Impossible Dream Research Articles

A decade of education reform in Thailand: broken promise or impossible dream?

This study addresses the perceived gap between the vision of education reform in Thailand embodied in its Education Reform Law of 1999 and the results of implementation a decade later. Drawing upon opportunistic data obtained from a sample of 162 Thai school principals, we analyze trends in reform implementation across schools in all regions and levels of Thailand’s K-12 education system. The results suggest that a decade following the formal initiation of education reform, changes in teaching and learning, ICT implementation and school management systems have yet to engage the nation’s teachers to a substantial degree. The lack of results is linked to a reform strategy that has emphasized top-down implementation and a cultural predisposition to treat change as an event rather than as a long-term process.

College Student Assessment of the Signs of Alcohol Poisoning: To Dream the Impossible Dream

Reliance on college student peer assessment of the signs of alcohol poisoning to prevent overdose deaths is, in most instances, an impossible dream, one that is both misleading and dangerous insofar as it fosters a false sense of security and enhances the perception of personal invulnerability. Although teaching the signs of alcohol poisoning should certainly continue, college students must understand that moderate and responsible drinking is the only reliable way to avoid death from alcohol poisoning.

Russia's Very Secret Services

Russia's <i>Very</i> Secret Services

Eighteenth-Century Literary Culture and the Experience of History

Eighteenth-Century Literary Culture and the Experience of HistoryRuth Mack's Literary Historicity: Literature and Historical Experience in EighteenthCentury Britain (Stanford, 2009) is original. It is the first book-length study of how eighteenth-century literary texts represent historical experience. We already have studies that address the early novel's quite deliberate affiliations with history, but the problem of historical experience has not been central in such studies. A book like Everett Zimmermann's The Boundaries of Fiction (1996) certainly engages the relationship between and fiction, but does so mainly to show how fictions reveal the epistemological limits of writing. In this regard, Zimmermann's study is still firmly attached to the poststructuralist critique of the historian's claims to truth and objectivity that was initiated, some thirty-five years ago, by Hayden White's Metahistory (1973). The debate that followed White's critique, Mack notes, has not really redrawn the boundary between fiction and history. Her book takes fresh look at this boundary by reviving the category of experience as central to how we know about the past.Mack's book suggests that our relationship to the past can never be rational: it is always fraught with emotions, with the impossible dream of entering into different life. Her study does not only align with the arguments made on behalf of experience as category of historical understanding by F. R. Ankersmit (whose Historical Representation [2001] emerges as kind of guiding light for Mack's study), but also with the recent academic interest in historical reenactments (this second alignment goes unmentioned: Jonathan Lamb's and Vanessa Agnew's edited collection, Settler and Creole Reenactment [2009] provides an introduction to reenactments). It is still unclear where the academic interest in reenactment will lead, but it is clear that it wants to reintroduce, just like Mack, the visceral in what we consider to be knowledge about the past. Mack's acceptance of unconscious or half-conscious forces, of imitative impulses, questions the demands for empiricist purity and critical distance that remain powerful in and eighteenth-century studies. It is in this way that Mack stakes her claim in the debate between fiction and truth.This is not to suggest, however, that Mack's book is in itself an attempt to bring experience back into the academic study of the past. I have just described is only the broad intellectual background of Mack's book. The foreground of Mack's book is filled by an argument that shows how eighteenthcentury writers represent different modes of experiencing the past. Mack argues that writers such as Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Horace Walpole, and Laurence Sterne are not really that interested in revealing the shortcomings of or appropriating its prestige. Rather, they explore what might be called a phenomenology of history (19). Their most insistent questions guide Mack's study: What does it mean to be historical, to exist historically? How is our experience of the past similar to or different from our experience of the present world? (19).Literary Historicity argues that eighteenth-century writers responded to crisis in writing - the decline of exemplary - and tried to tackle the freshly urgent problem of how we can experience the past when its examples no longer seem to bear on present that has been transformed by commerce and the discontinuities of several political revolutions. Mack claims that the continuity between past and present assumed by histories that weave their narratives around the deeds of exemplary heroes has lost intuitive acceptance by the time we get the first sustained reflections about how means (Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke is prominent example). The question of how we experience the past becomes pressing as result. Mack locates this shift by following fairly conventional timeline that takes the Glorious Revolution as convenient marker for the dawn of modernity. …

Universal Primary Education in the Philippines by 2015: An Impossible Dream?

