Anticipatory Reaching by Infants and Adults: The Effect of Object Features and Apertures in Opaque and Transparent Screens

Perception of the manner in which objects may be grasped was examined in a series of experiments with adults and 10-month-old infants; visuomotor adjustment in hand orientation before making contact with objects served as the index throughout. In the first experiment, infants modified their hand orientation to match more closely the long axis of an object. They did so even though the target object could have been grasped by either end with hands oriented orthogonally to the long axis of the object. In two subsequent experiments involving reaching through narrow apertures to grasp the target, anticipatory adjustments in hand posture were evident for adults but not for infants. However, anticipatory adjustments by infants, sometimes appropriate and sometimes inappropriate, were made when the object was of such a size that it could neither be grasped nor retrieved through the aperture. In the final experiment, infants directed their hands first toward a handle, the only graspable part of an object, and oriented their hands so as to be nearly parallel with it prior to contact. This was the only orientation in which a grasp was possible. It was concluded that infants at 10 months respond more appropriately to object properties than to surface apertures that place limitations on how an object may be grasped.     

Activist dispositions for social justice in advantaged and disadvantaged contexts of schooling

This article advances current conceptions of teacher activism through an exploration of the social justice dispositions of teachers in advantaged and disadvantaged contexts of schooling. We interrogate the practices of teachers in a government school, with a high proportion of refugee students and students from low socio-economic backgrounds, in a high-fees, multi-campus independent school, and in a disadvantaged Systemic Catholic school to illustrate how Bourdieu’s notion of dispositions (which are constitutive of the habitus) and Fraser’s distinction between affirmative and transformative justice are together productive of four types of teacher activism. Specifically, we show that activist dispositions can be characterised as either affirmative or transformative in stance and as either internally or externally focused in relation to the education field. We argue that the social, cultural and material conditions of schools are linked to teachers’ activist dispositions and conclude with the challenge for redressing educational inequalities by fostering a transformative activism in teachers’ practices.     

Collective memory,political nostalgia,and the rhetorical presidency: Bill Clinton's commemoration of the March on Washington,August 28, 1998

This essay offers a reading of President Bill Clinton's address on August 28, 1998 in which he commemorates the 35th anniversary of the March on Washington. Specifically, Clinton's August 28th address reveals how the presidency has become a hermeneutic site for the formation of collective memory and political nostalgia. This analysis discusses the uses of political nostalgia for the purposes of political image (re)construction as evidenced by Clinton's exploitation of the civil rights movement to explain and excuse his personal failings and his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. We also present a divergent version of Clinton's rhetoric, giving specific attention to how his particular use of nostalgia in this address works to articulate and confront many of the powerful dichotomies (masculine/feminine; war/peace; black/white; private/public) that define his presidency, his public persona, and the larger political culture in postmodern America.     

Comparison of holdings of NLM (CATLINE) with those of resource libraries.

The collection development practices of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), with the goal of comprehensive acquisition of biomedical monographs, are compared with those of the resource libraries of the TALON (Region IX) Regional Medical Library. Holdings of two resource libraries in the TALON region, The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, and of the TALON Union Catalog of Monographs were compared with the NLM CATLINE data base for four subject classes and selected imprint years. Foreign-language coverage is lacking in Region IX, with English-language coverage is lacking in Region IX, with English-language coverage ranging between 70 and 88% of titles listed in CATLINE. Absent English-language material tends to be ephemeral or otherwise out of scope for the resource libraries. Between 7.1 and 18.8% of monographs acquired in each subject class by the two recource libraries are lacking in CATLINE; this represents between 2 and 8% of the CATLINE titles for each class.