Rethinking Research in English with Nontraditional Adult Students

Adult students of diverse experiences, disciplines, and identities can become valued contributors to faculty-directed research while also benefiting from the experience. However, national data show that older students participate in mentored research at one of the lowest rates among all groups tracked. This article forwards principles for facilitating nontraditional students’ involvement in collaborative research. These were developed during studies conducted about and with adult undergraduates at a historically Black university. Student researchers’ insights, adult learning theory, and the scholarship of undergraduate research and mentoring indicate interlacing benefits that students, faculty, and English studies may gain from developing such research partnerships.

The benefit of an artificial carbohydrates supply on Earth

<p>Our conventional, biogenic agriculture (CBA) has failed to provide a reliable concept to feed a growing population in a sustainable way. In particular CBA suffers from severe environmental externalities - such as the massive use of land area, water for irrigation, fertiliser, pesticides, herbicides, and fossil fuel.</p> <p>Here we suggest the artificial synthesis of carbohydrates from (atmospheric) carbon dioxide, water, and renewable energy, which would allow not only a highly reliable production without those externalities, but would also open the possibility to increase the agricultural capacity of our planet by several orders of magnitude. Our study shows that saccharose could be produced from CO2, water and electrical energy with an efficiency exceeding 30% equivalent to about 15 kWh per kg of sugar. Factoring in the efficiency of photovoltaic electricity generation we derive a „sun to sugar“ efficinecy exceeding 6%, which is about 10-times the efficiency of CBA sugar beets or sugar cane.</p> <p>All required technology is either commercially available or at least developed on a lab-scale. No directed research has, however, yet been conducted towards an industry-scale carbohydrate synthesis because the CBA carbohydrate production was thought to be economically more competitive. However, considering the environmental and socioeconomic externalities of the conventional sugar production, this economical narrative has to be questioned. We estimate the production costs of artificial sugar at about 1 €/kg. Today’s spot market price for conventional sugar is about 0.3 €/kg, however, we estimate its total costs (including external costs) at >0.9 €/kg in humid regions and >2 €/kg in semi-arid regions. Accordingly, artificial sugar appears already today to be the less expensive way of production. The artificial sugar production allows in principle also for a subsequent synthesis of other carbohydrates such as starch as well as of fats. These synthetic products could be used as a feedstock to microorganisms, fungi, insects, or livestock in order to enhance also the sustainability of the biogenic production of, e.g., proteins.</p>

The Cultural Crossroads of Colonial Central America

The study of colonial Central American history, particularly its cultural history, remains in a nascent stage of development compared to that of other parts of colonial Spanish America such as Mexico and Peru. This partly reflects historical study’s “center–periphery paradigm,” which has tended to concentrate scholarly attention on powerful political and economic centers while neglecting places like Central America, deemed as peripheral. Twentieth-century civil wars and political violence impeded archival research and also directed research agendas toward modern historical topics. Over the last thirty years, a small but lively field has expanded in exciting directions including the following four: colonial religious encounters and the emergence of diverse Mayan Christianities; Afro-Central American society and culture; women, sexuality, and gender in urban society; and the images, ideas, and innovations that brought Central Americans closer together but also sparked controversies and conflicts over the long eighteenth century, here defined roughly as 1670 to 1820.

