Starting young?: links between childhood and adult participation in culture and science: a literature review

A selective review of research literature on the extent of childhood exposure to and experience of culture and science and subsequent adult cultural or science participation

Flaw Characterization by Low Frequency Scattering Measurements

In order to make a fracture mechanical prediction of the remaining lifetime of a part, it is necessary to know the overall size, shape and orientation of the flaws in the part. This paper describes the determination of these flaw characteristics from measurements of the scattering of low frequency (long wavelength) ultrasound from the flaw. Experimental results are excellent

Person-Job Fit in the Changing Work Environment : Models for Office Workers and Teleworkers

This thesis empirically examined the theoretical domain of Person-Job Fit proposed by Edwards (1991). Two models were tested with data collected from a sample of 101 Office Workers and 101 Teleworkers categorised as professional, managerial, clerical, technical and sales. The adequacy of the two models was tested using Partial Least Squares (PLS) analysis. The Person-Job Fit model found that measures of Abilities, Desires, Supplies and Demands were equally predictive of Personal and Organisational Outcomes for both groups. Commensurate measures were employed for Desires and Supplies. The h1ended Person-Job Fit model included the meaning of home (Groves, 1996b), which was hypothesised to be salient to Teleworkers because they work from home. The Person-Job Fit model was an adequate to good tit of the data for both Office Workers and Teleworkers, whereas the Extended Person-Job Fit model was a slightly better fit for Teleworkers. These findings supported the hypotheses for this study. Furthermore, the R2 for both models were statistically significant for Personal and Organisational Outcomes and improved for both Office Workers and Teleworkers in the Extended Person-Job Fit model. For both models differences emerged between Office Workers and Teleworkers in regard to Abilties, Desires, Supplies and Demands as predictors of Personal and Organisational Outcomes. In particular, the outcomes for Office Workers were predicted by contextual attributes whereas psychological aspects were predictive of Teleworker outcomes. In the extended model, the addition of the Home was an important predictor with each group. The interesting difference between Le groups was evidenced in the reversed effect between the Home and Organisational Outcomes for Teleworkers. This finding suggests that benefits accrue to the organisation when the Teleworkers\u27 home environment is compromised. It is concluded that the Edwards\u27 ( 1991) Person-Job Fit domain does provide cohesive parameters for investigation of Person-Job Fit. Moreover, the expansion of the measured environment to include the Home (Groves, 1996b) highlighted the need to consider the impact of the changing work environment These findings have implications for recruitment, staff retention and the successful accommodation of structural change within organisations

FEATURE BINDING IN VISUO-SPATIAL WORKING MEMORY

Four series of experiments using a paradigm adapted from Prabhakaran at al. (2000) are presented exploring the characteristics of bound visuo-spatial representations in memory. This thesis was guided by the following theoretical questions: (1) Can location binding be demonstrated in a recognition paradigm? (2) What are the temporal dynamics of location binding? (3) Is location binding automatic, or rather, does it require attentional resources? (4) What are the products of location binding: Whole new objects or links between features that contribute in an asymmetrical manner? Series 1 addressed the first question through the demonstration of binding effects across two experiments. Series 1 was additionally informative with respect to the second question in demonstrating that binding emerged relatively early (within 250ms post stimulus offset) and could be maintained for at least four seconds. With regard to the automaticity with which visual and spatial features are integrated, and the characteristics of the resulting bound representations, three lines of evidence are reported. Firstly, by manipulating feature relevance, Series 2 demonstrated that binding may occur automatically when shapes are attended, but not when locations are attended. This finding is not easily compatible with the idea that location binding results in the creation of an entirely new construct in memory which would predict binding effects when either shapes or locations are attended. Secondly, it was demonstrated that increasing the amount of attention necessary for encoding the shape features enhanced the binding which took place when shapes only were attended (Experiment 3B) but had minimal effect on performance when locations only were attended (Experiment 3C). This suggests that while binding to location may occur automatically when shapes are the attended feature, the amount of attention allocated to those shapes may increase the size of the binding effect which ensues. Thirdly, it was demonstrated that the binding effect following attendance to both features was significantly reduced, but not eradicated under attentional load conditions (Experiment 4) suggesting that while binding to location may in part emerge automatically, bound representations may benefit from available attentional resources. The results are discussed in terms of a hierarchical structure to encoding in memory (e.g., Jiang et al., 2000) which suggests that the encoding of the spatial layout of the scene must occur prior to the encoding of what occupies those locations (see also Navon, 1977). We speculate that location binding in memory may be characterised by links formed between features in memory, while the feature information is itself stored in parallel (e.g., Wheeler & Treisman, 2002). In addition, the links may be unequally weighted, an aspect of binding which may arise as a result of the order of encoding visual and spatial features

