Mortar to Repair Rammed-Earth Walls’ Surfaces: Do we still Need it?

A rammed-earth technique has been echoed worldwide due to being conceived not only as an environment-friendly method of construction but also standing as an alternative method to arguably replacing cement. The technique however shows several pitfalls. One concerns the lengthy process of curing upon erecting the rammed-earth walls due to the low process of a chemical reaction occurred throughout the curing stage. A second bias followed from the slow curing and concerns the degradation accentuated at the outer wall’s texture, particularly at the edges, due to effects of the weather cycle. These drawbacks have been observed while accomplishing a funded research project. This article has at its stake remedying the above pitfalls. A natural sandy limestone shows a low percentage of calcium carbonate needed for a cohesive mixture. The method suggested here is based on an experiment that uses minerals of the fruits’ and vegetables’ waste as a binding substance. Curing time in this method has been reduced to the half. It is also suggested here that each stage has its importance, including mixing the soil particles dry and wet, compacting the moistened soil mixture, a well-made formwork and curing, towards remedying the above pitfalls.

Erratum: E. A. Sokova et al., Risk factors and characteristics of adverse reactions associated with the use of beta-lactam antibiotics in older patients

Sоkоvа Е.А., Arkhipov V.V., Demidova O.A., Mazerkina I.A., Alexandrova T.V., Zhuravleva M.V. Risk factors and characteristics of adverse reactions associated with the use of beta-lactam antibiotics in older patients. Bezopasnost’ i risk farma koterapii = Safety and Risk of Pharmacotherapy. 2021;9(3):128–135. https://doi.org/10.30895/2312-7821-2021-9-3-128-135Dear readers, a technical error was made on page 134, issue 3 of the Safety and Risk of Pharmacotherapy, 2021 (2021;9(3):128–135). The following statement:“Acknowledgements. The study reported in this publication was carried out as part of a publicly funded research project No. 056-00005-21-00 and was supported by the Scientific Centre for Expert Evaluation of Medicinal Products (R&D public accounting No. 121021800098-4)”should read:“Acknowledgements. The study reported in this publication was carried out as part of a publicly funded research project No. 056-00005-21-00 and was supported by the Scientific Centre for Expert Evaluation of Medicinal Products (R&D public accounting No. 121022000154-2)”.The correction did not have any effect on the conclusions made by the authors.The text of the online version of the journal was corrected accordingly.

ONE ARABESQUE IN THE SMALL WORLD OF OD WEBMAPS

Arabesque is an application for the exploration and geovisualisation of origin-destination flows (or spatial networks), developed within the framework of the Univ. Gustave Eiffel (ex. IFSTTAR)-funded research project geographic flow visualisation (gflowiz) geoflowiz, in collaboration with the CNRS. It allows both the exploration and the filtering of OD data and their representation, with a strong emphasis on geographic information layering and features' semiology. The key-objective is to propose an easy way to produce a modern cartography (a geovisualisation) of thematic flows (e.g. bilateral flow volume), at several geographic scales, even from your own datasets. The objective of this article is to position Arabesque in the range of geoweb applications for producing flow maps, by comparing its functionalities with those of similar web applications – Magrit, Kepler.gl, flowmap.blue – pointing out their respective advantages and limitations. The analysis of its functionalities is compared on the same flow dataset – MOBSCO, i.e. a dataset describing the school mobility of French pupils and students on a given year – for a practical and empirical “validation” of its contributions. We demonstrate that the configurations and appearances of these tools’ visual output depend largely on the culture of their developers, and on the use and audiences for which they have been developed.

ATEFA - A first German approach on UAM community noise and air-taxi certification

Urban air mobility (UAM) includes larger air taxis, driven by multiple distributed propellers or fans, installed in a fixed configuration or as tilted wings/engines. These novel electric air vehicles will always generate tonal and broadband noise, in some cases with components from a specific installation situation. In any case, noise will propagate to the ground, into high populated areas of large cities or into their urban environment, individually depending on the operational situation of air taxi use. Some of the populated areas, where no significant noise from air traffic has been observed so far, will be exposed to this new type of aircraft noise. ATEFA, as the first German national funded research project on UAM community noise, aims to provide first answers. Three selected air taxi concepts, strongly differing acoustically from each other, will be technically described and their noise emissions will be modeled and predicted. Air taxi operations will be simulated by generic traffic scenarios in a selected area of southern Germany, and community noise near vertiports, but also "en-route" along the flight paths, will be computed. Beside this, noise certification aspects will be assessed regarding metrics and procedures and compared to a light low-noise helicopter as reference aircraft.

Software literacy in shaping what we know in a software-saturated society

Today’s modern societies are increasingly dependent on digital technologies and the software underpinning these technologies in almost every sphere of professional and personal life. These technologies and software are poorly understood as tools that shape our engagement with knowledge, culture and society in the 21st century. None of these tools are ‘neutral.’ They embody social and cultural assumptions about their use and all have particular values embedded in their interfaces and affordances. This paper draws from a funded research project investigating the notion of software literacy (Khoo, Hight, Torrens, & Cowie, 2017). In the project software literacy is defined as the expertise involved in understanding, applying, problem solving and critiquing software when it is used to achieve particular goals. The project team hypothesised there exists three progressive tiers of development towards software literacy in professional contexts. We conducted case studies of engineering and media studies students’ learning of an ubiquitous software such as PowerPoint as well as proprietary discipline-specific software to examine how software literacy is understood, developed and applied in a tertiary teaching-learning context. In this contribution we outline the project findings then use the notion of software literacy as the lens to unpack and illustrate through three everyday examples how software literacy would seem to be an essential part of learning and living in the 21st century.