805 Educational programme based on bottom-up learning approach

A substantial part of the training programme for cardiologists in training includes several hours per week of face-to-face teaching. Since the pandemic's beginning, most of these activities in the universities have been conducted virtually using one of the available secure and reliable video platforms. The proven standard educational method is top-down education. The teacher guides the instruction, focuses on what the students ‘need to know’, and transmits the knowledge to the fellows, then verifies the learning. Unfortunately, this method does not stimulate critical, creative ability and does not always represent what the fellows ‘want to know’. A new additional model of education in the Board of Cardiology of the Magna Graecia University and the University of Trieste has been designed to develop education from the bottom up. The topics that have been chosen are those of the training programme in Cardiology and necessary to complete the training period. A participants list of 60 fellows in training and a panellist list of 3 teachers were then created. The first topic was ‘Myocarditis’. Next, each fellow was asked about one topic/question (Figure 1) (see additional data). All participants then had to vote for the best five from the pool of 60 questions. Therefore, a pyramid of priorities was made between the topics/questions and assigned to the three panellists, based on specific expertise, 3 days before the event (see additional data). Then a 1, 15 H zoom session was opened at 7:00 AM, and all participants were invited. In the digital session, the fellow authors of the first 15 questions read the question by his/herself, then the moderator entrusted the answer to one of the expert panellists. With this approach, the student started with a question of the selected topic, performs self-directed research or experimentation, and, finally, arrives at explicit knowledge. The general rule of this approach is that participants are the producers and advantages of this method are to teach students how to seek knowledge on their own, even outside the virtual event. In conclusion, this bottom-up educational programme presented can be a valuable teaching aid in the training trajectory of the new generation of physicians. 805 Figure 1.

Bibliometric Visualisation of Research Performance of Post COVID -19 and Mucormycosis: Where Do We Stand?

Purpose: The second wave of the covid-19 pandemic has impacted global healthcare tremendously and mucormycosis associated with coronavirus disease is one of the deadly fungi that hit India in April 2021. An increasing number of research papers are upcoming with mucormycosis associated with coronavirus research and this paper aims at performing a bibliometric visualisation of all the available research on post covid-19 and mucormycosis. Method: The Scopus database was selected and the search query (ALL (novel coronavirus 2019 OR coronavirus 2019 OR COVID 2019 OR COVID 19 OR nCOV OR SARSCoV2 OR COVID19) and (black fungus or white fungus or yellow fungus or mucormycosis) was developed on 25 May 2021 to retrieve all the bibliographic records on the domine of interest. VOSviewer software tool was used to constructing and visualising bibliometric networks to measure co-authors, countries, and institutions document citation, keyword metrics. Results: A total of 154 documents were retrieved in the search, these were authored by 3,806 authors and published in 133 sources (journals, books, etc.). USA, India, and UK ware contributed the highest papers. Journal of Fungi (4), Heliyon (3), International Journal of Molecular Sciences (3), and Phytotherapy Research (3) are the journals that published the highest papers. Author per document was 24.7; Documents per author were 0.0405 and collaboration index was marked 26.5 during the period. Conclusion: this bibliometric visualisation presents the qualitative and quantitative metrics for post-covid-19 and mucormycosis research and provides evidence that research in this domine is more in-depth than before. It is hoped that this well-directed research in different countries will provide new avenues for understanding diseases caused by mucormycosis associated with coronavirus. Keywords: Bibliometric Visualisation; Post-Covid-19; Mucormycosis; Annual Growth Rate; Research Performance; India

Calling to Complain: An Ethnographic and Conversation Analytic Account of Complaints to an Industry Ombudsman

