Further Reflections on the WorldCat Collection Analysis Tool

This article focuses on a recent enhancement to the WorldCat Collection Analysis tool, the Interlibrary Loan Analyses module, exploring the possibilities that this enhancement offers for strategic collection development. The study concentrates on the tool as a way to assess the impact of the recent growth at North Carolina State University in biomedicine and human medicine programs. The research contained in this article originated from a session presented at XXVII Annual Charleston Conference, which was held in Charleston, South Carolina, on November 8, 2007.     

Infants Segment Continuous Events Using Transitional Probabilities

Throughout their 1st year, infants adeptly detect statistical structure in their environment. However, little is known about whether statistical learning is a primary mechanism for event segmentation. This study directly tests whether statistical learning alone is sufficient to segment continuous events. Twenty‐eight 7‐ to 9‐month‐old infants viewed a sequence of continuous actions performed by a novel agent in which there were no transitional movements that could have constrained the possible upcoming actions. At test, infants distinguished statistically intact units from less predictable ones. The ability to segment events using statistical structure may help infants discover other cues to event boundaries, such as intentions, and carve up the world of continuous motion in meaningful ways.     

Day one sustainability

Emissions reductions targets for the UK set out in the Climate Change Act for the period to 2050 will only be achieved with significant changes to the built environment, which is currently estimated to account for 50% of the UK's carbon emissions.

The socio-technological nature of Civil Engineering means that this field is uniquely placed to lead the UK through such adaptations. This paper discusses the importance of interdisciplinary teaching to produce multi-faceted team approaches to sustainable design solutions.

Methods for measuring success in education are often not fit for purpose, producing good students but poor engineers. Real-world failures to apply sustainable design present a serious, difficult to detect, and ultimately economically negative situation. Techniques to replace summative examinations are presented and discussed, with the aim of enhancing core technical skills alongside those required for sustainable design.

Finally, the role of our future engineers in policy-making is discussed. In addition to carbon, the provision of water and food will heavily influence the work of civil engineers in the coming decades. Leadership from civil engineers with the technical knowledge and social awareness to tackle these issues will be required. This provides both opportunities and challenges for engineering education in the UK.     

Minerva unbound: Knowledge stocks, knowledge flows and new knowledge production

Regional growth of new knowledge in nanotechnology, as measured by counts of articles and patents in the open-access digital library NanoBank, is shown to be positively affected both by the size of existing regional stocks of recorded knowledge in all scientific fields, and the extent to which tacit knowledge in all fields flows between institutions of different organizational types. The level of federal funding has a large, robust impact on both publication and patenting. The data provide support for the cumulative advantage model of knowledge production, and for ongoing efforts to institutionalize channels through which cross-organizational collaboration may be achieved.     

Exploring the Social Integration of Sexual Minority Youth Across High School Contexts

Mental health disparities between sexual minority and other youth have been theorized to result in part from the effects of the stigmatization on social integration. Stochastic actor‐based modeling was applied to complete network data from two high schools in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (M_age = 15 years, N = 2,533). Same‐sex attracted youth were socially marginalized in a smaller predominantly White school but not in a larger, more racially diverse school. For both schools, homophily was a critical network feature, and could represent social support for and social segregation of such youth. These findings emphasize the school context in studying the social lives of sexual minority youth and suggest that youth may be better off socially in larger and more diverse schools.     

Training in dealing with child abuse in schools: problems in evaluating course effectiveness

Teachers play an important part in identifying child maltreatment but find dealing with it difficult. This study examines the problems involved with evaluating a countywide training programme on this topic for senior teachers. The course was run 17 times and 60% of the participants attending were sent an evaluation questionnaire three months after taking part. There was a 49% response rate. It was found that the activities undertaken by the participants after the course were a greater reflection of the effort required than of the effectiveness of the course. It is argued that this factor should be taken into account when conducting and interpreting any course evaluation.     

Tradition,transformation and taboo: European games and festivals in Latin America, 1500–1900

This article builds on an emerging corpus of work that seeks to uncover the history and social, cultural and political significance of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) in the United States. However, it also marks a departure from any of the published work to date because for the first time it addresses the place of Gaelic games in the lives of the Irish émigré in the San Francisco Bay area. The article accounts for the origins and early history of the GAA there, and details the key agents and agencies responsible for the Association's development during the first 50 years of its existence. In doing so, it reveals that the GAA's growth in San Francisco appears to have been more moderately paced than it was in some of America's other centres of Irish immigration, particularly Boston, New York and Chicago. The article concludes by exploring the reasons for this and argues that a combination of quantitative differences in levels of Irish immigration to America's Pacific and Atlantic coasts and qualitative differences in the nature of the experiences of the Irish émigré in San Francisco were key in this regard.