Alternative Styles Research Articles

Islamic Equity Investing: Alternative Performance Measures and Style Analysis

Islamic Equity Investing: Alternative Performance Measures and Style Analysis

Parenting Picky Eaters: Strategies to Get Preschool Children to Eat Previously Rejected Foods (PRF)

Food neophobia affects a child's willingness to try new foods and can result in children consuming less diverse diets. Researchers conducted 17 focus groups (total participants = 103) to identify the strategies that parents use to get their preschool children to eat previously rejected foods (PRF). These focus groups targeted low‐income African American and Hispanic parents with young children (ages 3–5 years) in Texas, Colorado, and Washington. Using principles of grounded theory to analyze transcripts, researchers determined that parents most often intentionally decided not to purchase or serve PRF to their children. However, when parents did elect to serve PRF to their children, they employed strategies including serving the PRF in an alternative style (e.g. steaming instead of serving raw), adding an ingredient to the PRF (e.g. ranch dressing, cheese, sugar, or ketchup), involving children in the food preparation process, “tricking” the child to eat the PRF (e.g. telling the child that fish is chicken), and requiring the child to eat PRF. Results from this study will be used to create an intervention to help parents get their preschool children to eat PRF. Future investigations should focus on uncovering factors that motivate parents to repeatedly offer their children PRF, a key step in overcoming food neophobia.Grant Funding Source: USDA Grant No. 2011–68001‐30009; USDA/ARS Cooperative Agreement No. 58–6250‐0–008

Archaeologies and geographies of the post-industrial past: landscape, memory and the spectral

Located at the interface between contemporary archaeology, cultural and historical geography, this essay explores the ‘more-than-representational’ nature of memory as embodied and haunted by the spectral. Focusing on the post-industrial landscape of the Royal Forest of Dean, I narrate a walk undertaken in November 2008 with local resident, Ron Beard, as we sought to re-trace an old miners’ path. Histories of the landscape unfolded as we walked. Yet they also revealed a haunting sense of loss, a fragmented remembering and forgetting that was unsettled by ghosts from the past. For memory is born of strange and uncanny associations, inexplicable connections between times and places that erupt into the present without warning. As such, memory demands new ways of writing; narratives that better cope with our fragile and contingent recollections, disclosing the haunting presence-absence of the spectral in all its shapes, apparitions and phantasms. I begin by pursuing the idea that memory is more-than-representational. I go on to explore the recurrent manifestation of the spectral, which disturbs, displaces and conditions our understanding of space and time, absence and presence. Developing the argument that alternative styles of writing are needed to reveal the true nature of memory and our haunting engagements with the past − while at the same time accepting Wylie’s assertion that spectral geographies should themselves be spectral − I consider the work of Walter Benjamin and W.G. Sebald, which, through devices such as literary montage, biography and phantasmagoria, successfully unsettles, disrupts and enlivens. Taking stylistic inspiration from these great writers, the ‘Long Path’ is narrated in a non-conventional academic style that seeks itself to displace settled orders of space and time, to reveal the revenant trace of the spectre.

Embracing Technology

This study embraces technology and compares two teaching strategies for the undergraduate-level nursing student: a taped digital media classroom lecture with YouTube video clips and a simulated unfolding case study experience in the nursing skills laboratory. The objective was to determine which method best promotes critical problem solving around clinical care issues related to Parkinson disease. Each stage of the case simulation shows a progression of disability with increased complexity of patient symptoms, which requires higher levels of nursing assessment. Eighty-four undergraduate students in a baccalaureate nursing program participated in this research study. Significant differences were identified in knowledge and in their ability to analyze complex information. Student outcomes were reported through the comparison of scores on a preexamination and postexamination using alternative style questions.

Entrepreneurial action and the Euro-American social science tradition: pragmatism, realism and looking beyond ‘the entrepreneur’

Entrepreneurship studies are dominated by the disciplines of economics and psychology and work within a limiting methodological frame of reference; a ‘scientistic’ and individualistic framework that dominates the US-led mainstream of research. To achieve a more balanced scholarship, it is helpful to look at an alternative style of research and analysis which has deep and intertwined European and American roots. This looks to other social sciences such as sociology, as well as to history and the philosophy of science. Its adoption would encourage to shift the focus away from ‘entrepreneurs’ and onto the much broader phenomenon of entrepreneurial action or ‘entrepreneuring’ in its societal and institutional contexts. Such a shift would open up a greatly expanded range of research questions and enable a better balance to be achieved between attention to individual entrepreneurial actors and their organizational, societal and institutional contexts. A pragmatist and realist frame of reference, which recognizes both the importance of processes of social construction and the existence of a ‘real world’, has considerable potential to enrich and expand the scope of entrepreneurship scholarship.

