Kempe’s linkages and the Universality Theorem

Inspired by James Watt’s approximate straight line generator, kinematicians of the 19th century challenged themselves to design a mechanical device that could convert rotary motion into a perfect straight line and vice versa. Few inventions emerged in 1864 due to Peaucellier and Lipkin and in 1875 due to Hart. Just a year later, in 1876, Alfred B Kempe presented a generalized method for linkages that could exactly trace any algebraic curve of degree n and not just a straight line. This work of Kempe is of classical importance. Yet, many are not aware of it perhaps because the resulting linkages are quite complex. This article discusses Kempe’s method that highlights the way he treated the rotations analytically using only parallelograms and contra-parallelograms to get the final rigidbody linkage tracing a given algebraic curve. An elaborate example with geometric construction using only a ruler and compass is presented to help the readers understand the assembly of Kempe’s linkages.     

Children’s Ecoliterature and the New Nature Study

This essay explores how nineteenth-century nature study principles inform a twenty-first century New Nature Study movement, and gives examples of a trend toward nature writing in recent picture books. The pedagogical principles of nineteenth-century nature study, ascendant at the turn of the twentieth century and implicit in interwar children’s literature, yielded to a model founded on Cold War competition rather than environmental stewardship. In mid-century narratives for children, technological progress prevailed. In the 1990s, the ideals of the first nature study movement reemerged in a call for meaningful conservation to sustain future generations. Like the original nature study, the New Nature Study arises from anxieties about industrial development, habitat loss and extinction, and hazards to childhood itself. The New Nature Study treats children as agents for change and citizens being denied their full human rights when their land, soil, water, and lives are bought and sold.     

Gone with the Wind and Women’s Awakening

Scarlett who was the heroine in the world famous book Gone with the Wind,is regarded as one of the most impressive images in the world literature.Her charm lies in her perverse personality of independence and her spirit of freedom.This essay analyzes the characters of the heroine through highlighting women’s social status in the South during the age of Scarlett’s time.It could be safely concluded that Scarlett’s characters and her courage to face the difficulties during the war reveal the awakening of women’s self-consciousness and the realization of feminine value.     

Heroes and villains: the insistence of the imaginary and the novice teacher’s need to believe

This paper stems from research in Australia examining pre-service teacher and mentor teacher experiences on the practicum. The paper focuses on findings from the research, highlighting the tendency among the pre-service teachers to either valorise or demonise their mentor teachers, reflective of what we describe, following Kristeva and Britzman, as their powerful need to believe. The paper draws on psychoanalytic theory in order gain insights into this process, viewing the pre-service teachers’ accounts of their mentors as fantasies that serve a stabilising function in order to manage the intense emotional demands of schools and classrooms. The paper concludes with considerations of how teacher educators might ameliorate the ideality of novice teachers, reflecting the insistence of the imaginary, and hence enable them to benefit more from the practicum experience. We briefly suggest the use of tools that work within the symbolic register to exercise a mediating role in the context of these intense demands.     

Jocasta’s Crime and Fanyi’s Punishment: Reflection on Oedipus the King and Thunderstorm

From Oedipus the King and Thunderstorm, the masterpiece of tragedies, the author intended to throw light on the Jocasta and Fanyi, two female characters bearing sharply different cultural, social and religious mark, though, depicted similarly as unacceptable roles obsessed with the freak love and strong lust drive for their sons. Thus from the angle of respective emotional motivation, the author made a reflection on Jocasta’s crime and Fanyi’s punishment.     

Inter-Parental Violence: The Pre-Schooler’s Perspective and the Educator’s Role

Early childhood educators are likely to encounter youngsters who experience problems at home impeding their abilities to learn and benefit from the program. One such group is children who live or have lived with adult domestic violence. Children yet to begin elementary school are over-represented among groups of young people known to live with inter-parental violence. A qualitative study using clinical interviews of young children was used to develop a model suggesting how key aspects of development among children 3–5 years of age can react to and be affected by inter-parental violence. Focus is on age-appropriate expression of emotions, salience of observations and conflicting messages, a child’s focus on outcome versus process, egocentricity and self-blame, learning of gender roles, and delay or regression in development of independence. Implications for the classroom are outlined, including providing a nurturing environment, supporting child adjustment, and helping caregivers. Special contingencies when families are in shelters are also discussed.     

