Exploring employer behaviour in relation to Investors in People

"This report explores employer behaviour in relation to choices they make about Investors in People (IIP) accreditation in order for the future IIP strategy to ensure IIP is relevant, adds value to employers and tackles any barriers to successful delivery. The research focuses on the decision-making processes and experiences of three key groups of employers: employers that have held IIP accreditation for a number of years; employers who previously held IIP accreditation but have let this lapse; and employers who committed to gaining IIP accreditation but subsequently did not to go through the assessment process" - page 1

Reasonable Creates: British Equestrianism and Epistemological Responsibility in Late Modernity

This thesis investigates the ethical work British horse riders conduct in order to know their horses well. This ethical imperative emerges out of a changing equestrian context. A broadening socio-economic demographic of equestrian participants, with an increasingly female population, moves equestrianism further away from its military and elitist heritage, and towards more 'one-horse owners' who nurture the ideal of close, companionable, 'partnerships' with their horses. At the same time, an increasing number of options for horse care and riding style instil the owner with responsibility to act as their horse's agent in choosing well. One of the things that they must choose, from a commercialist sphere of options, is how to educate themselves and their horses in order to achieve true partnership. This market is fraught with critique and debunking, reform and invention. I describe how this relates to a broader neoliberal context in which the idea of 'real connection' is highly valued and nostalgically missed. Through this ethnography, I aim to bring the anthropology of ethics and the 'animal turn' in anthropology into productive dialogue with one another. This is no easy task, since the former is concerned with the human sphere of moral conduct, while the latter has implemented a substantial challenge to anthropocentric study and advocated a recognition of life 'beyond the human'. However, I find grounds for mutual engagement in investigating the role that reflective thought plays within intersubjective equestrian dynamics. Many authors within the 'animal turn' critique the Cartesian distinctions between mind and body, self and other, human and non-human, and advocate that we should be cautious of the forms of detachment they invoke. In contrast, I argue that the 'epistemological responsibility' involved in knowing the horse well requires a complex and highly particular mastery of the dualistic distinctions, rather than a negation of them. In making this argument, I also contribute to the anthropology of ethics an example of nuanced relatedness between embodied intersubjectivity, self-critique, and knowledge evaluation. I demonstrate ethnographically that horse riders critique and cultivate a number of ethical, epistemological skills: open-mindedness, management of real and non-real registers of speech, self-awareness and self-comportment, narrative competence, accurate sensitive perception and good 'feel' for the horse. I demonstrate that highly valorised experiences of 'true connection' comprise of moments where horse and human move in such harmony that a third-person reflective stance is redundant; no interpretative work, communicative repair, or self-assessment is necessary. However these moments are rare and fleeting, because in this context, relational skill is (self)critical skill, riders continually learn to 'feel' more detail, to evaluate more critically, and to better recognise subtle signs of disengagement and miscommunication. In sum, this thesis demonstrates that 'true relatedness' is performed as precarious within this particular classed, gendered and epistemological context, and mobilises this finding to contribute to debates in the anthropology of ethics and the 'animal turn'.Privately funded (tuition fees paid by Intelligent Horsemanship)

Collecting Older Lesbians' and Gay Men's Stories of Rural Life in South West England and Wales: "We Were Obviously Gay Girls ... (So) He Removed His Cow From Our Field"

The emerging recollections, perceptions and storied biographies of older lesbians and gay men and their experiences in rural Britain are presented in the article, alongside consideration of the multiple qualitative methodologies used in a unique multi-method participatory action research project. The project aimed to empower older lesbians and gay men in rural areas through a collaborative design and meaningful participation in the research process itself. Methods included the core Biographic Narrative Interpretive Method (BNIM) (JONES, 2001, 2004; WENGRAF, 2001) with its interpretation of data by panels of citizens. In addition, visual ethnographic site visits, a focus group and two days of theatrical improvisation of interview data to explore action within the texts were used. The project embraced the principles of a performative social science (GERGEN & JONES, 2008; JONES, 2006, 2012a, 2012b) in its dissemination plan. Four of the collected stories are elaborated on here. These and other stories, reports and observations contributed to the creation of the main output of the project—a short professionally made film (Rufus Stone). The film is used to encourage community dialogue and inform service providers, opening up new possibilities of connectivity, communication and common ground at both macro and micro levels

Bootstrapping for text learning tasks

Journal ArticleWhen applying text learning algorithms to complex tasks, it is tedious and expensive to hand-label the large amounts of training data necessary for good performance. This paper presents bootstrapping as an alternative approach to learning from large sets of labeled data. Instead of a large quantity of labeled data, this paper advocates using a small amount of seed information and a large collection of easily-obtained unlabeled data. Bootstrapping initializes a learner with the seed information; it then iterates, applying the learner to calculate labels for the unlabeled data, and incorporating some of these labels into the training input for the learner. Two case studies of this approach are presented. Bootstrapping for information extraction provides 76% precision for a 250-word dictionary for extracting locations from web pages, when starting with just a few seed locations. Bootstrapping a text classifier from a few keywords per class and a class hierarchy provides accuracy of 66%, a level close to human agreement, when placing computer science research papers into a topic hierarchy. The success of these two examples argues for the strength of the general boot¬ strapping approach for text learning tasks

Learning dictionaries for information extraction by multi-level bootstrapping

Journal ArticleInformation extraction systems usually require two dictionaries: a semantic lexicon and a dictionary of extraction patterns for the domain. We present a multilevel bootstrapping algorithm that generates both the semantic lexicon and extraction patterns simultaneously. As input, our technique requires only unannotated training texts and a handful of seed words for a category. We use a mutual bootstrapping technique to alternately select the best extraction pattern for the category and bootstrap its extractions into the semantic lexicon, which is the basis for selecting the next extraction pattern. To make this approach more robust, we add a second level of bootstrapping (metabootstrapping) that retains only the most reliable lexicon entries produced by mutual bootstrapping and then restarts the process. We evaluated this multilevel bootstrapping technique on a collection of corporate web pages and a corpus of terrorism news articles. The algorithm produced high-quality dictionaries for several semantic categories

Transform your training: practical approaches to interactive Information Literacy teaching

This article describes how the Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) Library has integrated interactivity into its information literacy (IL) training. Research has shown that interactivity is an important aspect of enhancing the learning process and this has been recognised in MMU's InfoSkills training programme. This paper will consider the theory behind adult learners and preferred learning styles and will illustrate specific examples of how MMU has included interactivity into its sessions. InfoSkills at MMU is taught through a variety of different methods, for example, lecturing, workshops and hands-on computer work. However, each of these alone is not enough and must be combined with other practical approaches in order to make training truly effective. Regardless of environment or technology available, active participation within MMU's InfoSkills sessions is key to enhancing students' independent learning. Although IL trainers at MMU have access to new technologies, such as interactive whiteboards and voting pods, these are not always accessible in every teaching location and so this article also refers to low-tech alternative methods. This paper hopes to provide practical ideas, for engaging students in interactive IL sessions that may inspire other IL trainers. It also gives information about future developments the InfoSkills team will be making in this area