Content and Connectivity in the Age of Digital Libraries

"Behind the world of virtual university is more than a method or system of work, you need to own, develop and master a connectivity structure of both technological and content development in multimedia digital text and then implement teaching methods line. "

An Exorbitant Privilege in the First Age of International Financial Integration

The exorbitant privilege literature analyzes the positive differential returns on net foreign assets enjoyed by the United States in the last quarter of the twentieth century as the issuer of the global reserve currency. In the first age of international financial integration (1870-1914), the global reserve currency of the period was the British pound sterling. Whether the United Kingdom enjoyed a similar privilege is analyzed with a new dataset, encompassing microdata on railroad and government financial securities. The use of microdata avoids the flaws that have plagued the US studies, particularly the use of incompatible aggregate variables. New measures of Britain’s net external position provide estimates on capital gains and dividend yields. As the issuer of the global reserve currency, Britain received average revenues of 13.4% of GDP from its international investment position. The country satisfied the necessary condition for the existence of an exorbitant privilege. Nonetheless, Britain’s case is slightly different from the American one. British external assets received higher returns than were paid on external liabilities for each class, but British invested mostly in securities with low profile of risk. The low return on its net external position meant that, for most of the time, Britain would not receive positive revenues from the rest of the world if it were a net debtor country, but this pattern changed after 1900. The finding supports the claim that, at least partially, exorbitant privilege is a general characteristic of the issuer of the global reserve currency and not unique to the late twentieth century US.

Luis Bello: vida y época. Su producción periodística y literaria

Taking into account the cultural and literary wealth of the first third of the twentieth century in Spain, this doctoral dissertation aims to increase our knowledge of literary journalism during that period through a monographic study of one of its greatest champions, the journalist and writer Luis Bello Trompeta (1872-1935). Although Bello enjoyed noteworthy success and popularity in life, he has since fallen into an almost complete yet unjustifiable oblivion. Bello’s lifetime coincided with a brilliant period of Spanish culture, one that is almost unanimously considered not simply a Silver Age but a veritable golden age of journalism in Spain. Nevertheless, the period is often unjustly reduced to a short list of names and works of extremely well known and well studied writers. There is a tendency to forget that such writers emerged within a vast, influential context comprising numerous cultural products, writers, and works that need to be recovered. More specifically, the general inclination to privilege the book as a period’s sole bearer of literary or testimonial significance often deprives us of richly complementary journalistic sources such as the chronicle or the newspaper report. Indeed, together with the book, such articles can help us achieve a broader understanding of both literary history and the personality of individual writers or the course of historical events. The fact that authors like Luis Bello are practically unknown today is likely related to the time-sensitive, intrinsically ephemeral nature of journalism, the print medium in which Bello published most of his work. Yet in spite of its passing nature, the press witnessed remarkable developments in Spain at the time, undergoing a transformative process of consolidation...

Copto-Arabic Universal Chronography. Between Antiquity, Judaism, Christianity and Islam The K. al-Tawārīkh of N. al-Khilāfa Abū Shākir Ibn al-Rāhib (655 Heg. / 973 Mart. / 1257 Chr. / 1569 Alex. / 6750 AM)

La obra histórica del erudito y enciclopedista de la edad de oro de la literatura árabe copta, de la cual el Dr. Samuel Moawad (Munster) está preparando una edición, representa en realidad una colección de tres tratados divididos artificialmente en 51 capítulos secuenciales. El núcleo cronológico es precedido por un largo tratado con 47 capítulos sobre cálculos astronómicos y eclesiásticos así como épocas históricas y calendarios de diferentes naciones. La parte histórica propia (ch. 48-50), de los cuales el llamado Chronicon orientale representa una deficiente revisión anónima, trata sucesivamente de historia universal, dinastías islámicas y patriarcas coptos. Un sumario histórico, así como dogmático, de los primeros siete/ocho concilios de la Iglesia cristiana (cap. 51) termina la compilación entera. El conocido historiador al-Makin Ibn al-.Amid hace un gran uso de la labor de su contemporáneo y, al parecer a través de él, los grandes historiadores musulmanes: Ibn Khaldun, Maqrizi o Qalqashandi hacen mención continua de Ibn al-Rahib. Más tarde en el siglo XVI, el K. al-Tawarikh fue traducido en etiópico y tuvo un gran impacto en la literatura histórica y computacional de los etíopes.

