Developing knowledge confidence and perceptions of primary science teaching skills

In the English speaking world, elementary school teachers confidence in their ability to teach science is a major area of research (Murphy 2009). This paper will present data from a cohort of approximately 200 student primary teachers, all of whom have to take modules on teaching science in the primary school. Data will be presented on students’ science knowledge, their perceived confidence with which they hold that knowledge, and how that relates to their perceptions of their confidence to teach both science content and processes. The implications for teaching and learning science and for teacher education will be presented

Developing knowledge confidence and perceptions of primary science teaching skills

In the English speaking world, elementary school teachers confidence in their ability to teach science is a major area of research (Murphy 2009). This paper will present data from a cohort of approximately 200 student primary teachers, all of whom have to take modules on teaching science in the primary school. Data will be presented on students' science knowledge, their perceived confidence with which they hold that knowledge, and how that relates to their perceptions of their confidence to teach both science content and processes. The implications for teaching and learning science and for teacher education will be presented

Student experiences of learning in a systems thinking course

Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 75-77)

Distributionally robust views on queues and related stochastic models

This dissertation explores distribution-free methods for stochastic models. Traditional approaches operate on the premise of complete knowledge about the probability distributions of the underlying random variables that govern these models. In contrast, this work adopts a distribution-free perspective, assuming only partial knowledge of these distributions, often limited to generalized moment information. Distributionally robust analysis seeks to determine the worst-case model performance. It involves optimization over a set of probability distributions that comply with this partial information, a task tantamount to solving a semiinfinite linear program. To address such an optimization problem, a solution approach based on the concept of weak duality is used. Through the proposed weak-duality argument, distribution-free bounds are derived for a wide range of stochastic models. Further, these bounds are applied to various distributionally robust stochastic programs and used to analyze extremal queueing models—central themes in applied probability and mathematical optimization

Distributionally robust views on queues and related stochastic models

This dissertation explores distribution-free methods for stochastic models. Traditional approaches operate on the premise of complete knowledge about the probability distributions of the underlying random variables that govern these models. In contrast, this work adopts a distribution-free perspective, assuming only partial knowledge of these distributions, often limited to generalized moment information. Distributionally robust analysis seeks to determine the worst-case model performance. It involves optimization over a set of probability distributions that comply with this partial information, a task tantamount to solving a semiinfinite linear program. To address such an optimization problem, a solution approach based on the concept of weak duality is used. Through the proposed weak-duality argument, distribution-free bounds are derived for a wide range of stochastic models. Further, these bounds are applied to various distributionally robust stochastic programs and used to analyze extremal queueing models—central themes in applied probability and mathematical optimization

Indefinite pronouns

This book is a comprehensive cross-linguistic study of indefinite pronouns ('someone', 'anything', 'nobody') in the world's languages. The PDF file deposited here is the manuscript version submitted to the publisher. The final published book is available in open access at http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780198235606.001.0001/oso-9780198235606

The Pinboard and the Paradox of Pain: An Experiment of Post-Epistemological Method in Representing the Lived Experience of Persistent Pain

This thesis is about the crisis in representation that accompanies the attempt to account for lived experience, with particular reference to bodily pain in social science. The diagnosis of this problem of experience identifies epistemology as an inappropriate means of knowing that initiates a translational paradox unable to satisfy the simultaneous demands of making lived experience familiar in representational form yet retaining the foreignness of the original experience at the same time. This problem of simultaneity is not a problem, however, if it is built into a way of knowing, something that escapes epistemological conditions of possibility with its either/or of singularities. To know in such ‘double vision’, or fractionally, characterises post-epistemological thinking. This thesis draws on a relatively underdeveloped method for practicing a fractional means of knowing from post- actor-network theory, that of the pinboard, and explores how it might be usefully applied to the problem of experience. The thesis constitutes an experiment in producing a social science account of the lived experience of chronic pain using this method as an alternative to conventional epistemological techniques that initiate the problem of experience. Through initial theoretical discussion, followed by reflection on its practical application involving the construction of fractional accounts of lived experience for five participants experiencing chronic pain (interviewed individually over several sessions), the pinboard is developed as a technique that seeks to maintain ‘double vision’ whilst inherently resisting attempts to resolve the juxtaposition it makes visible, enacting and engaging in an ontological politics with conventional methods of social analysis. This includes discussion of how the method might be transported from methodological knowledge spaces to effectively intervene on such conventional methods

Narrative and Finance: Cultural Logic of Financialisation and Financial Crisis – Focusing on the Korean Financial Crisis

