Transforming the relationship between staff and students to effect change

This opinion piece argues for the necessity of student-staff partnerships that go beyond the common rhetoric of ‘student engagement’, achieving a richer student and staff dialogue which results in more meaningful change in policy and practice. In particular, attention is drawn to the need for such partnerships when determining technology applications that are often missed out from, or treated in isolation from, the curriculum design process. This piece cites, as an example, a student-led taught day on the Post Graduate Diploma in Learning and Teaching at Aston University in July 2015. There was clear evidence that the staff participants designed their assessments with student partners in mind. It is therefore proposed that a partnership relationship offers an effective means of moving forward from common practices where technology simply replicates, or supplements, traditional activities.

On stopwords, filtering and data sparsity for sentiment analysis of Twitter

Sentiment classification over Twitter is usually affected by the noisy nature (abbreviations, irregular forms) of tweets data. A popular procedure to reduce the noise of textual data is to remove stopwords by using pre-compiled stopword lists or more sophisticated methods for dynamic stopword identification. However, the effectiveness of removing stopwords in the context of Twitter sentiment classification has been debated in the last few years. In this paper we investigate whether removing stopwords helps or hampers the effectiveness of Twitter sentiment classification methods. To this end, we apply six different stopword identification methods to Twitter data from six different datasets and observe how removing stopwords affects two well-known supervised sentiment classification methods. We assess the impact of removing stopwords by observing fluctuations on the level of data sparsity, the size of the classifier's feature space and its classification performance. Our results show that using pre-compiled lists of stopwords negatively impacts the performance of Twitter sentiment classification approaches. On the other hand, the dynamic generation of stopword lists, by removing those infrequent terms appearing only once in the corpus, appears to be the optimal method to maintaining a high classification performance while reducing the data sparsity and substantially shrinking the feature space

Determinants of Firm Growth with respect to Exporting and Innovation Activities: Evidence from Egyptian SMEs

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are considered to be the driving engine for employment growth, source of innovation and technological progress. Moreover, the success of small exporters is critical for economic growth and is considered as an important development stage for many SMEs. However, their competitive advantage lies within the firm’s ability to innovate. This thesis contributes to the above literature by examining two main factors believed to promote firm growth namely ‘exporting’ and ‘innovation’ activities. Growing interests on the relationship between exporting, innovation and growth have recently been tackled. However, there remains a gap in literature on the relationship between exporting, innovation and firm growth for SMEs in emerging economies. Previous studies are conducted in developed counties such as UK, Ireland, USA, Germany, and Switzerland, which leaves the gap for those developing countries. Thus, this thesis addresses the gap by examining the importance of innovation and exporting activities in the growth of SMEs in Egypt. It is also the researcher’s intent to recognise the unique contribution of innovation on firm exporting activities covering all sectors. gypt, one of the countries that were tremendously affected by the so-called ‘Arab Spring revolution’, is suffering from slow economic growth, high unemployment and poverty rate. Thus, the government must ensure economic growth and job creation. Programmes to encourage and develop SMEs should be part of inclusive growth strategy. Meanwhile, exporting is regarded as a key factor to help the economy recover from recession and stimulate economic growth. On the other hand, innovation leads to better performance in terms of growth, exporting and productivity. Therefore, SMEs and their exporting and innovation activities should be an integral part of any recovery and growth strategy for the economy. Moreover, Egypt is suffering from the so-called ‘Missing Middle’, which is problematic as medium firms tend to provide better employment growth and productivity. Therefore, more light is to shed on the importance of exporting and innovation in the growth of firms. The research design was quantitative in nature, testing the proposed hypotheses. The study was conducted in 2013 based on questionnaires of 406 Egyptians SMEs. The results of the empirical study suggest that both exporting and innovation activities are important in firm growth. However, the results show that, after controlling for endogeneity, innovation does not affect exporting activities in SMEs.

Determinants of firm growth with repect to exporting and innovation activities:evidence from Egyptian SMEs

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are considered to be the driving engine for employment growth, source of innovation and technological progress. Moreover, the success of small exporters is critical for economic growth and is considered as an important development stage for many SMEs. However, their competitive advantage lies within the firm’s ability to innovate. This thesis contributes to the above literature by examining two main factors believed to promote firm growth namely ‘exporting’ and ‘innovation’ activities. Growing interests on the relationship between exporting, innovation and growth have recently been tackled. However, there remains a gap in literature on the relationship between exporting, innovation and firm growth for SMEs in emerging economies. Previous studies are conducted in developed counties such as UK, Ireland, USA, Germany, and Switzerland, which leaves the gap for those developing countries. Thus, this thesis addresses the gap by examining the importance of innovation and exporting activities in the growth of SMEs in Egypt. It is also the researcher’s intent to recognise the unique contribution of innovation on firm exporting activities covering all sectors. Egypt, one of the countries that were tremendously affected by the so-called ‘Arab Spring revolution’, is suffering from slow economic growth, high unemployment and poverty rate. Thus, the government must ensure economic growth and job creation. Programmes to encourage and develop SMEs should be part of inclusive growth strategy. Meanwhile, exporting is regarded as a key factor to help the economy recover from recession and stimulate economic growth. On the other hand, innovation leads to better performance in terms of growth, exporting and productivity. Therefore, SMEs and their exporting and innovation activities should be an integral part of any recovery and growth strategy for the economy. Moreover, Egypt is suffering from the so-called ‘Missing Middle’, which is problematic as medium firms tend to provide better employment growth and productivity. Therefore, more light is to shed on the importance of exporting and innovation in the growth of firms. The research design was quantitative in nature, testing the proposed hypotheses. The study was conducted in 2013 based on questionnaires of 406 Egyptians SMEs. The results of the empirical study suggest that both exporting and innovation activities are important in firm growth. However, the results show that, after controlling for endogeneity, innovation does not affect exporting activities in SMEs.

Membrane protein extraction and purification using styrene-maleic acid (SMA) co-polymer:effect of variations in polymer structure

The use of styrene maleic acid (SMA) co-polymers to extract and purify transmembrane proteins, whilst retaining their native bilayer environment, overcomes many of the disadvantages associated with conventional detergent based procedures. This approach has huge potential for the future of membrane protein structural and functional studies. In this investigation we have systematically tested a range of commercially available SMA polymers, varying in both the ratio of styrene to maleic acid and in total size, for the ability to extract, purify and stabilise transmembrane proteins. Three different membrane proteins (BmrA, LeuT and ZipA) which vary in size and shape were used. Our results show that several polymers can be used to extract membrane proteins comparably to conventional detergents. A styrene:maleic acid ratio of either 2:1 or 3:1, combined with a relatively small average molecular weight (7.5-10 kDa) is optimal for membrane extraction, and this appears to be independent of the protein size, shape or expression system. A subset of polymers were taken forward for purification, functional and stability tests. Following a one-step affinity purification SMA 2000 was found to be the best choice for yield, purity and function. However the other polymers offer subtle differences in size and sensitivity to divalent cations that may be useful for a variety of downstream applications.