Discourse, the moral imperative and Faraday’s candle

This commentary considers two lines of inquiry into the work of Ideland and Malmberg: the role of discourse in shaping teachers’ responses to Roberts’ (2011) Visions of Science and the moral imperatives that will accompany any shifts between Vision I and II. Vision I of science has accreted to itself great power and prestige, both of which shape notions of a ‘good’ science education. Any shift towards Vision II will require serious engagement in a Foucaultian discourse into the issues of power, inclusion and exclusion that Ideland and Malmberg describe. Similarly, the moral imperatives that arise require courage to both contest the status quo in science education, and develop a reasoned, morally defensible, response to the challenge that Vision II is really a form of ideological activism.     

Hubble, Hubble’s law and the expanding universe

Hubble’s name is associated closely with the idea of an expanding universe as he discovered the relation between the recession velocity and the distances of galaxies. Hubble also did a lot of pioneering work on the distribution of galaxies in the universe. In this article we take a look at Hubble’s law and discuss how it relates with models of the universe. We also give a historical perspective of the discoveries that led to the Hubble’s law.     

Maxwell’s demon and the second law of thermodynamics

A century and a half ago, Maxwell introduced a thought experiment to illustrate the difficulties which arise in trying to apply the second law of thermodynamics at the level of molecules. He imagined an entity (since personified as ‘Mawell’s demon’) which could sort molecules into hot and cold and thereby create differences of temperature spontaneously, apparently violating the second law. This topic has fascinated physicists and has generated much discussion and many new ideas, which this article goes over. Particularly interesting is the insight given by deeper analysis of the experiment. This brings out the relation between entropy and information, and the role of irreversibility in computing as we understand it — topics still under discussion today.     

Between the Under-Labourer and the Master-Builder: Observations on Bunge’s Method

Mario Bunge has repeatedly discussed contributions to philosophy and to science that are worthless at best and dangerous at worst, especially cases of pseudo-science. He clearly gives his reason in his latest essay on this matter: ??The fact that science can be faked to the point of deceiving science lovers suggests the need for a rigorous sifting device??. Moreover, this sifting has its rewards, as ??sometimes intellectual gold comes mixed with muck??. Furthermore, the sifting device is a demarcation of science, which answers interesting questions: what is valuable in science and what makes it tick? The question is under dispute. So before coming to it we should admit a few preliminary ideas that are more difficult to contest than ideas that purport to demarcate science.     

Assessment and the aims of the curriculum: An explorer’s journey

This article considers lessons learnt through involvement in several assessment projects. Early experience, in university work and in school examinations, led to an opportunity to help establish a novel system of assessment for an innovative school curriculum. Different lessons were then learnt from work on a national survey of school students’ learning of science, and different lessons again while leading a group to advise the UK government on a new scheme for national testing of all students. Many welcomed the group’s advice but politicians rejected it; however, the recoil from this defeat led to very rewarding work on formative assessment. The article ends with reflection on the conflict between the summative and the formative and ways to resolve that conflict, along with the full benefit of formative approaches that investment can secure to help teachers share responsibility for high-stakes summative assessments.     

On George Orwell ’ s Politics and the English Language

George Orwell is an important essayist in the 20th century and of great influence for his critical essays. Politics and the English Language is an essay with an aim to criticize the misused English at the historical setting when World War Ⅱ was about to break out. The following article is to explore the essay＇ s language style and its theme.     

