Education for the Professions in Times of Change

The eminent Harvard educationalist Howard Garner writes a preface to the Place Model within his Good Project Blog which provides a preface to this timely book. Professional is a slippery term, open to willful abuse, misuse and misunderstanding – as evidenced by the ways in which this chameleon term can be used as both a compliment and an insult. In this book academics from a range of professional fields deconstruct ‘professional’ and reimagine professionals in an age of rapid change where professionals are both increasingly in demand and frequently under threat. Several deploy the lens of Clarke’s Place Model to examine professions including teaching, midwifery, social work, journalism, and optometry. Some papers are empirical and some are based around using the Place Model as a thought experiment. All turn a critical eye on professionals and all find them to be, like all humans, neither devils nor divines (Maya Angelou), but at their best a combination of two indispensable characteristics, trustworthiness and expertise

Understanding Gender Inequality in Poverty and Social Exclusion through a Psychological Lens:Scarcities, Stereotypes and Suggestions

Poverty and social exclusion are a gendered phenomenon. They are rooted deeply in the stereotypes, biases, prejudices, and discriminations against women, especially those suffering from poor living conditions. Unfortunately, gender inequality is manifested in most, if not all, major life domains. It is therefore important to understand the gender aspect of poverty and social exclusion through a psychological lens. We begin this chapter by introducing the concepts of multi-dimensional poverty and social exclusion with a sketch of the gender disparities displayed in these areas. We turn next to several mainstream psychological theories which have attempted to investigate and interpret the relationship between poverty and gender inequality from the dispositional, motivational, cognitive, and behavioural perspectives. Finally, we evaluate the reliability, objectivity, and generalisability of the reviewed theories and studies and offer suggestions for future research.</p

Implications of palaeomagnetic data from the Tortworth Silurian inlier (southern Britain) to palaeogeography and Variscan tectonism

Palaeomagnetic data are presented from early Silurian (Upper Llandovery) lavas from the Tortworth Silurian inlier of south-west England. Two magnetization components are recognized on the basis of contrasting demagnetization characteristics. A lower unblocking-temperature component (<350°C) is oriented parallel to the Earth's present magnetic field at the sampling site ( N = 46, declination = 352°, inclination = 69°, k = 52.1, Α 95 = 2.9°). A higher unblocking-temperature component (350–600°C) is inferred to be primary on the basis of a stratigraphy-parallel reversal pattern (combined tilt-corrected mean: N = 42, declination = 056°, inclination = -30°, k = 22.6, Α 95 = 4.7°). Geological implications of these new data are as follows. (1) the calculated Upper Llandovery ( c. 430 Ma) palaeolatitude for the site (16°S) is consistent with tectonic models invoking pre-Wenlock closure of the Iapetus Ocean across Britain. (2) the declination of the primary magnetization indicates substantial clockwise rotation within this sector of the Variscan thrust belt. Rotation is most likely to be linked to early Variscan northward thrust transport with components of dextral transpression. the amount of clockwise rotation is approximately 85° in the south (Mendips) and decreases to 33-63° in the north (Tortworth). (3) the polarity of the primary magnetization (Lower Trap lava: reversely polarized; Upper Trap lava: normally polarized is consistent with that expected from a preliminary analysis of the Silurian magnetic-field reversal pattern.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/75207/1/j.1365-246X.1994.tb00915.x.pd

The logical problem of language acquisition : a probabilistic perspective

Natural language is full of patterns that appear to fit with general linguistic rules but are ungrammatical. There has been much debate over how children acquire these “linguistic restrictions,” and whether innate language knowledge is needed. Recently, it has been shown that restrictions in language can be learned asymptotically via probabilistic inference using the minimum description length (MDL) principle. Here, we extend the MDL approach to give a simple and practical methodology for estimating how much linguistic data are required to learn a particular linguistic restriction. Our method provides a new research tool, allowing arguments about natural language learnability to be made explicit and quantified for the first time. We apply this method to a range of classic puzzles in language acquisition. We find some linguistic rules appear easily statistically learnable from language experience only, whereas others appear to require additional learning mechanisms (e.g., additional cues or innate constraints)