A New Approach to Mixed/Boundary Friction Prediction Using the Logistics Curve

There is a strong focus on improving the energy efficiency of machines. Over the last 20-30 years, one way to improve energy efficiency has been to reduce lubricant viscosity. This also has the effect of leading to thinner oil films between the machine’s moving surfaces and is likely to lead to increased mixed/boundary friction. Accurately predicting friction in the mixed/boundary friction regime is therefore becoming of great importance. The work reported here suggests that commonly used asperity friction models significantly underestimate friction in the mixed/boundary friction, and a new model, based on a logistic curve fit, gives a better estimate of mixed/boundary friction, provides good agreement with experimental friction data (from Mini Traction Machine experiments), and is much more straightforward for engineers and tribologists to apply for the estimation of mixed/boundary friction losses.

Contradictions of Ordered Trust: Trust-based Work and Conflicting Logics in Municipal Care

This article examines intra-organizational trust and institutional logics in municipal social care services in the setting of a trust-based developmental project. A case study was conducted in a Swedish municipal district. The data consists of 27 semi-structured interviews with care workers, first-line managers, and strategic staff as well as 11 observations. The study adds insights regarding trust in public sector organizations and shows how a strong focus on economic efficiency can relativize trust into a question of financial accountability. The results demonstrate how the governing managerial logic is not only in conflict with but also seems to overrule attempts to establish a more trust-based logic. Moreover, contributing to the institutional logics literature, it further shows how power structures affect institutional logics and how conflicts between logics play out differently at various organizational levels. The prospects of accomplishing a more trust-based governance without larger institutional or organizational changes are hence problematized.

What textbooks offer and what teachers teach: an analysis of the Dutch reading comprehension curriculum

In the Netherlands, the quality of the reading curriculum is currently under debate because of disappointing results on national and international assessments of students’ reading skills and motivation. In a mixed-method study, we analyzed the content of Dutch textbooks for reading comprehension instruction (i.e., the implemented curriculum) and teachers’ evaluation and use of these books (i.e., the enacted curriculum). A materials analysis of reading comprehension lessons (N = 80) in eight textbooks for grades 4 and 5 was complemented with semi-structured teacher interviews (N = 29) and lesson observations (N = 11), with a focus on the quality of reading strategy and text structure instruction in the curriculum. Main findings are (1) a lack of alignment between lesson goals, theory, and assignments, (2) a strong focus on practicing strategies, (3) limited declarative knowledge about strategies and text structure, (4) little opportunities for self-regulated strategy application. The teachers that were interviewed mention similar problems, but still hardly deviate from the textbook’s content and pedagogical guidelines. We make recommendations to improve the quality of the curriculum.

Neural Dynamics of Context-Sensitive Adjustments in Cognitive Flexibility

To adaptively interact with the uncertainties of daily life, we must match our level of cognitive flexibility to contextual demands—being more flexible when frequent shifting between different tasks is required and more stable when the current task requires a strong focus of attention. Such cognitive flexibility adjustments in response to changing contextual demands have been observed in cued task-switching paradigms, where the performance cost incurred by switching versus repeating tasks (switch cost) scales inversely with the proportion of switches (PS) within a block of trials. However, the neural underpinnings of these adjustments in cognitive flexibility are not well understood. Here, we recorded 64-channel EEG measures of electrical brain activity as participants switched between letter and digit categorization tasks in varying PS contexts, from which we extracted ERPs elicited by the task cue and alpha power differences during the cue-to-target interval and the resting precue period. The temporal resolution of the EEG allowed us to test whether contextual adjustments in cognitive flexibility are mediated by tonic changes in processing mode or by changes in phasic, task cue-triggered processes. We observed reliable modulation of behavioral switch cost by PS context that was mirrored in both cue-evoked ERP and time–frequency effects but not by blockwide precue EEG changes. These results indicate that different levels of cognitive flexibility are instantiated after the presentation of task cues, rather than by being maintained as a tonic state throughout low- or high-switch contexts.

Should I Play or Should I Go?

A pervasive application of gamification in many areas of everyday life has arguably yet to happen. For instance, despite much commercial interest in and a potentially huge market for successful gamification products in the areas of education and health, much of the excitement is still based on speculation, and reception in parts of the academic community remains sceptical. The chapter aims to collate observations from multiple empirical studies and meta-studies and collect and highlight issues that need to be resolved or mitigated for gamification to progress. Such issues include unclear definitions, a limitation on small sets of elements employed with unclear effects, unintentional side-effects of competition, a confusing variety of operationalizations, the erosion of intrinsic motivation through extrinsic incentives, a disconnect between theoretical understandings and practical realizations, a strong focus on a behaviorist paradigm, studies' mixed, partial, and inconclusive results, a lack of attention to moderating factors, and methodological limitations.

