What Do Executive Factors Contribute to the Failure on False Belief Tasks by Children with Autism?

As children with autism have pervasive executive difficulties it is necessary to determine whether these contribute to their often-reported failure on the false belief task. Failure on this task is frequently taken to diagnose the lack of a ``theory of mind''. We report two studies using two tasks that make similar executive demands to the false belief task. The first experiment showed that children with autism are significantly challenged by a "conflicting desire" task, which suggests that their difficulty with the false belief task is not rooted in difficulty with grasping the representational nature of belief. In the second study children with autism were also found to be impaired on a novel version of the "false photograph task". A parsimonious reading of these data is that their difficulty with all three tasks is due to commonalities in the tasks' executive structure

The Euro Area Crisis Management Framework – Consequences and Institutional Follow-Ups

The current instruments in the EU to deal with debt and liquidity crises include among others the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) and the European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism (EFSM). Both are temporary in nature (3 years). In terms of an efficient future crisis management framework one has to ask what follows after the EFSF and the EFSM expire in 3 years time. In this vein, this briefing paper addresses the question of the political and economic medium-to long-term consequences of the recent decisions. Moreover, we assess what needs to be done using this window of opportunity of the coming 3 years. Which institutions need to be formalized, into what format, in order to achieve a coherent whole structure? This briefing paper presents and evaluates alternatives as regards the on-going debate on establishing permanent instruments to support the stability of the euro. Among them are the enhancement of the effectiveness of the Stability and Growth Pact combined with the introduction of a European semester and a macroeconomic surveillance and crisis mechanism, fiscal limits hard-coded into each country's legislation in the form of automatic, binding and unchangeable rules and, as the preferred solution, the European Monetary Fund

Towards an ethical ecology of international service learning

International Service-Learning (ISL) is a pedagogical activity that seeks to blend student learning with community engagement overseas and the development of a more just society. ISL programmes have grown as educational institutions and non-governmental organisations have sought to achieve the goal of developing ‘global citizens’. However, Service Learning (SL) in general and International Service-Learning (ISL) in particular remain deeply under theorised. These educational initiatives provide policy makers with a practical response to their quest for a ‘Big Society’and present alluring pedagogical approaches for Universities as they react to reforms in Higher Education and seek to enhance both the student learning experience and graduate employability. After outlining the development of ISL in policy and practice, this paper draws on the rich tradition of ISL at one British university to argue that ISL is a form of engagement that has the potential to be ethical in character although we identify a number of factors that militate against this. Our contention is that ISL which promotes rationaland instrumental learning represents a deficit model and we therefore conceptualise ISL here as a transformative learning experience that evinces distinctly aesthetic and even spiritual dimensions. Upon this theoretical groundwork we lay the foundations for conceptualizing ISL in ways that ensure its ethical integrity

Diversity in collaborative research communities: a multicultural, multidisciplinary thesis writing group in public health

Writing groups for doctoral students are generally agreed to provide valuable learning spaces for Ph.D. candidates. Here an academic developer and the eight members of a writing group formed in a Discipline of Public Health provide an account of their experiences of collaborating in a multicultural, multidisciplinary thesis writing group. We consider the benefits of belonging to such a group for Ph.D. students who are operating in a research climate in which disciplinary boundaries are blurring and where an increasing number of doctoral projects are interdisciplinary in nature; in which both academic staff and students come from enormously diverse cultural and language backgrounds; and in which teamwork, networking and collaboration are prized but not always proactively facilitated. We argue that doctoral writing groups comprising students from diverse cultural and disciplinary backgrounds can be of significant value for postgraduates who wish to collaborate on their own academic development to improve their research writing and communication skills; at the same time, such collaborative work effectively builds an inclusive, dynamic research community.Cally Guerin, Vicki Xafis, Diana V. Doda, Marianne H. Gillam, Allison J. Larg, Helene Luckner, Nasreen Jahan, Aris Widayati and Chuangzhou X

Million revolution accelerator beam instrument for logging and evaluation

A data acquisition and analysis instrument for the processing of accelerator beam position monitor (BPM) signals has been assembled and used preliminarily for beam diagnosis of the Fermilab accelerators. Up to eight BPM (or other analogue) channels are digitized and transmitted to an acquisition Sun workstation and from there both to a monitor workstation and a workstation for off-line (but immediate) data analysis. A coherent data description format permits fast data object transfers to and from memory, disk and tape, across the Sun ethernet. This has helped the development of both general purpose and experiment-specific data analysis, presentation and control tools. Flexible software permits immediate graphical display in both time and frequency domains. The instrument acts simultaneously as a digital oscilloscope, as a network analyzer and as a correlating, noise-reducing spectrum analyzer. 2 refs., 3 figs