Measuring children’s metalinguistic awareness

Research into young learners’ metalinguistic awareness has led to both definitions of the construct and key findings about its role in children’s cognitive and linguistic development. I briefly summarise this research before introducing two established theoretical models that can help us understand the concept of metalinguistic awareness more broadly: E. Bialystok’s classic dichotomy of analysis of knowledge and control of processing, and R. Ellis’ notion of explicit (second language) knowledge. This is followed by an overview of measures of metalinguistic awareness that have been used in empirical studies to date as well as an illustration and critique of selected measures. As a result, I propose a model which combines features of the two previous frameworks by conceptualising knowledge representations and processes in terms of (1) how implicit/explicit and (2) how specific/schematic they are. I explain this model to illustrate how it can serve as a useful thinking tool. In particular, I argue that the model not only allows us to theorise measures of metalinguistic awareness more clearly and easily, but that it can also capture tasks aimed at assessing other linguistic and cognitive abilities. The paper concludes with a brief outlook on future research into metalinguistic awareness

Uncovering individualised treatment effects for educational trials

Large-scale Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) are widely regarded as “the gold standard” for testing the causal effects of school-based interventions. RCTs typically present the statistical significance of the average treatment effect (ATE), which captures the effect an intervention has had on average for a given population. However, key decisions in child health and education are often about individuals who may be very different from those averages. One way to identify heterogeneous treatment effects across different individuals, not captured by the ATE, is to conduct subgroup analyses. For example, free school meal (FSM) pupils as required for projects funded by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) in England. These subgroup analyses, as we demonstrate in 48 EEF-funded RCTs involving over 200,000 students, are usually not standardised across studies and offer flexible degrees of freedom to researchers, potentially leading to mixed, if not misleading, results. Here, we develop and deploy an alternative to ATE and subgroup analysis, a machine-learning and regression-based framework to predict individualised treatment effects (ITEs). ITEs could show where an intervention worked, for which individuals, and to what extent. Our findings have implications for decision-makers in fields like education, healthcare, law, and clinical practices concerning children and adolescents

Sequential estimation for mixture of regression models for heterogeneous population

Heterogeneity among patients commonly exists in clinical studies and leads to challenges in medical research. It is widely accepted that there exist various sub-types in the population and they are distinct from each other. The approach of identifying the sub-types and thus tailoring disease prevention and treatment is known as precision medicine. The mixture model is a classical statistical model to cluster the heterogeneous population into homogeneous sub-populations. However, for the highly heterogeneous population with multiple components, its parameter estimation and clustering results may be ambiguous due to the dependence of the EM algorithm on the initial values. For sub-typing purposes, the finite mixture of regression models with concomitant variables is considered and a novel statistical method is proposed to identify the main components with large proportions in the mixture sequentially. Compared to existing typical statistical inferences, the new method not only requires no pre-specification on the number of components for model fitting, but also provides more reliable parameter estimation and clustering results. Simulation studies demonstrated the superiority of the proposed method. Real data analysis on the drug response prediction illustrated its reliability in the parameter estimation and capability to identify the important subgroup

The Expressive Injustice of Being Rich

According to limitarianism, it is morally impermissible to be too rich. We consider three main challenges to limitarianism: the redundancy objection, the inconclusiveness objection, and the commitment objection. As a distributive principle, we find that limitarianism fails to overcome the three objections—even taking recent theoretical innovations into account. Instead, we suggest that the core commitment of limitarianism can be drawn from the excess intuition. It entails that at some point, people’s claims to retain wealth become qualitatively different: they become preposterous from the point of view of interpersonal morality and justification. Extreme wealth, we argue, adds a distinctive expressive reason to worry about inequality and insufficiency, compounding these other distributive injustices. In retaining or wasting excess wealth while others have too little, the wealthy send a message of complete disregard for the interests of their co-citizens. They express that their disadvantaged compatriots have a diminished moral standing

Drivers of Southern Ocean food web structure and impacts of environmental change

The Southern Ocean is experiencing major environmental and ecological changes which could drastically alter communities and impact ecosystem functioning. We still have a poor understanding of the structure of Southern Ocean food webs and their likely responses to ongoing and future changes, which limits our ability to develop and implement effective management and conservation strategies. This thesis employs multiple approaches to investigate several aspects relating to the structure and dynamics of Southern Ocean food webs. First, the links between morphological traits and trophic niches are explored within the demersal fish community of the subantarctic island of South Georgia, highlighting the role of functional traits in driving community structure. Second, functional traits including body size, mobility, foraging habitat and feeding mode are used to identify the drivers of stabilising sub-structures (modularity) across regional food webs. This leads to the hypothesis that habitat heterogeneity is a major determinant of the distribution of modules within networks. Third, an extensive dataset of mesopelagic fish and zooplankton samples from across a latitudinal temperature gradient is used to determine the impact of warming on predator-prey body mass ratios (PPMR). This reveals that ongoing environmental change may reorganise the size-structure of Southern Ocean ecosystems, with implications for their stability. Fourth, the possible consequences of ongoing baleen whale population recovery for competitor biomasses are explored using the Ecopath framework, with the conclusion that strong trade-offs between conservation objectives are likely unless substantial increases in suitable primary production occur. This thesis finishes with a synthesis of these new insights into the structure and dynamics of Southern Ocean food webs and discusses the major future directions for food web research more generally

