The social practice and regulation of cycling as ‘A Boy’s Thing’ in Irish secondary schools

Despite low levels of cycling to secondary education across the adolescent population in Ireland, there is, in addition, a pronounced inequality in rates of ridership between teenage girls and boys, with nearly 10 times as many boys cycling to school compared to girls. In light of this disparity, the Green-Schools #andshecycles campaign was created to explore and address the cycling gender gap among second-level students. Emerging from this campaign, this paper details qualitative research exploring this gender gap, drawing on focus groups with teenage girls and boys across Ireland. Using grounded theory methodology, a theory of cycling as 'A Boy's Thing' was generated. This theory makes sense of how cycling as a social practice is continually enacted, reproduced and regulated as a practice of and for boys among Irish adolescents, through related practices of exemplifying masculinity, incompatible femininity and processes of gender regulation. It has significant implications in considering the effects of gender as a configuration of social practice (Connell, 2005) or performance (Butler, 1990) on cycling, and how cycling is a uniquely gendered practice/performance in particular contexts. In light of this theoretical interpretation, two approaches for tackling the Irish second-level cycling gender gap are provided: first, promoting cycling among teenage girls by making cycling more compatible with dominant practices of femininity; second, promoting cycling among teenage girls by publicly rejecting and subverting dominant practices of femininity and processes of gender regulation relating to cycling in present day Ireland. 

The mediation of perceived risk’s impact on destination image and travel intention: An empirical study of Chengdu, China during COVID-19

Perceived risk clearly impacts travel behavior, including destination selection and satisfaction, but it is unclear how or why its effect is only significant in certain cases. This is because existing studies have undervalued the mediating factors of risk aversion, government initiatives, and media influence as well as the multiple forms or dimensions of risk that can mask its direct effect. This study constructs a structural equation model of perceived risk’s impact on destination image and travel intention for a more nuanced model of the perceived risk mechanism in tourism, based on 413 e-questionnaires regarding travel to Chengdu, China during the COVID-19 pandemic, using the Bootstrap method to analyze suppressing effect. It finds that while perceived risk has a significant negative impact on destination image and travel intention, this is complexly mediated so as to appear insignificant. Furthermore, different mediating factors and dimensions of perceived risk operate differently according to their varied combinations in actual circumstances. This study is significant because it provides a theoretical interpretation of tourism risk, elucidates the mechanisms or paths by which perceived risk affects travel intention, and expands a framework for research on destination image and travel intention into the realms of psychology, political, and communication science. It additionally encourages people to pay greater attention to the negative impact of crises and focuses on the important role of internal and external responses in crisis management, which can help improve the effectiveness of crisis management and promote the sustainable development of the tourism industry.

Deep Learning Technology Based on Intelligent Teaching in Social Psychology Courses

Social psychology is a comprehensive course which is an interdisciplinary of sociology and psychology. Most colleges and universities have currently taken social psychology as a general course to popularize psychological knowledge to students, which has great significance to cultivating their quality. Previous teaching did not combine this course with social needs, the optimization of students’ psychological needs and enhancement of their abilities to solve problems, on the contrary, pure theoretical interpretation was the focus, resulting in students’ lacking of proactivity. Therefore, a new teaching mode for improvement is urgent. Based on deep learning theory and comprehensively taking teaching environment, teaching resources and technical strategy support into consideration, and intelligence as the core, the paper has designed an intelligent teaching mode including intelligent preview, intelligent classroom, intelligent promotion and intelligent evaluation. Meanwhile, combined with courses of social psychology, video, audio and text teaching resources and multimedia courseware, multimedia resources were integrated, and problem discussion-based collaborative learning was adopted for teaching. To accurately evaluate the teaching effect under the intelligent teaching environment, guided by the appeal of intelligent teaching and based on analysis of accurate teaching objectives, the paper has established an accurate teaching evaluation index system, aiming at providing an idea for "How to evaluate the effect of accurate teaching in the intelligent teaching environment". At last, the paper has applied the new teaching mode into the practice of social psychology, finding that the new mode can stimulate students’ proactivity, improve their performance, which is worth promotion.

The Legal Conflictology and Its Development

The article considers legal conflictology as a relatively new scientific direction. The formation and development of legal conflictology in the Russian Federation and the Kyrgyz Republic are studied in the article. It was revealed that despite the extensive development of legal conflictology in the Russian Federation, in the Kyrgyz Republic so far this direction remains unexplored and is just beginning to take shape. The article substantiates the relevance of this direction with objective reasons and establishes the need to apply an interdisciplinary approach in the study of legal conflictology, where the theoretical and legal approach will be combined with sociological, philosophical and even psychological approaches. It is determined that research in the field of legal conflictology will allow to present an applied and theoretical interpretation of a wide range of issues on legal theory, therefore, such research on this topic should belong to one of its main directions. The term or legal category “legal conflict” is a reflection of a wide range of features of the essential process of interaction between the subjects of legal relations in crisis situations for them. The legal category of legal conflicts covers not only the legal conflicts themselves, but also mixed conflicts that begin at the beginning independently and outside of legal norms or relations, but subsequently acquire a legal character.

