Infants' use of lexical-category-to-meaning links in object individuation

Infants watched an experimenter retrieve a stuffed animal from an opaque box and then return it. This happened twice, consistent with either 1 animal appearing on 2 occasions or 2 identical-looking animals each appearing once. The experimenter labeled each object appearance with a different novel label. After infants retrieved 1 object from the box, their subsequent search behavior was recorded. Twenty-month-olds, but not 16-month-olds, searched significantly longer for a second object inside the box when the labels were both proper names than when they were 1 count noun followed by 1 proper name. The effect was not significant when proper names were replaced by adjectives. Twenty-month-olds' understanding of meaning distinctions among several word categories guided their object individuation.     

Experimental determination of baseball spin and lift

The aim of this study was to develop a new method for the determination of lift on spinning baseballs. Inertial trajectories of (a) ball surface markers during the first metre of flight and (b) the centre of mass trajectory near home-plate were measured in a pitch using high-speed video. A theoretical model was developed, incorporating aerodynamic Magnus-Robins lift, drag and cross forces, which predicts the centre of mass and marker trajectories. Parameters including initial conditions and aerodynamic coefficients were estimated iteratively by minimizing the error between predicted and measured trajectories. We compare the resulting lift coefficients and spin parameter values with those of previous studies. Lift on four-seam pitches can be as much as three times that of two-seam pitches, although this disparity is reduced for spin parameters greater than 0.4.     

Reframing Teacher In-Service Training in Kenya: Recommendations from the Literature

Following the rapid expansion of Kenya's education system from 2003, raising education standards has emerged as the country's next major nation-building challenge. There is acknowledgement within Kenya that high education standards are dependent upon the quality of its teachers, which is in turn dependent upon the quality of their pre-service training, and subsequent in-service training. However, amidst accusations that educational standards are declining, in-service training programmes in particular have been singled out as being overly bureaucratic, under resourced, poorly delivered and ineffective in helping to raise teaching standards. Further, the literature suggests that current in-service training programmes are failing to address more fundamental issues surrounding Kenyan teaching professionalism as a whole. This article examines the literature surrounding teacher in-service training in Kenya, as identified by Kenyan researchers, with the aim of synthesising and clarifying the major issues surrounding quality and delivery, and then presents policy recommendations for reframing and building effective in-service provision for the future.     

Context specificity of sensory preconditioning: Implications for processes of within-event learning

A variant of the taste aversion procedure for sensory preconditioning, as used by Rescorla and Cunningham (1978), was employed in a study of the context dependency of within-event learning. In two experiments, rats received Phase 1 exposure to a simultaneous flavor compound, AX; flavor X was paired with illness during Phase 2, and any tendency for the resulting aversion to be elicited by A was measured. It was found that subjects were less likely to shun flavor A as a consequence of this training if the Phase 1 and test episodes were conducted in distinctively different contexts. This effect was evident both when the change of context occurred just before the test with flavor A (Experiment 1) and when it occurred before Phase 2 (Experiment 2). These results were taken to imply that, as is often found with serial associations, the retrieval of within-event associations is subject to contextual control. The implications of these findings for the interpretation of perceptual learning effects are discussed.     

Assumptions about Word Meaning: Individuation and Basic-Level Kinds

In 2 experiments, 3 1/2-year-old children interpreted a novel count noun (e.g., "This is a murvil") applied to an unfamiliar stuffed animal as referring to a basic-level kind, rather than to a kind that individuates its members by type of situation (context or life-phase). For example, children made interpretations akin to PERSON (a basic-level kind) rather than PASSENGER (a context-restricted kind), and DOG (a basic-level kind) rather than PUPPY (a life-phase-restricted kind). These experiments also document the role of object familiarity (previous knowledge of a basic-level count noun for the animal) and explicit information (about the relevance of the animal's situation) in the learning of count nouns for situation-restricted kinds. We note that children readily learn the meanings of basic-level count nouns through ostensive definitions (e.g., "This is an X"), although ostensive definitions do not distinguish basic-level kinds from situation-restricted kinds. Therefore, we suggest that children make an implicit assumption that a count noun applied to an unfamiliar solid object refers to a basic-level kind of object, and not to a kind that individuates its members by type of situation. We illustrate the importance of this assumption by showing how it bears directly on individuation, and therefore, on quantification (e.g., counting).     

Stewart,O’Reilly,and The Rumble 2012: Alternative Political Debate in the Age of Hybridity

This study explores the internet-only political debate held in the run-up to the 2012 U.S. presidential election between political-entertainment personalities Jon Stewart and Bill O’Reilly. Independently produced and financed through a version of crowd-funding, the debate offers a window into the fundamentally hybrid nature of contemporary mediated political discourse. A novel form of hybrid celebrity politics afforded by emergent technological, economic, and cultural forces, the so-called “Rumble in the Air Conditioned Auditorium” interwove televisual celebrity, political advocacy, affective spectacle, and deliberative exchange. In so doing, it spoke to the increasingly complicated nature of representation, authenticity, and the possibilities of political speech in a hybrid media age.     

The Stanford-Binet mental age and the WISC-R test age: A comparison study

The Stanford-Binet and WISC-R were administered to 100 students (CA—6 to 15 years) to determine the comparability of the age equivalent scores obtained from each test. The limited range of test age (TA) values in the WISC-R Manual required the use of extrapolated values for some subjects. The results indicated that, for subjects whose WISC-R scores fell within the TA table, the Binet MAs and WISC-R TAs were comparable (p>.05). However, when the use of extrapolated TAs was required, the scores were not comparable (p<.05). Implications for test age and mental age equivalency were discussed.