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The professional lexicons of middle school mathematics teachers in communities around the world were documented as part of The International Classroom Lexicon Project. This vocabulary captured teachers' naming of classroom pedagogical practice. Reported in this paper are attributes of the lexicons of teachers from Australia and Chile. A comparison of the lexical items revealed commonalities and differences in the named phenomena and in the schema employed for their organisational structure. The analysis revealed differences attributable to cultural and contextual factors. A categorisation system was developed to classify the complexity of similarity of lexical items of one lexicon with another.

The involvement of parents in schools has been legislated in Spain since 1970, with the main activities being parents associations and school councils, but these partnerships do not represent a particularly friendly situation. A research project was carried out through the University of Oviedo, Spain, Department of Education, to create a mechanism for the exchange of ideas about parent-teacher partnership and education, including assessment of the school's cooperation needs. The setting was a well-organized school open to innovative programs, with good cooperation between parents and teachers, located in Gijon, Spain. The results based on the original objectives of the study, were achieved by means of a permanent school-based seminar with parents, teachers, children and a university coordinator to exchange ideas about parent-teacher partnerships and cooperation. Contributions of the project to the school were high, with a more positive attitude between parents and teachers and increased activities involving the community as major indicators. However, the project had a few limitations, mostly the dependence on the university facilitator and doubts as to the long-term effects to the school and generalization of issues to other schools. (SM)

Since the early 1990s, a sharp increase in the Internet traffic has been experienced. Technology, once again, has proven to be able to develop faster than regulation. In this endlessly evolving scenario, operators in the technology markets, as well as end-users, often find themselves under-protected. Therefore, it comes as a major concern the need to regulate those technological markets and, more specifically, the use -or abuse- of Internet. All Internet traffic should be treated equally and that is, precisely, what network neutrality aims at. Consequently, network operators may not take advantage of their position in the market to affect competition in related markets. All in all, network neutrality is crucial to achieve the highest degree of competition. In the absence of network neutrality, the Internet would find itself unable to qualify as a market merely driven by innovation, and it would unfailingly turn into one ruled by deal making. Competition law claims that the higher the neutrality is - i.e., the more equal the treatment is, the better it is for the consumer. If network operating companies create an exploitative business model, they might be able to block competitors' websites and services; in other words, it may facilitate adoption of anticompetitive practices - namely, the abuse of their dominant position. Transcending all the arguments raised against network neutrality -such as the prevention of an overuse of bandwidth-, we will demonstrate that it must be deemed essential from a Competition law perspective. In addition, we will argue, the imperative necessity of leaving the market under the tough scrutiny of competition authorities, which are best placed to assess the anticompetitive character of the practices brought about by market operators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, full-scale performance of large merchant ships is evaluated by means of newly developed onboard performance monitoring method. Full-scale performance monitoring and analysis method based on onboard performance monitoring has been developed for the performance evaluation of large merchant ships in service. Monitored full-scale performance data is analyzed in a similar way as that employed in ship's speed trials and the results are compared with performance predictions conducted at the design and development stage. Performance evaluations are made for 3 large merchant ships of bulk earner type. It is shown that by employing newly developed monitoring and performance procedures, full-scale performance can be evaluated with high degree of confidence and its results can effectively utilized to improve the accuracy of performance predictions at design stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Competition law seeks to foster competition and innovation through the sanctioning of antitrust behavior, and it especially seeks to discourage the creation of hardcore cartels. To that effect, the European Union imposes administrative sanctions to cartels, whereas the United States use their penal system against them. This paper will analyze the advantages and limitations of each option, and will determine whether it would be more effective for the European Union to also use its penal system against cartels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the construction of cultural freedom in post-revolutionary Cuba as it relates to cultural policy. The idea underlying liberal freedom is that power, in particular state power, constrains individuals, negates freedoms. Scholarship on Cuba's cultural policies is based on liberal definitions of freedom. The Instituto Cubano de Artes e Industrias Cinematográficas occupied a central position in the battle over cultural freedoms. In 1975 the First National Congress of the Partido Comunista de Cuba marked the continuation of the institutionalization of culture.

Despite a recent proliferation of educational media marketed specifically toward infants, little research to date has examined the content of infant-directed programming. Educational claims associated with these media frequently include references to early social and emotional development, which may be facilitated via modeling of positive interactions with caregivers and peers. The present research examined the number and quality of social interactions depicted in a representative sample of 55 infant programs. Surprisingly few onscreen interactions were found overall, with caregiver-child and peer-to-peer interactions representing only 10% and 25% of total character appearances, respectively. Moreover, only a small portion of the interactions shown were high-quality (active interactions with caregivers, cooperative or parallel play with peers). Given an audience targeted during a crucial period of early social and emotional development, it is interesting that so little modeling of quality interactions is depicted despite claims suggesting otherwise. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article queries the uses of machismo in studies of Mexican popular culture and argues that too many times machismo is used ahistorically and without reference to the ways in which the Mexican systems of sex and gender are imbricated with racial ideas. I track down the roots of machismo as a critical analytic category of sex in the writings of Samuel Ramos and Octavio Paz. According to them, machismo is a gender category; however, to theorize machismo's roots, they rely on racial and class arguments about hybridity and colonizations. This suggests that machismo is more than a gender category and that is infused with racial and class ideas. The racialization of the term is not often referenced on contemporary uses of the term. These uses have continued eliding the connection between machismo and race, limiting the understanding of masculinity and patriarchy in Mexico. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]