Co-Creative Collegial Communities of Instructional Engagement

With the rise of the digital age, the concept of anywhere and anytime learning has become a stunning reality, therefore embedding learning within one's daily life more securely than previous decades. Impactful is one's daily community through which each person engages, formally and informally engaging. As distance learning environments stealthily become a normal expectation, the embedding of learning experiences into communities of engagement arises. Focusing upon curricular design that emphasizes the engagement of different colleagues within the community, towards framing information in new and different ways, is of grounding impact upon the success of online learning success. A presentation of earning understandings, framed through digital pedagogy, andragogy, and heutagogy, are advanced supports through the social collegial community in which one currently lives. Further, embedding the concept of collegial communities within distance learning supports rethinking curricular design, thru values, professional standards, competences, capabilities, and behavioral dispositions.

Drawing up the missing link: State-society relations and the remaking of urban landscapes in Chinese cities

Studies of China’s urban transformation are characterized by diverse interpretations of the relevance of the theory of neoliberalism and continuing tension of epistemology vis-à-vis ontology. This research foregrounds state-society interplay as an alternative lens and analytical tool to understand China’s urban transformation in the context of neoliberalization and global urbanism. The remaking of the Chinese urban landscape is found to be shaped not simply by forces of agglomeration economies or bid-rent dynamism but more by the contestation and negotiation between a fragmented authoritarian state and a rapidly changing society. Existing land users are motivated by a decentralized power of decision-making and a share of the land conveyance income previously monopolized by the state. Contrary to normal expectation, urban redevelopment plays a role of greater significance in the local land supply of those cities in some less advanced regions than in the demographically dense and economically advanced regions. Administratively, urban redevelopment tends to prevail in those modes of land disposition that are either monopolized by the state or subject to close-door negotiation. Redevelopment is less contentious in a “village-in-the-city” where decisions are made by the collective organization internally than the other involving developers externally. Land use intensity and efficiency have been improved along with intensified social exclusion and marginalization. Drawing up the missing link concerning state-society relations may provide new insights to solve the myth of an urban China so ambivalent when seen in the lens of neoliberalism and help reconcile methodological tension in the studies of comparative urbanism involving China.

IS THERE SON PREFERENCE IN INDIA? - AN ANALYSIS BASED ON SEX RATIO AT BIRTH AND ORDER OF BIRTH

Based on NFHS data, the paper observes that females are significantly under-represented among the births in India. NFHS reports provide strong evidence of decline in sex ratios of the population aged 0-6 and in the Sex Ratio at Birth for births in the five years preceding the survey. Against the normal expectation that the sex of the first child is less likely to be controlled, NFHS provides strong evidence that, the Sex Ratio at Birth for first-born children has been below normal in all its surveys and has been declining steadily, except for NFHS-4, where it registered a marginal improvement. Also, the Sex Ratio at Birth for births at order two is substantially lower than at order one and at any other birth order, revealing strong son preference. The Sex Ratio at Birth for births at order three is also lower than the Sex Ratio at Birth for all births except births of order two, suggesting that substantial proportions of couples with two or three children stop having more children only if their last birth is a boy. Modern science and technology have been widely misused to determine the sex of unborn children and this has ended up in terminating unwanted and burdensome pregnancies. Myopia of individuals and authorities culminated in 'gendercide'. Prosperity effect, breadwinner desire, old age security and religious rights and powers, and a host of other factors ended up in the masculinization of India's population

SERPENTINE CONSTRUCTIONS: LUCRETIUS, DE RERVM NATVRA 3.657–63

The mutilation of the snake provides compelling evidence that the soul and the body form an interconnected structural complex. The verbal complex, however, in which this serpens is articulated, has long been a problematic one. At the heart of the problem is the meaning of serpentis utrumque, a phrase which has been treated with considerable indulgence and is printed in the majority of twentieth-century editions, though it does not yield a satisfactory sense. It is usually interpreted to mean ‘both parts of a snake’, as if utrumque serpentis were equivalent in meaning to utramque partem serpentis. The word ‘parts,’ however, is an evasion of the semantic value of utrumque because it eliminates the ambiguity, in this context, of the pronoun ‘each of two,’ the reference of which should be made clear by the context, and supplies instead the very thing that is in question here, a clearly defined object, ‘both parts,’ for discidere. This may seem a small point but ‘both parts’ greatly obscures the nature of the problem. If we take a more literal approach to utrumque, we will get a better sense of the frustrated linguistic expectation caused by the pronoun: ‘of a snake with a darting tongue, quivering tail, long body, to cut up each of the two’. The question immediately arises: to what does ‘each of the two’ refer? According to the normal usage of uterque the answer should be apparent. In 3.658 it is not. It has long been assumed that utrumque refers to cauda and corpore but such a reference is not at all clear from the syntax. In the description of the snake we do not find, and this is the essential point, two clearly defined components of the snake to which utrumque (‘each of the two’) can refer in accordance with its meaning and the syntax of the sentence. Instead, we find three components, expressed in three parallel ablative phrases, uibrante lingua, micanti cauda and procero corpore, all of equal importance in delineating the snake. And since the whole construction is dependent on one verb, discidere, the normal expectation would be that, whatever words are the antecedent of utrumque, those words would be in the accusative as well; the shift from cauda and corpore in the ablative to utrumque in the accusative, in what is essentially an appositional relationship, is syntactically jarring.