Reinventing Spatial Planning at the Urban Rural Interface: A Christchurch, New Zealand Case Study

Peri-urban areas are characterized by rapidly changing relationships between rural and urban land uses and activities and present both conceptual and practical policy challenges. Traditional urban containment strategies are being supplemented by a range of alternative spatial strategies and styles of governance. New Zealand has experimented with a performative approach to planning, replacing conventional land use zoning with an effects-based resource management paradigm. Consequences for peri-urban landscapes are investigated and implications for other developed countries seeking to reform their planning systems are discussed.

Middle and High School String Students’ Preferences for Alternative String Styles

The purpose of this study was to investigate middle school and high school string students’ (N = 241) preferences for various alternative string styles. String styles selected for the study were those represented in published, age-appropriate method books available for heterogeneous string study and included American Folk, Bluegrass, Celtic, Jazz, and Mariachi genres. Participants listened to 10 musical examples, two from each style, and gave a preference rating for each example using a seven-point response continuum. Results indicated that the Celtic genre was the most preferred, followed by Jazz, American Folk, Mariachi, and Bluegrass genres. Celtic and Jazz examples received significantly higher ratings than American Folk, Mariachi, and Bluegrass examples. Results also indicated significant differences between the preference ratings of participants who indicated they were familiar with at least one of the examples from each style and preference ratings of participants who were unfamiliar with either of the examples. No significant differences were found in preference ratings based on participants’ grade level, primary instrument, or gender.

Pragmatists, Deliberativists, and Democracy: The Quest for Inclusion

Pragmatists, Deliberativists, and Democracy: The Quest for Inclusion

Natural drinking strategies

AbstractWe examine the fluid mechanics of drinking in nature. We classify the drinking strategies of a broad range of creatures according to the principal forces involved, and present physical pictures for each style. Simple scaling arguments are developed and tested against existing data. While suction is the most common drinking strategy, various alternative styles have evolved among creatures whose morphological, physiological and environmental constraints preclude it. Particular attention is given to creatures small relative to the capillary length, whose drinking styles rely on relatively subtle interfacial effects. We also discuss attempts to rationalize various drinking strategies through consideration of constrained optimization problems. Some biomimetic applications are discussed.

Introduction

It has long been recognised that creativity is a vital part of literature's contribution to the interdisciplinary concerns of this journal. But while creativity is readily apparent in a host of writers from Auden to Zamyatin, it can be harder to recognise the imaginative contribution of the literary critic. Although departments of literary studies are forever redefining their raison d'être and celebrating the intellectual diversity of faculty members, critical essays rarely merit description as creative acts and are even more rarely defined by their imaginative intensity. One exception to this rule is the work of John Schad, and Literature and Theology are delighted that he accepted an invitation to give the 2011 Annual Lecture, republished as the first article of this issue. From the very start, Schad's work on literature and theology has been marked by playfulness and an attention to the creative possibilities of the literary form. All critics aspire to keeping the texts they analyse open to new readings, but ensuring that this aspiration does not lead to asphyxiation or imaginative expiration can be a challenge. In this respect, as in so many others, Schad's work has been a source of renewal, and his commitment to exploring new interpretative possibilities is evident in both the form and content of his writing. Early books, such as The Reader in the Dickensian Mirrors (1992), are methodologically innovative in their refusal to operate solely within an established theoretical paradigm. Schad's formal innovations took another step forward in 2004, however, with the publication of Queer Fish: Christian Unreason from Darwin to Derrida. As well as bringing to life a marginal and subversive Christian tradition, the book utilised extended sequences of associative thought to offer an alternative style of critical writing. As I commented when reviewing the work for Christianity and Literature, the book was ‘one of the most exciting and imaginative contributions to the field of religion and literature for some time’. But Schad's work took a stranger and still more exciting turn in 2007 with the publication of Someone Called Derrida: An Oxford Mystery. This is one of the best ‘critical’ works that I have read. I use the word ‘critical’ with caution, for it is a book that defies generic categorisation. It is, at one and the same time, an astute close reading of Derrida's ‘Envois', a moving memoir of John Schad's father, an investigation into Oxford wartime secrets, a mystery story, an intellectual history and a piece of creative writing. Schad's work has continued to push the boundaries of criticism since then: his series Critical Inventions, published by Sussex Academic Press, is outstanding, and his wonderful forthcoming book The Late Walter Benjamin (Continuum, 2012) is worth reading at the earliest opportunity.

