Third world woman meets third world man in Athens,Georgia OR manhunt,womanhunt

This article represents an attempt to reconcile discussions of aspects of educational research with recent developments in complexity science. It is argued that current characterizations of and distinctions among research methodologies in education are potentially counterproductive, in large part because they tend to be defined against or in terms of principles and methods that have been rendered problematic within the sciences. To develop this point, the authors draw on several contemporary discourses: poststructuralist methods are used to foreground the Euclidean (plane) geometric roots of much of the vocabulary of educational research; fractal geometry is taken as a source of images and analogies to support alternative conceptions of knowledge, learning and teaching; informed by poststructuralist and fractal geometric notions, the authors turn to complexity science and argue that it is fitted to and offers important elaborations of current discussions of educational research methodologies. In the process, they suggest that it may be time to abandon some of the prominent distinctions used to describe educational research, including ‘quantitative versus qualitative’ and ‘sciences versus humanities’.     

Visual constraints in written word recognition: evidence from the optimal viewing‐position effect

In this paper we review the literature on visual constraints in written word processing. We notice that not all letters are equally visible to the reader. The letter that is most visible is the letter that is fixated. The visibility of the other letters depends on the distance between the letters and the fixation location, whether the letters are outer or inner letters of the word, and whether the letters lie to the left or to the right of the fixation location. Because of these three factors, word recognition depends on the viewing position. In languages read from left to right, the optimal viewing position is situated between the beginning and the middle of the word. This optimal viewing position is the result of an interplay of four variables: the distance between the viewing position and the farthest letter, the fact that the word beginning is usually more informative than the word end, the fact that during reading words have been recognised a lot of times after fixation on this letter position and the fact that stimuli in the right visual field have direct access to the left cerebral hemisphere. For languages read from right to left, the first three variables pull the optimal viewing position towards the right side of the word (which is the word beginning), but the fourth variable counteracts these forces to some extent. Therefore, the asymmetry of the optimum viewing‐position curve is less clear in Hebrew and Arabic than in French and Dutch.     

Discourses of Exclusion and Inclusion in the South: Limits and Possibilities

The primary purpose of the article is to lookat how current thinking in the social sciences conceptualizes discourses of inclusion and exclusion in education and what the value of this thinking is for policy development incountries like South Africa and India. The article argues that the main conceptual weakness of current understandings is a failureto adequately engage with social justice concerns. While current approaches promote the achievement of certain kinds of rights, they are often complicit in the denial of others.This is because, the article seeks to show, the policy text in many countries, including countries of the South, invariably defines individuals and groups in essentialized terms and fails to engage with the complexity of their identities.     

Polymorphonuclear leukocyte mediated oxidative inactivation of alpha-1-proteinase inhibitor: Modulation by nitric oxide

Alpha-1-proteinase inhibitor activity was studied in presence of resting and activated polymorphonuclear leucocytes. Four different agonists; phorbol myristic acetate, N-formyl-methionyl-leucyl-phenylalanine, opsonised zymosan and arachidonic acid decreased the inhibitor activity by 23.3%, 20%, 12% and 16.6^ respectively. The inhibitor activity was protected by using various free radical scavengers. Catalase and superoxide dismutase both restored activity by about 18%, mannitol by 13% and sodium azide by 17.3%. The inhibitor activity was also protected significantly by pretreatment of polymorphs with L-Arg, a precursor of nitric oxide, before activation. L-Arg was also observed to suppress the generation of superoxide and hydroxyl radical appreciably. The nitric oxide synthase inhibitor, aminoguanidine drastically inhibited the nitrite release and reversed the protection offered by L-Arg to the inhibitor activity. Our results indicate a multifactorial nature of the inactivation process, the culprit species being superoxide, hydrogen peroxide, hydroxyl radical and hypohalides. Nitric oxide seems to scavenge the superoxide radical directly after its formation rather than inhibiting its generation by NADPH oxidase as was believed earlier.     

Researching 'my people,' researching myself: Fragments of a reflexive tale

The paper investigates my positionality as a Pakistani Muslim researcher, affiliated with a U.S. institution, conducting ethnographic research with Pakistani Muslim immigrants in California. Three vignettes reconstructed from field-notes and a reflective journal illustrate the tensions and contradictions informing the research process. The first vignette details my shifting subjectivities in relation to a segment of the Muslim community in Northern California. Although my perceived disempowerment of Muslims motivated my research, my failure to subscribe to the Muslim Student Association's version of Islam cost me their disapproval. The second vignette highlights my relationship with one particular research participant. Although I shared the same ethnic background as this participant, my inability to conceive of her empowerment in terms other than those of Western feminism led to tragedy. The last vignette focuses on my interaction with the ethnographic data at my desk and becomes an analysis of the forces in my life that feed into my research.