Goldsmith's cosmopolitanism

[First Paragraph] Although imaginary travelers and voyages date back at least as far as the work of Lucian, the figure of the fictional oriental traveler seems to belong primarily to the eighteenth century. Following the great success of Giovanni Marana’s Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, first published in Paris in 1684, a wide range of European writers sought to exploit the various satiric and comic possibilities that were offered by Eastern spies and observers. While a work such as George Lyttelton’s Letters from a Persian in England (1734) was clearly informed by a specific anti-Walpole agenda, fictional orientals in early-eighteenth-century British writing, especially, seem above all to have offered another means of addressing the experience of modernity: figures such as the Indian in Tom Brown’s Amusements Serious and Comical (1702) or the Ambassadors of Bantam in Spectator 557 (1712) are presented as newcomers to London, and shown to be both fascinated and perplexed by the workings of commercial society. In many ways, then, the oriental traveler performs more or less the same function as a range of other eighteenthcentury spies and observers, by offering positions — albeit provisional and ironic — from which to view the customs and manners of modern Britain. Oliver Goldsmith’s Chinese philosopher, Lien Chi Altangi, stands out from the crowd of such fictional informants, however, both because he is made to play a larger role than this, and because he serves as more than just an estranging device. Although Lien Chi frequently misreads situations and gets things wrong, he describes himself as one who seeks “to know the men of every country,” and he advances the claims of a “cosmopolitan” orientation that Goldsmith’s other writings of the late 1750s and early 1760s take very seriously. But while The Citizen of the World attempts to hold on to a utopian sense of global community, it offers a number of interrogative and even antagonistic perspectives on the idea of the cosmopolitan, too, often rehearsing the terms of current debates. Although Goldsmith arguably took the fiction of the oriental traveler further than any of his contemporaries, therefore, his work might also be seen to offer a critical reflection on such figures, and to anticipate the slow demise of this genre in the later decades of the eighteenth century. Continues.

The sense in humour : a personal exploration of humour in the teaching of adults : some questions and tentative answers : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Education in Adult Education at Massey University

This thesis is a personal exploration of the potential applications of humour in the teaching of adults. I have provided some questions and tentative answers about the use of humour in the facilitation of adult learning. Having recognised the value of humour in my own teaching practice, I have examined the ways in which humour, when applied appropriately, can promote creative thinking by enhancing the processes of knowing, perceiving and discovering. Adult learning has been said to be a means of gaining knowledge and skills, a way to satisfy learner needs and a process of critical self-reflection that may lead to transformation. Adult education can involve challenging periods of transformation and students may require assistance to overcome inhibitions, behaviours and beliefs about themselves their culture and learning. In this thesis I have sought to explore how humour, manifesting itself in verbal, written and visual formats, may be a valuable pedagogical tool to address such issues. One of the purposes of this thesis is to contribute to knowledge in teaching practice by demonstrating that the systematic and informed introduction of humour into individual teaching strategics may provide a more people-centred climate which addresses individual and group learning needs from the perspective of teacher and student

The GLASS project: supporting secure shibboleth-based single sign-on to campus resources

Higher and Further education institutions in the UK are in the process of migrating their IT infrastructures to exploit Shibboleth technologies for federated access management. Ease of use and secure access are paramount to the successful uptake of these technologies, both from the end user and system administrator perspective. The JISC-funded GLASS project is a one-year project investigating the use of Shibboleth to support single sign-on to a variety of campus resources at the University of Glasgow including browser-based email access; the Moodle online virtual learning environment; the WebSURF online student records facility, and a network filestore browser. This paper describes the implementation issues and experiences gained in rolling out the Shibboleth technologies to support federated access management

Socio-economic determinants of selected dietary indicators in British pre-school children

Objectives: To assess the proportion of pre-school children meeting reference nutrient intakes (RNIs) and recommendations for daily intakes of iron, zinc, vitamins C and A, and energy from non-milk extrinsic sugars. To assess whether meeting these five dietary requirements was related to a series of socio-economic variables.Design: Secondary analysis of data on daily consumption of foods and drinks from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey (NDNS) of children aged 1.5-4.5 years based on 4-day weighed intakes.Subjects: One thousand six hundred and seventy-five British pre-school children aged 1.5-4.5 years in 1993.Results: Only 1% of children met all five RNIs/recommendations examined; 76% met only two or fewer. Very few children met the recommendations for intakes of zinc (aged over four years) and non-milk extrinsic sugars (all ages). The number of RNIs/ recommendations met was related to measures of socio-economic class. Children from families in Scotland and the North of England, who had a manual head of household and whose mothers had fewest qualifications, met the least number of RNIs/recommendations.Conclusions: Very few pre-school children have diets that meet all the RNIs and recommendations for iron, zinc, vitamins C and A, and energy from non-milk extrinsic sugars. Dietary adequacy with respect to these five parameters is related to socio-economic factors. The findings emphasise the need for a range of public health policies that focus upon the social and economic determinants of food choice within families

