Introduction to this Special Issue

In 2001, for the first time in the history of the International Association for Counselling, International Conference was held in a developing Asian country–India, with the theme Families in Transition–Counselling in Transition–Meeting the Challenges Ahead. This special issue contains some of the presentations made by Indian participants during this conference which best reflect the challenges and diversities of counseling efforts with families in India. The first article was specially written for this issue in order to give an international relationship of this journal an in depth contextual understanding of Indian families in transition and the challenges they pose to the contemporary Indian counselor. Two articles are reflected to counseling families affected by socio-politial and economic changes. Five authors have written on counseling related to physical and mental disability/addiction and last two articles are reflected to authors experiences as family counselors.     

Digital archives in the cloud: Collective memory,institutional histories and the politics of information

The archive is a cultural institution that creates a framework for the social and collective memory and as such is one of the collection of knowledge institutions that not only preserves and classifies “texts” but uses them to re-create collective memory and sometimes to invent cultural histories. Like all knowledge institutions, the archive is also a construction deeply implicated in knowledge politics or what Foucault calls power/knowledge. In the past the archive has functioned as a central metaphor for the construction of human knowledge in all it is different institutional forms and like the encyclopedia and the camera, the archive produces highly coded representations that make implicit validity claims to the truth and justice of the past. Politically speaking, those who control the archive control the past. In the digital world, the archive is used to describe a machine-readable location as a store for “data” and “information.” Digital technologies radically alter our existing institutions, making access to their embedded knowledge widely available and enable learning and research anytime, anywhere. Data analytics algorithmically can manipulate electorates and entire democracies in new ways, while destabilising the free press. This article asks what digitizing an archive means for collective memory, for the history of institutions and for politics in the Cloud.     

Kinetics study on biomass pyrolysis for fuel gas production

Kinetic knowledge is of great importance in achieving good control of the pyrolysis and gasification process and optimising system design. An overall kinetic pyrolysis scheme is therefore addressed here. The kinetic modelling incorporates the following basic steps: the degradation of the virgin biomass materials into primary products (tar, gas and semi-char), the decomposition of primary tar into secondary products and the continuous interaction between primary gas and char. The last step is disregarded completely by models in the literature. Analysis and comparison of predicted results from different kinetic schemes and experimental data on our fixed bed pyrolyser yielded very positive evidence to support our kinetic scheme. Project (No. 2001CB409600) Supported by the National Key Basic Research Program (973) of China     

普通话二字组词语的动态声调

普通话二字组词语不同的声调组合方式 ,使前后位声调产生不同的动态变化形式。前位声调的动态变化明显表现在上声调变为低降调和中升调上 ;后位声调的动态变化则表现在调值的明显改变上。后位声调的动态变化更为普遍 ,应该引起足够的重视     

Educational inequality in Tasmania: evidence and explanations

In this article, we map the extent of educational inequality within Tasmania, and between Tasmania and the rest of Australia, using National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) and senior secondary attainment data. This analysis yields some surprising findings, showing the success of Tasmanian primary and high schools and that Tasmanian educational inequality is most strongly expressed at the senior secondary level. We conclude that using such publicly available data to identify differential achievement within and between jurisdictions would strengthen public policy and practitioner interventions aimed at achieving more equal educational outcomes for students in all schools. Our findings also have implications for research directions in this field, suggesting that by analysis of NAPLAN and My School data across individual schools and jurisdictions academic researchers could assist practitioners gain a deeper understanding of inequalities reproduced by the systems they are working within, while finding examples of schools and systems which show a greater level of success in ameliorating disadvantage.     

On tonal pattern perception in monkeys (Cebus apella)

The monkey’s capacity to extract tonal pattern from a sequence of tones was assessed in four subjects that had the benefit of substantial past experience in discriminating, matching, and remembering acoustic stimuli. In Experiment 1, the monkeys failed to transfer their well-established matching behavior to the matching of two structured sequences of tones that differed primarily in tonal pattern, indicating that for them tonal pattern was not a salient feature of the acoustic stimuli. Experiment 2 was an attempt to encourage tonal pattern perception by employing, within a discrimination paradigm, very simple tonal patterns and multiple exemplars of the positive and negative patterns; the transfer design, borrowed from Hulse and Cynx (1985), was a powerful one for revealing tonal pattern perception. Verifying earlier results from our laboratory, there was little in the monkeys’ transfer performance to indicate that they had extracted tonal pattern from the acoustic stimuli. Major discriminative control seemed to be vested in the first tone of each exemplar. This apparent cognitive limitation may be rather general among animals, perhaps reflecting an intimate connection between the capacity for tonal pattern perception and that for acoustically based language.