Fostering Communication

The period of transition for foster youth into independent adulthood is an important life stage, and one that has yet to be explored in HCI circles. We studied an online community centered on the experiences of former foster youth through the first year of its existence to better understand how online spaces are being used by this population. Our mixed-method study included the coding of all posts from the first year of the online community and offers a mix of quantitative and qualitative findings. These findings include alignments and gaps in an established descriptive framework from the field of social work as it relates to the online communication of former foster youth. It also includes how the domains from the framework co-occur, and some potential implications of these co-occurrences. Future research on this subject is warranted, particularly related to why former foster youth seek online platforms to engage in conversations on these topics and how effective community members perceive the platform to be in safely and securely facilitating their needs.

The Challenges and Coping Strategies of KM Implementation in HEIs

The pace of competition has increased in every sphere of the economy, and to face such high level of competition, organizations look for sustainable competitive edge. Knowledge as a tool of competition has been found to be highly sustainable as compared to physical resources and even technology, so organizations look for managing knowledge with strategic focus. This paper attempts to assess the knowledge management practices of a top Indian B-School, to identify the challenges faced by the B-School in the domain of knowledge management implementation and the coping strategies adopted by the school vis-à-vis the challenges. The study adopts for itself a descriptive framework and bases the enquiry on both primary as well as secondary data. For carrying out the investigation, case study method of research was applied. The findings show that though the B-School under study practices most of the selected parameters of knowledge management, managing knowledge as a strategic tool for developing and maintaining sustainable competitive edge is yet to be recognized.

Remote and Blended Teacher Education: A Rapid Review

Initial and continuing teacher education are increasingly making use of remote and blended modes of education. Conducted in the summer of 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, this rapid review brings together literature and evidence to inform planning for remote and blended teacher education during restrictions in face-to-face teaching activity. The review consists of three main parts: first, a descriptive framework of modes of remote and blended teacher education; second, an exploratory review of the affordances and limitations of remote and blended approaches connecting the literature on effective teacher education with reviews of remote and blended approaches; third, a rapid review of evidence on the efficacy of remote and blended approaches, including of a small number of studies comparing these to face-to-face equivalents. We conclude that remote and blended teacher education is likely to become an increasingly important part of the teacher education landscape and there are plausible theoretical reasons suggesting that it can be effective with suitable design. However, we find too few studies presenting robust evidence to enable firm conclusions to be drawn on the relative effectiveness of modes and approaches. The review provides a foundation for further research and practice in this area.

Chlamydia Psittaci ST24: Clonal Strains of One Health Importance Dominate in Australian Horse, Bird and Human Infections

Chlamydia psittaci is traditionally regarded as a globally distributed avian pathogen that can cause zoonotic spill-over. Molecular research has identified an extended global host range and significant genetic diversity. However, Australia has reported a reduced host range (avian, horse, and human) with a dominance of clonal strains, denoted ST24. To better understand the widespread of this strain type in Australia, multilocus sequence typing (MLST) and ompA genotyping were applied on samples from a range of hosts (avian, equine, marsupial, and bovine) from Australia. MLST confirms that clonal ST24 strains dominate infections of Australian psittacine and equine hosts (82/88; 93.18%). However, this study also found novel hosts (Australian white ibis, King parrots, racing pigeon, bovine, and a wallaby) and demonstrated that strain diversity does exist in Australia. The discovery of a C. psittaci novel strain (ST306) in a novel host, the Western brush wallaby, is the first detection in a marsupial. Analysis of the results of this study applied a multidisciplinary approach regarding Chlamydia infections, equine infectious disease, ecology, and One Health. Recommendations include an update for the descriptive framework of C. psittaci disease and cell biology work to inform pathogenicity and complement molecular epidemiology.

A Computational View on the Nature of Reward and Value in Anhedonia

Anhedonia—a common feature of depression—encompasses a reduction in the subjective experience and anticipation of rewarding events, and a reduction in the motivation to seek out such events. The presence of anhedonia often predicts or accompanies treatment resistance, and as such better interventions and treatments are important. Yet the mechanisms giving rise to anhedonia are not well-understood. In this chapter, we briefly review existing computational conceptualisations of anhedonia. We argue that they are mostly descriptive and fail to provide anexplanatory account of why anhedonia may occur. Working within the framework of reinforcement learning, we examine two potential computational mechanisms that could give rise to anhedonic phenomena. First, we show how anhedonia can arise in multidimensional drive reduction settings through a trade-off between different rewards or needs. We then generalize this in terms of model-based value inference and identify a key role for associational belief structure. We close with a brief discussion of treatment implications of both of these conceptualisations. Insummary, computational accounts of anhedonia have provided a useful descriptive framework. Recent advances in reinforcement learning suggest promising avenues by which the mechanisms underlying anhedonia may be teased apart, potentially motivating novel approaches to treatment.