Images of the witch in nineteenth-century culture

This thesis examines the witch imagery used during the nineteenth century in children’s literature, realist and gothic fiction, poetry and art, and by practitioners and critics of mesmerism, spiritualism and alternative spirituality. The thesis is based on close readings of nineteenth-century texts and detailed analysis of artwork, but also takes a long view of nineteenth-century witch imagery in relation to that of preceding and succeeding periods. I explore the means by which the image of the witch was introduced as an overt or covert figure into the work of nineteenth-century writers and artists during a period when the majority of literate people no longer believed in the existence of witchcraft; and I investigate the relationship between the metaphorical witch and the areas of social dissonance which she is used to symbolise. I demonstrate that the diversity of nineteenth-century witch imagery is very wide, but that there is a tendency for positive images to increase as the century progresses. Thereby the limited iconography of malevolent witches and powerless victims of witch-hunts, promulgated by seventeenth-century witch-hunters and eighteenth-century rationalist philosophers respectively, were joined by wise-women, fairy godmothers, sorceresses, and mythical immortals, all of whom were defined, directly or indirectly, as witches. Nonetheless I also reveal that every image of the witch I examine has a dark shadow, despite or because of the empathy between witch and creator which is evident in many of the works I have studied. In the Introduction I acknowledge the validity of theories put forward by historians regarding the influence of societal changes on the decline of witchcraft belief, but I argue that those changes also created the need for metaphorical witchery to address the anxieties created by those changes. I contend that the complexity of social change occurring during and prior to the nineteenth century resulted in an increase in the diversification of witch imagery. I argue that the use of diverse images in various cultural forms was facilitated by the growth of liberal individualism which allowed each writer or artist to articulate specific concerns through discrete images of the witch which were no longer coloured solely by the dictates of superstition or rationalism. I look at the peculiar ability of the witch as a symbolic outcast from society to view that society from an external perspective and to use the voice of the exile to say the unsayable. I also use definitions garnered from a wide spectrum of sources from cultural history to folklore and neo-paganism to justify my broad definition of the word ‘witch’. In Chapter One I explore children’s literature, on the assumption that images absorbed during childhood would influence both the conscious and unconscious witch imagery produced by the adult imagination. I find the templates for familiar imagery in collections of folklore and, primarily, in translations of ‘traditional’ fairy tales sanitised for the nursery by collectors such as Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. I then examine fantasies created for Victorian children by authors such as Mary de Morgan, William Makepeace Thackeray, George MacDonald and Charles Kingsley, where the image of witch and fairy godmother is conflated in fiction which elevates the didactic fairy tale to a level which in some cases is imbued with a neo-platonic religiosity, thereby transforming the witch into a powerful portal to the divine. In contrast the canonical novelists whose work I examine in Chapter Two generally project witch imagery obliquely onto foolish, misguided, doomed or defiant women whose witchery is both allusionary and illusionary. I begin with the work of Sir Walter Scott whose bad or sad witches touch his novels with the supernatural while he denies their magic. Scott’s witch imagery, like that of Perrault and Grimm, is reflected in the witches who represent women’s exclusion from autonomy, education and/or the literary establishment in the works of Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot. Traditional fairy-tale imagery is particularly evident in Charles Dickens’ use of the witch to represent negative aspects in the development of society or the individual. In contrast Scott’s impulse to distance himself from the pre-urban world represented by his witches contrasts with Thomas Hardy’s mourning of the female earth spirits of Wessex, thereby linking fluctuating and evolving images of nature with images of the nineteenth-century witch. In Chapter Three I explore poetry and art through Romantic verse, Tennyson’s Camelot, Rossetti and Burne-Jones’ Pre-Raphaelite classicism, Rosamund Marriot Watson and Mary Coleridge’s shape-shifting, mirrored women, and Yeats’ Celtic Twilight: in doing so I find representations of the witch as the destructive seductress, the muse, the dark ‘other’ of the suppressed poet, the symbol of spellbinding amoral nature, and the embodiment of the Celtic soul. In the final chapter witch imagery is attached to actual practitioners of so-called ‘New Witchcraft’, yet they also become part of a story which seeks to equate neo/quasi science with the supernatural. I demonstrate a gender realignment of occult power as the submissive mesmerist’s tool evolves into the powerful mother/priestess. I note the interconnectedness of fiction and fact via the novels of authors such as Wilkie Collins and Edward Bulwer-Lytton; and identify the role of the campaigning godmother figure as a precursor of the radical feminist Wiccan. I believe that my thesis offers a uniquely comprehensive view of the use of metaphorical witch imagery in the nineteenth century

