Early women law students at Cambridge and Oxford

This article examines the hitherto neglected history of the twelve women who studied law at Cambridge and Oxford in the years up to 1900. It concludes that the reason why so little has been written about them is, first, because women's experience has been routinely ignored in accounts of legal education ( and in history generally) and, second, because their entry to the university law schools was accomplished with very little fuss or opposition. This in turn was due not only to the fact that the law professors were generally sympathetic to higher education for women but also because the women themselves did not challenge university traditions or the men's curriculum.

Freeze-frame: a new infant inhibition task and its relation to frontal cortex tasks during infancy and early childhood

The current study investigated a new, easily administered, visual inhibition task for infants termed the Freeze-Frame task. In the new task, 9-month-olds were encouraged to inhibit looks to peripheral distractors. This was done by briefly freezing a central animated stimulus when infants looked to the distractors. Half of the trials presented an engaging central stimulus, and the other half presented a repetitive central stimulus. Three measures of inhibitory function were derived from the task and compared with performance on a set of frontal cortex tasks administered at 9 and 24 months of age. As expected, infants' ability to learn to selectively inhibit looks to the distractors at 9 months predicted performance at 24 months. However, performance differences in the two Freeze-Frame trial types early in the experiment also turned out to be an important predictor. The results are discussed in terms of the validity of the Freeze-Frame task as an early measure of different components of inhibitory function. (C) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Built environment education, research and practice: integrating diverse interests to make an impact

The role of the academic in the built environment seems generally to be not well understood or articulated. While this problem is not unique to our field, there are plenty of examples in a wide range of academic disciplines where the academic role has been fully articulated. But built environment academics have tended not to look beyond their own literature and their own vocational context in trying to give meaning to their academic work. The purpose of this keynote presentation is to explore the context of academic work generally and the connections between education, research and practice in the built environment, specifically. By drawing on ideas from the sociology of the professions, the role of universities, and the fundamentals of social science research, a case is made that helps to explain the kind of problems that routinely obstruct academic progress in our field. This discussion reveals that while there are likely to be great weaknesses in much of what is published and taught in the built environment, it is not too great a stretch to provide a more robust understanding and a good basis for developing our field in a way that would enable us collectively to make a major contribution to theory-building, theory-testing and to make a good stab at tackling some of the problems facing society at large. There is no reason to disregard the fundamental academic disciplines that underpin our knowledge of the built environment. If we contextualise our work in these more fundamental disciplines, there is every reason to think that we can have a much greater impact that we have experienced to date.

Entertainment education theory and practice in HIV/AIDS communication: a South Africa / United Kingdom comparison

Within development communication, gaps remain in theory and practice: communication innovations are taking place which either do not incorporate theory or fail to challenge the assumptions of development communication and HIV/AIDS theory. This can lead to the implementation of unsuccessful interventions that lack theoretical frameworks or to uninformed practice, making it difficult to replicate. Further, research has demonstrated that Entertainment Education (EE) interventions have a measurable impact on behaviour in areas such as HIV/AIDS prevention. Given the transitions in EE practice and evidence of its impact, EE theory and practice can contribute insight into these challenges. A pilot study investigated these dilemmas within the context of the monitoring and evaluation of development communication. Framing this discussion is the concept of South-North dialogue, using comparative analysis of EE interventions to distil lessons through contrasting experiences in two diverse settings. It holds as a principle that lessons from the experience of EE in the Southern context can inform lessons for the North. Further, comparison of the case studies can generate insights for the broader development communication field. We present four case studies, informed by key informant interviews, of EE interventions in the UK and South Africa. We address how communication is defined in planning, implementation and evaluation, highlighting how it often misses the importance of 'listening'. The case studies show that HIV/AIDS communication, and development communication more broadly, has not internalised ideas of evaluation and listening in communication. Successes in the case studies can be partially attributed to responsiveness and context-specificity rather than following rigid planning templates, such as those found in some development communication literature. This indicates the importance of flexibility and responsiveness to context for both development communication and HIV/AIDS communication.

Interpretation and expectation in childhood anxiety disorders: age effects and social specificity

Theory and treatment for childhood anxiety disorders typically implicates children’s negative cognitions, yet little is known about the characteristics of thinking styles of clinically anxious children. In particular, it is unclear whether differences in thinking styles between children with anxiety disorders and non-anxious children vary as a function of child age, whether particular cognitive distortions are associated with childhood anxiety disorders at different child ages, and whether cognitive content is disorder-specific. The current study addressed these questions among 120 7 - 12 year old children (53% female) who met diagnostic criteria for social anxiety disorder, other anxiety disorder, or who were not currently anxious. Contrary to expectations, threat interpretation was not inflated amongst anxious compared to non-anxious children at any age, although older (10 - 12 year old) anxious children did differ from non-anxious children on measures of perceived coping. The notion of cognitive-content specificity was not supported across the age-range. The findings challenge current treatment models of childhood anxiety, and suggest that a focus on changing anxious children’s cognitions is not warranted in mid-childhood, and in late childhood cognitive approaches may be better focussed on promoting children’s perceptions of control rather than challenging threat interpretations.

Towards a developmental memory-based and embodied cognitive architecture

A novel memory-based embodied cognitive architecture is introduced – the MBC architecture. It is founded upon neuropsychological theory, and may be applied to investigating the interplay of embodiment, autonomy, and environmental interaction as related to the development of cognition.