Search results

The chapter analyses the re-emergence of gene editing as an object of policy attention at the European Union (EU) level. Editing the genome of plants and/or animals has been a rather controversial component of all EU policies on agricultural biotechnology since the late 1980s. The chapter examines in detail the various initiatives that have been assumed for the regulation of gene editing at the EU level. Since the first political and legislative attempts, the field has been revolutionized with the development of the CRISPR-Cas9 system, which is comparatively much easier to design, produce, and use. Beyond the pure, safety-driven scientific questions, gene editing, in its contemporary form, raises a series of ethical and regulatory questions that are discussed in the context of the legal options and competences of the EU legislators. Special attention is paid to questions about the legal status of gene editing in Europe and the adequacy of the current GMO framework to deal with all the challenges associated with the latest scientific developments in the field of gene editing with a special focus on gene drive. Given the ongoing discussions regarding the ethical tenets of gene editing, the chapter investigates the question on whether there is a need to shape an EU-wide “intervention” that will address the complex and dynamic socio-ethical challenges of gene editing and puts forward a series of proposals for the framing of an inclusive framework that will be based on the need to re-enforce public trust in the EU governance of emerging technologies.

The purpose of this paper is to reveal the co-editing mechanism aiming at content creation, and an entry of online encyclopedia is taken as a case, for the purpose of promoting and enhancing the development of wiki-based digital humanities projects (WDHPs), specifically, the projects that focus on gathering contextual information in the culture heritage domain.

An exploratory study was conducted by three steps. A representative entry’s editorial records were reorganized to obtain a data set of discussion statements (n=608), based on which linked-structures were built, and PageRank algorithm was used to analyze the co-editing process. Skewness statistic was applied to measure the consensus of co-editing, and consensus evolution over time was explored. Linear or curve fitting was performed to analyze the correlation between consensus evolution and its influential factors.

In WDHPs, co-editing activity of content creation can be considered as a large-scale group discussion, consensus can evaluate the efficiency of co-editing, which evolves with time and is influenced by the number of statements, breadth and depth of argumentation structure. Taking “Mogao Grottoes” as an example, group discussions around 15 key issues dominate the content creating process, consensus is on a rise with time, finally reaches a relatively high level, and consensus evolution is more influenced by breadth than by depth of argumentation structure, which indicates that co-editing efficiency of “Mogao Grottoes” is fine and more argumentation in a depth manner should be guided.

For researchers of WDHPs, it is beneficial to apply online encyclopedia platform combining with consensus analysis to develop WDHPs. For designers of WDHPs, the elements related to argumentation structure can be absorbed into the design to promote co-editing in an effective manner. For DH researchers, the analytic procedure can be beneficial of revealing the interest of contributors in a specific DH field.

This research is novel in comprehensively understanding co-editing mechanism of content creation in WDHPs, resulting in a three-step analytic procedure of presenting co-editing process, evaluating and improving co-editing efficiency.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how and why choice editing is being used as a tool to promote sustainable consumption, using the choice editing of fish as a case study.

This study is explorative in nature and is based on a case study of choice editing of fish as a product category that has undergone fairly widespread choice editing. The case is built on primary empirical data from three Swedish and four British retailers collected through semi-structured interviews. These retailers are of different sizes, but together represent over 50 per cent of the food retail market in both Sweden and the UK taken by market share.

The findings suggest that the main business case choice editing is the creation of a responsible brand image and is often based on pressure from wider societal norms. The case for choice editing is therefore ultimately reliant on consumer recognition of sustainability issues as valuable, and it is unlikely to be taken up when retailers see no added brand value in acting responsibly on a certain issue. Clearer product-based indicators and stronger governmental regulation of unsustainable products may enable further choice editing for sustainability by retailers. NGOs and the media also play a critical role.

To enable further choice editing for sustainability by retailers, there is a need for clearer product-based indicators and stronger governmental regulation of unsustainable products.

Although wikis are common in higher education, little is known about the wiki user experience in these contexts and how system characteristics impact such experiences. The purpose of this paper is to explore experimentally the hypothesis that changing the anonymity of identity when editing wikis will impact significantly on user editing anxiety and that this may be dependent on the type of edit being conducted.

This hypothesis was explored using a controlled experiment study whereby users were given excerpts to include in their own words on a wiki site used for a psychology course. Users edited the wiki anonymously, using a pseudonym relevant to the context (a matriculation number) and using a full named identity. Users were also either asked to add content to the wiki or to delete and replace content on the wiki site.

The paper found that users experienced significantly less anxiety when editing anonymously compared to when editing with a pseudonym or full name and that the type of edit being conducted did not impact the anxiety felt.

The research highlights that the effects of anonymity discussed are also in operation in a wiki context, a more fundamentally anonymous context compared to blogs, bulletin boards or general computer-mediated communication tools.

For more than 20 years, genome editing has been one of the numerous technologies developed for the study and manipulation of the genome. However, since the relatively recent appearance of the so-called precision approaches, and especially through the “CRISPR revolution,” the modification of the genome of any living beings on our planet has become possible, despite recent results showing some unexpected and undesirable effects of this technology. The objective of this chapter is to illustrate how a mobilization of the scientific community through the setting-up of an association should allow a responsible and ethical use of these technologies with considerable impacts for our society.

To explain how digital video editing can help foster reflective pedagogical thinking for pre-service teachers (PSTs).

