A Democracy of Children’s Literature Critics? The Opportunities and Risks of Paying Attention to Open Reviews and Mass Discussion

Drawing on the outputs of a wider democracy of online reviewers presents the academic study of children’s literature with opportunities and challenges, and can enhance critical discussion. As it is now easy to locate a large number of online reviews, it is argued that children’s literature studies needs to make room for a wider range of critical voices. This article reports on the work of two cohorts of over a thousand students. Each cohort, in consecutive years, researched online reviews as part of their studies in contemporary children’s literature on a one year part-time module at a distance learning university. Despite the perceived lack of status of non-academic, non-professional critiques, students’ and tutors’ experiences of these tasks showed the value of researching online reviews. This work also allowed for alternative forms of writing and assessment alongside more conventional academic essays, and encouraged students to develop their skills of critical digital literacy. Module leaders recommended basic initial research methods for student use, but for more extensive or larger scale research it will be important to address methodological issues and understand how online reviewer communities operate. Such changes in approaches to teaching and learning also need to take into account the issues surrounding social media usage, ownership and control

Could Education Promote the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process?

This paper explores Palestinians' attitudes towards a peace process and their determinants, with a particular focus on the role of education. Understanding the factors that shape attitudes towards peace is important in order to be successful in negotiations or in implementing a peace agreement. In the literature, there is particular disagreement about the role of education. While some authors have linked violent and extreme positions to ignorance and to low market opportunities, others have found that education is positively correlated with being a member of a terrorist group. To better understand the role of education I decompose the attitudes towards peace into two dimensions; attitudes towards reconciliation and attitudes towards concessions. To measure these attitudes, I use a flexible item response model proposed by Spady (2007), which allows to take into account the multidimensionality of the concepts. The results show that education has a positive effect on attitudes towards concessions but a negative effect on attitudes towards reconciliation. This may occur because relative to a situation of peace, highly educated individuals are more strongly affected by current depressed economic conditions in Palestine. They therefore have more to gain from a peace agreement and may thus be more willing to make concessions. At the same time, they may be more frustrated and therefore less willing to reconcile. I also find that their attitudes to reconciliation move closely with aggregate economic conditions, while those of less educated individual are also influenced by local factors such as the construction of the separation barrier in their region of residence.conflict resolution, education, latent attitudes, item response models

Science in the Third Dimension of R&D

We study a Schumpeterian model of long-run growth with endogenous fertility and with three interacting dimensions of innovation. Scientific research is the fundamental dimension of innovation that creates new technological knowledge. This is allocated over new working prototypes in the horizontal dimension. New firms finance scientific research by obtaining the property rights of new working prototypes, and existing firms invest in developing the blueprint mode of working prototypes into the more productive modes of production in the vertical dimension. Balanced growth in the standards of living is fully endogenous without scale effects, and a new parameter, i.e., the elasticity of scientific knowledge with respect to existing collective scientific knowledge, nonlinearly accelerates long-run growth. With exogenous population growth, the model generates a semi-endogenous result due to the endogenously determined bound on technological opportunity.Science; Technology; Blueprints; R&D; Endogenous Fertility

On moral hazard and nonexclusive contracts

We study an economy where intermediaries compete over contracts in a nonexclusive insurance market affected by moral hazard. Our setting is the same as that developed in Bisin and Guaitoli [2004]. The present note provides a counterexample to the set of necessary conditions for high effort equilibria developed in Bisin and Guaitoli [2004] and suggests an alternative equilibrium characterization.non-exclusivity ; insurance ; moral hazard

Cooperative network-coding system for wireless sensor networks

Describes a cooperative network coding system for wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we propose two practical power) and bandwidth)efficient systems based on amplify)and)forward (AF) and decode)and)forward (DF) schemes to address the problem of information exchange via a relay. The key idea is to channel encode each source’s message by using a high)performance non)binary turbo code based on Partial Unit Memory (PUM) codes to enhance the bit)error)rate performance, then reduce the energy consumption and increase spectrum efficiency by using network coding (NC) to combine individual nodes’ messages at the relay before forwarding to the destination. Two simple and low complexity physical layer NC schemes are proposed based on combinations of received source messages at the relay. We also present the theoretical limits and numerical analysis of the proposed schemes. Simulation results under Additive White Gaussian Noise, confirm that the proposed schemes achieve significant bandwidth savings and fewer transmissions over the benchmark systems which do not resort to NC. Theoretical limits for capacity and Signal to Noise Ratio behaviour for the proposed schemes are derived. The paper also proposes a cooperative strategy that is useful when insufficient combined messages are received at a node to recover the desired source messages, thus enabling the system to retrieve all packets with significantly fewer retransmission request messages

