Telling stories for a politics of hope

This paper is about listening to voices from an excluded past. The oral history of disabled people challenges accepted, formal history, the history from dominant voices well established in unequal power relations. The paper draws on an oral history project conducted with over 60 visually impaired people who gave detailed accounts, telling stories of their experiences of education. This oral history research was carried out through the medium of the interview. The analysis covers school life, focusing on the recurring themes of abuse and friendships. The paper then turnd to relationships with family and community, and how participants placed schooling within the broader context of their lives. These stories are a small part of the history of disabled individuals' exclusion within which, as we hope to demonstrate, the chinks of collective light were born.     

AACR2 and the New York State Library's CONSER Project

Abstract

Daisy P. Waters reviews Using Microsoft Access XP, Hazel Cameron reviews Business Statistics on the Web, Elizabeth Parang reviews JSTOR: A History, and Sheila Corman reviews MARC21 for Everyone.     

The anti-social model of disability

Social theories are usually developed to enable a clearer understanding of a situation or problem. The 'Social Model' in various forms is currently the dominant model for researching disability, addressing disability from within a socio-political framework that draws substantially on a 'social constructionist' perspective. This article critiques some of the core sociological assumptions of the Social Model, questioning what 'work' this kind of theory does in informing a set of practical concerns around the design of assistive technologies, suggesting an alternative framework of analysis, supported by extensive ethnomethodologically informed ethnographic research     

A Latent Growth Curve Analysis of Prosocial Behavior Among Rural Adolescents

The present study was designed to investigate stability and changes in prosocial behavior and the parent and peer correlates of prosocial behavior in rural adolescents. Participants were from a rural, low SES community in the Eastern United States. The participants were in 7th, 8th, and 9th grades at Time 1 and 10th, 11th, and 12th grades at Time 4, and completed measures of prosocial behavior and quality of parent and peer relationships. Latent growth curve modeling revealed that despite moderate stability in individual differences in prosocial behavior and slight increases in quality of peer and parent relationships, level of prosocial behavior declined until late high school with a slight rebound in grade 12. Furthermore, increases in the quality of peer relationships predicted decreases in prosocial behavior for girls but not boys. Discussion focuses on continuity and change in prosocial behavior and the gender‐based relations between quality of parent and peer relationships and prosocial behaviors in adolescence.     

Fire and rescue operational effectiveness: the effect of alternative crewing patterns

Abstract

Decreasing demand and reduced budgets are driving changes to traditional crewing methods in the UK Fire and Rescue Service. Using an integration of two years' operational data within a novel framework, this paper assesses the impact of alternative crewing on operational effectiveness in one UK FRS. Changes in crewing patterns were implemented without substantial impact on overall operational effectiveness, but there may be a risk to wider operational resilience. The Overall Effectiveness of Fire Operations (OEFO) assessment tool can inform FRS decision making in an authentic way allowing stakeholder confidence in the outcomes, whilst being timely and not too complex or costly to evaluate. The OEFO approach is an important contribution to practice through its ability to assess public services at a time of challenging reform and demonstrates alterations can be made to crewing patterns to better match demand provided there is consideration of the potential wider impact.     

Knot selection for least-squares and penalized splines

Two new stochastic search methods are proposed for optimizing the knot locations and/or smoothing parameters for least-squares or penalized splines. One of the methods is a golden-section-augmented blind search, while the other is a continuous genetic algorithm. Monte Carlo experiments indicate that the algorithms are very successful at producing knot locations and/or smoothing parameters that are near optimal in a squared error sense. Both algorithms are amenable to parallelization and have been implemented in OpenMP and MPI. An adjusted GCV criterion is also considered for selecting both the number and location of knots. The method performed well relative to MARS in a small empirical comparison.