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.

How do students’ accounts of sociology change over the course of their undergraduate degrees?

Abstract: In this article we examine how students’ accounts of the discipline of sociology change over the course of their undergraduate degrees. Based on a phenomenographic analysis of 86 interviews with 32 sociology and criminology students over the course of their undergraduate degrees, we constituted five different ways of accounting for sociology. These ranged from describing sociology as a form of personal development focused on developing the students’ opinion to describing sociology as a partial way of studying the relations between people and society. The majority of students expressed more inclusive accounts of sociology over the course of their degrees. However, some students’ accounts suggested they had become disengaged with sociology. We argue that the differences in the ways that students were disengaged were not captured by our phenomenographic categories. In conclusion, we argue that our analysis illustrates the crucial role that students’ relations to knowledge play in understanding the transformative nature of higher education.

Encountering Globalization: Professional Groups in an International Context

Abstract: The market for professional services is increasingly international but comparisons have not been made between different professions nor on how state policies affect opportunities for mobility. This article considers three professions: engineers, physicians and psychologists and explores the similarities and differences in international labour market demand for occupations. It examines how state policies in four countries, Canada, Finland, France and the UK, aim to promote and control professional labour mobility and migration, and the differences across the three professions. Engineering is an international profession and the extent to which states encourage inward migration differs. Medicine is highly regulated in all four countries but inward migration of physicians varies depending on national policy. Psychologists are less mobile, and the extent of state sponsorship and regulation varies across countries. In all three professions, international organizations are a force encouraging global standards. The conclusion is that state policies reflect state interests and have a strong influence on patterns of mobility.

Lycopene extraction from extruded products containing tomato skin

Abstract: To determine the lycopene content of extruded products containing 10% tomato skin, the conditions for solvent extraction were optimised. After three extraction cycles at 50 °C each for 15 min at a solvent to meal ratio of 40:1, a maximum of 6.6 ppm lycopene was extracted. However, the extraction was considered incomplete, thus the product was digested by pancreatin prior to extraction. The extracted lycopene content was increased to 23.5 ppm using the optimum conditions of 20 min of digestion with 10 mg mL−1 pancreatin. To validate the extraction efficiency at optimum conditions, a set of extruded products containing different lycopene concentrations was used. Digestion increased the extracted lycopene content by more than 2.5-fold between the products. Furthermore, this inclusion significantly improved the correlation coefficient between the red colour and the extracted lycopene content. Therefore, including a digestion step prior to extraction by solvents was necessary to efficiently extract lycopene from extruded products.

Classification of EEG-based single-trial motor imagery tasks using a B-CSP method for BCI

Abstract: Classifying single-trial electroencephalogram (EEG) based motor imagery (MI) tasks is extensively used to control brain-computer interface (BCI) applications, as a communication bridge between humans and computers However, the low signal-to-noise ratio and individual differences of EEG can affect the classification results negatively In this paper, we propose an improved common spatial pattern (B-CSP) method to extract features for alleviating these adverse effects First, for different subjects, the method of Bhattacharyya distance is used to select the optimal frequency band of each electrode including strong event-related desynchronization (ERD) and event-related synchronization (ERS) patterns; then the signals of the optimal frequency band are decomposed into spatial patterns, and the features that can describe the maximum differences of two classes of MI are extracted from the EEG data The proposed method is applied to the public data set and experimental data set to extract features which are input into a back propagation neural network (BPNN) classifier to classify single-trial MI EEG Another two conventional feature extraction methods, original common spatial pattern (CSP) and autoregressive (AR), are used for comparison An improved classification performance for both data sets (public data set: 9125%±177% for left hand vs foot and 8450%±542% for left hand vs right hand; experimental data set: 9043%±426% for left hand vs foot) verifies the advantages of the B-CSP method over conventional methods The results demonstrate that our proposed B-CSP method can classify EEG-based MI tasks effectively, and this study provides practical and theoretical approaches to BCI applications