A Geology of School Reform: The Successive Restructurings of a School District

A Geology of School Reform: The Successive Restructurings of a School District. Liane Brouillette. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. 251 pp.     

New Type of Puzzle-Task Finger Maze Learning in Macaca fascicularis

In order to easily estimate the global cognitive ability of nonhuman primates, we developed a 4-step noncorrection-method-type finger maze (4FM) based on the standard puzzle feeder. We tested 7 experimentally naïve long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis) to assess the validity of the apparatus and the testing procedure. The most notable difference between the 4FM and the standard puzzle feeder is the presence of an error box. There is a hole at both ends of each step. One hole of each step is connected to the lower step or feeding box. The other hole of each step is connected to an error box. The monkey had to move the reward into the feeding box without dropping it into the error box and to retrieve the reward from the feeding box. Task difficulties could be controlled by deciding on which step to place the food reward at the beginning of the trial. All the monkeys could complete the tasks without food/water deprivation and pretraining. The results suggest that the 4FM is a suitable device to assess the cognitive ability of the monkeys simply, easily, and objectively.     

How Structure Shapes Dynamics: Knowledge Development in Wikipedia - A Network Multilevel Modeling Approach

Using a longitudinal network analysis approach, we investigate the structural development of the knowledge base of Wikipedia in order to explain the appearance of new knowledge. The data consists of the articles in two adjacent knowledge domains: psychology and education. We analyze the development of networks of knowledge consisting of interlinked articles at seven snapshots from 2006 to 2012 with an interval of one year between them. Longitudinal data on the topological position of each article in the networks is used to model the appearance of new knowledge over time. Thus, the structural dimension of knowledge is related to its dynamics. Using multilevel modeling as well as eigenvector and betweenness measures, we explain the significance of pivotal articles that are either central within one of the knowledge domains or boundary-crossing between the two domains at a given point in time for the future development of new knowledge in the knowledge base.     

Student Culture and the Contradictions of Equality at a Mexican Secondary School

This article examines the dynamic relationship between official school structures and forms of student subjectivity through an ethnographic account of student culture at a Mexican secondary school. Tightly interwoven discursive and organizational practices promoting solidarity and equality defined the official school structure. Students appropriated these resources to fashion a culture of equality which both accommodated and denied different student sensibilities. The article concludes with an analysis of student culture in terms of practice and cultural production theory.     

Negotiating a Multicultural Canon: Finding the "Indian" in American Indian Law

The Encyclopedia of Native American Legal Tradition. Bruce Elliot Johansen. ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998. 410 pp.
Linking Arms Together: American Indian Treaty Visions of Law and Peace, 1600-1800. Robert A. Williams Jr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 192 pp.     

Measles, Hmong, and Metaphor: Culture Change and Illness Management under Conditions of Immigration

When 19 Hmong families and three healers in St. Paul, Minnesota, were interviewed regarding their understanding of measles and the ways in which they cared for children with the disease, their responses spanned the range between Hmong animistic cosmology and Western theories of disease. The metaphors of growth that were used to describe the disease link language, cosmology, causation, body processes, and illness management practices. This study discusses the themes of cyclical time, disease-causing spirits, the natural/supernatural dichotomy, and agricultural metaphors as applied to disease, as well as the growing adaptation to, use of, and interpretation of Western medicine by these immigrants.     

Negotiating the New Health Care System in Cape Town, South Africa: Five Case Studies of the Acutely Chronically Ill

This article examines the experiences of chronically ill disadvantaged patients in a newly reformed health care system against a backdrop of inequalities still prevalent in the wider postapartheid sociopolitical economy of the Western Cape, South Africa. Patients negotiated a hierarchy of spaces at the national level of transformation and policy and at community-, secondary-, and tertiary-level facilities. The institutionalization of patients meant that expensive medical treatment was mobilized in accordance with different stages of illness and that certain services were available only to "qualifying" categories of diagnoses.     

Negotiating Individualist and Collectivist Futures: Emerging Subjectivities and Social Forms in Papua New Guinean High Schools

This article explains the academic disengagement of a critical mass of high school students in Manus Province, Papua New Guinea, as resulting in part from emerging personal subjectivities and new social networks. Based on a year of ethnographic research in 1994–95, the article describes the authority these young people attributed to their own perceptions of the limited opportunity structures facing them and to the idealized village-based egalitarian student identity being circulated through peer networks. As such, it illuminates the educational implications of youth culture, and demonstrates how local and global processes are mediated through the social fields of high schools.     

小鼠动物实验方法系列专题(一)——Morris水迷宫实验在小鼠表型分析中的应用

本文以C57和129Sv小鼠为例介绍了Morris水迷宫实验的基本原理和实验步骤。该实验是研究鼠类空间学习记忆功能的重要实验:通过连续多日训练鼠类以水池壁的标记物进行定位导航游泳寻找水中隐藏平台的方法检测小鼠的空间学习能力;接着撤除平台,分析小鼠在水迷宫里搜索原隐藏平台的行为来检测小鼠的空间记忆功能。结果发现,两种小鼠均可成功完成实验,C57综合表现优于129Sv小鼠。Morris水迷宫是对小鼠空间学习和记忆功能研究的重要工具。     

How the door opened: the peopling of the New World.

The timing, pathways, and number of migrations involved in the early peopling of the New World are examined from a variety of perspectives. Ultimately, the occupation of the Western Hemisphere was a direct result of boreal cultural adaptations in the Old World. Here, we discuss (1) the dates of appearance of these boreal cultural adaptations and their relevance to the peopling of America, (2) archeological and linguistic evidence bearing on the earliest peopling of the New World, (3) ecological and linguistic evidence on two alternative routes into the New World, and (4) the assumptions present in various migration models. The relative strengths of opposing hypotheses are analyzed by observing whether different approaches point to the same answers.