Industrial art materials

Anyone, who has ever tried to paint has become well acquainted with the fact that huge sums of money too often buy the meagerest amounts of supplies. Faced with the possibility of either breaking into art supply stores at night or learning to vent my hostilities elsewhere I traded my studio supplies for their industrial counterparts and gratefully have never looked back. The following report will document the advantages as well as the disadvantages that I have encountered in working exclusively with industrial art materials. The first half will deal the materials themselves while the second half will offer a little homespun philosophy on just how using the materials should be approached. Also, an appendix has been included to indicate where the various industrial materials can be purchased

Weaving strands of knowledge: Leaning about environmental change in the Bhutan Himalayas

Climate change is a complex phenomenon, so much so that even those with expert knowledge on the scientific data struggle to understand the impacts of climate change on their everyday lives. Contradictions across systems of knowledge make clear that climate change is not just a problem of scientific understanding but is also simultaneously a problem of global coordination as well as a sociopolitical problem of connecting domains of knowledge that are seldom valued equitably. The project described in this paper is a prototype effort to put knowledge from community members in two culturally distinct rural areas of the world at equal footing with scientific knowledge. The overarching project aim was to design partnership-based inquiry into environmental and climate change that coordinated the aforementioned three facets of climate change (a) scientific understanding, (b) cross-cultural coordination among globally dispersed communities, and (c) sociopolitical equity in bringing nondominant perspectives to the table

Morphological and semantic processing in developmental dyslexia

This chapter examines the theoretical and empirical foundations of the roles of morphological and semantic skills in developmental dyslexia. Morphemes are the minimal units of meaning by which we create new words in any given language (e.g., “magic”+“ian” = “magician”). Semantics is the study of meaning, broadly speaking. In this chapter, we review data on children’s access to meaning at the word and sentence level in tasks, primarily in the oral modality. This review is important because of two common assumptions. The first is of the dominant role of phonological skills in dyslexia, an assumption that has limited the scope of empirical exploration into other potentially implicated factors. The second is that people with dyslexia have a strength in morphology and semantics, a speculation with surprisingly little empirical foundation. We first review the theoretical background for these speculations. We then present the available research evidence, focusing specifically on children with dyslexia, for alphabetic, morphosyllabic, and abjad writing systems

Translation and Psychometric Evaluation of a Standard Chinese Version of the Body Appreciation Scale-2

The present study examined the factorial and construct validity of a Standard Chinese translation of the Body Appreciation Scale (BAS-2; Tylka & Wood-Barcalow, 2015b). Participants were 191 women and 154 men from mainland China who were resident in Hong Kong at the time of recruitment. Results of confirmatory factor analysis indicated that the one-dimensional model of the BAS-2, in which all 10 items loaded onto the same factor, had adequate fit and was invariant across sex. Body appreciation scores had good internal consistency and were significantly correlated with self-esteem and life satisfaction, and, in women, with weight discrepancy and body mass index. There were no significant differences in body appreciation scores between women and men. The present findings suggest that the Standard Chinese translation of the BAS-2 has the same one-dimensional factor structure as its parent scale and may facilitate cross-cultural studies of positive body image

Cognitive skills and literacy performance of Chinese adolescents with and without dyslexia

The present study sought to identify cognitive abilities that might distinguish Hong Kong Chinese adolescents with dyslexia and to assess how these abilities were associated with Chinese word reading, word dictation, and reading comprehension. The cognitive skills of interest were morphological awareness, visual-orthographic knowledge, rapid naming, and verbal working memory. A total of 90 junior secondary school students, 30 dyslexic, 30 chronological age controls, and 30 reading level controls was tested on a range of cognitive and literacy tasks. Dyslexic students were less competent than the control students in all cognitive and literacy measures. The regression analyses also showed that verbal working memory, rapid naming, morphological awareness, and visual-orthographic knowledge were significantly associated with literacy performance. Findings underscore the importance of these cognitive skills for Chinese literacy acquisition. Overall, this study highlights the persistent difficulties of Chinese dyslexic adolescents who seem to have multiple causes for reading and spelling difficulties