How the Lithuanian research and studies center got started

Ethnic, linguistic identity, heritage language maintenance and transmission, language attitudes and policies remain important topics in nowadays globalized world. The main purpose of this study, which is a part of a large-scale research on Lithuanian heritage language, was to analyze the linguistic and ethnic identity development within Lithuanian diaspora. The article investigates the linguistic attitudes, language practices and language policies within the Lithuanian diaspora in Ireland and Norway, paying extra attention to the younger (K2) generation of Lithuanian migrants. A specialized sociolinguistic questionnaire was developed for this study. A total of 74 first-generation Lithuanian emigrants based in Ireland (n = 18) and Norway (n = 56) participated in the online survey. All participants had children aged 4–17. The data from the questionnaire survey are also illustrated with examples from 5 semi-structured interviews. The study revealed that emigrants from both countries maintain a strong connection with their country of origin. Almost half of the respondents claim that their children visit Lithuania at least once a year, while more than a third of respondents’ children visit Lithuania twice a year or more often. A third of participants are planning to return to Lithuania. Most of the respondents enroll their children to Lithuanian Saturday schools. However, the younger generation seem to differ from their parents in their language attitudes and practices: Lithuanian children based in Ireland tend to feel a stronger connection with the majority language (English) than Lithuanian. Meanwhile, children in Norway are multilinguals, having more than two languages in their everyday repertoire. To summarize, the study demonstrated the main language attitudes and practices of Lithuanians abroad and also highlighted some differences between the first and the second generation of Lithuanian migrants. The results from this study might provide interesting insights for future studies in the fields of sociology, sociolinguistics, and diaspora studies.

SEVERAL HUNDRED health care providers, medical school faculty, philosophers, and other scholars are expected to convene in Chicago, Ill, this week (October 15 through 17) to debate whether a medical specialty in women's health should be created. The conference, "Reframing Women's Health: Multidisciplinary Research and Practice," is sponsored by the University of Illinois at Chicago's Center for Research on Women and Gender. Its purpose is to explore strategies for enhancing research and clinical practice in women's health. Much of the first day of the meeting will be taken up by discussions on the need for a specialty in women's health and what kind of curricula would be necessary for establishing such a specialty. "This is the first national meeting that focuses on the creation of a women's health specialty," says Alice Dan, PhD, conference chair and director of the Center for Research on Women and Gender. On the second day,

Ethiopia is an agrarian country and agriculture is the backbone of its economy. Consequently, the government of Ethiopia has devised Agricultural Development Led Industrialization (ADLI) as the country’s overall economic development policy. For the last 15 years, public investment towards the expansion of higher education, research and extension in agriculture has been so enormous. In reality, however, these higher education and research institutions were not sufficiently responsive to rural transformation. Thus, to evaluate the role of higher education and research institutions in stimulating rural transformation and to identify main training constraints accountable for their poor performances in institutional learning and rural transformation is of paramount importance. To this effect focus group discussions and key informant interviews were conducted. Stratified and purposive sampling technique was dominantly employed during the survey studies. The result of the study has shown that higher education and research institutions were less responsive to address the actual problems of small-scale farmers and they were limited by a number of constraints/challenges to address the actual problems of farmers. The major constraints were, to list some, limited involvement in research and extension works by the university staff, students limited practical attachments of the training programmes with farming communities, limited infrastructures and facilities and limited availability of contextualized learning resources. In addressing the aforesaid constraints/challenges, the university staff should proportionally allocate time in the research and extension activities on top of practical teaching supported by local research results and experience; involving students on practical attachments both in their academic and vacation time; giving emphasis on basic training preparation like fulfilling libraries, laboratories, demonstration fields and transportation facilities; and lastly to revise the existing curriculum in to the direction of solving the real problems of the Amhara region then the country Ethiopia.

This research examines the methodological effectiveness of Institutional Research (IR) through the lens of Action Research (AR). Combining AR with IR, we can reconstruct the IR project flow model.

The Development of a Strategic CRM-i Framework: Case Study in Public Institutions of Higher Learning

From the Ground Up-Materials Science in Singapore.

