Why all counter-evidence to the critical period hypothesis in second language acquisition is not equal or problematic

That adult and child language acquisitions differ in route and outcome is observable. Notwithstanding, there is controversy as to what this observation means for the Critical Period Hypothesis’ (CPH) application to adult second language acquisition (SLA). As most versions of the CPH applied to SLA claim that differences result from maturational effects on in-born linguistic mechanisms, the CPH has many implications that are amendable to empirical investigation. To date, there is no shortage of literature claiming that the CPH applies or does not apply to normal adult SLA. Herein, I provide an epistemological discussion on the conceptual usefulness of the CPH in SLA (cf. Singleton 2005) coupled with a review of Long's (2005) evaluation of much available relevant research. Crucially, I review studies that Long did not consider and conclude differently that there is no critical/sensitive period for L2 syntactic and semantic acquisition.

Museum geography: exploring museums, collections and museum practice in the UK

In the UK alone there are more than 2500 museums of interest to international and home audiences. Despite their prevalence and a strong museological culture in the UK and beyond, the geographic study of museums is relatively under-developed. To date there has been no systematic overview of this field either in the UK or internationally. This review article is intended as a contribution towards an emerging ‘museum geography’. Beginning with an exploration of research on museums, collections and museum practice, the author then considers the recent ‘spatial turn’ in museum studies and discusses how geographers have variously encountered museums, collections and museum practice to date. The article then reviews the potential for the future study of museums by geographers. In so doing, the author suggests that the study of museums offers some exciting opportunities for geographical research and teaching.

How reward and emotional stimuli induce different reactions across the menstrual cycle

Despite widespread belief that moods are affected by the menstrual cycle, researchers on emotion and reward have not paid much attention to the menstrual cycle until recently. However, recent research has revealed different reactions to emotional stimuli and to rewarding stimuli across the different phases of the menstrual cycle. The current paper reviews the emerging literature on how ovarian hormone fluctuation during the menstrual cycle modulates reactions to emotional stimuli and to reward. Behavioral and neuroimaging studies in humans suggest that estrogen and progesterone have opposing influences. That is, it appears that estrogen enhances reactions to reward, but progesterone counters the facilitative effects of estrogen and decreases reactions to rewards. In contrast, reactions to emotionally arousing stimuli (particularly negative stimuli) appear to be decreased by estrogen but enhanced by progesterone. Potential factors that can modulate the effects of the ovarian hormones (e.g., an inverse quadratic function of hormones’ effects; the structural changes of the hippocampus across the menstrual cycle) are also discussed.

Contemporary ordinary language philosophy

There is a widespread assumption that ordinary language philosophy was killed off sometime in the 1960s or 70s by a combination of Gricean pragmatics and the rapid development of systematic semantic theory. Contrary to that widespread assumption, however, contemporary versions of ordinary language philosophy are alive and flourishing, but going by various aliases—in particular (some versions of) "contextualism" and (some versions of) "experimental philosophy". And a growing group of contemporary philosophers are explicitly embracing the methods as well as the title of ordinary language philosophy and arguing that it has been unfairly maligned and was never decisively refuted. In this overview, I will outline the main projects and arguments employed by contemporary ordinary language philosophers, and make the case that updated versions of the arguments made by ordinary language philosophers in the middle of the twentieth century are attracting renewed attention.

The Cold War and its aftermath in the Americas: the search for a synthetic interpretation of U.S. policy

More than two decades have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the transfer of the Cold War file from a daily preoccupation of policy makers to a more detached assessment by historians. Scholars of U.S.-Latin American relations are beginning to take advantage both of the distance in time and of newly opened archives to reflect on the four decades that, from the 1940s to the 1980s, divided the Americas, as they did much of the world. Others are seeking to understand U.S. policy and inter-American relations in the post-Cold War era, a period that not only lacks a clear definition but also still has no name. Still others have turned their gaze forward to offer policies in regard to the region for the new Obama administration. Numerous books and review essays have addressed these three subjects—the Cold War, the post-Cold War era, and current and future issues on the inter-American agenda. Few of these studies attempt, however, to connect the three subjects or to offer new and comprehensive theories to explain the course of U.S. policies from the beginning of the twentieth century until the present. Indeed, some works and policy makers continue to use the mind-sets of the Cold War as though that conflict were still being fought. With the benefit of newly opened archives, some scholars have nevertheless drawn insights from the depths of the Cold War that improve our understanding of U.S. policies and inter-American relations, but they do not address the question as to whether the United States has escaped the longer cycle of intervention followed by neglect that has characterized its relations with Latin America. Another question is whether U.S. policies differ markedly before, during, and after the Cold War. In what follows, we ask whether the books reviewed here provide any insights in this regard and whether they offer a compass for the future of inter-American relations. We also offer our own thoughts as to how their various perspectives could be synthesized to address these questions more comprehensively.

