An analysis of the significance for curriculum theory of the work of Michel Foucault :with particular reference to the concept of power

The aim of this thesis is to draw on the work of Michel Foucault to focus on the field\ud of curriculum theory - with particular reference to his theme of power/knowledge.\ud Several curriculum theorists are indebted to Foucault's thought in developing their\ud own work. The ways in which they use Foucault's work, however, do not accurately\ud reflect his central project. Rather than critiquing curriculum theories themselves or\ud developing my own, alternative theories from a Foucauldian perspective, however,\ud my purpose here is to diagnose how curriculum is studied and how the field of\ud curriculum theory governs itself, in the name of Foucault. To achieve this purpose, I\ud develop three lines of inquiry. First, I review Foucault's reception in curriculum\ud theory and educational policy analysis. I focus specifically on the perspectives of\ud Cleo Cherryholmes, Henry A. Giroux, Thomas S. Popkewitz and Stephen J. Ball.\ud Second, I seek a preliminary understanding of the notion of power/knowledge by\ud directly referring to Foucault's work. Third, I attempt to refine my account of\ud power/knowledge through reference to secondary literature on Foucault. Through\ud exploration of power/knowledge along these three lines, I develop a critique, in light\ud of both Foucault's own account and these secondary interpretations, of the way that\ud Foucault's concept has been used in curriculum theory. This enables an examination\ud of the limitations of their application of Foucault's notion of power/knowledge,\ud seemingly constrained by a dominant understanding of curriculum as the medium\ud through which to understand the oppressive social structure. Instead I seek to outline\ud an idea of curriculum as a practice for inspiring self-transformation. At the end of this\ud thesis, I raise two new issues, to illustrate the ways in which Foucault's notion of\ud power/knowledge can be applied elsewhere in the study of curriculum.\u

THE INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL AND JOURNALISTS\u27 PERFORMANCE

In the age of knowledge-based economy, intellectual capital (IC) is of growing and substantial importance more so than the tangible assets such as land and financial capital. IC includes human capital, organizational capital and social capital. IC has become a driving force for an organization to stay competitive. Journalists are vital human capital in a news organization. They are the knowledge workers who need both independence (autonomy) and interdependence (teamwork) in order to accumulate and share knowledge. In addition to playing the role as \u27gate-keepers\u27 in the information delivery process, part of a journalist\u27s job is to develop relationships with news sources from outside of the organization. Therefore, journalists are also the social capital in their organization. A news organization loses both human and social capital whenever a journalist resigns or job-hops. The purpose of this research is to examine relationships between IC and journalists? performance in the media. We argue that journalists embody both human and social capitals which are mediated by job autonomy which journalists need in order to achieve high individual job performance. We also argue that organizational capital is mediated by team-level task interdependence which also leads to better individual job performance

Use of the Chinese (Taiwan) Version of the Social Phobia Inventory (SPIN) Among Early Adolescents in Rural Areas: Reliability and Validity Study

BackgroundTo assess the screening abilities of the Chinese (Taiwan) version of the Social Phobia Inventory (SPIN) for evaluating social phobia in an adolescent community sample.MethodsA total of 3,393 students (1,669 boys, 1,724 girls), aged 13–15, completed the SPIN questionnaire. A total of 144 students were enrolled for validity. The Mini-International-Neuropsychiatric-Interview-Kid (MINI-Kid) was used to establish Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders–IV diagnosis.ResultsThe mean SPIN total score of all subjects was 14.2 ± 9.4, which was higher in girls than in boys (14.7 ± 9.4 vs. 13.7 ± 9.1; p < 0.01). The 7th graders had the highest SPIN total scores compared with the 8th and 9th graders (15.4 ± 9.7 vs. 13.4 ± 9.1 and 14.0 ± 9.4; p < 0.001). Internal consistency (Cronbach's α = 0.85) and test–retest reliability (r = 0.73) were both good. A cut-off score of 25 resulted in balanced sensitivity (80%) and specificity (77%).ConclusionThe Chinese (Taiwan) SPIN has good screening abilities. The cut-offs are different from those in other countries, and highlight the importance of culturally adapted cut-offs

Optimal production-shipment decisions for the finite production rate model with scrap

