National Sporting Pastimes,Spectacles of Sporting Otherness and American Imaginings, 1880–1920

This discussion focuses on how the rise of America's national sporting pastimes, during the period 1880–1920, was inextricably tied to the ambitions and outpourings of American print capitalism and a concomitant congealing of a sense of modern American nationhood. In examining this thematic, we explicate the manner in which American national sporting audiences during the period 1880–1920 were variously constituted through discourses of national and ethnic sporting difference or Otherness. Hence, we examine the popular representation of turn of the century rodeo practices (as narrated through the spectacle of the western showman William Frederick ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody's Wild West show productions), the position of early-twentieth-century American baseball in relation to other sporting cultures (graphically depicted by Albert Goodwill, or A.G., Spalding's promotional publications, specifically the 1911 America's National Game) and the national and ethnic differences discerned within the global sporting landscape more generally (explicated within the 1919 National Geographic article ‘The Geography of Games’). These performances and representations of ethnic and national sporting Otherness played an important role in re-inscribing and legitimating the (White European American) normative core of American sport culture (as manifest within and through the dominant practices of playing and/or spectating of football, baseball and basketball).     

Let's keep in contact with Europe — a joint European research project about lifelong education for adults with learning difficulties

The authors of this article come from a range of professional backgrounds in agencies across Europe. Samuel Fernandez lectures at the University of Oviedo in Spain; Janos Kovari works at the Kerek Vilag Foundation in Hungary; Paola Vulterini works for Capodarco, a service provider in Italy; and Val Williams is a researcher at the Norah Fry Research Centre at the University of Bristol. Using funding from the European Commission, the team undertook research into the curriculum provided for adults with learning difficulties in a variety of centres in their four home countries. Fernandez, Kovari, Vulterini and Williams find some interesting similarities and some significant differences in provision. They also seek the views of service users about a common core curriculum derived from their research and present a case for further work in this important area.     

You can’t ignore us: what role does family play in student engagement and alienation in a Ghanaian university?

Much of the existing literature on student engagement focuses on what happens within the higher education environment or what the institution has direct control over, restricting understanding of how issues outside of the institution affect engagement. This paper argues that efforts to improve student engagement should be broadened to incorporate issues relating to the family. It employed a case study design in order to develop a broad and more in-depth understanding of how family influences the amount of time and effort students invest in their learning in a large public university in Ghana. It was established that engagement is influenced by family expectation, financial and social support, as well as monitoring of students’ academic performance. The unique contribution of the study is that it broadens current understandings of engagement because it adds an aspect that has not been highlighted in current work on engagement, making a case for institutions to work more with families to get a broader understanding of challenges students face in order to provide comprehensive support.     

Coefficient relationship between rook and chromatic polynomials

It is shown that a p+q node graph G_c representation can be drawn for a chessboard C(p,q) i.e. an array of p rows and q columns. It is shown further that the coefficients of the rook polynomial for C(p,q) correspond 1:1 inversely with the coefficients of the chromatic polynomial for G_c written in factorial form.     

Critically engaging the ethics of AI for a global audience

Ethics and Information Technology - This article introduces readers to the special issue on Selected Issues in the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. In this paper, I make a case for a wider...     

Errors of programming and ownership of the robot concept made by trainee kindergarten teachers during an induction training

Education and Information Technologies - Computational thinking in the educational environment has awaken a rising interest, having been included as part of the curricula from the very beginnings...