Making interpretive policy analysis critical and societally relevant: emotions, ethnography and language

This article summarises the main achievements of interpretive approaches to policy analysis and signposts ways to develop them to strengthen inclusivity and diversity. By visualising tangible strategies used in the approach, it demonstrates how we can better understand how policies are made and understood. At the same time, the article places a strong focus on emotions and ethnography as a way to strengthen the societal relevance of the approach. Focusing on emotions in policy research goes beyond a simple interest in emotions, using them as a specific critical lens to view the researched phenomenon while considering how policy ideas are framed as relevant or irrelevant through expressive language. Analogously, the article describes ethnography as an epistemological lens for analysing policy wherein researchers embrace human bias and the normativity of their research. To illustrate how these two lenses work in practice, the article concludes by discussing the research design of an analysis of the role of fathers in the policy debate around birth care in Czechia.

Deep Learning Based TTS-STT Model with Transliteration for Indic Languages

This paper introduces a new text-to-speech presentation from end-to-end (E2E-TTS) using toolkit called ESPnet-TTS, which is an open source extension. ESPnet speech processing tools kit. Various models come under ESPnet TTS TacoTron 2, Transformer TTS, and Fast Speech. This also provides recipes recommended by the Kaldi speech recognition tool kit (ASR). Recipes based on the composition combined with the ESPnet ASR recipe, which provides high performance. This toolkit also provides pre-trained models and samples of all recipes for users to use as a base .It works on TTS-STT and translation features for various indicator languages, with a strong focus on English, Marathi and Hindi. This paper also shows that neural sequence-to-sequence models find the state of the art or near the effects of the art state on existing databases. We also analyze some of the key design challenges that contribute to the development of a multilingual business translation system, which includes processing bilingual business data sets and evaluating multiple translation methods. The test result can be obtained using tokens and these test results show that our models can achieve modern performance compared to the latest LJ Speech tool kit data. Terms of Reference — Open source, end-to-end, text-to-speech

Strategies and challenges for the promotion of a responsibility mindset in technical career students during internships

Promoting responsibility values and knowledge of students requires actions with a strong focus on citizenship and ethics, with the aim to commit, engage, and empower future professionals. In this sense, a key question arises: how to define and foster responsibility among professionals at different organizational levels? This paper deals with contextual factors and key concepts for promoting responsibility-related values and competences (knowledge, skills, attitudes) throughout curricular internships carried out by students of technical degrees. In this work, we explore the advantages and challenges of working on a responsibility approach at this stage of a professional career, and we outline ideas for optimizing the process.

Classroom learning of English L2 requests: Input and interactional opportunities in French secondary schools

With today’s strong focus on communicative competence in second language (L2) classrooms, speech acts like suggestions, requests, refusals, and apologies are often investigated in interlanguage pragmatic (ILP) as well as instructional pragmatics. Even though there is strong evidence in ILP research that purports that L2 learners respond well to pragmatic instruction (Taguchi, 2015), the teaching of L2 pragmatics is not always prioritized in textbooks, teaching programmes or teacher education (Barron, 2016; Savvidou & Economidou-Kogetsidis, 2019) with the consequence that pragmatic learning can only occur incidentally. The present study examines opportunities to acquire L2 requests for 308 English as a foreign language (EFL) learners across 7 years of instruction in French secondary schools, investigating textbooks preferred by teachers, classroom interaction (39 hours), and teacher perspectives (semi-structured interviews with 10 teachers). After a pragmatic analysis of 15 EFL textbooks with a focus on requests, the study examines the incidence of metapragmatic input in 39 hours of teaching in 13 classes at 3 levels, and relates interactional patterns with interview data from the 10 teachers concerned. Findings suggest limited pragmatic input in both textbooks and classroom interaction. By comparing the profiles of teachers who encouraged L2 requests with those who did not, the study offers new explanations for L2 learners’ limited pragmatic development which also broadly corroborate previous findings of somewhat limited potential for L2 pragmatic development in obligatory school contexts.

Microenvironment-mediated cancer dormancy: Insights from metastability theory

Dormancy is an evolutionarily conserved protective mechanism widely observed in nature. A pathological example is found during cancer metastasis, where cancer cells disseminate from the primary tumor, home to secondary organs, and enter a growth-arrested state, which could last for decades. Recent studies have pointed toward the microenvironment being heavily involved in inducing, preserving, or ceasing this dormant state, with a strong focus on identifying specific molecular mechanisms and signaling pathways. Increasing evidence now suggests the existence of an interplay between intracellular as well as extracellular biochemical and mechanical cues in guiding such processes. Despite the inherent complexities associated with dormancy, proliferation, and growth of cancer cells and tumor tissues, viewing these phenomena from a physical perspective allows for a more global description, independent from many details of the systems. Building on the analogies between tissues and fluids and thermodynamic phase separation concepts, we classify a number of proposed mechanisms in terms of a thermodynamic metastability of the tumor with respect to growth. This can be governed by interaction with the microenvironment in the form of adherence (wetting) to a substrate or by mechanical confinement of the surrounding extracellular matrix. By drawing parallels with clinical and experimental data, we advance the notion that the local energy minima, or metastable states, emerging in the tissue droplet growth kinetics can be associated with a dormant state. Despite its simplicity, the provided framework captures several aspects associated with cancer dormancy and tumor growth.