Alternative style of documentary: the application of Genre Convention - Film Noir style employed in The Thin Blue Line

Alternative style of documentary: the application of Genre Convention - Film Noir style employed in The Thin Blue Line

Teaching Characteristics Of Successful College Professors

During the past several years, the authors have devoted a great deal of time and energy in the pursuit of becoming effective college professors. After observing a number of excellent professors (and a number of less-than-excellent ones), the authors would like to share some of their observations and ideas.Although this article focuses specifically on effective classroom performance in a traditional lecture-based setting, many of the principles discussed can be applied to alternative styles of teaching such as seminar settings, individualized instruction, etc.

텔레비전 탈장르 프로그램의 제작과정 특성 -KBS 2TV <스펀지>를 중심으로-

Nowadays, `fusion style` television programs are increasingly found in the production of television program. Originally such a trend has been developed with a purpose of changing tedious cultural program into entertaining style. Recently, however, it has also become as an alternative style of genre which is against from lasciviousness or lewdness of entertaining programs. This study is designed to analyse the characteristics of television production and theorize a producing process of the television genre-over program As a result of various aspects of research, it is found that recent producers who make genre-over program choose any kind of genre which is thought to be needed for their program, without any limitation in terms of methods or skills for specific genre. And with this change of concept for making programs, genre-over programs are newly defined as the entertaining programs, in which its entertaining function is widen and broaden, absorbing the informative function of cultural programs.

A method for displaying imprecision in early radiological emergency assessments

This paper presents an approach to estimating and displaying the imprecisionassociated with predictions from early emergency response calculations based ona limited number of off-site measurements and incomplete information aboutthe nature of the release. The method enables key elements of imprecision to beincluded in the assessment in a simple and transparent manner, notably those arisingfrom alternative weather evolutions, release durations, and factors influencing theamount of radioactivity deposited to ground. The presentation of assessment resultsincorporating lack of knowledge in a way that is easily understandable is important inthe context of emergency decision making, and options for alternative styles ofdisplay are presented and discussed. A new system of early emergency response forradiological releases to atmosphere based on this approach is under development.

The Limits of Teacher Education Reforms: School Subjects, Alchemies, and an Alternative Possibility

Contemporary U.S. schools and professional reforms call for teachers to have greater disciplinary and pedagogical knowledge for teaching school subjects. Reform efforts leave unexamined the rules and standards of “reason” that historically order school subjects. The notion of alchemy provides an analytic “tool” to consider the processes of translation from disciplinary knowledge to teaching practices. It is argued that the intellectual tools of school pedagogies have little to do with the disciplinary fields. The psychological strategies for defining school subjects historically are strategies of governing who the child is and should be. There is an ironic quality to this alchemy of schooling subjects. Efforts to increase student participation may narrow the possibilities of reflection and action. An alternative style for thinking about the translation of disciplinary fields into the curriculum and “methods” of school subjects is discussed, drawing on studies of science, technology, and mathematics.

Effects of alternative styles of risk information on EMF risk perception

Risk scenarios characterized by exposures to new technologies with unknown health effects, together with limited appreciation of benefits pose a challenge to risk communication. The present report illustrates this situation through a study of the perceived risk from mobile phones and mobile masts in residential areas. Good information should objectively convey the current state of knowledge. The research question is then how to inform lay people so that they trust and understand the information. We used an Internet-based survey with 1687 Danish participants randomized to three types of information about radiation from mobile phones and masts. The objective was to study whether different types of information were rated as equally useful, informative, comprehensible, and trustworthy. Moreover, an important issue was whether information would influence risk perception and intended behavior. The conclusion is that lay people rate information about risks associated with a new and largely unknown technology more useful and trustworthy when provided with brief statements about how to handle the risk, rather than more lengthy technical information about why the technology may or may not entail health hazards. Further, the results demonstrate that information may increase concern among a large proportion of the population, and that discrepancies exist between expressed concern and intended behavior.

