Artful Language: Academic Writing for the Art Student

The task of writing about the process of making and contextualising art can be overwhelming for some graduate students. While the challenge may be due in part to limited time and attention to the practice of writing, in a practice‐based arts thesis there is a deeper issue: how the visual and written components are attended to in a manner that neither is subjugated and both are fully realised. Helping students to revision art and writing as similar creative processes that can be structured around a framework designed to address both processes can override the conception that writing and art are polarising forces. This article describes one such framework that was found to be effective from both the perspective of the professor and the student in fleshing out the heart of both artistic processes and finding an integrating structure that moves a thesis to fruition.     

Mini managers: Children strategically divide cognitive labor among collaborators,but with a self-serving bias

Strategic collaboration according to the law of comparative advantage involves dividing tasks based on the relative capabilities of group members. Three experiments (N = 405, primarily White and Asian, 45% female, collected 2016–2019 in Canada) examined how this strategy develops in children when dividing cognitive labor. Children divided questions about numbers between two partners. By 7 years, children allocated difficult questions to the skilled partner (Experiment 1, d = 1.42; Experiment 2, d = 0.87). However, younger children demonstrated a self-serving bias, choosing the easiest questions for themselves. Only when engaging in a third-party collaborative task did 5-year-olds assign harder questions to the more skilled individual (Experiment 3, d = 0.55). These findings demonstrate early understanding of strategic collaboration subject to a self-serving bias.     

‘I'm always up against a brick wall with them’: parents' experiences of accessing support for their child with a newly recognised developmental disorder

Three of the most prevalent developmental disorders (DDs) are autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD). As part of a study screening for DDs in Greater Manchester, UK, a unique opportunity was taken to explore parents' experiences of receiving reports about their child's previously unrecognised DD. Six parents out of a possible 16 took part in interviews, which were analysed thematically. Findings drawn from parental responses revealed a number of barriers to accessing support for their child's additional needs, including perceived resistance from schools, particularly for quiet, well-behaved girls, and difficulty in accessing assessment or referrals. There needs to be greater awareness of additional needs in children without externalising behaviours, the presence of gender-specific differences in the presentation of DDs, and FASD as a commonly occurring DD. Ultimately, better support for children with DDs would reduce the burden of unmet needs for the children and their families, and for wider services.     

Adaptive sliding mode control for a class of MIMO nonlinear systems with uncertainties

This paper proposes an adaptive scheme of designing sliding mode control (SMC) for affine class of multi-input multi-output (MIMO) nonlinear systems with uncertainty in the systems dynamics and control distribution gain. The proposed adaptive SMC does not require any a priori knowledge of the uncertainty bounds and therefore offers significant advantages over the non-adaptive schemes of SMC design. The closed loop stability conditions are derived based on Lyapunov theory. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated via simulations considering an example of a two-link robot manipulator and has been found to be satisfactory.