The Collaborative Process in Environmental Projects, a Place-Based Coevolution Perspective

Environmental research and management organizations are mutually dependent when it comes to produce and use knowledge in favor of responsible action in an increasingly uncertain world. Still, science and practice interfacing remains a challenge when it comes to implementing and sustaining a collaborative process. In this paper, we develop a descriptive framework to study the coevolution of scientific and planning activities embedded in a territorial system. Scientists and managers dynamically interact through institutional arrangements, operationalization of knowledge and information and communication tools. We propose an approach to systematically document transdisciplinary pathways and characterize the bounding process between organizations on a typical case-study, the coastal Thau territoire (Mediterranean Sea, France). By tracing, illustrating and analyzing coupled trajectories of environmental sciences and planning for the last decades, the Systemic Timeline Multistep methodology tackles cross-fertilization mechanisms. The relational analysis draws on the elaboration of a synchronic timeline to question co-evolution and grasp causal mechanisms of research projects interactions with management pathways. Its application on the Thau territoire shows that scientific activities and public actions shaped each other in a continuous process of interaction. It also gives insights into the contributive roles of long-term place-based research and intermediate organizations for the emergence of new sociotechnical arrangements.

Verbing and Linguistic Innovation

Denominal verbs are produced by a syntactic category shift, conversion, in which the word’s inflectional and combinatory potential change while its internal composition does not (Valera, 2015: 322). Perhaps no language owes as many of its verbs to the conversion strategy as English (Koutsoukos, 2021), the majority being denominal (noun-derived) verbs, e.g., Widespread seedless cultivars typically fruit twice yearly in the Caribbean. Denominal conversion has been the predominant method of verb creation since the 13th century (Gottfurcht, 2008), with the result that denominal verbs present a continuum of conventionality ranging from conventional verb-phrase replacements like paint, trash, pocket, mother to evanescent innovations like adulting and criming. Language users must rely on certain inferential strategies to figure out what novel denominal verbs mean, combining information from multiple sources, including salient properties of the source noun’s denotatum, the event structure of the clause in which that noun serves as a predicator, and socio-cultural knowledge. How exactly does this work? Our answer recalls the major lessons of Clark and Clark’s seminal 1979 paper “When Nouns Surface as Verbs”: denominal verbs have context-dependent rather than fixed meanings, and their interpretations rely on cooperation between speaker and hearer. These are lessons seemingly forgotten by proponents of recent, influential derivation-based accounts, which leverage the formal similarity between denominal verbs and noun-incorporating verbs like backstab and manspread. While, as discussed here, syntacticized approaches to semantic representation fail to account for the interpretive latitude that denominal verbs actually display, there are reasons to reject a strong view of context dependence as well. For Clark and Clark, interpretations of innovative denominal verbs either directly reflect criterial features of their source nouns or are ad hoc, derived from “moment-to-moment cooperation,” including gestures, allusions, and “other momentarily relevant facts about the conversation” (1979: 783). We argue that denominal interpretations are more tightly regulated, and involve reconciling the results of four distinct interpretive strategies: nominal frame computation, verb-construction integration, co-composition and, finally, conceptual blending. To describe these interpretive strategies, we bring to bear a suite of analytic tools developed to model everyday language understanding: Construction Grammar (Michaelis, 2004; Goldberg, 2006; Michaelis, 2011), enriched composition (Pustejovsky, 1998; Pustejovsky, 2012), Conceptual Blending Theory (Fauconnier and Turner, 2004), and Frame Semantics (Fillmore, 2006; Andor, 2010). In line with Clark and Clark’s (1979) convention for the interpretation of innovative denominal verbs, we argue that nouns used in innovative denominal formations are chosen based on relational properties of entities denoted by those nouns, whether common or proper (e.g., shape, behavior, composition, use, provenance). At the same time, the descriptive framework that we propose leaves fewer interpretive factors to vagaries of context.

A Requirements Engineering Framework for Software Startup Companies

Requirements engineering (RE) for startups has only recently become an area of intense exploration. This paper provides results of a qualitative study with 45 practitioners from four startup companies in four countries. This research was planned and executed using the design science research (DSR) methodology and yielded a descriptive framework that was subjected to a first evaluation in empirical settings. The authors found that practitioners in startups deploy rapid prototyping practices and user feedback but in a different way than the agile methods assume. This research concludes with discussion on validity threats and some implications for practice and research.