Creating proactive interference in immediate recall: Building a DOG from a DART, a MOP, and a FIG

Phonemic codes are accorded a privileged role in most current models of immediate serial recall, although their effects are apparent in short-term proactive interference (PI) effects as well. The present research looks at how assumptions concerning distributed representation and distributed storage involving both semantic and phonemic codes might be operationalized to produce PI in a short-term cued recall task. The four experiments reported here attempted to generate the phonemic characteristics of a nonrhyming, interfering foil from unrelated filler items in the same list. PI was observed when a rhyme of the foil was studied or when the three phonemes of the foil were distributed across three studied filler items. The results suggest that items in short-term memory are stored in terms of feature bundles and that all items are simultaneously available at retrieval.

Cherbourg's Chinatown: creating an identity of place on an Australian Aboriginal settlement

This is the story of an extraordinary Aboriginal woman, Princy Carlo, and the identity of place she and her descendants fashioned within the confines of the Aboriginal settlement of Cherbourg (formerly Barambah), during the early twentieth century. The patch of Cherbourg that came to be known as 'Chinatown' has to date attracted cursory reference in historical commentary on the south-eastern Queensland Aboriginal settlement. Yet, hidden beneath what may appear as an inconsequential historical detail lies a fascinating illustration of the negotiation of place identity within a frame of triangulated group relations (Aboriginal-Chinese-White) in what remained, in essence, a colonial society. Incorporating primary written sources and oral accounts from descendants the study analyses the forging of the Chinatown identity of place through a process of 'spatial othering', eliciting features unique to this indigenous identity-construct. The study provides an insight into Aboriginal connection and kinship with land following forced removal to a government settlement, and contributes to the historical records of the Cherbourg Aboriginal community and the Eidsvold district in Queensland, Australia. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Out of the generosity of your heart: Are we creating active citizens through compulsory volunteer programmes for young people in Australia?

Using governmentality as a theoretical framework, we examine two Australian policy areas where young people are disciplined into becoming good, active citizens. These policies-mutual obligation through the work for the dole programme, and school-based active citizenship programmes similar to American service learning programmes-both mirror volunteer-ope activities, in a social context where volunteers are viewed as good citizens. In this study, we present findings from a qualitative study that addresses the question of whether young people will develop active citizenship through compulsory volunteer-type programmes. The findings show that first, young people are very conscious of the lack of choice involved in these programmes and that this weakened their sense of agency. Second, the programmes failed to develop positive community attitudes and active social behaviours. These results suggest that policies that compel individuals to contribute to society may actually weaken their citizenship identities.

Systemic absorptive capacity: creating early-to-market returns through R&D alliances

For most complex emergent technologies, product-market success depends on efficient linkages between changing lead innovators within the R&D process. In this paper, our unit of analysis is a complex high technology product and the system of alliance linkages formed to progress a product through R&D milestones. We present a model and evidence for advancing our understanding of how achieving early-to-market returns depends on systemic absorptive capacity. This systemic absorptive capacity is the cumulative efficiency in the use of absorptive capacity to link changing lead innovators across successive milestones in R&D product development. We advance propositions of how systemic absorptive capacity can explain performance differences between rival product development systems competing for early-to-market returns with similar products through accelerating speed to market, cost and quality advantages. These explanations are contrasted with the conclusions of previous studies that have focused on absorptive capacity of single firms or single alliances in RD.