The large nature of students’ dataset has made it difficult to find patterns associated with students’ academic performance (AP) using conventional methods. This has increased the rate of drop-outs, graduands with weak class of degree (CoD) and students that spend more than the minimum stipulated duration of studies. It is necessary to determine students’ AP using educational data mining (EDM) tools in order to know students who are likely to perform poorly at an early stage of their studies. This paper explores k-means and self-organizing map (SOM) in mining pieces of knowledge relating to the natural number of clusters in students’ dataset and the association of the input features using selected demographic, pre-admission and first year performance. Matlab 2015a was the programming environment and the dataset consists of nine sets of computer science graduands. Cluster validity assessment with k-means discovered four (4) clusters with correlation metric yielding the highest mean silhouette value of 0.5912.  SOM provided an hexagonal grid visual of feature component planes and scatter plots of each significant input attribute. The result shows that the significant attributes were highly correlated with each other except entry mode (EM), indicating that the impact of EM on CoD varies with students irrespective of mode of admission. Also, four distinct clusters were also discovered in the dataset by SOM —7.7% belonging to cluster 1 (first class), and 25% for cluster 2 (2nd class Upper) while Clusters 3 and 4 had 35% proportion each. This validates the results of k-means and further confirms the importance of early detection of students’ AP and confirms the effectiveness of SOM as a cluster validity tool. As further work, the labels from SOM will be associated with records in the dataset for association rule mining, supervised learning and prediction of students’ AP.

This paper is a response to a 2018 call for greater understanding of how previous examples of marine science diplomacy could help shape present day efforts to draft a new law of the sea that protects marine biodiversity and conserves the marine environment. It tackles this through analysis of the various twists, turns, and challenges of early science diplomacy efforts in marine science during the early twentieth century. It looks in turn at questions of defining and agreeing on research objectives, how backchannel science diplomacy can become official government diplomacy, and finally, how careful science diplomacy brought Germany back to the international research arena so as to successfully put in place marine conservation measures during the 1920s. In doing this, it argues that the foundation of the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas in 1902 represented a revolutionary moment where supra-national scientific research, coordination, and conservation politics for the ocean first emerged; with International Council for the Exploration of the Sea becoming a key model for all subsequent marine science diplomacy. This essay is part of a special issue entitled Science Diplomacy, edited by Giulia Rispoli and Simone Turchetti.

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It is a cliché of self-help advice that there are no problems, only opportunities. The rationale and actions of the BSHS in creating its Global Digital History of Science Festival may be a rare genuine confirmation of this mantra. The global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 meant that the society's usual annual conference – like everyone else's – had to be cancelled. Once the society decided to go digital, we had a hundred days to organize and deliver our first online festival. In the hope that this will help, inspire and warn colleagues around the world who are also trying to move online, we here detail the considerations, conversations and thinking behind the organizing team's decisions.

As technologies of ocean exploitation emerged during the late 1960s, science policy and diplomacy were formed in response to anticipated capabilities that did not match the realities of extracting deep‐sea minerals and of resource exploitation in the deep ocean at the time. Promoters of ocean exploitation in the late 1960s envisaged wonders such as rare mineral extraction and the stationing of divers in underwater habitats from which they would operate seabed machinery not connected to the turbulent surface waters. Their promises coincided with others' fears that nuclear weaponry would be placed on the seabed. Those who lacked the technological capability to extract minerals from the seabed also had concerns that other nations would exploit their resources. Scientific imaginaries caused uncertainty in the international community—especially in the “Global South.” The UN called the “Law of the Sea” conferences to mediate emerging geopolitical tensions caused by these imaginaries of exploitation of ocean resources. These conferences became a site where lawmakers projected futures rather than merely responding to past or present dilemmas. Diplomats' negotiations, with their basis in anticipation of the future uses of science and technology, reveal the role of scientific imaginaries within complex negotiations. Here, we see the impact of the distinction (or blurring) of the real and the imagined on the balance of relations between Global North and South increasing global imbalances of resources and power. This article's analysis of such scientific diplomacy provides a valuable example of the power of scientific imaginaries to have a global impact.