‘What Do You Think?’ Let Me Tell You: Discourse about Texts and the Literature Classroom

This article examines the practice of studying texts in secondary school English lessons as a particular type of reading experience. Through a critical stylistic analysis of a popular edition of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, the article explores how reading the text is framed by educational editions, and how this might present the purpose of studying fiction to students. The article draws on two cognitive linguistic concepts – figure/ground configuration and narrative schemas – in order to explore how ‘discourse about a text’ can potentially influence how students read and engage with a text. Building on a previous article, the notion of pre-figuring is developed to offer an account of how a reader’s attention can be directed to particular elements of a text, thus privileging some interpretations and downplaying others. The article then reflects more widely on the perceived purposes of studying fiction with young people, exploring in particular the recent rise of support within the profession in England for Hirsch’s ‘cultural literacy’ model, which sees knowledge about texts as more valuable than authentic reading and personal response.     

Thermo-formation process of plastic shells for winter sport boots for improved comfort

We have performed a study on the thermo-formation process of plastic shells of boots for winter sports. The aim of the work has been to determine how the process parameters can improve the ergonomic and thermal comfort for athletes and winter sports participants. We have found that the initial deformation and memory effect are strongly influenced by the type of thermoplastic material used, heating time and cooling procedure. We have also found that the ovens currently used for this process are not correctly designed to obtain an efficient heat transfer and, therefore, a heating time of at least 12 min is necessary to achieve an average deformation of more than 2 mm. The measure of the boot flexural stiffness has shown that there are no changes in the load–deflection behavior after the thermo-formation process of a ski boot made of thermoplastic polyurethane. We have also found that the thermo-formation process decreases the pressure on skier’s feet of more than five times and, therefore, improves the comfort of the skier.     

The effects of owner identity and external governance systems on R&D investments: A study of Western European firms

This paper builds on agency and institutional theory to extend the analysis of the effects of ownership and control on R&D investments by considering the influence of different types of ownership and of institutional corporate governance systems. Our empirical analysis is based on a unique dataset of 1000 firms publicly-traded in six European countries (France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden and the UK). Controlling for industry- and firm-level effects, our findings show that higher shareholding by families is negatively associated with R&D investment. Moreover, widely-held firms invest less in R&D in the United Kingdom than in Continental European countries, thus suggesting the existence of a greater pressure towards the reduction of R&D in market-based governance systems. The results are robust against possible sample selection biases due to firms’ discretional R&D disclosure.     

Social play as joint action: A framework to study the evolution of shared intentionality as an interactional achievement

Social play has a complex, cooperative nature that requires substantial coordination. This has led researchers to use social games to study cognitive abilities like shared intentionality, the skill and motivation to share goals and intentions with others during joint action. We expand this proposal by considering play as a joint action and examining how shared intentionality is achieved during human joint action. We describe how humans get into, conduct, and get out of joint actions together in an orderly way, thereby constructing the state of “togetherness” characteristic of shared intentionality. These processes play out as three main phases, the opening (where participants are ratified and joint commitments are established), the main body (where progress, ongoing commitments, and possible role reversals are coordinated), and the closing (where the intention to terminate the action is coordinated and where participants take leave of each other). We use this process in humans as a framework for examining how various animal species get into, maintain, and get out of play bouts. This comparative approach constitutes an alternative measure of those species’ possession of shared intentionality. Using this framework, we review the play literature on human children and different social species of mammals and birds in search of behavioral markers of shared intentionality in the coordination of play bouts. We discuss how our approach could shed light on the evolution of the special human motivation to cooperate and share psychological states with others.     

Timing with opportunity cost: Concurrent schedules of reinforcement improve peak timing

The temporal generalization gradient produced by the peak-interval (PI) procedure reflects behavior under the control of positive reinforcement for responding after the criterial time, but shows negligible discouragement for early responses. The lack of consequences for premature responding may affect estimates of timing accuracy and precision in the PI procedure. In two experiments, we sought to encourage more accurate timing in pigeons by establishing an opportunity cost for such responding. Concurrent ratio and interval schedules of reinforcement reduced the dispersion of keypecking around the target time. A sequence of three response-rate states (low-high-low) characterized performance in individual trials. Opportunity cost substantially reduced the mean and standard deviation of the duration of the middle-high state that typically enveloped the target time, indicating improved temporal acuity. We suggest a model as a first-order approximation to timing with opportunity cost.     

A triad of Filipino adolescents’ zones of lived experiences of information and communications technology (ICT)

Considering that today’s students feel extremely more comfortable with computers than did earlier generations of students vis-à-vis the notion that, as a social category, they have become one of the most interesting topics in research papers and journals in the field of behavioral and social sciences since the 1950s (Batan 2002), their individual and collective experiences of information and communications technology (ICT) could be expected to create a portrait of accounts that might inform educational policy makers as to how their ICT needs and concerns could be better addressed through a more responsive and a well-defined IT-driven educational platform. The central question that this phenomenological study purported to answer was: “How does a select group of Filipino adolescents collectively experience information and communications technology (ICT)?” Findings of this study revealed that the individual and collective articulations, verbalizations, and musings of the 60 adolescents recruited from two regions in the Philippines exposed three distinct but interrelated conceptual zones of ICT, namely: the zone of technology perspective (ZTP), zone of technology power and efficacy (ZTPE), and zone of technology deficits (ZTD). Implications of the study are also discussed in the paper. “There is a demand for qualitative research with an insider perspective, as young voices appear not to have been sufficiently heard.” (Hauan and Heggli 2002:13)      

A Global Culture of Peace: Transmission and Ethical Dimensions

The author considers in this article the ethical boundaries of knowledge, the challenges inherent in the improvement of international ethical and legal frameworks, and some of the ethically important moments of the past half‐century. Implications for higher education in the context of globalization are also considered, as are some of the new educational requirements of the knowledge‐driven economy and society.     

Persistence of innovation and patterns of firm growth

In this work we exploit a long-in-time panel of Spanish manufacturing firms observed during the period 1990–2012 to examine the long-run contribution of innovation persistence to sales growth and market share dynamics. We examine two main research questions. First, do persistent innovators grow more than other firms? Second, do persistent innovators show more persistent growth patterns over time compared to other firms? We find negative answers to both questions: firms that persistently innovate over the first decade, do not grow more and do not display more persistent growth dynamics in the succeeding years, regardless of whether innovation persistence is defined in terms of R&D, patenting activity, or product or process innovation. These findings lend support to luck and random theories of firm growth, in turn challenging innovation persistence theories commonly suggesting that persistent innovators enjoy large and sustained comparative advantages.     

Control of clock signals

Precision and reliability of timescales are of importance in many situations, in particular in satellite navigation systems (i.e., Galileo system). Motivated by the necessity to improve the precision and the reliability of such clock signals, we have explored the possibility to exploit control theory in clock steering methods. First of all we provide a more robust theoretical framework for the analysis of the process. Two novel control algorithms are here proposed aiming to meet metrological specifications. Numerical simulations have been performed in order to evaluate the performances of the new control systems.