Lessons from a new science? : on teaching happiness in schools

Recent media reports about new programmes for 'happiness lessons' in schools signal a welcome concern with children's well-being. However, as I shall argue, the presuppositions of the discourse in which many of these proposals are framed, and their orientation towards particular strands of positive psychology, involve ideas about human life that are, in an important sense, anti-educational. © 2008 Journal of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain

E-democracy and values in information systems design

In this paper I demonstrate the utility of a Values in Design (VID) perspective for the assessment, the design and development of e-democracy tools. In the first part, I give some background information on Values in Design and Value-Sensitive Design and their relevance in the context of e-democracy. In part 2, I analyze three different e-democracy tools from a VID-perspective. The paper ends with some conclusions concerning the merits of VID for e-democracy as well as some considerations concerning the dual tasks of philosophers in assessing and promoting value-sensitive technology design

A Progress Report on the Caltech Faint Galaxy Redshift Survey

I review recent progress on determining the spectral energy distributions and luminosity functions for galaxies in the large magnitude limited sample in the region of the HDF-North of the Caltech Faint Galaxy Redshift Survey.Comment: Invited contribution to Deep Fields meeting, Munich, Oct 2000, to be published by Springer Verlag, ESO Astrophysics Symposia Series, reformatted to use AASTex macros. 8 pages with 4 figure

Comment on Article by Berger, Bernardo, and Sun

Discussion of Overall Objective Priors by James O. Berger, Jose M. Bernardo, Dongchu Sun [arXiv:1504.02689].Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/14-BA937 in the Bayesian Analysis (http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ba) by the International Society of Bayesian Analysis (http://bayesian.org/

Theory and practice in the induction of five graduate nurses : a reflexive critique : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Education at Massey University

This thesis investigates the induction of comprehensive nurses into a professional culture during their polytechnic nursing education and first year of hospital practice. It combines a critical theory approach with case study method. The ways in which social forces constrain individual and professional action are demonstrated through a critical reflexive analysis of the perceptions of five recently graduated comprehensive nurses. Each graduate was interviewed at regular intervals over a three month period. It is argued that previous studies of professional socialisation of nurses conducted within both empirico-analytic and interpretive epistemologies, have tended to objectify the day-to-day actions that students and new graduates take. While providing descriptions of the socialisation process, previous studies have not explored the reflexivity of understanding and action as well as the structural constraints of nursing education and practice. In this thesis critical social theory provides a framework in which to reveal, through empirical research, the constraining conditions of actions, and, through interpretive forms of enquiry, human perception and understanding. The reflections of the five participants in this study reveal that there are similar structural constraints in education as in hospital based nursing practice. There is, in effect, a continuity of structural constraints and this is contrasted with a disjunction between knowledge and beliefs gained through education and those apparently required in nursing practice. The graduates' perceptions are discussed and interpreted in terms of both the intended and the unintended learning states engendered by their actual experiences in the polytechnic and hospital settings. It is suggested that, at present, nursing education and practice are shaped by forms of technical control which arise from the dominant ideologies already embedded in the education and health care structures. In particular, nursing curricula are dominated by the technical linear paradigm of curri­culum design which contributes to a distorted separation of theory and practice and which obscures the process of reproduction of professional culture. It is argued that a more socially critical approach to the design of nursing curricula might begin to transform some of the structures which presently inhibit and constrain the professional choices and actions of student and graduate nurses

"Hard to know what to do": how residential workers experience the mental health needs of young people

This paper aimed to describe the experiences and perspectives of residential child care practitioners in dealing with the mental health difficulties of the children for whom they are responsible and to compare their experience with that of other professionals. it draws on the findings of the Scottish Needs Assessment Programme (SNAP) which surveyed a wide range of professionals who worked regularly with young people but whose main focus of work was not mental health. This article focuses on the findings from questionnaires sent out to 289 residential workers in Scotland. Replies were received from 104 staff, giving a 36 percent response rate. Residential workers were asked about their most recent experience of working with a child or young person with mental health, emotional or behavioural problems, the most worrying case they had worked with in the last three years and the case that had given them the most satisfaction in the same timescale