279 research outputs found
Street Name Data as a Reflection of Migration and Settlement History
Street names (odonyms) play an important role not only as descriptors of geographic locations but also due to their sociological and political connotations and commemorative character. Here we analyse street names in Europe and North America extracted from OpenStreetMap, asking in particular to what extent odonyms reflect early European settlements in the New World, i.e., the immigration of German, Austrian and Scandinavian minorities. We observe that old street names of European origin can predominantly be found in rural areas. North American street names indeed recapitulate local and regional settlement histories. The aim of this study is to demonstrate that easily accessible data sets from freely available map data such as street names convey usable information concerning migration patterns and the history of settlements in the case of European immigrants in North America as well as colonial history. We provide a freely available pipeline to analyse this kind of data
What constitutes a 'risky' identity? : the social representation of the risk of contracting HIV among South African students.
This research aimed to explore the social representation of a ‘risky identity’ with regard to
HIV. 12 students participated in the research and these participants were required to take
photographs regarding their perceptions of a ‘risky identity’. Each participant also took part
in a semi-structured interview that prompted discussion of the photographs and the different
factors perceived to influence the risk of HIV infection. These interviews were audiorecorded
and transcribed. Discourse analysis was used to analyse the data and how the
participants position the ‘other’ as more at risk of HIV infection than the self. The analysis
also revealed that the most common factor perceived to influence the risk of HIV infection is
substance use. Other factors include: gender, race, age, and socio-economic status.
Interestingly, the participants found it easier to attribute risk to behavioural and
environmental factors, whereas they were more reluctant to associate risk with factors such as
race and gender. In fact, when doing so, many of the participants emphasised the impact of
environmental and behavioural factors as a means to justify their perceptions. The risk of
justifying social representations in such a manner is that prejudiced attitudes remain, just in a
seemingly more socially acceptable form. Subsequently, it is recommended that HIV
prevention programs go beyond education to critical discussions about issues of identity and
the social representations and risk perceptions influencing sexual behaviour
Evaluating a City Lab Process in Mannheim's district Neckarstadt-West: Three main challenges for the evaluation
During the last few years, city labs have emerged as promising formats to address transformative change. The aim of these formats often is to create collaborative spaces in which different stakeholders can jointly experiment with novel solutions for certain problems. While city labs start to establish transdisciplinary research settings, evaluating the effects of a city lab still brings about several chal- lenges. In this contribution, we reflect on three main challenges that emerged in the course of evaluating a city lab in Mannheim’s district Neckarstadt-West. The city lab was conducted as part of the research project SONNET (Social Innovation in Energy Transitions) and aimed to encourage social innovation in energy and thereby enable local energy transition. In the context of evaluating the city lab, we identified three main challenges that were related to a) evaluating an ongoing and open process, b) external shocks (especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic) and c) evaluating new forms of innovation under the concept of ‘social innovation’. The main achievement of this evaluation was to trace the process of a city lab and identify changes in objectives as well as the engagement of different stakeholder groups. However, an evaluation of the city lab’s outcomes remains challenging due to the openness of the process. This suggests rethinking linear evaluation models in favour of co-designing evaluation criteria in the course of the city lab process
Learning to solve ill-defined statistics problems: does self-explanation quality mediate the worked example effect?
Extensive research has established that successful learning from an example is conditional on an important learning activity: self-explanation. Moreover, a model for learning from examples suggests that self-explanation quality mediates effects of examples on learning outcomes (Atkinson et al. in Rev Educ Res 70:181–214, 2000). We investigated self-explanation quality as mediator in a worked examples—problem-solving paradigm. We developed a coding scheme to assess self-explanation quality in the context of ill-defined statistics problems and analyzed self-explanation data of a study by Schwaighofer et al. (J Educ Psychol 108: 982–1000, 2016). Schwaighofer et al. (J Educ Psychol 108: 982–1000, 2016) investigated whether the worked example effect depends on prior knowledge, working memory capacity, shifting ability, and fluid intelligence. In our study, we included these variables to jointly explore mediating and moderating factors when individuals learn with worked examples versus through problem-solving. Seventy-four university students (mean age = 23.83, SD = 5.78) completed an open item pretest, self-explained while either studying worked examples or solving problems, and then completed a post-test. We used conditional process analysis to test whether the effect of worked examples on learning gains is mediated by self-explanation quality and whether any effect in the mediation model depends on the suggested moderators. We reproduced the interaction effects reported by Schwaighofer et al. (J Educ Psychol 108: 982–1000, 2016) but did not detect a mediation effect. This might indicate that worked examples are directly effective because they convey a solution strategy, which might be particularly important when learning to solve problems that have no algorithmic solution procedure
Securing Personal Items in Public Space: Stories of Attacks and Threats
While we put great effort in protecting digital devices and data, there is a lack of research on usable techniques to secure personal items that we carry in public space. To better understand situations where ubiquitous technologies could help secure personal items, we conducted an online survey (N=101) in which we collected real-world stories from users reporting on personal items, either at risk of, or actually being lost, damaged or stolen. We found that the majority of cases occurred in (semi-)public spaces during afternoon and evening times, when users left their items. From these results, we derived a model of incidents involving personal items in public space as well as a set of properties to describe situations where personal items may be at risk. We discuss reoccurring properties of the scenarios, potential multimedia-based protection mechanisms for securing personal items in public space as well as future research suggestions
Spiders can be recognized by counting their legs
Spiders are arthropods that can be distinguished from their closest
relatives, the insects, by counting their legs. Spiders have 8, insects just 6.
Spider graphs are a very restricted class of graphs that naturally appear in
the context of cograph editing. The vertex set of a spider (or its complement)
is naturally partitioned into a clique (the body), an independent set (the
legs), and a rest (serving as the head). Here we show that spiders can be
recognized directly from their degree sequences through the number of their
legs (vertices with degree 1). Furthermore, we completely characterize the
degree sequences of spiders
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