TALON--the first five years.

The South Central Regional Medical Library Program, Region IX in the national network of medical libraries, was one of the last to be organized and funded. The particular makeup of this organization has permitted a good deal of flexibility in the identification and implementation of various types of network services and activities. The following is a brief account of some of these network functions during the first five years relating the successes and failures in network strategies and describing the further evolution of programs and refinement of a regional plan which will advance network services.     

‘The feeling of exclusion’: Young peoples' perceptions of art galleries

This article first looks at the relationship between museums and art galleries and their potential audiences and, in particular, the under-represented sector of young visitors. It examines the main findings from the limited research available on young visitors, and goes on to discuss theories delineating the differences between the cultures, identities and values of culture consumers and culture providers. The second part of the article looks at what specific museums have done towards being more inclusive in their appeal, and then reports the findings of a survey of young people in relation to New Zealand's Auckland Art Gallery. The survey found that young people's ideas of what constitutes modern, relevant art do not match standard art criteria, and that most exhibitions and marketing methods do not mesh with their worldview. The article concludes by using data from the survey to suggest ways of engaging more young people with public art galleries.     

Disciplined freedom,branded authenticity,and dependable independence: how tensions enact flexibility in lifestyle blogging careers

Analyzing 219 blog posts from 52 self-employed women lifestyle bloggers in North America, this study shows how these digital professionals navigate tensions and communicatively constitute work flexibility. In their narratives, women bloggers employed tension management approaches such as reframing, continual connections, and reflective practice in response to tensions in enacting temporal–spatial, identity, and financial flexibility. Specifically, women followed oxymoronic constructions – disciplined freedom, branded authenticity, and dependable independence – to embrace and transform competing poles of fluidity?structure, authenticity?marketability, and independence?interconnection. Expanding work–life research to the self-employed digital labor context, this study responds to recent calls to uncover more-than tension management strategies in empirical settings and contributes to a tension-centered, contextual, and processual analysis of workplace flexibility construction.     

The Information Nature of Culture

This paper explores the information nature of culture. It is represented as an extragenetic and nonorganizational information process and system. Information is regarded as a universal property of matter that is essentially associated with development processes and realizes various forms and ways of storage and circulation at various development stages of global evolution. The socio-cultural principle of exogenous accumulation, transmission, and transformation of information is analyzed in the context of the continuing growth of the information content of material systems on the superhighway of global-universal evolution. It is noted that the information concept of culture evolves into a new area of cultural studies, that is information and cultural studies, advancing our understanding of the nature of culture and cultural genesis.     

审美游戏与中学课程教学

审美游戏是人类特有的一种融创造性、娱乐性和教育性为一体的活动,由于学校教育和审美游戏在本质上具有同一性,因而在实践活动中可以将二者有机地结合起来。以中学课程教学为例:语文和哲学是关于语言和解释的游戏,音乐和数学是关于符号和序列的游戏,美术和历史是关于时间和变化的游戏,地理和物理是关于空间和运动的游戏,生物和化学是关于模拟与复制的游戏。搞好课程教学的关键在于充分发掘身体、器物和符号这三者之间的内在联系并不断地促使其相互转化。     

大学的收益:留学生教育中的经济学意义

留学生教育的经济收益是国际教育服务贸易中的重要部分,国外有关学者、政府机构和国际组织都非常关注,但在国内,人们对留学生教育的认识还主要集中在政治和文化层面。通过建构的经济收益测算模型(包括图式模型和数学模型),并以上海一所大学的留学生样本进行试测,研究显现出我国高校留学生教育的经济学意义:留学生教育促进了教育服务贸易,增加了我国经济总量;能够缩减我国在国际教育服务贸易中的巨大逆差;增加了高校的"预算外收入";改变了高校的教育资源结构,提高了教育管理效率。