Sustainable Smart Cities and Smart Villages Research

ca. 200 words; this text will present the book in all promotional forms (e.g. flyers). Please describe the book in straightforward and consumer-friendly terms. [There is ever more research on smart cities and new interdisciplinary approaches proposed on the study of smart cities. At the same time, problems pertinent to communities inhabiting rural areas are being addressed, as part of discussions in contigious fields of research, be it environmental studies, sociology, or agriculture. Even if rural areas and countryside communities have previously been a subject of concern for robust policy frameworks, such as the European Union’s Cohesion Policy and Common Agricultural Policy Arguably, the concept of ‘the village’ has been largely absent in the debate. As a result, when advances in sophisticated information and communication technology (ICT) led to the emergence of a rich body of research on smart cities, the application and usability of ICT in the context of a village has remained underdiscussed in the literature. Against this backdrop, this volume delivers on four objectives. It delineates the conceptual boundaries of the concept of ‘smart village’. It highlights in which ways ‘smart village’ is distinct from ‘smart city’. It examines in which ways smart cities research can enrich smart villages research. It sheds light on the smart village research agenda as it unfolds in European and global contexts.

Measuring the Scale and Scope of Workplace Bullying: An Alternative Workplace Bullying Scale

The toll of workplace bullying is immense, yet, similarly as with an iceberg, its scope, scale and implications tend to remain underestimated. Several ways of assessing the prevalence of workplace bullying have been proposed in the literature. The most frequently discussed are the ‘subjective method’ assessing individuals’ perceptions of being a victim and the questionnaire, i.e., criterion-based, methods, including Negative Acts Questionnaire (NAQ) and Leymann Inventory of Psychological Terror (LIPT). Since in both cases culture plays a profound role as a mediating factor in the process of identifying, collecting, and processing data, the applicability of these methods across cultures and countries has several limitations. At this stage, it is impossible to determine the impact of the implicit cultural-bias that these methods entail on the research outcomes. This would be possible if an alternative workplace bullying scale (WBS) was at hand and, consequently, a comparative analysis was conducted. This paper, drawing from a study conducted at higher education institutions (HEI) across Pakistan, addresses this issue by devising an alternative WBS. The value added of this paper is three-fold, i.e., it elaborates on the study and the specific methods employed to prove the validity and relevance of the alternative WBS. Moreover, by so doing, it addresses some of the limitations that other methods measuring the prevalence of workplace bullying display. As a result, it adds to the researchers’ and administrators’ toolkit as regards research and policies aimed at mitigating the scope and scale of bullying at HEIs across cultures and countries

Linking Work-Family Conflict (WFC) and Talent Management: Insights from a Developing Country

Considering the profound societal change taking place in several developing countries, the objective of this paper is to reflect on work-family conflict (WFC) both as a concept and a social phenomenon. Given that WFC is a concept rooted in academic debate focusing on developments in Western, largely individualistic, societies, this paper reconsiders WFC’s value added as applied in a context of a collectivist society in a developing country. The objective of this paper is thus threefold, i.e., (i) to assess WFC’s applicability in a context of a collectivist society in a developing country, where the position and role of women gradually changes; (ii) to develop a culturally adjusted/sensitive scale to measure the scope of WFC in Pakistan, whereby the latter is treated here as a case study; and (iii) to reflect on the possibility of devising a set of good practices that would allow a smooth inclusion of women in the formal workforce, while at the same time mitigating the scope and scale of WFC. The value added of this paper stems from these three objectives

Sustainable Higher Education and Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL)

The field of education is not immune to advances in sophisticated information and communication technology (ICT). Going beyond the ICT-hype, the objective of this paper is to examine to what extent and how technology-enhanced teaching and learning (TEL) can enhance teaching and learning and, hence, turn them into levers of sustainable socio-economic growth and development. To address these questions, a multidimensional survey was developed and distributed internationally to lecturers/professors active in the field of higher education. The initial point of departure for this study was consistent with the well-referenced in the literature thesis that TEL has profound value added in view of enhancing the teaching and learning process. Yet, as the outcomes of the survey underpinning the discussion in this paper suggest, there is much more is at stake than that. Indeed, it is argued that several conditions need to be fulfilled if technology is to serve as a benefit, and not an obstacle to teaching and learning, and thus boost the delivery of quality education. This paper outlines them

Demonstrating and negotiating the adoption of web design technologies : Cascading Style Sheets and the CSS Zen Garden

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) express the visual design of a website through code and remain an understudied area of web history. Although CSS was proposed as a method of adding a design layer to HTML documents early on in the development of the web, they only crossed from a marginal position to mainstream usage after a long period of proselytising by web designers working towards “web standards”. The CSS Zen Garden grassroots initiative aimed at negotiating, mainstreaming and archiving possible methods of CSS web design, while dealing with varying levels of browser support for the technology. Using the source code of the CSS Zen Garden and the accompanying book, this paper demonstrates that while the visual designs were complex and sophisticated, the CSS lived within an ecosystem of related platforms, i.e., web browsers, screen sizes and design software, which constrained its use and required enormous sensitivity to the possibilities browser ecosystems could reliably provide. As the CSS Zen Garden was maintained for over ten years, it also acts as a unique site to trace the continuing development of web design, and the imaginaries expressed in the Zen Garden can also be related to ethical dimensions that influence the process of web design. Compared to Flash-based web design, work implemented using CSS required a greater willingness to negotiate source code configurations between browser platforms. Following the history of the individuals responsible for creating and contributing to the CSS Zen Garden shows the continuing influence of layer-based metaphors of design separated from content within web source code

