Parents and Educators: Dialogue and Development Through Partnership

SUMMARY. This paper describes an approach to working with parents which emphasises the parents' own learning process and which might be termed ‘developmental partnership’. By this is meant a relationship in which not only are the parents explicitly acknowledged as the primary educators of their own children but also that, through a process of mutual enquiry into the activities and development of these children, parents, educator and children learn and work together. A number of issues are raised about working in ‘developmental partnership’ with parents, including the role of the unconscious in relationships focused upon learning.     

Food for Thought: Malnutrition and Obesity

The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2003: Monitoring Progress towards the World Food Summit and Millennium Goals. By FAO Ending Hunger in Our Lifetime: Food Security and Globalization. By C. Ford Runge, Benjamin Senauer, Philip G. Pardey and Mark W. Rosegrant Combating Malnutrition: Time to Act. Edited by Stuart Gillespie, Milla McLachlan and Roger Shrimpton The Economist's Tale: A Consultant Encounters Hunger and the World Bank. By Peter Griffiths Disease‐Related Malnutrition: An Evidence‐based Approach to Treatment. By R. J. Stratton, C. J. Green and M. Elia Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All‐American Meal. By Eric Schlosser Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. By Marion Nestle Food Fight: The Inside Story of the Food Industry, America's Obesity Crisis, and What We Can Do About It. By Kelly D. Brownell and Katherine Battle Horgen     

Dimensions of Poverty: Status and Solutions Towards the Millennium Development Goals

Books reviewed: State of the World Population 2004: The Cairo Consensus at Ten ‐ Population, Reproductive Health and the Global Effort to End Poverty. By UNFPA. How Have the World's Poorest Fared Since the Early 1980s? By Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion. The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2004: Monitoring Progress towards the World Food Summit and Millennium Development Goals. By FAO. Fifth Report on the World Nutrition Situation: Nutrition for Improved Development Outcomes. By SCN. IFPRI Annual Report 2003‐4. By IFPRI. Halving Hunger: It Can Be Done. By Task Force on Hunger. Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures. By Lester R. Brown. The State of the World's Children 2005: Childhood Under Threat. By UNICEF. Education for All: The Quality Imperative ‐ EFA Global Monitoring Report 2005. Commissioned by UNESCO. World Employment Report 2004‐05: Employment, Productivity and Poverty Reduction. By ILO. The Future of the WTO: Addressing Institutional Challenges in the New Millennium. By the Consultative Board. State of the World 2005: Redefining Global Security. By the Worldwatch Institute. Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals. By Jeffrey D. Sachs and the UN Millennium Project.     

Efficient Algorithms for Local Alignment Search

We present efficient algorithms for local alignment search in biological sequences. These algorithms identify maximal segment pairs (MSPs). Our algorithms have the potential of performing better than BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) and also are efficiently parallelizable. We employ Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs). Though several attempts have been made in the past to employ FFTs in sequence analysis, they fail to capture local similarities. Our algorithms employ FFTs in a novel way to identify local similarities. FFT-based techniques have the attractive feature of benefiting from ultrafast special purpose hardware available for digital signal processing.     

Risk Assessment Based on Financial Data: Market Response to Airline Accidents

The risk of catastrophic failures, for example in the aviation and aerospace industries, can be approached from different angles (e.g., statistics when they exist, or a detailed probabilistic analysis of the system). Each new accident carries information that has already been included in the experience base or constitutes new evidence that can be used to update a previous assessment of the risk. In this paper, we take a different approach and consider the risk and the updating from the investor's point of view. Based on the market response to past airplane accidents, we examine which ones have created a surprise response and which ones are considered part of the risk of the airline business as previously assessed. To do so, we quantify the magnitude and the timing of the observed market response to catastrophic accidents, and we compare it to an estimate of the response that would be expected based on the true actual cost of the accident including direct and indirect costs (full-cost information response). First, we develop a method based on stock market data to measure the actual market response to an accident and we construct an estimate of the full-cost information response to such an event. We then compare the two figures for the immediate and the long-term response of the market for the affected firm, as well as for the whole industry group to which the firm belongs. As an illustration, we analyze a sample of ten fatal accidents experienced by major US domestic airlines during the last seven years. In four cases, we observed an abnormal market response. In these instances, it seems that the shareholders may have updated their estimates of the probability of a future accident in the affected airlines or more generally of the firm's future business prospects. This market reaction is not always easy to explain much less to anticipate, a fact which management should bear in mind when planning a firm's response to such an event.     

Conditional Uncertainty Analysis and Implications for Decision Making: The Case of WIPP

Uncertainty analyses and the reporting of their results can be misinterpreted when these analyses are conditional on a set of assumptions generally intended to bring some conservatism in the decisions. In this paper, two cases of conditional uncertainty analysis are examined. The first case includes studies that result, for instance, in a family of risk curves representing percentiles of the probability distribution of the future frequency of exceeding specified consequence levels conditional on a set of hypotheses. The second case involves analyses that result in an interval of outcomes estimated on the basis of conservative assumptions. Both types of results are difficult to use because they are sometimes misinterpreted as if they represented the output of a full uncertainty analysis. In the first case, the percentiles shown on each risk curve may be taken at face value when in reality (in marginal terms) they are lower if the chosen hypotheses are conservative. In the second case, the fact that some segments of the resulting interval are highly unlikely—or that some more benign segments outside the range of results are quite possible—does not appear. Also, these results are difficult to compare to those of analyses of other risks, possibly competing for the same risk management resources, and the decision criteria have to be adapted to the conservatism of the hypotheses. In this paper, the focus is on the first type (conditional risk curves) more than on the second and the discussion is illustrated by the case of the performance assessment of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. For policy-making purposes, however, the problems of interpretation, comparison, and use of the results are similar.     

Intercultural literacy dialogue: international assessment moderation in early childhood teacher education

ABSTRACT

This research reports intercultural dialogue of meaning making in literacy by lecturers, engaged with an assessment moderation process of early childhood education (ECE) preservice teacher education across Australia, New Zealand and Sweden. The purpose of the dialogue was to inform pedagogical and conceptual knowledge in their courses. The research question is: How does intercultural dialogue inform teacher education literacy practices? Methods include (1) a blind assessment review process using 30 examples from ‘high’ to ‘low’ exemplars of ECE students’ literacy assessment annotations, some from each country, and (2) textual analysis of intercultural student feedback and reflection from student forum comments and, semi-structured reflexive interviews with students about the assessment moderation process. Rich academic reflections on the data have led to our recommendations that the conceptual framework of intercultural praxis could be applied in early childhood preservice teacher education practice. Further, we suggest there are increased possibilities for the use of intercultural literacy with ECE preservice student teachers using virtual and explicit collaborations and texts as explained in this research.     

Resources for Social Policy

The paper attempts the difficult task of identifying and exploring key resource factors which may influence social policy in the next millennium. It begins by critically examining the impact of demographic trends upon finance and demand for welfare in Europe. The possible impact of this is then examined in relation to the role of the family as a primary welfare resource and upon the supply of professional services. The implications of diminishing environmental resources are then examined and green social policy proposals are briefly outlined. However, the paper argues that the key resource is public goodwill and support for a range of social policy interventions. "The public" has been regarded as homogeneous in many surveys, but this paper argues that trends in middle-class welfare support and welfare activity pose concerns for the future of welfare provision.