Promoting Positive Family Interactions: Evaluating a Free Early Childhood Book Distribution Program

The Dolly Parton Imagination Library (DPIL) program encourages reading among families of preschool children by mailing age-appropriate books, once per month, until the child reaches the age of five. An evaluation of a DPIL program in a southern state in the U.S. was conducted to assess the impact on enrolled children. Focus groups were conducted and a survey was administered to over 100 parents of children in the program to determine parents’ satisfaction with–and assessment of–the program relative to its activities and stated outcomes. To what extent the program promoted reading in the family, and children’s enjoyment of reading and school readiness was explored. In addition, family communication styles and relationships were assessed relative to these outcomes. The parents reported that the program introduced more diverse reading choices, fostered their children’s love of reading, promoted cognitive development and readiness for school, increased use of public libraries, and encouraged family interaction. Some differences in reading activities based on family communication styles were found. As well, parents provided recommendations for outreaching to underserved children. Implications of these findings for groups that sponsor this program and for further research are presented.     

Whiteness in the academy: using vignettes to move beyond safe silences

This point of departure presents the writings of a White, female teacher educator’s experiences in the academy. Through the use of vignettes, the author discusses how four recent experiences – and her writing about those experiences – reveal the insidiousness of silence and Whiteness in the academy.     

Symmetries and conservation laws in classical and quantum mechanics 2. Quantum mechanics

In Part 1 of this two-part article we have spelt out, in some detail, the link between symmetries and conservation principles in the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations of classical mechanics (CM). In this second part, we turn our attention to the corresponding question in quantum mechanics (QM). The generalization we embark upon will proceed in two directions: from the classical formulation to the quantum mechanical one, and from a single (infinitesimal) symmetry to a multi-dimensional Lie group of symmetries. Of course, we always have some definite physical system in mind. We also assume that the reader is familiar with the elements of quantum mechanics at the level of a standard first course on the subject. Operators will be denoted with an overhead caret, e.g., $ \hat A,\hat G,\hat U $ \hat A,\hat G,\hat U , etc., while $ [\hat A,\hat B] = \hat A\hat B - \hat B\hat A $ [\hat A,\hat B] = \hat A\hat B - \hat B\hat A is the commutator of $ \hat A $ \hat A and $ \hat B $ \hat B .     

The Experimental Economy of Geoengineering

Will the practical application of geoengineering technologies inadvertently bring about the catastrophic futures they are meant to pre-empt? And is such elicitation of unpredictability as unintended as it might appear – the accidental consequence of the extension of a modernist attitude to control and domesticate nature? To grasp what is at stake in such questions, this paper traces out the marginal history of ocean geoengineering, its correlative ‘green’ economy, and through the deployment of algae as an inventive world-remaking device, their co-formation of the earth as a site of unbounded experimentation – of what I call experiment earth. My argument here is that such methods of geoengineering inject disturbances into the algae-ocean-earth system that do not seek control, but to elicit surprise and explicate the mechanisms of the complex permutations of their unpredictability, where new forms of knowledge and value are created not through the application of preconceived ideas or a process of commensuration, but through the harnessing of anticipation and the generation of surprise. How, I ask, are we to understand the lineaments of a pre-emptive ‘green’ economy that is premised on not just managing, but speculatively materially recomposing the non-linear chemical and ecological constitution of the earth’s metabolism? And what, from this vantage point, is the earth becoming?     

Actor and partner effects of adolescents' romantic working models and styles on interactions with romantic partners

The present study examined how adolescents' and their romantic partners' romantic working models and relational styles were related to their interactions with each other. Sixty-five couples (M age = 18.1 years) were observed interacting. Romantic working models were assessed in interviews about their romantic experiences; romantic styles were assessed by self-report. Data were analyzed using the Actor Partner Interdependence Model. Working models of romantic relationships, especially girls' models, were predictive of their behavior, the partners' behavior, and the dyads' behavior. Fewer links were found between relational styles and observed behavior. The present study extends past work by showing that representations of romantic relationships influence or are influenced by romantic interactions, even as these representations and relationships are just developing.     

Document collections,mobilized regulations,and the making of customary law at the end of the Middle Ages

Using late medieval examples from Switzerland, this paper argues that the emergence of formally organized archives around 1500 was part of an important shift in how documents could be deployed. However, this shift was not away from an oral and toward a literate culture, as argued in some earlier studies, but rather away from seeing documents as testimony that reminded a community about past authoritative actors, and toward relating the texts of documents to other texts, that is, to contexts. This shift took place largely through the appropriation of methods for using and organizing written material that had been developed in the realms of scholastic theology and liturgy, and applying them to secular lordship and administration. These methods provided new models for organizing collections of parchments and papers into connected archives and gave rise to new forms of text collection such as reorganized versions of law books (Spiegel, Coutumiers) containing new search tools such as tables of contents (capitulationes) and indices (abecedaria). Individual charters and scattered legal norms were also organized into textus–glossae structures in larger and smaller administrative units. In the Swiss case, the contextualization of legal texts was accompanied by an increased attribution of authority to ‘custom’ in general, because the community-oriented attribution of meaning found in earlier use was lost. Ultimately, recasting individual documents as part of larger textual contexts increased the power of rulers and ushered in an age of lawyers and of archives.     

Handling of artificial membranes using electrowetting-actuated droplets on a microfluidic device combined with integrated pA-measurements

Artificial membranes, as a controllable environment, are an essential tool to study membrane proteins. Electrophysiology provides information about the ion transport mechanism across a membrane at the single-protein level. Unfortunately, high-throughput studies and screening are not accessible to electrophysiology because it is a set of not automated and technically delicate methods. Therefore, it is necessary to automate and parallelize electrophysiology measurement in artificial membranes. Here, we present a first step toward this goal: the fabrication and characterization of a microfluidic device integrating electrophysiology measurements and the handling of an artificial membrane which includes its formation, its displacement and the separation of its leaflets using electrowetting actuation of sub-μL droplets. To validate this device, we recorded the insertion of a model porin, α-hemolysin.     

Characterising the impact performance of field hockey sticks

Published research on field hockey equipment is scarce. The aim of this research was to investigate methods for characterising the impact performance of field hockey sticks. Three sticks were used with fundamental frequencies in the range 74?C154?Hz. Striking an initially still ball with a stick was identified as the preferred method for characterising performance. Impacts were simulated at mean velocities of 19?m/s at toe and 16?m/s at the shaft. The mean apparent coefficient of restitution and standard deviation were ?0.32?±?0.05 at the toe and ?0.18?±?0.02 at the shaft. The foundation work presented here provides the foundations for developing a methodology for characterising the impact performance of field hockey sticks.     

The role of education in development: an educationalist’s response to some recent work in development economics

This paper delves beneath the widespread belief that education (often repackaged as human capital) is important in development to consider the role that the discipline of education plays in shaping the wider discourses of development. In particular, it will explore recent texts by important figures in development economics (Collier, Easterly, Sachs and Stiglitz) to see what they say (and don’t say) about education’s role in development and to contrast this with educationalists’ accounts. This will lead on to a consideration of what the implications of such a reading are for the field of international and comparative education. The paper concludes that the relative marginalisation of educational accounts in mainstream development thinking is a major challenge to which international and comparative education needs to respond.