They (Don't) Care About Education: A Counternarrative on Black Male Students' Responses to Inequitable Schooling

Focus group interviews and systematic content analysis of 304 essays written by black male undergraduates refute the dominant message that black men do not care about education. On the contrary, these students aspire to earn doctoral degrees in education despite acute understanding that the education system is stacked against them. The analysis asks what compels that dedication

L’UNESCO et la promotion des politiques scientifiques nationales en Afrique sub-saharienne, 1960-1979

In the last two decades many African states established science policy institutions inspired, directly or indirectly, by the promotional activities of UNESCO. This paper examines certain aspects of UNESCO's science policy assistance activities in Africa and describes the science policy devices that are proposed to African states inapproximately 45 mission reports. While the principal function of science policy is supposed to be to increase the utility of national scientific and technical resources, science policy assistance takes place within contexts that lend other kinds of significance to it. Three factors that have contributed to the expansion of UNESCO-promoted science policy bodies in Africa are discussed: entrepreneurial initiatives on the part of UNESCO, the volontarist-managerial approach to domestic political decision-making offered by the UNESCO science policy paradigm, and assistance relations between donors and African clients

Framing audience prefigurations of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey: The roles of fandom, politics and idealised intertexts

Audiences for blockbuster event-film sequels and adaptations often formulate highly developed expectations, motivations, understandings and opinions well before the films are released. A range of intertextual and paratextual influences inform these audience prefigurations, and are believed to frame subsequent audience engagement and response. In our study of prefigurative engagements with Peter Jackson’s 2012 film, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, we used Q methodology to identify five distinct subjective orientations within the film’s global audience. As this paper illustrates, each group privileges a different set of extratextual referents – notably J.R.R. Tolkien’s original novels, Peter Jackson’s The Lord of The Rings film trilogy, highly localised political debates relating to the film’s production, and the previous associations of the film’s various stars. These interpretive frames, we suggest, competed for ascendancy within public and private discourse in the lead up to The Hobbit’s international debut, effectively fragmenting and indeed polarising the film’s prospective global audience

Alien Registration- Davis, Charles H. (Presque Isle, Aroostook County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/33489/thumbnail.jp

Solutions to the tethered galaxy problem in an expanding universe and the observation of receding blueshifted objects

We use the dynamics of a galaxy, set up initially at a constant proper distance from an observer, to derive and illustrate two counter-intuitive general relativistic results. Although the galaxy does gradually join the expansion of the universe (Hubble flow), it does not necessarily recede from us. In particular, in the currently favored cosmological model, which includes a cosmological constant, the galaxy recedes from the observer as it joins the Hubble flow, but in the previously favored cold dark matter model, the galaxy approaches, passes through the observer, and joins the Hubble flow on the opposite side of the sky. We show that this behavior is consistent with the general relativistic idea that space is expanding and is determined by the acceleration of the expansion of the universe -- not a force or drag associated with the expansion itself. We also show that objects at a constant proper distance will have a nonzero redshift; receding galaxies can be blueshifted and approaching galaxies can be redshifted.Comment: 8 pages including 6 figures, to appear in Am. J. Phys., 2003. Reference added in postscrip

Enterprise Integration in Business Education: Design and Outcomes of a Capstone ERP-based Undergraduate e-Business Management Course

This article describes the design, delivery, and outcomes of a course on enterprise integration at the senior undergraduate level in the e-business concentration in the University of New Brunswick\u27s Faculty of Business. The course aims to provide education to the young business manager regarding the process of adoption and exploitation of an ERP or enterprise-wide software system. The course is deliberately business-centric rather than technology-oriented. It contains two streams: a management component based on readings and discussion, and a hands-on laboratory component in which students individually configure a firm. We evaluated students\u27 performance in three areas: completion of a learning log containing literature summaries and reflections on individual learning, completion of configuration exercises on SAP R/3, and completion of a take-home business case. We offer several suggestions to potential providers of enterprise integration education to business students. First, do not underestimate the considerable operational requirements of a lab-based ERP course. Second, because no business-oriented curriculum for enterprise integration business education is presently available on the market, teachers must be prepared to develop one. Third, students have very different learning needs with respect to ERP. The combination of hands-on lab learning and management learning via reading, discussions, and cases is very powerful but it is a challenge to balance the two streams and to relate the lab learnings with the management learnings

The Modern Language Association: Electronic and paper surveys of computer-based tool use

Members of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) were surveyed about their use of computer-based tools. A questionnaire was sent to 1,000 randomly-selected members in the U.S., with 500 sent via paper mail and 500 through electronic mail. Word processing, electronic mail, online catalogs, and the MLA International Bibliography were used heavily. Responses by the two subgroups differed significantly in several respects. Electronic full texts received substantially less use by both groups, especially those responding to the print survey. Major changes in research habits included greater reliance on word processing and more work outside of libraries. Problems reported focused on access to computer-based resources, learning to use them, the need for instruction, and inconsistent interfaces. Finally, evidence strongly suggests that reliance solely on electronic surveys may produce misleading results

On the Non-observability of Recent Biogenesis

In a previous paper we addressed the question "Does the Rapid Appearance of Life on Earth Suggest that Life is Common in the Universe?" The non-observability of recent biogenesis is a self-selection effect that needs to be considered if inferences are to be drawn from the rapidity of terrestrial biogenesis. We discuss several approaches that have been proposed to take this effect into account.Comment: 3 pages, no figures, in press at "Astrobiology", Vol 3, 2003 Reply to a comment on our previous paper: astro-ph/020501