Introduction: The effectiveness of impact assessment instruments

The global application of impact assessment instruments to achieve a variety of policy integration goals (e.g. the mainstreaming of environmental, gender or economic efficiency concerns) continues to proliferate. These instruments represent important components of contemporary political governance and hence are an important locus for applied research. This special issue of Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal critically examines 'state-of-the-art' knowledge and understanding of the effectiveness of impact assessment instruments. Six articles explore this subject from a variety of orientations (in terms of theoretical versus empirical emphasis, policy integration concerns, contributors' beliefs and framing etc.). Individually and cumulatively, these articles make a powerful contribution to learning about the 'thorny' issue of effectiveness and its implications for the theory and practice of impact assessment

The educational value of student generated podcasts

Podcasting is becoming a well established technology in Higher Education (HE). However, most applications tend to use staff-developed content to provide material to supplement lectures. The use of learner-generated podcasts and its impact on the learning of both student producers and listeners are under researched. This paper reports on a pilot study of student-created podcasts. The podcasts were developed by a group of medical students at the University of Leicester who chose to study a genetic module in their second year. The content of the podcasts was entirely generated by students. Their topics covered a range of ethical issues surrounding genetics. Five student-developed podcasts were made available in early 2007 for other medical students to access through the Medical School Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). The study focused on the impact of these student-developed podcasts on student producers’ learning. It demonstrated how podcasting can empower learners and help them become more active and independent learners, and how student developed podcasts can promote engagement and motivation for learning, improve cognitive learning and develop transferable team-working skills among student producers. This paper offers an example of student-generated podcasts from practice and insights on how this practice might be expanded and transferred to other learning contexts with HE sectors

Care Planning and Review for Looked After Children: Fifteen Years of Slow Progress?

This Critical Commentary reviews progress in research into planning and reviewing for children in care in England and Wales since the publication of two major studies in the late 1990s (roughly coinciding with the New Labour period). It briefly considers the changing context of law, regulation and guidance and the aims and objectives of the care planning and review system. It then reviews the limited research literature available, in relation to a series of key topics. Consideration is also given to guides for children and practitioners on the subject. The commentary concludes by suggesting that this is an area in which research has failed to keep pace with changes in policy and practice, and recommends a more systematic approach

Planning as Quantified Boolean Formulae

This work explores the idea of classical Planning as Quantified Boolean Formulae. Planning as Satisfiability (SAT) is a popular approach to Planning and has been explored in detail producing many compact and efficient encodings, Planning-specific solver implementations and innovative new constraints. However, Planning as Quantified Boolean Formulae (QBF) has been relegated to conformant Planning approaches, with the exception of one encoding that has not yet been investigated in detail. QBF is a promising setting for Planning given that the problems have the same complexity. This work introduces two approaches for translating bounded propositional reachability problems into QBF. Both exploit the expressivity of the binarytree structure of the QBF problem to produce encodings that are as small as logarithmic in the size of the instance and thus exponentially smaller than the corresponding SAT encoding with the same bound. The first approach builds on the iterative squaring formulation of Rintanen; the intuition behind the idea is to recursively fold the plan around the midpoint, reducing the number of time-steps that need to be described from n to log₂n. The second approach exploits domain-level lifting to achieve significant improvements in efficiency. Experimentation was performed to compare our formulation of the first approach with the previous formulation, and to compare both approaches with comparative and state-of-the-art SAT approaches. Results presented in this work show that our formulation of the first approach is an improvement over the previous, and that both approaches produce encodings that are indeed much smaller than corresponding SAT encodings, in both terms of encoding size and memory used during solving. Evidence is also provided to show that the first approach is feasible, if not yet competitive with the state-of-the-art, and that the second approach produces superior encodings to the SAT encodings when the domain is suited to domain-level lifting.This work explores the idea of classical Planning as Quantified Boolean Formulae. Planning as Satisfiability (SAT) is a popular approach to Planning and has been explored in detail producing many compact and efficient encodings, Planning-specific solver implementations and innovative new constraints. However, Planning as Quantified Boolean Formulae (QBF) has been relegated to conformant Planning approaches, with the exception of one encoding that has not yet been investigated in detail. QBF is a promising setting for Planning given that the problems have the same complexity. This work introduces two approaches for translating bounded propositional reachability problems into QBF. Both exploit the expressivity of the binarytree structure of the QBF problem to produce encodings that are as small as logarithmic in the size of the instance and thus exponentially smaller than the corresponding SAT encoding with the same bound. The first approach builds on the iterative squaring formulation of Rintanen; the intuition behind the idea is to recursively fold the plan around the midpoint, reducing the number of time-steps that need to be described from n to log₂n. The second approach exploits domain-level lifting to achieve significant improvements in efficiency. Experimentation was performed to compare our formulation of the first approach with the previous formulation, and to compare both approaches with comparative and state-of-the-art SAT approaches. Results presented in this work show that our formulation of the first approach is an improvement over the previous, and that both approaches produce encodings that are indeed much smaller than corresponding SAT encodings, in both terms of encoding size and memory used during solving. Evidence is also provided to show that the first approach is feasible, if not yet competitive with the state-of-the-art, and that the second approach produces superior encodings to the SAT encodings when the domain is suited to domain-level lifting

Beyond Black

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Beyond Black is Ellis Cashmore's compelling appraisal of the impact of black celebrities on the cultural landscape of contemporary America. In recent years a new variety of African American celebrity has emerged: acquisitive, ambitious, flamboyantly successful and individualistic - more interested in channelling their energy into career development than into the political struggles that animated some of their predecessors. Bill Cosby and Oprah Winfrey were early examples; current A-listers include Beyoncé and Tiger Woods. The most valuable product these celebrities sell, according to Cashmore, is a particular conception of America: as a nation where racism has been - if not banished - rendered insignificant. Jargon-free but with scholarly attention to theory, evidence and logic, this is a riveting account of contemporary American society, from the minstrel shows of the nineteenth century, through the Hollywood film industry of the 1930s, to today's hip-hop culture

Performance differences in diverse contexts: The role of personality

This study seeks to explain performance differences in demographically diverse settings by examing introverted and extraverted individuals and using the Inverted-U-Theory developed by Hans J. Eysenck

Assessing the different dimensions and degrees of risk of child sexual abuse in institutions

This research report has been published by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. It identifies four dimensions of risk of child sexual abuse in institutional settings: situational, vulnerability, propensity and institutional risks. It draws on the existing research to examine how risk factors might operate cumulatively in the context of institutions. It examines to what extent various risk factors are more likely to occur in some institutions or activities than in others

Utility of newer technologies for the diagnosis of active and latent tuberculosis

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 91-109).Since the 1800s the tuberculin skin test (TST) has been the only available test for latent tuberculosis (LTBI). Recently, interferon-gamma release assays (IGRAs) have been developed which are based upon the responses of peripheral blood effector cells to M.tb-specific antigens [early secretory antigenic target -6 (ESAT-6) and culture filtrate protein (CFP10)]. Discordance between the TST and IGRAs has been well documented but remains largely unexplained