Universal Primary Education in the Philippines by 2015: An Impossible Dream?

Striving for the impossible dream: a community‐based multi‐practice collaborative model of diabetes management

In 1994 the Centre for Diabetes and Endocrinology (CDE) based in Johannesburg, South Africa established a novel community-based capitation and risk-sharing model for diabetes management. We here describe the model and present a recent survey of the performance/outcomes of this unique diabetes care programme. Data on 17 043 patients managed by the CDE Diabetes Management Programme at its Centre and its 262 affiliated Centres were analysed from its national database. From this total cohort, 1520 Type 1 and 8026 Type 2 diabetes patients have been in the Programme for > 5 years. The 5-year outcome data on hospital admission rates, glycaemic control (HbA(1c)), and microvascular complication rates were assessed in this subgroup of patients. Major reductions in hospital admission rates for both acute metabolic emergencies and all causes (40% overall) were achieved in patients enrolled onto the Diabetes Management Programme. The mean HBA(1c) on enrolment was 9.2% for subjects with Type 1 and 8.8% for those with Type 2 diabetes. After 1 year, mean HbA(1c) fell to 7.6% and 7.3% for the Type 1 and Type 2 subjects, respectively. At 5 years the HbA(1c) remained similar at 7.7% for the Type 1 subjects and 7.4% for the Type 2 subjects, demonstrating sustained improvement. Progression of microvascular complications appears to have been delayed. This managed care model of diabetes care in the context of the South African Private Health Care System achieved long-term improvement in glycaemic control and all-cause hospital admission rates. This may be due to the cost-containment being in the hands of the treating doctor, supported by an annual training programme. This programme is based on an individualized and holistic approach encompassing intensive patient education to facilitate self-empowerment and including prompting for the management of risk factors.

Reversing the trend

Globally, the destruction and degradation of wetlands have been matters of increasing concern for several decades (Maltby 1986, Williams 1990). The response has been the adoption of a variety of measures to slow the rate of habitat loss and increase the protection of remaining natural wetlands. Nevertheless, it has also been acknowledged that complete cessation of wetland destruction is an almost impossible dream; there will be circumstances where the economic or social benefit of development will be perceived as outweighing the loss of environment values associated with a particular wetland. The concept of wetland mitigation has therefore been promoted, whereby development is permitted on condition that other areas of wetland are either rehabilitated or are created. Mitigation may either be part of a general policy (as in the 'no net loss' concept in the USA) or be a matter to be taken into consideration by planning authorities on a case by case basis (as in allowed for in State Environmental Planning Policy No. 14 (Coastal Wetlands) in NSW).

Vereen to ASHA Members: “You Are My Angels”

