue organization. Thus, the adaptive mechanisms induced by hypoxia itself may have a selective effect on cells with a fine-tuned protection against damage and stress of many kinds. It therefore could be that the adaptive mechanisms may be taken advantage of for new tumor labelling/imaging and treatment strategies. One of the Achilles’ heels of hypoxia research has always been exact measurements of tissue oxygenation as well as control of oxygenation in biological tumor models. Thus, development of technology that can ease this control is vital in order to study mechanisms and perform drug development under relevant conditions. An integrated EU Framework project 2004-2009, termed Euroxy, demonstrates several pathways involved in transcription and translation control of the hypoxic cell phenotype and evidence of cross talk with responses to pH and redox changes. The carbon anhydrase isoenzyme CA IX was selected for further studies due to its expression on the surface of many types of hypoxic tumors. The effort has lead to marketable culture flaks with sensors and incubation equipment and the synthesis of new drug candidates against new molecular targets. New labelling/imaging methods for cancer diagnosing and imaging of hypoxic cancer tissue now are being tested in xeno-graft models and also are in early clinical testing while new potential anticancer drugs are undergoing tests using xenografted tumor cancers. The present paper describes the above results in individual consortium partner presentations