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Practical Sense (practical + sense)
Selected AbstractsForeign language teaching , a modern building on historical foundations1INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS, Issue 1 2006Werner Hüllen praktischer Sprachgebrauch; Deutschland; Lehrziele; Kultur; Schulbildung During the 20th century, the teaching and learning of foreign languages has gained an unprecedented importance. This pertains mainly to English in its world-wide use, but also to other national languages. The question is discussed of whether new vernaculars are to be taught merely as the instrument of communication, i.e. in a practical sense, or whether further-reaching pedagogical goals should be envisaged. During the 19th and 20th centuries, educators in Germany discussed this issue heatedly with reference to the teaching of Greek and Latin vs the teaching of French and English. Using these thought-provoking discussions, the idea is floated that foreign language teaching should always include reflecting on the respective culture in which the language is embedded and on the general rules and conventions which guide its use. Während des 20. Jahrhunderts ist die Bedeutung des Lehrens und Lernens von fremden Sprachen in nie gekannter Weise gewachsen. Dies gilt für das Englische im weltweiten Gebrauch, aber auch für andere Nationalsprachen. Die Frage wird diskutiert, ob die für die Lerner neuen Sprachen nur als Instrumente der Kommunikation, also im praktischen Sinne, gelehrt oder ob damit weiter reichende pädagogische Ziele verbunden werden sollen. Während des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts wurde diese Frage im Hinblick auf den Unterricht im Griechischen und Lateinischen sowie im Französischen und Englischen heftig diskutiert. Mit Rückgriff auf diese historische Anregung wird die Meinung vertreten, dass Fremdsprachenunterricht immer Reflektionen auf die Kultur, in der die Sprache eingebettet ist, und auf die allgemeinen Bedingungen, die ihren Gebrauch regulieren, einschließen sollte. [source] Qualitative research to make practical sense of sustainability in primary health care projects implemented by non-governmental organizationsINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HEALTH PLANNING AND MANAGEMENT, Issue 1 2004Eric G. Sarriot Abstract Sustainability continues to be a serious concern for Primary Health Care (PHC) interventions targeting the death of millions of children in developing countries each year. Our work with over 30 Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) implementing USAID's Child Survival and Health Grants Program (CSHGP)-funded projects revealed the need for a study to develop a framework for sustainability assessment in these projects. We surveyed NGO informants and project managers through semi-structured interviews and questionnaires. This paper summarizes our study findings. The NGOs share key values about sustainability, but are skeptical about approaches perceived as disconnected from field reality. In their experience, sustainable achievements occur through the interaction of capable local stakeholders and communities. This depends strongly on enabling conditions, which NGO projects should advance. Sustainability assessment is multidimensional, value-based and embeds health within a larger sustainable development perspective. It reduces, but does not eliminate, the unpredictability of long-term outcomes. It should start with the consideration of the ,local systems' which need to develop a common purpose. Our ability to address the complexity inherent to sustainability thinking rests with the validity of the models used to design interventions. A participant, qualitative research approach helped us make sense of sustainability in NGO field practice. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Descent with modification: the unity underlying homology and homoplasy as seen through an analysis of development and evolutionBIOLOGICAL REVIEWS, Issue 3 2003BRIAN K. HALL ABSTRACT Homology is at the foundation of comparative studies in biology at all levels from genes to phenotypes. Homology similarity because of common descent and ancestry, homoplasy is similarity arrived at via independent evolution However, given that there is but one tree of life, all organisms, and therefore all features of organisms, share degree of relationship and similarity one to another. That sharing may be similarity or even identity of structure the sharing of a most recent common ancestor,as in the homology of the arms of humans and apes,or it reflect some (often small) degree of similarity, such as that between the wings of insects and the wings of groups whose shared ancestor lies deep within the evolutionary history of the Metazoa. It may reflect sharing entire developmental pathways, partial sharing, or divergent pathways. This review compares features classified homologous with the classes of features normally grouped as homoplastic, the latter being convergence, parallelism, reversals, rudiments, vestiges, and atavisms. On the one hand, developmental mechanisms may be conserved, when a complete structure does not form (rudiments, vestiges), or when a structure appears only in some individuals (atavisms). On the other hand, different developmental mechanisms can produce similar (homologous) features Joint examination of nearness of relationship and degree of shared