Unraveling networked learning initiatives: an analytic framework

Networked learning happens naturally within the social systems of which we are all part. However, in certain circumstances individuals may want to actively take initiative to initiate interaction with others they are not yet regularly in exchange with. This may be the case when external influences and societal changes require innovation of existing practices. This paper proposes a framework with relevant dimensions providing insight into precipitated characteristics of designed as well as ‘fostered or grown’ networked learning initiatives. Networked learning initiatives are characterized as “goal-directed, interest-, or needs based activities of a group of (at least three) individuals that initiate interaction across the boundaries of their regular social systems”. The proposed framework is based on two existing research traditions, namely 'networked learning' and 'learning networks', comparing, integrating and building upon knowledge from both perspectives. We uncover some interesting differences between definitions, but also similarities in the way they describe what ‘networked’ means and how learning is conceptualized. We think it is productive to combine both research perspectives, since they both study the process of learning in networks extensively, albeit from different points of view, and their combination can provide valuable insights in networked learning initiatives. We uncover important features of networked learning initiatives, characterize actors and connections of which they are comprised and conditions which facilitate and support them. The resulting framework could be used both for analytic purposes and (partly) as a design framework. In this framework it is acknowledged that not all successful networks have the same characteristics: there is no standard ‘constellation’ of people, roles, rules, tools and artefacts, although there are indications that some network structures work better than others. Interactions of individuals can only be designed and fostered till a certain degree: the type of network and its ‘growth’ (e.g. in terms of the quantity of people involved, or the quality and relevance of co-created concepts, ideas, artefacts and solutions to its ‘inhabitants’) is in the hand of the people involved. Therefore, the framework consists of dimensions on a sliding scale. It introduces a structured and analytic way to look at the precipitation of networked learning initiatives: learning networks. Successive research on the application of this framework and feedback from the networked learning community is needed to further validate it’s usability and value to both research as well as practice.

Back to the failure: an analytic narrative of the De Lorean debacle

There has been a recent identification of a need for a New Business History. This discussion connects with the analytic narrative approach. By following this approach, the study of business history provides important implications for the conduct and institutional design of contemporary industrial policy. The approach also allows us to solve historical puzzles. The failure of the De Lorean Motor Company Limited (DMCL) is one specific puzzle. Journalistic accounts that focus on John De Lorean's alleged personality defects as an explanation for this failure miss the crucial institutional component. Moreover, distortions in the rewards associated with industrial policy, and the fact that the objectives of the institutions implementing the policy were not solely efficiency-based, led to increased opportunities for rent-seeking. Political economy solves the specific puzzle; by considering institutional dimensions, we can also solve the more general puzzle of why activist industrial policy was relatively unsuccessful in Northern Ireland.

Paradigms that guide the models of attention to the health in Brazil: an analytic essay

SILVA, Flávio César Bezerra da ; COSTA, Francisca Marta de Lima; ANDRADE, Hamilton Leandro Pinto de; FREIRE, Lúcia de Fátima; MACIEL, Patrícia Suerda de Oliveira; ENDERS, Bertha Cruz ; MENEZES, Rejane Maria Paiva de. Paradigms that guide the models of attention to the health in Brazil: an analytic essay. Revista de Enfermagem UFPE On Line., Recife, v.3,n.4, p.460-65. out/dez. 2009. Disponível em < http://www.ufpe.br/revistaenfermagem/index.php/revista/search/results >.

Analytic modelling of the galactic fountain in the Milky Way potential

Le galassie a spirale, come la Via Lattea, sono caratterizzate dalla presenza di gas freddo e formazione stellare e vengono perciò chiamate star-forming. Per creare nuove stelle è necessaria una sufficiente riserva di gas, la cui disponibilità governa l’evoluzione della galassia stessa. Finora, non è stato individuato con certezza un meccanismo che possa alimentare la formazione di nuove stelle nelle galassie star-forming. Una delle possibili sorgenti di tale gas è l’alone galattico caldo (corona galattica) il cui raffreddamento e successivo accrescimento possono essere stimolati dal processo di fontana galattica. L’esplosione di supernovae porta nubi di gas freddo in orbita al di sopra del disco stellare; queste nubi raggiungono altezze dell’ordine del kiloparsec, interagendo con la corona di gas caldo. Il moto delle nubi all’interno di un mezzo meno denso comporta l’instaurarsi dell’instabilità di Kelvin-Helmholtz, che ’strappa’ gas dalle nubi e causa la condensazione di materia coronale. Quest’ultima viene quindi accresciuta e, ricadendo sul disco, trasferisce nuovo materiale alla galassia e ne alimenta la formazione stellare. Lo scopo di questa tesi è derivare un modello analitico di fontana galattica che consenta di ottenere una formulazione analitica per il tempo orbitale, cioè il tempo richiesto alle nubi per ricadere sul disco galattico. Infatti, più u tempo le nubi impiegano per attraversare il materiale coronale caldo e ricadere sul disco, più materiale viene accresciuto durante l’orbita. Conoscendo i tempi orbitali sarebbe possibile calcolare il tasso di accrescimento legato al fenomeno di fontana e studiarne l’andamento con il raggio del disco. Questo modello potrebbe rivelarsi utile per lo studio dell’impatto della fontana nell’evoluzione globale del disco galattico e della chimica dell’intera galassia.