Marxists in the age of Palmer: a genealogy of ‘anti-politics’

The decline of trust in Australian political institutions and the rise of anti-political sentiment, most dramatically represented by the phenomenon of Clive Palmer, has been largely perplexing to the Australian left whether in its labourist, green or revolutionary varieties. In recent years support for Labor and the Greens has fallen, union membership has continued to stagnate and the revolutionary left has failed to break out of its campus enclaves despite a global crisis of capitalism. This article provides a critical examination of a minority trend within the Australian left that seen the rise of ‘anti-politics’ as a positive development. Leading figures in this have been Tad Tietze, Elizabeth Humphrys, Marc Newmann and anonymous blogger The Piping Shriek. Their work has been critical of attempts to revive traditional institutions of the left and has argued that the organised left has become committed to a project of state management of individual behaviour. This line of argument represents a distinctive critique of politics that echoes themes espoused by John Anderson and Sydney libertarianism. This article applies Michel Foucault’s genealogical approach to explain the revival of libertarian themes on the left and their particular resonance within Sydney political culture.

Does maternal concern about children's weight affect children's body size perception at the age of 6.5? A community-based study

OBJECTIVE: Though overweight is often established by school entry, not all mothers of such children report weight concerns. Enhancing concern might assist lifestyle change, but could lead to child body dissatisfaction. We investigated (i) perceived/desired body size and body dissatisfaction in mothers and their 6.5-year-old children, and (ii) the impact of earlier maternal concern about overweight on children's body mass index (BMI) status and body dissatisfaction. DESIGN: Prospective community study. SETTING: Melbourne, Australia. SUBJECTS: 317 mother-child dyads. MAIN EXPOSURES: Child and maternal BMI (kg m(-2)) at 4.0 and 6.5 years; maternal concern about child overweight at 4.0 years. OUTCOME MEASURES: Paired perceived and desired body size on 7-point figural rating scales self-reported by mothers and children, and reported by mothers regarding children; dissatisfaction ('desired' minus 'perceived') score. RESULTS: For all three actual BMI perceived size pairings (mother self-report, mother's report on child and child self-report), BMI correlated with perceived body size (r=0.82 (mother self-report); r=0.65 (mother reporting on child); r=0.22 (child self-report); all P<0.001). Similarly, all three dissatisfaction scores were greater with increasing BMI status. Children's own dissatisfaction scores correlated with their actual BMI, but were not related to mothers' own body dissatisfaction scores or with mothers' dissatisfaction with children's body size. Maternal concern about overweight at the age of 4 years was not associated with BMI change, or child body dissatisfaction by the age of 6.5. Most mothers of overweight and obese children (88 and 90%, respectively) regarded their child as the middle figure (that is, 4) or thinner. CONCLUSIONS: Despite low rates of recognition of child overweight, maternal perceptions of the child's body correlated strongly with the child's actual BMI. Maternal concerns about child BMI did not appear to impact on child BMI change or child body dissatisfaction.

Experiential learning styles in the age of a virtual surrogate

There is a long-held sense in general that the increasing use of computers and digital technology changes how a user experiences and learns about the world, not always for the better. This paper reports on a longitudinal study of 245 architecture and construction students over a two year period which examines the impact that virtual reality technologies have on the learning style preferences of students. A series of controlled experiments tests for the impact that increasing exposure to a proprietary virtual reality system has on the mode of learning and learning style preferences of individuals and particular cohorts. The results confirm that when virtual reality applications are used in teaching and learning, the learning behaviours will favour a more concrete experiential mode of learning and a preference for the Accommodator learning style. However, the results also demonstrate, consistently and for the first time, individual students do not privilege any particular mode of learning or learning style preference to any significant extent but rather engage in all modes and represent all learning styles. Novel visualisation techniques are introduced to examine and discuss this contrast.

Literacy education in the age of new media

This chapter focus on the question of literacy education itself-on how this is to be understood in the current and emerging age, how it is changing, and what it is for. It also engages the other key question here, that of what constitutes 'new media,' or rather, as Levinson puts it, 'new new media'-media forms emerging on the scene more or less constantly, and each time ever newer. Increasingly, literacy guidelines in many parts of the world call on teachers to incorporate attention to multimodal and electronic texts into their classrooms and curriculum. Curriculum guidelines addressing the 'new literacies' are structured around an expanded view of literacy that recognizes the changing and dynamic nature of text and textual forms, and call on research into the textual, communicative and cultural practices of young people as they engage with online popular culture and the digital world.