Deep Learning-based Extraction of Algorithmic Metadata in Full-Text Scholarly Documents

The advancements of search engines for traditional text documents have enabled the effective retrieval of massive textual information in a resource-efficient manner. However, such conventional search methodologies often suffer from poor retrieval accuracy especially when documents exhibit unique properties that behoove specialized and deeper semantic extraction. Recently, AlgorithmSeer, a search engine for algorithms has been proposed, that extracts pseudo-codes and shallow textual metadata from scientific publications and treats them as traditional documents so that the conventional search engine methodology could be applied. However, such a system fails to facilitate user search queries that seek to identify algorithm-specific information, such as the datasets on which algorithms operate, the performance of algorithms, and runtime complexity, etc. In this paper, a set of enhancements to the previously proposed algorithm search engine are presented. Specifically, we propose a set of methods to automatically identify and extract algorithmic pseudo-codes and the sentences that convey related algorithmic metadata using a set of machine-learning techniques. In an experiment with over 93,000 text lines, we introduce 60 novel features, comprising content-based, font style based and structure-based feature groups, to extract algorithmic pseudo-codes. Our proposed pseudo-code extraction method achieves 93.32% F1-score, outperforming the state-of-the-art techniques by 28%. Additionally, we propose a method to extract algorithmic-related sentences using deep neural networks and achieve an accuracy of 78.5%, outperforming a Rule-based model and a support vector machine model by 28% and 16%, respectively

Leveraging AI and Machine Learning for National Student Survey: Actionable Insights from Textual Feedback to Enhance Quality of Teaching and Learning in UK’s Higher Education

Students’ evaluation of teaching, for instance, through feedback surveys, constitutes an integral mechanism for quality assurance and enhancement of teaching and learning in higher education. These surveys usually comprise both the Likert scale and free-text responses. Since the discrete Likert scale responses are easy to analyze, they feature more prominently in survey analyses. However, the free-text responses often contain richer, detailed, and nuanced information with actionable insights. Mining these insights is more challenging, as it requires a higher degree of processing by human experts, making the process time-consuming and resource intensive. Consequently, the free-text analyses are often restricted in scale, scope, and impact. To address these issues, we propose a novel automated analysis framework for extracting actionable information from free-text responses to open-ended questions in student feedback questionnaires. By leveraging state-of-the-art supervised machine learning techniques and unsupervised clustering methods, we implemented our framework as a case study to analyze a large-scale dataset of 4400 open-ended responses to the National Student Survey (NSS) at a UK university. These analyses then led to the identification, design, implementation, and evaluation of a series of teaching and learning interventions over a two-year period. The highly encouraging results demonstrate our approach’s validity and broad (national and international) application potential—covering tertiary education, commercial training, and apprenticeship programs, etc., where textual feedback is collected to enhance the quality of teaching and learning

Mediating Bullying and Strain in Higher Education Institutions: The Case of Pakistan

Although workplace bullying is a well-researched phenomenon, the specific way it unfolds in higher education institutions (HEI) remains largely underdiscussed. Based on the outcomes of a survey conducted across HEI in Pakistan, by reference to structural equation modeling, using Amos-20, this paper not only adds to our understanding of the scope and features of bullying in HEI, but also suggests strategies employers and victims could employ to cope with the adverse implications of bullying. The key findings of this research are: (i) a positive correlation exists between the degree of workplace bullying and strain levels; (ii) more frequently than not, female employees, younger employees, and employees in junior positions are victims of bullying; (iii) bullying and strain can be fully mediated only when both emotion-focused and problem-focused coping strategies are employed in synergy. In brief, although research findings elaborated in this paper draw from the specific case of HEI in Pakistan, this paper makes a case for more research, vigilance and action to understand the scale of the phenomenon in academia and to undertake concerted action to mitigate its adverse impact on specific individuals and HEI themselves

NA POGRANICZU ŚWIATÓW: GRECJA, MIGRACJA I POPULIZM

Na pograniczu światów: Grecja, migracja i populizm Światowy kryzys finansowy oraz kryzys w strefie euro i ich implikacje stanowiły przyczynek dla ożywienia demagogii i populizmu w krajach Unii Europejskiej (UE). W okresie 2015-2016 kryzysy uchodźczy i migracyjny wzmocniły dynamikę tychże tendencji, tym bardziej że rozgrywająca się na poziomie UE debata na temat migracji stworzyła możliwość wykorzystania tejże, debaty a przez to migracji, do realizacji – niekoniecznie związanych z migracją – celów polityki wewnętrznej wielu krajów członkowskich. Paradoksem jest, że choć Grecja bodajże najbardziej odczuła efekty kryzysów uchodźczego i migracyjnego, migracja nie została wykorzystana w Grecji jako element konkurencji politycznej. Niniejszy artykuł identyfikuje i analizuje czynniki, które się do tego przyczyniły.The global financial crisis and the euro area crisis and their implications, triggered populism and demagogy, which have fed on people’s ignorance, confusion and despair. As no common EU-level response to the refugee and migration crises was negotiated promptly, over the period 2015-2016 the EU-level debate on migration created a new opportunity for domestic political actors to employ migration as a resource of political competition at home. Paradoxically, in Greece, i.e.  a country so profoundly exposed to the unprecedented influx of migrants, migration has not been used as a resource of political competition. This paper identifies and examines factors that have contributed to that