Statutory auditor's role in corporate social and environmental reporting

The social and environmental audit practice is regarded as an effective mechanism for adding accuracy and credibility to the corporate social responsibility reports. In civilised societies, auditing is viewed as an evaluative tool for enhancing corporate accountability and transparency (Power, 1999; Owen and Humphrey, 2000; Sikka et. al, 1998; Smith et. al, 2011; Perego and Kolk, 2012). Throughout the past few decades, previous investigatory studies have provided a critical assessment of the evolution of social audit practices (for example, Gray, 2000; 2007; O’Dwyer and Owen, 2005; 2007; Bebbington and Thomson, 2007; Manetti and Toccafondi, 2012; Bepari and Mollik, 2016; Canning et. al, 2019). However, these studies offered little evidence on issues related to the impact of social audit services on the professional independence and ethic of auditors, and the role of religious and cultural values in shaping the nature of the social audit engagements. Furthermore, there is also a paucity in the prior literature in investigating critical issues, such as the lack of consistency in social and environmental audit practices. Moreover, the influence of socio-environmental factors on the views of stakeholders on social auditing remains largely unaddressed in the mainstream literature. Most studies in the relevant literature examined the social and environmental audit phenomenon from a Western perspective, leaving several open-ended questions and unresearched issues about the social audit practices in non-Western contexts. The present research aims to fill the gap in the literature by highlighting sustainability audits in the emerging economies from an Islamic angle, taking Saudi Arabia as a model. In doing so, the study sought to scrutinise the social audit phenomenon and elicit viewpoints from audit providers and relevant stakeholders, embracing the interpretivist methodology to help in gaining insights from this exploratory examination. Particularly, the study selected a triangulation of mixed methods to collect data through content analysis of audit reports, and semi-structured interviews with statutory auditors and individual stakeholders. Finally, the empirical findings were analysed and interpreted with the consideration of the three theoretical constructs (audit, legitimacy, and stakeholder theories). The interviewed auditors claimed that social and environmental audit services would benefit the audit firms, the companies, and the Saudi Arabian society. However, some interviewees expressed concerns about various risks associated with the ways social and environmental audits are currently exercised. Although the audit of corporate social responsibility reports helps to identify risks in corporate governance systems, it may jeopardise the impartiality and ethics of audit providers. Consequently, the social and environmental audit engagements may pose a reputational risk to the audit firm. Similarly, statutory auditors expressed opposing views about engaging stakeholders in the social and environmental audit processes. While some interviewees admitted that the audit of stakeholder engagements in client companies' social responsibility processes is a daunting, costly and valueless task for Saudi Arabian audit firms, others supported that audit procedure as an accountability and transparency enabler. Nevertheless, there are several problematic issues associated with stakeholder engagement reporting audits. Obstacles to the auditing of stakeholder engagement include, among others, dealing with unreliable evidence, engaging the irrelevant stakeholders, and the inability to assess the stakeholder materiality and relevance. Also, the statutory auditors offered a collective opinion that regarded the accurate representation of stakeholders' views on companies' social performance as a quite challenging and unattainable goal within the Saudi cultural boundaries. On the other hand, the interviewees from stakeholder groups gave a general satisfactory impression of the growing, albeit slowly, social audit performance. The participated stakeholders recognised and appreciated the importance of the voluntary contribution of statutory auditors to the Saudi Arabian business environment through their independent verification of corporate social and environmental responsibility activities and statements. Whereas findings from the content analysis of sixty audit reports revealed a high tendency of statutory auditors to integrate the outcome of social and environmental audit processes with that of the traditional financial auditing within single audit statements. The observation showed also an overwhelming reliance on accountancy-based approaches of generally accepted financial auditing standards in Saudi Arabia, ISA, or the ISAE 3000 in the audits of corporate social and environmental reports. Stakeholder engagements in the social audits were noticed in only one audit report, which illustrated a limited range of assurance on a company-stakeholder dialogue. Although the audit of corporate social and sustainability reports is not mandated in Saudi Arabia, the statutory auditors' voluntary role in ensuring the validity of corporate social responsibility statements is seen as an acceptable act whereby auditors can boost their social legitimacy. From an Islamic perspective, the notion of corporate social and environmental responsibility is strongly encouraged for Islamically permitted or Halal purposes (Dusuki, 2008; Elasrag, 2015). Hence, the provision of sustainability audit services to improve the quality of corporate social reporting and discharge organisational accountability can be viewed as an Islamic permitted act. Overall, social audit exercises in Saudi Arabia are still at an early stage and necessitate substantial improvements