The hidden architecture of higher education:Building a big data infrastructure for the ‘smarter university’

Universities are increasingly organized and managed through digital data. The collection, processing and dissemination of Higher Education data is enabled by complex new data infrastructures that include both human and nonhuman actors, all framed by political, economic and social contingencies. HE data infrastructures need to be seen not just as technical programs but as practical relays of political objectives to reform the sector. This article focuses on a major active data infrastructure project in Higher Education in the United Kingdom. It examines the sociotechnical networks of organizations, software programs, standards, dashboards and visual analytics technologies that constitute the infrastructure, and how these technologies are fused to governmental imperatives of market reform. The analysis foregrounds how HE is being reimagined through the utopian ideal of the ‘smarter university’ while simultaneously being reformed through the political project of marketization

The role of hydrogen and fuel cells in the global energy system

Hydrogen technologies have experienced cycles of excessive expectations followed by disillusion. Nonetheless, a growing body of evidence suggests these technologies form an attractive option for the deep decarb onisation of global energy systems, and that recent improvements in their cost and performance point towards economic viability as well. This paper is a comprehensive review of the potential role that hydrogen could play in the provision of electricity, h eat, industry, transport and energy storage in a low - carbon energy system, and an assessment of the status of hydrogen in being able to fulfil that potential. The picture that emerges is one of qualified promise: hydrogen is well established in certain nic hes such as forklift trucks, while mainstream applications are now forthcoming. Hydrogen vehicles are available commercially in several countries, and 225,000 fuel cell home heating systems have been sold. This represents a step change from the situation of only five years ago. This review shows that challenges around cost and performance remain, and considerable improvements are still required for hydrogen to become truly competitive. But such competitiveness in the medium - term future no longer seems an unrealistic prospect, which fully justifies the growing interest and policy support for these technologies around the world

Autonomy and expertise in the English workplace

Exercising autonomy in the workplace is a prerequisite for the acquisition of complex perceptual, judgement, and decision making skills widely agreed to be criteria of vocational expertise. It has wide workplace relevance. Despite the importance of autonomy for developing vocational expertise there is virtually nothing on methodologies for measuring autonomy in the British workplace in the literature. This article reports on a new approach using an application of the methodology of the Transformers Project to measure workplace autonomy in England. Workplace know how broadly distinguishes into skills required to perform particular types of tasks, and transversal level abilities, both those generally encompassed by planning and individual ones such as communication, critical thinking, evaluation, problem solving and teamwork. Agency in the workplace is the formation and implementation of intentions over relatively extended periods. Such agency is manifested as the ability to form and carry through projects involving planning and other transversal abilities. The conceptual approach to workplace autonomy taken here is that a reasonable proxy for and measure of it is the display of transversal abilities