BJET Editorial November 2016

Greetings to the BJET community from the new editorial team. We took over in July 2016 and are excited about the opportunity to lead and shape this esteemed journal. In this editorial we outline our policies and vision for the future and report on our first few months in post

BJET Editorial for the 50th Anniversary Volume in 2019: Looking back, reaching forward

The Editors are thrilled to introduce the 50th Anniversary volume of the British Journal of Educational Technology (BJET). This momentous milestone has spurred us to share with the readership our pride and sense of responsibility for editing one of the top journals in the field

Redox kinetics of the amyloid-β-Cu complex and its biological implications

The ability of the amyloid-β peptide to bind to redox active metals and act as a source of radical damage in Alzheimer’s disease has been largely accepted as contributing to the disease’s pathogenesis. However, a kinetic understanding of the molecular mechanism, which underpins this radical generation, has yet to be reported. Here we use a sensitive fluorescence approach, which reports on the oxidation state of the metal bound to the amyloid-β peptide and can therefore shed light on the redox kinetics. We confirm that the redox goes via a low populated, reactive intermediate and that the reaction proceeds via the Component I coordination environment rather than Component II. We also show that while the reduction step readily occurs (on the 10 ms time scale) it is the oxidation step that is rate-limiting for redox cycling

Restorative and conflict resolution interventions

20 pagesConflicts between peers are inevitable in schools, and schools must be equipped with strategies to assist students in avoiding conflicts and engaging in problem-solving when conflicts occur. Restorative practices and other conflict resolution interventions such as peer mediation are gaining popularity, particularly as an alternate framework to the overutilization of disciplinary punishment with ethnic minority students. This chapter discusses the effective use of restorative practices and conflict resolution interventions, with an emphasis on establishing these types of practices in schools using best practices.Preparation of this chapter was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305A180006 to University of Oregon

Random matrix analysis of network Laplacians

We analyze eigenvalues fluctuations of the Laplacian of various networks under the random matrix theory framework. Analyses of random networks, scale-free networks and small-world networks show that nearest neighbor spacing distribution of the Laplacian of these networks follow Gaussian orthogonal ensemble statistics of random matrix theory. Furthermore, we study nearest neighbor spacing distribution as a function of the random connections and find that transition to the Gaussian orthogonal ensemble statistics occurs at the small-world transition.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, replaced with the final versio

Editorial

We are delighted to take this opportunity to wish our readership, members of the Editorial Board, our International Advisory Board, authors and all our reviewers a Very Happy New Year. Reflecting on the past year, we are pleased to report that the Impact Factor for BJET rose substantially in the past year and currently stands at 2.41. The journal was ranked 22 out of 235 in ISI Journal Citation Reports Ranking in 2016 in the area of Education and Educational Research. A big thank you is due to the authors and expert reviewers who continue to push up the standards of articles, to our Editorial Board and International Advisory Board for their guidance and input, to the Critical Friends who willingly support early career researchers and other authors who need support to bring their manuscripts up to standard, to all our readers who appreciate and cite the journal’s content, and to our publisher Wiley for their efficient article processing and invaluable support to our team. The figures show that BJET is certainly a leading journal in the field of educational technology research and is going from strength to strength

Bi-Objective Community Detection (BOCD) in Networks using Genetic Algorithm

A lot of research effort has been put into community detection from all corners of academic interest such as physics, mathematics and computer science. In this paper I have proposed a Bi-Objective Genetic Algorithm for community detection which maximizes modularity and community score. Then the results obtained for both benchmark and real life data sets are compared with other algorithms using the modularity and MNI performance metrics. The results show that the BOCD algorithm is capable of successfully detecting community structure in both real life and synthetic datasets, as well as improving upon the performance of previous techniques.Comment: 11 pages, 3 Figures, 3 Tables. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:0906.061

Interplay between HIV/AIDS Epidemics and Demographic Structures Based on Sexual Contact Networks

In this article, we propose a network spread model for HIV epidemics, wherein each individual is represented by a node of the transmission network and the edges are the connections between individuals along which the infection may spread. The sexual activity of each individual, measured by its degree, is not homogeneous but obeys a power-law distribution. Due to the heterogeneity of activity, the infection can persistently exist at a very low prevalence, which has been observed in real data but can not be illuminated by previous models with homogeneous mixing hypothesis. Furthermore, the model displays a clear picture of hierarchical spread: In the early stage the infection is adhered to these high-risk persons, and then, diffuses toward low-risk population. The prediction results show that the development of epidemics can be roughly categorized into three patterns for different countries, and the pattern of a given country is mainly determined by the average sex-activity and transmission probability per sexual partner. In most cases, the effect of HIV epidemics on demographic structure is very small. However, for some extremely countries, like Botswana, the number of sex-active people can be depressed to nearly a half by AIDS.Comment: 23 pages, 12 figure

Finding and evaluating community structure in networks

We propose and study a set of algorithms for discovering community structure in networks -- natural divisions of network nodes into densely connected subgroups. Our algorithms all share two definitive features: first, they involve iterative removal of edges from the network to split it into communities, the edges removed being identified using one of a number of possible "betweenness" measures, and second, these measures are, crucially, recalculated after each removal. We also propose a measure for the strength of the community structure found by our algorithms, which gives us an objective metric for choosing the number of communities into which a network should be divided. We demonstrate that our algorithms are highly effective at discovering community structure in both computer-generated and real-world network data, and show how they can be used to shed light on the sometimes dauntingly complex structure of networked systems.Comment: 16 pages, 13 figure