The endless spiral

A Danish textbook on the history of technology,Skruen uden ende — Den vestlige teknologis historie (The Endless Spiral: A History of Western Technology), was published in 1990. In the present article, one of the authors presents some of the background to this event and puts the work into historical perspective by describing a number of different traditions for writing textbooks on the history of technology. Next follows a discussion of why history of technology ought to be an important ingredient in upper secondary education and why only the contextualist tradition — inspired by the rapidly developing school of research centered around the journalTechnology & Culture — offers any real hope for providing meaningful teaching materials on history of technology. The paper ends with a brief outline of the textbook's contents, with special emphasis on one of its several case studies describing the development of certain mainstream technologies in the context of the scientific, economic, social and cultural developments existing when the particular technology came into being.     

Activating lignite and sludge by electro-hydraulic impulse

1. Introduction At present, it is necessary to use fertilizer to ensure the stable and high agricultural productivity. However, as we all know, the fertilizer not only decreases the self-fertility of soil, but also is accompanied with pesticide. Food poisoning caused by remnant pesticide in fruits and vegetables is often reported, and in such cases, chronic poisoning is the majority. The remnant pesticide accumulates in body gradually, and then induces kinds of disease. As reported, the Miyu…     

A New Approach to Avoiding Problems of Scale in Interpreting Trends in Mental Measurement Data

Extracting policy-relevant information from large national surveys of educational achievement is ordinarily a nontrivial task. It is made more treacherous when the data are expressed on scales that are not uniquely determined. The paper begins with a critical analysis of a recent attempt to interpret the findings on reading achievement obtained by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). It then describes a new approach to the quantification and interpretation of change and demonstrates its appropriateness for repeated cross-sectional designs such as NAEP. Limitations imposed by the survey design and the nature of the measurements are highlighted     

Views from the field: program directors' perceptions of teacher education and the education of students who are deaf or hard of hearing

Arandom sample of directors of programs for the deaf in North America were surveyed to get their views about the skills that teacher education programs need to be teaching future teachers of students who are deaf or hard of hearing. The directors were queried about literacy practices, classroom management strategies, and communication strategies used in their programs, and were encouraged to comment freely on the questionnaire items presented to them. Program directors predicted a need for more itinerant and resource teachers. The survey also revealed that programs for the deaf are highly behaviorist (i.e., You do this and you'll get that) in the way they induce students to learn and in how they manage student behavior.     

The Mind's "I": Children's Conception of the Mind as an Active Agent

1 hypothesis about children's developing conception of the mind is that preschoolers are limited to an understanding that persons have internal, mental contents like thoughts and beliefs, whereas older children and adults conceive of the mind itself as an independent, active structure or processor. Adults' conception of the mind in this independent active fashion seems evident in their use of personified mental metaphor (e.g., "My mind tricked me"). 3 studies examined the development and consolidation of this active, personified view. Study 1 provided an analysis of natural language data regarding 1 child's uses of vision words such as see and look from age 2 1/2 to 8 years. We examined the child's use of such words to refer literally to perception (e.g., "I see the TV") and also to refer nonliterally to active mental processes such as comprehension and inference (e.g., "I see what you mean"). Studies 2 and 3 examined 6-, 8-, and 10-year-olds' comprehension and production of mental metaphors. In a metaphor comprehension task, we asked children to interpret personified metaphoric statements about the mind (e.g., "My mind wandered") and 3 comparison domains, mechanics (e.g., "The car is dead"), nature (e.g., "The wind is howling"), and emotion (e.g., "Her heart was smiling"). In an explanation task, we asked children to explain the processes underlying the making of both instant photos and mental images. The findings reveal a developing ability to interpret and produce statements personifying the mind and provide considerable evidence about children's movement toward a conception of the mind as an independent entity deserving reference and conceptualization in its own right.