Active music

We are a group of eleven young people with intellectual disability and three music therapists. We did action research at a university. We wanted to find out how a music group might be helpful for young people with intellectual disabilities. We wanted to tell our own story and use our own words because we have a lot to say. We wanted people to read our story and to use our ideas to help young people with intellectual disabilities to have good lives. We went to twenty sessions of music research, and five more sessions of research analysis. We also did a lot of research work in between sessions. We found out that music groups can be fun. They can also be hard work. They help us develop skills like listening and waiting. They are places where we can be independent. But music groups are also good places to practice working as a team. They can be safe places for people to express emotions. Music helps us to know people. It brings us together. Playing musical instruments can also help physical development. A good life for us would include having the chance to play music with others or to have music lessons. But it is not always easy for us to go to ordinary lessons or music groups. It might be important for young people with intellectual disability to have support from people who understand them at first. We want to be independent but we need help to develop our dreams in practical ways. We found that doing research is fun and interesting. We were all researchers but we had different things to do. The adults had to be the organisers, setting up the research. We knew from the start the research would be about what young people think about music. The adults had done their reading and had written the literature review. The young people decided on other questions, and gathered data in lots of different ways. They also did some of the analysis, and decided on the findings of each cycle. The findings of each cycle, with more of the young people’s words, are in the appendices. Later, the adults wrote the main findings, the discussion and conclusion. We all discussed the things we wrote along the way and at the end of the research. The adults have tried to help the young people understand what has been written. The research took a lot of time and it was hard work for everybody. To be a good researcher you need to learn research skills. It is important that young people with intellectual disabilities are not exhausted by research. They need to be able to enjoy the things they are doing. We all liked being involved in research even though it was hard work. We think that research is important and helpful. Young people should be involved in research that is about them. We learnt that young people with intellectual disabilities can go to university. Going to university was scary at first but we got used to it and we started to enjoy it. We need to do more research to make sure universities are ready to welcome students with intellectual disabilities. We can use our research to show universities that it can be a good idea to support people with intellectual disabilities to go to university. We can also use our research show people what we can do; what we like to do; and what we want to do in the future. Most of us would like to do more music and research in future

Probabilistic promotion and ability

We often have some reason to do actions insofar as they promote outcomes or states of affairs, such as the satisfaction of a desire. But what is it to promote an outcome? I defend a new version of 'probabilism about promotion'. According to Minimal Probabilistic Promotion, we promote some outcome when we make that outcome more likely than it would have been if we had done something (anything) else. This makes promotion easy and reasons cheap

History in images / history in words : reflections on the possibility of really putting history on film (or what a historian begins to think about when people start turning his books into movies)

This was supposed to be easy. A chance to bring together all my thoughts on film and history. To make my inchoate notions coherent. To force myself to see what it is I have been thinking. But it has not been easy--more like attempting to pick up water and hold it in your hand. The ideas will not cohere. They change between the thinking and the writing of them. They slip away. They refuse to blend into a whole. Is it me? Is it the subject? I won't even bother with that one. The point is to say only what I can. Which means refusing to make artificial sense of ideas that will not make sense. Which means refusing to bridge the gaps in my knowledge. Which means refusing to make connections where connections do not yet (in my mind) exist. Which means abandoning the idea of an essay and doing no more than sharing some of my reflections and the ideas I have wrestled with during the months I have been attempting to write this piece. Which means there will be no linear development, no attempt at closure, no final answers to the questions posed by the elusive problem of can we represent history on film

A Comparative Study Of Large-Scale Network Data Visualization Tools

One of the most important parts of Data Analysis is Data Visualization [15]. The easy thing about Data Visualization is that there are hundreds of ways to do it, one better than the other. Ironically, however, it is difficult to choose the right tool for the job. This can be a concern because it is really important to know which tool is best depending on the resources we have. This thesis tries to answer that question – to an extent. In this thesis, I have tried to compare three Data Visualization tools: Gephi, Pajek and NodeXL. I have mainly discussed what each tool can do, what each tool is best at, and when to and when not to use each tool. Therefore, using the right tool can not only save us a lot of time by making the task easy and get the work done using a minimal number of resources, but also help to get the best results. The comparison is based on what Visualization features each tool has, how each tool computes different graph features, and how Compatible and Scalable each tool is. In the process, I used different Network datasets and tried to calculate certain features of the graph and wrote the findings. The end report discusses which tool can be best to use given the size of dataset, the problem we are trying to solve, the resources we have and the time we can spend