PST education has emphasized reflective thinking, particularly through the use of video as a means to view teaching vignettes. As the process of editing videos involves recursive viewings and numerous multimodal choices in representing the raw footage, this chapter outlines two disciplinary PST courses (English and science) where they used digital video editing to create narratives of and reflect on their teaching lesson.

PSTs who edited their teaching promoted reflexive thinking about their content learning, provided a means to critique their teaching context, pedagogy, and assessment, and served to shift their attention from PST as learner to student as learner.

Using digital video allows teachers, through the recursive process of editing their footage, to emphasize reflection on content area learning, planned and enacted pedagogy, and context-based and learner-centered approaches to teaching.

This paper aims to explore the effect of participant composition and contribution behavior of the different types of participants on the quality of knowledge generation in online communities.

This study samples all the featured articles in Chinese Wikipedia and performs a Cox regression to reveal how participant composition and contribution behavior affect the quality of articles in different contexts.

The results show that an increase in the number of participants increases the possibility of either enhancing or reducing the article quality. In most cases, the greater the proportion of core members (people who frequently participate in editing), the higher the possibility of enhancing the article quality. Occasional participants’ editorial behavior hinders quality promotion, this negative effect weakens when such editorial behavior becomes more frequent.

The findings help to better leverage the role of online communities in practice and to achieve knowledge collaboration in a more efficient manner. For example, an appropriate centralized organizational form should be established in online communities to improve the efficiency of crowd contributions. And it is worth developing mechanism to encourage participants to frequently participate in editing the article.

This study contributes to the research on the organizational forms of online communities by showing the effect of participant composition and behavior in the new form of organizing on knowledge generation. This study also contributes to the research on wisdom of crowds by revealing who in a group of participants, in what context, and by what means influence knowledge generation.

The purpose of this paper (experimental–comparative research) is to investigate the possible impacts of explicit and implicit teaching Persian structures and editing methods on the translation performance of the Iranian undergraduate translation students.

This research enjoyed a quasi-experimental design. A quasi-experimental research design was used in this research, as it was impossible to assign random sampling to the subjects. In addition, this research was a comparative group study as there were two experimental groups with two different treatments and one control group with placebo. Table I represents the design of the research.

The results showed that before the treatment there were no significant differences between three groups in terms of translation performance; however, after treatment, the results indicated a statistically significant difference between two experimental groups and treatment group. Moreover, explicit instruction yielded more positive results than the implicit group.

Although research in the field of translation assessment and quality in relation to target language are prevalent and in spite of the abundance of research in the field of implicit/explicit instructions in second language teaching and learning, there is no research (to the best knowledge of authors) which looks at translation performance from teaching structures and editing methods of target language perspective with the focus of explicit and implicit (in an English–Persian context).

Throughout the years, many scholarly answers were given to the question regarding the gender bias in Wikipedia. However, the research literature seldom explores how different barriers are interconnected and rarely focuses on what prevents women who initially declared their interest from eventually participating in the website. The purpose of this paper is to deal with this lacuna and explore the gender bias in Wikipedia through examining how the different barriers are interlinked in a manner that deters women and prevents them from editing in the website.

Based on action research with a mixed evaluation method and two rounds of interviews, the research followed the steps of 27 Israeli women activists who participated in editing workshops.

The findings show that having the will to edit and the knowledge of how to edit are necessary but insufficient conditions for women to participate in Wikipedia. The finding reveals two categories: pre-editing barriers of negative reputation, lack of recognition, anonymity and fear of being erased; and post-editing barriers of experiences of rejection, alienation, lack of time and profit and ownership of knowledge. The research suggests a “Vicious Circle” model, displaying how the five layers of negative reputation, anonymity, fear, alienation and rejection – enhance each other, in a manner that deters women from contributing to the website.

In order for more women to join Wikipedia, the research offers the implantation of a “Virtuous Circle” that consists of nonymity, connection to social media, inclusionist policy, soft deletion and red-flagging harassments.

Throughout the years, many answers were given to the question regarding the gender bias in Wikipedia. However, research literature seldom explores how different barriers are interconnected and rarely focuses on what prevents women who initially declared their interest and who attended editing workshops from eventually participating in the website. The current research has taken upon itself to deal with this lacuna and explores the power-relations in Wikipedia through three questions: first, why an educational intervention did not increase participation? Second, how the different barriers described by research group members are interconnected and enhance each other in a manner that prevents women from editing on the website? and third how can the gap be narrowed?

The purpose of this paper is to investigate which learning targets can be achieved by using Wikipedia as a tool for teaching information literacy within the context of brief one-shot library instruction sessions.

In this case study, a Wikipedia-editing activity was incorporated into 2-hour one-shot instruction sessions. A variety of qualitative data were collected during these sessions: Student reflections during a facilitated discussion, student responses to exit-survey questions and instructor observations about the extent to which students completed Wikipedia-editing tasks.

Students found Wikipedia-editing activities and Wikipedia-related discussions engaging, and as a result they seemed to learn valuable lessons about research and writing. Students participating in this project effectively identified gaps in Wikipedia entries, critically evaluated and used sources to address those gaps and appropriately documented those materials. Students were easily encouraged to be critical about information sources, including Wikipedia and the more traditionally scholarly resources alike.

While a great deal of attention has been paid to teaching with multi-week Wikipedia assignments and coursework, evidence from this project suggests that Wikipedia-related activities can be used effectively within much narrower time constraints, including during brief one-shot library instruction sessions.