An Explorative Review of Copyright Education: Studies and Resources

Copyright education is a contested field characterised by disagreements about definitions and aims. The present report seeks to identify and map current debates about copyright education by surveying relevant literature. The paper identifies 10 distinct categories of copyright education discussed in research and scholarship about copyright. These categories include consumer education initiatives in the tradition of public warnings against criminal behaviour ‘You wouldn’t steal a handbag…’, studies of use of media materials by educators in classrooms, and debates about open access to knowledge in higher education. The paper closes with a discussion of the findings and recommendations for future research about copyright education

Techniques and Modes of Insertion

In this report, I intend to mention most of the methods of implantation of permanent pacemakers while indicating those methods which are currently favored

Challenges in Creating a Disaster Resilient Built Environment

With the increase in occurrences of high impact disasters, the concept of risk reduction and resilience is widely recognised. Recent disasters have highlighted the exposure of urban cities to natural disasters and emphasised the need of making cities resilient to disasters. Built environment plays an important role in every city and need to be functional and operational at a time of a disaster and is expected to provide protection to people and other facilities. However, recent disasters have highlighted the vulnerability of the built assets to natural disasters and therefore it is very much important to focus on creating a disaster resilient built environment within cities. However the process of making a disaster resilient built environment is a complex process where many challenges are involved. Accordingly the paper aims at exploring the challenges involved in building a disaster resilient built environment. Paper discusses the findings of some expert interviews and three case studies which have been conducted in Sri Lanka by selecting three cities which are potentially vulnerable to threats posed by natural hazards. The empirical evidence revealed, lack of regulatory frameworks; unplanned cities and urbanisation; old building stocks and at risk infrastructure; unauthorised structures; institutional arrangements; inadequate capacities of municipal councils; lack of funding; inadequacy of qualified human resources; and corruption and unlawful activities as major challenges for creating a disaster resilient built environment within Sri Lankan cities. The paper proposes a set of recommendations to address these prevailing concerns and to build a more resilient built environment within cities

The reification of resilience and the implications for theory and practice

A review of academic and grey literature in disaster risk reduction, construction, urban planning and architecture shows that the term ‘resilience’ has been increasingly adopted to describe an ethical posture towards interventions in the built environment. Policy makers in the United Kingdom (UK) have followed this trend and increasingly adopt the resilience language in policy and Government agendas. However, a detailed examination of over 20 UK policy documents and 19 interviews with stakeholders involved in the planning, design, construction and operation of the built environment, reveals a multiplicity of diverse uses and representations of resilience. Moreover, the meaning attributed to the term is often influenced by the professional remits and decision space of policy and decision makers. Given these results, we argue that resilience should not be seen as a consensual concept but rather as an unfolding ethical paradigm through which stakeholders create their own dynamic representations and meanings. By illustrating how the term is often reified in divergent and incompatible ways, we identify five tensions that this creates, and the implications from both a theoretical and a policy perspective. Given the malleable and nebulous nature of the term we suggest that it should be used cautiously within both contexts

'The divine hierarchy': the social and institutional elements of vulnerability in South India

Studies over the last twenty years show that understanding the social and economic forces that govern societies and create vulnerability should have the same emphasis as understanding the physical causes of vulnerability. This enquiry investigates what social networks and institutions are available (created or imposed) to people that enable them to cope with large scale crises, such as tropical cyclones, and 'everyday' problems such as poverty and illness. The social institutions prevalent in villages in coastal Andhra Pradesh, South India, have been assessed regarding which variables appear to be the most and least successful in contributing to the reduction of people's vulnerability and aiding the coping mechanisms of individuals and households. Using a mixed methods approach, quantitative and qualitative data were collected from over 300 respondents in twelve villages, enabling an assessment to be made of each respondent's access to resources as indicators of levels of poverty, marginalisation, resilience and social power. Data was obtained using questionnaires, village cartographic surveys, sociograms and semi-structured interviews. The sociograms used throughout this research were developed during the fieldwork. They were adapted to suit the requirements of the research focus and thereby facilitate the assessment of the types and strengths of social networks used by the respondents in both 'everyday' and 'crisis' situations. A contextual analysis was conducted to locate concepts such as 'community' and 'risk' within the discourse appropriate to the respondents. From this analysis it became apparent that the village level respondents perceive risk in terms of recurring 'everyday' occurrences such as low crop yields and the lack of basic needs, and not high impact but infrequently occurring events such as tropical cyclones or floods. The village level respondents, government officials and NGO employees typically perceive the concept of 'community' as defined by caste classifications. The main variable explaining access to resources is caste. Caste is the dominant social institution that influences social networks and hence (with poverty) levels of vulnerability. This is because it not only influences levels of vulnerability directly, through levels of poverty, but also restricts the ability of some respondents to change their circumstances through enduring caste-defined inequalities with regards to accessing the resources that might help them to reduce their levels of vulnerability. Given this fording, and because caste is not predominately an economic phenomenon, vulnerability reduction initiatives that focus on economic advancement alone are unlikely to usurp patterns of caste discrimination and thereby are unlikely to reduce endemic levels of vulnerability for the most vulnerable members of society: they are treating symptoms, not causes. In contrast, social networks are also important: while the 'lower' castes are the most marginalised, powerless and poorest members of the case study areas they attempt to address this by accessing socio-economic resources that can, and marginally do, increase their resilience to frequent small scale crises, typically via social networks with informal social institutions such as NGOs, CBOs and kinship networks. In view of the dearth in empirical evidence associated to inequalities related to caste in rural India, this thesis adds to the limited contemporary evidence that suggests that caste defined disparities persist. Consequently, practitioners involved in vulnerability reduction need to gain a better understanding of the communities and the `political realities' in which they operate, so that future interventions will be better targeted and ultimately be more appropriate and sustainable that they have been in the past

Using keystroke logging to understand writers’ processes on a reading-into-writing test

Background Integrated reading-into-writing tasks are increasingly used in large-scale language proficiency tests. Such tasks are said to possess higher authenticity as they reflect real-life writing conditions better than independent, writing-only tasks. However, to effectively define the reading-into-writing construct, more empirical evidence regarding how writers compose from sources both in real-life and under test conditions is urgently needed. Most previous process studies used think aloud or questionnaire to collect evidence. These methods rely on participants’ perceptions of their processes, as well as their ability to report them. Findings This paper reports on a small-scale experimental study to explore writers’ processes on a reading-into-writing test by employing keystroke logging. Two L2 postgraduates completed an argumentative essay on computer. Their text production processes were captured by a keystroke logging programme. Students were also interviewed to provide additional information. Keystroke logging like most computing tools provides a range of measures. The study examined the students’ reading-into-writing processes by analysing a selection of the keystroke logging measures in conjunction with students’ final texts and interview protocols. Conclusions The results suggest that the nature of the writers’ reading-into-writing processes might have a major influence on the writer’s final performance. Recommendations for future process studies are provided