Introduction

Why do parent\u2013child argumentative interactions matter? What is the reason for such an interest? This chapter provides the reasons that motivated the study of parent\u2013child argumentation with the aim to understand the function of this type of interactions. Focusing on the activity of family mealtime, in the first part, the chapter draws attention to the distinctive features of parent\u2013child conversations. A second section of the chapter is devoted to discussing whether and, eventually, when children have the competence to construct arguments and engage in argumentative discussions with the aim to convince their parents to change opinion. In the last part of the chapter, research questions and structure of the volume are presented

Response perseveration and ventral prefrontal sensitivity to reward and punishment in male problem gamblers and smokers

Pathological gambling (PG) is associated with maladaptive perseverative behavior, but the underlying mechanism and neural circuitry is not completely clear. Here, the hypothesis was tested that PG is characterized by response perseveration and abnormalities in reward and/or punishment sensitivity in the ventral frontostriatal circuit. Executive functioning was assessed to verify if these effects are independent of the dorsal frontostriatal circuit. A group of smokers was also included to examine whether impairments in PG generalize to substance use disorders. Response perseveration and reward/punishment sensitivity were measured with a probabilistic reversal-learning task, in which subjects could win and lose money. Executive functioning was measured with a planning task, the Tower of London. Performance and fMRI data were acquired in 19 problem gamblers, 19 smokers, and 19 healthy controls. Problem gamblers showed severe response perseveration, associated with reduced activation of right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex in response to both monetary gain and loss. Results did not fully generalize to smokers. Planning performance and related activation of the dorsal frontostriatal circuit were intact in both problem gamblers and smokers. PG is related to response perseveration and diminished reward and punishment sensitivity as indicated by hypoactivation of the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex when money is gained and lost. Moreover, intact planning abilities and normal dorsal frontostriatal responsiveness indicate that this deficit is not due to impaired executive functioning. Response perseveration and ventral prefrontal hyporesponsiveness to monetary loss may be markers for maladaptive behavior seen in chemical and nonchemical addictions. © 2009 Nature Publishing Group All rights reserved

Possible geographies: a passing encounter in a café

The rise of non-representational theory in human geography has prompted searching questions about how researchers might 'represent' what they encounter in their fieldwork. A central problem is that we reach an insurmountable impasse, an aporia, because we cannot share thoughts, meanings, feelings, etc., in a manner faithful to our experience of them or equally that certain spectacular or horrific events and encounters escape their retelling. We argue that this impossibility should not become a warrant for withdrawing from the world, and instead propose that close descriptions can still be offered of particular encounters, attending in the process to the situated, embodied sense-making work being (unavoidably) undertaken by the peoples involved that makes those encounters what they are. Such work may be threatened by scepticism, because it assumes the possibility of representation being at least partially successful, here and now, and relies on the 'just-thisness' of things. Scholars of social life can, scepticism contained, learn much from taking seriously how any encounter unfolds without transcendental or structural guarantee in the immediacy of the life-worlds where it is made and re-made

Research on Teaching and Learning Mathematics at the Tertiary Level:State-of-the-art and Looking Ahead

This topical survey focuses on research in tertiary mathematics education, a field that has experienced considerable growth over the last 10 years. Drawing on the most recent journal publication as well as the latest advances from recent high quality conference proceedings, our review culls out the following five emergent areas of interest: mathematics teaching at the tertiary level; the role of mathematics in other disciplines; textbooks, assessment and students’ studying practices; transition to the tertiary level; and theoretical-methodological advances. We conclude the survey with a discussion of some potential ways forward for future research in this new and rapidly developing domain of inquiry

The News at the Ends of the Earth

From Sir John Franklin's doomed 1845 search for the Northwest Passage to early twentieth-century sprints to the South Pole, polar expeditions produced an extravagant archive of documents that are as varied as they are engaging. As the polar ice sheets melt, fragments of this archive are newly emergent. In The News at the Ends of the Earth Hester Blum examines the rich, offbeat collection of printed ephemera created by polar explorers. Ranging from ship newspapers and messages left in bottles to menus and playbills, polar writing reveals the seamen wrestling with questions of time, space, community, and the environment. Whether chronicling weather patterns or satirically reporting on penguin mischief, this writing provided expedition members with a set of practices to help them survive the perpetual darkness and harshness of polar winters. The extreme climates these explorers experienced is continuous with climate change today. Polar exploration writing, Blum contends, offers strategies for confronting and reckoning with the extreme environment of the present

