Rethinking multiculturalism, reassessing multicultural education report 2

Rethinking Multiculturalism/Reassessing Multicultural Education Project Report Number 2: Perspectives on Multiculturalism is the second report of Rethinking Multiculturalism/Reassessing Multicultural Education (RMRME), an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Project between the University of Western Sydney (UWS), the NSW Department of Education and Communities (DEC) and the Board of Studies, Teaching and Educational Standards (BOSTES) incorporating the former NSW Institute of Teachers (NSWIT) and the Board of Studies. It follows an earlier report, Rethinking Multiculturalism/Reassessing Multicultural Education Project Report Number 1: Surveying NSW Public School Teachers and will be followed by a final report Rethinking Multiculturalism/Reassessing Multicultural Education Project Report Number 3: Knowledge Translation and Action Research. This second report provides an analysis of 42 focus groups involving a total of 222 parents, teachers and students in the 14 targeted schools. These included primary and secondary schools from a range of contexts: urban and rural, high and low socio-economic status (SES), and high and low levels of cultural diversity (see Table 1, p.9). The views recounted here are not intended to be representative of the schools themselves (which remain anonymous) nor of teachers, parents and students in NSW as a whole. Nevertheless, they provide a useful record of diverse perspectives to be found across NSW schools regarding multiculturalism and multicultural education. The report documents the complex array of cultural backgrounds and forms of identification amongst students, parents and teachers in NSW public schools, which challenges conventional wisdom about the nature of cultural diversity. It finds, however, that there is something of a mismatch between this complexity and teachers’ experience and expertise in multicultural education

Where Value Resides:Making Ecological Value Possible

Distinguishing between the source and the locus of value enables environmental philosophers to consider not only what is of value, but also to try to develop a conception of valuation that is itself ecological. Such a conception must address difficulties caused by the original locational metaphors in which the distinction is framed. This is done by reassessing two frequently employed models of valuation, perception, and desire, and going on to show that a more adequate ecological understanding of valuation emerges when these models are fully contextualized in the intersecting life worlds of the ecological community. Ecological evaluation takes place in ongoing encounters between these worlds and a crucial part in this process is assigned to living beings that are “open-endedly open,” that is, open only to what the world affords them and others, but open to an indefinite field of possible valuational encounters between all kinds of beings. Ecological valuation overcomes some of the conceptual failings of contemporary attempts to evaluate nature: “The Economics of Ecology and Biodiversity” and “Valuing Nature.

Artificial intelligence's new frontier: artificial companions and the fourth revolution

‘The definitive version is available at www3.interscience.wiley.com '. Copyright Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.In this paper I argue that recent technological transformations in the life-cycle of information have brought about a fourth revolution, in the long process of reassessing humanity’s fundamental nature and role in the universe. We are not immobile, at the centre of the universe (Copernicus); we are not unnaturally distinct and different from the rest of the animal world (Darwin); and we are far from being entirely transparent to ourselves (Freud). We are now slowly accepting the idea that we might be informational organisms among many agents (Turing), inforgs not so dramatically different from clever, engineered artefacts, but sharing with them a global environment that is ultimately made of information, the infosphere. This new conceptual revolution is humbling, but also exciting. For in view of this important evolution in our self-understanding, and given the sort of IT-mediated interactions that humans will increasingly enjoy with their environment and a variety of other agents, whether natural or synthetic, we have the unique opportunity of developing a new ecological approach to the whole of reality.Peer reviewe

Infrastructure investment - the emergent PPP equity market

Increasingly governments are looking to private sector actors to invest in infrastructure projects. An emergent mechanism for such investment is the market in PPP equity. This is an aspect of PPPs that has to date had little empirical attention. This paper reports on the size and scope of the market in PPP equity sales within the UK. In the process, the nature of PPP projects and the existing rationales for the policy are critiqued. The paper concludes by laying out a number of potential research agendas focused on PPP equity sales including a call for reassessing theoretical perspectives

All That We Are: Philosophical Anthropology and Ecophilosophy

Ecophilosophers have long argued that addressing the environmental crisis not only demands reassessing the ethical aspects of human and nature relations, but also prevailing theories of human nature. Philosophical anthropology has historically taken this as its calling, and its resources may be profitably utilized in the context of ecophilosophy. Distinguishing between conservative and emancipatory naturalism leads to a critical discussion of the Cartesian culture/nature dualism. Marjorie Grene is discussed as a resource in the tradition of philosophical anthropology which enables us to avoid dualistic thinking and espouse an emancipatory naturalism by resisting reductionism and acknowledging the diffuse dependence of human being on natural processes. In order to fully explicate the conditions of human dependence upon nature it becomes necessary to define an appropriate approach to ontology. This critical ontology facilitates a stratified understanding of the place of humans in nature without lapsing into reductivism or post-Kantian constructivism. It provides a sounder basis than either alternative for motivating a many- sided ecophilosophical perspective on human being

