Gut microbiome development in early childhood is affected by day care attendance

The human gut microbiome develops during the first years of life, followed by a relatively stable adult microbiome. Day care attendance is a drastic change that exposes children to a large group of peers in a diverse environment for prolonged periods, at this critical time of microbial development, and therefore has the potential to affect microbial composition. We characterize the effect of day care on the gut microbial development throughout a single school year in 61 children from 4 different day care facilities, and in additional 24 age-matched home care children (n = 268 samples, median age of entering the study was 12 months). We show that day care attendance is a significant and impactful factor in shaping the microbial composition of the growing child, the specific daycare facility and class influence the gut microbiome, and each child becomes more similar to others in their day care. Furthermore, in comparison to home care children, day care children have a different gut microbial composition, with enrichment of taxa more frequently observed in older populations. Our results provide evidence that daycare may be an external factor that contributes to gut microbiome maturation and make-up in early childhood.

Reflective and Dynamic in Style

This chapter dives into the different components that weighted on the author's decision to pursue higher education in the United States. She compares business degrees in the US, Brazil, and Europe, explaining how each one has a different reputation in their own country and abroad. Bringing to the table a perspective of a born and raised Brazilian who was exposed to a diverse environment since an early age, she analyses the critical components included in choosing where to expand her academic career and provides both factual material and personal experience to support her decision of pursuing a business degree in the United States.

Maximizing Learning to Meeting the Multicultural Learner

Mindfulness training might be the single easiest and cost-effective school effort to implement to support students. In a diverse environment like those found in schools on the island of Guam, combining multicultural education and mindfulness training could provide an effective and low-cost means to improve student outcomes. An agenda is proposed for a two-day professional development session incorporating mindfulness and multicultural offerings of community-centered literacy projects such as book clubs, virtual museums, library projects, and home-based literacy strategies using the sociolinguistic framework.

‘Every day is a challenge’: Expatriate acculturation in the United Arab Emirates

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has a very small population of national citizens, so it relies on foreign workers who bring a range of cultures with them, resulting in a unique multi-cultural context. Unlike Western countries, such as the UK, Canada and Australia, workers are unable to permanently migrate to the UAE, so instead they hold temporary, expatriate status. This exploratory study focuses on the experiences of internationally qualified, expatriate nurses in hospitals in Al Ain, gathered by qualitative interviews. Twenty-one registered nurses participated in this study. The nurses faced challenges associated with language requirements and differing cultural expectations, and displayed limited acculturation, which compromised their ability to provide appropriate care for patients. The temporary nature of the work, cultural expectations, language difficulties and potential improvements are discussed. The findings have important implications for organizations that employ large groups of staff from overseas in all sectors. This article contributes to knowledge of expatriates’ challenges in the UAE and highlights the difficulties of working in a diverse environment, leading to a range of actions being recommended for managers.

Gender, Space, and Religious Privacy in Amsterdam

Silva Perez and Kristensen examine the intersection of gender and religious traditions for the use of space for two distinct religious groups: the Amsterdam beguines, a Catholic community, and the Portuguese Nation, a Jewish community. In the religiously diverse environment of seventeenth century Amsterdam, only the Dutch Reformed Church was officially authorized to have visible places of worship. Unsanctioned religious groups such as the beguines and the Portuguese Nation had to make arrangements to regulate visibility and access to their spaces of worship. Using privacy as an analytical lens, the authors discuss how strategies employed by the two groups changed over the course of the century.

THE DETERMINANTS OF POSITIVE CREATIVE ADAPTATION OF YOUTH IN THE POLISH-CZECH BORDERLAND

The purpose of this text is to showcase creativity in action, creativity that has been directed to fostering mutual understanding and cooperation in a culturally diverse environment – in a region that has seen ethnic conflict. The text is devoted to the analysis of the work of two interrelated organisations – the Borderland Foundation, Poland and the Center for Borderland Arts, Cultures and Nations, Poland – which for decades have been working innovatively on a complex history, together with the local community. This is a history that includes nationally and religiously diverse groups. Experiences with the local community have provided the inspiration for the Borderland Foundation and the Centre for Borderland Arts, Cultures and Nations for further creative work in art, education and history focussed on the phenomenon of borderland identity. The text is based on an analysis of both institutions’ websites, as well as interviews with their team members and project participants.

