This thesis will probe selected Arabic commentary material on the Hippocratic Aphorisms. The aim is, first, to shed light on the development of Arabic medical commentary; second, to draw attention to issues of continuity and change in medical ideas and debates; third, to shed light on wider debates about women and medicine in the medieval world. Due to limitations on space, the main focus is on the second point. The sample of Arabic commentary material investigated here relates to Aph. 5. 31, Aph. 5. 35 and Aph. 5. 48. The material is situated within the wider context of the Islamic scientific commentary genre. The Arabic material is taken from the preliminary online edition now available due to the culmination of the Project on the Hippocratic Aphorisms (2012-2017) led by Peter Pormann at the University of Manchester.

O presente trabalho propõe-se analisar a forma como os fatores sociais, associados à prática do aleitamento materno, vêm sendo tratados na literatura científica. Num primeiro momento, procura identificar o comportamento do volume da produção científica, seguindo-se à identificação e análise dos fatores sociais arrolados nos estudos sobre a prática do aleitamento materno. O material de estudo compreende os trabalhos indexados na \"Nutrition Abstracts and Reviews\", no período de 1945 a 1985. Concluiu-se que a produção de conhecimento científico sobre o aleitamento materno faz-se presente em todo o desenvolvimento científico sobre nutrição infantil, no período estudado, com importância relativa acentuada em determinados momentos históricos. Destaca-se a produção de trabalhos sobre a prática do aleitamento materno dentre os estudos sobre o aleitamento materno. Identificam-se, como mais freqÜentes, entre os fatores sociais associados, o nível socio-econômico, o nível educacional, a distribuição urbano-rural e o trabalho da mulher. Os fatores sociais, arrolados nos estudos sobre a prática do aleitamento materno, caracterizam-se numa abordagem predominantemente multicausal. / The purpose of this work is to analyse how social factors associated with breast-feeding have dealt with scientifical literature. At first it outlines the behavior of the total scientific production and then it identifies and analyses the social factors connected up with the practice of breast-feeding. The material for this study encloses all the papers indexed in Nutrition Abstracts and Reviews throughout the period comprised between 1945 and 1985. There is concluded that the production of scientific knowledge on breast-feeding has been present throughout the general scientific development of child nutrition in the studied period with relative more deeper importance at certain historical moments. The practive of breast-feeding has been more dealt with studying breast-feeding at large. The most frequently associated social factors that were identified in this work were the socio-economic level, the educational level, the urban-rural distribution and women employment. These social factors connected up with breast-feeding practice have been approached essentialy from a multicausal angle.

The need for office efficiency is now of paramount importance. Great strides have been made in factory production methods and procedures during the first half of the twentieth century. But to the present, application of scientific management solution of office problems has been much slower.

Archaeologists are increasingly asked to justify the meaning and importance of their work to the public through the development of outreach and education programs. As repositories of culture, museums provide a perfect medium to assist in the promotion of an archaeology that is both relevant and engaging. Many archaeology education programs advocate “doing” or “learning about” archaeology, placing strict emphasis upon stewardship messages and the dangers associated with looting and site destruction. While this approach to teaching makes excellent sense from a modern cultural resource management perspective, it fails to portray archaeology education in any other light. Archaeology exhibits particular relevance within public schools, whose population holds one of the discipline’s largest, most inclusive captive audiences. This paper explores the most effective strategies for teaching archaeology to third and fourth grade students in the museum. I assess student level of engagement with object- and scientific skills-based activities, and results of a pilot study conducted at the Utah State University Museum of Anthropology indicate a need for more object-based curricula within archaeology education programs. Detailed consideration of archaeology’s relevance to skills developed within the social, physical, and life sciences highlights areas of focus and improvement in current and future programs.

The scientific literacy of four students in Year 8 was the main focus of one year of participant observer research. An interpretive research methodology was employed to generate tales about each student, in order to provide rich descriptions of the participation of these students in Science classes and in non-Science classes.A major theme was the complementarity of epistemological referents for scientific literacy. Objectivism, personal constructivism and social constructivism were identified as major referents for scientific literacy, and therefore as underpinning factors for the diversity of definitions of scientific literacy. Some authors have called for these referents to complement one another. In this study, I used the conceptual tool of metaphor to facilitate the holding together, in dialectical tension, of these often competing ideas.No a-priori notion of scientific literacy was adopted for the research, but an emergent theoretical framework for scientific literacy evolved. This metaphorical framework was shown to be a viable way of organising a diversity of literature-based definitions of scientific literacy. It was subsequently utilised to interpret the tales about the four students, and helped reveal significant themes.Foremost amongst the emerging research themes was equity of access into scientific literacy. Ten major assertions from the research provide different considerations of the ways that students access, or are denied access to, scientific literacy. Finally, implications of the three-metaphor framework for research, and speculations about its place in informing classroom practice are presented.