Obfuscation and Strict Online Anonymity

I consider the case for genuinely anonymous web searching. Big data seems to have it in for privacy. The story is well known, particularly since the dawn of the web. Vastly more personal information, monumental and quotidian, is gathered than in the pre-digital days. Once gathered it can be aggregated and analyzed to produce rich portraits, which in turn permit unnerving prediction of our future behavior. The new information can then be shared widely, limiting prospects and threatening autonomy. How should we respond? Following Nissenbaum (2011) and Brunton and Nissenbaum (2011 and 2013), I will argue that the proposed solutions—consent, anonymity as conventionally practiced, corporate best practices, and law—fail to protect us against routine surveillance of our online behavior. Brunton and Nissenbaum rightly maintain that, given the power imbalance between data holders and data subjects, obfuscation of one’s online activities is justified. Obfuscation works by generating “misleading, false, or ambiguous data with the intention of confusing an adversary or simply adding to the time or cost of separating good data from bad,” thus decreasing the value of the data collected (Brunton and Nissenbaum, 2011). The phenomenon is as old as the hills. Natural selection evidently blundered upon the tactic long ago. Take a savory butterfly whose markings mimic those of a toxic cousin. From the point of view of a would-be predator the data conveyed by the pattern is ambiguous. Is the bug lunch or potential last meal? In the light of the steep costs of a mistake, the savvy predator goes hungry. Online obfuscation works similarly, attempting for instance to disguise the surfer’s identity (Tor) or the nature of her queries (Howe and Nissenbaum 2009). Yet online obfuscation comes with significant social costs. First, it implies free riding. If I’ve installed an effective obfuscating program, I’m enjoying the benefits of an apparently free internet without paying the costs of surveillance, which are shifted entirely onto non-obfuscators. Second, it permits sketchy actors, from child pornographers to fraudsters, to operate with near impunity. Third, online merchants could plausibly claim that, when we shop online, surveillance is the price we pay for convenience. If we don’t like it, we should take our business to the local brick-and-mortar and pay with cash. Brunton and Nissenbaum have not fully addressed the last two costs. Nevertheless, I think the strict defender of online anonymity can meet these objections. Regarding the third, the future doesn’t bode well for offline shopping. Consider music and books. Intrepid shoppers can still find most of what they want in a book or record store. Soon, though, this will probably not be the case. And then there are those who, for perfectly good reasons, are sensitive about doing some of their shopping in person, perhaps because of their weight or sexual tastes. I argue that consumers should not have to pay the price of surveillance every time they want to buy that catchy new hit, that New York Times bestseller, or a sex toy.

Orientation and external morphology of burrows of the mangrove crab Ucides cordatus (Crustacea: Brachyura: Ucididae)

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Defensoria pública e sua legitimidade à tutela jurídica dos direitos humanos

The realization of human rights is a prerequisite to the development of peoples, this requires legal mechanisms and techniques to its consistent and effective promotion, protection and fulfillment. So, agree that there is an institution or public agency created for the purpose of protecting those who suffer most in the face of human rights violations: the needy. In Brazil, among other institutions and public agencies, the responsibility of the Public Defender to promote the protection of human rights. The constitutional system recognizes the institution in its essence the role of the state court, whose duty is to provide guidance and legal defense of the needy. The legal system as a whole sufraga the relevance of the Ombudsman as a mainspring of human rights. In the prison system, with the ultimate regulatory changes, such as Law 12.313 of 2010 which introduced changes to the Law 7.210 of 1984, the institution must ensure the correct and humane enforcement of sentences and the security measures pertaining to the needy. With the Complementary Law 132 of 2009, to systematize other duties of the Public Defender, highlighting their contribution to the movement of access to justice. Within the OAS, to adopt Resolution 2656, 2011, characterizing, with ruler and compass, the relevance of the Ombudsman access to justice and protection of human rights. In this step, the present study concerns the role of Defender in the legal protection of human rights, through monographic and deductive methods, as there remains a technical and theoretical connection between these two points themed legal phenomenon, since the rights humans, especially after the second half of the twentieth century, form the basis of the legal system of the major Western nations in the world. This led, therefore, the emergence of technical and legal institutions aimed at realizing human rights. This applies to the Defender. Access to justice and public service provision of legal assistance are human rights, therefore, essential to humans and necessary for social inclusion. Countries such as Brazil, marked by social inequality, depend on the structuring of institutions like the Defender, designed to promote citizenship to the Brazilian people

