Attention deficit hyperctivity disorder –aviable training module for school teachers

Attention Deficit Disorders in children is a problem that teachers face in classrooms universally, and it can be particularly challenging. Despite this, there is a great paucity of work either in evaluating the existing knowledge levels of the teachers of Primary schools concerning this neurobehavioral problem, or in formulating attempts to train them in classroom management. The aim of the present study is the development of an evaluation and Training Module for Teachers, comprising of a three-step ADD group training method, with evaluation included. The target group comprised of 30 primary school teachers representing various schools in D. K. District. Following a baseline evaluation, the group training was performed. The curriculum included ADD/ADHD theory, case study and discussions. The specific objectives of the 3 day activity were to: assess them on their knowledge of ADD on a pre evaluation Test, obtaining relevant socio-demographic details, and providing them with specific training, after which they were re-assessed. The experience showed that the training facilitates knowledge of this clinical condition. The age, sex, teaching experience, qualifications and the residential area, were not found to be associated with the knowledge levels of teachers. The inclusion of this time and cost effective module in awareness and management skill building of Primary teachers as part of their in- service training as well as the implications of a successful culture and context specific training programe for the inclusion of ADD children in the regular classroom is discussed

Ethnic entrepreneurs and online home-based businesses

Objectives The study considers how online home-based businesses offer opportunities for ethnic entrepreneurs to ‘break out’ of the traditional highly competitive and low margin sectors they are often associated with. Prior Work Previous studies have found a positive association between ethnic minorities high levels of entrepreneurship (Levie, 2007) and between home computer use and entrepreneurship in ethnic groups (Fairlie, 2006). Despite these associations, no previous studies have explored the formation of home-based or other online businesses by ethnic entrepreneurs. This study seeks to address this gap by exploring how online home-based businesses provide opportunities for ethnic entrepreneurs to form and operate businesses outside traditional sectors (Rath, 2002; Kloosterman, 2010). Approach The study adopts mixed embeddedness (Kloosterman et al, 1999) as a theoretical lens to guide interviews with 22 ethnic entrepreneurs who have started online home-based businesses in the UK. All interviews are recorded, fully transcribed and analysed by thematic coding using NVivo software. Results Our findings suggest two distinct groups of online home-based business ventures. The first consist of mainly entrepreneurs who have good IT qualifications and are using the internet to leverage these, such as running web design or networking businesses or selling computer hardware online. The second group had no IT expertise and saw the web as an opportunity to start a business based on retailing, design skills or other interests. The informants were emphatic that the unique characteristics offered by an online home-based business were instrumental in their decision and ability to form a business. We use the findings of the study to argue that the theory of mixed embeddedness should include notions of choice and agency by ethnic entrepreneurs and also that the entrepreneurs are not only subject to social, economic and institutional forces, but that their actions can positively influence these forces. Implications The findings suggest that online home-based businesses can offer new opportunities to ethnic entrepreneurs that allow them to move beyond being the passive subjects of social, economic and institutional forces. Value The study is of benefit to ethnic entrepreneurs seeking to start new ventures and provides a valuable evidence base for wider social debates about the role and contribution of ethnic groups to the economic and social fabric of the UK. The research also has important policy implications, for example, the efficacy and sustainability of entrepreneurship visas

Enterprise portals: addressing the organisational and individual perspectives of information systems

Enterprise portals are being viewed as the next generation application platform of choice, offering benefits over both client/server and thin client arrangements. By providing a mediating layer between the information applications and resources of the organisation and the individuals using them, enterprise portals appear to provide a unique context to allow both the organisational and individual perspectives of information systems to be addressed. This study seeks to examine these often competing perspectives of information systems by using an exploratory empirical survey to investigate the actual deployment of enterprise portals within a range of different organisations. It is found that both the individual and organisational benefits that enterprise portals can offer appear to have been recognised, and coherent sets of services addressing each of these perspectives are being developed. Consistent with diffusion and acceptance of technology models, organisations appear to be commencing their portal developments with services that will ensure utilisation by individuals, and are subsequently seeking to realise organisational level benefits

A corpus-based approach to mind style

Fowler's (Linguistics and the novel, Methuen, 1977) original definition of mind style emphasised consistency as a defining feature of the phenomenon, something that is (i) difficult to measure, and (ii) often missed in qualitative analyses. In this paper we investigate how a computational semantic analysis might be used to address this difficulty, with particular reference to McIntyre's (Journal of Literary Semantics 34: 21–40, 2005) analysis of the deviant mind style of the character of Miss Shepherd in Alan Bennett's play The Lady in the Van. To do this we analyse the speech of all the characters in The Lady in the Van using Wmatrix (Rayson, Matrix: A statistical method and software tool for linguistic analysis through corpus comparison, Lancaster University PhD thesis, 2003, Wmatrix: A web-based corpus processing environment, Lancaster University, 2008), to see whether it provides quantitative support for the interpretative conclusions reached by McIntyre. Wmatrix utilises the UCREL Semantic Annotation System (USAS) which has been designed to undertake the automatic semantic analysis of English. The initial tag-set of the USAS system was loosely based on McArthur's Longman Lexicon of Contemporary English (McArthur, Longman, 1981), but has since been considerably revised in the light of practical tagging problems met in the course of previous research, and now contains 232 category labels (such as medicine and medical treatment, movement, obligation and necessity, etc.). We use Wmatrix's facility for identifying key semantic domains in pursuit of our two main aims: (i) to determine whether Miss Shepherd's odd mind style is consistent, as Fowler's definition suggests it should be; and (ii) to determine the usefulness of computational semantic analysis for investigating mind style

