Assessing gender mainstreaming in the education sector: depoliticised technique or a step towards women's rights and gender equality?

In 1995 the Beijing Conference on Women identified gender mainstreaming as a key area for action. Policies to effect gender mainstreaming have since been widely adopted. This special issue of Compare looks at research on how gender mainstreaming has been used in government education departments, schools, higher education institutions, international agencies and NGOs .1 In this introduction we first provide a brief history of the emergence of gender mainstreaming and review changing definitions of the term. In the process we outline some policy initiatives that have attempted to mainstream gender and consider some difficulties with putting ideas into practice, particularly the tensions between a technical and transformative interpretations . Much of the literature about experiences with gender mainstreaming tends to look at organizational processes and not any specificities of a particular social sector. However, in our second section, we are concerned to explore whether institutional forms and particular actions associated with education give gender mainstreaming in education sites some distinctive features. In our last section we consider some of the debates about global and local negotiations in discussions of gender policy and education and the light this throws on gender mainstreaming. In so doing, we place the articles that follow in relation to contestations over ownership, political economy, the form and content of education practice and the social complexity of gender equality

Gender violence in schools: taking the ‘girls-as-victims’ discourse forward

This paper draws attention to the gendered nature of violence in schools. Recent recognition that schools can be violent places has tended to ignore the fact that many such acts originate in unequal and antagonistic gender relations, which are tolerated and ‘normalised’ by everyday school structures and processes. After examining some key concepts and definitions, we provide a brief overview of the scope and various manifestations of gender violence in schools, noting that most research to date has focused on girls as victims of gender violence within a heterosexual context and ignores other forms such as homophobic and girl violence. We then move on to look at a few interventions designed to address gender violence in schools in the developing world and end by highlighting the need for more research and improved understanding of the problem and how it can be addressed

On the multiple spots and streamers exhibited by the (111) dynamic reflections in diamond

This article does not have an abstract

The Brexit Botnet and User-Generated Hyperpartisan News

In this paper we uncover a network of Twitterbots comprising 13,493 accounts that tweeted the U.K. E.U. membership referendum, only to disappear from Twitter shortly after the ballot. We compare active users to this set of political bots with respect to temporal tweeting behavior, the size and speed of retweet cascades, and the composition of their retweet cascades (user-to-bot vs. bot-to-bot) to evidence strategies for bot deployment. Our results move forward the analysis of political bots by showing that Twitterbots can be effective at rapidly generating small to medium-sized cascades; that the retweeted content comprises user-generated hyperpartisan news, which is not strictly fake news, but whose shelf life is remarkably short; and, finally, that a botnet may be organized in specialized tiers or clusters dedicated to replicating either active users or content generated by other bots

Probabilistic Temporal Databases, II: Calculus and Query Processing

There is a vast class of applications in which we know that a certain event occurred, but do not know exactly when it occurred. However, as studied by Dyreson and Snodgrass \cite{ds98}, there are many natural scenarios where probability distributions exist and quantify this uncertainty. Dekhtyar et. al. extended Dyreson and Snodgrass's work and defined an extension of the relational algebra to handle such data. The first contribution of this paper is a declarative temporal probabilistic (TP for short) calculus which we show is equivalent in expressive power to the temporal probabilistic algebra of Dekhtyar et. al. Our second major contribution is a set of equivalence and containment results for the TP-algebra. Our third contribution is the development of cost models that may be used to estimate the cost of TP-algebra operations. Our fourth contribution is an experimental evaluation of the accuracy of our cost models and the use of the equivalence results as rewrite rules for optimizing queries by using an implementation of TP-databases on top of ODBC. (Also referenced as UMIACS-TR-2001-79

The future problem solving program international: an intervention to promote creative skills in portuguese adolescents

The Future Problem Solving Program International (FPSPI) is an internationally applied educational program that involves young people. Its theoretical foundation is both the Creative Problem Solving Model and the Futurist Thinking. It aims to promote creative and critical thinking through a futurist approach to problems. This study intended to analyze the effects of the program on creative skills evaluated by the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (Figural Version). The participants’ perceptions of the efficacy of the program were also assessed. This intervention was carried out with 131 adolescents over a period of 7 months in an extra-curricular context. The evaluation of the program takes into account periods both before and after interventions, using similar experimental and control groups. The results showed significant statistical differences for the all skills studied and very positive perceptions of the efficacy of FPSPI. Two significant gender differences in creative performance were also found. The results are described and discussed in order to promote awareness for future research concerning this program(undefined)info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

On profiling bots in social media

Submit request for dataset at https://larc.smu.edu.sg/twitter-bot-profiling</p

Regulation of LRRK2 activity by metabolic stress and heavy metal exposure

Genetic variability in the gene encoding leucine-rich repeat kinase 2 (LRRK2) is associated with both familial and sporadic Parkinson's disease (PD). While LRRK2 is known to modulate vesicular trafficking and stress signaling through its phosphorylation and kinase activity, how it responds to metabolic and environmental stressors remains poorly understood. Here, we show that acute inhibition of glycolysis and oxidative phosphorylation triggers rapid, reversible dephosphorylation of LRRK2 at constitutive sites in cells, ex vivo brain slices, and primary astrocytes. In contrast, glucose deprivation modestly increases LRRK2 kinase activity and Rab substrate phosphorylation. In vivo, chronic 2-deoxyglucose treatment reduces S935 phosphorylation in kidney tissue, linking energy stress to LRRK2 modulation in peripheral organs. Strikingly, manganese (Mn), a PD-relevant environmental toxicant, robustly activates LRRK2, inducing pS1292 autophosphorylation and phosphorylation of Rab8a, Rab10 and Rab12, while suppressing S935 phosphorylation after a 24 hrs exposure. Time-resolved analysis revealed distinct temporal substrate regulation, with rapid Rab12 phosphorylation and pRab10 levels gradually increasing and peaking only after 24 h. Phosphorylated Rab10 remains closely associated with both lysosomal and centrosomal membranes under Mn stress. Mn impaired mitochondrial respiration and increased ROS, and antioxidant treatment rescued Rab10 phosphorylation, establishing a redox-dependent mechanism of LRRK2 activation. Together, these findings reveal stressor-specific modes of LRRK2 regulation and suggest that LRRK2 integrates metabolic and environmental signals via redox-sensitive pathways relevant to PD pathogenesis