'In practice it doesn't always work out like that.' Undergraduate experiences in a research community of practice

This paper examines the extent to which a structured undergraduate research intervention, UROP, permits undergraduate students early access to legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) in a research community of practice. Accounts of placement experiences suggest that UROP affords rich possibilities for engagement with research practice. Undergraduates tread a path of gaining access to mature practice while also building their own independence, participating in work that they see matters to the community and making gains in use of a shared research repertoire. Students place UROP experiences in a contrasting frame to research exercises experienced during degree programmes; their sense of the authenticity of the research experienced through UROP emerges as a key element of these accounts. The data generate the interesting question that the degree of engagement with mature practice may account for more of the gain from UROP than simply the quantity of contact other researchers.

Lorrie Moore: Mo(o)re than an interim assessment

Lorrie Moore has long shed the image of the precocious talent who won the Seventeen story prize with her first submission as a nineteen-year-old undergraduate, but there is still a sense that her best work may be yet to come. In that respect, this mini special issue represents by no means the final word on Moore, but rather an interim assessment of a career that is already substantial and that promises much more to come. Together these three essays (and introduction) offer a coherent and striking exploration of Moore's work that develops new directions for future criticism and will help cement her growing reputation as one of the most original and distinctive contemporary writers. They sometimes circle around the same stories, even the same quotations, reading them in a variety of frames and picking up (and at) the nuances of Moore's sustained wordplay and careful documenting of space, of identity, of gender. Thus these essays work together rather than separately, layering over multiple understandings of Moore's incisive American literature.

Adapting Jules Verne for the baby-boom generation: Hachette and the Bibliothèque Verte, c.1956-1966

How do changing notions of children’s reading practices alter or even create classic texts? This article looks at how the nineteenth-century author Jules Verne (1828-1905) was modernised by Hachette for their Bibliothèque Verte children’s collection in the 1950s and 60s. Using the methodology of adaptation studies, the article reads the abridged texts in the context of the concerns that emerged in postwar France about what children were reading. It examines how these concerns shaped editorial policy, and the transformations that Verne’s texts underwent before they were considered suitable for the children of the baby-boom generation. It asks whether these adapted versions damaged Verne’s reputation, as many literary scholars have suggested, or if the process of dividing his readership into children and adults actually helped to reinforce the new idea of his texts as complex and multilayered. In so doing, this article provides new insights into the impact of postwar reforms on children’s publishing and explores the complex interplay between abridgment, censorship, children’s literature and the adult canon.

NGOs, elite capture and community-driven development: perspectives in rural Mozambique

This article examines the problems of elite capture in community driven development (CDD). Drawing on two case studies of non-governmental organisation (NGO) intervention in rural Mozambique, the authors consider two important variables – 1) the diverse and complex contributions of local elites to CDD in different locations, and 2) the roles that non-elites play in monitoring and controlling leader activities – to argue that donors should be cautious about automatically assuming the prevalence of malevolent patrimonialism and its ill-effects in their projects. This is because the ‘checks and balances’ on elite behaviour that exist within locally-defined and historically-rooted forms of community-based governance are likely to be more effective than those introduced by the external intervener.

The civic zeitgeist: nationalism and liberal values in the European radical right

This article examines the relationship between nationalism and liberal values, and more specifically the redefinition of boundaries between national communities and others in the rhetoric of radical right parties in Europe. The aim is to examine the tension between radical right party discourse and the increasing need to shape this discourse in liberal terms. We argue that the radical right parties that successfully operate within the democratic system tend to be those best able to tailor their discourse to the liberal and civic characteristics of national identity so as to present themselves and their ideologies as the true authentic defenders of the nation's unique reputation for democracy, diversity and tolerance. Comparing the success of a number of European radical right parties ranging from the most electorally successful SVP to the more mixed BNP, FN and NPD, we show that the parties that effectively deploy the symbolic resources of national identity through a predominantly voluntaristic prism tend to be the ones that fare better within their respective political systems. In doing so, we challenge the conventional view in the study of nationalism which expects civic values to shield countries from radicalism and extremism.