Paradigms that guide the models of attention to the health in Brazil: an analytic essay

SILVA, Flávio César Bezerra da ; COSTA, Francisca Marta de Lima; ANDRADE, Hamilton Leandro Pinto de; FREIRE, Lúcia de Fátima; MACIEL, Patrícia Suerda de Oliveira; ENDERS, Bertha Cruz ; MENEZES, Rejane Maria Paiva de. Paradigms that guide the models of attention to the health in Brazil: an analytic essay. Revista de Enfermagem UFPE On Line., Recife, v.3,n.4, p.460-65. out/dez. 2009. Disponível em < http://www.ufpe.br/revistaenfermagem/index.php/revista/search/results >.

The Role of decision-analytic modelling in German health technology assessments

BACKGROUND: Decision-analytic modelling (DAM) has become a widespread method in health technology assessments (HTA), but the extent to which modelling is used differs among international HTA institutions. In Germany, the use of DAM is optional within HTAs of the German Institute of Medical Documentation and Information (DIMDI). Our study examines the use of DAM in DIMDI HTA reports and its effect on the quality of information provided for health policies. METHODS: A review of all DIMDI HTA reports (from 1998 to September 2012) incorporating an economic assessment was performed. All included reports were divided into two groups: HTAs with DAM and HTAs without DAM. In both groups, reports were categorized according to the quality of information provided for healthcare decision making. RESULTS: Of the sample of 107 DIMDI HTA reports, 17 (15.9%) used DAM for economic assessment. In the group without DAM, conclusions were limited by the quality of economic information in 51.1% of the reports, whereas we did not find limited conclusions in the group with DAM. Furthermore, 24 reports without DAM (26.7%) stated that using DAM would likely improve the quality of information of the economic assessment. CONCLUSION: The use of DAM techniques can improve the quality of HTAs in Germany. When, after a systematic review of existing literature within a HTA, it is clear that DAM is likely to positively affect the quality of the economic assessment DAM should be used.

Applying the Analytic Hierarchy Process in healthcare research: A systematic literature review and evaluation of reporting

Background: The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), developed by Saaty in the late 1970s, is one of the methods for multi-criteria decision making. The AHP disaggregates a complex decision problem into different hierarchical levels. The weight for each criterion and alternative are judged in pairwise comparisons and priorities are calculated by the Eigenvector method. The slowly increasing application of the AHP was the motivation for this study to explore the current state of its methodology in the healthcare context. Methods: A systematic literature review was conducted by searching the Pubmed and Web of Science databases for articles with the following keywords in their titles or abstracts: "Analytic Hierarchy Process," "Analytical Hierarchy Process," "multi-criteria decision analysis," "multiple criteria decision," "stated preference," and "pairwise comparison." In addition, we developed reporting criteria to indicate whether the authors reported important aspects and evaluated the resulting studies' reporting. Results: The systematic review resulted in 121 articles. The number of studies applying AHP has increased since 2005. Most studies were from Asia (almost 30 %), followed by the US (25.6 %). On average, the studies used 19.64 criteria throughout their hierarchical levels. Furthermore, we restricted a detailed analysis to those articles published within the last 5 years (n = 69). The mean of participants in these studies were 109, whereas we identified major differences in how the surveys were conducted. The evaluation of reporting showed that the mean of reported elements was about 6.75 out of 10. Thus, 12 out of 69 studies reported less than half of the criteria. Conclusion: The AHP has been applied inconsistently in healthcare research. A minority of studies described all the relevant aspects. Thus, the statements in this review may be biased, as they are restricted to the information available in the papers. Hence, further research is required to discover who should be interviewed and how, how inconsistent answers should be dealt with, and how the outcome and stability of the results should be presented. In addition, we need new insights to determine which target group can best handle the challenges of the AHP. © 2015 Schmidt et al.