Challenging stereotypes about academic writing: Complexity, elaboration, explicitness

The stereotypical view of professional academic writing is that it is grammatically complex, with elaborated structures, and with meaning relations expressed explicitly. In contrast, spoken registers, especially conversation, are believed to have the opposite characteristics. Our goal in the present paper is to challenge these stereotypes, based on results from large-scale corpus investigations. Our findings strongly support the view that academic writing and conversation have dramatically different linguistic characteristics. However, the specific differences are quite surprising. First, we show that academic writing is not structurally ‘elaborated’ (in the traditional sense of this term). In fact, subordinate clauses – especially finite dependent clauses – are much more common in conversation than academic writing. Instead, academic writing is structurally ‘compressed’, with phrasal (non-clausal) modifiers embedded in noun phrases. Additionally, we challenge the stereotype that academic writing is explicit in meaning. Rather, we argue that the ‘compressed’ discourse style of academic writing is much less explicit in meaning than alternative styles employing elaborated structures. These styles are efficient for expert readers, who can quickly extract large amounts of information from relatively short, condensed texts. However, they pose difficulties for novice readers, who must learn to infer unspecified meaning relations among grammatical constituents.

Evaluating the Prevention through Alternative Learning Styles Program

This article reports on the evaluation of a two-year alcohol, tobacco and other drug (ATOD) intervention, the Prevention through Alternative Learning Styles (PALS) program, targeting both teachers and middle-school students. Teachers are taught to recognize students' unique learning styles in the context of the ATOD curriculum and adapt the ATOD messages to these learning styles. The student curriculum consists of 5 topic areas with two lessons per topic area. Student goals include enhancing students' knowledge of the effects of ATOD, promoting students' use of refusal skills and decreasing students' intentions to use ATOD. The program was implemented in school dis-tricts in the greater Dayton Ohio area. Support was found for the intervention's overall effectiveness in both years, with statistically significant improvements demonstrated by the students who participated in the PALS program. Students had an increase in their knowledge of ATOD topic areas and a decrease in their intentions to use ATOD.

Memory and trauma: Narrating the Western Front 1914–1918

The memory of the Western Front still seems to haunt British society nearly 90 years after the Armistice. The mention of the battlefields of the Somme or Passchendaele, or references to ‘the trenches’ evokes sadness and poignancy as the Western Front represents a traumatic memory within Britain. The image of the soldiers suffering in the trenches as victims of the war appears so deeply ingrained that military historians have lamented the seemingly impossible task of revising the popular memory of the conflict. Attempts to show the tactical advances made by the army, the positive attitudes of the soldiers and the emphasis on the fact that the British Army was victorious in the war, have failed to make an impact on popular perceptions. This paper highlights that this failure stems from the narratives employed by historians of the war, which fail to accommodate or acknowledge the trauma still felt by contemporary society. By exploring alternative narrative styles this paper offers an alternative to the linear narratives, and stresses that through a non-linear narrative historians can begin to engage with the ideas which drive the popular memory. Using recent multi-disciplinary work which has drawn from archaeological and anthropological perspectives this paper describes the British soldiers on the Western Front as arriving at an understanding of a hostile war-landscape. Through an alternative narrative this paper demonstrates a way in which the conflict can be remembered and studied without being hidden within a veil of sentimentality.

Asset allocation and value at risk in shipping equity portfolios

This study employs alternative dynamic volatility models to investigate the risk and return characteristics of a carefully selected sample of shipping stocks, in order to enhance asset allocation opportunities. As private and institutional investors are in search of alternative style investments, the assessment of stock volatility is a critical issue for efficient asset allocation, dynamic portfolio management and firm valuation. The empirical findings indicate a highly volatile profile for shipping stock returns, in line with respective (tanker and dry bulk) earnings. Sectoral and company fundamentals may affect shipping stock volatility, which is found to be sensitive to asymmetric shocks. The results support high portfolio returns for shipping stock portfolios that appear to be superior to standard market benchmarks but are associated with higher risk level.