The monitoring of ecological quality and the classification of standing waters in temperate regions: a review and proposal based on a worked scheme for British waters

This paper reviews the ways that quality can be assessed in standing waters, a subject that has hitherto attracted little attention but which is now a legal requirement in Europe. It describes a scheme for the assessment and monitoring of water and ecological quality in standing waters greater than about I ha in area in England & Wales although it is generally relevant to North-west Europe. Thirteen hydrological, chemical and biological variables are used to characterise the standing water body in any current sampling. These are lake volume, maximum depth, onductivity, Secchi disc transparency, pH, total alkalinity, calcium ion concentration, total N concentration,winter total oxidised inorganic nitrogen (effectively nitrate) concentration, total P concentration, potential maximum chlorophyll a concentration, a score based on the nature of the submerged and emergent plant community, and the presence or absence of a fish community. Inter alia these variables are key indicators of the state of eutrophication, acidification, salinisation and infilling of a water body.

Universally reversible JC*-triples and operator spaces

Abstract. We prove that the vast majority of JC∗-triples satisfy the condition of universal reversibility. Our characterisation is that a JC∗-triple is universally reversible if and only if it has no triple homomorphisms onto Hilbert spaces of dimension greater than two nor onto spin factors of dimension greater than four. We establish corresponding characterisations in the cases of JW∗-triples and of TROs (regarded as JC∗-triples). We show that the distinct natural operator space structures on a universally reversible JC∗-triple E are in bijective correspondence with a distinguished class of ideals in its universal TRO, identify the Shilov boundaries of these operator spaces and prove that E has a unique natural operator space structure precisely when E contains no ideal isometric to a nonabelian TRO. We deduce some decomposition and completely contractive properties of triple homomorphisms on TROs.

Evaluating forecasts of extreme events for hydrological applications: an approach for screening unfamiliar performance measures

Many different performance measures have been developed to evaluate field predictions in meteorology. However, a researcher or practitioner encountering a new or unfamiliar measure may have difficulty in interpreting its results, which may lead to them avoiding new measures and relying on those that are familiar. In the context of evaluating forecasts of extreme events for hydrological applications, this article aims to promote the use of a range of performance measures. Some of the types of performance measures that are introduced in order to demonstrate a six-step approach to tackle a new measure. Using the example of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) ensemble precipitation predictions for the Danube floods of July and August 2002, to show how to use new performance measures with this approach and the way to choose between different performance measures based on their suitability for the task at hand is shown. Copyright © 2008 Royal Meteorological Society

The repatriation of 1973 and the re-making of modern south Asia

In the aftermath of the 1971 war, nearly 250,000 people found themselves stranded in various parts of the subcontinent. These 'trapped minorities' became hostages in a complex negotiation process that highlighted how questions of citizenship and belonging remained unresolved in post-Partition South Asia. By studying three groups - the non-Bengalis, the Bengalis and the prisoners of war in a comparative perspective, this paper re-visits the question of who was welcome within certain borders and on what terms. It argues that these decisions depended not just on the state's policies towards 'outsiders' but also upon its own relationship with its minority communities.

Enterprise pedagogy in music: an exploration of multiple pedagogies

This article investigates the nature of enterprise pedagogy in music. It presents the results of a research project that applied the practices of enterprise learning developed in the post-compulsory music curriculum in England to the teaching of the National Curriculum for music for 11-to-14-year-olds. In doing so, the article explores the nature of enterprise learning and the nature of pedagogy, in order to consider whether enterprise pedagogy offers an effective way to teach the National Curriculum. Enterprise pedagogy was found to have a positive effect on the motivation of students and on the potential to match learning to the needs of students of different abilities. Crucially, it was found that, to be effective, not only did the teacher’s practice need to be congruent with the beliefs and theories on which it rests, but that the students also needed to share in these underlying assumptions through their learning. The study has implications for the way in which teachers work multiple pedagogies in the process of developing their pedagogical identity.

