Making electronics more accessible to people with learning disabilities

We extended 'littleBits' electronic components by attaching them to a larger base that was designed to help make them easier to pick up and handle, and easier to assemble into circuits for people with learning disabilities. A pilot study with a group of students with learning disabilities was very positive. There were fewer difficulties in assembling the components into circuits, and problems such as attempting to connect them the wrong way round or the wrong way up were eliminated completely.

'Doctor, Doctor...' entrepreneurial diagnosis and market making

Doctor-patient jokes are universally popular because of the information asymmetries within the diagnostic relationship. We contend that entrepreneurial diagnosis is present in markets where consumers are unable to diagnose their own problems and, instead, may rely on the entrepreneur to diagnose them. Entrepreneurial diagnosis is a cognitive skill possessed by the entrepreneur. It is an identifiable subset of entrepreneurial judgment and can be modeled – which we attempt to do. In order to overcome the information asymmetries and exploit opportunities, we suggest that entrepreneurs must invest in market making innovations (as distinct from product innovations) such as trustworthy reputations. The diagnostic entrepreneur described in this paper represents a creative response to difficult diagnostic problems and helps to explain the success of many firms whose products are not particularly innovative but which are perceived as offering high standards of service. These firms are trusted not only for their truthfulness about the quality of their product, but for their honesty, confidentiality and understanding in helping customers identify the most appropriate product to their needs.

Present simple and continuous: emergence of self-regulation and contextual sophistication in adolescent decision-making

Sophisticated, intentional decision-making is a hallmark of mature, self-aware behaviour. Although neural, psychological, interpersonal, and socioeconomic elements that contribute to such adaptive, foresighted behaviour mature and/or change throughout the life-span, here we concentrate on relevant maturational processes that take place during adolescence, a period of disproportionate developmental opportunity and risk. A brief, eclectic overview is presented of recent evidence, new challenges, and current thinking on the fundamental mechanisms that mature throughout adolescence to support adaptive, self-controlled decision-making. This is followed by a proposal for the putative contribution of frontostriatal mechanisms to the moment-to-moment assembly of evaluative heuristics that mediate increased decision-making sophistication, promoting the maturation of self-regulated behaviour through adolescence and young adulthood.

(Re)shaping the South Bank: the (post)politics of sustainable place-making

While the private sector has long been in the vanguard of shaping and managing urban environs, under the New Labour government business actors were also heralded as key agents in the delivery of sustainable places. Policy interventions, such as Business Improvement Districts (BIDs), saw business-led local partnerships positioned as key drivers in the production of economically, socially and environmentally sustainable urban communities. This research considers how one business-led body, South Bank Employer’s Group (SBEG), has inserted itself into, and influenced, local (re)development trajectories. Interview, observational and archival data are used to explore how, in a neighbourhood noted for its turbulent and conflictual development past, SBEG has led on a series of regeneration programmes that it asserts will create a “better South Bank for all”. A belief in consensual solutions underscored New Labour’s urban agenda and cast regeneration as a politically neutral process in which different stakeholders can reach mutually beneficial solutions (Southern, 2001). For authors such as Mouffe (2005), the search for consensus represents a move towards a ‘post-political’ approach to governing in which the (necessarily) antagonistic nature of the political is denied. The research utilises writings on the ‘post-political’ condition to frame an empirical exploration of regeneration at the neighbourhood level. It shows how SBEG has brokered a consensual vision of regeneration with the aim of overriding past disagreements about local development. While this may be seen as an attempt to enact what Honig (1993: 3) calls the ‘erasure of resistance from political orderings’ by assuming control of regeneration agendas (see also Baeten, 2009), the research shows that ‘resistances’ to SBEG’s activities continue to be expressed in a series of ways. These resistances suggest that, while increasingly ‘post-political’ in character, local place shaping continues to evidence what Massey (2005: 10) calls the ‘space of loose ends and missing links’ from which political activity can, at least potentially, emerge.

littleBits go LARGE: making electronics more accessible to people with learning disabilities

The “littleBits go LARGE" project extends littleBits electronic modules, an existing product that is aimed at simplifying electronics for a wide range of audiences. In this project we augment the littleBits modules to make them more accessible to people with learning disabilities. We will demonstrate how we have made the modules easier to handle and manipulate physically, and how we are augmenting the design of the modules to make their functions more obvious and understandable.

