„U-Multirank“ und „U-Map” als Ansätze zur Schaffung von Transparenz im europäischen und globalen Hochschulsystem – Konzepte und Erfahrungen

Im Zuge der wachsenden Bedeutung weltweiter Hochschulrankings werden zunehmend \ud deren problematische Aspekte thematisiert – etwa ein sich ausweitendes \ud „reputation race“. Ausgehend von der Überzeugung, dass die über Rankings herzustellende Transparenz von grundlegender Bedeutung für verschiedenste Akteure im Hochschulbereich ist, widmen sich die Autoren den Projekten „U-Map“ und „U-Multirank“. Dabei zeichnen sie nach, welche notwendigen Gestaltungsprinzipien sich aus der Betrachtung des theoretischen Hintergrunds von Klassifikationen und Rankings sowie aus den Erfahrungen mit mehreren Rankings ergeben. Hiernach stellen sie dar, wie jene beiden „multi-dimensional“ und „user-driven“ Ansätze sich an den erarbeiteten Anforderungen orientieren, zentrale negative Effekte zu vermeiden versuchen, in komplementären Funktionen zusammenspielen und so einen Beitrag zur adäquaten Schaffung von Transparenz leisten können. Erste praktische Erfahrungen mit den beiden Ansätzen werden aufgegriffen

Impact of rankings

This chapter discusses the influence league table performance can have on an institution, affecting its student recruitment, its funding and even its leadership. It goes on to discuss the impact on the sector as a whole in encouraging a frantic reputation race and leading institutions to concentrate their efforts and resources on a single area of activity, research, with detrimental effects on individual institutions and the sector. The chapter also looks at the potential positive impact that a well-designed ranking system could deliver and outlines the basic principles and ‘lessons learned’ that would shape the design of such a system

Transparency in higher education:The emergence of a new perspective on higher education governance

Reliable information and transparency on the benefits that higher education institutions offer their students, funders and communities is key for their legitimacy, their funding and their competitiveness. Worldwide, relationships between governmental authorities and higher education institutions are changing, particularly because of the increased demands for transparency about outcomes and impacts of higher education. In our contribution, we discuss three higher education ‘transparency tools’: accreditation, rankings and—briefly—performance contracts. We present some recent developments regarding these tools in the broader context of governance and policy making and analyse how they aim to address the growing need for more transparency. The transparency tools are part of a recently emerging governance paradigm in higher education, networked governance; a paradigm that explicitly acknowledges the diverse information needs of a wide variety of higher education stakeholder groups

Weighted gene co-expression network analysis of the peripheral blood from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis patients

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is a lethal disorder characterized by progressive degeneration of motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord. Diagnosis is mainly based on clinical symptoms, and there is currently no therapy to stop the disease or slow its progression. Since access to spinal cord tissue is not possible at disease onset, we investigated changes in gene expression profiles in whole blood of ALS patients.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Our transcriptional study showed dramatic changes in blood of ALS patients; 2,300 probes (9.4%) showed significant differential expression in a discovery dataset consisting of 30 ALS patients and 30 healthy controls. Weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA) was used to find disease-related networks (modules) and disease related hub genes. Two large co-expression modules were found to be associated with ALS. Our findings were replicated in a second (30 patients and 30 controls) and third dataset (63 patients and 63 controls), thereby demonstrating a highly significant and consistent association of two large co-expression modules with ALS disease status. Ingenuity Pathway Analysis of the ALS related module genes implicates enrichment of functional categories related to genetic disorders, neurodegeneration of the nervous system and inflammatory disease. The ALS related modules contain a number of candidate genes possibly involved in pathogenesis of ALS.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>This first large-scale blood gene expression study in ALS observed distinct patterns between cases and controls which may provide opportunities for biomarker development as well as new insights into the molecular mechanisms of the disease.</p

A cloud-based robot system for long-term interaction: principles, implementation, lessons learned

Making the transition to long-term interaction with social-robot systems has been identified as one of the main challenges in human-robot interaction. This article identifies four design principles to address this challenge and applies them in a real-world implementation: cloud-based robot control, a modular design, one common knowledge base for all applications, and hybrid artificial intelligence for decision making and reasoning. The control architecture for this robot includes a common Knowledge-base (ontologies), Data-base, “Hybrid Artificial Brain” (dialogue manager, action selection and explainable AI), Activities Centre (Timeline, Quiz, Break and Sort, Memory, Tip of the Day, ), Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA, i.e., robot and avatar), and Dashboards (for authoring and monitoring the interaction). Further, the ECA is integrated with an expandable set of (mobile) health applications. The resulting system is a Personal Assistant for a healthy Lifestyle (PAL), which supports diabetic children with self-management and educates them on health-related issues (48 children, aged 6–14, recruited via hospitals in the Netherlands and in Italy). It is capable of autonomous interaction “in the wild” for prolonged periods of time without the need for a “Wizard-of-Oz” (up until 6 months online). PAL is an exemplary system that provides personalised, stable and diverse, long-term human-robot interaction

Off-hours admission and mortality in two pediatric intensive care units without 24-h in-house senior staff attendance

To compare risk-adjusted mortality of children non-electively admitted during off-hours with risk-adjusted mortality of children admitted during office hours to two pediatric intensive care units (PICUs) without 24-h in-house attendance of senior staff. Prospective observational study, performed between January 2003 and December 2007, in two PICUs without 24-h in-house attendance of senior staff, located in tertiary referral children's hospitals in the Netherlands. Standardized mortality rates (SMRs) of patients admitted during off-hours were compared to SMRs of patients admitted during office hours using Pediatric Index of Mortality (PIM1) and Pediatric Risk of Mortality (PRISM2) scores. Office hours were defined as week days between 8:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m., with in-house attendance of senior staff, and off-hours as week days between 6:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m., Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays, with one resident covering the PICU and senior staff directly available on-call. Of 3,212 non-elective patients admitted to the PICUs, 2,122 (66%) were admitted during off-hours. SMRs calculated according to PIM1 and PRISM2 did not show a significant difference with those of patients admitted during office hours. There was no significant effect of admission time on mortality in multivariate logistic regression with odds ratios of death in off-hours of 0.95 (PIM1, 95% CI 0.71-1.27, p = 0.73) and 1.03 (PRISM2, 95% CI 0.76-1.39, p = 0.82). Off-hours admission to our PICUs without 24-h in-house attendance of senior staff was not associated with higher SMRs than admission during office hours when senior staff were available in-house