You have accessThe ASHA LeaderASHA Convention Coverage1 Dec 2009Vereen to ASHA Members: “You Are My Angels” Marat Moore Marat Moore Google Scholar More articles by this author https://doi.org/10.1044/leader.ACC2.14162009.np SectionsAbout ToolsAdd to favorites ShareFacebookTwitterLinked In Ben Vereen is a dynamo—he acts, sings, dances, and has an infinitely expressive face. He has won international acclaim and numerous honors as an actor, singer and dancer in theatre, film, and television. His Broadway shows range from “Jesus Christ Superstar,” and “Hair,” to the lead role in “Pippin,” which won him the Tony. Or you may remember him as the unforgettable Chicken George in “Roots.” He also is a philanthropist; his “Celebrities for a Drug Free America” has raised more hundreds of thousands of dollars for drug rehabilitation centers, education centers, and community-based programs. Vereen brought his shimmering talent and words of praise to the ASHA stage in New Orleans, where he delivered a keynote address during the Convention’s opening general session on Nov. 19. “I came here to let you know the importance of your work, and to inspire you,” he adding, “I am the result of your work—in 1992 we met on a serious level.” That year, a cascading series of accidents changed his life in a single, terrible day in June. After struggling for several years with addiction following the sudden death of his 16-year-old daughter, he had a car accident that damaged an artery to his brain. “I didn’t know I was injured,” he said. “It was early in the morning and I started walking home along the Pacific Coast Highway.” As he was walking, he had a stroke as a result of the damaged artery, and then wandered into the highway and was struck by a truck. Pronounced dead on the scene, Vereen survived, but barely. The left-hemisphere stroke affected his right side, his traumatic brain injury robbed him of speech, a tracheotomy was needed to help him breathe, and his spleen was removed. During his long rehabilitation—when physicians told him to consider another career—one doctor introduced Vereen to what he calls “my guides, my masters who brought me back into the light.” Voice trainer Bill Riley and his wife, speech-language pathologist Linda Carroll, focused on restoring Vereen’s speech and singing voice (see article at below by Riley about his treatment of Vereen.) “Bill Riley and Linda Carroll made it possible for me to speak. They gave my life back to me,” he said. I kept working on my speech and would go to their house, and they would say, ‘You can do this. Have faith.’” “Ten months later, because of these angels in my life, angels like you, I walked onstage at the St. James Theater, and invited all the doctors who said I couldn’t do it,” he said. “That’s the importance of what you do. Don’t forget your impact on those of us who have fallen through the cracks, who have lost their ability to speak out.” Vereen emphasized the importance of hearing and speech, and the collaboration of the two professions that provide those services. “It’s important that you come together. When you can’t hear, people think you can’t speak, and when you can’t speak, they think you can’t hear. “We need you because you don’t just look at what is, you look at what can be,” he said, to loud applause. “You chose your profession—and were chosen—because you have the power of healing.” “Don’t ever be discouraged—you may reach someone who can save the world.” Vereen then motioned to someone at stage right and led SLP Linda Carroll onstage. “This is my doctor—Dr. Linda Carroll.” He looked at her. “Can I sing a song to you and all of ASHA?” Vereen walked hand-in-hand with her toward the stage center, and sang “The Impossible Dream”: “To dream the impossible dream/ To fight the unbeatable foe/ To bear with unbearable sorrow/ To run where the brave do not go…” A roar of applause rose up from ASHA attendees. Author Notes Marat Moore, managing editor of The ASHA Leader, can be contacted at [email protected]. Advertising Disclaimer | Advertise With Us Advertising Disclaimer | Advertise With Us Additional Resources FiguresSourcesRelatedDetails Volume 14Issue 16December 2009 Get Permissions Add to your Mendeley library History Published in print: Dec 1, 2009 Metrics Downloaded 101 times Topicsasha-topicsleader_do_tagleader-topicsasha-article-typesCopyright & Permissions© 2009 American Speech-Language-Hearing AssociationLoading ...

Ecosystem‐Based Management: What Really Happens?

Ecosystem‐Based Management: What Really Happens?

Multiculturalism, the Canadian academy, and the impossible dream of Black Canadian Studies

Multiculturalism, the Canadian academy, and the impossible dream of Black Canadian Studies

Making the Impossible Dream: Latin, Print, and the Marriage of Frederick V and the Princess Elizabeth

This article investigates the use of Latin within a northern European, militantly Protestant literary community at a crucial moment in its fortunes: the marriage in 1613 of the Princess Elizabeth, daughter of the English king James I, to Frederick V, the Palatine Elector and leader of the Protestant Union of princes in Germany. Using Europe's transnational language, Protestant Latin writers in Britain and continental northern Europe envisioned an international godly community and even the possibility of a common cultural bond that would unite England with German-speaking areas in the Holy Roman Empire. Latin's transnational reach could be powerfully combined with print, sometimes with disastrous results—as in the case of a commemorative anthology assembled by the University of Oxford to celebrate the marriage—but at other times effectively, as by Andrew Willet and Abraham Scultetus who tailored Latin and vernacular texts designed to unify Protestant readers in Britain and continental northern Europe. Frederick's subsequent expulsion from Prague and the Palatinate would seem to have ended what Patrick Collinson has described as the "impossible dream" of a military, religious, political, and even a cultural union between England and Protestant northern Europe. But, as historians have been discovering, the vision that these Neo-Latin writers helped to shape is symptomatic of a large, long-term division between southern and northern Europe and formed part of a domestic politico-religious discourse that continued in Britain and continental Protestant countries well into the eighteenth century.

