From Multi-User Virtual Environment to 3D Virtual Learning Environment

While digital virtual worlds have been used in education for a number of years, advances in the capabilities and spread of technology have fed a recent boom in interest in massively multi‐user 3D virtual worlds for entertainment, and this in turn has led to a surge of interest in their educational applications. In this paper we briefly review the use of virtual worlds for education, from informal learning to formal instruction, and consider what is required to turn a virtual world from a Multi‐User Virtual Environment into a fully fledged 3D Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). In this we focus on the development of Sloodle – a system which integrates the popular 3D virtual world of Second Life with the open‐source VLE Moodle. Our intent is not simply to provide additional learning support features for Second Life, but to study more generally the ways in which integrated virtual environments can benefit teaching and learning, and this is the focus of our closing discussion

Adda F. Howie: America’s Outstanding Woman Farmer

In 1894, forty-two-year-old Milwaukee socialite Adda F. Howie seemed a very unlikely candidate to become one of the most famous women in America. And yet by 1925, Howie, the first woman to serve on the Wisconsin State Board of Agriculture, had long been “recognized universally as the most successful woman farmer in America.”1 Howie’s rise to fame came at a time when the widely accepted ideas about gender were divided into the “man’s world” of business, power, and money, and the “woman’s world” devoted to family and home. Yet Howie, rather than being vilified for succeeding in the male sphere, was publicly praised for her skill in bringing traditional female values into the barns and pastures of Wisconsin. Instead of facing ridicule for her unconventional, ostentatiously feminine innovations, she was heaped with praise and her methods studied and adopted on farms across the United States and beyond

The recent growth of international reserves in developing economies: A monetary perspective

The massive accumulation of international reserves in developing economies is a puzzling recent development in the world economy. This paper studies reserve accumulation as the outcome of a simple model in which the central bank smooths inflation. I explore the view that central banks accumulate reserves to face large fiscal shocks that need monetary financing. Central bank revenues are obtained through inflation, but inflation is distortionary. As a result, the central bank optimally accumulates international reserves in order to spread the costs associated with inflation over time. A simple numerical exercise for an average developing economy using data between 1970 and 2009 yields fast growth of international reserves

Pegxit Pressure: Evidence from the Classical Gold Standard

We develop a simple model that highlights the costs and benefits of fixed exchange rates as they relate to trade, and show that negative export-price shocks reduce fiscal revenue and increase the likelihood of an expected currency devaluation. Using a new high-frequency data set on commodity-price movements from the classical gold standard era, we then show that the model’s main prediction holds even for the canonical example of hard pegs. We identify a negative causal relationship between export-price shocks and currency-risk premia in emerging market economies, indicating that negative export-price shocks increased the probability that countries abandoned their pegs

The Most Technologically Progressive Decade of the Century

Because of the Depression’s place in both the popular and academic imagination, and the repeated and justifiable emphasis on output that was not produced, income that was not earned, and expenditure that did not take place, it will seem startling to propose the following hypothesis: the years 1929–1941 were, in the aggregate, the most technologically progressive of any comparable period in U.S. economic history.1 The hypothesis entails two primary claims: that during this period businesses and government contractors implemented or adopted on a more widespread basis a wide range of new technologies and practices, resulting in the highest rate of measured peacetime peak-to-peak multifactor productivity growth in the century, and secondly, that the Depression years produced advances that replenished and expanded the larder of unexploited or only partially exploited techniques, thus providing the basis for much of the labor and multifactor productivity improvement of the 1950’s and 1960’s

The increasing happiness of US parents

Previous research suggests that parents may be less happy than non-parents. We critically assess the literature and examine parents’ and non-parents’ happiness-trends using the General Social Survey (N = 42,298) and DDB Lifestyle Survey (N = 75,237). We find that parents are becoming happier over time relative to non-parents, that non-parents’ happiness is declining absolutely, and that estimates of the parental happiness gap are sensitive to the time-period analyzed. These results are consistent across two datasets, most subgroups, and various specifications. Finally, we present evidence that suggests children appear to protect parents against social and economic forces that may be reducing happiness among non-parents