Don’t throw rocks from the side-lines: A sociomaterial exploration of organizational blogs as boundary objects

Purpose Social media such as blogs are being widely used in organizations in order to undertake internal communication and share knowledge, rendering them important boundary objects. A root metaphor of the boundary object domain is the notion of relatively static and inert objects spanning similarly static boundaries. A strong sociomaterial perspective allows the immisciblity of object and boundary to be challenged, since a key tenet of this perspective is the ongoing and mutually-constituted performance of the material and social. Design/methodology/approach The aim of our research is to draw upon sociomateriality to explore the operation of social media platforms as intra-organizational boundary objects. Given the novel perspective of this study and its social constructivist ontology, we adopt an exploratory, interpretivist research design. This is operationalized as a case study of the use of an organizational blog by a major UK government department over an extended period. A novel aspect of the study is our use of data released under a Freedom of Information request. Findings We present three exemplar instances of how the blog and organizational boundaries were performed in the situated practice of the case study organization. We draw on literature on boundary objects, blogs and sociomateriality in order to provide a theoretical explication of the mutually-constituted performance of the blog and organizational boundaries. We also invoke the notion of ‘extended chains of intra-action’ to theorise changes in the wider organization. Originality/value Adoption of a sociomaterial lens provides a highly novel perspective of boundary objects and organizational boundaries. The study highlights the indeterminate and dynamic nature of boundary objects and boundaries, with both being in an intra-active state of becoming, challenging conventional conceptions. The study demonstrates that specific material-discursive practices arising from the situated practice of the blog at the respective boundaries were performative, reconfiguring the blog and boundaries and being generative of further changes in the organization

Lot Size, Zoning, and Household Preferences: Impediments to Smart Growth?

The paper explores a number of issues related to lot size and urban density. First, trends in single-family residential lot size over the past 35 years are examined in eight counties in the state of Maryland. We find that there was a trend toward larger lot sizes in many suburban counties in the mid to late 1990s, and that there has been a general flattening of the density gradient in urban areas over the last few decades. We then examine the extent to which lot size is being constrained by regulation by comparing actual subdivision density to the allowable density under zoning rules. This analysis is done for three counties with different degrees of suburbanization. We find that only in the areas with the very large lot zoning does zoning seem to be constraining actual lots size. There is a good deal of excess capacity in the density that could be built, especially in the more densely zoned areas. Finally, recognizing that households have preferences for lot size and other housing characteristics, we provide some evidence about the strength of household preferences over lot size and their willingness to trade off lot size for other characteristics.land use, urban sprawl, density, lot size

The Power of the Pill for the Next Generation

In this paper we ask how the diffusion of oral contraception to young unmarried women affected the number and maternal characteristics of children born to these women. Using census data, we find that early pill access led to an increase in the share of children whose mothers were married, college-educated, and had professional occupations. The pill's effects on the average mother are different from the pill's effects on the average woman, and the effects of the pill on maternal characteristics are in some instances different from the effects of abortion. We investigate the mechanisms by which the pill led to these differential effects and find that access to the pill led to falls in short-term fertility rates for young women and led to decreases in lifetime fertility at the intensive and extensive margins. The impacts of the pill on household characteristics are thus associated with retiming of births, changes in the characteristics of potential mothers, changes in which women become mothers, and by reductions in completed family size. Finally, while the pill affected maternal characteristics differently than abortion, we find suggestive results that availability of the pill lowered abortions among young women.

Quantifying the Effect of Matrix Structure on Multithreaded Performance of the SpMV Kernel

Sparse matrix-vector multiplication (SpMV) is the core operation in many common network and graph analytics, but poor performance of the SpMV kernel handicaps these applications. This work quantifies the effect of matrix structure on SpMV performance, using Intel's VTune tool for the Sandy Bridge architecture. Two types of sparse matrices are considered: finite difference (FD) matrices, which are structured, and R-MAT matrices, which are unstructured. Analysis of cache behavior and prefetcher activity reveals that the SpMV kernel performs far worse with R-MAT matrices than with FD matrices, due to the difference in matrix structure. To address the problems caused by unstructured matrices, novel architecture improvements are proposed.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures. IEEE HPEC 201