Suchergebnisse

AbstractDebates on Scottish constitutional reform go hand in hand with discussions of political reform. Its reformers use the image of 'old Westminster' to describe 'control freakery' within government and an adversarial political system. Many thought that the Scottish political system could diverge from the UK, to strengthen the parliamentary system, introduce consensus politics and further Scotland's alleged social and democratic tradition. Yet the experience of devolution suggests that Holyrood and Westminster politics share key features. Both systems are driven by government, making policy in 'communities' involving interest groups and governing bodies, with parliaments performing a limited role and public participation limited largely to elections. The Scottish government's style of policy‐making is distinctive, but new reforms are in their infancy and their effects have not been examined in depth. In this context, the article identifies Scotland's ability to make and implement policy in a new way, based on its current trajectory rather than the hopes of reformers.

This paper discusses Australia's oldest and largest undergraduate science communication program: that offered at the Centre for the Public Awareness of Science at the Australian National University. We outline the history of the program, and explain the pedagogy that drove its development. In particular, we address the assessment of student learning, which focuses on 'real-world' tasks. The four main assessment approaches discussed are 1) online blogs and opinion pieces; 2) a student conference, 3) research publication, and 4) work-integrated learning. These assessment approaches specifically target skills required by graduates to achieve both within the university and professionally. The different approaches require students to employ diverse communication techniques and strategies appropriate to their chosen audience. Students also gain practical experience outside of the university context, allowing them to recognise the relevance of their studies within an industry, private or government environment. Although these assessment practices are embedded in a specific science communication curriculum, we suggest that they can be incorporated within any science discipline major.

This paper discusses Australia's oldest and largest undergraduate science communication program: that offered at the Centre for the Public Awareness of Science at the Australian National University. We outline the history of the program, and explain the pedagogy that drove its development. In particular, we address the assessment of student learning, which focuses on 'real-world' tasks. The four main assessment approaches discussed are 1) online blogs and opinion pieces; 2) a student conference, 3) research publication, and 4) work-integrated learning. These assessment approaches specifically target skills required by graduates to achieve both within the university and professionally. The different approaches require students to employ diverse communication techniques and strategies appropriate to their chosen audience. Students also gain practical experience outside of the university context, allowing them to recognise the relevance of their studies within an industry, private or government environment. Although these assessment practices are embedded in a specific science communication curriculum, we suggest that they can be incorporated within any science discipline major.

Social influences on the class vote result in a higher SPD-vote of workers who live in class-homogeneous environments. These environments can be operationalized as ego-centric networks. In West Germany, these social influences are restricted to older cohorts and earlier Bundestag elections. This result gets corroborated by applying a more sophisticated dynamic version of an influence model, which analyses the relationship between party identification and the vote intention. It is shown that workers who do not identify with a party get mobilized as SPD-voters during election campaigns if they have contacts with other workers. This effect cannot be observed with ALLBUS-data from 1980, 1990 and 2000 for which interviewing did not take place during election campaigns. What has not changed in the last decades is the recruitment of friends and acquaintances from the same social class and subjective class identification under the impact of class homogeneous networks. What has changed is the politisation of these class homogeneous networks.

The intent of this study was to compare attachment styles and Mate-selection criteria in urban and rural girls. The participant in this study included all the urban and rural girls (17-23 year old) of Ghorveh city in 2013-2014. A Sample consisting of 100 girls (50 urban and 50 rural) were selected using simple random sampling method. These two groups were equally matched on the basis of age, educational and economic status. Measuring instrument was the adult attachment scale, contains 21 questions, and researcher made questionnaire, titled as the mate-selection criteria contains 75 questions were applied. To analyze the data, frequency, percentage, average and the t test were applied. The results indicated that there is significant difference between the rural and urban girls with respect to the secure attachment style. Also the results reveal that there is a no difference between the anxiety attachment style, avoidance attachment style and Mate-selection criteria of the two groups (rural and urban girls).

This article examines storytelling (narratives) in interaction at a Japanese American museum. The analysis draws upon audiovisual recordings of tours led by older, male Japanese American docents. It examines ways docents tell stories — primarily of vicarious experience — in educating visitors on Japanese-American history, and ways they use a range of verbal and non-verbal communicative practices that invite visitors' engagement in the telling as a social and sense-making activity. We categorize two types of communicative practices: elicited and non-elicited. Elicited practices include (1) interrogative and polar questions, which are further divided into (a) known and (b) unknown information questions, and (2) other-repetition + list intonation. Non-elicited practices include affective talk and gestures in recounting past events. We show ways that visitor engagement varies in relation to elicited and non-elicited practices. Finally, we discuss storytelling as a vehicle for displaying and positioning the self and others in relation to stance and identity, and in working towards the goals of the museum.

AbstractTraditionally, crawling and sitting are considered distinct motor behaviors with different postures and functions. Ten‐ to 12‐month‐old infants were observed in the laboratory or in their homes while being coaxed to crawl continuously over long, straight walkways (Study 1; N = 20) and during spontaneous crawling during free play (Study 2; N = 20). In every context, infants stopped crawling to sit 3–6 times per minute. Transitions from crawling to sitting frequently turned infants' bodies away from the direction of heading; subsequent transitions back to crawling were offset by as much as 180° from the original direction of heading. Apparently, body reorientations result from the biomechanics of transitioning between crawling and sitting. Findings indicate that sustained, linear crawling is likely an epiphenomenon of how gait is studied in standard paradigms. Postural transitions between crawling and sitting are ubiquitous and can represent a functional unit of action. These transitions and the accompanying body reorientations likely have cascading effects for infants' exploration, visual perception, and spatial cognition.