New therapeutic agents in ovarian cancer.

Despite advances in management over recent years, epithelial ovarian cancer remains the most lethal gynaecological malignancy. Methods of early detection, as well as improved therapeutic options, are urgently needed. Currently, a number of targeted therapies, including vascular endothelial growth factor inhibitors, poly-ADP-ribose polymerase inhibitors and folate receptor inhibitors look promising in this arena and this article will review a number of these drugs and the evidence pertaining to their use. Much further research is required to define if, when and how best to integrate these novel therapies, and also to define associated biomarkers that predict toxicity and select patients most likely to derive benefit. Individualized therapy is not an impossible dream, but there is still a long way to go.

The Impossible Dream: Consensus-Based International Climate Change Responses

The Impossible Dream: Consensus-Based International Climate Change Responses

Curbing Corruption in India: An Impossible Dream?

This article analyses the serious problem of corruption in India by examining its causes and the various anti-corruption measures employed by the government from the formation in 1941 of the first anti-corruption agency, the Delhi Special Police Establishment, which was expanded to form the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in April 1963. India's ineffective anti-corruption strategy can be attributed to the lack of political will of its leaders and its unfavourable policy context, which has hindered the enforcement of the anti-corruption laws. The lack of political will in fighting corruption is manifested in the lowest per capita expenditure and least favourable staff-population ratio of the CBI when compared to those of its counterparts in Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and Thailand. To enhance the CBI's effectiveness, it should be removed from the jurisdiction of the police and be established as an independent agency dedicated solely to curbing corruption. The Constitution of India should also be amended to empower the CBI to investigate corruption cases at the state level without obtaining the consent of the chief minister of the state. In view of the lack of political will, this article concludes that curbing corruption in India remains an impossible dream in the foreseeable future.

Audiologists Join SLPs at Schools Conference

Audiologists Join SLPs at Schools Conference

Technical Aspects in Laboratory Testing for Antiphospholipid Antibodies: Is Standardization an Impossible Dream?

Anticardiolipin (aCL) and anti-beta2 glycoprotein I (anti-beta2GPI) assays are widely performed because they are part of the laboratory criteria for the antiphospholipid syndrome (APS). Despite several standardization workshops and the availability of a worldwide accepted calibrator material for aCL, a high variability in numerical assay results and in sample classification is still observed in comparative studies and external quality control surveys. For anti-beta2GPI assays, comparison of numerical values is impeded by the absence of a common calibrator material, and external quality surveys similarly show a large overlap in sample classification. Numerous variables impact assay results, among them the source and integrity of beta2GPI, the secondary calibration process, and the assessment and derivation of cutoff values. For both assays, the vast majority of laboratories use commercial kits whose number has risen considerably in the past years. However, many problems persist, and there is a need to improve the comparability in assay results. The use of monoclonal antibodies as reference calibrators has to be especially considered, with their suitability evaluated by future collaborative studies and external quality controls surveys. Manufacturers should provide more precise information on results obtained when testing control groups for establishing reference ranges and cutoff values. From the customers' perspective, it is important that each laboratory, even if using commercial kits, assesses its local cutoff value whenever possible. In the field of autoimmunity, assay standardization is a difficult but nevertheless important task. Much more effort is needed to reduce the high interlaboratory variability in assay results even if absolute standardization cannot be feasibly achieved.

Automated technologies and novel techniques to accelerate protein crystallography for structural genomics

The sequence infrastructure that has arisen through large-scale genomic projects dedicated to protein analysis, has provided a wealth of information and brought together scientists and institutions from all over the world. As a consequence, the development of novel technologies and methodologies in proteomics research is helping to unravel the biochemical and physiological mechanisms of complex multivariate diseases at both a functional and molecular level. In the late sixties, when X-ray crystallography had just been established, the idea of determining protein structure on an almost universal basis was akin to an impossible dream or a miracle. Yet only forty years after, automated protein structure determination platforms have been established. The widespread use of robotics in protein crystallography has had a huge impact at every stage of the pipeline from protein cloning, over-expression, purification, crystallization, data collection, structure solution, refinement, validation and data management- all of which have become more or less automated with minimal human intervention necessary. Here, recent advances in protein crystal structure analysis in the context of structural genomics will be discussed. In addition, this review aims to give an overview of recent developments in high throughput instrumentation, and technologies and strategies to accelerate protein structure/function analysis.

