Humphry Davy: science and social mobility

Humphry Davy (1778–1829) was one of the first professional scientists, earning his living and rising spectacularly from an impoverished upbringing in Cornwall to be President of the Royal Society and a baronet. He owed his rise to patronage as well as to his range of abilities: as a lecturer, as a chemical theorist and as a very early applied scientist. But his exalted position brought him little happiness, for he could not satisfy all the hopes put upon him as the successor to Sir Joseph Banks. Admired rather than loved, he became unpopular and was seen as haughty. In his last two years, spent wandering lonely and sickly in Italy and the Alps, he sought to make sense of his life, writing dialogues as his bequest to the new generation.     

ACHIEVING PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Public schools are functionally provided through structural arrangements such as government funding, but public schools are achieved in substance, in part, through local governance. In this essay, Kathleen Knight Abowitz explains the bifocal nature of achieving public schools; that is, that schools are both subject to the unitary Public compact of constitutional principles as well as to the more local engagements with multiple publics. Knight Abowitz sketches this bifocal nature, exploring both the unitary ideal and its parameters, as well as the less understood forms of multiple, organic publics that come into being in response to localized problems in schools or districts. These publics often fail to realize their potential in the development of increased capacity for enhanced teaching and learning. The essay ultimately points to a practical application: that educational leadership of all types, and with some very specific kinds of habits and skills, is needed to help achieve public schools.     

The complexities and challenges of regional education hubs: focus on Malaysia

The race to establish regional education hubs is a recent development in cross-border higher education. This article briefly examines the rationales and strategies used by three countries in the Middle East and three in South East Asia which are working towards positioning themselves as regional education hubs. The different approaches and purposes among the six countries highlight the need for a typology of education hubs. Three types are proposed: the student hub, the training and skilled workforce hub, and the knowledge/innovation hub. The final section of the paper takes a closer look at Malaysia??s cross-border education initiatives and its actions to establish itself as a competitive education hub in a region where Singapore and Hong Kong have similar intentions. Whether Malaysia has the ability to make a quantum leap from being a student hub to becoming a knowledge/innovation hub remains to be seen and appears to be an optimistic outlook.     

The world of the British hifz class student: observations,findings and implications for education and further research

This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork that took place in 2004 in a boys’ hifz class which met in a north‐east London mosque. Drawing on the results of semi‐participant observations and semi‐structured interviews, the research findings are collated under five themes: the routines and rhythms of the hifz class; routes into the hifz class; the students’ perceptions of what they were doing; the ‘sacrifice’ of becoming a hafiz; and hifz class and the rest of students’ lives. Though the analysis is largely of the subjective responses of hifz class members and cannot therefore give definitive answers to research questions, the author points to some of the implications of this work and offers pointers for further research work in this field.     

Harnessing technology to improve formative assessment of student conceptions in STEM: forging a national network

Concept inventories, consisting of multiple-choice questions designed around common student misconceptions, are designed to reveal student thinking. However, students often have complex, heterogeneous ideas about scientific concepts. Constructed-response assessments, in which students must create their own answer, may better reveal students' thinking, but are time- and resource-intensive to evaluate. This report describes the initial meeting of a National Science Foundation-funded cross-institutional collaboration of interdisciplinary science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education researchers interested in exploring the use of automated text analysis to evaluate constructed-response assessments. Participants at the meeting shared existing work on lexical analysis and concept inventories, participated in technology demonstrations and workshops, and discussed research goals. We are seeking interested collaborators to join our research community.     

Neuromuscular control and running economy is preserved in elite international triathletes after cycling

Running is the most important discipline for Olympic triathlon success. However, cycling impairs running muscle recruitment and performance in some highly trained triathletes; though it is not known if this occurs in elite international triathletes. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of cycling in two different protocols on running economy and neuromuscular control in elite international triathletes. Muscle recruitment and sagittal plane joint angles of the left lower extremity and running economy were compared between control (no preceding cycle) and transition (preceded by cycling) runs for two different cycle protocols (20-minute low-intensity and 50-minute high-intensity cycles) in seven elite international triathletes. Muscle recruitment and joint angles were not different between control and transition runs for either cycle protocols. Running economy was also not different between control and transition runs for the low-intensity (62.4 +/- 4.5 vs. 62.1 +/- 4.0 ml/min/kg, p > 0.05) and high-intensity (63.4 +/- 3.5 vs. 63.3 +/- 4.3 ml/min/kg, p > 0.05) cycle protocols. The results of this study demonstrate that both low- and high-intensity cycles do not adversely influence neuromuscular control and running economy in elite international triathletes.     

Imagination and technoscientific innovations: governance of transgenic cows in New Zealand

This paper examines a controversial research programme aimed at the production of transgenic cows in New Zealand. It emphasizes the contested representation of the research, in its promotion, in its governance, and in the opposition sparked amongst environmentallanti-genetic modification groups and within the Māori community. The paper contends that the case of New Zealand's genetically modified cows certainly reveals some unique features of the prevailing economic, geographical and cultural context, but nonetheless has salience for the broader understanding of the promotion, public reception and governance of genetic modification.