Challenges Confronting Students With Disabilities in Research Engagement in South Africa

This chapter presents physical barriers, lack of adequate funding, poor supervision, delay in feedback, communication difficulties, negative attitudes, and impairment-related disadvantages as the unique challenges confronted by students with disabilities when doing research in higher education in South Africa. Data were collected through scanning South African and international literature available on Google scholar, ProQuest, in books, journal articles, and online resources. Informed by decolonial theory, the invisible underlying causes of the challenges are discussed. Suitable assistive devices, listening to students with disabilities' voices, and more time allocation are suggested as strategies that could improve research engagement for students with disabilities.

Quadrature Demodulator-Assisted Estimation of Load Voltage and Resistance Based on Primary-Side Information of a Wireless Power Transfer Link

This paper proposes an algorithm for the extraction of primary-side first harmonic voltage and current components for inductive wireless power transfer (WPT) links by employing quadrature demodulation. Such information allows for the accurate estimation of corresponding receiver-side components and hence permits the monitoring of the output voltage and resistance necessary for protection and/or control without using either sensors or feedback communication. It is shown that precision estimation is held as long as the parameter values of the system are known and the phasor-domain equivalent circuit is valid (i.e., in continuous conduction mode). On the other hand, upon light load operation (i.e., in discontinuous conduction mode), the proposed technique may still be employed if suitable nonlinear correction is employed. The methodology is applied to a 400 V, 1 kW inductive WPT link operating at a load-independent-voltage-output frequency and is well-verified both by simulations and experiments.

Information Transmission in Delay-Coupled Neuronal Circuits in the Presence of a Relay Population

Synchronization between neuronal populations is hypothesized to play a crucial role in the communication between brain networks. The binding of features, or the association of computations occurring in spatially segregated areas, is supposed to take place when a stable synchronization between cortical areas occurs. While a direct cortico-cortical connection typically fails to support this mechanism, the participation of a third area, a relay element, mediating in the communication was proposed to overcome this limitation. Among the different structures that could play the role of coordination during the binding process, the thalamus is the best placed region to carry out this task. In this paper we study how information flows in a canonical motif that mimics a cortico-thalamo-cortical circuit composed by three mutually coupled neuronal populations (also called the V-motif). Through extensive numerical simulations, we found that the amount of information transferred between the oscillating neuronal populations is determined by the delay in their connections and the mismatch in their oscillation frequencies (detuning). While the transmission from a cortical population is mostly restricted to positive detuning, transmission from the relay (thalamic) population to the cortical populations is robust for a broad range of detuning values, including negative values, while permitting feedback communication from the cortex at high frequencies, thus supporting robust bottom up and top down interaction. In this case, a strong feedback transmission between the cortex to thalamus supports the possibility of robust bottom-up and top-down interactions in this motif. Interestingly, adding a cortico-cortical bidirectional connection to the V-motif (C-motif) expands the dynamics of the system with distinct operation modes. While overall transmission efficiency is decreased, new communication channels establish cortico-thalamo-cortical association loops. Switching between operation modes depends on the synaptic strength of the cortico-cortical connections. Our results support a role of the transthalamic V-motif in the binding of spatially segregated cortical computations, and suggest an important regulatory role of the direct cortico-cortical connection.

Advertising activities of research libraries in the period of pandemic

The article examines the advertising activities of scientific libraries during the pandemic period, including the role and importance of advertising in the process of promoting library and information services and products. The author notes that advertising allows to reach a wider audience in a short time, to increase the efficiency and quality of the service process and to ensure the stability of the library position in the society.Advertising can create a stable information demand for definit library and information services and products. The article also touches questions of SMM (Social Media Marketing) usage in libraries.It is emphasized that SMM is a solution for marketing issues of the library through social networks. Its main purpose is to provide the profile audience with information about the library’s services and products in the form of feedback, communication with the user and exchange of their views, as well as to encourage them to use the library resources as a whole. The advantage of using SMM instruments is the possibility to attract more users. The author also studied the activities of one of the largest Azerbaijani libraries during the pandemic and came to the conclusion that in the current situation on the information market, the leader-ship of publishing and bookselling enterprises with advertizing services and products is obvious. In this connection such coordination of libraries with these enterprises can support and maintain the position of the library in the society.

THE INFLUENCE OF WRITTEN FEEDBACK ON THE WRITING SKILL PERFORMANCE OF HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

Written feedback has been conceptualized as a form of communication between the instructor and the learners in the educational context. The written feedback helps to improve learning through knowledge construction and practice. It was to this background that I undertook this research to examine the influence of written feedback on the writing skill performance of high school students. Using a descriptive design, the study was undertaken in Kumasi Metropolis. Utilizing 350 participants, I analyzed the data with SPSS 25.0. The findings of the study revealed that students have a positive perception towards written feedback, the communicative function of the teachers’ feedback was both expressive and metalinguistic, and there was a positive effect of the written feedback from teachers on students writing performance. Hence, it was confirmed that written feedback influences writing skills. Keywords: Written feedback, Communication, Writing skills.