No abstract available

The majority of adults in the US and in Europe appear to be scientifically illiterate. This has not changed in more than half a century. It is unknown whether the Australian public is also scientifically illiterate because no similar testing is done here. Public scientific illiteracy remains in spite of improvements in science education, innovative approaches to public outreach, the encouraging of science communication via the mass media, and the advent of the Internet. Why is it that there has been so little change? Is school science education inadequate? Does something happen between leaving high school education and becoming an adult? Does Australia suffer from the same apparent malady? The pilot study at the heart of this thesis tests a total of 692 Year Ten (16-year-old) Australian students across ten high schools and a first year university class in 2005 and 2006, using measures applied to adults. Twenty-six percent of those tested participated in a related scientific literacy project utilising in-person visits to Macquarie University in both years. A small group of the students (64) tested in 2005 were considered the best science students in seven of the ten high schools. Results indicate that no more than 20% of even the best high school science students - on the point of being able to end their formal science education - are scientifically literate if measured by adult standards. Another pilot test among 150 first year university students supports that indication. This compares to a scientific literacy rate of 28% for the US public. This thesis finds that the scientific literacy enterprise ?? in all its forms ?? fails scrutiny. Either we believe our best science students are leaving high school scientifically illiterate or there is something fundamentally wrong in our perceptions of public scientific illiteracy. This pilot study ?? probably the first of its kind ?? indicates we cannot rely on our current perceptions of a scientifically illiterate public. It demonstrates that a paradigm shift in our thinking is required about what scientific literacy is and in our expectations of a scientifically literate adult public. In the worst case scenario, governments are pouring millions of dollars into science education and public outreach with little or no basis for understanding whether either is effective. That is illogical, even irresponsible. It also impacts on the way astrobiology ?? or any science ?? is communicated in public.

SYNOPSIS Included in this work, is a general historical overview of the development of astronomical knowledge in the West from the realms of Greek scholarship in classical times through to the Renaissance and the threshold of modern physics. The subject matter of both the Irish Tract and this review extends beyond the strict confines of astronomy, encompassing the physical sciences in general. The extent of astronomical knowledge in medieval Ireland is given specific attention with a review of scholarly works in Latin since the seventh century. This includes a number of specialist studies on astronomical topics and related cosmographical fields. Also included are numerous incidental references to astronomical matters from both Irish and Latin literature during the Middle Ages. Attention is devoted to the surviving manuscript copies of the Tract and the question of its sources, origin and purpose. A possible Dominican context for the compilation and dissemination of the Tract is considered. A detailed commentary of the technical content of each chapter is presented, together with reference to contemporary developments in the West and to the occasional clues as to the institutional, geographical and chronological origins of the Tract. A study of the technical terminology used by the Irish compiler is presented in detail. Reference is made both to earlier Irish terminology where appropriate, as well as to the limitations imposed by the fact that many of the scientific concepts were yet to attain clarity that came with the advent of Newtonian physics, Copernican astronomy and post-Colombian geography. The data entries on ms Stowe B are evaluated and compared with computer generated data of astronomical movements in the 14th and 15th centuries with a view to ascertaining the time of compilation of the Tract and its working life. A A revised English translation of the Tract is included in the appendices together with Maxwell Close's unpublished commentary to relevant portions. An Irish edition, closely following the ITS edition of 1914 is also included. Corruptions to the text are footnoted together with the likely run of the original text.

This paper presents techniques that actively exploit chaotic behavior to accomplish otherwise-impossible control tasks. The state space is mapped by numerical integration at different system parameter values and trajectory segments from several of these maps are automatically combined into a path between the desired system states. A fine-grained search and high computational accuracy are required to locate appropriate trajectory segments, piece them together and cause the system to follow this composite path. The sensitivity of a chaotic system's state-space topology to the parameters of its equations and of its trajectories to the initial conditions make this approach rewarding in spite of its computational demands.

Since the 1950s, inquiry has been considered an effective strategy to promote students’ science learning. However, the use of inquiry in contemporary science classrooms is minimal, despite its long history and wide recognition elsewhere. Besides, inquiry is commonly confused with discovery learning, which needs minimal level of teacher supervision. The lack of thorough description of how inquiry works in diverse classroom settings is known to be a critical problem. To analyze the complex and dynamic nature of inquiry practices, a comprehensive tool is needed to capture its essence. In this dissertation, I studied inquiry lessons conducted by one high school science teacher of 9th grade students. The inquiry sequence lasted for 10 weeks. Using the Scientific Practices Analysis (SPA)-map and the Mathematics and Science Classroom Observation Profile System (M-SCOPS), elements of inquiry were analyzed from multiple perspectives. The SPA-map analysis, developed as a part of this dissertation, revealed the types of scientific practices in which students were involved. The results from the M-SCOPS provide thorough descriptions of complex inquiry lessons in terms of their content, flow, instructional scaffolding and representational scaffolding. In addition to the detailed descriptions of daily inquiry practices occurring in a dynamic classroom environment, the flow of the lessons in a sequence was analyzed with particular focus on students’ participation in scientific practices. The findings revealed the overall increase of student-directed instructional scaffolding within the inquiry sequence, while no particular pattern was found in representational scaffolding. Depending on the level of cognitive complexity imposed on students, the lessons showed different association patterns between the level of scaffolding and scientific practices. The findings imply that teachers need to provide scaffolding in alignment with learning goals to achieve students’ scientific proficiency.