A Slippery Road to Equality: Hong Kong's experience of unplanned integrated education

This article examines the issue of children with a disability who are 'informally integrated' into mainstream school. Its main purpose is to reflect the views and experiences of parents, and to identify the major difficulties that arise and their suggestions for ameliorating the situation. The data is based on a series of interviews and focus groups of parents. In order to provide a balanced perspective, responses of schools to a questionnaire were also included. Teachers were asked to express their views about integrated education. These responses were then categorised. It was found that lack of resources and training predominated.     

Trapped in the Working Class? Prospects for the Intergenerational (Im)Mobility of Latino Youth

Opportunities for upward mobility have been declining in the United States in recent decades. Within this context, I examine the mobility trajectories of a contemporary cohort of 1.5‐, second‐, and third‐plus‐generation Latino youth. Drawing on survey data from California that accounts for the precarious legal status of many 1.5 generation immigrants, I find that Latino youths' patterns of postsecondary enrollment and employment do not differ by generation since migration. Additionally, I do not find evidence of racial/ethnic barriers to Latino youths' enrollment in less selective colleges and participation in the labor market. Yet, given the low socioeconomic origins of many Latino youth and their correspondingly low 4‐year college enrollment rates, only a small proportion will likely enjoy upward mobility through jobs that require a bachelor's degree. Overall, the cohort of Latino youth coming of age during the Great Recession is poised to experience working‐class stagnation. This group's future access to economic and political positions of power will likely be limited by their low enrollment rates in 4‐year colleges in general, but in selective postsecondary institutions in particular.     

A tale of two cities: an experiment on inequality and preferences

Theory and Decision - The existence of a strong link between socio-economic background and individual preferences has been documented among both children and grown-ups. Here, we study whether such...     

Social media time,identity narratives and the construction of political biographies

ABSTRACT

The question of identity narrative is at the core of the interaction between social movements and temporalities. In this paper, we draw on long-term qualitative research amongst activists engaged in Italian social movements and argue that identity narratives are often the result of a complex mnemonic, contradictory and open-ended process that spans through a life-time of engagement with multiple collectives. We then question whether the use of social media reshape these dynamics. The analysis shows that the construction of identity narratives on social media tends to take place with knowledge of the complexity and overlaps that characterise these processes online. Nevertheless, the temporality of social media, based on immediacy, archival and predictive time, challenges the unpredictable, contradictory, and open-ended nature of political identity construction offline. The need to escape the hegemonic temporalities of social media poses new challenges to activists in their creative agency.     

Analysis of the Multistep Process of Carcinogenesis Using Human Fibroblasts

Normal human cells in culture have never been neoplastically transformed by carcinogen exposure. One possible explanation is that the life span of such cells is too short for them to acquire the necessary changes. To test this hypothesis, we needed normal human cells with a greatly extended or an infinite life span. We transfected the v- myc gene and a selectable marker into normal human fibroblasts, identified a drug-resistant clone expressing v- myc protein, and passaged the progeny of the clone until they senesced. A few cells continued to proliferate and gave rise to a diploid, infinite life span cell strain, MSU-1.0, that has normal growth control and is nontumorigenic in athymic mice. Analysis showed that one more genetic change, in addition to unregulated expression of the v- myc gene, was involved in generating MSU-1.0 cells. They spontaneously gave rise to a variant strain, designated MSU-1.1, that grows more rapidly and is less dependent on exogenous growth factors. Analysis showed that at least two additional changes were involved in generating this cell strain. It has a stable karyotype composed of 45 chromosomes, including two markers. Transfection of specific oncogenes was used to determine the number and nature of additional changes required to transform MSU-1.1 cells into malignant cells. Analysis indicated that two changes were involved, but no change in karyotype. Exposure of MSU-1.1 cells to a single carcinogen treatment, followed by selection for cells with the characteristics of oncogene-trans-formed MSU-1.1 cells also yielded malignant human cells. We conclude that malignant transformation of normal human fibroblasts requires six or seven genetic changes, some of which involve suppressor genes.     

The Structure and Content of Social Inclusion: voices of young adults with learning difficulties in Guangzhou

The aim of the research described here was to examine the issue of social inclusion in relation to young people with a learning difficulty in Guangzhou. Ten families were included in this study based on their willingness to participate. The young people had to be over the age of 16 and not attending school. In each family the young person and a family carer (usually one of the parents) was interviewed separately. The article focuses mainly on the experience and words of the young people who express their feelings towards work and other social contacts. The conclusion is that despite greater government awareness of the needs of people with a disability, and the formulation of social and economic policies designed to encourage inclusion this is far from happening at grassroots level.     

Devising Context Sensitive Approaches To Change: The Example of Glaxo Wellcome

There is a growing awareness of the need for designers of organisational change to develop context sensitive approaches to implementation if change is to be successful. Existing change literature indicates that there are many aspects of an organisation’s change context that need to be considered, and a wide range of different implementation options open to those designing change. However, these contextual aspects and design options are not currently pulled together in a comprehensive manner, or in a form that makes them easily accessible to practitioners. This paper builds a framework, called the change kaleidoscope, which aims to achieve this. It illustrates the applicability of this framework in practice as an aid to managers in the development of context sensitive implementation approaches via a case study on the changes undertaken at Glaxo Wellcome UK since the early 1990s. This is an interesting case of a successful organisation that managed to change in a pro-active manner rather than in a crisis driven re-active manner. The paper concludes with the lessons for practitioners on the impact of certain contextual features and design choices during change as illustrated by the Glaxo Wellcome case, and a discussion on the use of the kaleidoscope in practice.     

Bayesian analysis for mixtures of discrete distributions with a non-parametric component

Bayesian finite mixture modelling is a flexible parametric modelling approach for classification and density fitting. Many areas of application require distinguishing a signal from a noise component. In practice, it is often difficult to justify a specific distribution for the signal component; therefore, the signal distribution is usually further modelled via a mixture of distributions. However, modelling the signal as a mixture of distributions is computationally non-trivial due to the difficulties in justifying the exact number of components to be used and due to the label switching problem. This paper proposes the use of a non-parametric distribution to model the signal component. We consider the case of discrete data and show how this new methodology leads to more accurate parameter estimation and smaller false non-discovery rate. Moreover, it does not incur the label switching problem. We show an application of the method to data generated by ChIP-sequencing experiments.