ETIC and EMIC views of early childhood education in Singapore

Well-qualified women in Singapore working in professional fields including banking and marketing have many views about early childhood education for their own children as well as in general. Our study examined the views and attitudes of a group of these women who were recently retrenched and had decided to retrain as child-care professionals. After a pre-treatment attitudinal survey, participants engaged in a five-day workshop exploring the SEARCH heuristic (Geoghegan, 2002). A post-treatment attitudinal survey was administered. Results indicated a consensus of what constitutes quality in Singaporean early childhood education. The consensus reflected humanistic perspectives that appear at odds with Singapore’s international reputation for formal, academically-structured early childhood education

Convergence and Contention: The Least Developed Countries in Post-2015 Debates

Of all the development challenges the world has faced over the past 50 years, bringing prosperity to the poorest countries has proven the most stubborn. In 1971 the United Nations established the category of Least Developed Country (LDC) in order to focus special attention and support on its poorest and most vulnerable member states. Since then, only three countries designated as LDCs have moved out of the category, which now includes 48 nations. The UN Millennium Declaration and Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) called for the international community to give priority to LDCs. Although progress has varied greatly, LDCs as a group have lagged far behind the rest of the developing world in achieving the MDGs. LDCs also are especially vulnerable to economic and political shocks and environmental threats such as climate change, which compound the challenges they face.LDCs can offer important lessons on past development failures and successes, and testing grounds for new approaches. As the international community develops a new global development framework to replace the MDGs when they expire in 2015, it would do well to listen to what LDC development experts and observers are saying. In many ways, the success of this new post-2015 agenda may be judged by how effectively it contributes to development progress in this group of countries. As an input to post-2015 debates, this paper scans a wide range of perspectives on how the post-2015 agenda can most effectively support the LDCs' development priorities. It identifies many areas of agreement on the challenges that LDCs face. It also finds a number of areas of disagreement, particularly on the strategies and measures needed for LDCs to achieve sustainable, equitable social and economic progress

Limit sets for modules over groups on CAT(0) spaces -- from the Euclidean to the hyperbolic

The observation that the 0-dimensional Geometric Invariant $\Sigma ^{0}(G;A)$ of Bieri-Neumann-Strebel-Renz can be interpreted as a horospherical limit set opens a direct trail from Poincar\'e's limit set $\Lambda (\Gamma)$ of a discrete group $\Gamma$ of M\"obius transformations (which contains the horospherical limit set of $\Gamma$) to the roots of tropical geometry (closely related to $\Sigma ^{0}(G;A)$ when G is abelian). We explore this trail by introducing the horospherical limit set, $\Sigma (M;A)$, of a G-module A when G acts by isometries on a proper CAT(0) metric space M. This is a subset of the boundary at infinity of M. On the way we meet instances where $\Sigma (M;A)$ is the set of all conical limit points, the complement of a spherical building, the complement of the radial projection of a tropical variety, or (via the Bieri-Neumann-Strebel invariant) where it is closely related to the Thurston norm.Comment: This is the final published versio

From ivory tower to factory floor? How universities are changing to meet the needs of industry

While policy recognises the need to facilitate university-industry technology transfer (UITT), international studies indicate that the setup and effectiveness of the associated instruments is highly context-specific. We examine the reorientation of Irish universities in the direction of facilitating UITT, with a substantive focus on the role of Ireland's technology transfer offices. This paper also questions how academic research is changing in line with policy rhetoric. We find that Irish university research and the management of its output are changing in a manner that is not incompatible with UITT, although with significant resource and skills constraints. These findings hold important lessons for national economic and innovation systems of comparable size, with a development trajectory shaped by foreign direct investment