The ambiguities of empowerment : a deconstructive approach to the adult education work of Edward Roux in the 1930s and 1940s and its implications for present conceptions of learner materials for adult basic education and training (ABET)

Bibliography: p. 173-182.This research is an attempt to understand the ambiguities of empowerment inherent in transactions between educators and adult learners studying at a basic level. Through analysing the case study of Edward Roux's text-based adult education intervention for Africans in South Africa in the 1940's, some conclusions on the resultant power arrangements were drawn. These interpretive conclusions were applied comparatively to a set of adult basic education texts in use in South Africa in the 1990's. The research addressed itself to selected biographical events from Roux's life, as well as to a set of theoretical texts written by Roux about adult education and a set of pamphlets called The Sixpenny Library, intended for mass distribution to adult readers. The texts were analysed using a postmodern discourse analysis methodology. Having identified five recurrent discursive formations in the texts, it was proposed that these discourses could be intertextually read as constituting an individualised construction by Roux of the Enlightenment meta-narrative. The genealogy of the meta-narrative was analysed, the subjectification of the adult learners was asserted and an interpretation of the arrangements of power within the educational transaction was proposed. The primary findings were made on the basis of the case study: it was concluded that Roux was committed to the Enlightenment ideal which he constructed in terms of Western educational and cultural norms. By conflating education with social remediation and rationalism, he proposed that education in its own right had socially . redemptive power and that it would even result in equality. The potential impact of the intervention in subjectifying adult learners and their resultant disempowerment was analysed and some general trends were noted. Roux's intervention suggested a deep but unrealistic conviction that the acquisition of knowledge had the potential to alleviate the social deprivations that Africans suffered under conditions of post-colonial racial capitalism. Unconsciously Roux conflated the promise of empowerment with the acquisition of a set of basically Western rationalist cultural values and beliefs, without recognising the identity which he constructed for the educator and the attendant disempowerment which the learners may have experienced. The secondary stage of the research comprised the application of the claims identified in Roux's case study to three comparable genres of Adult Basic Education and Training texts of the 1990's; the presence of similar assumptions in these transactions was assessed and continuities and changes were identified. Some general conclusions were drawn regarding the nature of adult education transactions and the potential for a postmodern consciousness to alter the arrangements of power within educational transactions for adults was discussed. The limitations of the study in terms of learner responses was acknowledged and avenues for further research were identified. An attempt was made to bring into focus some of the uncertainties operative at a global level within adult education, while addressing issues of power between educator and learner in the field of basic adult education in South Africa

The formation of helium lines in the spectrum of COM J1740-5340

The He I 5876A absorption line recently discovered in the spectrum of the companion to the millisecond pulsar PSR J1740-5340 is tentatively attributed to electron impact excitations due to the irradiation of its atmosphere by gamma-rays emitted by the pulsar's magnetosphere. Numerical calculations, similar to those carried out previously for Type Ib SNe, indicate that a pulsar beam with photon energies ~ 1 MeV gives rise to a 5876A line of the observed strength if the beam's spin-down conversion efficiency approaches 1%. However, a significant difficulty for the proposed mechanism is the strength of the singlet line at 6678A. Compared to the corresponding triplets, singlet lines are weak because of the loss of excitation when photons emitted in decays to the ground state ionize hydrogen atoms, an effect absent in the hydrogen-free atmospheres of Type Ib SNe.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&

Representatives of similarity classes of matrices over PIDs corresponding to ideal classes

For a principal ideal domain A, the Latimer–MacDuffee correspondence sets up a bijection between the similarity classes of matrices in Mn(A) with irreducible characteristic polynomial f(x) and the ideal classes of the order A[x]/(f(x)). We prove that when A[x]/(f(x)) is maximal (i.e. integrally closed, i.e. a Dedekind domain), then every similarity class contains a representative that is, in a sense, close to being a companion matrix. The first step in the proof is to show that any similarity class corresponding to an ideal (not necessarily prime) of degree one contains a representative of the desired form. The second step is a previously unpublished result due to Lenstra that implies that when A[x]/(f(x)) is maximal, every ideal class contains an ideal of degree one

