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This paper examines intra-household and socio-cultural factors leading to differential outcomes in educational attainment by gender and birth order amongst smallholder oil palm households in Papua New Guinea. Not all children share equitably in the household resources allocated to education: females have lower average education levels than males, and high birth order children have higher education attainment than lower birth order siblings, indicating preferential parental investment in sons and early born children. The findings demonstrate that despite households having regular access to relatively high incomes from oil palm and residing in close proximity to schools, primary school net enrolment rates remain significantly lower than those for East Asia and the Pacific region, and the millennium development goal of universal primary education has not been met. This finding is likely to be the result of a combination of intra-household factors including gender power imbalances, low parental education levels, the agency of youth in educational decision-making and the weakening attraction of education as a means of improving income-earning potential.

Why do many science graduates lack the skills that industry is looking for? Sean Ryan and Veronica Benson of the South-East Physics Network explore the problem and discover that there is one straightforward way for universities and businesses to address this

This paper, based on theories of ecological perception, embodied motivated cognition, and evolutionary psychology, proposes that pictures elicit evolved biologically imperative responses more quickly and thoroughly than do words. These biologically imperative responses are directly responsible for evolved automatic reactions away from biological threats (e.g. escaping predators, avoiding disease and noxious stimuli) and towards opportunities (e.g. consuming food, approaching mates, finding shelter) in the environment. When elicited, these responses take time to occur and may delay or interfere with other types of behavior. Thus, when environmental information is presented in pictures (which should elicit larger biological responses than words) biological responses should interfere more with higher order tasks like information processing and cognitive decision-making. To test this proposition we designed an experiment in which participants performed speeded categorizations of 60 pairs of matched pleasant and unpleasant environmental opportunities and threats. They categorized the items based on their form (is this a word or a picture?) or based on how the picture made them feel (is this pleasant or unpleasant to you?). If pictures do elicit greater biologically imperative responses than their word counterparts, participants should be able to make form decisions faster than feeling decisions, especially when presented with words rather than pictures and especially when the words and pictures have less biological relevance. This main proposition was supported. Implications for this proposition in terms of communication theory are discussed.

Rapid changes in technology and the democratisation of information capabilities have sparked the concept of ‘War in the Information Age’. Intelligence branches within NATO militaries have been slow to adapt and risk being outpaced. Sean Ryan, a former British military intelligence officer, argues that while some structural changes have occurred, lessons from the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns about the nature of modern intelligence have not yet been learned, and fundamental changes to the doctrine, training and culture of military intelligence are required.

This study aims to understand the needs of plus-size pregnant women and critical design aspects for a pregnancy support garment and to emphasize the importance of inclusive design in this important product category.The research examines the historical and societal connotations of maternity and the changes in support garment design associated with changes in the perception of the modern plus size Madonna. At the same time, it analyses the state-of-the-art in modern maternity support garments and examines data, gathered through a pilot online survey.

This chapter examines the educational levels and opportunities among migrant oil palm farming households in the three main oil palm-growing areas of Papua New Guinea (PNG). Whilst average adult education levels in oil palm farming communities are higher than the national average, they are still low given most children do not finish primary school. Moreover, findings indicate that population and income pressures are leading to increasing social and economic stratification within and between families. Inequality is most evident by the fact that children from families without regular access to oil palm income have lower education levels than those children from families living on the same block who regularly receive oil palm income. Stratification as differential educational opportunities is a new phenomenon reflecting greater individualism and the rise of market relations and has considerable development implications particularly for policies aimed at reducing poverty and vulnerability levels in rural PNG.

This chapter deepens the archaeological and genealogical analysis of outdoor recreation (OR) by expanding on the idea that the most significant discursive practise in OR is the separation of (human)culture and natural nature. Appreciating how OR arrived at the tenuous position of searching for natural nature to study or recreate in necessitates an exploration of the historical links between science, rationality, modernity, and the (human)culture/nature split. The first section of this chapter is devoted to examining the historical details of this story.

This paper makes the suggestion that the field of outdoor recreation needs to move toward recognizing human agency when constructing definitions of wilderness if it wishes to address the ecological crisis. In an attempt to show this, this paper begins with an overview of two trends in outdoor recreation - the emphasis on minimum impact wilderness techniques and the various technological innovations that have occurred in the past few years. The next section explores some consequences associated with these trends (e.g. what definition of human beings is being suggested through an emphasis on minimum impact practises? What kind of sub-textual message of nature, and hence human beings, is technology promoting?). Each of these two trends is shown to relate to each other in ways that are simultaneously conflicting, ironic and complimentary. The next section offers one critical postmodern alternative to the ontologically absolute type of knowledge often generated within the discourse of outdoor recreation. This ...

This chapter addresses the question of how individuals and families in rural PNG respond to major livelihood threats as they make the transition from a subsistence mode of life to become increasingly integrated into the global economy through export cash cropping. Two case studies are presented: cocoa farmers on the Gazelle Peninsula of East New Britain Province (ENB) and oil palm migrant farmers residing on the Hoskins Land Settlement Scheme in West New Britain Province (WNB). The cocoa farming community of Gazelle Peninsula began growing cocoa on their customary land in the 1950s with encouragement by the Australian administration. Since 2006 they have been confronted with an introduced cocoa pest, Cocoa Pod Borer (CPB), which is devastating their cocoa crop and livelihoods. The migrant oil palm farmers voluntarily took up State agricultural leases of 6 ha blocks in the late 1960s and early 1970s and are now experiencing population and resource pressures as their children marry and begin raising their own families on their parents’ blocks. By examining the pressures emerging among farming households as they make the transition to a market economy, the chapter highlights some of the key challenges and pressures of contemporary rural life for people in the Global South such as declining access to land, increased dependence on cash, fluctuating cash crop prices and changing lifestyle values.

Los Alamos National Laboratory’s A LEXIS satellite (a wide area EUV monitoring instrument) was launched April 25, 1993. Due to the damage sustained at launch by the satellite, the ALEXIS project team has had to spend over a year devising new methods to determine spacecraft attitude knowledge, essential for putting photons back on the sky correctly. These efforts have been successful and currently the ALEXIS attitude solutions are precise to better than 0.5 degree close to the original 0.25 degree pre-flight specification. This paper will discuss the number and types of point sources that have been revealed in the ALEXIS data, to date. We will also discuss ALEXIS observations of the June, 1994 super outburst of the Cataclysmic Variable VW Hyi, a program to look for simultaneous EUV emission from Gamma Ray Bursts, as well as an effort to detect EUV transients with a 12 – 24 hour response time.