Impacts of COVID-19 on parents with small children in South Korea: survey findings and policy implications

The COVID-19 pandemic has emphasised the importance of care and care work, and exposed pre-existing inequalities. Our survey of the impacts of COVID-19 on parents with small children in South Korea reveals that mothers were much more likely to bear the increased burden of childcare than fathers, which, in turn, had direct and negative impacts on their well-being. We discuss how South Korea’s dualised labour market, gender-biased employment practice, social norms about childcare and instrumental approach to family and care policies may have contributed to the persistent unequal distribution of unpaid care work within households and gender inequality.

The Great Aurora of 4 February 1872 observed by Angelo Secchi in Rome

Observation of auroras at low latitudes is an extremely rare event typically associated with major magnetic storms due to intense Earth-directed Coronal Mass Ejections. Since these energetic events represent one of the most important components of space weather their study is of paramount importance to understand the Sun-Earth connection. Due to the rarity of these events, being able to access all available information for the few cases studied is equally important. Especially if we refer to historical periods in which current accurate observations from ground-based instruments or from space were not available. Certainly, among these events we must include the great aurora of February 4, 1872. An event whose effects have been observed in different regions of the Earth. What we could consider today a global event, especially for its effects on the communication systems of the time, such as the transatlantic cable that allowed a connection between the United States and Europe since 1866. In this paper we describe the main results of the observations and studies carried out by Angelo Secchi at the Observatory of the Roman College and described in his Memoria sull’Aurora Elettrica del 4 Febbraio 1872 for the Notes of the Pontifical Academy of new Lincei. This note is extremely modern both in its multi-instrumental approach to the study of these phenomena and in its association between solar-terrestrial connection and technological infrastructures on the Earth. The Secchi's note definitely represents the first example of analysis and study of an event on a global scale, such as the Atlantic cable, affecting the Earth. What we nowadays call an extreme space weather event.

The Educators’ Datafied Present and Future: Complexity as an Approach to Developing Educators' Data Literacies

In the higher education context, an increasing concern on the technical or instrumental approach permeates attention to academics’ data literacies and faculty development. The need for data literacy to deal specifically with the rise of learning analytics in higher education has been raised by some authors, though in spite of some focus on the need to develop academics’ data literacy to embrace fair practices, this literature is often also rooted in a technical or data-driven perspective. In this paper, the authors summarize an empirical study based on 137 articles using the terms “data literacy,” “teachers,” and “faculty development,” spanning from 2014 and 2019. The findings point out that out of the total, 78 papers reviewed took an instrumental, data science-focused perspective on data literacy, were the technical abilities like extracting data and interpreting or reporting appropriately (authors, in press). Data safety and effective data management perspectives accounted for another 35 of the 137 articles. Only seven took up data literacy from a critical perspective, while only five looked at the pedagogical practice. These preliminary findings require awareness and discussion on the light of appropriate faculty development approaches and activities. We introduce some recommendations aimed at understanding data as a complex emerging phenomenon in our societies, which requires building the literacies to face their negative effects like data surveillance and algorithmic biases, but also, to uncover its emancipatory power.

Legal regime: the concept and features

The purpose of the study is to conduct a general theoretical analysis of scientific approaches to the definition of the concept and essence of the legal regime in order to overcome its narrow industrial understanding and identify the role and significance in the process of legal regulation. General scientific and private scientific methods of knowledge including formal legal and comparative legal methods have been chosen as research methods of this paper. Logical techniques allowing to reveal the essence of legal regimes and formulate the author's definition of them have also been applied. The analysis of scientific works expressing various opinions indicates that at present an instrumental approach to the definition of the concept and essence of the legal regime prevails directly (or indirectly through the procedure of legal regulation) as a set of legal means (instruments). The following are mentioned as signs of the legal regime: mandatory normative legal consolidation (formal legal nature), specific target, special regulatory order based on a combination of legal means and methods of legal regulation, in relation to subjects of law, i.e., in a subjective sense, creating of favorable (or unfavorable) conditions to achieve certain interests, systemic and integrated character of a regime and its special structure. As a result, the author's definition of the legal regime is presented as a special procedure for the legal regulation of public relations, based on a certain combination of legal means and methods of legal regulation (permits, prohibitions, and positive obligations) aimed at achieving the relevant legal goals and planned optimal socially significant result.