Analytic and heuristic processes in the detection and resolution of conflict

Previous research with the ratio-bias task found larger response latencies for conflict trials where the heuristic- and analytic-based responses are assumed to be in opposition (e.g., choosing between 1/10 and 9/100 ratios of success) when compared to no-conflict trials where both processes converge on the same response (e.g., choosing between 1/10 and 11/100). This pattern is consistent with parallel dualprocess models, which assume that there is effective, rather than lax, monitoring of the output of heuristic processing. It is, however, unclear why conflict resolution sometimes fails. Ratio-biased choices may increase because of a decline in analytical reasoning (leaving heuristic-based responses unopposed) or to a rise in heuristic processing (making it more difficult for analytic processes to override the heuristic preferences). Using the process-dissociation procedure, we found that instructions to respond logically and response speed affected analytic (controlled) processing (C), leaving heuristic processing (H) unchanged, whereas the intuitive preference for large nominators (as assessed by responses to equal ratio trials) affected H but not C. These findings create new challenges to the debate between dual-process and singleprocess accounts, which are discussed.

Understanding social media in everyday life: Ethnomethodological and conversation analytic perspectives

Over the last decade, social media has become a hot topic for researchers of collaborative technologies (e.g., CSCW). The pervasive use of social media in our everyday lives provides a ready source of naturalistic data for researchers to empirically examine the complexities of the social world. In this talk I outline a different perspective informed by ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA) - an orientation that has been influential within CSCW, yet has only rarely been applied to social media use. EMCA approaches can complement existing perspectives through articulating how social media is embedded in everyday life, and how its social organisation is achieved by users of social media. Outlining a possible programme of research, I draw on a corpus of screen and ambient audio recordings of mobile device use to show how EMCA research can be generative for understanding social media through concepts such as adjacency pairs, sequential context, turn allocation / speaker selection, and repair. In doing so, I also raise questions about existing studies of social media use and the way they characterise interactional phenomena.

Analytic models of self-gravitating rotating gaseous tori with central black hole

In this thesis project, I present stationary models of rotating fluids with toroidal distributions that can be used to represent the active galactic nuclei (AGN) central obscurers, i.e. molecular tori (Combes et al., 2019), as well as geometrically thick accretion discs, like ADAF discs (Narayan and Yi, 1995) or Polish doughnuts (Abramowicz, 2005). In particular, I study stationary rotating systems with a more general baroclinic distribution (with a vertical gradient of the angular velocity), which are often more realistic and less studied, due to their complexity, than the barotropic ones (with cylindrical rotation), which are easier to construct. In the thesis, I compute analytically the main intrinsic and projected properties of the power-law tori based on the potential-density pairs of Ciotti and Bertin (2005). I study the density distribution and the resulting gravitational potential for different values of α, in the range 2 < α < 5. For the same models, I compute the surface density of the systems when seen face-on and edge-on. I then apply the stationary Euler equations to obtain rotational velocity and temperature distributions of the self-gravitating models in the absence of an external gravitational potential. In the thesis I also consider the power-law tori with the presence of a central black hole in addition to the gas self-gravity, and solving analytically the stationary Euler equations, I compute how the properties of the system are modified by the black hole and how they vary as a function of the black hole mass. Finally, applying the Solberg-Høiland criterion, I show that these baroclinic stationary models are linearly stable in the absence of the black hole. In the presence of the black hole I derive the analytical condition for stability, which depends on α and on the black hole mass. I also study the stability of the tori in the hypothesis that they are weakly magnetized, finding that they are always unstable to this instability.

