Zoroastrian exhibition

The Everlasting Flame: Zoroastrianism in History and Imagination is the first exhibition of its kind to provide a visual history of Zoroastrianism, one of the world's oldest religions, which was for centuries the principal faith in Iran. Artefacts, texts and paintings from major institutions around the world give important historical, social, economic and religious information.     

To Patent or Not: Faculty Decisions and Institutional Success at Technology Transfer

We draw on qualitative data derived from field work on two university campuses to develop an explanation for widely disparate rates of new invention disclosure. We argue that faculty decisions to disclose are shaped by their perceptions of the benefits of patent protection. These incentives to disclose are magnified or minimized by the perceived costs of interacting with technology transfer offices and licensing professionals. Finally, faculty considerations of the costs and benefits of disclosure are colored by institutional environments that are supportive or oppositional to the simultaneous pursuit of academic and commercial endeavors.     

The gap between the natural and social sciences sometimes leaves the public poorly informed

Abstract

In his book On Human Nature, sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson expresses many of the frustrations of natural scientists, complaining that the intellectual community has failed to recognize the importance of their contributions. He attributes this partly to the natural scientists' lack of literary ability and laments that even those who “step outside scientific materialism to participate in the [dominant] culture” have almost never been able “to close the gap between the two worlds of discourse.” But he directs his main criticism at those who work in the social sciences. He argues that they control the cultural establishment and that their reflections “are devoid of the idioms of chemistry and biology, as though humankind were still in some sense a numinous spectator of physical reality.”     

Coke in Context: Early Modern Legal Observation and Sir Edward Coke's Reports

Our understanding of Sir Edward Coke's Reports turn upon an appreciation of his methodology as a reporter; the strengths and limitations of the Reports as a source of legal and political commentary have implications for our reading of the early Stuart constitution. This article locates Coke's Reports within the broader habits of record-keeping and observation employed by common lawyers in the early seventeenth century. It argues that a conflation of personal observation and professional opinion, promoted through the educational techniques of English law, provided Coke with a unique opportunity to place his own views at the heart of the profession.     

Examination of the consistency of interviewer performance across three distinct interview contexts

Abstract

The current study examined the consistency of investigative interviewers' performance (n=31) across three distinct interview paradigms: (a) a mock interview where an adult actor played the role of a child recalling abuse, (b) a mock interview where a school child recalled an innocuous event that was staged at the child's school, and (c) a field interview where the interviewer elicited a statement of abuse from a child. Performance was measured by calculating the proportion of open-ended and leading questions, and by eliciting expert ratings of the presence of a range of problem behaviours commonly exhibited by interviewers. Overall, the performance of individual interviewers was relatively stable across the tasks. Heterogeneity in stability, however, differed according to the type of question and the nature of the event being examined. In particular, the mock interview paradigm where the adult acted the role of an alleged child abuse victim produced a measure of performance that was more similar to the field interview than the interview where a school child recalled an innocuous event. The implications of the findings for trainers, and directions for future research, are discussed.     

Does free recall moderate the effect of mental context reinstatement instructions on children's cued recall?

Cognitive Interview instructions increase children's recall of events; one important instruction is the mental reinstatement of context. We examined one factor that may affect mental context reinstatement: whether children had the opportunity to freely recall the event before answering cued recall questions. One hundred and fifty-two children aged 6, 9, or 11 years were interviewed twice about a staged event. The event consisted of an argument between two adults about whose turn it was to show the children a film. One week after the event, some of the children received mental context reinstatement instructions before having their cued recall tested. Some children also received a free recall test immediately before the cued recall test. In the second interview, 2 weeks after the first interview, all children freely recalled the event. The results showed no effects of mental context reinstatement instructions and no moderating effect of free recall on children's cued recall. The implications of these findings and directions for future research are discussed.     

Spaces of Informalisation: Playscapes,Power and the Governance of Behaviour

Geographers have contributed a great deal towards an understanding of social control across different spaces and the ways in which power is exercised in the interests of élite groups to the detriment of marginalised ‘others’. Little attention however, has been given to decontrolled spaces: spaces where the standard of conduct expected of previous generations is no longer as rigid and formalised as it once was. This paper draws on the work of Norbert Elias and Cas Wouters in exploring how previously prohibited behaviours become admissible within particular social situations, groups and settings: a process known as informalisation. The informalisation thesis posits that a long-term perspective can elucidate the ways in which gradual changes in expected standards of behaviour are linked to corresponding changes in social habitus and the power differentials that characterise the social relations between élite and outsider groups. The paper contends that a revision of the sociological concept of informalisation, emphasising spatial context and difference, can contribute a great deal to debates in human geography. It is argued that the spatialisation of Elias' work could provide a useful theoretical framework with which to enhance the geographer's understanding of the relationship between group identities, power, social change and governance. Conversely, a focus on the spaces of informalisation may also advance the theory from a sociological perspective. The theory is applied to specific playscapes and highlights the uneven, problematic nature of contemporary governance projects and the related problem of social misdiagnoses in the quest towards the ‘non-antagonistic’ city.