University of Lincoln

About: University of Lincoln is a education organization based out in Lincoln, Lincolnshire, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Higher education. The organization has 2341 authors who have published 7025 publications receiving 124797 citations.

“Having sex” as a graded and hierarchical construct: a comparison of sexual definitions among heterosexual and lesbian emerging adults in the U.K.

Abstract: Research into definitions of “having sex” has tended to employ a dichotomous response design (following Sanders & Reinisch, 1999). However, conceptions of sexual activity may be far less clear-cut (c.f. Faulkner, 2003; Peterson & Muehlenhard, 2007). More refinement is also needed regarding the impact of sexual orientation on the construction of what counts as sex. This research employed a continuous response design, asking 124 emerging adults (40 male heterosexuals, 42 female heterosexuals, & 42 lesbians) to judge 13 sexual acts using a graded, six-point scale. Overall, there was substantial agreement that intercourse (vaginal and anal) was “definitely,” and kissing “definitely not,” sex. However, across the various acts, participants also consistently made use of options between these extremes, such that a clear hierarchy of sexual behaviors emerged. The lesbian group considered a range of forms of genital stimulation to be significantly more constitutive of sex than either heterosexual group, while judg...

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF SECONDARY EDUCATION IN BANGLADESH: COLONIAL PERIOD TO 21st CENTURY

Abstract: In a world of global market competition, the secondary level education has become a part of basic education. Secondary schools are vested with the responsibility of imparting knowledge, skills and attitudes essential for individuals to fit into society and be able to contribute fruitfully to its development. This article analyses the development of secondary education in Bangladesh in different period of time, socio-political context. Therefore, a general overview of secondary education is provided which is followed by historical evolution of secondary education in the British and Pakistani rule over Bangladesh. In conjunction with primary and mass educa­tion, secondary education was revised with great emphasis on the development of an all-round individual, female education, the acquisition of quality education, and the inculcation of technical and science education. A good number of commissions and committee were formed in different time to make changes in educational arena. Following the recommendations, the system of educational administration has been decentralised to promote school-based management and teacher empowerment. Furthermore, the non-government schools have been always encouraged to play an active role in providing secondary level education. A new education policy for Bangladesh has been tabled in September, 2009 after restoration of democratic process. At secondary education level a broad-based change in educational objectives, structure and system, curriculum have been proposed which is under public scrutiny.

Recurrent Kalman Networks: Factorized Inference in High-Dimensional Deep Feature Spaces

Abstract: In order to integrate uncertainty estimates into deep time-series modelling, Kalman Filters (KFs) (Kalman et al., 1960) have been integrated with deep learning models, however, such approaches typically rely on approximate inference tech- niques such as variational inference which makes learning more complex and often less scalable due to approximation errors. We propose a new deep approach to Kalman filtering which can be learned directly in an end-to-end manner using backpropagation without additional approximations. Our approach uses a high-dimensional factorized latent state representation for which the Kalman updates simplify to scalar operations and thus avoids hard to backpropagate, computationally heavy and potentially unstable matrix inversions. Moreover, we use locally linear dynamic models to efficiently propagate the latent state to the next time step. The resulting network architecture, which we call Recurrent Kalman Network (RKN), can be used for any time-series data, similar to a LSTM (Hochreiter & Schmidhuber, 1997) but uses an explicit representation of uncertainty. As shown by our experiments, the RKN obtains much more accurate uncertainty estimates than an LSTM or Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) (Cho et al., 2014) while also showing a slightly improved prediction performance and outperforms various recent generative models on an image imputation task.

The antecedents of travellers’ e-satisfaction and intention to buy airline tickets online: A conceptual model

Abstract: Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to utilise the existing theories on consumer behaviour and scales within web quality to develop a framework for measuring travellers’ web satisfaction and willingness to purchase tickets through airlines’ web sites. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is discursive, based on the analysis and synthesis of literature pertaining to e-consumer behaviour, web quality and travel and tourism streams. Gaps in the previous research have been identified and a conceptual framework is consequently proposed. In addition, further research and methodology is suggested. Findings – The paper proposes a conceptual framework that can measure consumers’ electronic satisfaction and intention to purchase tickets from airlines’ web sites. The framework includes nine constructs: information quality, system quality, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, e-trust, airline reputation, price perception, e-satisfaction and intention to purchase. Research limitations/implications – As a...