The Millennium Development Goals: How realistic are they?

Poverty reduction, Hunger, Lagging regions, Social innovation, United Nations, MDGs, Investment needs, infrastructure, health,

‘Play Ground’ An Art Approach to Working in an Aboriginal Community School

This article reflects on an art approach referred to as ‘Play Ground’ that evolved over six years in four Aboriginal pre-schools in regional NSW, Australia. It focuses on one of the pre-schools and proposes a culturally sensitive, collaborative play space that allows for individual and group expression within the safety of the art therapy setting, reaching beyond the work with the children, including teachers, families, and Community.  Art therapy theory and processes, my art practice, and a reflective psychodynamic orientation guided my thinking and helped in navigating uncertain terrain and in understanding the continuing traumatic social framework of this school and community in the aftermath of colonisation. Western psychological knowledges offer a way of understanding the work, however, the author embarks on an ongoing search for a meeting place and point of exchange and learning in the intercultural space, within the socio-historical context of this Aboriginal Community School. Winnicott’s idea of ‘potential space’ (1971), as an intermediate area of experiencing, is embedded in Play Ground but also brought alive in the encounters and knowledge sharing between cultures - in the classroom, the staffroom, ‘under a tree’ - and may offer a between-worlds area of reverie and place of meeting.  Keywords: Aboriginal, intercultural, trauma, clay, play, uncertaint

International Trade Policies in Models of Barter Exchange

This paper is the third in a series on the linkage of national models of food and agriculture. International agreements are discussed in which given levels of world market prices are aimed at. Buffer stock agreement, various compensatory financing schemes and specific types of cartels are represented in general equilibrium models of barter exchange

Formulation and Spatial Aggregation of Agricultural Production Relationships within the Land Use Change (LUC) Model

Land Use Change (LUC) Project at IIASA in which the Centre for World Food Studies participates, is currently engaged in the development of a case study for China (Fischer et al., 1996). Its focus on land use and land cover change makes it necessary to ensure that geographic detail and statistical information on conditions prevailing within these regions be preserved to the extent possible. This raises two issues that are addressed in this paper. First, while it is not practical to formulate a regional optimization model with a very large number of sub-regions, over two thousand in the case of China, one would like to avoid the loss of information associated with aggregation. For a generalized version of the Mitscherlich-Baule yield function that is commonly used in agronomy the paper describes a consistent aggregation procedure over sub-regions, which leads to simple aggregate functions at regional level, but has the special property that, once the regional model has been solved, all results can be recovered fully at sub-regional level. Secondly, agronomy studies commonly use yield functions in which the per hectare yield of a particular crop depends on inputs per hectare. Unfortunately, in the case of China, as for most countries, input use is not available by crop and only recorded for a particular geographical unit. The paper proposes a more crude formulation whose parameters, however, can be estimated by cross-section on the basis of available data

On the normativity of semantic norms and intentions

2013 Summer.Includes bibliographical references.This thesis clarifies the assumption that meaning is normative and defends this assumption from recent criticism by Anandi Hattiangadi and Akeel Bilgrami. Against Hattiangadi, I argue that the paradigmatic examples of moral and semantic obligations are strictly-speaking more like 'limit' hypotheticals in that having an obligation is contingent on some conditions, but these conditions are quite different than that those of the typical examples of means-end hypotheticals. I argue that the conditions relevant to limit hypotheticals are widely-satisfied by constitutive facts about beings with certain rational and linguistic competence like us. The 'limitation' is that being this kind of thing isn't something one chooses, but is a constitutive for what one is. Against Bilgrami, I argue that a meaning intention is a normative state of commitment. Having a meaning intention means that one is prepared to speak and being prepared to speak is something one must live up to by having and maintaining a plan. I argue that part of this plan is to make some minimal effort to be interpretable to others