The view from the mast-head: Antebellum American sea narratives and the maritime imagination

“The View from the Mast-Head: Antebellum American Sea Narratives and the Maritime Imagination” examines the first-person sea narratives of the federal and antebellum periods. Popular American sea narratives, both fictional and non-fictional, include for their readers details such as latitude and longitude notation, maps, and descriptions of ship labor. This narrative quantification provides a way for the texts to chart an American physical and imaginative presence on a landscape that, unlike most natural environments, cannot be marked or stabilized. A genre whose popularity with a landed readership continually increased between 1783–1860, sea writing has been marginalized in current critical discourse as “low” or rough, much as sailors themselves were typed. Yet sea narratives—which are continually engaged with contemporary crises of nation- and self-hood—describe a process of coming to imaginative mastery from a state of physical incompetence that productively speaks to larger issues in antebellum American literature and culture. In maritime literature, this process can find expression, for example, in the experience of shipwreck, which is incomprehensible to those lacking fluency in the mundane details of maritime life. Barbary captive Archibald Robbins explains, “To a seaman, the description of a shipwreck is familiar from his knowledge of a vessel, the tackle, and the nautical terms of sea-faring men; but by that portion of readers who are not thus acquainted, no adequate conception can be formed of the appalling horrors of such a scene.” This methodology, by which the facts of nautical labor can anchor the subject in the face of what is not conceptually “familiar,” is used by sea narratives to articulate a vision of the world predicated on fluency with the material and the imaginative. In stressing the value of experiential knowledge, sea narratives invest in another kind of materiality as well: the materiality of the printed text. Sailors were attentive to the conditions and requirements of textual publication. Even as sailor authors retained the professional status of seamen, they demonstrated a keen interest in the book trades, and negotiated their writerly position in a publication industry whose codes and expectations sailors both adopted and defied

The view from the mast-head: Antebellum American sea narratives and the maritime imagination

“The View from the Mast-Head: Antebellum American Sea Narratives and the Maritime Imagination” examines the first-person sea narratives of the federal and antebellum periods. Popular American sea narratives, both fictional and non-fictional, include for their readers details such as latitude and longitude notation, maps, and descriptions of ship labor. This narrative quantification provides a way for the texts to chart an American physical and imaginative presence on a landscape that, unlike most natural environments, cannot be marked or stabilized. A genre whose popularity with a landed readership continually increased between 1783–1860, sea writing has been marginalized in current critical discourse as “low” or rough, much as sailors themselves were typed. Yet sea narratives—which are continually engaged with contemporary crises of nation- and self-hood—describe a process of coming to imaginative mastery from a state of physical incompetence that productively speaks to larger issues in antebellum American literature and culture. In maritime literature, this process can find expression, for example, in the experience of shipwreck, which is incomprehensible to those lacking fluency in the mundane details of maritime life. Barbary captive Archibald Robbins explains, “To a seaman, the description of a shipwreck is familiar from his knowledge of a vessel, the tackle, and the nautical terms of sea-faring men; but by that portion of readers who are not thus acquainted, no adequate conception can be formed of the appalling horrors of such a scene.” This methodology, by which the facts of nautical labor can anchor the subject in the face of what is not conceptually “familiar,” is used by sea narratives to articulate a vision of the world predicated on fluency with the material and the imaginative. In stressing the value of experiential knowledge, sea narratives invest in another kind of materiality as well: the materiality of the printed text. Sailors were attentive to the conditions and requirements of textual publication. Even as sailor authors retained the professional status of seamen, they demonstrated a keen interest in the book trades, and negotiated their writerly position in a publication industry whose codes and expectations sailors both adopted and defied