Editorial for special issue on education and humour: Education and humour as tools for social awareness and critical consciousness in contemporary classrooms

It is not new to consider the instructive power of humour. Both Plato and Aristotle, through their superiority theories, saw the benefit of wit as a social corrective, although they remained suspicious of the uneducated laughter of the masses (Plato in Morreall 1987; Aristotle in Morreall 1987). This approach has informed traditions of satire and resistance humour in a myriad of contexts. Stott summarises the raison d'être of satire through its aim “to denounce folly and vice and urge ethical and political reform through the subjection of ideas to humorous analysis” (Stott 2005: 109). The political potential of humour is easily recognised as a rhetorical and communicative device, yet it seems odd that little stock has been placed academically or culturally in the idea of humour as an educative tool in other social and cultural contexts and, more specifically, in the classroom

Restoring a Public Interest Vision of Law in the Age of the Internet

In November 2003, Mr. Marc Rotenberg, Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, lectured at Duke Law School on the importance of protecting individual privacy. In his remarks, Mr. Rotenberg recounted the successful campaign against the government\u27s Clipper Chip proposal. He argued that successful public interest advocacy in the Internet age requires the participation of experts from many fields, public engagement, and a willingness to avoid a simple balancing analysis. He further concluded that privacy may be one of the defining issues of a free society in the twenty-first century

Assessing the Evidence About Work Support Benefits and Low-Income Families

Reviews research on factors affecting participation in work supports such as Medicaid, Children's Health Insurance, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance, and childcare subsidy programs; the programs' payoff, and state benefits of modernized delivery systems

Innovative teaching of IC design and manufacture using the Superchip platform

In this paper we describe how an intelligent chip architecture has allowed a large cohort of undergraduate students to be given effective practical insight into IC design by designing and manufacturing their own ICs. To achieve this, an efficient chip architecture, the “Superchip”, has been developed, which allows multiple student designs to be fabricated on a single IC, and encapsulated in a standard package without excessive cost in terms of time or resources. We demonstrate how the practical process has been tightly coupled with theoretical aspects of the degree course and how transferable skills are incorporated into the design exercise. Furthermore, the students are introduced at an early stage to the key concepts of team working, exposure to real deadlines and collaborative report writing. This paper provides details of the teaching rationale, design exercise overview, design process, chip architecture and test regime

Assessing Community Progress on the Blueprint to End Homelessness

In 2002, the Indianapolis Housing Task Force published the Blueprint to End Homelessness, an ambitious 10-year strategy to end homelessness in Indianapolis by 2012. The Blueprint called for regular reports and evaluation of progress toward the Blueprint’s goals. The Coalition for Homelessness Intervention and Prevention (CHIP), charged with moving the Blueprint forward, has completed its own annual Community Progress Reports for 2009, 2010, and 2011. This report does not seek to replicate or evaluate these or any of the many previous reports CHIP has facilitated. We take what is presented in the previous reports as accurate and eminently useful. The annual Community Progress Reports, in particular, already serve as good evaluations of progress toward the Blueprint goals. Instead, this report seeks to identify issues not yet covered, areas where data have not been collected, areas where data collection could be improved, or areas where existing data have not yet been analyzed for the purpose of assessing Blueprint goals. We have gathered and analyzed new qualitative and quantitative data from CHIP, stakeholders, the homeless, and other sources to provide additional measures of progress toward achieving the various goals stipulated in the Blueprint and to establish new measures for future assessment. Besides qualitative interviews with samples of stakeholders and homeless, we collected census data on affordable housing for Marion County, the U.S., and four other comparison counties. We conducted a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) Analysis of CHIP’s annual Community Progress Reports. CHIP also provided nine years’ worth of client data from the Homeless Management Information Systems (HMIS). Finally, we collected progress reports from other jurisdictions implementing ten-year/community plans and looked at those. The overarching goal of the Blueprint has not been achieved. Homelessness has not been eliminated and will not be eliminated by the 2012 date established in the Blueprint. Progress has been and continues to be made in many areas, though. It is hoped this report will help the community as it moves forward with creating a new strategic plan