Seymour Sudman, devoted husband, loving father, dedicated teacher, patient mentor, revered scholar, and an extraordinarily humble man, died Tuesday, May 2, in Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago, of complications related to a stroke. Born in Chicago, Seymour received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Roosevelt University in 1949. After working in several positions as a statistician, he received a doctorate in business from the University of Chicago in 1962. He then directed sampling and senior studies at the National Opinion Research Center in Chicago until he joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1968. He was appointed the Walter H. Stellner Distinguished Professor of Marketing in 1985. He had planned to retire from teaching this spring. He is survived by his wife, Blanche; a son, Harold; two daughters, Emily Hindin and Carol Sudman; a sister, Annette Baich; and two grandchildren. Since 1968, Seymour had been a University of Illinois faculty member in marketing and sociology. He was also Deputy Director of the Survey Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois. He was internationally recognized as an outstanding survey research methodologist, whose writings are required reading for students of marketing, statistics, and sociology. Seymour Sudman was a pioneer in designing survey questionnaires, a semanticist with an eye for spotting a single word that could influence an entire survey's findings.

The author describes his 50 years of experience in studying public opinion in America, the Soviet Union and Russia. This includes research at the Institute of American and Canadian Studies of American mass consciousness, the study of Americans’ attitudes towards economic and social problems, Soviet-American relations; and collaboration with leading American public opinion polling centers — the Gallup Institute, the University of Michigan, National Opinion Research Center in Chicago, studying the work of the L. Harris and M. Field polling services, the CBS-New York Times, ABC-Washington Post centers, the polling organizations of the Democratic and Republican parties, presidential advisors on public opinion. The author implemented his American experience in organizing the study of public opinion in the USSR and then in Russia when creating the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM), the Center for Studying Public Opinion of the Presidential Administration of Boris Yeltsin, the Agency for Regional Political Research, and other survey centers. Analyzed is the use of sociological surveys in Boris Yeltsin’s presidential election campaign in 1996. The author has conducted several joint Soviet/Russian-American public opinion studies: “Television and society”, “Soviet and American children on the threat of war”, “National problems of Russia”. The author describes his experience in communicating with leading American and Russian experts in the study of public opinion — G. Gallup, L. Harris, Yu.A. Zamoshkin, B.A. Grushin.

Lateral deformation caused by the installation of 0.76 m to 1.5 m diameter, caissons were measured by inclinometers placed at the excavation for the Lurie Research Center in Chicago, Il. The bells of the caissons were founded at an average elevation of -23.8 m Chicago City Datum (CCD). Subsurface conditions at the site and construction techniques used to install the caissons were described. Eight inclinometers were placed around the perimeter of the site and one inclinometer was placed in ad hoc test section consisting of two caissons located in the interior of the site. The ad hoc test section and production caisson inclinometer responses are compared. The times needed to construct the production caissons around the exterior of the site and the test section caissons were very similar so that the time-dependent responses of the clays squeezing into the caisson did not cause differences in the observed responses. Larger ground movements were observed adjacent to the production caissons located near the perimeter of the temporary wall than adjacent the two caissons located at the test section in the interior of the site. The performance data show a correlation between lateral movements caused by installing caissons and the stability number. A finite element simulation models the stress differences between the production and test section caissons. An empirical means to estimate the movements associated with caisson construction is provided.

In partnership with the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Iowa State University (ISU) has formed the International Institute of Theoretical and Applied Physics (IITAP). The mission of IITAP is to foster excellence in scientific research and teaching, especially in developing geographical areas, with an emphasis on advanced studies and original research in physics and overlapping disciplines. The Institute is open to qualified scientists of all countries. The Institute provides an open forum for scientific dialogue and furnishes modern facilities for research and collaboration among all participants of its scientific programs. The Institute will form long‐term partnerships with research and teaching institutions in developing countries to help strengthen their infrastructure in science and technology. To achieve its mission, the Institute is working in partnerships with other US research organizations and institutions of learning. Six initial thrust areas and their activities are outlined.

