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In this article we examine the European Semester as an innovative form of policy coordination, with distinct effects on education and skills policies for Member States. We analyse the Semester's framing of education policy, and examine its manifestations in Spain and Sweden, two countries considered to be different in their approach to education. Drawing on a policy instrumentation approach and interviews with policy actors and documentary analysis, our research suggests that while the Semester has given education policy a significant place within the EU's governance, economic rationales for education are clearly dominant in the process. Still, we identify underpinning logics that strengthen the social and educational perspectives represented in the Semester, although these are still treated as productive forces for labour market integration. In addition, there is a strengthening of collaboration between the European Commission and Member States, but also tensions between different parts of the Commission over the definition and direction of education policy.

The paper investigates two related questions that concern the realization of plural morphology on nouns across languages. The first question is whether markedness in the sense of complexity in form goes hand in hand with complexity in meaning. In other words, since plural nouns are formally more complex than singular nouns, does that mean that they differ in interpretation? On the basis of experimental and theoretical investigations the claim is supported that plurals, although morphologically more complex than singulars, are semantically unmarked across languages. The second question is what regulates the presence of plural morphology in numeral-noun constructions across languages, in light of the proposal that plural appears on nouns in such constructions only if it is semantically unmarked. The paper offers an explanation of this distribution by adopting a dual system of agreement, which distinguishes between CONCORD and INDEX features. By looking at these two questions, the paper makes a contribution to the discussion of the relationship between semantic and morphological markedness.

This paper discusses two patterns of language mixing involving verbal predicates produced by bilingual speakers, the so-called light verb construction and the so-called affixal pattern. The empirical focus of the study is on Greek-German and Cypriot Greek-English varieties, which are contrasted to the Spanish-German variety discussed in González-Vilbazo and López (2011). An analysis of the constructions is offered using the tools of Distributed Morphology and Minimalist Syntax. The paper shows that bilingual speakers have very detailed knowledge of fine properties of their two linguistic systems that become apparent in the context of building verbs.

Debates around internationalisation-at-home (IaH) focus on the benefits accrued to students from the integration of internationalisation dimensions in their studies, curricular developments and interactions with international students, but, with scant attention to how these vary in different subject areas. In this article, we focus on the disciplinary experiences and framings of internationalisation from the perspectives of students in two Swedish universities. Drawing on 67 interviews with students sampled across different subject areas, we examine how the disciplinary definitions of study objects and pedagogic approaches filter the students' experiences and shape their views around IaH, and their ambitions for the future. Our findings suggest first, a discipline-specific set of positionings regarding the nature of subject areas as lenses through which internationalisation is understood. Second, the students hold strong views around the contribution of IaH in strengthening the disciplines themselves. In addition, the student voices paint a dynamic picture of internationalisation positions, not always consistent with disciplinary stereotypes.

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) is changing across Europe, reflecting multiple-policy intentions and assumptions about education in early years, and the role of the state in supporting, funding and regulating its institutions. In this article, we examine the evolution of ECEC comparatively in Finland and Sweden, and we explore the shifts in goals, governance mechanisms and policy ideas that have characterised reforms in the sector. We draw on an analysis of policy documents, and argue that the incremental changes achieved over the last 50 years have been in response to changing goals assigned to ECEC and ideas about its roles and functions as part of the welfare and education sectors. The power of ideas in effecting policy change is tempered by established institutional framings, yet is visible in the early dominance of child-centred ideas, and the later controversies over the emergent labour-market and education-driven rationales of the post-2010s.

Sweden has actively pursued internationalisation policies at national level, in parallel to the pursuit of internationalisation strategies of individual universities. This article focuses on university responses towards internationalisation, and the interplay between external higher education environments and institutional positioning. We draw on empirical qualitative research in two of Sweden's largest universities, to examine institutional responses to internationalisation, expressed through documentary material and interviews with 32 senior leaders. Our findings suggest that the global research environment acts as a strong discursive driver for internationalisation actions, manifested in the strategic partnerships pursued by the two institutions. An equally powerful driver, is the national higher education sector as a context of constant comparisons and competition but also as a source of collaborative learning and exchange. The two universities exhibit strategic autonomy in their reading of the internationalisation imperative, and in constructing their actions and responses, although these are significantly framed by size and geography. In the Swedish higher education landscape, these two dimensions constitute a constraining physical and discursive context, underpinning the links between a global, internationalised environment, and the universities' self-image and positioning.

