Grade inflation in the assessment of clinical practice

Assessment of performance and achievement in the work place is integral to pre-registration midwifery programmes. The value of hands-on clinical care is so essential to midwifery practice that the professional regulatory body, the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC), stated that practice should be graded and contribute to the final award (NMC, 2009). The NMC confirmed the importance of work based learning by stating that a minimum of fifty per cent of a full time course must be situated within the practice environment compared with a minimum of forty per cent in theory (NMC, 2008). Assessment of student performance will be a key component of any programme that has a large work based element (Wilson & Scammell, 2011). The grading of practice in midwifery at this institution contributes to half of the final grade and thus the overall degree classification (NMC, 2009). Assessment in healthcare education is becoming increasingly important for public accountability and safety (Holomboe et al, 2010). As educators, we must therefore seek to reassure ourselves, students, professional regulators and the public that the assessment processes we use are valid and reliable

Democratic Constitution Making

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Optimal monetary policy and firm entry

This paper characterises optimal monetary policy in an economy with endogenous firm entry, a cash-in-advance constraint and preset wages. Firms must make profits to cover entry costs; thus the markup on goods prices is efficient. However, because leisure is not priced at a markup, the consumption-leisure tradeoff is distorted. Consequently, the real wage, hours and production are suboptimally low. Due to the labour requirement in entry, insufficient labour supply also implies that entry is too low. The paper shows that in the absence of fiscal instruments such as labour income subsidies, the optimal monetary policy under sticky wages achieves higher welfare than under flexible wages. The policy maker uses the money supply instrument to raise the real wage - the cost of leisure - above its flexible-wage level, in response to expansionary shocks to productivity and entry costs. This raises labour supply, expanding production and rm entry

Optimal monetary policy and firm entry. NBB Working Paper 178, October 2009

This paper describes optimal monetary policy in an economy with monopolistic competition, endogenous firm entry, a cash-in-advance constraint and pre-set wages. Firms must make profits in order to cover entry costs; thus a mark-up on goods prices is necessary. Without this mark-up, profits would be zero and no firm would enter the market, resulting in zero production. Therefore, the mark-up should not be removed. In this economy with market entrants, goods are more expensive than in a competitive economy with marginal cost pricing. This leads to a misallocation of resources, because leisure is not sold at a mark-up. Goods and leisure are two sources of utility that households trade off against each other. Thus, they may buy too much leisure instead of consumption goods. The consequence is that labour supply and production are sub-optimally low. Due to the labour requirement at market entry stage, insufficient labour supply also implies too little entry and too few firms in equilibrium. In the absence of fiscal instruments such as labour income subsidies, the optimal monetary policy under sticky wages achieves higher welfare than under flexible wages. The policy-maker uses the money supply instrument to raise the real wage - the cost of leisure - above its flexible-wage level, in response to expansionary shocks. This induces a rise in labour supply, more production of goods and more new firms

A family of centered random walks on weight lattices conditioned to stay in Weyl chambers

Under a natural asumption on the drift, the law of the simple random walk on the multidimensional first quadrant conditioned to always stay in the first octant was obtained by O'Connell in [O]. It coincides with that of the image of the simple random walk under the multidimensional Pitman transform and can be expressed in terms of specializations of Schur functions. This result has been generalized in [LLP1] and [LLP2] for a large class of random walks on weight lattices defined from representations of Kac-Moody algebras and their conditionings to always stay in Weyl chambers. In these various works, the drift of the considered random walk is always assumed in the interior of the cone. In this paper, we introduce for some zero drift random walks defined from minuscule representations a relevant notion of conditioning to stay in Weyl chambers and we compute their laws. Namely, we consider the conditioning for these walks to stay in these cones until an instant we let tend to infinity. We also prove that the laws so obtained can be recovered by letting the drift tend to zero in the transitions matrices obtained in [LLP1]. We also conjecture our results remain true in the more general case of a drift in the frontier of the Weyl chamber

An age of consent : press representations of endemic sexual abuse of young girls by Pitcairn Island men : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Women's Studies at Massey University

This thesis is an analysis of press representations of Pitcairn Island women's complaints of child sexual abuse by the island's men. Press constructions of the case provide an opportunity to analyse how western society represents the alleged endemic sexual abuse of young Pitcairn girls by family and family friends. A database of 93 press reports draws on British, New Zealand and Australian newspapers and includes reports from the first mention of criminal charges in March 2001 until most of the charges had been laid against offenders in July 2003. A dual research method combines a chronological content analysis of the whole database with a detailed discourse analysis of two reports to examine how discursive strategies categorised, minimised and normalised the Pitcairn crimes. Representations of familial/familiar sexual abuse in the Pitcairn case do not fit with stereotypical constructions of child sexual abuse as 'psychopathic' violence and 'paedophilic' stranger-danger. This thesis shows that the press diffused the issue as one of cultural, rather than sexual, consent in order not to have to explain the contradiction-in-terms that is endemic familial/familiar sexual abuse of young girls in a respectable community. Cultural relativism undermines the credibility of the women complainants. The thesis argument is that the press finds the issue of familial/familiar sexual abuse of girls younger than 12 years of age. which is the most prevalent category of sexual abuse in society, difficult to represent

Theorizing ideas and discourse in political science: intersubjectivity, neo-institutionalisms, and the power of ideas

Oscar Larsson’s (2015) essay condemns discursive institutionalism for the “sin” of subjectivism. In reality, however, discursive institutionalism emphasizes the intersubjective nature of ideas through its theorization of agents’ “background ideational abilities” and “foreground discursive abilities.” It also avoids relativism by means of Wittgenstein’s distinction between experiences of everyday life and pictures of the world. Contrary to Larsson, what truly separates post-structuralism from discursive institutionalism is the respective approaches’ theorization of the relationship of power to ideas, with discursive institutionalists mainly focused on persuasive power through ideas, while post-structuralists focus on the structural power in ideas or on coercive power over ideas