Direito fundamental à saúde: parâmetros e alternativas para sua concretização no Brasil

If, on one hand, only with the 1988 Federal Constitution the right to health began to receive the treatment of authentic fundamental social right; on the other, it is certain since then, the level of concretization reached as to such right depicts a mismatch between the constitutional will and the will of the rulers. That is because, despite the inherent gradualness of the process of concretization of the fundamental social rights, the Brazilian reality, marked by a picture of true chaos on public health routinely reported on the evening news, denatures the priority status constitutionally drew for the right to health, demonstrating, thus, that there is a clear deficit in this process, which must be corrected. This concern regarding the problem of the concretization of the social rights, in turn, is underlined when one speaks of the right to health, since such right, due to its intimate connection with the right to life and human dignity, ends up assuming a position of primacy among the social rights, presenting itself as an imperative right, since its perfect fruition becomes an essential condition for the potential enjoyment of the remaining social rights. From such premises, this paper aims to provide a proposal for the correction of this problem based upon the defense of an active role of the Judiciary in the concretization of the right to health as long as grounded to objective and solid parameters that come to correct, with legal certainty, the named deficit and to avoid the side effects and distortions that are currently beheld when the Judiciary intends to intervene in the matter. For that effect, emerges as flagship of this measure a proposition of an existential minimum specific to the right to health that, taking into account both the constitutionally priority points relating to this relevant right, as well as the very logic of the structuring of the Sistema Único de Saúde - SUS inserted within the core of the public health policies developed in the country, comes to contribute to a judicialization of the subject more in alignment with the ideals outlined in the 1988 Constitution. Furthermore, in the same intent to seek a concretization of the right to health in harmony with the constitutional priority inherent to this material right, the research alerts to the need to undertake a restructuring in the form of organization of the Boards of Health in order to enforce the constitutional guideline of SUS community participation, as well as the importance of establishing a new culture budget in the country, with the Constitution as a compass, pass accurately portray a special prioritization directed constitutional social rights, especially the right to health

Navegando nas ondas dos saberes do ser: uma conversa com a sexualidade à luz da corporeidade.

This study aimed to provide a continuing education towards raising teachers for reflection and effective sexual education within the school environment as a possible route of self-education and training of teachers of elementary school. More specifically aim to facilitate through the Continuing Education to discuss the knowledge of the body and knowledge of human sexuality, presenting them as core knowledge in the integral formation of individuals and promote discussion of a Human-centered education Teaching in a vocational training and human .In this sense, we dialogue with the human teaching preconized by Arroyo (2002, 2004) along with the humanization (hominization) of the individuals through education, under Freire´s perspective of the being more (2003) as well as his ideas, Pineau´s (2003) and Josso´s (2004) about the educational practice understanding as a way to build up the autonomy of the individuals who we intend to educate. We defend the inclusion of the body as an essential learning element according to the principles of corporeity presented by Assman (2001), whose comprehension is that every learning experience has a corporal inscription. Furthermore, the knowledge about human sexuality cannot be excluded from this process since the sexuality is inherent of individuals and is constructed and reconstructed during their existence. Our view of the world and of man is supported by the knowledge of the complexity (Morim, 2004) trying to surpass the mechanist view that sees them through the duality view, fragmenting them. For the discussion and construction of knowledge that search for the confluence of these knowledges about the being and the educational practice, aiming at the individual integral formation starting from the process of self-formation/self-knowledge, we´ve directed our research-action-formation having as compass the theoretical-methodological postulate of the research-action (Barbier, 2002; Morin, 2004; Thiollent, 2004) because it makes the participation of all the involved people in the process of resolution or surpassing of problem solving possible. We´ve used the continuing formation as a way of access for data collection, applying a questionnaire with open questions for the ones involved in the research. Based on the findings it´s been possible to infer that for the teaching formation it is necessary the inclusion of the Human sexuality and corporeity theme, so that the teacher can surpass the biological view of sexuality and also the expansion of the mechanist view of the body. To do so, we suggest that the teaching formation happens supported by the teaching capacitation and formation according to Maturana (2004), bringing teaching knowledges (Tardiff, 2002), which contribute effectively for the responsibility to educate people for life.

