The Entrepreneurial Children's Home

Summaries This article is an exploration of how assumptions about how welfare should be provided can affect the conclusions one draws from studying the welfare system of another society, and how immersion in a welfare system of another country can lead to different conclusions about how welfare might best be provided. It is based on an analysis of Japan's child welfare system, in particular homes ( yôgoshisetsu ) for children whose parents cannot care for them, and seeks to compare a critique of them based largely on assumptions culled from social work practice in north Europe with a more sympathetic analysis in terms of Japanese practice. It concludes that, while neither analysis should be termed ‘correct’, it is incumbent on any researcher to provide both types of account (what might be termed an ‘etic’ and an ‘emic’ picture) when describing the welfare system of another society

The changing status of vocational higher education in contemporary Japan and South Korea

노트 : Vocational Content in Mass Higher Education? Responses to the Challenges of the Labour Market and the Work-Place. Bonn, 8 -10 September 200

Anchoring Magnetic Field in Turbulent Molecular Clouds

One of the key problems in star formation research is to determine the role of magnetic fields. Starting from the atomic inter-cloud medium (ICM) which has density nH ~ 1 per cubic cm, gas must accumulate from a volume several hundred pc across in order to form a typical molecular cloud. Star formation usually occurs in cloud cores, which have linear sizes below 1 pc and densities nH2 > 10^5 per cubic cm. With current technologies, it is hard to probe magnetic fields at scales lying between the accumulation length and the size of cloud cores, a range corresponds to many levels of turbulent eddy cascade, and many orders of magnitude of density amplification. For field directions detected from the two extremes, however, we show here that a significant correlation is found. Comparing this result with molecular cloud simulations, only the sub-Alfvenic cases result in field orientations consistent with our observations.Comment: accepted by Ap

The factors influencing car use in a cycle-friendly city: the case of Cambridge.

Encouraging people out of their cars and into other modes of transport, which has major advantages for health, the environment and urban development, has proved difficult. Greater understanding of the influences that lead people to use the car, particularly for shorter journeys, may help to achieve this. This paper examines the predictors of car use compared with the bicycle to explore how it may be possible to persuade more people to use the bicycle instead of the car. Multivariable logistic regression was used to examine the socio-demographic, transport and health-related correlates of mode choice for work, shopping and leisure trips in Cambridge, a city with high levels of cycling by UK standards. The key findings are that commuting distance and free workplace parking were strongly associated with use of the car for work trips, and car availability and lower levels of education were associated with car use for leisure, shopping and short-distanced commuting trips. The case of Cambridge shows that more policies could be adopted, particularly a reduction in free car parking, to increase cycling and reduce the use of the car, especially over short distances

Uncertainty estimates and L_2 bounds for the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation

We consider the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky (KS) equation in one spatial dimension with periodic boundary conditions. We apply a Lyapunov function argument similar to the one first introduced by Nicolaenko, Scheurer, and Temam, and later improved by Collet, Eckmann, Epstein and Stubbe, and Goodman, to prove that ||u||_2 < C L^1.5. This result is slightly weaker than that recently announced by Giacomelli and Otto, but applies in the presence of an additional linear destabilizing term. We further show that for a large class of Lyapunov functions \phi the exponent 1.5 is the best possible from this line of argument. Further, this result together with a result of Molinet gives an improved estimate for L_2 boundedness of the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation in thin rectangular domains in two spatial dimensions.Comment: 17 pages, 1 figure; typos corrected, references added; figure modifie