Reputation or Interaction: What Drives Cooperation on Economic Sanctions?

This article studies cooperation on multilateral economic sanctions. Despite low effectiveness and sanction-busting, multilateral economic sanctions are a popular tool of foreign policy. We explore an instrumental approach to sanctions and develop a game theory framework where sender states face a collective action problem when coordinating multilateral coercion. We indicate that cooperation can be achieved through repeated interactions and reputation. We test empirically the two mechanisms with the TIES data on economic sanctions and adherence to past sanction regimes and the Correlates of War data on membership in International Organisations. Our results indicate that reputation is a strong predictor of cooperation on multilateral economic coercion. The effect of repeated interaction appears conditional on reputation; states with poor reputation mediate its effect through repeated interaction.

Learning to Collaborate from Diverse Interactions in Project-Based Sustainability Courses

Project-based sustainability courses require and facilitate diverse interactions among students, instructors, stakeholders, and mentors. Most project-based courses take an instrumental approach to these interactions, so that they support the overall project deliverables. However, as courses primarily intend to build students’ key competencies in sustainability, including the competence to collaborate in teams and with stakeholders, there are opportunities to utilize these interactions more directly to build students’ interpersonal competence. This study offers insights from project-based sustainability courses at universities in Germany, the U.S., Switzerland, and Spain to empirically explore such opportunities. We investigate how students develop interpersonal competence by learning from (rather than through) their interactions with peers, instructors, stakeholders, and mentors. The findings can be used by course instructors, curriculum designers, and program administrators to more deliberately use the interactions with peers, instructors, stakeholders, and mentors in project-based sustainability courses for developing students’ competence to successfully collaborate in teams and with stakeholders.

Socially robotic: making useless machines

As robots increasingly become part of our everyday lives, questions arise with regards to how to approach them and how to understand them in social contexts. The Western history of human–robot relations revolves around competition and control, which restricts our ability to relate to machines in other ways. In this study, we take a relational approach to explore different manners of socializing with robots, especially those that exceed an instrumental approach. The nonhuman subjects of this study are built to explore non-purposeful behavior, in an attempt to break away from the assumptions of utility that underlie the hegemonic human–machine interactions. This breakaway is accompanied by ‘learning to be attuned’ on the side of the human subjects, which is facilitated by continuous relations at the level of everyday life. Our paper highlights this ground for the emergence of meanings and questions that could not be subsumed by frameworks of control and domination. The research-creation project Machine Ménagerie serves as a case study for these ideas, demonstrating a relational approach in which the designer and the machines co-constitute each other through sustained interactions, becoming attuned to one another through the performance of research. Machine Ménagerie attempts to produce affective and playful—if not unruly—nonhuman entities that invite interaction yet have no intention of serving human social or physical needs. We diverge from other social robotics research by creating machines that do not attempt to mimic human social behaviours.

The Influence of Omeprazole on the Dissolution Processes of pH-Dependent Magnetic Tablets Assessed by Pharmacomagnetography

Pharmacomagnetography involves the simultaneous assessment of solid dosage forms (SDFs) in the human gastrointestinal (GI) tract and the drug plasmatic concentration, using a biomagnetic technique and pharmacokinetics analysis. This multi-instrumental approach helps the evaluation, as GI variables can interfere with the drug delivery processes. This study aimed to employ pharmacomagnetography to evaluate the influence of omeprazole on the drug release and absorption of metronidazole administered orally in magnetic-coated tablets. Magnetic-coated tablets, coated with Eudragit® E-100 (E100) and containing 100 mg of metronidazole, were produced. For the in vivo experiments, 12 volunteers participated in the two phases of the study (placebo and omeprazole) on different days to assess the bioavailability of metronidazole. The results indicated a shift as the pH of the solution increased and a delay in the dissolution of metronidazole, showing that the pH increase interferes with the release processes of tablets coated with E100. Our study reinforced the advantages of pharmacomagnetography as a tool to perform a multi-instrumental correlation analysis of the disintegration process and the bioavailability of drugs.