Toward People’s Community Control of Technology: Race, Access, and Education

This field review explores how the benefits of access to computing for racialized and minoritized communities has become an accepted fact in policy and research, despite decades of evidence that technical fixes do not solve the kinds of complex social problems that disproportionately affect these communities. I use the digital divide framework—a 1990s policy diagnosis that argues that the growth and success of the internet would bifurcate the public into digital “haves” and “have-nots”—as a lens to look at why access to computing frequently appears as a means to achieve economic, political, and social equality for racialized and minoritized communities. First, I present a brief cultural history of computer-assisted instruction to show that widely-held assumptions about the educational utility of computing emerged from utopian narratives about scientific progress and innovation—narratives that also traded on raced and gendered assumptions about users of computers. Next, I use the advent of the digital divide framework and its eventual transformation into digital inequality research to show how those raced and gendered norms about computing and computer users continue to inform research on information and communication technologies (ICTs) used in educational contexts. This is important because the norms implicated in digital divide research are also present in other sites where technology and civic life intersect, including democratic participation, public health, and immigration, among others. I conclude by arguing that naïve or cynical deployments of computing technology can actually harm or exploit the very same racialized and minoritized communities that access is supposed to benefit. In short, access to computing in education—or in any other domain—can only meaningfully contribute to equality when minoritized and racialized communities are allowed to pursue their own collective goals.

Personal traits of the prophet muhammed their relationship to moral values

The aim of the research is to identify the personal characteristics of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. The research sample consisted of 360 individuals from different spectrums in society. The descriptive and analytical method was used, and a questionnaire was prepared for the personal characteristics of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and a questionnaire of the moral and human values in the contemporary world. : The personal characteristics of the Prophet Muhammad were as follows: The Prophet Muhammad, upon him be prayers and peace, was characterized by sincerity, honesty and generosity among his companions. He was characterized by humility, justice, forgiveness and pardon. He was characterized by sincerity in secret, openness and mercy for children. He was never afraid of anyone as long as he was right and his courage increased after the prophetic mission, from the human and moral values that have been agreed upon in the contemporary world: love and defense of the homeland, preservation of sacred places, love for school and appreciation of teachers, rationalization of the use of water and electricity, appreciation of scientific progress Generous hospitality, advising others, visiting patients, appreciating professions and respecting their owners, being kind to others, maintaining order, maintaining the law and respecting rights Child, animal welfare, justice, loyalty, patience, honesty, humility and respect for the rights of others, sympathy for the poor, selflessness, sincerity in work, tolerance for others, seeking lawful earnings, suppressing anger, kindness to animals, generosity, avoiding bad behaviors, Hide anger and do good deeds, love beauty, arts and inventions, appreciate scientific progress, provide advice to others, and the research also found that there is a positive and statistically significant relationship between the personal characteristics of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him and between the human and moral values in the contemporary world.

Integrating Agricultural Diversification in China’s Major Policies for Sustainable and Resilient Crop Production

Agricultural diversification of intensified farming systems is being proposed as a solution for achieving both food security and agricultural sustainability, but so far there has been little implementation of such policy at a larger scale. In China, major policies promote the “High-standard farmland consolidation” (HSFC) strategy to improve productivity and reduce environmental degradation in the world’s largest food production areas by simplifying instead of diversifying landscapes on large instead of small fields. As China’s Central government is asking for scientific innovations to improve its sustainable development strategy, we argue that China can become a role model to integrate agricultural diversification in its major policies, if HSFC builds on five decades of diversification research to achieve the national food security and sustainable development goals. We use text mining to analyze the past 17 years of China’s most important agricultural policy, the No. 1 Central Documents (1CD) policy and show that agricultural diversification at the field and supply chain level has received limited attention. Based on global synthesis studies covering five decades of research, we provide practical recommendations of how to integrate agricultural diversification in the China’s major policies from the national (the National 5-Year Plan and 1CD) to the provincial level. We use the major agricultural commodities rice, tea, wheat, and rapeseed in Zhejiang province as a case study to discuss how diversification can help to reach China’s sustainable agriculture targets. Diversification of China’s major food production areas on small fields could be an important example globally of how scientific progress informs policy and facilitates the food system transition.

