Never mind the quality, take a seat!

This paper considers whether lecturers delivering Business Higher Education Programmes (BHEPs) in Further Education Colleges (FECs) in the UK see education to be a production industry, or a knowledge industry. It will consider the effects of managerialism and marketisation that the UK government (and others around the world), are applying to the education sector, and their possible effects. The study considers the narratives of twenty-six lecturers delivering BHEPs in FECs in relation to government intervention, and the impacts it may be having on their role as a lecturer. The research highlights that there may be a great deal of frustration and angst amongst these lecturers, and from this, suggests that colleges may be behaving more like production factories, rather than institutions of further and higher education

Is subjective duration a signature of coding efficiency?

Perceived duration is conventionally assumed to correspond with objective duration, but a growing literature suggests a more complex picture. For example, repeated stimuli appear briefer in duration than a novel stimulus of equal physical duration. We suggest that such duration illusions appear to parallel the neural phenomenon of repetition suppression, and we marshal evidence for a new hypothesis: the experience of duration is a signature of the amount of energy expended in representing a stimulus, i.e. the coding efficiency. This novel hypothesis offers a unified explanation for almost a dozen illusions in the literature in which subjective duration is modulated by properties of the stimulus such as size, brightness, motion and rate of flicker