Book-a-Book: Facilitating Access to Learning Materials for Students With Disabilities

Abstract

Until 2019, each higher education institution in Flanders had to develop their own workflows to handle requests for digital study materials for students with disabilities. At KU Leuven these requests are processed by KU Leuven Libraries Central Services. This unit, among other things, supports the core tasks of KU Leuven Libraries in the area of acquisitions and licensing negotiations with publishers. This article will focus on the creation and development of Book-a-Book, which has its origin in the service the KU Leuven Libraries Central Services has been providing for students with disabilities for KU Leuven students since 2011. Book-a-Book is a web application that facilitates access to learning materials for students with disabilities enrolled in Flemish higher education institutions. It is the first online tool to serve all higher education students with disabilities in Flanders and is the result of a collaboration between The Support Center for Inclusive Higher Education (SIHO), KU Leuven Libraries, and LIBIS (Leuven Integrated Library and Information System). SIHO is as a collaboration between the associations of the Flemish universities and colleges on the one side, and the Flemish government on the other side. The core responsibility of the SIHO lies in the support of all higher education institutions in realizing inclusive higher education for students with a disability. On September 12, 2019, Book-a-Book was launched on the international conference “Enhancing Student Experience: Innovative Support Tools for Students with Disabilities” in Brussels, Belgium.     

Signaling strength? An analysis of decision making in <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Weakest Link</Emphasis>

We analyze contestants’ behavior in the game show “The Weakest Link”. We focus on banking decisions, where a contestant chooses to secure an amount of money for the eventual winner, or to risk it on a general knowledge question. We find that contestants do not use the banking strategy that maximizes total expected prize money. Average earnings could be at least 17% higher. Our results suggest that contestants are not overconfident, but do try to convince other contestants that their ability is higher than it really is, in order to increase chances of winning the prize. We argue that this mechanism may also be applicable to other situations that are of economic interest.     

Welfarism and the multidimensionality of welfare state legitimacy: Evidence from The Netherlands, 2006

Oorschot W van, Meuleman B. Welfarism and the multidimensionality of welfare state legitimacy: evidence from The Netherlands, 2006 Is it possible that citizens who support a substantial role for government in the provision of welfare are, at the same time, critical about specific aspects of such provision? Based on confirmatory factor analyses, and using a 2006 Dutch survey, this study shows that welfare state legitimacy is indeed multidimensional, i.e. that opinions tend to cluster together in several dimensions referring to various aspects of the welfare state. There is partial evidence for the existence of a single, underlying welfarism dimension which consists basically of views regarding the range of governmental responsibility, as well as of the idea that these governmental provisions do not have unfavourable repercussions in economic or moral spheres. However, the separate dimensions cannot be reduced entirely to this overall welfarism dimension. This is illustrated by the finding that the various attitude dimensions are affected differently by socio‐structural position and ideological dispositions.     

Relative Utilitarianism

‘If empirically meaningful interpersonal comparisons have to be based on indifference maps, as we have argued, then the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives must be violated. The information which enables us to assert that individual A prefers x to y more strongly than B prefers y to x must be based on comparisons by A and B of x and y not only to each other but also to other alternatives. Kenneth J. Arrow, ‘Social Choice and Individual Values, p. 112. In a framework of preferences over lotteries, we show that an axiom system consisting of weakened versions of Arrow's axioms has a unique solution. ‘Relative Utilitarianism’ consists of first normalizing individual von Neumann-Morgenstern utilities between 0 and 1 and then summing them.     

Adolescents' and parents' affect in relation to discrepant perceptions of parental warmth in daily life

The current study aimed to evaluate how adolescents' and parents' perceptions of daily parenting—and their discrepancies—relate to daily parent and adolescent affect. Daily parental warmth and affect were assessed using electronic diaries in 150 American adolescent–parent dyads (61.3% females, M_age = 14.6, 83.3% White; 95.3% mothers, M_age = 43.4; 89.3% White) and in 80 Dutch adolescents with 79 mothers and 72 fathers (63.8% females, M_age = 15.9, 91.3% White; M_age = 49.0, 97.4% White). Results of preregistered models indicated that individuals' affect may be more important for perceptions of parenting than discrepancies between parent–adolescent reports of parenting for affect, stressing the need to be aware of this influence of affect on parenting reports in clinical and research settings.     

Multivariate Chebyshev Inequality With Estimated Mean and Variance

A variant of the well-known Chebyshev inequality for scalar random variables can be formulated in the case where the mean and variance are estimated from samples. In this article, we present a generalization of this result to multiple dimensions where the only requirement is that the samples are independent and identically distributed. Furthermore, we show that as the number of samples tends to infinity our inequality converges to the theoretical multi-dimensional Chebyshev bound.     

Pushing the Boundaries: Responses to Ethnic Conformity Pressure in Two Turkish Communities in Belgium

Previous research has demonstrated that ethnic communities try to maintain ethnic boundaries through group pressure to conform to premigration cultural patterns, which mainly happens indirectly through social control. So far however, little attention has been given to how group members respond to this indirect ethnic conformity pressure, as well as to the factors that shape these responses. Drawing on in-depth interviews with second- and third-generation Turkish Belgians, we examine and explain different responses to ethnic conformity pressure and link these to ethno-cultural change and boundary change. We distinguish three negotiation strategies, namely conformity, creativity and disregard, and find that the choice for a particular strategy is first and foremost shaped by the agent’s gender, their embeddedness in the Turkish community, and the availability of an alternative support network, both of which are shaped by exclusion in the larger society. In addition, also the severity of the norm violation, the social structure of the community and parental expectations play a role. Findings are interpreted in terms of ethnic boundary dynamics, and implications for ethno-cultural change are discussed.     

Balinese cultural identity and global tourism: the Garuda Wisnu Kencana Cultural Park

ABSTRACT

The island of Bali has been inextricably bound up with the tourism industry. This article examines the dynamic Balinese cultural identity and its ever changing relationship with tourism in the age of globalism through the analysis of a case study: the construction of the Garuda Wisnu Kencana Cultural Park (between 1993–2018), containing an enormous statue of the Hindu God Wisnu mounting the magical bird Garuda. The park and statue can be seen as a new cultural landmark for the Indonesian nation and for the Balinese tourism industry. However, the case study of the park also shows how Bali has changed its role within the Indonesian archipelago since the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998 while dealing with new challenges of global tourism. Representations of a Balinese cultural identity have evolved from national, top-down level constructions of ‘cultural tourism’ into a global tourist destination through hosting international events at the park.