The title of Gloria Fisk's monograph is somewhat deceptive. Seemingly a throwback to a fast-disappearing species of literary criticism—the single-author study—the book is not that at all. Taking Orhan Pamuk as an exemplary case study, Fisk brilliantly leapfrogs from there to raise broader questions on how the field of world literature is constituted in Euro-American academies and institutions; on what underpins our assumptions when reading literary works from different regions, especially those from the global South; and on the chasm between local and global forms of reception while reading international authors. Her monograph can be situated in a two decades-long conversation regarding the field and compass of world literature that has been shaped by a series of key texts, among them, Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters (originally published in French in 1999 and translated into English in 2005); David Damrosch's What Is World Literature? (2004); Gayatri Spivak's Death of a Discipline (2005); Eric Hayot's On Literary Worlds (2012); Emily Apter's Against World Literature (2013); the Warwick Research Collective's Combined and Uneven Development (2015); and Aamir Mufti's Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literature (2016). Populated by heavyweight critics, the field has generated a daunting debate that has grown alongside a flourishing mini-industry—at least relative to the rest of the squeezed humanities—that caters to the pedagogy of world literature in undergraduate and graduate curricula, tenure-track hires, research institutes, textbook anthologies, and academic monographs.It is undoubtedly reductive, though nonetheless accurate, to suggest that this debate has largely been divided into the polar camps of the proponents and opponents of world literature. Its proponents see world literature expanding the narrow confines of the Western canon, thereby breaking down disciplinary linguistic and national-literary boundaries, and also generating knowledge about other cultures to foster a cosmopolitan diversity. But its detractors invariably read world literature as the literary handmaiden to a neoliberal ethos that superficially celebrates diversity while reinforcing both the global forces of capitalism and the hegemony of the Anglophone, since these authors and their works are mainly propped up by multinational publishing industries, Western-based literary prizes (e.g. the Booker and the Nobel), and Anglo-American academic institutions. The divide between the enthusiasts and the skeptics of world literature was conveniently on display at a 2011 conversation at the American Comparative Literature Association between Damrosch and Spivak. The former suggested that we “have much to celebrate here” (456), thanks to a global expansion of the literature canon that might lead to “a more genuine understanding of the world” (463), whereas the latter maintained that “to say that [world literature] is the message of capitalist globalization is not to be tendentious” (467).Fisk comes neither to praise nor to bury world literature but instead to intervene elegantly and incisively in this impasse. As she writes, “I am reading the debate for and against world literature with less interest in taking sides than in taking the polarity apart” (166). The two ostensibly opposed camps have more in common than it may seem, she argues, in that both are structurally generated out of the same institutional framework. Operating in a domestic context in which a rhetoric of crisis pervades the humanities, in which the literary sphere of letters is marginalized in the broader public sphere, in which tenure-track positions and undergraduate enrollments in literature departments have dropped precipitously, critics are quick to instrumentalize literature to make more ambitious claims for its political utility. The supporters of world literature insist on “the good world literature can do” because of “the view it gives its readers on [foreign] worlds they would find hard to see without a local and literary guide” and because of “the kinds and degrees of solidarity [it] creates among strangers” (3–4). The importance of the humanities becomes legible insofar as world literature provides an aesthetic incubator for ethical principles that help readers navigate an increasingly plural and globalized world and that can thus counter the homogenizing processes of capital. Detractors, by contrast, see world literature as a product of neoliberal capitalist systems and seek to unmask its underlying complicity with “the cultural logic of the multinational corporation and the neoliberal university” (184). Fisk sees this anti–world literature position making similarly “grandiose claims” for the political radicalism and ethical good of literary studies. She notes the material irony of this critique in view of both the structural marginality of the humanities and the fact that mounting them helps us to “amass the cultural capital we need to get and keep a tenure track job” (184–85) in the neoliberal university in which we all work. Burdened by the assumptions we bring to world literature, we approach global novelists like Pamuk with the expectation that they, too, must function as a political agent of the liberal values of Western academies—to wit, as a defender of free speech, a cross-cultural bridge, a voice for the marginalized, and a critic of capitalism—without any regard for the position these authors occupy in their national spaces. This leads to the promotion of some global authors at the expense of others who do not meet these standards of liberal goodness, and forces novelists writing for a global readership into an uneasy role, caught between their domestic constraints and the international literary norms imposed on them.Fisk unfolds this argument over the course of her monograph with a dazzling demonstration of methodological scope and variety that reveals an expert grasp of different ways of reading. This scope is revealed in the tripartite structure and expanding foci of the book. The first two chapters examine the good attributed to the global novel in the kinds of cultural work it is expected to perform; the next two consider the good values the novelist is expected to champion qua world author; and the final two chapters interrogate the literary institutions (the Nobel Prize and the U.S. academy) that make claims for the good of world literature. Fisk's scale of interpretation thus widens from section to section, with the first hewing toward the more traditional approaches of close reading. She slyly titles her first two chapters “A Novel Can Teach You about Other People” and “A Novel Can Teach You about Other People's History”—common assumptions about the cultural work expected of world literature—but goes on to argue that a novel fails to reliably do such things. Focusing primarily on Pamuk's Snow, she shows how Pamuk toggles between realist conventions and metafictional postmodernism to cannily satisfy and subvert the reader's expectations by creating both proximity and distance between Western readers and his foreign characters. Furthermore, by altering the representation of historical events in Turkey in ways that elude most non-Turkish readers, Pamuk “thematize[s] the limits of the mimetic representation in world literature” (84) and reveals how realism is always culturally specific rather than a transparent lens into a different world.Turning in the next section from a hermeneutic focus on the text to the broader methods of cultural analysis, Fisk explains how the figure of the global author is constructed in the world republic of letters. Chapter 3 examines the controversy stemming from Pamuk's acknowledgment of the mass murder of Armenians—though he does not use the word genocide, as Fisk points out—under the Ottoman Empire to the fury of nationalist Turks, on one hand, and the admiration of his Western readers, on