It’s Not the Book,It’s Not the Author,It’s the Award: The Lambda Literary Award and the Case for Strategic Essentialism

On September 16, 2009, the Lambda Literary Foundation (LLF) released a statement revising their eligibility guidelines for the Lambda Literary Award, the most prestigious citation offered for LGBT books and authors. This criteria, which demands that an author must self-identify as a member of the LGBT family of writers, has been met with considerable disapproval within the field of children’s and young adult literature, with critics decrying the decision as unfair and essentialist. By arguing for the deployment of strategic essentialism as a discourse of resistance and by working to complicate discussions of essentialism within the field of children’s and young adult literature, the author of this article confronts the condemnation levied at the Lambda Literary Foundation and makes the case for the necessity of establishing the “Lammys” as an “insider-only” citation.     

Education and the working-class girl of the 1970s: reconstructing the theoretical field of Carolyn Steedman’s The Tidy House

This article asks historians of education to think about the influences that we bring to bear on our work. It uses, as an example, Carolyn Steedman’s book The Tidy House: Little Girls Writing (1982). The Tidy House set out to interpret a short story written by three primary school girls in Britain in 1976. Steedman contextualised this source against the backdrop of modern children’s writing and childhood experience in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. Viewing the book itself as a source, this article explores the intellectual background (the ‘theoretical field’) that gave its ideas meaning. This involves looking at the historiographical surroundings of the author, such as Marxism and feminism, in a wider lens. It also entails a consideration of how The Tidy House relates to educational thought today – as well as to key issues tackled by some of the most celebrated historians of education in the last 40 years.     

On the Manipulation of the Selectivity of Encoding and Decoding over the Translator’s Subjectivity

The translation activity is a process of the interlinguistic transmission of information realized by the information encoding and decoding.Encoding and decoding,cognitive practices operated in objective contexts,are inevitably of selectivity ascribing to the restriction of contextual reasons.The translator as the intermediary agent connects the original author(encoder)and the target readers(decoder),shouldering the dual duties of the decoder and the encoder,for which his subjectivity is irrevocably manipulated by the selectivity of encoding and decoding.     

Regulating the unthinkable: Bernstein’s pedagogic device and the paradox of control

Drawing upon Bernstein’s writings on the pedagogic device, this article examines how critical thinking is regulated in Singapore through the process of pedagogic recontextualization. The potential of critical thinking to speak to alternative possibilities and notions of individual autonomy as well as its assumptions of a liberal arrangement of society are problematized in Singapore. By documenting how such curricular discourses are articulated by the state and taken up in schools and classrooms, the article provides a sociological account of the relations between the organization of knowledge and the distribution of social power and control. The analysis reveals that even as official understandings of critical thinking are transmitted in the classroom, alternative, non-official orders of meaning are inevitably made available. Showing how teachers and students act to resist and challenge these prescribed understandings the article argues that the very ideas of change and indeterminacy are fundamentally built into the pedagogic device.     

Internationalization of Japanese higher education in the 1980‘s and early 1990‘s

The Japanese response to its recognition that the countrys economicachievements implied that it should increase its interaction with theworld-wide community is analysed with particular reference to developmentsin the 1980s and early 1990s. Attention is particularly drawn to thesignificant part played by Japanese government initiatives aimed atincreasing the number of foreign students coming to Japan to study and atfacilitating the employment of foreign nationals as members of faculty inJapanese universities. Curricular developments within Japanese universitiesincluding undergraduate programs with an international flavour intended forJapanese students and the development of several graduate schools with afocus on international development are detailed. Programs on Japaneselanguage and culture, some aimed at Junior Year Abroad students mainly fromthe USA, are noted as well as the steps taken to smooth the path of foreignresearchers seeking to complete doctoral studies in Japan.Inter-governmental and inter-university agreements are described includingprojects aimed at training scientists and other specialists from developingcountries which include training in Japanese institutions. The paperidentifies a complementary movement by foreign institutions, mainly in theUSA (prompted in part by awareness of Japan's mounting trade surplus withthe USA) to establish branches in Japan; it is shown that such developmentswere encouraged by Japanese municipalities, especially those anxious tore-vitalize their communities. The conclusion reviews the whole developmentand adds a note on problems which may lie ahead in the future.