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This paper explores the factors motivating people to attend the Dutch hardstyle festival, Defqon.1. This paper delivers new insights to festival attendance by including social and cultural factors in the motivational dimensions and considering a niche electronic music festival.

This research utilised qualitative methods to identify and gain detailed information about attendee's visitor motives. Eleven semi-structured in-depth interviews which focus on the influence of intangible features of visitor motivations were conducted.

The research result revealed an increased influence of social factors and decreased the effect of all other visitor motives. The subcultural ties amongst members of the hardstyle scene were identified as stronger than the ones of different electronic music scenes. The study concluded that social factors, such as friendships gain significant importance for stimulating return visits.

Contemporary music festivals, especially electronic events have not comprehensively been researched. Also, the effects of social and cultural factors on festival attendance have previously been neglected in research. Studies on popular electronic music genres, such as rave and hardcore, are from a sociological viewpoint. These studies revealed motivations of members of the subculture to be a part of the scene and to attend events.

The aim of the present investigation was to study numerically the transient of thermal convection in a square cavity filled with low‐Prandtl‐number fluids. The flow is driven by the horizontal temperature gradient between the vertical walls maintained at different temperatures. Two‐dimensional equations of conservation and energy are solved using a finite element method and a fractional step time. The discrete equations systems are solved in the lap of each element‐mesh with the aim of verifying the Boussinesq hypothesis locally. To compare our results with the earlier predictions, we have chosen the fluids for Prandtl‐numbers 0.001, 0.005 and 0.01 and with Grashof numbers up to 1 × 10⁷. To predict the steady state solutions with an oscillary transient period, the results are reduced in terms of the time series average Nusselt‐number at the vertical walls, the velocity at the center of the cavity and near right boundary. In addition, the isotherms and the velocity field are produced with the aim of showing the main circulation and particularly the weak circulations at the corners of the cavity.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate how new healthcare professionals engage with information practices and information culture in their workplace, and the resulting influences on development and change.

A longitudinal study was conducted on a hospital training programme. Three series of focus groups provided data from 18 recently qualified nurses, supported by observations. Data were thematically analysed applying a framework consisting of six approaches to information use.

Newcomers take a proactive approach to seek, use and share scientific information, which is negotiated within existing information practices and organisational information culture. Their competencies, such as research skills, values, motivation and sense of integrity to use and share scientific information, often differ from those existing workplace practices. For this reason, they drive towards renewal and change.

Examination of organisational approaches to information use indicates clearly the necessity for improvements to meet the needs of information proactiveness and thus be able to face challenges and changes in an organisation.

This work sheds new light on newcomers’ information use, as they integrate into a workplace and interact with information practices and organisational approaches to information use. A significant contribution is the identification of the dynamics and interdependencies between newcomers’ individual agency in their way of seeking, using and sharing information, and the established community’s social agency promoting existing information practices and the organisational agency represented by information culture.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, British public debt, accumulated over the eighteenth century and during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815), had attained extremely high levels, at times even reaching 200% of the gross national product (GNP). This increase in debt paradoxically coexisted with the early progression of the industrial revolution.

In this chapter, we explain this concomitance by the effective policies of sovereign debt management put in place by the State and the Bank of England (BoE). First, the State put in place measures to lower its risk of default by funding its debt with tax revenue that would allow it to honour due payments. Second, following the suspension in 1797 of cash payments for pounds sterling, the BoE, in addition to its role in financing the State, followed an active policy of sovereign debt management, promoting both bank liquidity and market liquidity.

Mezirow's theory of transformative learning aims to evoke change on a deeper level of learning. This qualitative study with 38 pre-service teachers enrolled in a Master's degree programme for teacher education in Austria used semi-structured interviews to explore how diversity skills can transform after diversity training applying Mezirow's theory of transformative learning. In these trainings, a disorienting dilemma was placed at the centre of the diversity training from which transformative learning took its start.

In an increasingly diversified school system, diversity skills have become a pedagogical necessity for teachers in their future workplace. However, many teachers state not feeling adequately prepared for diversity within higher education and their attitudes towards diversity oftentimes remain unchanged despite diversity training.

The findings were deduced from structured content analysis. They show that the diversity trainings led to new cultural frames of reference for the study participants on a cognitive and social level, but to a smaller extent on an emotional level.

The study follows a different approach than “typical” diversity trainings through Mezirow's theory on transformative learning contributing to making a real change to preparing students for their workplaces in diversified Austrian schools.