Wage Matters & Globalization: South Florida’s Low-Wage Immigrant Plant Nursery Workers and Business Protectionism in the Age of Neoliberalism

Ornamental plant production in the State of Florida is an anomaly with respect to current theories of globalization and particularly their explanation of the employment of low-wage, immigrant labor. Those theories dictate that unskilled jobs that do not need to be performed within highly developed countries are outsourced to where labor is cheaper and more flexible. However, the State of Florida remains an important site of ornamental plant production in the US amidst a global economic environment of outsourcing and transnational corporate expansion. This dissertation relies on 50 semi-structured interviews with insiders of the Florida plant nursery industry, focus groups, and participant observation to explain how US trade, labor, and migration policy-making at local levels are not removed from larger global processes taking place in the world since the 1970s. In Florida, elite market players of the plant nursery industry have been able to resist global trends in free trade, operating instead in a protected market. They have done this by appealing to scientific justifications and through arbitrary implementations of neoliberal ideology that keeps small and middle range business alive, while maintaining a seemingly endless supply of marginalized and exploited low-wage, immigrant workers.

Empire's Children: Soviet Childhood in the Age of Revolution

Ideas of childhood and citizenship stood at the center of the Soviet Union’s empire-building project during the 1920s and 1930s. After the 1917 Revolution the Bolsheviks were faced with the challenge of establishing a new state structure and governing a vast territory inherited from its tsarist predecessor. In the early years of the Soviet project, new leaders enlisted a cadre of professionals tasked with not only creating the norms of childhood and the everyday, but also implementing policies to modernize habits and values of the empire’s younger citizens. To understand how children became a prime focus of Soviet imperial and ethno-cultural politics, my dissertation employs discourse analysis and compares the ways in which Soviet imperial policies were implemented in two ethnically different regions: the Buddhist Republic of Kalmykia as the colonial case study and Moscow as the Metropole. The current project examines newspapers, treatises, and inspectors’ reports over the span of twenty years. It finds that the Bolsheviks’ initial values and discourses in the realm of children’s education, health, leisure and nutrition, all which were scientifically designed to transform children into ideal Soviet and modern citizens, changed over time as a result of the competing ideologies among local elites and the challenges they faced while intervening in children’s everyday lives. The most significant conclusion in this dissertation reveals that, contrary to previous scholarly arguments, the modernization projects that took place in Moscow and Kalmykia were more similar in the challenges and outcomes that local officials faced when implementing state policies.

Age of onset of obesity and risk of type 2 diabetes

OBJECTIVE: To compare a simple measure - age of onset of obesity - to an obese-years construct (a product of duration and magnitude of obesity) as risk factors for type 2 diabetes.

METHOD: Participants from the Framingham Heart Study who were not obese and did not have diabetes at baseline were included (n=4,320). The Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) was computed to compare four Cox proportional hazards models with incident diabetes as the outcome and: (i) obese-years; (ii) age of onset of obesity; (iii) body mass index (BMI); and (iv) age of onset of obesity plus magnitude of BMI combined, as exposures.

RESULTS: AIC indicated that the model with obese-years provided a more effective explanation of incidence of type 2 diabetes compared to the remaining three models. Models including age of onset of obesity plus BMI were not appreciably different from the model with BMI alone, except in those aged ≥60.

CONCLUSIONS: While obese-years was the optimal obesity construct to explain risk of type 2 diabetes, age of onset may be a useful, practical addition to current BMI in the elderly.

IMPLICATIONS: Where computation of obese-years is not possible or impractical, age of onset of obesity combined with BMI may provide a useful alternative.

Cultural reductionism and the media: polarising discourses around schools, violence and masculinity in an age of terror

This paper provides a media analysis of three interrelated sets of newspaper articles dealing with youth, schooling and violence. Understanding the media as a dominant and powerful cultural text that creates the realities it describes, the paper takes a critical view of the ‘standpoint’ of recent media representations of the Cronulla (Sydney, Australia) riots, gang violence in schools, and issues of education amid broader concerns with security in an ‘age of terror’. The paper draws attention to the polarising media discourses that demonise young Muslim men as the ‘other’—violent and dangerous—and advocate for ‘ethnic’ integration of this ‘other’ over ‘progressive education’ or ‘multiculturalism’. Such reductionist sociology is presented as highly problematic in its homogenising and inferiorising of minority cultures and in its silencing of particular issues imperative in understanding and addressing contemporary expressions of violence. The paper calls for a more nuanced interpretation of issues of culture and violence that, in particular, acknowledges how masculinity politics are implicated in current manifestations of violence.

Sixty-Third Annual Report of the Public Service Commission of South Carolina 1940-41

Each year the South Carolina Public Service Commission reports to the Office of State Budget that includes the agency's mission, goals and objectives to accomplish the mission, and performance measures regarding the goals and objectives.