Are schools panoptic?

Schools are often understood by social researchers as panoptic spaces, where power is exercised through constant surveillance and monitoring. In this paper, I use Foucault’s notorious account of the Panopticon as a point of departure for a detailed empirical investigation of the specificities of surveillance in schools. Drawing on ethnographic data from fieldwork in a primary school, I argue that how surveillance actually operated in this context diverged from the panoptic programme in two crucial ways: surveillance was (i) discontinuous rather than total, and therefore open to resistance and evasion, and (ii) exercised through sound and hearing as much as through vision

Child sexual abuse: informed or in fear?

A number of major organisations have, over the last five years or so, become involved in offering advice on the taking and use of photographs of children. The Information Commissioner's Office, for example, has issued guidance on the legal situation surrounding the photographing of children and the NSPCC has drawn up recommendations, for community groups, concerning the placement of children's photographs on websites

The economic case for union

This article puts forward an economic case for Scotland staying in the union. There have been many debates regarding the economic consequences of independence. It has been argued that Scotland would be better off. Independence, however, is an uncertain business; a new state might gain new freedoms but would lose present sources of stability, and some questions about independence are simply unanswerable in advance. It is nevertheless possible to draw some conclusions about its possible economic effects

The future of the WTO

This repository item contains a single issue of Issues in Brief, a series of policy briefs that began publishing in 2008 by the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.This policy brief reviews the current debates about the future of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and looks at why current discussions on international trade and development are stalled and also on what the implication of this stalemate might be on the longer-term future of the WTO, and of trade and development in general

Gaming Business Communities: Developing online learning organisations to foster communities, develop leadership, and grow interpersonal education

This paper explores, through observation and testing, what possibilities from gaming can be extended into other realms of human interaction to help bring people together, extend education, and grow business. It uses through action learning within the safety of the virtual world within Massively Multiplayer Online Games. Further, I explore how the world of online gaming provides opportunity to train a wide range of skills through extending Revans’ (1980) learning equation and action inquiry methodology. This equation and methodology are deployed in relation to a gaming community to see if the theories could produce strong relationships within organisations and examine what learning, if any, is achievable. I also investigate the potential for changes in business (e.g., employee and customer relationships) through involvement in the gaming community as a unique place to implement action learning. The thesis also asks the following questions on a range of extended possibilities in the world of online gaming: What if the world opened up to a social environment where people could discuss their successes and failures? What if people could take a real world issue and re‐create it in the safe virtual world to test ways of dealing with it? What education answers can the world of online gaming provide

The IMF's new view on financial globalization: a critical assessment

This repository item contains a single issue of Issues in Brief, a series of policy briefs that began publishing in 2008 by the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.In December 2012, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) issued a new “institutional view” on capital account liberalization and the management of capital flows between countries. In this Issues in Brief, Kevin P. Gallagher, one of the co-chairs of the Pardee Center Task Force on Regulating Global Capital Flows for Long-Run Development, offers his assessment of the IMF’s new position. The IMF’s “institutional view” historically tempers the IMF’s advocacy of capital account liberalization and even endorses the regulation of cross-border finance in some circumstances. What is more, the IMF points out that many trade and investment treaties do not provide the appropriate level of policy space to regulate cross-border finance when needed. This is truly landmark, given that the IMF attempted to legally mandate worldwide capital account liberalization in the 1990s. The turnaround is largely a function of the persistence of emerging market and developing country members of the Fund, in addition to some innovative economists on the IMF staff. Unfortunately however, those voices did not fully prevail. The IMF view still urges capital account liberalization as a long-run goal for all nations, only sanctions regulating cross-border finance under limited circumstances, and puts too much of the burden for regulation on emerging market countries, rather than the industrialized world that is often the source of this finance. The brief reiterates the “rules of thumb” put forward by the Pardee Center Task Force in 2011 that should be considered when devising capital account regulations applicable to developing countries

Teaching English, Language and Literacy

[Review of Teaching English, Language and Literacy - Wyse, D and Jones, R] When David Wray decides to accord to any work the status of “an impressive achievement” (Wyse and Jones 2008: xvi), it bears some serious scrutiny. Written for “all primary education students and their teachers” (Wyse and Jones 2008: xviii), this is the second edition of a book first published in 2001 and its authors can lay claim to some substantial revisions. Having sought to address the National Literacy Strategy in 2001, Dominic Wyse and Russell Jones now offer a critique of the Primary National Strategy Literacy Framework and set that out in a much wider and ambitious context as “an essential guide to the teaching of English” (Wyse and Jones 2008: xviii). I found myself in the interesting position of assessing that claim from a tangential Scottish perspective, hoping to mine some generic gems. With the usual reservations about the inevitable limitations of any such guide, I believe that this book offers a great deal of interest and value, not only to primary teachers but to a wider audience. Without doubt, it has a distinct voice which dissents very audibly from some current practice where that has its roots in reactive policy initiative rather than research evidence

Method for forming hermetic seals

The firmly adherent film of bondable metal, such as silver, is applied to the surface of glass or other substrate by decomposing a layer of solution of a thermally decomposable metallo-organic deposition (MOD) compound such as silver neodecanoate in xylene. The MOD compound thermally decomposes into metal and gaseous by-products. Sealing is accomplished by depositing a layer of bonding metal, such as solder or a brazing alloy, on the metal film and then forming an assembly with another high melting point metal surface such as a layer of Kovar. When the assembly is heated above the temperature of the solder, the solder flows, wets the adjacent surfaces and forms a hermetic seal between the metal film and metal surface when the assembly cools