Infraorbital foramen location in dry human skulls

The objective of this study was to determine the mean distance between the infraorbital foramen and the infraorbital margin, as well as the mean distance between the infraorbital foramen and the piriform aperture on both sides of dry human skulls, with the aim of improving the efficiency in clinical situations, such as surgery and anesthetic procedures. Two hundred ninety-five skulls were used (590 sides), located in the Frankfurt Plane through a craniostat. The measurements were collected by two distinct operators, with a dry tip compass and carried to a caliper. The general mean obtained between the infraorbital foramen and the infraorbital margin was 6.37 mm (±1.69 mm), with a mean of 6,28 mm (±1.79 mm) on the right side and 6.45 mm (±1.76 mm) on the left side. The general mean obtained between the infraorbital foramen and the piriform aperture was 17.67 mm (±1.95 mm), being 17.75 mm (±2.10 mm) on the right side and 17.60 mm (±2.04 mm) on the left side. There were statistically significant differences between the right and left distances of the infraorbital foramen and the infraorbital margin, verified by the Student's-t test. The results of this study allow a more precise location of the infraorbital foramen, particularly as regards the infraorbital margin, since this distance is of relevant importance as a repair point during surgical procedures involving this anatomical structure.

International finance and Caribbean development

Includes bibliography

Paradigmas diversos no campo da assistência social e seus estabelecimentos assistenciais típicos

In order to understand what is the situation of entities that serve children and adolescents today, as well as the institutional plot that comprises these institutions, we aimed to formulate a set of paradigmatic possibilities that would allow us to understand the configuration of the dialectical field of various pulses, in which these entities are located. We detected the subjects we associate with counterparts paradigms of Charity, of Human Promotion, of Philanthropy, of assistentialist government patronage, of Social Work as a State Policy, and finally, another set of events that we propose to designate as the paradigm of Citizen Subjects we associate with the ethical perspective of People Education. These paradigmatic possibilities range from the simply various and contrasting ones, including the similar and competing ones, to the dialectically contradictory ones. Its spectrum oscillates between tutelage and citizenship. The characterization of these didactic paradigms can provide us a compass that is required in a highly complex social field, allowing us to understand the variety of ethical effects promoted by these paradigms in the social field.

Influência da combinação de dados GPS e GLONASS no georreferenciamento de imóveis rurais

The land question has been a widely discussed topic in Brazil, regarding land tenure. Law No. 10.267/01 was a major breakthrough for the agrarian issue. Since then on all rural properties must be georeferenced to the Brazilian Geodetic System (BGS). Therefore, satellite positioning and conventional methods are extensively used. Changes have been occurring in satellite positioning systems due to the addition of new signals in GPS (Global System Positioning), restructuring of GLONASS (Global Orbiting Navigation Satellite System), and the new systems like Galileo and Compass as well. To evaluate the effects of combining GPS and GLONASS data, several batches of processings were performed on different configurations. The data processing was performed to determine the coordinates of points of basic support and those materializing the neighborhood of the rural properties. As a result, it was found that the use of accurate ephemeris in transporting coordinates to support points has no significant influence, since transportation with broadcast ephemeris also meets the accuracy requirements for the Standard Technique for Georreferencing Rural Properties. On the other hand, when GPS and GLONASS data were used, such combination provides the best results. In the case of neighboring points, the use of GPS and GLONASS data is also recommended because such data meet the precision requirement and showed better results than those from where data were processed separately.

Influência da combinação e modernização dos sistemas que integram o GNSS no georreferenciamento de imóveis rurais

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)