Epilogue: Roberta J. Park and the ‘impossible dream’: keeping it together for physical education and the academy*

Can physical education become the renaissance field of the twenty first century, or is it just an impossible dream of one of the world's leading sport historians? This article illuminates, celebrates and contextualizes the remarkable range and depth of Roberta J. Park's intellectual contributions to sport history and physical education in North America and internationally. Her extensive career at the University of California, Berkeley as student, teacher, colleague, administrator and researcher is a powerful example of one woman's agency, determination and success in the hierarchical world of higher education with its ambiguous and shifting attachment to the profession and discipline of physical education and sport science. Systematically opening up the breadth of embodied and gendered practices deemed suitable for examination by sport historians, Park has helped turn a narrow lane into the broad and busy highway sport history has now become. Like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, ‘Queenmother' of first wave feminists, she has equated the gymnasium with the meeting house and shown an abiding respect for saints with strong bodies.

Responses and Interventions (1946–98)

evost. It isperhaps opportune to wonder why Malraux’s novel about Spain is called ‘Days of Hope’. 1 The novel, we may recall, ends with the victorious battle of Guadalajara. Manifestly however, hope here is not for the victory, sooner or later, of the revolutionary forces over Franco. If it is not unconcerned by that victory, if it calls for it even, and not as an impossible and profligate dream but as an event already assured by history, the book is in no way restricted to the outcome it foresees. The Republicans’ failure did not make the title of Malraux’s novel seem ridiculous. Man’s Estate, 2 which is in many ways a gloomier book and which concludes with the tragic collapse of the Chinese revolution, is also a book on which hope has left its mark. It is through disaster and the terrible closing scenes of torture and death, and against a devastating background of desolation and misery, that hope is born. And though this hope bears the mark of the fate which crushes it, it is reborn and rises above it, and in the end it follows its own course, it is unchangeable, always threatened and always triumphant. We may assume that, in Malraux’s work, the theme of hope—like the other themes no doubt—almost always has a double meaning, one of which is political. There is no way in which revolution can be defeated. It suffers serious setbacks, and the mistakes of its leaders sometimes lead to catastrophes made all the harsher in that those who pay the price of them are the masses whom revolution is meant to

Feeling is believing, or landscape as a way of being in the world

.This article is work‐in‐progress, an orientation of thought towards possibilities for individual human beings to diminish the distance between outer and inner landscapes imposed by cultural norms and happenstances such as exile. The dominance of visual landscapes and visual perceptions is seen as a pivotal problem, to be solved by the engagement of all the senses in landscape discourse and formation. All the senses are engaged in earliest childhood, as they have been in ‘primitive’ societies. While returning to either a state of childhood or primitivism is an impossible dream, it is possible to edge closer to human nature by engaging and honing all the senses, especially the ‘earth‐bound senses’ of feel, smell and taste. Cultivating those senses and developing discourse about them, and incorporating them into landscape formation and enjoyment, is much more difficult than having a discourse about sight and hearing, for which there is a rich and well‐developed symbolic language and which can be shared through various types of media. The way towards a deeper discourse about the earth‐bound senses, and the way out of the tyranny of the visual, is to be found in stories, as several thinkers suggest.The story told is autobiographical and literary – a mode of geographic writing that I developed in a 2004 book (Bunkše 2004a), in which the complex dilemmas of home and road were explored. This article shows how in the early 1970s I defined the individual's landscape as ‘a unity in one's surroundings perceived through all the senses’, with imagination as the key human faculty. And I tell the story of how through complex circumstances, a visually and emotionally repugnant landscape became emotionally and intellectually attractive, with a scent, not a picture or image causing the initial attraction. The external and internal landscapes are thus unified, resulting in a sense of timelessness and placelessness of deep existential significance for the person.