<p>Although the term complaining represents an ostensibly straightforward behaviour, it has come to obtain a range of meanings within academic and commercial works which have directed research toward understanding the behaviour and attempting to improve the way that it is undertaken, particularly in commercial environments where complaint handling constitutes an important field of commercial practice for many firms. It is proposed in this thesis that such variation in the way that complaining is approached is problematic, as it is treated ways that frequently underemphasise the fundamental point that it is overwhelmingly conducted in interpersonal interactions using language as its primary vehicle (Edwards, 2005). This thesis offers an approach to complaint handling and complaining that eschews such approaches in favour of an empirically grounded account based on the principles of ethnographic analysis, conversation analysis, and discursive psychology. Through investigating the complaint handling procedures as practiced by employees in an institution expressly dedicated to the receipt of complaints and enquiries from customers by employing participant observation and interviews, an account of complaint handling is developed that identifies how a range of forces works to impact on the way that it is performed in an institutional environment, furnishing complaint handling with a level of detail not currently offered in managerial literature dedicated to developing the practice. Next, two research chapters present the investigation of two different aspects of complaint interactions themselves. The first of these focuses on call openings as customers and institutional agents work to align themselves to the project of the call, demonstrating varying orientations to institutional complaining as callers demonstrate their own procedures for complaining (and enquiring) which may not match the institutional prerogatives and procedures of the agents receiving the calls. The final research chapter offers an analysis of a recurrent practice in the complaint calls themselves: callers’ use of self-disclosure in the service of rendering matters as problematic and warranting complaint. This finding adds to existing discursive understandings of how complaining is done. Taken together the findings offer an alternative approach to investigating complaint handling by treating it as an indexical practice bound to local demands. This offers a detailed depiction of complaint handling and complaining ‘in situ’ that may offer researchers and commercial entities a new approach to investigating how it is that complaining is done and how, in commercial or institutional contexts, complaint handling may be improved through the methods employed in the thesis.</p>

Calling to Complain: An Ethnographic and Conversation Analytic Account of Complaints to an Industry Ombudsman

<p>Although the term complaining represents an ostensibly straightforward behaviour, it has come to obtain a range of meanings within academic and commercial works which have directed research toward understanding the behaviour and attempting to improve the way that it is undertaken, particularly in commercial environments where complaint handling constitutes an important field of commercial practice for many firms. It is proposed in this thesis that such variation in the way that complaining is approached is problematic, as it is treated ways that frequently underemphasise the fundamental point that it is overwhelmingly conducted in interpersonal interactions using language as its primary vehicle (Edwards, 2005). This thesis offers an approach to complaint handling and complaining that eschews such approaches in favour of an empirically grounded account based on the principles of ethnographic analysis, conversation analysis, and discursive psychology. Through investigating the complaint handling procedures as practiced by employees in an institution expressly dedicated to the receipt of complaints and enquiries from customers by employing participant observation and interviews, an account of complaint handling is developed that identifies how a range of forces works to impact on the way that it is performed in an institutional environment, furnishing complaint handling with a level of detail not currently offered in managerial literature dedicated to developing the practice. Next, two research chapters present the investigation of two different aspects of complaint interactions themselves. The first of these focuses on call openings as customers and institutional agents work to align themselves to the project of the call, demonstrating varying orientations to institutional complaining as callers demonstrate their own procedures for complaining (and enquiring) which may not match the institutional prerogatives and procedures of the agents receiving the calls. The final research chapter offers an analysis of a recurrent practice in the complaint calls themselves: callers’ use of self-disclosure in the service of rendering matters as problematic and warranting complaint. This finding adds to existing discursive understandings of how complaining is done. Taken together the findings offer an alternative approach to investigating complaint handling by treating it as an indexical practice bound to local demands. This offers a detailed depiction of complaint handling and complaining ‘in situ’ that may offer researchers and commercial entities a new approach to investigating how it is that complaining is done and how, in commercial or institutional contexts, complaint handling may be improved through the methods employed in the thesis.</p>

Recent Advances in Protective Coatings for Accident Tolerant Zr-Based Fuel Claddings

Zirconium-based alloys have served the nuclear industry for several decades due to their acceptable properties for nuclear cores of light water reactors (LWRs). However, severe accidents in LWRs have directed research and development of accident tolerant fuel (ATF) concepts that aim to improve nuclear fuel safety during normal operation, operational transients and possible accident scenarios. This review introduces the latest results in the development of protective coatings for ATF claddings based on Zr alloys, involving their behavior under normal and accident conditions in LWRs. Great attention has been paid to the protection and oxidation mechanisms of coated claddings, as well as to the mutual interdiffusion between coatings and zirconium alloys. An overview of recent developments in barrier coatings is introduced, and possible barrier layers and structure designs for suppressing mutual diffusion are proposed.