Making the tacit explicit: children's strategies for classroom writing

A key highlight of this study is generating evidence of children ‘making aware the unaware’, making tacit knowledge explicit. The research explores the levels of awareness in thinking used by eight 7–8 year-old children when engaged in school-based genre writing tasks. The focus is on analysing children’s awareness of their thought processes, using a framework originally devised by Swartz and Perkins (1989), in order to investigate ways in which children can transform their tacit knowledge to explicit within the writing process. Classroom ‘think aloud’ protocols are used to help children ‘manage their knowledge transfer’, to speak the unspoken. In their framework Swartz and Perkins distinguish between four levels of thought that they view as hierarchical and ‘increasingly metacognitive.’ However, there is little evidence in this study to show that levels of awareness in thinking are increasingly progressive and observations made during the study suggest that young writers move in and out of the suggested levels of thinking during different elements of a writing task. The reasons for this may depend on a number of factors which are noted in this paper. Evidence does suggest children in this age group are consciously aware of their own and others’ thought processes both with and without adult prompting. By using collaborative talk, their awareness of these thought processes is highlighted enabling the co-construction and integration of new ideas into their existing knowledge base.

Making internalization theory good for practice: the essence of Alan Rugman’s contributions to international business

This perspectives paper and its associated commentaries examine Alan Rugman's conceptual contribution to international business scholarship. Most significantly, we highlight Rugman's version of internalization theory as an approach that integrates transaction cost economics and ‘classical’ internalization theory with elements from the resource-based view, such that it is especially relevant to strategic management. In reviewing his oeuvre, we also offer observations on his ideas for ‘new internalization theory’. We classify his other novel insights into four categories: Network Multinationals; National competitiveness; Development and public policy; and Emerging Economy MNEs. This special section offers multiple views on how his work informed the larger academic debate and considers how these ideas might evolve in the longer term.

Multi-attribute collaborative filtering recommendation based on improved group decision-making

Currently researchers in the field of personalized recommendations bear little consideration on users' interest differences in resource attributes although resource attribute is usually one of the most important factors in determining user preferences. To solve this problem, the paper builds an evaluation model of user interest based on resource multi-attributes, proposes a modified Pearson-Compatibility multi-attribute group decision-making algorithm, and introduces an algorithm to solve the recommendation problem of k-neighbor similar users. Considering the characteristics of collaborative filtering recommendation, the paper addresses the issues on the preference differences of similar users, incomplete values, and advanced converge of the algorithm. Thus the paper realizes multi-attribute collaborative filtering. Finally, the effectiveness of the algorithm is proved by an experiment of collaborative recommendation among multi-users based on virtual environment. The experimental results show that the algorithm has a high accuracy on predicting target users' attribute preferences and has a strong anti-interference ability on deviation and incomplete values.

Responsibility effects in decision making under risk

We systematically explore decision situations in which a decision maker bears responsibility for somebody else's outcomes as well as for her own in situations of payoff equality. In the gain domain we confirm the intuition that being responsible for somebody else's payoffs increases risk aversion. This is however not attributable to a 'cautious shift' as often thought. Indeed, looking at risk attitudes in the loss domain, we find an increase in risk seeking under responsibility. This raises issues about the nature of various decision biases under risk, and to what extent changed behavior under responsibility may depend on a social norm of caution in situations of responsibility versus naive corrections from perceived biases. To further explore this issue, we designed a second experiment to explore risk-taking behavior for gain prospects offering very small or very large probabilities of winning. For large probabilities, we find increased risk aversion, thus confirming our earlier finding. For small probabilities however, we find an increase of risk seeking under conditions of responsibility. The latter finding thus discredits hypotheses of a social rule dictating caution under responsibility, and can be explained through flexible self-correction models predicting an accentuation of the fourfold pattern of risk attitudes predicted by prospect theory. An additional accountability mechanism does not change risk behavior, except for mixed prospects, in which it reduces loss aversion. This indicates that loss aversion is of a fundamentally different nature than probability weighting or utility curvature. Implications for debiasing are discussed.

Everyday revolution: the making of the Soviet Urban commune

This chapter charts the rise the urban commune as a cultural construct in early Soviet Russia and, in so doing, explores the implication of assessing the spaces in-between the apparatus of state -- very much a new venture in Soviet history.