Experiences during three generations of web based learning. Six years of web based communication

This paper tells the story of how a set of university lectures developed during the last six years. The idea is to show how (1) content, (2) communication and (3) assessment have evolved in steps which are named “generations of web learning”. The reader is offered a stepwise description of both didactic foundations of university lectures and practical implementation on a widely available web platform. The relative weight of directive elements has gradually decreased through the “three generations”, whereas characteristics of self-responsibility and self-guided learning have gained in importance. -Content was in early times presented and expected to be learned but in later phases expected to be constructed for examples of case studies. -Communication meant in early phases to deliver assignments to the lecturer but later on to form teams, exchange standpoints and review mutually. -Assessment initially consisted in marks invented and added up by the lecturer but was later enriched by peer review, mutual grading and voting procedures. How much “added value” can the web provide for teaching, training and learning? Six years of experience suggest: mainly insofar as new (collaborative and selfdirected) didactic scenarios are implemented! (DIPF/Orig.)

Priority research questions for the UK food system

The rise of food security up international political, societal and academic agendas has led to increasing interest in novel means of improving primary food production and reducing waste. There are however, also many 'post-farm gate' activities that are critical to food security, including processing, packaging, distributing, retailing, cooking and consuming. These activities all affect a range of important food security elements, notably availability, affordability and other aspects of access, nutrition and safety. Addressing the challenge of universal food security, in the context of a number of other policy goals (e.g. social, economic and environmental sustainability), is of keen interest to a range of UK stakeholders but requires an up-to-date evidence base and continuous innovation. An exercise was therefore conducted, under the auspices of the UK Global Food Security Programme, to identify priority research questions with a focus on the UK food system (though the outcomes may be broadly applicable to other developed nations). Emphasis was placed on incorporating a wide range of perspectives ('world views') from different stakeholder groups: policy, private sector, non-governmental organisations, advocacy groups and academia. A total of 456 individuals submitted 820 questions from which 100 were selected by a process of online voting and a three-stage workshop voting exercise. These 100 final questions were sorted into 10 themes and the 'top' question for each theme identified by a further voting exercise. This step also allowed four different stakeholder groups to select the top 7-8 questions from their perspectives. Results of these voting exercises are presented. It is clear from the wide range of questions prioritised in this exercise that the different stakeholder groups identified specific research needs on a range of post-farm gate activities and food security outcomes. Evidence needs related to food affordability, nutrition and food safety (all key elements of food security) featured highly in the exercise. While there were some questions relating to climate impacts on production, other important topics for food security (e.g. trade, transport, preference and cultural needs) were not viewed as strongly by the participants.

Prioritization of knowledge needs for sustainable aquaculture: a national and global perspective

Aquaculture is currently the fastest expanding global animal food production sector and is a key future contributor to food security. An increase in food security will be dependent upon the development and improvement of sustainable practices. A prioritization exercise was undertaken, focusing on the future knowledge needs to underpin UK sustainable aquaculture (both domestic and imported products) using a ‘task force’ group of 36 ‘practitioners’ and 12 ‘research scientists’ who have an active interest in sustainable aquaculture. A long list of 264 knowledge needs related to sustainable aquaculture was developed in conjunction with the task force. The long list was further refined through a three stage process of voting and scoring, including discussions of each knowledge need. The top 25 knowledge needs are presented, as scored separately by ‘practitioners’ or ‘research scientists’. There was similar agreement in priorities identified by these two groups. The priority knowledge needs will provide guidance to structure ongoing work to make science accessible to practitioners and help to prioritize future science policy needs and funding. The process of knowledge exchange, and the mechanisms by which this can be achieved, effectively emerged as the top priority for sustainable aquaculture. Viable alternatives to wild fish-based aquaculture feeds, resource constraints that will potentially limit expansion of aquaculture, sustainable offshore aquaculture and the treatment of sea lice also emerged as strong priorities. Although the exercise was focused on UK needs for sustainable aquaculture, many of the emergent issues are considered to have global application.

Making 'party identification' more versatile: operationalising the concept for the multiparty setting

The conventional operationalisation of the concept of party identification is not appropriate for the multiparty setting. I offer new measures that facilitate multiple, and negative as well as positive, identities. Using survey evidence from Northern Ireland, these new measures are validated in a number of ways and their role in a comprehensive model of voting is illustrated.

Ownership Patterns and Control in Turkish Listed Companies

The purpose of this paper is to document the prevalent ownership concentration, structure and control in the top 100 companies listed on the Istanbul Stock Exchange. The results are discussed in the context of emerging corporate governance trends in Turkey. Where appropriate, comparisons with other countries are provided. The results of the study indicate that ownership of Turkish companies is highly concentrated, families being the dominant shareholders. The separation of ownership and control among Turkish companies is mainly achieved through pyramidal ownership structures and the presence of big business groups. However, the cash flow and voting rights in Turkish companies are relatively more aligned compared to other family–ownership–dominated insider–system countries.

The Combination of Multiple Classifiers Using an Evidential Reasoning Approach

In many domains when we have several competing classifiers available we want to synthesize them or some of them to get a more accurate classifier by a combination function. In this paper we propose a ‘class-indifferent’ method for combining classifier decisions represented by evidential structures called triplet and quartet, using Dempster's rule of combination. This method is unique in that it distinguishes important elements from the trivial ones in representing classifier decisions, makes use of more information than others in calculating the support for class labels and provides a practical way to apply the theoretically appealing Dempster–Shafer theory of evidence to the problem of ensemble learning. We present a formalism for modelling classifier decisions as triplet mass functions and we establish a range of formulae for combining these mass functions in order to arrive at a consensus decision. In addition we carry out a comparative study with the alternatives of simplet and dichotomous structure and also compare two combination methods, Dempster's rule and majority voting, over the UCI benchmark data, to demonstrate the advantage our approach offers. (A continuation of the work in this area that was published in IEEE Trans on KDE, and conferences)

Why do people non-demand reveal in hypothetical double referenda for public goods?