The Partnership of Patriarchy and Capitalism in Cho Nam-joo’s Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982

Socialist feminism, which emerged in the 1970s, aims to solve female oppression and make a comprehensive and innovative understanding of gender, class, capitalism, and male domination. As the mainstay of the socialist feminist school, the ideas of Hartmann and Young make significant contributions to the development of the theory. Hartmann first proposed dual systems theory, and Young published her single system response shortly after. To a certain extent, Young’s new thinking and questioning of dual systems theory also supplement and go into some of the arguments by Hartmann that are not clear enough. Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 is an English-translated novel written by contemporary South Korean writer and screenwriter Cho Nam-joo. The novel was translated into English by award-winning translator Jamie Chang in 2020. The plight of women highlighted in this novel caused widespread controversy in the international community, especially in East Asian countries. This article examines the oppression of women in Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, by the long-term interaction between patriarchy and capitalism. This study adopts a research method combining theoretical interpretation and close reading of the text. It addresses the research gap by focusing on a new perspective on the causes of Cho’s female characters’ oppression through the dual systems theory by Hartmann.

Investigating the replicability of preclinical cancer biology

Replicability is an important feature of scientific research, but aspects of contemporary research culture, such as an emphasis on novelty, can make replicability seem less important than it should be. The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology was set up to provide evidence about the replicability of preclinical research in cancer biology by repeating selected experiments from high-impact papers. A total of 50 experiments from 23 papers were repeated, generating data about the replicability of a total of 158 effects. Most of the original effects were positive effects (136), with the rest being null effects (22). A majority of the original effect sizes were reported as numerical values (117), with the rest being reported as representative images (41). We employed seven methods to assess replicability, and some of these methods were not suitable for all the effects in our sample. One method compared effect sizes: for positive effects, the median effect size in the replications was 85% smaller than the median effect size in the original experiments, and 92% of replication effect sizes were smaller than the original. The other methods were binary – the replication was either a success or a failure – and five of these methods could be used to assess both positive and null effects when effect sizes were reported as numerical values. For positive effects, 40% of replications (39/97) succeeded according to three or more of these five methods, and for null effects 80% of replications (12/15) were successful on this basis; combining positive and null effects, the success rate was 46% (51/112). A successful replication does not definitively confirm an original finding or its theoretical interpretation. Equally, a failure to replicate does not disconfirm a finding, but it does suggest that additional investigation is needed to establish its reliability.

John Lofland's concept of analytical ethnography

The paper presents a historical and theoretical interpretation of the ethnographic paradigm in the social sciences, its specificity, general principles of application and main research directions. The sources of analytical ethnography, its founders and the period of formation as an independent approach in the structure of interpretive metaparadigm are briefly considered. An ethnographic perspective is defined as a systematic, integral understanding of social processes and the organization of the collective life in the context of everyday practices. The intellectual heritage of the analytical ethnography’s founder John Lofland is presented by characterizing the basic research principles that constitute the essence of his theoretical and methodological strategy: generic propositions; unfettered inquiry; deep familiarity; emergent analysis; true content; new content; developed treatment. An attempt is made to trace the further connections of Lofland's analytical approach with other areas of the ethnographic paradigm.

The lower bound of nonlocal gradient for non-convex and non-smooth image patches based regularization

In the inverse problem of image processing, we have witnessed that the non-convex and non-smooth regularizers can produce clearer image edges than convex ones such as total variation (TV). This fact can be explained by the uniform lower bound theory of the local gradient in non-convex and non-smooth regularization. In recent years, although it has been numerically shown that the nonlocal regularizers of various image patches based nonlocal methods can recover image textures well, we still desire a theoretical interpretation. To this end, we propose a non-convex non-smooth and block nonlocal (NNBN) regularization model based on image patches. By integrating the advantages of the non-convex and non-smooth potential function in the regularization term, the uniform lower bound theory of the image patches based nonlocal gradient is given. This approach partially explains why the proposed method can produce clearer image textures and edges. Compared to some classical regularization methods, such as total variation (TV), non-convex and non-smooth (NN) regularization, nonlocal total variation (NLTV) and block nonlocal total variation(BNLTV), our experimental results show that the proposed method improves restoration quality.