Entrepreneurship in the northern region

Entrepreneurship in the Northern Region. There has been a tendency to ignore the role of the entrepreneur in regional development. An examination of economic literature indicated that he performed functions essential to the efficient use of resources and to technological advance, while relying heavily on information for knowledge on which to act. In carrying out such functions the entrepreneur was central to the whole of economic activity in the production of goods and services and in economic change. Consideration of growth and location theories did not alter these conclusions. Regional data on indicators of entrepreneurship led to the conclusion that in recent years indigenous entrepreneurship has been relatively low. This situation was in contrast to that existing in the 19th. Century when the Northern Region was a leading industrial centre of the world. An investigation of growth in the Region traced the rise of the major industries in the 19th century and their subsequent decline in the 20th century. The development of the large industries led to particular forms of organisation, marketing and geographic isolation for many firms and workers. The result was that for many, experiences were limited and information flows restricted. When shifts in demand came in the 20th century from heavy capital goods to lighter consumer goods, entrepreneurs in the North were unable to bring about the industrial changes necessary to rejuvenation of the region. Government action was needed with mobile plants becoming the corner-stone of regional policy in employment terms. The signs of long-term self-sustained growth were not so encouraging. With real constraints on the supply of mobile plants in the future the Region will have to rely more heavily on its present resources of industry and entrepreneurship to promote further economic growth than it has done in the past

Evaluating Matrix Functions by Resummations on Graphs: the Method of Path-Sums

We introduce the method of path-sums which is a tool for exactly evaluating a function of a discrete matrix with possibly non-commuting entries, based on the closed-form resummation of infinite families of terms in the corresponding Taylor series. If the matrix is finite, our approach yields the exact result in a finite number of steps. We achieve this by combining a mapping between matrix powers and walks on a weighted directed graph with a universal graph-theoretic result on the structure of such walks. We present path-sum expressions for a matrix raised to a complex power, the matrix exponential, matrix inverse, and matrix logarithm. We show that the quasideterminants of a matrix can be naturally formulated in terms of a path-sum, and present examples of the application of the path-sum method. We show that obtaining the inversion height of a matrix inverse and of quasideterminants is an NP-complete problem.Comment: 23 pages, light version submitted to SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications (SIMAX). A separate paper with the graph theoretic results is available at: arXiv:1202.5523v1. Results for matrices over division rings will be published separately as wel

Halliday’s View of Child Language Learning: Has it been Misinterpreted?

This paper gives a brief summary of Halliday’s theory of how children learn to talk, illustrating the development of children’s language from the microfunctions through the macrofunctions and into the metafunctions of adult language. The paper points to a possible source of the misinterpretation of Halliday’s theory in the work of Frank Smith (1983), which appears to have “trickled down” into some of the textbooks written for pre-service teachers in Australia. Links are made to teachers’ knowledge about language (KAL) and the current Australian Curriculum English (ACE). It is suggested that while any number of functions of the language of school-aged children may be described, it is perhaps misleading to refer to the microfunctions as “Halliday’s functions”

Magic and the material culture of healing in early modern England

This dissertation questions how people used objects to preserve health and cure illness in early modern England. Each chapter focuses on a different object or group of objects, to make interventions in the history of contemporary healing, and to demonstrate what we can learn about early modern healing from a study that places things at the centre. I bring together items that vary according to material, size, shape, function and application, to reveal the diverse range of things used for cure and protection in this period. Some were everyday, relatively worthless things, while others were expensive, coveted rarities, and I use both types of object to investigate the complex relationship between value and power. Throughout, this thesis explores how modern research, and trends of collecting and categorisation, have affected our interpretation of the physical evidence of early modern healing, and shows how objects can be resituated within medical contexts. It analyses how and why learned, elite men in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries criticised what they saw as erroneous medical belief and practice, and the crucial role played by objects in these condemnations. In comparison, it examines how, despite religious and societal changes, laypeople continued to use a variety of healing objects, even in the face of theological denunciation and diabolical threat. My research contributes to recent scholarship that advocates object-focused histories, and provides a model of how to examine objects on their own terms, regardless of whether or not textual evidence exists. As a study of magic and the material culture of healing, it contributes to histories of household medicine, recipes and secrets, magic, ritual, superstition, demonology and witchcraft, medical politics, curiosity and wonder, and collecting.Wellcome Trust Medical Humanities Studentshi