Legal privacy

As a word, legal concept and institution, privacy is exceptionally challenging. It is easy enough to understand but difficult to define and identify. It is not particularly easy to legislate either. For the legislator, privacy very much resembles Tantalus’ fruit: just when it seems to be in reach, it withdraws yet remains temptingly visible.The end result has been an extensive body of legislation in various forms both nationally and internationally.There is more to come, and no end in sight. Privacy is every bit as daunting when considered as a subject to be taught to prospective lawyers and others interested in the law.We are forced to ask where, to whom and how privacy in the legal sense should be taught.As yet privacy does not seem to have a real disciplinary home to call its own in legal research or teaching in any country. Academically, law has thus largely overlooked one of our main fundamental rights – the right to privacy.We have every reason to ask how this is possible and what we can do about it

How to improve social mobility

Merely tweaking existing policies won't do, but four major changes have the potential to transform society, write Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin. Talking social mobility is easy; addressing it is hard. In our book, Social Mobility and Its Enemies, we argued that the prospects for social mobility in Britain are bleak. Declining real wages signal shrinking opportunities. Inequalities in income, wealth, housing and education are biting. Problems of social justice and social mobility are two sides of the same coin. We fear Brexit will further fracture society

How Far Have We Come? Foundation CEOs on Progress and Impact

The performance of major U.S. foundations is much discussed and debated. It is also very difficult to gauge. The past decade or so has seen increased interest and effort related to the question of how foundations are doing, and how they might do better. These questions are not new. The earliest major American philanthropists were interested in answering them. But recent years have seen an uptick in at least the discussion of these issues.Indeed, our organization, the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) has focused much energy on this issue, and we have noted how uniquely challenging assessing foundation performance can be. Among the challenges are the difficulty of drawing a causal link between what a foundation funds and change on the ground, the extended time horizons associated with making progress on the difficult issues foundations often address, and the fact that information from different program areas cannot be easily aggregated using some common measure. There is no universal measure -- no easy analog to return on investment -- for foundations.So what conclusion do foundation leaders draw about their success? Brest and others suggest that, "philanthropy remains an underperformer in achieving social outcomes."6 Do foundation CEOs agree? How much progress do they believe foundations have made?In January 2013, we sent surveys to 472 full-time CEOs leading U.S.-based foundations that give at least $5 million annually in grants; 211 CEOs completed the survey for a 45 percent response rate. The survey was designed to collect data on CEOs' understanding of progress and their attitudes and practices in relation to foundation impact. This research was not meant to serve as an objective evaluation of how much progress foundations have made through their work

Roots of Justice: Historical Truth and Reconciliation in Lincoln and Nebraska

A bibliography of resources about the history in Nebraska of Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and Recent Refugees We hope that these five bibliographies will prove fruitful in helping us to understand what our history has been, where we have gone astray, and what we can do to help bring about reconciliation in our community and in our state. The discovery of what has happened in Nebraska in the last hundred and seventy years is not an easy task, but it is our goal in putting together this bibliography to begin that task. By putting together a picture that has, to this point, been fragmentary we hope to achieve something like the truth. We envisage that filling in the picture will allow us to understand what people have suffered and what will constitute proper reconciliatory measures

Copyright and Creativity: cultural economics for the 21st century

Inaugural lecture for the personal Chair in Economics of Creative Industries, Faculty of History and ArtsThe title of this lecture is ‘Copyright and Creativity: cultural economics for the 21st century’ and the title of my chair is Economics of Creative Industries, so I obviously think I have something to say about creativity. However, creativity is one of those words that has become completely debased by overuse: anything and everything is apparently ‘creative’ nowadays – not just industries and the economy but also advertising, salesmanship, management consultancy – even accountancy! And of course, artists are creative but then so are children and according to UNESCO we are all creative. Overuse has rendered it devoid of meaning – so, is it even worth investigating, especially from the economic point of view? The ‘creative economy’ has become a buzz word, a slogan, something that is unquestionably true. And it is easy to see why Ministries of Culture have embraced it so whole-heartedly: it empowers them to be in the forefront of the quest for economic growth, just as that other buzz word ‘the economic impact of the arts’ did 20 years ago. But Ministries of Economic Affairs are also on the bandwagon. So, if I am scornful of the endless appeal to the creative economy, why choose this theme? Well, the reason is that if these terms ‘creative economy’ and ‘creative industries’ are to be taken seriously (and governments from here to Uruguay have policies for them), economists should be capable of analysing them, especially cultural economists. Put simply: if the creative economy is such a good thing, can an economy be made more creative and if so, how? - do we know how to create creativity? Is it something that is amenable to social engineering? These questions have to be answered if we are to believe that government policies can promote the creative economy