Background: Iron deficiency anemia (IDA) is a major public health problem among children worldwide. Iron deficiency without anemia (IDWA) is at least twice as common as IDA. Some studies propose that oral iron fortification can modify the infant’s gut microbiome leading to intestinal inflammation. Objectives: To determine whether oral iron therapy can lead to intestinal inflammation in children with IDA or IDWA. Patients and methods: Fifty-six patients aged 6 months to 16 years (median age 7.6 years) with IDA or IDWA were randomly assigned to receive either iron (III)-hydroxide polymaltose complex (IPC) 5mg/kg once daily (maximum dose 100 mg) or sucrosomial iron (SI) 1.4 mg/kg once daily (maximum dose 29.4 mg). Safety and efficacy were studied after 30 and 90 days of treatment. In addition, fecal calprotectin as a marker of intestinal inflammation was measured simultaneously and compared to results obtained before therapy. Results: A significant increase in serum ferritin was noted in both groups as the median ferritin level at baseline was 6.7 μg/L in the IPC group and 6.6 μg/L in the SI group, increasing to 15.9 μg/L and 12.1μg/L respectively, after 90 days of treatment. However, there was no significant change in fecal calprotectin in either group. In addition, no differences in the trend over time were observed between the two groups regarding fecal calprotectin, serum ferritin, and hemoglobin. Conclusions: IPC and SI were equally effective in treating IDA and IDWA. At the recommended doses, oral iron therapy does not seem to induce intestinal inflammation.

Twenty years after the Lisbon strategy, education policy in the European Union (EU) is at a critical juncture, with a new set of strategic goals endorsed for the 2021-2030 decade. This article examines the complex interplay of ideas, institutions and actors, in articulating education policy priorities in the new European Education Area (EEA). Drawing on documentary reviews and interviews with policy actors in the European Commission and the Council of the European Union, we trace the rise and fall of policy ideas in the new framework. The negotiations over the definition of EEA reveal new tensions between and within European institutions over specific policy ideas, with "lifelong learning" and "gender" as the most controversial ones. Continuing, longstanding tensions between the education and employment fields remain, and present a difficulty for the construction of a comprehensive and cohesive education policy program.

Iron deficiency (ID) is by far the most common nutritional disorder in developing and developed countries. When left untreated, ID leads to anemia. Although the usually recommended treatment for iron deficiency anemia (IDA) is oral iron therapy with countless products, such therapy necessitates administration for >3–6 months with questionable patient compliance since most oral iron products have an unpleasant metallic aftertaste and cause intestinal side effects. In addition, in certain gastrointestinal conditions, such as inflammatory bowel diseases or untreated gluten-sensitive enteropathy, oral iron therapy is contraindicated or unsuccessful. Intravenous iron is considered safe in adults, where adverse events are mild and easily managed. The experience with parenteral iron in children is much more limited, and many pediatricians appear reluctant to use it because of uncorroborated fears of serious anaphylactic reactions. In the current article, we thoroughly review the available pediatric literature on the use of all commercially available parenteral iron products except ferumoxytol, which was recently removed from the market. We conclude that parenteral iron appears to be safe in children; it works faster than oral iron, and the newer third-generation products allow replacement of the total iron deficit in a single sitting.

In this paper, I will discuss double plural marking found in various language mixing pairs such as Ewe English, Hiaki Spanish, Bantu English, Bantu French and Greek Turkish. I will contrast this double marking, a case of multiple exponence, to better studied cases of double marking of plurality in languages such as Amharic and Breton. I will argue that double marking can be treated uniformly as an instance of split plurality and offer an analysis within the framework of Distributed Morphology. This in turn means that there is no such thing as multiple exponence of grammatical plurality. I will then discuss why the plural, as opposed to other numbers, and why language mixing favor doubling. I will argue that double marking is favored in the context of the plural as plurality is manifold, being associated with two semantic primitives in the universal functional spine. Language mixing situations have been argued to show analyticity and thus double marking is favored in those.

