Search results for "NIST"
showing 10 items of 13738 documents
Internet Adoption at the User Level: Empirical Evidence from The Gambia
2014
The unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) are used to investigate technology adoption. However, its application in Sub-Saharan Africa is rare and barely extended to the validation phase. In this paper, we introduce six new moderating factors for UTAUT core determinants and two other direct determinants of Internet adoption. The objective of this approach is to identify relevant elements of Internet adoption at the user level in The Gambia. Moderating factors are interacting terms used when the relationship between independent and dependent variable is weak, inconsistent or non-existent. A case study research design was employed and the data were gathered in Autumn of 20…
Semantic Portal as a Tool for Structural Reform of the Ukrainian Educational System
2014
Education is recognized as a fundamental enabler of human development. The adoption of information and communications technologies (ICTs) by education (especially in developing countries) contributes to educational system reforms, in addition to the traditional advantages, such as social openness and accessibility. Yet the academic community has not studied sufficiently the challenging context in which ICTs are used as instruments for the reform of inefficient, and sometimes even corrupted, educational systems rather than just as means for smarter classrooms, remote access, or content management. The object of this study is Ukrainian higher education (HE) and its quality assurance (QA) syst…
Memorializing mass deaths at the border: two cases from Canberra (Australia) and Lampedusa (Italy)
2017
In this paper, we compare two seemingly very similar instances in which individuals and organizations within the borders of the global North have memorialized the deaths of irregular migrants at sea: the SIEV X memorial in Australia’s national capital Canberra, and the Giardino della memoria (Garden of Remembrance) on the Italian island of Lampedusa. Unlike ephemeral manifestations of grief, potentially these memorials have effects that reach well beyond their creation. We relate the differences between the memorials to the contexts within which they were created: an immediate local response involving people directly affected by the disaster’s aftermath, on the one hand, and a delayed natio…
Competing institutional logics in Soviet industrial location policy
2018
The Soviet legacy has been widely demonstrated to have had negative impacts on the regional and economic development of Russia. This article studies the mechanisms of competing institutional logics in Soviet industrial location policies as a source of this adverse heritage. The results indicate that prolonged competition between three institutional logics complicated the adoption and practice of consistent industrial location strategies and contributed to structural problems in economic geography. An analysis of Soviet institutional logics demonstrates parallel forms of competition and coexistence with findings from other institutional environments, paving the way for a broader theoretical …
More educated, more mobile? Evidence from post-secondary education reform
2016
More educated, more mobile? Evidence from post-secondary education reform. Spatial Economic Analysis. This paper examines the causal impact of the level of education on within-country migration. To account for biases resulting from selection into post-secondary education, it uses a large-scale reform within the higher education system that gradually transformed former vocational colleges into polytechnics in Finland in the 1990s. This reform created quasi-exogenous variation in the supply of higher education over time and across regions. The results based on multinomial treatment effects models and population register data show that, overall, polytechnic graduates have a significantly highe…
Is there a Nordic model of final disposal of spent nuclear fuel? Governance insights from Finland and Sweden
2017
This paper explores citizen participation in Swedish and Finnish regulatory processes for final disposal of spent nuclear fuel (SNF). Finland and Sweden are considered the most advanced worldwide in term of SNF disposal plans. Our aim is to analyze the institutional waste management frameworks, focusing on the role of civil society organizations (CSOs); how lay-people and civil society organizations have been able to participate and contribute to radioactive waste licensing processes; and the nature of radioactive waste risk debates. We review official documents of the waste companies and nuclear safety authorities, plus information from civil society organizations and laypeople. Our theore…
University Autonomy, Agenda Setting and the Construction of Agency : the case of the European University Association in the European Higher Education…
2014
This article analyses the ways in which a policy actor constructs its agency through the production of knowledge. Taking the example of the concept of ‘autonomy’ as constructed in the discourse of the European University Association (EUA), the article draws on the theory of discursive framing and agenda setting, as well as on Meyer and Jepperson's heuristic of agentic actors, to show how the practice of knowledge production can shape the European higher education policy. The article offers a contribution to the debate aiming to develop a more critical perspective on the development of the European Higher Education Area, which sees the process as constituted through the activities of, and t…
Equal access to the top? Measuring selection into finnish academia
2019
In this article, we draw a parallel between equality of opportunity in educational transitions and equality of opportunity in academic careers. In both cases, many methodological problems can be ameliorated by the use of longitudinal rather than cross-sectional data. We illustrate this point by using Finnish full-population register data to follow the educational and academic careers of the 1964–1966 birth cohorts from birth to the present day. We show how the Finnish professoriate is highly selected both in terms of parental background and in terms of gender. Individuals of different backgrounds differ greatly in the likelihood of completing different educational and academic transitions, …
Institutional Autonomy and Academic Freedom in the Nordic Context — Similarities and Differences
2013
Owing to their common history, similarities in language and culture, long traditions in political collaboration and the shared Nordic societal model, an assumption is often made that the operational and regulatory context of universities is similar in the five Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. In this article, we examine the relationship between the Nordic higher education institutions and their specific governments. The interpretation of institutional autonomy and academic freedom in the Nordic countries is discussed with support from recently collected empirical data, Nordic university legislation and the topical research literature. We describe the differenc…
Gender segregation in the employment of higher education graduates
2014
This article examines the employment and placement in the working life of Finnish higher education graduates (i.e. graduates from universities and polytechnics), focusing on gender equality. It reports a study on gender segregation in higher education and working life, considered in relation to Nordic gender equality policies. The data were gathered via a questionnaire administered to graduates in business and administration (n = 1067) and in technology (n = 1087), three years after their graduation. The results showed that men were able to secure permanent and full-time employment more often than women, and men achieved better correspondence between their degree and their employment. Howev…