development reveals a continuum within expanded category of homology, extending from homology , reversals , rudiments , vestiges , atavisms , parallelism, with convergence as the only class of homoplasy, an idea that turns out to be surprisingly old. realignment provides a glimmer of a way to bridge phylogenetic and developmental approaches to homology homoplasy, a bridge that should provide a key pillar for evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo). It will and in a practical sense cannot, alter how homoplastic features are identified in phylogenetic analyses. But rudiments, reversals, vestiges, atavisms and parallelism as closer to homology than to homoplasy should guide toward searching for the common elements underlying the formation of the phenotype (what some have called deep homology of genetic and/or cellular mechanisms), rather than discussing features in terms of shared independent evolution. [source] Variances Are Not Always Nuisance ParametersBIOMETRICS, Issue 2 2003Raymond J. Carroll Summary In classical problems, e.g., comparing two populations, fitting a regression surface, etc., variability is a nuisance parameter. The term "nuisance parameter" is meant here in both the technical and the practical sense. However, there are many instances where understanding the structure of variability is just as central as understanding the mean structure. The purpose of this article is to review a few of these problems. I focus in particular on two issues: (a) the determination of the validity of an assay; and (b) the issue of the power for detecting health effects from nutrient intakes when the latter are measured by food frequency questionnaires. I will also briefly mention the problems of variance structure in generalized linear mixed models, robust parameter design in quality technology, and the signal in microarrays. In these and other problems, treating variance structure as a nuisance instead of a central part of the modeling effort not only leads to inefficient estimation of means, but also to misleading conclusions. [source] Reduction of a set of elementary modes using yield analysisBIOTECHNOLOGY & BIOENGINEERING, Issue 2 2009Hyun-Seob Song Abstract This article proposes a new concept termed "yield analysis" (YA) as a method of extracting a subset of elementary modes (EMs) essential for describing metabolic behaviors. YA can be defined as the analysis of metabolic pathways in yield space where the solution space is a bounded convex hull. Two important issues arising in the analysis and modeling of a metabolic network are handled. First, from a practical sense, the minimal generating set spanning the yield space is recalculated. This refined generating set excludes all the trivial modes with negligible contribution to convex hull in yield space. Second, we revisit the problem of decomposing the measured fluxes among the EMs. A consistent way of choosing the unique, minimal active modes among a number of possible candidates is discussed and compared with two other existing methods, that is, those of Schwartz and Kanehisa (Schwartz and Kanehisa, 2005. Bioinformatics 21: 204,205) and of Provost et al. (Provost et al., 2007. Proceedings of the 10th IFAC Symposium on Computer Application in Biotechnology, 321,326). The proposed idea is tested in a case study of a metabolic network of recombinant yeasts fermenting both glucose and xylose. Due to the nature of the network with multiple substrates, the flux space is split into three independent yield spaces to each of which the two-staged reduction procedure is applied. Through a priori reduction without any experimental input, the 369 EMs in total was reduced to 35 modes, which correspond to about 91% reduction. Then, three and four modes were finally chosen among the reduced set as the smallest active sets for the cases with a single substrate of glucose and xylose, respectively. It should be noted that the refined minimal generating set obtained from a priori reduction still provides a practically complete description of all possible states in the subspace of yields, while the active set covers only a specific set of experimental data. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2009;102: 554,568. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source] Recent progress in engineering ,/, hydrolase-fold family membersBIOTECHNOLOGY JOURNAL, Issue 2 2007Zhen Qian Abstract The members of the ,/, hydrolase-fold family represent a functionally versatile group of enzymes with many important applications in biocatalysis. Given the technical significance of ,/, hydrolases in processes ranging from the kinetic resolution of enantiomeric precursors for pharmaceutical compounds to bulk products such as laundry detergent, optimizing and tailoring enzymes for these applications presents an ongoing challenge to chemists, biochemists, and engineers alike. A review of the recent literature on ,/, hydrolase engineering suggests that the early successes of "random processes" such as directed evolution are now being slowly replaced by more hypothesis-driven, focused library approaches. These developments reflect a better understanding of the enzymes' structure-function relationship and improved computational resources, which allow for more sophisticated search and prediction algorithms, as well as, in a very practical sense, the realization that bigger is not always better. [source] | ||||||||||