11,370 research outputs found
What does engagement look like in a Media Studies classroom?
In wider discourses about teaching and learning, āengagementā has become something of a contested term, with teachers and educationalists often arguing about what being engaged in education actually involves. This contestation is compounded in media education, because the teacher has to deal with multiple conceptions of audience and, as a consequence, multiple meanings of the term engagement. In this essay, these conceptions and meanings are explored using some primary data taken from surveys of students and teachers from A-Level Media Studies classes, who were asked about both their engagement with the texts they taught and studied on the course, and their engagement with the wider critical study of media texts. The analysis of the data shows varying types and levels of engagement, some of which are personal, some educational and some academically critical. The authors seek to categorise these āengagement eventsā in different ways and highlight the idea that engagement in the study of media texts is very different to other types of audience engagement
Long Term Wind-Driven X-Ray Spectral Variability of NGC 1365 with Swift
We present long-term (months-years) X-ray spectral variability of the Seyfert
1.8 galaxy NGC 1365 as observed by Swift, which provides well sampled
observations over a much longer timescale (6 years) and a much larger flux
range than is afforded by other observatories. At very low luminosities the
spectrum is very soft, becoming rapidly harder as the luminosity increases and
then, above a particular luminosity, softening again. At a given flux level,
the scatter in hardness ratio is not very large, meaning that the spectral
shape is largely determined by the luminosity. The spectra were therefore
summed in luminosity bins and fitted with a variety of models. The best fitting
model consists of two power laws, one unabsorbed and another, more luminous,
which is absorbed. In this model, we find a range of intrinsic 0.5-10.0 keV
luminosities of approximately 1.1-3.5 ergs/s, and a very large range of
absorbing columns, of approximately 10^22 - 10^24 cm^-2. Interestingly, we find
that the absorbing column decreases with increasing luminosity, but that this
result is not due to changes in ionisation. We suggest that these observations
might be interpreted in terms of a wind model in which the launch radius varies
as a function of ionising flux and disc temperature and therefore moves out
with increasing accretion rate, i.e. increasing X-ray luminosity. Thus,
depending on the inclination angle of the disc relative to the observer, the
absorbing column may decrease as the accretion rate goes up. The weaker,
unabsorbed, component may be a scattered component from the wind.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices
of the Royal Astronomical Societ
Long-Term X-ray Spectral Variability of Seyfert Galaxies with Swift
We present analysis of the long-term X-ray spectral variability of Seyfert
galaxies as observed by Swift, which provides well-sampled observations over a
much larger flux range and a much longer timescale than any other X-ray
observatory. We examine long-term variability of three AGN: NGC 1365 (see
Connolly et al. 2014), Mkn 335 and NGC 5548. At high fluxes, the 0.5-10 keV
spectra soften with increasing flux, as seen previously within the 2-10 keV
band. However, at very low fluxes the sources also become very soft. We have
fitted a number of models to the data and find that both intrinsic luminosity
variability and variable absorption are required to explain the observations.
In some systems, e.g. NGC 1365, the best explanation is a two-component wind
model in which one component represents direct emission absorbed by a disc wind
wind, with the absorbing column inversely proportional to the intrinsic
luminosity, and the second component represents unabsorbed emission reflected
from the wind. In other AGN the situation is more complex.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figues, to appear in "Swift: 10 years of discovery",
Proceedings of Scienc
Management of adrenal insufficiency risk after long-term systemic glucocorticoid therapy in Duchenne muscular dystrophy: Clinical practice recommendations
A Bayesian Approach to Comparing Cosmic Ray Energy Spectra
A common problem in ultra-high energy cosmic ray physics is the comparison of
energy spectra. The question is whether the spectra from two experiments or two
regions of the sky agree within their statistical and systematic uncertainties.
We develop a method to directly compare energy spectra for ultra-high energy
cosmic rays from two different regions of the sky in the same experiment
without reliance on agreement with a theoretical model of the energy spectra.
The consistency between the two spectra is expressed in terms of a Bayes
factor, defined here as the ratio of the likelihood of the two-parent source
hypothesis to the likelihood of the one-parent source hypothesis. Unlike other
methods, for example chi^2 tests, the Bayes factor allows for the calculation
of the posterior odds ratio and correctly accounts for non-Gaussian
uncertainties. The latter is particularly important at the highest energies,
where the number of events is very small.Comment: 22 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in Ap
Media literacy, curriculum and the rights of the child
Engaging with digital media is part of everyday living for the majority of children, yet opportunities to learn about, through and with media are denied many pupils in compulsory schooling. Whilst Media Studies in the UK is internationally reputed to be well established, changes made to the primary and secondary national curriculum in 2014 included removal of existing media study elements. We demonstrate what is lost by these actions in relation to the United Nations Rights of the Child and, in particular, the right of the child to express identity. We demonstrate how media literacy had previously been included in curriculum, enabling opportunities to address childrenās rights, and propose that the absence of media education is part of an overall trend of the non-prioritisation of childrenās rights in England and Northern Ireland. The paper calls for media literacy to be reintroduced into primary and secondary curriculum
Who are Non-Resident Fathers?: A British Socio-Demographic Profile
Despite international growth of, and policy interest in, divorce and separation since the 1970s, there is still surprisingly little known about non-residential fatherhood. This paper presents a 'father-centric' analysis and provides one of the first profiles of non-residential fatherhood in early millennium UK. Using data from Understanding Society Wave 1, a nationally representative survey of over 30,000 households in the UK, we found 1,070 men self-identifying as having a non-resident child under 16 years old (https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk). We estimate a prevalence of 5 per cent of British men having a non-resident dependent child. Through latent class analysis, four distinct groups of non-resident fathers are identified: 'Engaged' fathers, 'Less Engaged' fathers, 'Disengaged' fathers and 'Distance' fathers. Our analysis finds that non-resident fathers form a heterogeneous group in terms of their socio-demographic profile and family behaviour. It is recommended that legislation and policy concerning fathers in post-separation families are sensitive to variation as well as commonality in socio-economic conditions and family lives and situations
Britain's slow movement to a Gender Egalitarian Equilibrium: Parents and Employment in the UK 2001 - 2013
This paper examines the working lives of British couple families across the first decade of the
millennium using EU Labour Force Survey data (2001-2013) taking a multiple equilibria approach
(Esping-Andersen and Billari, 2015). We identify a growth in dual full-time earners, increased
working hours of mothers in part-time employment and a growing proportion of households with
ānon-standardā working patterns, suggesting both a convergence and greater diversity in economic
provisioning within parent couple households. We find that household employment patterns remain
strongly associated with maternal education and family size but are becoming less sensitive to the
age of youngest child. The dual full-time earner model is growing in significance for British parents
of young children but a new gender egalitarian equilibrium has not yet been reached
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