MRDRL-ROS: a Multi Robot Deep Reinforcement Learning Platform based on Robot Operating System

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has greatly improved the intelligence of AI in recent years and the community has proposed several common software to facilitate the development of DRL. However, in robotics the utility of common DRL software is limited and the development is time-consuming due to the complexity of various robot software. In this paper, we propose a software engineering approach leveraging modularity to facilitate robot DRL development. The platform decouples learning environment into task, simulator and hierarchical robot modules, which in turn enables diverse environment generation using existing modules as building blocks, regardless of the underlying robot software details. Experimental results show that our platform provides composable environment building, introduces high module reuse and efficiently facilitates robot DRL.

The Cross-Cultural Understanding of Metaphors in the Information Technology Sphere

The Cross-Cultural Understanding of Metaphors in the Information Technology SphereThis paper analyses recent changes in cross-cultural communication concerning metaphor use and its functioning on the Internet, specifically in the information technology sphere.The paper outlines the academic literature and proposes a study that aims to evaluate users’ perception of IT metaphors. The study analyses reports and articles for IT users. The articles were profiled according to country and language, with a detailed analysis of English and Ukrainian examples. The paper reviews the relation between IT metaphors and their cognition, introducing a new conceptualization “A Computer as a Human Being”. The research seeks to provide evidence for the claim that understanding metaphors facilitates cross-cultural communication, whether universal or culturally-bounded.The results show the growing scale of the creation of new metaphors due to cross-cultural communication, especially in the IT sphere, and the importance of the cognitive functions of metaphors in a culturally and linguistically diverse environment. Międzykulturowe rozumienie metafor w sferze technologii informacyjnejAutorki analizują najnowsze zmiany w komunikacji międzykulturowej w zakresie użycia metafor oraz ich funkcjonowania w Internecie w zawężeniu do sfery technologii informacyjnych.Po przedstawieniu stanu badań zaproponowały analizy, których celem jest ocena postrzegania metafor informatycznych przez użytkowników. W badaniu przeanalizowano raporty i artykuły przeznaczone dla użytkowników IT. Autorki sprofilowały artykuły według kraju i języka. Następnie przeprowadziły szczegółową analizę przykładów angielskich i ukraińskich. Dokonały przeglądu relacji pomiędzy metaforami IT a ich poznaniem, wprowadzając nową konceptualizację: "Komputer jako istota ludzka". Przeprowadzone badania mają na celu dostarczenie dowodów na tezę, że rozumienie metafor ułatwia komunikację międzykulturową, zarówno uniwersalną, jak i ograniczoną kulturowo.Wyniki wskazują na rosnącą skalę tworzenia nowych metafor w wyniku komunikacji międzykulturowej, zwłaszcza w sferze IT, oraz na znaczenie funkcji poznawczych metafor w środowisku zróżnicowanym kulturowo i językowo.

TRENDS IN CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE RESEARCH IN THE CONTEXT OF INTERCULTURAL MANAGEMENT

Cultural intelligence (CQ), expressing a capacity to effectively function in a cultural or culturally diverse environment (professional and otherwise), has great importance not only for the success of individuals who operate professionally in a intercultural environment, but also for the competitiveness of companies or organizations operating in international markets. For this reason research about CQ abroad is given the high level of attention, however this is not the case in the Czech Republic. This review uses the relatively new method of systematic quantitative literature review to provide a detailed mapping of cultural intelligence research in the years 2015–2019. The results of the analysis indicate that CQ is a global multidisciplinary phenomenon that has become established in intercultural management as a compelling area of research. The concept of CQ is well conceptualized and operationalized; the research at present is focused on the known relationships of new mediators or moderators and other correlations between CQ and new variables are being sought at the level of international economies and management. From the number of published research outcomes it can be seen that interest in CQ is growing, primarily among authors from multicultural countries. Researchers in the years 2015–2019 tested (predominantly in empirical studies) far more hypotheses related to CQ than they did in a comparable previous period; the studies took place in 33 countries, however mostly in the USA. European countries nonetheless fall somewhat behind in this area. Building on previous literature reviews, the nomological network of CQ has been supplemented for the years 2018 and 2019. From the classification of research outcomes it is evident that researchers are most interested in topics oriented on psychology of work. Our study brings entirely new information about CQ research pertaining to the methods used in quantitative analysis and the characteristics of respondents and localization of research.