Whitehead's Contribution to Ecological Thought: Some Unrealized Possibilities

The organizers of this conference have given me a difficult task: that of finding heretofore unfound implications of Whitehead's philosophy for environmental thought. The task is not difficult because implications of Whitehead's philosophy for environmental thought are hard to find. They are easy to find. The problem is that so many people have found them that finding something new to say is not easy.In what follows, however, some new implications are actually ferreted out. They fall under three headings: a) the interrelations between three ways of thinking about the environment: bioregionalism, land ethics, and the philosophy of organism; b) the implications of Whitehead's philosophy of organism for environmental aesthetics; and c) the implications of Whitehead's philosophy of organism for human communities (sustainable communities) viewed as interfused with living nature.     

Making Meaningful Choices: an investigation into young children's intonation patterns in storytelling

Abstract This paper investigates the meaningful choices in intonation made by young children. A category system for classifying choices is outlined and an experiment is reported in which randomly selected groups of 41/2‐5 year‐olds heard and retold stories in different situations. Results indicate that all groups distinguished narrative from other forms of discourse and drew upon intonation resources appropriately. Differences were found between recalling a story with pictures and one without, suggesting that these are different cognitive tasks and that children make different selections from choices available to them.     

Achieving a World-Wide Software Engineering Profession: A Report on the CSEET 2001 Workshop

The prime aim of the workshop was to provide a forum to consider the global dimensions of a Software Engineering profession and determine the relevance and usefulness of an initiative concerning the harmonization of professional standards which had been produced under the auspices of the International Federation of Information Processing. In particular the workshop addressed: the current situation with regard to certification and/or licensing in different countries, the drivers and constraints regarding Software Engineering Professionalism, the extent to which world-wide Software Engineering Professionalism is achievable (particularly in the light of IFIP's proposals regarding harmonization), and possible strategy(ies) that would assist in achieving such world-wide Software Engineering Professionalism. A pre workshop survey was carried out at the conference and the results of this are reported. The two staged operation and results of the workshop are then detailed. Initial position statements are summarised and the conclusions from the four separate subgroups that operated within each of the two stages are reported. Finally the major points from a general discussion on what the future goals and strategies for achieving a recognised profession should be are presented followed by the overall conclusion of the workshop participants.     

Was Humpty Dumpty Right? An Exploratory Study of Semantic Priming and Lexical Access

This study investigates the way subjects gain access to their internal lexicon and assesses the effects of context on this process. The focus is on ambiguous words that are homographic but pronounced differently. A total of 35 adult subjects read aloud from word lists containing the same target homographs. In two conditions the targets were primed by words calculated to influence subjects either towards a regular or irregular pronunciation; a third condition without primers provided a baseline check. The influence of primers on subjects’ pronunciations was recorded and calculated. Results confirmed a significant influence of primers on pronunciation for a majority of target words. Further analysis showed groups of subjects were significantly (p<0.001) influenced by semantic primers. However, results are interpreted cautiously and proposals are made for a more rigorous study using this exploratory work as a basis. Finally, the potential of semantic priming studies for future research is outlined.     

Literacy skills of welfare recipients

Illiteracy is considered to be a significant barrier to employment. Programs are being established to require literacy education and work programs of welfare recipients. The purpose of this study was to determine the literacy skills of a random sample of welfare recipients. One-hundred and six welfare subjects were administered theWoodcock-Johnson Psycho-Educational Battery and a comprehensive interview form. Using common criteria to separate the sample into the literate and functionally illiterate, the groups were found to differ significantly on intellectual capabilities. It was concluded that illiteracy is associated with subaverage intellectual functioning among persons on welfare. A number of recommendations were made pertaining to policy.