the other. Tracing the reasons for these opposed responses in his local and global readerships, Fisk criticizes how we box a novelist like Pamuk into being an advocate of human rights, even as we fail to attend to the local histories—nationalism, class, colonialism—that shape the Turkish public sphere and make it dangerous for Pamuk to occupy such a position. By doing so, we inadvertently “reinforce the global unevenness we critique” (112). Chapter 4 expands on this paradox by juxtaposing Pamuk with the father of comparative literature, Erich Auerbach, showing how the disciplinary fetishization of authorial exile forces world writers to sacrifice their relationship to their national publics to become celebrated international figures. Finally, in chapters 5 and 6, Fisk draws on the methods of the sociology of literature to clarify the way our definitions of world literature are inseparable from the norms with which our institutions of literary prizes and universities operate. The Nobel Prize honors foreign authors “for behaving like good citizens of participatory democracies” (164), a political standard rarely applied to Western authors, while U.S. academics make claims about world literature to “advance institutional interests” (171) that have little to do with Pamuk himself or his work. Moving deftly from text to context, from the literary to the extra-literary, from the internal dynamics of the work of art to the institutions the work inhabits, Fisk displays a rare methodological versatility and performs these analyses with a sophistication that is rarer still.The strength of Fisk's argument rests on her reorientation of the debate over world literature, reading it as a product of its institutional location, rather than the terms it sets for itself. She reminds us of the political limits of criticism; of the meaningful difference between aesthetics and politics in their effects on the world; of our privileged status as tenured or tenure-track faculty trafficking in world literature; and of our complicit if agonized relationship with the structures of literary and academic capitalism. In this respect, her monograph is an accomplished example of what Jeffrey Williams has described as a “new modesty in literary criticism.” He traces the fullest articulation of this trend to Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus's 2009 essay “Surface Reading,” which recognizes that, despite the long and robust tradition of criticism conducted in the name of “political activism”—particularly under the aegis of the hermeneutics of suspicion and symptomatic reading—such claims overlook the fact that the “disasters and triumphs of the last decade have shown that literary criticism alone is not sufficient to effect change” (2). Fisk echoes their call for a new “political realism about the revolutionary capacities of both texts and critics” (Best and Marcus 15) when she insists that critical discourses which make grandiose pronouncements about world literature—whether about its ethical good or its complicity with capital—obscure the material conditions allowing those pronouncements to be made in the first place. These arguments rely solely on a form of “magical thinking,” Fisk complains, a phrase she repeatedly uses to describe these critical modes, and “we should not confuse talk of revolution for revolution” (Fisk 170). Williams rightly suggests that this trend toward critical modesty emerges in the wake of the waning power and status of the humanities and literary studies. Rather than being “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”—the Shelleyesque aims of the Nobel Prize formulated by Alfred Nobel (Fisk 137)—we are closer today to Auden's modest rebuttal that “poetry makes nothing happen.” But if critical modesty aspires to “less hubris” in its claims, it also loses something by virtue of its pragmatism—“the utopian impulse of criticism,” according to Williams, what Fisk would call “magical thinking” perhaps. This loss has led to the accusation that these varieties of surface reading ultimately succumb to a certain “political quietism” (Best and Marcus 16), an acceptance of the status quo of the diminished standing of humanistic study in the world.Given that the coda to her monograph is titled “Now, What?,” Fisk is clearly not proposing the quiet acceptance of the world as it is. If the assumptions we make about the good of world literature make us rather bad readers, we could do better, she argues, by developing reading methods that acknowledge our complicity with the neoliberal university instead of polemics that assume our autonomy from it. This might return us to the solutions of a modest criticism: more accurate descriptions of our state of affairs and self-reflexivity about how we are conditioned by them. Fisk's persuasive sociological analysis, however, also points us in a different direction, suggesting that the answer lies not in the intellectual realm of improved reading methodologies but in the material realm of institutional change. If we can arrive at a more nuanced understanding of Pamuk's local constraints—“give literary establishments . . . a vocabulary through which to see the complexity of [his] relation to the nationalist discourse” (194)—instead of expecting him to function as a neutral conduit across cultures, we can do so only if we continue to have access to scholarship from historians knowledgeable about Turkey, critics fluent with Turkish literary traditions, or institutional ties that link U.S.-based scholars with scholars elsewhere, all of which Fisk's brilliant monograph is indebted to. Put differently, we read world literature best when we retain access to the very methodologies that the present formation of “world literature” has institutionally supplanted to some extent: “area studies, for example, critical race studies, Marxist theory, postcolonial theory, and translation theory” (166), housed in the shrinking departments of comparative literature and foreign languages. Fisk acknowledges that there are better and worse polemics against world literature, but in choosing to focus on the “least convincing arguments that scholarly critics make” against it (168), her argument does not give sufficient attention to critiques that are less about establishing one's political purity or academic credentials by inveighing against neoliberalism, and more about confronting the institutional losses and deaths of disciplines that make us collectively worse readers. We need not return to a fetishization of reading world literature in the original language—for Fisk, Apter's Against World Literature is an exemplary instance of this—to argue that there is a profound intellectual loss when that language and literature ceases to be taught if it is replaced by the proliferation of world literature courses in translation. In such a scenario, we eventually lose the opportunity to learn from scholarship by those fluent in different languages, even if we ourselves are not. Thus, although Fisk argues that the debate for and against world literature is one waged in the hermetic walls of the Anglo-American academy that imposes a set of constraints on world authors, it is frequently also the case that this debate is fundamentally about how to read authors like Pamuk well—or, at least, better—insofar as the material distribution of resources across disciplines and departments shapes these readerly practices. Fisk's monograph is invaluable for highlighting how these practices are imbricated in the institutions we inhabit. If we take the logic of her argument seriously, how to become a good reader of world literature may have less to do with improving the critical methodologies of world literature, and more to do with fighting to ensure that the methodologies of adjacent disciplinary formations can continue to flourish in our institutions of learning, rather than be slowly eclipsed by the allure of the global.

