Investigating child participation in the everyday talk of a teacher and children in a preparatory year

In early years research, policy and education, a democratic perspective that positions children as participants and citizens is increasingly emphasized. These ideas take seriously listening to children’s opinions and respecting children’s influence over their everyday affairs. While much political and social investment has been paid to the inclusion of participatory approaches little has been reported on the practical achievement of such an approach in the day to day of early childhood education within school settings. This paper investigates talk and interaction in the everyday activities of a teacher and children in an Australian preparatory class (for children age 4-6 years) to see how ideas of child participation are experienced. We use an interactional analytic approach to demonstrate how participatory methods are employed in practical ways to manage routine interactions. Analysis shows that whilst the teacher seeks the children’s opinion and involves them in decision-making, child participation is at times constrained by the context and institutional categories of “teacher” and “student” that are jointly produced in their talk. The paper highlights tensions that arise for teachers as they balance a pedagogical intent of “teaching” and the associated institutional expectations, with efforts to engage children in decision-making. Recommendations include adopting a variety of conversational styles when engaging with children; consideration of temporal concerns and the need to acknowledge the culture of the school

Evidence of Strong Electron Correlations in Gamma-Iron

Single-particle excitation spectra of gamma-Fe in the paramagnetic state have been investigated by means of the first-principles dynamical coherent potential approximation theory which has recently been developed. It is found that the central peak in the density of states consisting of the t2g bands is destroyed by electron correlations, and the Mott-Hubbard type correlated bands appear. The results indicate that the gamma-Fe can behave as correlated electrons at high temperatures.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, to be published in J. Phys. Soc. Jpn. Vol.78, No.9 (2009

‘What are you going to do, confiscate their passports?’ Professional perspectives on cross-border reproductive travel

Objective: This article reports findings from a UK-based study which explored the phenomenon of overseas travel for fertility treatment. The first phase of this project aimed to explore how infertility clinicians and others professionally involved in fertility treatment understand the nature and consequences of cross-border reproductive travel. Background: There are indications that, for a variety of reasons, people from the UK are increasingly travelling across national borders to access assisted reproductive technologies. While research with patients is growing, little is known about how ‘fertility tourism’ is perceived by health professionals and others with a close association with infertility patients. Methods: Using an interpretivist approach, this exploratory research included focussed discussions with 20 people professionally knowledgeable about patients who had either been abroad or were considering having treatment outside the UK. Semi-structured interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim and subjected to a thematic analysis. Results: Three conceptual categories are developed from the data: ‘the autonomous patient’; ‘cross-border travel as risk’, and ‘professional responsibilities in harm minimisation’. Professionals construct nuanced, complex and sometimes contradictory narratives of the ‘fertility traveller’, as vulnerable and knowledgeable; as engaged in risky behaviour and in its active minimisation. Conclusions: There is little support for the suggestion that states should seek to prevent cross-border treatment. Rather, an argument is made for less direct strategies to safeguard patient interests. Further research is required to assess the impact of professional views and actions on patient choices and patient experiences of treatment, before, during and after travelling abroad

The effects of user characteristics on query performance in the presence of information request ambiguity

This paper investigates the effects of personality characteristics on individuals' abilities to compose queries from information requests containing various types of ambiguity. In particular, this research examines the effects of user personality characteristics on query performance in the presence of information requests that contained no extraneous, syntactic, or both extraneous and syntactic ambiguities. The results indicate that personality characteristics significantly affect users' abilities to compose accurate queries. Neuroticism, agreeableness, openness to experience, and conscientiousness significantly affected the number of errors made in the query formulations. Conscientiousness affected the length of time taken to compose the queries and neuroticism affected the confidence users had in the accuracy of their queries. Although several personality dimensions affected query performance, no significant interactions between personality dimensions and ambiguity were detected. Furthermore, both query complexity and information request ambiguity exhibited greater impacts on query performance than personality characteristics. Hence, organizations should attempt to train users to deal with query complexity and information request ambiguity before modifying their training programs for personality characteristics