Raman spectroscopy of volcanic lavas and inclusions of relevance to astrobiological exploration

Volcanic eruptions and lava flows comprise one of the most highly stressed terrestrial environments for the survival of biological organisms; the destruction of botanical and biological colonies by molten lava, pyroclastic flows, lahars, poisonous gas emissions and the deposition of highly toxic materials from fumaroles is the normal expectation from such events. However, the role of lichens and cyanobacteria in the earlier colonization of volcanic lava outcrops has now been recognized. In this paper, we build upon earlier Raman spectroscopic studies on extremophilic colonies in old lava flows to assess the potential of finding evidence of biological colonization in more recent lava deposits that would inform, first, the new colonization of these rocks and also provide evidence for the relict presence of biological colonies that existed before the volcanism occurred and were engulfed by the lava. In this research, samples were collected from a recent expedition to the active volcano at Kilauea, Hawaii, which comprises very recent lava flows, active fumaroles and volcanic rocks that had broken through to the ocean and had engulfed a coral reef. The Raman spectra indicated that biological and geobiological signatures could be identified in the presence of geological matrices, which is encouraging for the planned exploration of Mars, where it is believed that there is evidence of an active volcanism that perhaps could have preserved traces of biological activity that once existed on the planet’s surface, especially in sites near the old Martian oceans.

Regularity of sound change through lexical diffusion: A study of s > h > in Gondi dialects

ABSTRACTGondi is a Dravidian language spoken by 2.2 million speakers (Census of India 1981) in the mountains and forests of four adjacent states in central India. Gondi is a chain of several dialects, some of which, at distant points, are perhaps not mutually intelligible. A major dialect division is provided by a two-step sound change: s- > h- in the west, north, and northwest and h- > - in the south and southeast. The present article studies this two-step sound change, which is still in progress, and establishes two facts. First, contrary to the normal expectation that this sound change would be phonetically gradual and lexically abrupt (Neogram-marian type), there is evidence that it has been lexically gradual and perhaps also phonetically gradual (lexical diffusion). Second, phonetic gradualness and regularity in implementation of sound change are properties not incompatible with the mechanism of lexical diffusion. Labov's observation that s > h > has not been reported as a lexically diffused change in many quantitative studies of Portuguese and Spanish (1981) finds a clear exception in Gondi. Under the lexical diffusion model, the regularity of a sound change is defined as the final outcome in a three-stage change of the relevant lexicon: unchanged (u), variant (u ˜ c), and changed (c). If the entire eligible lexicon passed from u to c through u ˜ c, the change would become regular. If all u ˜ c became c and for some reason no item under u became u ˜ c, the sound change would die prematurely, since the variant stage which provided the rule for the innovation would be absent. Since a regular sound change can result from either the Neogrammarian model or the lexical diffusion model, Labov's (1994:542–543) theoretical proposal of complementarity between the kinds of changes resulting from the two mechanisms calls for more studies of sound change in progress to decide the issue.

A method for the identification of trees with unusually colored foliage

A method is presented for recognizing trees with unusually colored foliage, based on the use of Munsell plant color charts. Color assessments are made by scoring the crown of each tree for hue, value, and chroma. These values are plotted in three-dimensional space for each species, and a threshold is identified marking the border of an ellipsoid. Trees with foliage outside this ellipsoid are considered as unusual. The method means that assessments of discoloration can cover a range of colors and moves the decision over the color status of a tree from a subjective field decision to a statistically defined decision at the analytical stage. It takes into account that a tree may still be classified as green (previously classed as without discoloration) when its color of green lies outside the normal expectation for the species. The method represents a significant improvement on the discoloration assessments currently being used in large-scale inventories of crown condition in Europe.