IRB permission is required for most research with people, including research regulated by the FDA or funded by the NIH. Typically, the scientist or scholar submits a proposal; the IRB approves it, rejects it, or returns it with instructions for changes. Most IRBs are situated in hospitals, government agencies, and institutions of learning (including universities, medical schools, and research institutes); the rest are independent, either nonprofit or for profit. All follow the same rules.

The paper explores the pivotal role of mothers in maintaining the Lithuanian language within the Lithuanian diaspora, drawing upon Spolsky’s family language policy theory and Curdt-Christiansen’s dynamic family language policy model. Analyzing data collected in 2011–2013 and 2015–2017, the study investigates various factors shaping family language policy, with a particular focus on the mother’s influence. It examines the interplay between the mother’s role, emigrants’ language ideology, Lithuanian identity, language acquisition, proficiency, and language usage across different domains and emotional dimension of language attitudes. Quantitative analysis, considering respondents’ parents’ ethnicities, reveals that respondents with Lithuanian mothers exhibit stronger connections to Lithuanian identity, more frequent acquisition of Lithuanian as their first language, higher proficiency, and increased usage of Lithuanian within the family and as an inner language. Moreover, positive language attitudes towards the heritage Lithuanian language are more pronounced among those with Lithuanian mothers. However, emotional attitudes towards language did not significantly differ based on parental ethnicity. The paper concludes by discussing the heightened responsibility of mothers in language maintenance within the diaspora and the challenges they face in fulfilling this role.

