Editorial

This general issue of Critical Survey ranges from mediaeval to modern literature and drama.

The practical training of student teachers in New Zealand : an historical and critical survey

Central to educational progress or even to the maintenance of an existing school system is a constant supply of adequately trained teachers. At no time has this been more apparent than at present whether we look overseas at Britain or America or at New Zealand where shortages of personnel are also acute.<br>The personal development and calibre of its teachers, the ideals they pursue and the training the recieve constitute the foundation upon which any system must be based. Included factors are:- the supply of entrants, the selection from these of applicants whose personal qualities are capable of modification and growth; the extension of their knowledge both academic and professional as well as the training that is undertaken in the schools.<br>It is to a survey of this last-named field of practical training that the following thesis is devoted. By a study of the background and development of teacher education in New Zealand from its origins in Britain upto the present, and through a critical review of the present system is it possible to drawn conclusions and make suggestions of value in future training in New Zealand?

The practical training of student teachers in New Zealand : an historical and critical survey

Central to educational progress or even to the maintenance of an existing school system is a constant supply of adequately trained teachers. At no time has this been more apparent than at present whether we look overseas at Britain or America or at New Zealand where shortages of personnel are also acute.<br>The personal development and calibre of its teachers, the ideals they pursue and the training the recieve constitute the foundation upon which any system must be based. Included factors are:- the supply of entrants, the selection from these of applicants whose personal qualities are capable of modification and growth; the extension of their knowledge both academic and professional as well as the training that is undertaken in the schools.<br>It is to a survey of this last-named field of practical training that the following thesis is devoted. By a study of the background and development of teacher education in New Zealand from its origins in Britain upto the present, and through a critical review of the present system is it possible to drawn conclusions and make suggestions of value in future training in New Zealand?

Naming and Indexicality

How do words stand for things? Taking ideas from philosophical semantics and pragmatics, this book offers a unique, detailed, and critical survey of central debates concerning linguistic reference in the twentieth century. It then uses the survey to identify and argue for a novel version of current 'two-dimensional' theories of meaning, which generalise the context-dependency of indexical expressions. The survey highlights the history of tensions between semantic and epistemic constraints on plausible theories of word meaning, from analytic philosophy and modern truth-conditional semantics, to the Referentialist and Externalist revolutions in theories of meaning, to the more recent reconciliatory ambition of two-dimensionalists. It clearly introduces technical semantical notions, theses, and arguments, with easy-to-follow, step-by-step guides. Wide-ranging in its scope, yet offering an accessible route into literature that can seem complex and technical, this will be essential reading for advanced students, and academic researchers in semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language.

Deep Reinforcement Learning For Trading—A Critical Survey

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved significant results in many machine learning (ML) benchmarks. In this short survey, we provide an overview of DRL applied to trading on financial markets with the purpose of unravelling common structures used in the trading community using DRL, as well as discovering common issues and limitations of such approaches. We include also a short corpus summarization using Google Scholar. Moreover, we discuss how one can use hierarchy for dividing the problem space, as well as using model-based RL to learn a world model of the trading environment which can be used for prediction. In addition, multiple risk measures are defined and discussed, which not only provide a way of quantifying the performance of various algorithms, but they can also act as (dense) reward-shaping mechanisms for the agent. We discuss in detail the various state representations used for financial markets, which we consider critical for the success and efficiency of such DRL agents. The market in focus for this survey is the cryptocurrency market; the results of this survey are two-fold: firstly, to find the most promising directions for further research and secondly, to show how a lack of consistency in the community can significantly impede research and the development of DRL agents for trading.

Tamil Nadu Politics and Tamil Cinema: A Symbiotic Relationship?

From the second-half of the twentieth century, a nascent Tamil cinema became increasingly influential in Tamil society and more prominent in political life. The Dravidar Kazhagam, founded by Periyar E. V. Ramasamy in 1944, morphed into the DMK and AIADMK, two dominant state political parties in Tamil Nadu. Through the medium of film, some of its leading lights, C. N. Annadurai, M. Karunanidhi, M. G. Ramachandran and Jayalalitha, cultivated cinema audiences and the voting public in the political ideologies of the Dravidian movement and subsequently became Chief Ministers of Tamil Nadu. The symbiotic relationship between politics and Tamil cinema has meant that political and social commentaries and the assertion of Tamil nationalistic ideas was commonplace in Tamil films. In recent years, Tamil cinema has become the vehicle for raising a wide range of concerns ranging from caste, class and gender and state/nation politics, marking a shift that focusses on everyday politics in the state. In this article, we present a critical survey of the role of Tamil cinema in disseminating particular realities and politics of identity that speak to an essentialised notion of Tamil cultural and linguistic identity, the concomitant disavowal of broader conceptions of Indian-ness or belonging to the Indian nation, as well as the use of cinema to address everyday politics in the State.