‘It's All a Bit Pantomime’: An Exploratory Study of Gay and Lesbian Adopters and Foster-Carers in England and Wales

This paper reports the findings of a study identifying the experiences of gay and lesbian adopters and foster-carers in England and Wales. Qualitative interviews were conducted with twenty-four lesbians and gay men who had undertaken any part of the adoption or fostering application process since the implementation of the Adoption and Children Act of 2002. The study suggests that, whilst increasing numbers of lesbians and gay men are accessing fostering and adoption services, gender and sexuality are still problematic areas of contestation within this context. As a result, participants were required to present themselves to assessing professionals in distinct ways, in order to be recognised as ‘legitimate’ in their applications. Using the concept of ‘displaying family’, this paper illustrates the ways in which sexuality can complicate such displays, as they fall outside prevailing cultural and familial scripts. However, taking an intersectional perspective, this paper will also demonstrate that this was dependent upon the complex subjectivities of each participant. Finally, it will analyse what this means for the assessment of gay and lesbian adopters and foster-carers, and how social workers can respond to both individual identities and diverse family forms

21st Century Learners: Changing Conceptions of Knowledge, Learning and the Child

The term ‘21st century learner’ emerged at the turn of the millennium and evoked a certain type of certain type of digitally‐agile and self‐driven learner. These ideas about 21st century learners have been widely and uncritically adopted in New Zealand policies and practices in recent years. This paper examines the origins and substance of this term against the backdrop of globalisation and Knowledge Economy discourses and emerging ideas of ‘digital natives’. It considers the implications of these ideas on conceptualisations of the child, the development of deep learning, the impact on relationships between adults/teachers and students and on social equity. It concludes by suggesting that the term 21st century learner needs onâ€going critique if we want critical, informed citizens in our democracy.   &nbsp

Spatial aspects of the design and targeting of agricultural development strategies:

Two increasingly shared perspectives within the international development community are that (a) geography matters, and (b) many government interventions would be more successful if they were better targeted. This paper unites these two notions by exploring the opportunities for, and benefits of, bringing an explicitly spatial dimension to the tasks of formulating and evaluating agricultural development strategies. We first review the lingua franca of land fragility and find it lacking in its capacity to describe the dynamic interface between the biophysical and socioeconomic factors that help shape rural development options. Subsequently, we propose a two-phased approach. First, development strategy options are characterized to identify the desirable ranges of conditions that would most favor successful strategy implementation. Second, those conditions exhibiting important spatial dependency – such as agricultural potential, population density, and access to infrastructure and markets – are matched against a similarly characterized, spatially-referenced (GIS) database. This process generates both spatial (map) and tabular representations of strategy-specific development domains. An important benefit of a spatial (GIS) framework is that it provides a powerful means of organizing and integrating a very diverse range of disciplinary and data inputs. At a more conceptual level we propose that it is the characterization of location, not the narrowly-focused characterization of land, that is more properly the focus of attention from a development perspective. The paper includes appropriate examples of spatial analysis using data from East Africa and Burkina Faso, and concludes with an appendix describing and interpreting regional climate and soil data for Sub-Saharan Africa that was directly relevant to our original goal.Spatial analysis (Statistics), Agricultural development., Burkina Faso., Africa, Sub-Saharan.,

The Case for Medium-Sized Regional Data Centres

Cloud computing is widely associated with majorcapital investment in mega data centres, housing expensive bladeservers and storage area networks. In this paper we argue that amodular approach to building local or regional data centres usingcommodity hardware and open source hardware can produce acost effective solution that better addresses the goals of cloudcomputing, and provides a scalable architecture that meets theservice requirements of a high quality data centre.In support of this goal, we provide data that supports threeresearch hypotheses:1. that central processor unit (CPU) resources are notnormally limiting;2. that disk I/O transactions (TPS) are more oftenlimiting, but this can be mitigated by maximizing theTPS-CPU ratio;3. that customer CPU loads are generally static andsmall.Our results indicate that the modular, commodity hardwarebased architecture is near optimal. This is a very significantresult, as it opens the door to alternative business models for theprovision of data centres that significantly reduce the need formajor up-front capital investment