This article examines the national and European policy contexts that shaped the Swedish internationalisation agenda in higher education since 2000, the policy ideas that were mobilised to promote it, and the national priorities that steered higher education debates. The analysis highlights how domestic and European policy priorities, as well as discourses around increasing global economic reach and building solidarity across the world, have produced an internationalisation strategy that is distinctly 'national'. Drawing on the analysis of the most recent internationalisation strategies we argue that the particular Swedish approach to internationalisation has its ideational foundations in viewing higher education as a political instrument to promote social mobility and justice, as well as a means to develop economic competitiveness and employability capacity. In addition, internationalisation has been used to legitimise national reform goals, but also as a policy objective on its own with the ambition to position Sweden as a competitive knowledge nation in a global context.

Introduction Bariatric surgery is associated with adverse pregnancy outcomes such as reduced birth weight and premature birth. One possible mechanism for this is increased glycemic variability (GV) which occurs after bariatric surgery. The objective of this study was to compare the effect of Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB) versus vertical sleeve gastrectomy (SG) on GV during pregnancy and to investigate the relationships of GV, type of bariatric surgery and maternal and neonatal outcomes.Research design and methods Fourteen pregnant women after RYGB and 14 after SG were investigated with continuous glucose monitoring in their second or third trimester in this observational study carried out as part of routine clinical care.Results Pregnant women with RYGB had similar mean interstitial glucose values but significantly increased indices of GV and a lower %time in range 3.9–7.8 mmol/L (70–140 mg/dL), compared with SG.Conclusions Pregnant women who have undergone RYGB have greater GV during pregnancy compared with those who have undergone SG. Further research is needed to establish the relationship between GV and pregnancy outcomes to determine the preferred bariatric operation in women of reproductive age, and whether interventions to reduce GV might improve outcomes.

Enabled by market-oriented policies implemented in the early 1990s, a nation-wide for-profit education industry has emerged and flourished in Sweden. As a more recent expansion strategy, Swedish school companies have begun exporting their school and early childhood education and care services internationally. In this article, three such companies and a selection of the foreign operations they have set up are studied to analyse how they describe the education services they are establishing in the new national settings. The findings show that the companies have developed and followed different edu-business models, using and transforming particular pedagogical ideas and connecting them to different spatial imaginaries. These include the Swedish/Scandinavian as both places and idealized spaces, infused with borderless global transformative spatial imaginaries on the creation of autonomous learners and futuristic education visions for global futures. Educational profiles and concepts from the Swedish context are both adjusted and marketed to the foreign settings, and entail stories on spaces and mobilities, encompassing pedagogy, teachers and students.

This article focuses on "internationalization at home" (IaH) for education students in Swedish Universities and its significance for their professional formation and future practice. We draw on research in two large institutions and explore the perceptions and experiences of internationalization of home students in education. We find that while the "intercultural" understanding of students is well developed, the international and intercultural dimensions of experiencing IaH are limited, due to several institutional and learning environment contexts. This has consequences for the social dimensions of future teaching practice. In addition, the perception of the discipline as "national" is significant in shaping the outlook of students toward international questions and their own future personal and professional mobility. We contextualize these findings using documentary analysis and staff interviews, and argue that to achieve intercultural and international learning environments of quality, social relevance, and long-term social benefit, we need to rethink how internationalization perspectives are integrated in teacher education courses.

Quantity distinctions are morphologically indicated in the majority of languages.However, the marking of these distinctions exhibits a high degree of cross-linguistic variation with respect to the number of quantity categories, their agreement properties, and the morphemes themselves. Furthermore, number marking on numerically quantified nouns varies across languages: for instance, while German and English use plural number marking with numerals other than “one” (for example, “two books”), Turkish and Hungarian use singular number marking with all numerals. Recent work has discussed how to explain number marking with numerals. In particular, Bale and Khanjian (2014) propose that the quantity concepts of the two types of languages vary semantically. We present novel evidence from a cross-linguistic study of Hungarian, Turkish and German child language, and argue that the quantity concepts do not vary, and the variation between languages must have a morphosyntactic explanation.