International Children's Rights Symposium : In Partnership: Policymakers, Practitioners, Academia and Young People

This is a report of an international symposium on children’s rights that took place in June 2017. It was organised by the Centre for Excellence for Looked After Children in Scotland (CELCIS), at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland. The event brought together an unprecedented gathering of participants who share a commitment to shaping the world through promoting children’s rights. Participants included those who had worked on the development of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the UN Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children (UN Guidelines), as well as those currently working on the realisation of children’s rights in Scotland, the UK and internationally. The purpose of the event was to reflect deeply on the progress and successes in realising children’s rights thus far, to clarify what must be our focus to address the challenges ahead, and to share these reflections and deliberations with others to ‘sense check’ our thinking, spurring us on to further progress for children

Moving Forward : Implementing The United Nations Guidelines For The Alternative Care Of Children

The subject of constant and serious concern expressed by the Committee on the Rights of the Child over its two decades of work to monitor and promote the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. This concern is not only evident from the Committee’s findings when reviewing individual States’ compliance with the treaty’s provisions, but was also manifested clearly and in global terms when it decided to devote its annual Day of General Discussion to that issue in 2005. The Committee’s preoccupations are based on a variety of factors. These include: • the large number of children coming into alternative care in many countries, too often essentially due to their family’s material poverty, the conditions under which that care is provided, and the low priority that may be afforded to responding appropriately to these children who, lacking the primary protection normally assured by parents, are particularly vulnerable. The reasons for which children find themselves in alternative care are wide-ranging, and addressing these diverse situations – preventively or reactively – similarly requires a panoply of measures to be in place. While the Convention sets out basic State obligations in that regard, it does not provide significant guidance on meeting them. This is why, from the very outset of the initiative in 2004, the Committee gave whole-hearted support to the idea of developing the Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children that would gain the approval of the international community at the highest level. The acceptance of the Guidelines by the UN General Assembly in 2009 signalled all governments’ general agreement that the ‘orientations for policy and practice’ they set out are both well-founded and desirable. Since that time, the Committee has been making full use of the principles and objectives established in the Guidelines when examining the reports of States Parties to the Convention and in formulating its observations and recommendations to them. As with all internationally agreed standards and principles, however, the real test lies in determining how they can be made a reality throughout the world for those that they target – in this case, children who are without, or are at risk of losing, parental care. Identifying those measures means, first of all, understanding the implications of the ‘policy orientations’ proposed in the Guidelines, and then devising the most effective and ‘do-able’ ways of meeting their requirements. Importantly, moreover, the Guidelines are by no means addressed to States alone: they are to be taken into account by everyone, at every level, who is involved in some manner with issues and programmes concerning alternative care provision for children. This is where the Moving Forward handbook steps in. As its title suggests, it seeks precisely to assist all concerned to advance along the road to implementation, by explaining the key thrusts of the Guidelines, outlining the kind of policy responses required, and describing ‘promising’ examples of efforts already made to apply them in diverse communities, countries, regions and cultures. I congratulate all the organisations and individuals that have contributed to bringing the Moving Forward project to fruition. This handbook is clearly an important tool for informing and inspiring practitioners, organisations and governments across the globe who are seeking to provide the best possible rights-based solutions and care for their children