This thesis suggests a cultural logic of financialisation in terms of (re)presentation of information and (re)configuration of temporality, both of which are critically undertaken and regulated by financial narrative. This narrative functions, following Bourdieu, as “the sign of wealth” in our times. It is time for cultural theorists and activists to approach finance as a set of epistemic cultural processes beyond the economic, which modulates epistemological and ontological contexts, affecting actors’ cognition and behavior in value production and realisation. Financialisation is supported and maintained by narrative intervention in valorising the onto-phenomenological level of the economic. From this perspective, financialisation is suggested as a disinformation campaign, through which the cognitive dissonance of the financial mechanism is effectively contained, concealing its damaging effects and thus valorising the financial mechanism. It implements an intensification of the transactional orientation as the legitimate mode of value production and circulation. Sustaining and amplifying the transactional orientation of investment banking among the actors in the financial markets, the financial system conceals cognitive dissonance through its operativity of information. It works towards the construction of a new financial reality, stimulating belief and guiding action⎯without which financial integrity, credit relations, and transactional orientation could not be sustained. Observing the contemporary culture-finance relationship from the perspective of value politics under financial capitalism, this thesis analyses specific aspects of homology between culture and finance from the perspective of the cultural logic of financial narrative. This is seen as a frame of value transference and a device of activation as well as of domination. Exploring the possibilities of a cultural theory of value, this project, first of all, focuses upon the question of value and the actual process of value formation associated with operativity and performativity of narrative. Narrative is analysed as the cognitive operation constitutive of financial narrative politics for value transference in the discourse of financial crisis, which has been, as this thesis upholds and examines, systematically operated throughout the Korean financial crisis. It mainly revisits the value theories and narrative analyses of Simmel, Marx, Ricoeur, Jameson, and Genette to articulate an economic theory of value in the cultural politics of narrative. Following Ricoeur, it sees this as a mechanism of value transference, and it is here correlated with the financial doctrine of entanglement and contagion. Through a narrative, wherein utterances and statements around a primal event, or crisis, perform as the collective operativity of information, a value is constructed and transferred to inform and motivate actors. Narrative structure, from which the nexuses of intentionalities of the financial system are formulated and transmitted, is proposed as a meta-frame of cultural valorisation. It valorises economic value for the (re)production of dominant financial value, without which any unprecedented application of ‘methodology,’ such as a ‘shock doctrine,’ of economic prescription cannot be legitimised and extrapolated. This project begins with the argument in Chapter 2 that narrative exploits uncertainty as a resource for performativity, and thus necessitates a new standard, thereby regulating and activating heterogeneous actors in the markets. A financial crisis is the crucial point of narrativity in the constitution of a legitimate guiding structure, exploiting uncertainty in order to manage risk⎯ thus producing a narrative as a frame of self-reference. The narrative identifies the new main value by effectively performing the uncertainty of a financial crisis. In this regard, the chapter proposes that the necessity of negating (or guaranteeing) the fundamental contradiction, or “the self-abolishing contradiction,” bolstered by the sheer size of the entanglement and contagion in finance capitalism, is authenticated and initiated by a preliminary cultural operation of a discursive approach to the crisis. The discourse is not a randomly disseminated rhetoric, but is presented as a narrative in which temporal reconfiguration and sequences of action are carefully guided to represent the main event as a source of cognition and action for contextual control; a certain sequence of events is thereby thematised and anticipated through the interpretation of the event in question, with clear intentions by the main financial narrator. Narrative opens a performative field of objectification in which the power relationship between the main narrator and the object, the narratee, is established and coordinated. The narrative emphasis in a collapse, for instance, one that is yet to come, grounds the operativity and performativity through which actors are informed and motivated, while implementing and legitimising the necessary official description. Articulating the intentions of the system, and its employment of capitalistically reconfigured temporality, as well as its representation of information into narrative, Chapter 3 suggests that narrative is the objectifying field of value and value-transference, in which the textuality of everyday narrative is produced to direct actors as the ushering force of the main value. Proposing value as a guiding force of cognition and action, the chapter closely inquires into the value-forming process, arguing that narrative process is an inevitabl

Always One Bit More, Computing and the Experience of Ambiguity

Fun is often understood to be non-conceptual and indeed without rigour, without relation to formal processes of thought, yielding an intense and joyous informality, a release from procedure. Yet, as this book argues, fun may also be found, alongside other kinds of pleasure, in the generation, iteration and imagination of operations and procedures. This chapter aims to develop a means of drawing out an understanding of fun in relation to concepts of experience in the culture of mathematics and in the machinic fun of certain computer games. Mathematical concepts of experience, as something to be effaced, in terms of the grind of churning out calculations, understood as an acme of human knowledge bordering on the mystical or something both prosaic, peculiar and thrillingly abstract have been crucial to the motivation and genesis of computing. Experience may be figured as something innate to the computing person, or that is abstractable and thus mobile, shifting heterogeneously from one context to another, producing strange affinities between scales – residues and likeness among computational forms that can occasionally link the most austere and mundane or cacophonous of aesthetics. Among such, the fine and perplexing fun of paradox and ambiguity arises not simply in the interplay between formalisms and other kinds of life but as formalisms interweave releasing and congealing further dynamics. There are many ways in which mathematics has been linked to culture as a means of ordering, describing, inspiring or explaining ways of being in the world, but it is less often that mathematics thinks about itself as producing figurations of existence, and such moments are useful to turn to in gaining a sense of some of the patternings of computational culture