Cost estimation is an important decision‐making process where many factors are interrelated in a complex manner, thus making it difficult to analyse and model using conventional mathematical methods. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) offer an alternative approach to modelling cost estimation. ANNs are simple mathematical models that self‐organize information from training data. This paper explores the use of ANNs in cost estimation. Research issues investigated are twofold. First, this paper compares the performance of ANNs to a regression‐based method which leads to a better understanding of the applicability of ANNs. Second, this paper identifies the effect of different configurations of neural networks on estimating accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate the many advantages and disadvantages of using neural networks in modelling cost estimation.

Before it was fully nationalized in 1945, the Banque de France was a listed company that distributed dividends to its shareholders and was listed on the Paris stock exchange. By comparing with other stocks and indexes, I show that, in spite of large earnings, Banque de France’s stock was a lackluster but popular investment. By examining the distribution of profits between the state and ordinary shareholders, I show that the state began to exert an influence over the Bank well before its nationalization, in the nineteenth century, amounting to a stealthy takeover. I then go on to analyze the Bank’s formal governance framework and the power of its regents (directors). Using a novel method to compute the shareholders’ statistical distribution, I conclude that small new shareholders who were less sophisticated bought predominantly shares from old larger shareholders. Eventually, most of the shareholders were “petit-bourgeois” passive rentiers who accepted the mediocre performance and kept reelecting the regents. I conclude by saying that the power of the 200 largest shareholders (“200 families”) was a political myth with little foundation in reality.

This chapter seeks to present an in-depth understanding of the dynamics of the experience of criminal involvement in old age, drawing on data from a descriptive, phenomenology study with 20 offenders aged 50 and over at a total institution in Ghana. The findings show that the onset of offending in later life is embedded in diverse scenarios including a survival strategy pertaining to engagement in economic activities for survival with retirement planning implications. Correspondingly, the crimes committed are violent, namely, murder, causing physical harm, food poisoning, and those that are non-violent, namely, narcotics dealings, petty thievery in nature. Among others, cognitive impairment/dementia and poverty are contributory factors to the incarnation of older offenders between one month and 27 years. The older offenders were involved in second line criminal activities, namely, the sale of stolen goods obtained from first liners. Compliance with prison rules incentivised reduced prison sentence years, fostered peace of mind. Tipping colleague inmates to execute allotted prison work is another coping strategy resulting from inability to do same. Imprisonment induced Christianity-oriented reformation, served as an integrative factor between criminality and serving prison sentence(s). Also worth reiterating is the fact that imprisonment may induce stigmatisation and isolation-related loneliness, while serving as an antidote to the pangs of loneliness with consequences for recidivism among older offenders. Gerontological offending has debilitating effects on older adults and is associated with the social isolation of an age cohort that is already predisposed to witchcraft accusations. The conduction of cognitive impairment/dementia tests on older offenders may moderate the sentence they receive.

The research on the positive effects of children’s learning in and with nature is persuasive yet a deeper examination of the contemporary and historical discourses suggests that the school garden has been neither welcoming nor accessible to all children. Its detrimental effects on groups of children have been masked within the discourses of urban children’s health and wellbeing, environmental stewardship, and children’s connection with nature. The school garden has been used historically to enact adult agendas to contain and protect urban children from the social ills of modernity; civilise and assimilate marginalised, impoverished, and immigrant groups; and make future industrial and agricultural labourers who would in turn, entrench the white affluent society’s economic and social positions. In this sense, the school garden was used to reinforce patriarchal, colonial, white supremacist, and eugenic aspirations. We consider the school garden movement in North America through a discourse analysis of historical school garden texts to explore how childhoods were culturally constructed and how these discourses have influenced children both in the past and present.

Several countries in South Asia face the challenge of ineffective educational reforms manifest in increasing rates of school failure and poor learning outcomes after embarking along education for all. Critical voices from the South have questioned the relevance and appropriateness of ideas that have shaped these reforms. Narratives from the region tell us that importation of educational concepts and policy orientations have led to the dismantling of existing structures and processes of education, creating new forms of inequities and disadvantage. The sheer scale and diversity of populations within the region poses formidable challenges and opportunities for contextual innovation. The construction of national imaginaries in the diverse societies of South Asia has the potential to provide new discourses to educational reform; going beyond the abstract goals set by disconnected international experts and the institutional processes they represent. This chapter deliberates on the need to establish a persuasive critical perspective that can influence and shape the trajectories of policy and practice, research and theorization, within the field of comparative education in South Asia, and the global south.