Brussels French une fois: Transfer-induced innovation or system-internal development?

In language contact studies, specific features of the contact languages are often seen to be the result of transfer (interference), but it remains difficult to disentangle the role of intra-systemic and inter-systemic factors. We propose to unravel these factors in the analysis of a feature of Brussels French which many researchers attribute to transfer from (Brussels) Dutch: the adverbial use of une fois. We compare the use of this particle in Brussels French with its occurrence in corpora of other varieties of French, including several that have not been influenced by a Germanic substrate or adstrate. A detailed analysis of the frequency of occurrence, the functions and the distribution of the particle over different syntactic positions shows that some uses of une fois can be traced back to sixteenth-century French, but that there is also ample evidence for overt and covert transfer (Mougeon and Beniak, 1991) from Brussels Dutch.

Borrowing and shift-induced interference: contrasting patterns in French-Germanic contact in Brussels and Strasbourg

The main aim of the present article is to test hypotheses derived from the model for contact- induced language change as formulated in Thomason and Kaufman (1988 et seq.). As the model correctly predicts the asymmetries between the mutual influences of the Germanic and the Romance varieties in Brussels and Strasbourg it is a very powerful tool for describing the contact patterns in these cities. The analysis shows that the contact patterns are very similar, both from a quantitative and from a qualitative point of view, despite important differences in the sociolinguistic situation of both cities. The striking similarities in the outcome of language contact seem to find a plausible explanation in the fact that the language contact situations in both cities are similar from a typological point of view: in each city a variety of French is in contact with a Germanic variety (Alsatian and Brussels Dutch). Thus, the claim of the present article is that the structure of the languages plays a more prominent role in the outcome of language contact than the sociolinguistic history of the speakers.

The role of transfer in language variation and change: Evidence from contact varieties of French

In this Special Issue, the focus is on contact-induced language variation and change in situations of societal bilingualism that involve long-term contact between French and another language. As is well known, when two or more languages are spoken by groups of speakers in the same geographical area, over time, features from one language can be transferred to the other language, especially when the languages in question are unequal in terms of prestige, institutional support and demographic factors. The process that leads to the adoption of such features in the contact languages is generally known as INTERFERENCE or TRANSFER, and these terms are also used to describe the features in question (i.e. the end product of the process of transfer). In this issue we prefer to use the term TRANSFER over the use of the notion INTERFERENCE, as the former has fewer negative connotations than the latter.

The role of fimbriae and flagella in the colonization, invasion and persistence of Escherichia coli O78 : K80 in the day-old-chick model

To understand the role of flagella and fimbriae of Escherichia coli O78:K80 in avian colibacillosis, day-old chicks were dosed orally with defined afimbriate and or aflagellate mutants and colonization, invasion and persistence compared with that of the wild-type. In an invasion model, chicks were dosed with 1 x 10(5) c.f.u. of a single strain and mutants defective for type 1 fimbriae, curli fimbriae or flagella colonized livers by 24 h although the numbers of bacteria present were significantly less than the wild-type, Mutants colonized between 50 and 75 % of spleens whereas the wild-type colonized 100 % of spleens. Additionally, the numbers of mutant bacteria in colonized spleens were significantly less than the wild-type. Surprisingly, mutants defective for the elaboration of more than one appendage were no more attenuated than single mutants. In a persistence model, chicks were dosed with 1 x 10(2) c.f.u. of a single strain and mutants defective for type 1 or curli or flagella or any combination thereof persisted as assessed by cloacal swabbing for 5 weeks of the experiment less well than the wild-type. In an additional persistence model, chicks were dosed with 5 x 10(2) c.f.u. of each of wild-type and one mutant together. All mutants were significantly less persistent than the wild-type (P < 0.001) and one mutant which lacked type 1, curli and flagella, was eliminated within 2 weeks. Analysis of the trends of elimination indicated that flagella contributed to persistence more than curli, which contributed more than type 1 fimbriae. Here was evidence for a major role in colonization, invasion and persistence played by type 1, curli and flagella.