Between Hype and Understatement: Reassessing Cyber Risks as a Security Strategy

Most of the actions that fall under the trilogy of cyber crime, terrorism,and war exploit pre-existing weaknesses in the underlying technology.Because these vulnerabilities that exist in the network are not themselvesillegal, they tend to be overlooked in the debate on cyber security. A UKreport on the cost of cyber crime illustrates this approach. Its authors chose to exclude from their analysis the costs in anticipation of cyber crime, such as insurance costs and the costs of purchasing anti-virus software on the basis that "these are likely to be factored into normal day-to-day expenditures for the Government, businesses, and individuals. This article contends if these costs had been quantified and integrated into the cost of cyber crime, then the analysis would have revealed that what matters is not so much cyber crime, but the fertile terrain of vulnerabilities that unleash a range of possibilities to whomever wishes to exploit them. By downplaying the vulnerabilities, the threats represented by cyber war, cyber terrorism, and cyber crime are conversely inflated. Therefore, reassessing risk as a strategy for security in cyberspace must include acknowledgment of understated vulnerabilities, as well as a better distributed knowledge about the nature and character of the overhyped threats of cyber crime, cyber terrorism, and cyber war

Males resemble females. re-evaluating sexual dimorphism in protoceratops andrewsi (neoceratopsia, protoceratopsidae)

BACKGROUND: Protoceratops andrewsi (Neoceratopsia, Protoceratopsidae) is a well-known dinosaur from the Upper Cretaceous of Mongolia. Some previous workers hypothesized sexual dimorphism in the cranial shape of this taxon, using qualitative and quantitative observations. In particular, width and height of the frill as well as the development of a nasal horn have been hypothesized as potentially sexually dimorphic. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Here, we reassess potential sexual dimorphism in skulls of Protoceratops andrewsi by applying two-dimensional geometric morphometrics to 29 skulls in lateral and dorsal views. Principal Component Analyses and nonparametric MANOVAs recover no clear separation between hypothetical "males" and "females" within the overall morphospace. Males and females thus possess similar overall cranial morphologies. No differences in size between "males" and "females" are recovered using nonparametric ANOVAs. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Sexual dimorphism within Protoceratops andrewsi is not strongly supported by our results, as previously proposed by several authors. Anatomical traits such as height and width of the frill, and skull size thus may not be sexually dimorphic. Based on PCA for a data set focusing on the rostrum and associated ANOVA results, nasal horn height is the only feature with potential dimorphism. As a whole, most purported dimorphic variation is probably primarily the result of ontogenetic cranial shape changes as well as intraspecific cranial variation independent of sex

Reassessing the History of U.S. Hazardous Waste Disposal Policy - Problem Definition, Expert Knowledge and Agenda-Setting

The authors show that in the 1940\u27s technical consensus began to develop about the effects of land-based waste disposal on groundwater degradation. They go on to explain why this understanding was only slowly reflected in federal legislation

Reassessing the financial and social costs of public transport

This paper uses a previously developed spreadsheet cost model which simulates public transport modes operated on a 12km route to analyse the total costs of different passenger demand levels. The previous cost model was a very powerful tool to estimate the social and operator cost for different public transport technologies. However, as the model is strategic based, some assumptions are very basic and idealized and the demand was assumed to be exogenous (externally fixed). When the level of demand is high for the lower capacity public transport technologies, passengers may find the incoming vehicle full and therefore they have to wait more than one service interval. This paper applies queueing theory to investigate the probability of having to wait longer than the expected service headways which will affect the average passenger waiting time. The extra waiting time for each passenger is calculated and applied in the spreadsheet cost model. The speed-flow equation in the original spreadsheet model assumes the speed decreases according to the ratio of the current frequency and the lane capacity which is based on the safety headway without any passenger boarding. However, this may vary in different operating environments. Therefore, the speed equation is improved by moving from a linear equation to a piecewise equation that considers the features of different operating environments. To evaluate the differences after applying these equations, endogenous demand rather than exogenous demand will be investigated by using the elasticities for passenger waiting time and journey time

Reassessing the Citizens Protection Act: A Good Thing It Passed, and a Good Thing It Failed

The Citizens Protection Act (CPA) of 1998 has always been a lightening rod for criticism, and it remains so today. This article reassesses the CPA’s perceived inadequacies in light of how it has actually affected (or, not affected) federal prosecutors’ involvement in criminal investigations. The article takes issue with the critics and demonstrates that the CPA succeeded where it should have, failed where it should have, and left us—however inadvertently—with a remarkably coherent and consistent approach to regulating federal prosecutors’ involvement in criminal investigations regardless of whether a suspect retains counsel early in the proceedings. The CPA requires federal prosecutors to follow state rules of professional conduct “to the same extent and in the same manner” as all other lawyers. The CPA was intended to—and did—nullify a U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) declaration that unilaterally exempted federal prosecutors from much of the “no-contact” rule, which prohibits a lawyer in a matter from communicating with the client of another lawyer in the matter. The CPA was also intended to—but did not—require federal prosecutors to comply with various state interpretations of the no-contact rule that might have restricted their ability to participate in both covert and overt communications with represented criminal suspects. It is a good thing the CPA passed because DOJ’s assertion of authority over the no-contact rule for its own lawyers would inevitably have undermined public confidence in federal prosecutors’ commitment to fair and ethical investigatory processes. By the same token, it is a good thing that the CPA failed because broadly depriving DOJ of federal prosecutors’ involvement in communications with represented suspects would have substantially hindered criminal investigations for no good reason