The paper investigated the use of open access and licensed electronic books by the research scholars in academic and research institutions in Karnataka. The rate of response is 92.5%. In addition to questionnaire method, interview schedule and observation method were also used to collect required information. It is clear from the study that a large number of research scholars rely upon open access and licensed e-books for academic and research purposes. The institutions have to subscribe large number of e-books for target users and proper training should be given to maximize utilization of open access and licensed e-books.

PurposeThe purpose of the study was to investigate factors promoting innovation and application of internet of things in academic and research information organizations.Design/methodology/approachQuantitative research design involved survey of selected academic and research information organizations in public and private chartered institutions. Information professionals, digital content managers, information systems and technologists that normally consume big data and technological resources were involved in the process of data collection using structured questionnaire and content analysis. Information organizations and information practitioners were selected from public and private academic and research institutions.FindingsInnovation of internet of things has increasingly transformed and changed academic and research information organizations as the source of knowledge in addition to expanding access to education, data, information and communication anywhere anytime through hyperconnectivity and networking. Internet of things technologies such as mobile of things, web of things, digital information systems and personal devices are widely applied by digital natives in academic and research information organizations. Mobilization platform and devices is the single biggest provider of data, information and knowledge in academic and research organizations. Modern trends in education and knowledge practices in academic institutions and information organizations depends upon internet of things, digital repositories, electronic books and journals, social media interfaces, multimedia applications, information portal hubs and interactive websites, although challenges regarding inadequate information communication technology infrastructure and social computing facilities still persist.Research limitations/implicationsInformation organizations in public and private chartered academic and research institutions were adopted in the study. Respondents handling and supporting information management, planning and decision-making provided the necessary data. Information professionals, digital content managers, information systems and technologists are proactively involved in data and information analytics.Practical implicationsAcademic and research information organizations are powerhouses that provide knowledge to support research, teaching and learning for sustainable development and the betterment of humanity and society. Innovation of internet of things and associated technologies provides practical aspects of attaining sustainable information development practices in the contemporary knowledge society. Internet of things technologies, principles of economies of scale and investment and customer needs entail that information organizations and practitioners should provide appropriate and smart systems and solutions.Social implicationsModern academic and research information organizations have the social corporate responsibility to offer technological innovations to heighten access to knowledge and learning in academic and research institutions. Economically, innovation and application of internet of things provide unlimited access to big data and information in organizations all the time anywhere anytime.Originality/valueData management is a growing phenomenon that information practitioners need to fully understand in the digital economies. Information professionals need to embrace and appreciate innovation and application of internet of things technologies whose role in sustainable development practices is critical in academic and research organizations.