This paper is concerned with the decision-making on the optimal production batch size and optimal number of shipments for a finite production rate model with random scrap rate. The classic finite production rate (FPR) model assumes a continuous inventory issuing policy for satisfying product demand and perfect quality for all items produced. However, in a real life vendor-buyer integrated production-inventory system, a multiple shipment policy is practically used in lieu of the continuous issuing policy, and it is inevitable to generate defective items during a production run. All nonconforming items produced are assumed to be scrap, and the finished (perfect quality) products can only be delivered to customers if the whole lot is quality assured at the end of the production run. The fixed-quantity multiple instalments of the finished batch are delivered to customers at a fixed interval of time. Mathematical modelling is employed and the renewal reward theorem is used to cope with the variable production cycle length. The long-run average cost for the proposed model is derived, and its convexity is proved by the use of the Hessian matrix equations. A closed-form optimal production-shipment policy for such an imperfect FPR model is obtained and a special case is discussed. Finally, a numerical example is provided to demonstrate the model’s practical usage

Staphylococcal Cassette Chromosome mec in MRSA, Taiwan

To determine the predominant staphylococcal cassette chromosome (SCC) mec element in methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, we typed 190 isolates from a hospital in Taiwan. We found a shift from type IV to type III SCCmec element during 1992–2003, perhaps caused by selective pressure from indiscriminate use of antimicrobial drugs

Identification of overexpressed cytokines as serum biomarkers of hepatitis C virus-induced liver fibrosis using bead-based flexible multiple analyte profiling

Hepatic inflammation is the stimulator to activate hepatic stellate cells (HSCs) and triggers fibrogenesis. Cytokines are produced during liver inflammation and maybe considered as liver fibrosis biomarker. The aim of this study was to investigate whether cytokines can be used as reliable biomarkers of liver fibrosis using flexible multi-analyte profiling (xMAP). A total of 61 chronic hepatitis C patients with different severity of liver fibrosis were enrolled. Liver biopsy was used as standard to assess the severity of fibrosis according to METAVIR classification. Afterward, 15 samples from healthy controls were analyzed and totally 50 cytokines were screened using flexible multi-analyte profiling to discover differential biomarkers. Finally, levels of protein expressions of individual stages of liver fibrosis were measured. In histological examination, the necroinflammatory score (histology activity index, HAI) was increased from F1 to F4 stage in hepatitis C virus (HCV) infected patients, indicating that inflammation was accompanied with the progression of liver fibrosis. Using flexible multi-analyte profiling, four serum cytokines, including IFN-α2 (p=0.023), GRO-α (p=0.013), SCF (p=0.047) and SDF-1α p=0.024), were identified under antibody specific recognition and elevated with HAI score. This study reveals the relationship between cytokines and liver fibrosis, and demonstrated that IFN-α2, GRO-α, SCF and SDF-1 α may be used as biomarkers to predict liver fibrosis. The overexpressed cytokines may play a role in the progression of liver fibrosis and deserves further investigation.Keywords: Cytokine, flexible multi-analyte profiling, hepatitis C virus, liver fibrosisAfrican Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 11(29), pp. 7535-7541, 29 April, 201

N-(6-Methyl-2-pyrid­yl)formamide

The mol­ecule of the title compound, C7H8N2O, is essentially planar with a maximum deviation of 0.0439 (1) Å from the best plane. In the crystal, N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds between self-complementary amide groups join mol­ecules into centrosymmetric dimers

Automatic Cephalometric Landmark Detection on X-Ray Images Using Object Detection

We propose a new deep convolutional cephalometric landmark detection framework for orthodontic treatment. Our proposed method consists of two major steps: landmark detection using a deep neural network for object detection, and landmark repair to ensure one instance per landmark class. For landmark detection, we modify the loss function of the backbone network YOLOv3 to eliminate the constrains on the bounding box and incorporate attention mechanism to improve the detection accuracy. For landmark repair, a triangle mesh is generated from the average face to eliminate superfluous instances, followed by estimation of missing landmarks from the detected ones using Laplacian Mesh. Trained and evaluated on a public benchmark dataset from IEEE ISBI 2015 grand challenge, our proposed framework obtains comparable results compared to the state-of-the-art methods for cephalometric landmark detection, and demonstrates the efficacy of using a deep CNN model for accurate object detection of landmarks defined by only a single pixel location