Directed information exchange between cortical layers in macaque V1 and V4 and its modulation by selective attention

Achieving behavioral goals requires integration of sensory and cognitive information across cortical laminae and cortical regions. How this computation is performed remains unknown. Using local field potential recordings and spectrally resolved conditional Granger causality (cGC) analysis, we mapped visual information flow, and its attentional modulation, between cortical layers within and between macaque brain areas V1 and V4. Stimulus-induced interlaminar information flow within V1 dominated upwardly, channeling information toward supragranular corticocortical output layers. Within V4, information flow dominated from granular to supragranular layers, but interactions between supragranular and infragranular layers dominated downwardly. Low-frequency across-area communication was stronger from V4 to V1, with little layer specificity. Gamma-band communication was stronger in the feedforward V1-to-V4 direction. Attention to the receptive field of V1 decreased communication between all V1 layers, except for granular-to-supragranular layer interactions. Communication within V4, and from V1 to V4, increased with attention across all frequencies. While communication from V4 to V1 was stronger in lower-frequency bands (4 to 25 Hz), attention modulated cGCs from V4 to V1 across all investigated frequencies. Our data show that top-down cognitive processes result in reduced communication within cortical areas, increased feedforward communication across all frequency bands, and increased gamma-band feedback communication.

Marketing of vending channels: a case of French university campuses

PurposeThis study identifies the conventional elements of the vending marketing mix and how they vary across academic segments in the context of a typical French university.Design/methodology/approachTo determine the elements of the vending marketing mix, the author conducts interviews with international industry experts and undertake 170 direct observations at various universities to verify the differences between the marketing mix proposals of dissimilar target markets.FindingsThe results reveal significant variances across all elements of the marketing mix, with distribution characteristics being the most frequently adapted element across various markets, followed by promotion- and product-related parameters, while pricing characteristics are most commonly standardised.Research limitations/implicationsVending operators should pay particular attention to marketing decisions related to the product assortment length, selection of appropriate locations, availability of smart payment options and feedback communication channels. The results reveal significant variances across all elements of the marketing mix indicating that vending operators apply strategies to reach different market segments. However, there is a high degree of standardisation within vending channels.Originality/valueThough vending channels are an important retail format, prior studies do not investigate their marketing mixes. This is the first attempt to empirically establish the conventional elements of the vending marketing mix and to measure its variation across customer segments.

Optimizing HARQ and Relay Strategies in Limited Feedback Communication Systems

One of the key challenges for future communication systems is to deal with fast changing channels due to the mobility of users. Having a robust protocol capable of handling transmission failures in unfavorable channel conditions is crucial, but the feedback capacity may be greatly limited due to strict latency requirements. This paper studies the hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) techniques involved in re-transmissions when decoding failures occur at the receiver and proposes a scheme that relies on codeword bundling and adaptive incremental redundancy (IR) to maximize the overall throughput in a limited feedback system. In addition to the traditional codeword extension IR bits, this paper introduces a new type of IR, bundle parity bits, obtained from an erasure code across all the codewords in a bundle. The type and number of IR bits to be sent as a response to a decoding failure is optimized through a Markov Decision Process. In addition to the single link analysis, the paper studies how the same techniques generalize to relay and multi-user broadcast systems. Simulation results show that the proposed schemes can provide a significant increase in throughput over traditional HARQ techniques.

Increased Anxiety is Associated with Better Learning from Negative Feedback

Anxiety is one of the most prevalent mental health problems; it is known to impede cognitive functioning. It is believed to alter preferences for feedback-based learning in anxious and non-anxious learners. Thus, the present study measured feedback processing in adults ( N = 30) with and without anxiety symptoms using a probabilistic learning task. Event-related potential (ERP) measures were used to assess how the bias for either positive or negative feedback learning is reflected by the feedback-related negativity component (FRN), an ERP extracted from the electroencephalogram. Anxious individuals, identified by means of the Penn State Worry Questionnaire, showed a diminished FRN and increased accuracy after negative compared to positive feedback. Non-anxious individuals exhibited the reversed pattern with better learning from positive feedback, highlighting their preference for positive feedback. Our ERP results imply that impairments with feedback-based learning in anxious individuals are due to alterations in the mesolimbic dopaminergic system. Our finding that anxious individuals seem to favor negative as opposed to positive feedback has important implications for teacher–student feedback communication.