IDENTIFICATION OF COMPONENTS FOR THE EVALUATION OF FUNDED RESEARCH PROJECT: A SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW

The purpose of this paper is to identify different components that can help to determine the effect of study findings and to identify different methodologies as well. To clarify the extent of the study on the impact assessment of funded initiatives in various countries, a systematic literature review is carried out. Methodology: It is important to consider the effects of scientific findings to achieve value for the resources spent in science and technology. A systematic literature review (SLR) is carried out to gain a detailed understanding of the different literature available in the area of assessment of the search results of the projects funded. A total of 72 papers are collected from Google scholars to perform the SRL, which are screened according to the requirements for inclusion and exclusion. Further 20 papers, primarily focusing on two study fields, namely the academic and health care industries, are accepted. The 20 papers chosen are mapped accordingly based on the market, country of origin, variables, and approaches used by different authors. Conclusion: To determine the most significant variables commonly used by numerous writers in their studies, a systematic literature review is undertaken. The methodologies used by writers in their studies are also identified in this study. This paper can also be used by other researchers to describe in their studies the components and methodologies commonly used. Originality/Value: The current research assists policymakers in making decisions on which components to examine when assessing funded initiatives that improve the effects, quality, and productivity in the higher educational sectors, and there has been relatively limited research in this field.

Keynote Address, Third Colloquium, Constitutional Justice Project, HSRC (South Africa), 4 June 2015

This keynote address at the Third Colloquium of the Constitutional Justice Project held at the HSRC on 4 June 2015 covers three topics: it first briefly recounts the history of this South African government funded research project on the impact of court decisions and other matters, it surveys the main findings to date of the research project, and it renders one academic’s opinion as to its likely significance.

Individual and Community Crises in a Pandemic: The Social Theater of Ambulatory Care

This article offers a preliminary diagnosis of Polish social theaters with regard to the crises of the individual and the community during the Covid-19 pandemic. The interpretive framework is Lidia Zamkow’s concept of the theater of ambulatory care, which allows us to locate the activity of social theaters in the context of Michel de Certeau’s tactics and Jack Halberstam’s low theories. The theater of ambulatory care recognizes the needs of individuals and communities in a pandemic crisis and reacts to them in different ways. We distinguish and describe three ideal types of diagnoses and the resulting treatments that theaters of ambulatory care use in a pandemic: therapy, conjuring, and revolution. The article is based on materials collected during two studies: a funded research project on the anthropological and social activity of the Węgajty Theater, carried out at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and a survey among theater staff during the pandemic, initiated by the Zbigniew Raszewski Theater Institute in Warsaw. (Trans. K. Kułakowska)

Research That Is Real and Utopian: Indigenous Knowledge as a Resource to Revitalise High School Poetry

This article presents the reflections of a research team from the ZAPP-IKS project. ZAPP (the South African Poetry Project) undertook a three-year NRF-funded research project titled “Reconceptualising Poetry Education for South African Classrooms through Infusing Indigenous Poetry Texts and Practices”. The research on which we report here was undertaken as part of that project. The team consists of an English teacher, a poet and an academic. Together, they attempted a research intervention at a Johannesburg secondary school. The article presents their reflections on the challenges, successes and potentials of the attempted research intervention, which was intended to energise and inspire the teaching of English poetry by drawing from and developing indigenous knowledges and principles. Presented as a play, a praise poem and a conventional academic analysis by the school-based teacher, the university-based poet, and the university-based academic, respectively, the article offers diverse analyses as an illustration of how research relationships may be understood, experienced and represented in various ways. These analyses draw implicitly and explicitly on conceptualisations of indigeneity and indigenous knowledges, as well as decoloniality, with the conventional academic analysis making use of Erik Olin Wright’s concept of real utopias to frame its understanding of the project and the other two perspectives on it. Together they invite readers to challenge and transform the conventions that govern educational practices, research and representation, but caution against naïve idealism when doing so.

Researching Otherwise? Autoethnographic Notes on the 2013 Stockholm Riots

Market adaptation, fragmentation and precariousness have been widely documented as problematic features of knowledge production processes in the university. This article follows an undercurrent of critical scholarship to explore how paths of resistance can be opened up by researching otherwise. The article builds on autoethnographic notes from a collective and non-funded research project aimed at gathering in situ narratives from people who experienced the 2013 Stockholm Riots. The research strategy behind this project, its organization as well as its results and reception, is here used as a point of departure to scrutinize the conditions of the possibility of critical knowledge production. The article draws attention to a critical place for doing research – in the cracks of the university – which arguably complicates the academic–public divide and keeps open discursive spaces during troubling moments of closure.