Considering the International Monetary Fund and World Bank: Lending Effectiveness in Sub-Saharan Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa is a place of unequivocal beauty, diversity and history; it is also the most impoverished and neglected area on the planet. With an objective look at what has gone wrong in the past five decades of International Monetary Fund and World Bank lending, along with strategic assessment and planning, sub-Saharan Africa does not have to remain the home to unimpeded, rampant poverty

"We need it loud!": Preschool making from mediated and materialist perspectives

In this chapter, we frame data analysis from multimodal (Scollon, 2001; Kress, 2003) and materialist (Lenz Taguchi, 2010) perspectives to expand our understanding of the complex interplay of purposes, properties, and possibilities in a moment of playful making at an impromptu art table in a preschool classroom. This auditory double take-that listens and listens again--problematizes educational assumptions in a prominent anthropocentric pedagogy that reads child/material productions primarily as evidence of a linear, lockstep developmental sequence. To unpack a moment of early childhood art production from two perspectives, we explore research methods that move away from privileging order and coherence, taming chaotic intra-actions among materials and humans, discounting material catalysts and perhaps child purposes. This chapter advances a notion of development as jumbled, recursive entanglement of action, artifacts, and making worlds. Art becomes coproduction through which things and humans communicate purposes and possibilities

Creation of a Prolog Fact Base from the Collins English Dictionary

Machine readable dictionaries may be invaluable components of future in-formation retrieval systems. The Virginia Tech department of Computer Science is fortunate to have available for research purposes machine readable versions of the Collins English Dictionary (CED) [HANK 79] and of the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary of Current English (OALDCE) [HORN 74] among others. McIllroy [MCIL 84] and Mitton [MIlT 85] have put forth separate efforts in cleaning up the OALDCE. The CED is only available in its original typesetting form, and it required a great deal of effort and patience to transform this into a relational lexicon. A number of recent efforts have been made to generate relational lexicons from dictionaries (e.g., [AHLS 81], [AHLS 83], [AHLS 85], [WHIT 83], [EVEN 78] ). The lexicon that will be discussed in this paper consists of a large set of relations in the form of PROLOG facts. This knowledge base will become a very important entity in the analysis and retrieval sub-systems of the CODER project [FOXE 86]

Critical Lessons and Playful Literacies: Digital Media in PK–2 Classrooms

Copyright © 2012 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Used with permission.Digital literacies present opportunities to expand ways of making meaning. Utilizing a New Literacies Studies framework, this article presents critical lessons in film production from a multiple site case study using examples of classroom experience to demonstrate how filmmaking and play come together in a process of storying, a multimodal approach to text composition. Students in both preschool and early elementary contexts expressed an expanded understanding of composing through digital means, utilized technology in sophisticated ways, and accessed their knowledge of popular culture and film conventions through the process of storying

Design and fabrication of the superconducting-magnet system for the Mirror Fusion Test Facility (MFTF-B)

The superconducting magnet system for the Mirror Fusion Test Facility (MFTF-B) consists of 24 magnets; i.e. two pairs of C-shaped Yin-Yang coils, four C-shaped transition coils, four solenoidal axicell coils, and a 12-solenoid central cell. General Dynamics Convair Division has designed all the coils and is responsible for fabricating 20 coils. The two Yin-Yang pairs (four coils) are being fabricated by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Since MFTF-B is not a magnet development program, but rather a major physics experiment critical to the mirror fusion program, the basic philosophy has been to use proven materials and analytical techniques wherever possible. The transition and axicell coils are currently being analyzed and designed, while fabrication is under way on the solenoid magnets

Literacy practices of primary education children in Andalusia (Spain): a family-based perspective

Primary school children develop literacy practices in various domains and situations in everyday life. This study focused on the analysis of literacy practices of children aged 8–12 years from the perspec- tive of their families. 1,843 families participated in the non-experimental explanatory study. The children in these families speak Spanish as a first language and are schooled in this language. The instrument used was a self-report questionnaire about children’s home-literacy practices. The data obtained were analysed using categorical principal components analysis (CATPCA) and analysis of variance (ANOVA). The results show the complex relationship between literacy practices developed by children in the domains of home and school and the limited development of a literacy-promoting ‘third space’. In conclusion, the families in our study had limited awareness of their role as literacy- promoting agents and thought of literacy learning as restricted to formal or academic spaces

Building the CODER Lexicon: The Collins English Dictionary and Its Adverb Definitions

The CODER (COmposite Document Expert/extended/effective Retrieval) project is an investigation of the applicability of artificial intelligence techniques to the information retrieval task of analyzing, storing, and retrieving heterogeneous collections of "composite documents." In order to support some of the processing desired, and to allow experimentation in information retrieval and natural language processing, a lexicon was constructed from the machine readable Collins dictionary of the English Language. After giving background, motivation, and a survey of related work, the Collins lexicon is discussed. Following is a description of the conversion process, the format of the resulting Prolog database, and characteristics of the dictionary and relations. To illustrate what is present and to explain how it relates to the files produced from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, a number of comparative charts are given. Finally, a summary of adverb definitions is presented, together with a description of defining formula that usually indicate the type of the adverb. Ultimately it is hoped that definitions for adverbs and other words will be parsed so that the relational lexicon being constructed will include many additional relationships and other knowledge about words and their usage

Matter, Literacy, and English Language Teaching in an Underprivileged School in Spain

This article analyzes the processes and findings of a collaborative action research (CAR) project that aimed to analyze the potential of materiality to radically transform the way English was taught and learned in an underprivileged public school in Spain. The CAR drew on new materialisms and new literacy studies to explore the relationship between matter and English language teaching from socioeconomic, sociocultural, and technological perspectives. The main pedagogical strategy consisted of widening the quantity and quality of the material resources in the English classroom, precisely to draw a material link between the English classroom and the students' homes, communities, and the informal literacies they enacted in them. Through two cycles of inquiry, the CAR team put into practice two multimodal and artifactual workshops with a group of nine children from underprivileged, minority backgrounds. A variety of qualitative strategies were used (including classroom recordings, student interviews, and photographs) to confirm that the insights from new materialisms and new literacy studies had generated opportunities for meaningful English learning within a culturally sustaining pedagogy

Trialling technologies to reduce hospital in‐patient falls: an agential realist analysis

This paper analyses the 'failure' of a patient safety intervention. Our study was part of an RCT of bed and bedside chair pressure sensors linked to radio pagers to prevent bedside falls in older people admitted to hospital. We use agential realism within science and technology studies to examine the fall and its prevention as a situated phenomenon of knowledge that is made and unmade through intra-actions between environment, culture, humans and technologies. We show that neither the intervention (the pressure sensor system), nor the outcome (fall prevention) could be disentangled from the broader sociomaterial context of the ward, the patients, the nurses and (especially) their work through the RCT. We argue that the RCT design, by virtue of its unacknowledged assumptions, played a part in creating the negative findings. The study also raises wider questions about the kind of subjectivities, agencies and power relations these entanglements might effect and (re)produce in the hospital ward