Representations of twisted q-Yangians

The twisted q-Yangians are coideal subalgebras of the quantum affine algebra associated with gl(N). We prove a classification theorem for finite-dimensional irreducible representations of the twisted q-Yangians associated with the symplectic Lie algebras sp(2n). The representations are parameterized by their highest weights or by their Drinfeld polynomials. In the simplest case of sp(2) we give an explicit description of all the representations as tensor products of evaluation modules. We prove analogues of the Poincare-Birkhoff-Witt theorem for the quantum affine algebra and for the twisted q-Yangians. We also reproduce a proof of the classification theorem for finite-dimensional irreducible representations of the quantum affine algebra by relying on its R-matrix presentation.Comment: 60 pages, minor corrections are made, references are adde

Identification and characterisation of 17 polymorphic candidate genes for response to parasitic nematode (Trichostrongylus tenuis) infection in red grouse (Lagopus lagopus scotica)

Acknowledgements This study was funded by a BBSRC studentship (MA Wenzel) and NERC Grants NE/H00775X/1 and NE/D000602/1 (SB Piertney). We are grateful to Jacob Hoglund for providing willow grouse samples, Mario Roder, Keliya Bai, Marianne James, Matt Oliver, Gill Murray-Dickson, Francois Mougeot and Jesus Martınez-Padilla for help with fieldwork, and all grouse estate factors, owners and keepers, most particularly Alistair Mitchell, Shaila Rao, Christopher Murphy, Richard Cooke and Fred Taylor, for providing access to estate game larders.Peer reviewedPostprin

A Spatial Approach to Surveying Crime‐problematic Areas at the Street Level

Ponencias, comunicaciones y pósters presentados en el 17th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science "Connecting a Digital Europe through Location and Place", celebrado en la Universitat Jaume I del 3 al 6 de junio de 2014.Reaching far beyond the realm of geography and its related disciplines, spatial analysis and visualization tools now actively support the decision-making processes of law enforcement agencies. Interactive mapping of crime outperforms the previously manual and laborious querying of crime databases. Using burglary and robbery events reported in the urban city of Manchester, England, we illustrate the utility of graphical methods for interactive analysis and visualization of event data. These novel surveillance techniques provide insight into offending characteristics and changes in the offending process in ways that cannot be replicated by traditional crime investigative methods. We present a step-wise methodology for computing the intensity of aggregated crime events which can potentially accelerate law enforcers’ decision making processes by mapping concentrations of crime in near real time

Is Pupil Attainment Higher in Well-managed Schools?

Linking the Workplace Employment Relations Surveys 2004 and 2011 to administrative data on pupil attainment in England we examine whether secondary and primary schools who deploy more intensive human resource management (HRM) practices have higher pupil attainment. We find intensive use of HRM practices is positively and significantly correlated with higher labour productivity and quality of provision, and with better financial performance, most notably in primary schools, but it is not associated with higher pupil attainment as indicated by assessment scores at Key Stage 2, Key Stage 4 and value-added measures based on assessments at these points

Gordon Valentine Manley and his contribution to the study of climate change: a review of his life and work

British climatologist and geographer, Gordon Manley (1902–1980), is perhaps best known for his pioneering work on climate variability in the UK, for establishing the Central England Temperature series and, for his pivotal role in demonstrating the powerful relationship between climate, weather, and culture in post-World War II Britain. Yet Manley made many contributions, both professional and popular, to climate change debates in the twentieth century, where climate change is broadly understood to be changes over a range of temporal and spatial scales rather than anthropogenic warming per se. This review first establishes how Manley's work, including that on snow and ice, was influenced by key figures in debates over climatic amelioration around the North Atlantic between 1920s and 1950s. His research exploring historical climate variability in the UK using documentary sources is then discussed. His perspectives on the relationship between climate changes and cultural history are reviewed, paying particular attention to his interpretation of this relationship as it played out in the UK. Throughout, the review aims to show Manley to be a fieldworker and an empiricist and reveals how he remained committed to rigorous scientific investigation despite changing trends within his academic discipline