Motor-Driven Bacterial Flagella and Buckling Instabilities

Many types of bacteria swim by rotating a bundle of helical filaments also called flagella. Each filament is driven by a rotary motor and a very flexible hook transmits the motor torque to the filament. We model it by discretizing Kirchhoff's elastic-rod theory and develop a coarse-grained approach for driving the helical filament by a motor torque. A rotating flagellum generates a thrust force, which pushes the cell body forward and which increases with the motor torque. We fix the rotating flagellum in space and show that it buckles under the thrust force at a critical motor torque. Buckling becomes visible as a supercritical Hopf bifurcation in the thrust force. A second buckling transition occurs at an even higher motor torque. We attach the flagellum to a spherical cell body and also observe the first buckling transition during locomotion. By changing the size of the cell body, we vary the necessary thrust force and thereby obtain a characteristic relation between the critical thrust force and motor torque. We present a sophisticated analytical model for the buckling transition based on a helical rod which quantitatively reproduces the critical force-torque relation. Real values for motor torque, cell body size, and the geometry of the helical filament suggest that buckling should occur in single bacterial flagella. We also find that the orientation of pulling flagella along the driving torque is not stable and comment on the biological relevance for marine bacteria.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figure

Intracellular Serotonin Modulates Insulin Secretion from Pancreatic β-Cells by Protein Serotonylation

Non-neuronal, peripheral serotonin deficiency causes diabetes mellitus and identifies an intracellular role for serotonin in the regulation of insulin secretion

Towards the automated localisation of targets in rapid image-sifting by collaborative brain-computer interfaces

The N2pc is a lateralised Event-Related Potential (ERP) that signals a shift of attention towards the location of a potential object of interest. We propose a single-trial target-localisation collaborative Brain-Computer Interface (cBCI) that exploits this ERP to automatically approximate the horizontal position of targets in aerial images. Images were presented by means of the rapid serial visual presentation technique at rates of 5, 6 and 10 Hz. We created three different cBCIs and tested a participant selection method in which groups are formed according to the similarity of participants’ performance. The N2pc that is elicited in our experiments contains information about the position of the target along the horizontal axis. Moreover, combining information from multiple participants provides absolute median improvements in the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of up to 21% (for groups of size 3) with respect to single-user BCIs. These improvements are bigger when groups are formed by participants with similar individual performance, and much of this effect can be explained using simple theoretical models. Our results suggest that BCIs for automated triaging can be improved by integrating two classification systems: one devoted to target detection and another to detect the attentional shifts associated with lateral targets

Stripping the Boss : The Powerful Role of Humor in the Egyptian Revolution 2011

The Egyptian Revolution 2011 has shaken the Arab world and stirred up Middle-East politics. Moreover, it caused a rush in political science and the neighboring disciplines, which had not predicted an event like this and now have troubles explaining it. While many things can be learned from the popular uprising, and from the limitations of previous scholarship, our focus will be on a moral resource, which has occasionally been noticed, but not sufficiently explored: the role of humor in keeping up the spirit of the Revolution. For eighteen days, protestors persevered at Liberation Square in Central Cairo, the epicenter of resistance; at times a few dozens, at times hundreds of thousands. What they did was to fight the terror of the regime, which reached absurd peaks during those days, with humor – successfully. We offer a social-functionalist account of the uprising, which includes behavioral as well as cultural levels of analysis, and illuminates how humorous means helped to achieve deadly serious goals. By reconstructing how Egyptians laughed themselves into democracy, we outline a social psychology of resistance, which uses humor both as a sword and a shield.Peer reviewe

The impacts of IT capability and marketing capability on supply chain integration: A resource-based perspective

Although previous research has addressed the interface and logical association among marketing, information technology (IT) and supply chain management, there have been few, if any, attempts to investigate how IT capability and marketing capability influence supply chain integration (SCI). Thus, this study investigates the direct and interacting effects of IT capability and marketing capability on SCI. The hypothesised relationships were tested using survey data gathered from 329 firms in China’s manufacturing industry. The results reveal that both IT capability and marketing capability have a significant positive effect on SCI. Interestingly, no significant interaction effect was found, indicating that marketing IT capability and marketing capability influence SCI independently, and not synergistically. However, while IT capability and marketing capability do not interact, IT capability does mediate the impact of marketing capability on SCI