Middle-class housing in Greece developed rapidly after World War II (WWII). Across all Greek cities a multi-story building type, so-called “polykatoikia” emerged because before the war, in 1929, a social and legal contract was constituted, according to which each apartment could be owned by “micro-owners”. The applied General and Special Building Regulations envisioned a homogeneous city volume composed of these polykatoikias. On the other hand, the new ownership model invited a heterogeneous middle-class population to buy and reside in these apartments, in contrast to the previous homogenous one owner per building model. Thessaloniki developed differently than other cities, starting with homogeneous urban planning and city volume, but heterogeneous architectural styles that would evolve vice versa in the post-WWII era. The contemporary political–social–economic changes modified the city’s development vision and population’s needs related to the polykatoikia. Today, the matured state of the polykatoikias, the expected deterioration of the building stock and its environmental (in)efficiency troubles the micro-owners. The lack of common decision-making strategies to enforce building unity increases the entropy to a dysfunctional level. The paper’s main goal is to investigate whether the polykatoikia model is reaching a breaking point. Will the future of the polykatoikia return to homogeneity by relying on one investor per building and be leading a decrease of polykatoikia’s variety, or are there strategies that lead to the sustainability of the building type and its micro-owners? The research is based on the author’s Ph.D. thesis; recent literature on the topic and in-situ observations both support the objectives.

In this article we examine the European Semester as an innovative form of policy coordination, with distinct effects on education and skills policies for Member States. We analyse the Semester's framing of education policy, and examine its manifestations in Spain and Sweden, two countries considered to be different in their approach to education. Drawing on a policy instrumentation approach and interviews with policy actors and documentary analysis, our research suggests that while the Semester has given education policy a significant place within the EU's governance, economic rationales for education are clearly dominant in the process. Still, we identify underpinning logics that strengthen the social and educational perspectives represented in the Semester, although these are still treated as productive forces for labour market integration. In addition, there is a strengthening of collaboration between the European Commission and Member States, but also tensions between different parts of the Commission over the definition and direction of education policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policies on inclusion are being increasingly embedded within education systems and teacher education across the world, with schools and teachers called upon to add 'inclusion' to their already large set of skills and tasks. There is, however, no consistent definition of what inclusion means or how it can be best promoted. The purpose of this paper is to explore the dilemmas that student teachers face when they encounter policy requirements to practice inclusion, and how they mediate the tensions. Drawing on two exploratory studies with science student teachers in two Initial Teacher Education programmes in England, we focus on the conceptions of inclusion held by the student teachers and the links between inclusion and teacher education. Our findings suggest that conventional understandings in relation to ability still dominate, with ability-based differentiation viewed as the key teaching strategy to promote inclusion. In addition, student teachers find themselves having to negotiate contradictory and often conflicting approaches to inclusion, diversity, and academic attainment. The discrepancies highlighted by this study have implications for how teacher education courses need to be organised to promote the practice of inclusion.

A large array of nominal measurement structures can give rise to proportional readings, i.e., readings which specify the proportional relation of two measurements. Two key questions in the analysis of such readings is (a) whether nominal measurement structures are (or can be) in some sense inherently proportional or whether proportionality comes to be part of the meaning of nominal measurement via some external factor, like the manipulation of a contextual standard, the choice of a proportional measure function, or the presence of a relative modifier, and (b) to what extent it is possible to attribute proportionality to a single source across different nominal measurement structures. This paper addresses these questions by investigating the proportional readings of three nominal measurement structures in Greek (comparatives, juxtaposed measurement structures, and partitive measurement structures) as they arise in the presence of precise proportions specified by percentages like n tis ekato ‘n percent’. We argue that even in the presence of such relative modifiers, it is necessary to assume a second source of proportionality. We provide novel evidence for the necessity of proportional measure functions for both comparatives and juxtaposed measurement structures. Partitives are the only case at hand that seems to necessitate inherent proportionality. Moreover, a unified analysis of precise proportions is shown to be possible as long as we move away from a standard analysis of differential comparatives.

Research on different populations of heritage speakers (HSs) has demonstrated that these speakers (i) frequently produce fewer adjectives, and (ii) produce more errors in nominal concord than in subject–verb agreement. The first point, (i), has been attributed in the literature to the optionality of adjectives and to the fact that adjectives characterize the literary language and HSs lack familiarity with this register. The second point, (ii), is viewed by other researchers as supporting theories that treat nominal concord as being different from subject–verb agreement. In this paper, we contribute data on production of adjectives and agreement asymmetries with adjectives from heritage Greek. We show that these cannot be viewed as supporting claims with respect to (i) but conclude that nominal concord and subject–verb agreement involve different mechanisms. We furthermore explore ways to account for a slight contrast we observe between prenominal and postnominal agreement.