Teachers And Teacher Aides Initiating Five-Year-Olds Into Science

Apprenticing children into discourses necessary for success at school begins at a very early age. In this paper I look at five-years-olds being introduced to Science and Technology while at the same time being involved in talk around literacy. The various adults who surround the children engage differentially in talk and action while merging the discourses of literacy and science. Data for this study were obtained during the course of the project ‘Early literacy through science in Indigenous and culturally diverse communities’, funded by Edith Cowan University in Australia from 2009–2010, in which the author was involved as a researcher. The project involved observing and recording a series of lessons over nine weeks in a Pre-Primary classroom of five year-olds from diverse backgrounds in a metropolitan school. Various functional analyses were used in order to bring out some of the differences in the discourse of the trained teachers compared with that of the other adults working with the children. Analyses included Field, Tenor, Exchange Structure and Speech Function. Differences were apparent in the structure of the discourse, Questions, Commands, vocabulary and the teacher-student relationships. As an example of the contrast between teachers and teacher aides, I look more closely at two lessons involving photography and use of electronic resources. These lessons show the teachers and the teacher aide constructing different relationships with the children and the teacher using a wider variety of linguistic resources in her interactions

Five year olds doing science and technology: How teachers shape the conversation

This paper presents an analysis of a series of lessons observed and recorded over nine weeks in a pre-primary classroom where children were undertaking science and technology activities. Using a functional discourse analysis, we describe how teachers use various strategies to structure the discourse to facilitate children\u27s learning in this area. These strategies include various methods of controlling the topic and discourse participants, techniques involving questioning, ways of dealing with vocabulary and constructing inclusive relationships with children. We propose that explication of these discourse strategies is a valuable research tool for pre-service and new teachers who are evolving their own classroom communication skills and techniques

Chinese-speaking undergraduates in Australia: A lexical approach to teaching academic writing

Chinese-speaking students enroll in Australian tertiary institutions in large numbers. Success for these international students is heavily dependent upon their mastering the conventions of academic writing in English. How best to ensure such mastery among EAL learners has been a matter of debate among tertiary educators and language specialists, with competing theories and methods proposed. This paper reports on an attempt to improve English academic writing through intensive lexical instruction, a method proposed by Ackermann & Chen (2013), Boers et al. (2016), Lewis (1993), Selivan (2018), Wray (2005, 2018) and others. Nine Chinese-speaking tertiary students were offered training in recognising and employing those lexical constructions commonly found in relevant technical and academic genres. The project employed a mixed methods case study approach to describe students’ performance and their perceptions and responses to the teaching they underwent. While gains in performance were evident in some cases, the outcomes of the teaching were inconsistent and equivocal overall. We conclude that this raises questions about the efficacy of purely lexical methods and underscores the challenge involved in teaching complex genres at tertiary level. These findings have implications for those teaching Chinese-speaking students, particularly in EAL contexts

Pairing mean-field theory for the dynamics of dissociation of molecular Bose-Einstein condensates

We develop a pairing mean-field theory to describe the quantum dynamics of the dissociation of molecular Bose-Einstein condensates into their constituent bosonic or fermionic atoms. We apply the theory to one, two, and three-dimensional geometries and analyze the role of dimensionality on the atom production rate as a function of the dissociation energy. As well as determining the populations and coherences of the atoms, we calculate the correlations that exist between atoms of opposite momenta, including the column density correlations in 3D systems. We compare the results with those of the undepleted molecular field approximation and argue that the latter is most reliable in fermionic systems and in lower dimensions. In the bosonic case we compare the pairing mean-field results with exact calculations using the positive-$P$ stochastic method and estimate the range of validity of the pairing mean-field theory. Comparisons with similar first-principle simulations in the fermionic case are currently not available, however, we argue that the range of validity of the present approach should be broader for fermions than for bosons in the regime where Pauli blocking prevents complete depletion of the molecular condensate.Comment: 16 pages, 10 figure

A history of amulets in ten objects

What are amulets? How are they situated in the larger narrative of European healing? Varied and complex objects, amulets present both challenges and opportunities for historians and museums alike. Yet an examination of these often-overlooked items within a medical context can provide significant information about cure and protection over different times and geographies. This article analyses ten amulets from the Science Museum collections, and asks what we can learn from exploring these objects’ material features and varying functions. It argues for a re-consideration of amulets from their categorisation by nineteenth- and twentieth-century collectors and classification by modern museums, to their recognition as a significant part of the history of healing