Analytic Network Process (ANP) a supporto della scelta della strategia produttiva: sviluppo e test di un approccio decisionale

Di fronte alla concorrenza globale, la sopravvivenza di un'azienda manifatturiera dipende sempre più da come essa può progettare, gestire e strutturare al meglio il proprio sistema di produzione per far fronte alla diversità dei prodotti, per migliorare l'affidabilità di consegna e anche per ridurre i costi. In questo contesto, le aziende manifatturiere utilizzano spesso sistemi di produzione diversi, in base a ciò che richiede il mercato. Molto in generale, i sistemi produttivi possono essere classificati in due categorie principali: make-to-stock (MTS) e make-to-order (MTO), in base alla politica di risposta alla domanda del mercato. Nel nuovo contesto competitivo le aziende si sono trovate a dover produrre costantemente prodotti specifici e di alta qualità con costi unitari bassi e livelli di servizio elevati (ossia, tempi di consegna brevi). È chiaro, dunque, che una delle principali decisioni strategiche da prendere da parte delle aziende sia quella relativa alla ripartizione dei prodotti in MTS/MTO, ovvero quale prodotto o famiglia di prodotti può essere fabbricato per essere stoccato a magazzino (MTS), quale può essere prodotto su ordinazione (MTO) e quale dovrebbe essere fabbricato in base alla politica di produzione ibrida MTS/MTO. Gli ultimi anni hanno mostrato una serie di cambiamenti nella politica di produzione delle aziende, che si stanno gradualmente spostando sempre più verso la modalità̀ di produzione ibrida MTS/MTO. In particolare, questo elaborato si concentrerà sul delayed product differentiation (DPD), una particolare strategia produttiva ibrida, e ne verrà proposto un modello decisionale basato sul funzionamento dell’Analytic Network Process (ANP) implementato attraverso il software Superdecisions.

Hdl Levels And Oxidizability During Myocardial Infarction Are Associated With Reduced Endothelial-mediated Vasodilation And Nitric Oxide Bioavailability.

Acute phase response modifies high-density lipoprotein (HDL) into a dysfunctional particle that may favor oxidative/inflammatory stress and eNOS dysfunction. The present study investigated the impact of this phenomenon on patients presenting ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI). Plasma was obtained from 180 consecutive patients within the first 24-h of onset of STEMI symptoms (D1) and after 5 days (D5). Nitrate/nitrite (NOx) and lipoproteins were isolated by gradient ultracentrifugation. The oxidizability of low-density lipoprotein incubated with HDL (HDLaoxLDL) and the HDL self-oxidizability (HDLautox) were measured after CuSO4 co-incubation. Anti-inflammatory activity of HDL was estimated by VCAM-1 secretion by human umbilical vein endothelial cells after incubation with TNF-α. Flow-mediated dilation (FMD) was assessed at the 30(th) day (D30) after STEMI. Among patients in the first tertile of admission HDL-Cholesterol (<33 mg/dL), the increment of NOx from D1 to D5 [6.7(2; 13) vs. 3.2(-3; 10) vs. 3.5(-3; 12); p = 0.001] and the FMD adjusted for multiple covariates [8.4(5; 11) vs 6.1(3; 10) vs. 5.2(3; 10); p = 0.001] were higher than in those in the second (33-42 mg/dL) or third (>42 mg/dL) tertiles, respectively. From D1 to D5, there was a decrease in HDL size (-6.3 ± 0.3%; p < 0.001) and particle number (-22.0 ± 0.6%; p < 0.001) as well as an increase in both HDLaoxLDL (33%(23); p < 0.001) and HDLautox (65%(25); p < 0.001). VCAM-1 secretion after TNF-a stimulation was reduced after co-incubation with HDL from healthy volunteers (-24%(33); p = 0.009), from MI patients at D1 (-23%(37); p = 0.015) and at D30 (-22%(24); p = 0.042) but not at D5 (p = 0.28). During STEMI, high HDL-cholesterol is associated with a greater decline in endothelial function. In parallel, structural and functional changes in HDL occur reducing its anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant properties.

Rigidez do papelão ondulado: comparação entre resultados experimentais e os obtidos por cálculo analítico

Cardboard packing for horticultural products has as main function to protect them. The design of a cardboard packing request the knowledge of the bending stiffens which is depending on the modulus of elasticity. The objective of this work was to calculate the cardboard modulus of elasticity from data obtained in laboratory using physical characterization test, with different methods, and comparing the results with the values obtained experimentally. Ten samples of each cardboard selected for this study were tested in the paper fabrication direction and in its transverse direction. The papers liner and medium resistance to the traction, used to calculate the bending stiffness, was determined in a universal machine test. To obtaining of the bending stiffens the four points test was accomplished. Expressive variations among the methods from which the modulus of elasticity is obtained were observed and that influence the bending stiffness of the structure. The stiffness values obtained experimentally were always greater than the values obtained from analytical method. This difference can be attributed to two factors, the production processes that assurance a larger rigidity than the components separately and the addition of the adhesive layer that is not taken in consideration in the analytic calculations.