The speed of information propagation in the scientific network distorts biomedical research

Delays in the propagation of scientific discoveries across scientific communities have been an oft-maligned feature of scientific research for introducing a bias towards knowledge that is produced within a scientist’s closest community. The vastness of the scientific literature has been commonly blamed for this phenomenon, despite recent improvements in information retrieval and text mining. Its actual negative impact on scientific progress, however, has never been quantified. This analysis attempts to do so by exploring its effects on biomedical discovery, particularly in the discovery of relations between diseases, genes and chemical compounds. Results indicate that the probability that two scientific facts will enable the discovery of a new fact depends on how far apart these two facts were originally within the scientific landscape. In particular, the probability decreases exponentially with the citation distance. Thus, the direction of scientific progress is distorted based on the location in which each scientific fact is published, representing a path-dependent bias in which originally closely-located discoveries drive the sequence of future discoveries. To counter this bias, scientists should open the scope of their scientific work with modern information retrieval and extraction approaches.

Improvement of drought tolerance in rice using line X tester mating design and biochemical molecular markers

Background Water stress, specifically the limited water resources needed to grow strategic crops, especially rice, poses a great threat to crop productivity. So, it was imperative that scientists all work together to try genetically improving the rice for drought tolerance in light of these environmental challenges. The aim of this study is trying to know the genetic behavior responsible for water-deficit tolerance in rice genotypes but at the molecular level. Moreover, this attempt will be an important leap in the process of genetic improvement in rice for water stress tolerance in Egypt. Results Twenty-three rice genotypes including eight parents and their fifteen F1 crosses or (the first hybrid generation) by line X tester analysis were evaluated for water stress tolerance during two experiments (the control and drought experiment) besides some molecular–biochemical studies for eight parents and the highest selected five crosses for water stress tolerance. The research revealed that five rice crosses out of fifteen hybrids were highly tolerant to water stress compared to the normal conditions. Data of biochemical markers indicated the presence of bands that are considered as molecular genetic markers for water-deficit tolerance in some rice genotypes, and this is the scientific progress achieved in this research. This was evident by increasing the density and concentration of SDS-protein electrophoresis besides enhancing the activities of peroxidase (POD) and polyphenol oxidase (PPO) under water-deficit conditions, which confirmed the tolerance of drought stress in the eight rice genotypes and the best five crosses from the first hybrid generation. Conclusion The five promising and superior rice hybrids showed an unparalleled tolerance to water stress in all evaluated traits under water stress treatment compared to the standard experiment. Also, biochemical and molecular parameters evidence confirmed the existence of unquestionable evidence that it represents the main nucleus for producing rice lines tolerated for drought stress under Egyptian conditions.

Science maps for exploration, navigation, and reflection—A graphic approach to strategic thinking

The world of science is growing at an unprecedented speed with more and more scholarly papers produced each year. The scientific landscape is constantly changing as research specialties evolve, merge or become obsolete. It is difficult for researchers, research managers and the public alike to keep abreast with these changes and maintain a true and fair overview of the world of science. Such an overview is necessary to stimulate scientific progress, to maintain flexible and responsive research organizations, and to secure collaboration and knowledge exchange between different research specialties and the wider community. Although science mapping is applied to a wide range of scientific areas, examples of their practical use are sparse. This paper demonstrates how to use a topical, scientific reference maps to understand and navigate in dynamic research landscapes and how to utilize science maps to facilitate strategic thinking. In this study, the research domain of biology at Aarhus University serves as an example. All scientific papers authored by the current, permanent staff were extracted (6,830 in total). These papers were used to create a semantic cognitive map of the research field using a co-word analysis based on keywords and keyword phrases. A workflow was written in Python for easy and fast retrieval of information for topic maps (including tokens from keywords section and title) to generate intelligible research maps, and to visualize the distribution of topics (keywords), papers, journal categories, individual researchers and research groups on any scale. The resulting projections revealed new insights into the structure of the research community and made it possible to compare researchers or research groups to describe differences and similarities, to find scientific overlaps or gaps, and to understand how they relate and connect. Science mapping can be used for intended (top-down) as well as emergent (bottom-up) strategy development. The paper concludes that science maps provide alternative views of the intricate structures of science to supplement traditional bibliometric information. These insights may help strengthen strategic thinking and boost creativity and thus contribute to the progress of science.

A Cutting-Edge Survey of Tribological Behavior Evaluation Using Artificial and Computational Intelligence Models

Any metal surface’s usefulness is essential in various applications such as machining and welding and aerospace and aerodynamic applications. There is a great deal of wear in metals, used widely in machines and appliances. The gradual loss of the upper metal layers in all metal parts is inevitable over the machine or component’s lifetime. Artificial intelligence implementations and computational models are being studied to evaluate different metals’ tribological behavior, as technological progress has been made in this field. Different neural networks were used for different metals. They are classified in this paper, together with a description of their benefits and inconveniences and an overview and use of the different types of wear. Artificial intelligence is a relatively new term that uses mechanical engineering. There is still no scientific progress to examine various metal wear cases and compare AI and computational models’ accuracy in wear behavior.