Children's views on their household work as mutual contribution within the family may encourage their initiative in pitching in. We asked 9- and 10-year-old children from a Mexican city how they viewed child participation in family household work. Almost all of the 16 children reported that children want to contribute to family household work, which they regarded as the shared responsibility of everyone in the family. However, the 8 children who lived in an Indigenous-heritage community were more often reported to take initiative to make broad and complex work contributions than children from a newly schooled community. The children in the Indigenous-heritage community more often emphasized their mutual coordination and collaboration with other members of the family, whereas children from the newly schooled community often focused on their personal contributions. We examine cultural values that may support children in viewing household work as part of being a responsible family member, and consider the possibility that these encourage children's development of initiative.

This article contributes to research on the felt-experience of new media. It describes how the body's corporal capacities are augmented through one 12-year-old boy's play of the video game, Minecraft, while hospitalized. Expanding player-centric perspectives of video gameplay, the authors leverage work on place-events to develop an intra-actional methodology aligned with their relational materialist analysis. Their analysis illuminates how multiple human and nonhuman bodies become entangled in gameplace-events and potentially generate affective atmospheres. Analysis shows how these atmospheres reverberate and adhere within social space, revealing experiences of new media as less a one-to-one transaction between player and game and more an affective experience felt across multiple bodies and temporalities. Implications, suggesting both how intimate atmospheres developed during gameplay and how those atmospheres (re)shaped care in the hospital, point toward new media's potential to engage users in uniquely meaningful felt-experiences made visible—and felt—through methods of intra-action and relational materialism.

Poland faces one of the most rapidly ageing population in Europe. The old age dependency ratio is expected to triple until 2060. Against this background, our paper examines the sustainability of Polish public finances and its isolated subsystems. We consider the profound recent reforms including the transfer of 2nd pillar pension obligations to the general government in 2014. Furthermore, we extend our previous computations (Jablonowski et al., 2011) by using data from household budget surveys as well as large pension contributors' and tax payers' databases. Our results show that the pension reforms enacted since 2011 improve the long-term stability of public finances. A risk for fiscal sustainability represents, however, the public health care system which may be severely challenged by the ageing process and a continuing excess cost growth. We assess a number of health reforms including co-payments and a shift to tax financing which have the potential to stabilize the public health care system.

On 05/25/2014 heard the legendary Speaker of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, after 20 years to exist. In the place with history La Realidad he left during the memorial service for the murdered teacher Jose Luis Solis Lopez called Galeano. Marcos announced that he, who was known by his costume, Uniform, Pasamontana, bandana, whistle, and his interesting stories in the world, only a fictional character was that different exchangers had. The Zapatistas no longer need such a figure now. In his speech, Marcos summed up the over 20-year-old history of the Zapatistas, the uprising of 1994, when they started the war of the 'bottom-up' against the 'top', but instead opted for life for death and established their autonomous structures, land distributed, a functioning health and education systems and established its own nutrition basis created. The Zapatistas were defending the EZLN - its armed forces - these structures and were repeatedly attacked by the government, the military and paramilitary exposed. Adapted from the source document.

This report explores the question of how populist parties organize and towhat extent they have intrinsic characteristics and are alike in their organization. As this problematique is under-researched there is an important gapin our understanding and knowledge concerning populism and its parties. Largely a synthetic work, the report seeks to fill this void in existing researchthrough an overview of the secondary literature and an inventory ofscattered evidence covering a set of political parties broadly labelled populist. The evidence reveals that these parties in a range of European countrieshave experienced remarkably similar organizational attributes andstyle. A clear pattern has emerged. In a broad comparative perspective,three identifiable patterns are particularly notable as regards the organizationof these parties. The first pattern is centralized organizational structures. The second pattern, and linked to the former, is personalized leadership,which is often but not always based on charismatic authority. Thethird pattern is factionalism or intra-party division. ; New Voices, Old Roots: Dilemmas of Populism in Enlarged Europe

Beijing, motivated by the 2008 Olympics, has impressively modernizedin the past decade, replacing crumbling infrastructure and architecture, missingstreet lights, grey dirt, and weeds with wide boulevards crowded with late modelcars, ultra-modern bridges, subways, and skyscrapers. Yet, experts say, everythingin China is a trade-off. My focus is on one form of trade-off, the degradation of historicChina. Traveling in China exactly ten years after my first visit gave me opportunitiesto meet with representatives from media, education, and government, andask: how well has China maintained its cultural heritage in the face of rapid modernization?And how important is it for citizens and government to do so? Today'sChina, where "everything new is better," must be rendered "livable" for growingnumbers of citizens who are part of an ongoing mass internal migration involvingrelocation from rural areas to rapidly burgeoning cities, increasing pressures torepurpose spaces occupied by old structures. This paper presents current problemsrelating to historic preservation, and some perspectives for the future.