New development: Rethinking public sector accounting systems by rediscovering their relational nature

Public sector accounting systems have been criticised for being ‘monological’ tools, narrowly focusing on efficiency and financial values while disregarding the plurality of public values, and suffering from limited use, relevance, transparency, and involvement of citizens. This article offers a new perspective by highlighting not only the technical but also the relational nature of accounting systems where citizens and governments interact in deciding what counts, measuring it, and accounting for it. It calls for future research exploring the potential of interactive forms of accounting systems, both government- and citizen-initiated

Entrepreneurship and Development in Nepal Post-COVID Implications

This book illustrates a connection between entrepreneurship and development in an emerging economy context, focusing on Nepal. That entrepreneurship contributes to sustainable development by creating jobs, elevating economic growth, promoting innovation, and mitigating social and environmental challenges is discussed in other works. Entrepreneurship is linked to several sustainable development goals. However, relatively little is known about entrepreneurship in Nepal at an international level and rarely have researchers attempted to explore the relationship between entrepreneurship and development in the Nepalese context. In this regard, this book generates valuable insights, not only contributing to policy implications but also setting a direction for entrepreneurship research in Nepal within a wider context of sustainable development. In particular, the book discusses several important issues on entrepreneurship, including migrant entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial ecosystem, social entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial finance, community-based entrepreneurship, and tourism entrepreneurship, issues which are intrinsically connected to the sustainable development of the country. In addition to policy contributions, the book provides a direction for facilitating theoretically underpinned work in entrepreneurship and development in the Nepalese context. The factors driving entrepreneurship, including specific social-cultural and historical factors that remain relevant for emerging economies, and emancipation, inclusion and participation, which are central to achieving development, are to be theorized in order to better understand the relationship between entrepreneurship and development. The topics covered by the book will be of interest to policy-makers from ministries and departments, international organizations, and development partners

Aptitude for explicit and implicit learning

The present study examined the structure of and relationship between aptitude for explicit and implicit learning and working memory. Furthermore, we investigated to what extent these variables could predict second-language (L2) proficiency in terms of reading, listening and grammar knowledge. A total of 86 Croatian learners of English at advanced levels completed the LLAMA aptitude test suite, a probabilistic serial reaction time (SRT) task, operation span and forward digit span tasks, as well as grammar, reading and listening comprehension tests. Our factor-analytic results support a conceptual distinction between (1) working memory, (2) explicit aptitude and (3) implicit aptitude, while at the same time highlighting the multi-componential nature of implicit aptitude, with factor loadings of LLAMA D and SRT pulling in opposite directions. Regression analyses mirror this pattern of results: Whereas components of explicit aptitude, implicit aptitude and working memory significantly predicted L2 proficiency, LLAMA D, SRT and forward digit span emerged as negative predictors. We argue that these findings support a conceptualization of (implicit) aptitude as a cognitive proclivity rather than as a context-independent ability, in line with both current research and previously proposed multi-dimensional and dynamic perspectives of aptitude

Optimal reinsurance with multivariate risks and dependence uncertainty

In this paper, we study the optimal reinsurance design from the perspective of an insurer with multiple lines of business, where the reinsurance is purchased by the insurer for each line of business respectively. For the risk vector generated by the multiple lines of business, we suppose that the marginal distributions are fixed, but the dependence structure between these risks is unknown. Due to the unknown dependence structure, the optimal strategy is investigated for the worst-case scenario. We consider two types of risk measures: Value-at-Risk (VaR) and Range-Value-at-Risk (RVaR) including Expected Shortfall (ES) as a special case, and general premium principles satisfying certain conditions. To be more practical, the minimization of the total risk is conducted under some budget constraint. For the VaR-based model with only two risks, it turns out that the limited stop-loss reinsurance treaty is optimal for each line of business. For the model with more than two risks, we obtain two types of optimal reinsurance strategies if the marginals have convex or concave distributions on their tail parts by constraining the ceded loss functions to be convex or concave. Moreover, as a special case, the optimal quota-share reinsurance with dependence uncertainty has been studied. Finally, after applying our findings to two risks, some studies have been implemented to obtain both the analytical and numerical optimal reinsurance policies

Pathology and Visual Culture The Scientific Artworks Of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot and The Salpêtrière School

In this book, Natasha Ruiz-Gómez delves into an extraordinary collection of pathological drawings, photographs, sculptures, and casts created by neurologists at Paris’s Hôpital de la Salpêtrière in the nineteenth century. Led by Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893) and known collectively as the Salpêtrière School, these savants-artistes produced works that demonstrated an engagement with contemporary artistic discourses and the history of art, even as the artists/clinicians professed their dedication to absolute objectivity. During his lifetime, Charcot became internationally famous for his studies of hysteria and hypnosis, establishing himself as a pioneer in modern neurology. However, this book brings to light the often-overlooked contributions of other clinicians, such as Dr. Paul Richer, who created “scientific artworks” that merged scientific objectivity with artistic intervention. Challenging conventional interpretations of visual media in medicine, Ruiz-Gómez analyzes how these images and objects documented symptoms and neuropathology while defying disciplinary categorization. Grounded in extensive archival research, Pathology and Visual Culture targets an international audience of historians and students of art, visual culture, medicine, and the medical humanities. It will also captivate neurologists and anyone interested in fin-de-siècle French history and culture