Experiences in teaching grid computing to advanced level students

The development of teaching materials for future software engineers is critical to the long term success of the grid. At present however there is considerable turmoil in the grid community both within the standards and the technology base underpinning these standards. In this context, it is especially challenging to develop teaching materials that have some sort of lifetime beyond the next wave of grid middleware and standards. In addition, the current way in which grid security is supported and delivered has two key problems. Firstly in the case of the UK e-Science community, scalability issues arise from a central certificate authority. Secondly, the current security mechanisms used by the grid community are not line grained enough. In this paper we outline how these issues are being addressed through the development of a grid computing module supported by an advanced authorisation infrastructure at the University of Glasgow

Advanced security infrastructures for grid education

This paper describes the research conducted into advanced authorization infrastructures at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow and their application to support a teaching environment as part of the Dynamic Virtual Organisations in e-Science Education (DyVOSE) project. We outline the lessons learnt in teaching Grid computing and rolling out the associated security authorisation infrastructures, and describe our plans for a future, extended security infrastructure for dynamic establishment of inter-institutional virtual organisations (VO) in the education domain

Advanced security infrastructures for grid education

This paper describes the research conducted into advanced authorization infrastructures at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow and their application to support a teaching environment as part of the Dynamic Virtual Organisations in e-Science Education (DyVOSE) project. We outline the lessons learnt in teaching Grid computing and rolling out the associated security authorisation infrastructures, and describe our plans for a future, extended security infrastructure for dynamic establishment of inter-institutional virtual organisations (VO) in the education domain

DyVOSE project: experiences in applying privilege management infrastructures

Privilege Management Infrastructures (PMI) are emerging as a necessary alternative to authorization through Access Control Lists (ACL) as the need for finer grained security on the Grid increases in numerous domains. The 2-year JISC funded DyVOSE Project has investigated applying PMIs within an e-Science education context. This has involved establishing a Grid Computing module as part of Glasgow University’s Advanced MSc degree in Computing Science. A laboratory infrastructure was built for the students realising a PMI with the PERMIS software, to protect Grid Services they created. The first year of the course centered on building a static PMI at Glasgow. The second year extended this to allow dynamic attribute delegation between Glasgow and Edinburgh to support dynamic establishment of fine grained authorization based virtual organizations across multiple institutions. This dynamic delegation was implemented using the DIS (Delegation Issuing) Web Service supplied by the University of Kent. This paper describes the experiences and lessons learned from setting up and applying the advanced Grid authorization infrastructure within the Grid Computing course, focusing primarily on the second year and the dynamic virtual organisation setup between Glasgow and Edinburgh

Security-oriented infrastructures for social simulation

The JISC-funded National e-Infrastructure for Social Simulation (NeISS) project aims to develop and provide new services to social scientists and public/private sector policymakers interested in “what-if” questions that have an impact upon society and can be tackled through social simulation. For the first what-if question, a traffic simulation modelling how congestion will affect routes within a city or region projected across a time-span of decades has been identified. This paper describes the work that has been done in implementing a secure, user-oriented environment that provides seamless access to relevant nationally significant data sets such as the 2001 Census and demographic transition statistics from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) , and a Population Reconstruction Model (PRM) simulator, which simulates a population of individuals or households based upon these data sets

Shibboleth-based access to and usage of grid resources

Security underpins grids and e-research. Without a robust, reliable and simple grid security infrastructure combined with commonly accepted security practices, large portions of the research community and wider industry will not engage. The predominant way in which security is currently addressed in the grid community is through public key infrastructures (PKI) based upon X.509 certificates to support authentication. Whilst PKIs address user identity issues, authentication does not provide fine grained control over what users are allowed to do on remote resources (authorization). In this paper we outline how we have successfully combined Shibboleth and advanced authorization technologies to provide simplified (from the user perspective) but fine grained security for access to and usage of grid resources. We demonstrate this approach through different security focused e-science projects being conducted at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow. We believe that this model is widely applicable and encourage the further uptake of e-science by non-IT specialists in the research communitie