Hypothetical contingent valuation surveys used to elicit values for environmental and other public goods often employ variants of the referendum mechanism due to the cognitive simplicity and familiarity of respondents with this voting format. One variant, the double referendum mechanism, requires respondents to state twice how they would vote for a given policy proposal given their cost of the good. Data from these surveys often exhibit anomalies inconsistent with standard economic models of consumer preferences. There are a number of published explanations for these anomalies, mostly focusing on problems with the second vote. This article investigates which aspects of the hypothetical task affect the degree of nondemand revelation and takes an individual-based approach to identifying people most likely to non-demand reveal. A clear profile emerges from our model of a person who faces a negative surplus i.e. a net loss in the second vote and invokes non self-interested, non financial motivations during the decision process.

Resolving questions about bias in real and hypothetical referenda

Despite 10 years of research on behavior in hypothetical referenda, conflict remains in the literature on whether or not the mechanism generates biased responses compared to real referenda, and the nature and source of any such bias. Almost all previous inquiry in respect of this issue has concentrated on bias at the aggregate level. This paper reports a series of three experiments which focuses on bias at the individual level and how this can translate to bias at the aggregate level. The authors argue that only an individual approach to hypothetical bias is consistent with the concept of incentive compatibility. The results of these experiments reflect these previous conflicting findings but go on to show that individual hypothetical bias is a robust result driven by the differing influence of pure self-interest and other-regarding preferences in real and hypothetical situations, rather than by a single behavioral theory such as free riding. In a hypothetical situation these preferences cause yea-saying and non-demand revealing voting. This suggests that investigation of individual respondents in other hypothetical one-shot binary choices may also provide us with insights into aggregate behavior in these situations.

Hillary Clinton's Race: Did She Match the Presidential Prototype?

The present research addresses how voters’ perceptions of Hillary Clinton’s warmth and competence influenced decisions to vote for her in the 2008 Democratic primary. We apply research on gender stereotypes and perceptions of women leaders to demonstrate that voters perceived Clinton as highly competent but relatively less warm. Further, this research examines how perceptions of Clinton’s warmth and competence contributed to decisions to vote for her. Results suggest that perceptions of Clinton’s warmth and competence differentially predicted voting behavior for voters strongly and less strongly identified with their political party. This research provides a descriptive analysis of how voters’ beliefs about leaders can be colored by gender, and how such beliefs contribute to electing women candidates.

Direct Democracy and Regional Integration::Citizens' Perceptions of Treaty Implications and the Irish Reversal on Lisbon

Analyses of voting in European Union referendums typically distinguish between ‘second-order’ effects and the impact of substantive ‘issues’. In order to explain change in referendum outcome, two types of substantive issues are distinguished in this article. Focusing on Irish voting in the Lisbon Treaty referendums and using data from post-referendum surveys, it is found that perceptions of treaty implications outperform underlying attitudes to EU integration in predicting vote choice at both referendums, and perceptions of treaty implications are strong predictors of vote change between the referendums. The findings have broadly positive implications for normative assessments of the usefulness of direct democracy as a tool for legitimising regional integration advance.

SOCIAL-CLASS, CLASS ORIGINS AND POLITICAL PARTISANSHIP IN THE REPUBLIC-OF-IRELAND

As Laver (1992) notes, people who write about Irish politics frequently describe Ireland as a rather peculiar place. One aspect of this peculiarity is that voters in the Republic of Ireland do not behave like their European counterparts. In particular, Irish voting patterns appear to be only weakly structured by social class. Recent contributions to the debate employing a more sophisticated categorisation of classes have led to some qualification of the 'politics without social bases' description, but still lead to the broad conclusion that any relationship which does exist between social divisions, on the one hand, and party preference, on the other, is, at most, quite marginal. In this paper we draw on data from the 1990 European Values Study to re-examine this issue. We apply a variety of models to the data, including logit regression and diagonal reference models (Sobel 1981, 1984) to explore the complex fashion in which class and political preferences are related in Ireland. We argue that the relationship between such preferences and social divisions are, in fact, greater than has been hitherto thought. In particular, we show the importance of taking into account not only social class but also class origins and class mobility in understanding the nature of political partisanship in the Republic of Ireland.

Linking Parliamentary Records through Metatdata

The LIPARM schema links the parliamentary record together for the first time by creating a unified metadata scheme for all of its key elements. People, bills, acts, items of business, debates, divisions and sessions will all be described by the scheme and will be linked together across resources which are currently spread out and isolated. For the first time, it will be possible to trace a given MP’s entire voting record or to find every speech they made. It will be possible to follow the passage of every bill or act, and every contribution to the debates that accompany it. Both the historical and the contemporary record of parliamentary proceedings will become accessible in this way for the first time.

Why Northern Ireland’s Institutions Need Stability

Northern Ireland’s consociational institutions were reviewed by a committee of its Assembly in 2012–13. The arguments of both critics and exponents of the arrangements are of general interest to scholars of comparative politics, powersharing and constitutional design. The authors of this article review the debates and evidence on the d’Hondt rule of executive formation, political designation, the likely impact of changing district magnitudes for assembly elections, and existing patterns of opposition and accountability. They evaluate the scholarly, political and legal literature before commending the merits of maintaining the existing system, including the rules under which the system might be modified in future.