God So Loved the World...Ministerial Religious Life in 2009

The Leadership Council invited me to speak about “vowed Religious Life” following an earlier and complementary presentation on the subject of Associates. In a sense, this is a bit like talking about “wet water” because the terms “vowed” and “Religious Life” are mutually implicating though not co-extensive. As all water is wet but not all wet things are water, so all Religious Life is vowed life but not all vowed life is Religious Life. Furthermore, there are many forms of vowed Religious Life such as monastic, mendicant, or apostolic and much that applies to one does not apply to another. So, to focus our discussion, I am going to circumscribe the topic in the hope of better contributing to our community project of meaningful discussion about our identity and relationships. My precise focus, therefore, will be on Religious Life, in 2009, of women who have made (or are preparing to make) perpetual public profession of the vows of consecrated celibacy, poverty, and obedience in the IHM Congregation, and who live out its charism, as articulated in the 1982-1988 Constitutions, in community and ministry.1 So, our topic is vowed Religious Life in the IHM Congregation in 2009. In what follows I have two objectives which will be given different amounts of space and emphasis but which will also intertwine throughout. First, I do want to supply a certain amount of data that might be useful in our ongoing discussions and which will already be well known to some people but perhaps less familiar to others. A colleague of mine once pointed out, as he reached for a dictionary, how much discussion time would be saved if people agreed not to argue about facts, but to look them up. So, I’ve tried to do some of the “looking up” for us and to include the results in this presentation. However, my second and more important objective is to interpret the data in a way that will illuminate our current experience and supply resources and energy for what lies ahead. I will do that interpretation as responsibly as I can within the limits of my own areas of competence but this is where you have to be the judge of what seems to flow legitimately from the data and to match your own experience. Any interpretation is only as good as it is persuasive. Two further points will affect these remarks. I am focusing this talk on IHM experience but very little of this experience is absolutely unique to us. Our current process of development is fairly common to many if not most Congregations of women Religious in the so-called “developed world”2 and much of my reflection is influenced by that common experience. Finally, we are working under tight time constraints this afternoon and Religious Life is one of those phenomena in which everything implies everything else. There is not time to make all the interconnections, much less explore them, so this presentation is necessarily selective. Please keep track of what needs to be brought up in later discussion

The Recovery of the First History of Alta California: Antonio María Osio’s La historia de Alta California

The transformation of Alta California was as sudden as it was unexpected. From a population of less than 15,000 gente de razón [literally, people with the capacity to reason, meaning people born into Christianity; that is, any non-Indian people] in the mid-1840s, it contained over 100,000 inhabitants in 1850 and almost a quarter of a million two years later. Swarming over the landscape, hostile to the system of land ownership and use that had developed over the previous half century, the newcomers, imbued with their longstanding belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority, went where they willed and took what they wanted. The Californios [any Mexican raised, or later, born and raised in California] adopted various strategies to meet this invasion. Some participated in the institutions set up by the conquerors, sitting in the 1849 Constitutional Convention and in the early state legislatures. Others prepared to defend themselves through North American courts and land commissions. Others withdrew from public life and public view, in the hope that they would be left alone. Others left and returned to Mexico. This paper tells the story of another strategy, one man\u27s attempt to preserve a world through the creation of history and autobiography. On April 4, 1851, in the city of Santa Clara, Antonio María Osio, who had been a bureaucratic functionary and officeholder in Mexican California for two decades, presented Father José María Suárez del Real with a densely written one hundred and ten page manuscript. In a cover letter, Osio told Suarez del Real that what the priest had asked him to do, write the history of California, was beyond his ability. But he had decided, Osio said, to write a letter, a relación of events since 1815 and especially of what I have known and seen since 1825