Winter

Winter is snowy and cold season.
Christmas is in winter.
Winter is when you get out for Christmas break.
Winter is when you have hot chocolate with marshal mallows.
Winter is the season for colds and sinus problems Winter is when you have snow days.     

What are the characteristics of nature preschools in Norway,and how do they organize their daily activities?

This study provides basic information about how Norwegian nature preschools differ from other Norwegian preschools and how they organize their daily activities. Fifty-six nature preschools and 52 other preschools were included in the study. A total of 106 headmasters and 98 pedagogical leaders filled out questionnaires about the characteristics of their preschool and the characteristics of their preschool’s outdoor activities. Two women and four men from nature preschools were interviewed about organizing a nature preschool. Most nature preschools are private and have less children and staff than other preschools. Nature preschools have more reference areas in nature and visit these areas more frequently than other preschools. Nature preschools spend a large amount of time in nature and have routines and rules that allow the children a significant amount of trust.     

Design and development of a cross-cultural disposition inventory

Advances in technology have increased the likelihood that engineers will have to work in a global, culturally diverse setting. Many schools of engineering are currently revising their curricula to help students to develop cultural competence. However, our ability to measure cultural dispositions can be a challenge. The purpose of this project was to develop and test an instrument that measures the various aspects of cultural disposition. The results of the validation process verified that the hypothesised model adequately represented the data. The refined instrument produced a four-factor model for the overall construct. The validation process for the instrument verified the existence of specific subcomponents that form the overall cultural disposition construct. There also seems to be a hierarchical relationship within the subcomponents of cultural disposition. Additional research is needed to explore which aspects of cultural disposition affect an individual's ability to work effectively in a culturally diverse engineering team.     

Cross-modal transfer as a function of similarities between training tasks in classical conditioning of the rabbit

The present experiments examined transfer of training from visual to auditory sensory modalities in classical conditioning of the rabbit’s nictitating membrane response. Experiment 1 examined transfer from initial training with a single visual CS to subsequent auditory discrimination training, and Experiment 2 examined transfer from visual discrimination training to auditory discrimination training. The major findings were that (1) initial conditioning of a visual CS facilitated the overall rate of CR acquisition to the auditory CSs separate from the requirements for discrimination learning (Experiments 1 and 2), and (2) initial visual discrimination training facilitated auditory discrimination learning (Experiment 2). Thus, the animals appeared to encode separately both contiguous CS-US relations and CS+ versus CS? relations during initial visual training. The results are discussed with respect to theories of extradimensional transfer.     

Venture capital as a catalyst to commercialization

We find that the public funding of academic research and venture capital have a complementary relationship in fostering innovation and the creation of new firms. Using panel data on metropolitan areas in the United States, from 1993 to 2002, our analyses reveal that the positive relationships between government research grants to universities and research institutes and the rates of patenting and firm formation in a region become more pronounced as the supply of venture capital in that region increases. Our results remain robust to estimation with an instrumental variable to address potential endogeneity in the provision of venture capital. Consistent with perspectives that emphasize the importance of an innovation ecosystem, our findings point to a strong interaction between private financial intermediation and public research funding in promoting entrepreneurship and innovation.     

havingproblems@cm.com: new ways to miss the point

The desire to establish international links between two departments of adult education and to experiment with new technologies led us to establish a listserv—a computer based community in cyberspace. This article describes the experience and attempts to articulate some of the problems that emerged. The main problem was the failure in developing a sense of community among the participants. This failure had its origins in some of the assumptions about groups in cyberspace and their similarity to groups in face to face settings.     

A good hustle: the moral economy of market competition in adult webcam modeling

In this article, we examine how models working on Chaturbate, one of the world’s most popular adult webcam platforms, negotiate and make sense of the dynamic ways in which this platform configures their competitive environment. By combining different perspectives from the field of economic sociology, we demonstrate how competition on Chaturbate is shaped by various market devices whose strategic negotiation informs – and is informed by – the moral economy articulated on web forums where models gather to discuss their work experiences and market strategies. We first introduce Chaturbate and the ways in which it organizes market competition, surveying the environment models have to negotiate. We then zoom in on two controversial strategies for beating the competition, each of which upset the moral economy of Chaturbate’s model community. Subsequently, we turn to what models term ‘the hustle,’ which encompasses a number of competitive strategies and criteria judged to be fair and thus legitimate. The final part of our analysis considers the limitations of the hustle, as well as the meritocratic and entrepreneurial discourse that surround it, in light of what we identify as Chaturbate’s ‘manufactured uncertainty.’     

The limitations of multiculturalism in Norwegian early childhood education

In Norway, 9 out of 10 children between the ages of one and five participate in an educational formation programme which, despite around half of the kindergartens being privately owned, is regulated by a common law and relatively detailed regulations describing what the content of kindergartens should be. Norwegian kindergartens therefore represent a central institution for integration and transfer of values and morals in today's multicultural Norwegian society. The relatively new situation of multicultural diversity is challenging earlier cultural hegemonies where Christian heritage and tradition combined with a strong social democratic movement were important components. The issue discussed in this paper is how this cultural diversity is dealt with in the early childhood education documents, with emphasis on understanding where the limits of multiculturalism are set. I argue, in dialogue with three standpoints of multiculturalism, that while Norwegian early childhood education embraces cultural diversity, it is unclear about the limits to its political implications.