Bronfenbrenner in context and in motion

Urie Bronfenbrenner\u27s contributions to the understanding of human development span the multilayered contexts he himself identified. He succeeded in reframing the study of development, from an exclusive focus on the decontextualized individual to viewing developing persons in dynamic transaction with the multiple, nested layers of the (changing) environments in which they are embedded. He has been equally influential in moving scholarship in the social sciences beyond the false dichotomy differentiating \u27basic\u27 from \u27applied\u27 research, as well as the artificial divides between science and social policy. Urie\u27s greatest contribution is this: He transformed the way all of us - scholars, parents, teachers, policy makers - study, conceptualize, write about, and seek to enhance human development. His theories and concepts have been usefully employed by scholars located within and/or working across a wide range of societal, disciplinary, substantive, and age-graded boundaries. (DIPF/Orig.)Urie Bronfenbrenners Beitrag die menschliche Entwicklung zu verstehen, umfasst den mehrschichtigen Kontext, der durch ihn selbst gekennzeichnet wurde. Es gelang ihm die Untersuchung der Entwicklung von einem außergewöhnlichen Blickwinkel aus neu zu entwerfen: die Analyse die sich entwickelnder Personen in ihrer dynamischen Beziehung mit den vielfältigen ineinander geschachtelten (und sich verändernden) Umgebungen, in denen sie eingebunden sind. Er hat ebenso maßgeblich dazu beigetragen, die Wissenschaftsgemeinschaft in den Sozialwissenschaften dahingehend zu beeinflussen, die falsche Dichotomie von \u27einfacher\u27 und \u27angewandter\u27 Forschung zu überwinden, genauso wie die künstliche Trennung zwischen Wissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. Uries größter Beitrag ist, dass er die Denkweise von uns allen - Wissenschaftlern, Eltern, Lehrern und Verantwortlichen in der Politik - veränderte, die Art und Weise wie die menschliche Entwicklung zu untersuchen, begrifflich gedacht, darüber zu schreiben und zu verbessern sei. Seine Theorien und Konzepte wurden von Wissenschaftlern nutzbringend angewendet, die sowohl innerhalb ihrer Grenzen als auch über diese gesellschaftlichen, disziplinären, substanziellen und altersgestuften Grenzen hinaus arbeiten. (DIPF/Orig.

Hedonism Before Bentham

The hedonistic theories of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill are both widely known. Hedonism before Bentham, however, is much less known and, hitherto, no systematic presentation of hedonism’s early history has been written. In this paper I seek to fill this gap in the literature by providing an overview of hedonism in early Indian and ancient Greek thought (Sections 1-4), in Roman and Medieval thought (Section 5), and from the Renaissance until the Enlightenment (Section 6)

Self-cycling fluid heater

A self-cycling fluid heater is described which includes a high temperature upstream preheater for elevating the stream temperature. A high intensity jet arc heater heats the preheated fluid stream to ultrahigh reaction temperatures and discharges the stream into an electric resistance tubular heat exchanger. The heat exchanger has variations in wall thickness at measured intervals along its length to control the temperature of the fluid passing through the heat exchanger for desired time intervals to provide the specified chemical reactions desired

Designing and Implementing a Learning Object Repository: Issues of Complexity, Granularity, and User Sense-Making

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : DSpace User Group PresentationsDate: 2009-05-20 03:30 PM – 05:00 PMThe Texas Center for Digital Knowledge at the University of North Texas is designing and implementing a DSpace/Manakin learning object repository (LOR) for the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board to store and provide access to redesigned undergraduate courses being created through the Board's Texas Course Redesign Project (TCRP). The content for the THECB LOR differs in significant ways from content stored in other well-known and evolving LORs, since the content is in the form of complete or partial courses. While this content can be represented as a single learning object (i.e., a complete course as one learning object), the THECB LOR is making the complete courses available as learning objects and it is providing access to components of the courses' content as discrete learning objects for reuse and repurposing. A number of challenges and issues have emerged in the design, development, and implementation the LOR, and this paper focuses on three key aspects and the solutions we are pursuing: 1) complexity of the course content and granularity; 2) submission of complex objects and metadata; and 3) user interface design to assist users in making sense of this repository and its contents.Texas Higher Education Coordinating Boar

Policy Analysis for Natural Hazards: Some Cautionary Lessons From Environmental Policy Analysis

How should agencies and legislatures evaluate possible policies to mitigate the impacts of earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and other natural hazards? In particular, should governmental bodies adopt the sorts of policy-analytic and risk assessment techniques that are widely used in the area of environmental hazards (chemical toxins and radiation)? Environmental hazards policy analysis regularly employs proxy tests, in particular tests of technological feasibility, rather than focusing on a policy\u27s impact on well-being. When human welfare does enter the analysis, particular aspects of well-being, such as health and safety, are often given priority over others. Individual risk tests and other features of environmental policy analysis sometimes make policy choice fairly insensitive to the size of the exposed population. Seemingly arbitrary numerical cutoffs, such as the one-in-one million incremental risk level, help structure policy evaluation. Risk assessment techniques are often deterministic rather than probabilistic, and in estimating point values often rely on conservative rather than central-tendency estimates. The Article argues that these sorts of features of environmental policy analysis may be justifiable, but only on institutional grounds-if they sufficiently reduce decision costs or bureaucratic error or shirking-and should not be reflexively adopted by natural hazards policymakers. Absent persuasive. institutional justification, natural hazards policy analysis should be welfare-focused, multidimensional, and sensitive to population size, and natural hazards risk assessment techniques should provide information suitable for policy-analytic techniques of this sort

Submission Tool for the DSpace-Based Learning Object Repository

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Conference PostersThe poster briefly reports our experience with building Learning Object Repository based on DSpace and analyzes some problems we encountered with the submission system. The poster describes custom submission tool that can be used as an alternative to the DSpace submission system and provides useful extensions that allow connecting to the automatic keyword extraction services and generating of IMS and SCORM packages