The University of Buckingham Press Journals
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COMMERCIAL ARBITRATION AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY DISPUTES
Get PDFAs late as the 1960s there was an old gentleman in once smart, but now shabby, clothes who paraded outside the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand, carrying a placard which read ‘ARBITRATE DON’T LITIGATE’. He was a famous character who had been around since the 1930s and he endeared himself to the judges who referred to him in several judgments. It is fair to say, however, that the old gentleman was usually referred to in order to make the point that, in the case before the court, his advice had been misleading because the arbitration had proved far more difficult and costly than proceeding by way of litigation in the courts.
Content Based Language Instruction practice and its challenges in TVET: the case of Bahir Dar polytechnic college, Bahir Dar, Ethiopia
No full textABSTRACTThe purpose of this study was to assess whether or not students and teachers were having positive attitude towards the practice of content based language instruction and to see the actual practice of it in TVET poly technic colleges. It was particularly meant to investigate students’ attitude towards the usefulness of the course, course contents, assessment and teacher’s competence. Teacher’s attitude towards the course and challenges of it if occurs were investigated. Moreover, the study was targeted to investigating the actual practice of teaching in three areas: students’ participation, teachers’ language skills and teachers’ skill in using instructional materials. The study was conducted in one Polytechnic College of Amhara Region. Generally, from the total number of 2909 trainees in four different levels; second year Level Three and Level Four trainees were purposefully selected. From the selected six departments (639 trainees), 185 were randomly selected. Regarding CBL teachers, no sample selection were needed for their number was small and easily manageable. So, the participant of the study were 6 teachers and 185 students in the college. The data were collected through questionnaire, observation and interview and the results were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. The result of the study revealed that students and teachers showed positive attitude towards the usefulness of CBL courses, course contents and course assessment. However, students had negative attitude towards teachers’ competence. And teachers’ actual practice revealed that teachers did not properly apply content based language instruction to bring the desired result. The study also indicated that there were problems for its implementation due to teachers’ lack of language skills and training. The combined responses of the participants (students and teachers) revealed that the students didn’t get benefit and this impact developed because of teachers’ incompetence to implement content based language instruction. Finally, it was concluded that CBLI was not implemented as it is desired. Therefore, concerned bodies should take various measures to ameliorate the challenges.
OFSTED V AL-HIJRAH, THE CASE OF SEGREGATED SCHOOLS AND SEX DISCRIMINATION
Get PDFThis case of HM Chief Inspector of Education, Children’s Services and Skills v The Interim Executive Board of Al-Hijrah School was the unfortunate outcome of an Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted) inspection which resulted in a cataclysmic breakdown in trust between the government agency and the Birmingham city based Al-Hijrah school. Following an Ofsted inspection carried out under section 5 of the Education Act 2005, the subsequent Report stated that the full segregation of female and male pupils in a mixed-sex school amounted to sex discrimination under the Equality Act 2010. Al-Hijrah School applied to the High Court for a judicial review of the report prior to its official publication. The High Court Justice considered a range of evidences including facts related to Ofsted procedure, and ruled that the segregation did not amount to a breach of the 2010 Act, as when taken as a group, the treatment of the boys and the girls was the same and so there was an absence of “less favourable treatment”.
Comparing the transformative potentials of the FCCC and the CCD: An ecofeminist exploration
Get PDFThis article undertakes a critical comparison and analysis of two environmental regimes – the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, Particularly in Africa – to explore their transformative potential. Drawing on Karen Warren’s ecofeminist ethics, the author compares and contrasts the ways in which these two regimes engage with the underlying institutional, structural, social and conceptual frameworks which ecofeminists argue contribute to the environmental degradation and the exploitation suffered by marginalised groups. She examines how marginalised communities have been involved in the evolution of the two regimes, the differing approaches towards science and technology, as well as the integration of differentiation within the two regimes. The author concludes that while both regimes have transformative potential, they both continue to affirm an ideological perspective that disembeds humanity from the environment, while at the same time commodifying nature in order to protect it
Behaviour of the Foreign Exchange Rates of BRICS: Is it Chaotic?
No full textThe article focuses on the behaviour of foreign exchange rates of BRICS countries in reference to US dollar with special emphasis on examining presence of nonlinear dependence and deterministic chaos. The findings did not indicate random walk behaviour in the returns for all exchange rates and performance of GARCH as well as EGARCH models are reasonably good in capturing the conditional volatility. Further evidences suggest existence of nonlinear dependence and we compute Maximal Lyapunov Exponent and Correlation Dimension test with multiple surrogate series which confirms the chaotic nature of the exchange rates for all countries under study except for South Africa. The findings support short run predictability in exchange rates while long run predictions are unlikely to be successful. The chaotic nature of the foreign exchange market calls for newer intervention mechanism by the Central Bank of the respective countries to limit the exchange rate volatility
THE LINGUISTIC REGISTER OF BRITISH PREPARATORY SCHOOLS IN ANTHONY BUCKERIDGE’S JENNINGS GOES TO SCHOOL
Get PDFThe unique language employed in many British Public Schools has long been noted; that of the Preparatory Schools from which the Public Schools mostly draw their pupils has generally been neglected.[1] Public School English is a feature of such popular sources as the novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) and has had formal analysis at least since 1900, the year of publication of Farmer’s Public School Word Book. By contrast, there are far fewer sources for the language of the Preparatory Schools. In Jennings Goes to School, novelist Anthony Buckeridge provides a surprisingly rich overview of this English linguistic Register as it was in the late 1940s. The Jennings Register is explored here through a Jennings word-list as an appendix to this article, and through discussion within this article of the Register in action. The Jennings Register looks in two directions. It is the primary source of Public School English and therefore of the dialect of British English associated with the Upper and Upper-Middle Classes. However, the Jennings Register surprises in that its sources are primarily Working Class and from popular culture, and in this respect it is a dialect of the Working Class. Preparatory School English therefore appears to provide a bridge between various class-based dialects of British English. It may be regarded as a linguistic and cultural unifier for Britain in the twentieth century.The structure of British Schools should perhaps be clarified. Public Schools are fee-charging schools, in contrast with State Schools which charge no fees. Public Schools include many of the most famous schools in Britain, perhaps in the world, for example Charterhouse, Eton, Harrow, Merchant Taylors’, Rugby, St Paul’s, Shrewsbury, Westminster and Winchester. Most are boarding schools, most were for boys only, and most provide education for ages 13-18. Fee-charging schools for the age range of (typically) 8-13 are called Preparatory Schools, and these are schools which prepare pupils for entry to the Public Schools
SFL- based Analysis of Thematic Structure of the Qurʾān (19:41-50): Some Reflections
Get PDFThe present study is an endeavor to explore applying Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to the oldest Arabic text (the Qurʾān). The study point of departure is the textual metafunction (of the Sura 19:41-50), focusing principally on thematic structure (Theme-Rheme) for its role first in organizing the linguistic resources of both the experiential and interpersonal meanings in text production; and secondly in message unfolding. The salient results are the followings: the use of the three types of Theme (i.e., textual, interpersonal and topical). The topical Theme, important in message unfolding, it is essentially realized by the verbal group in the declarative clause. By virtue of verbal inflection, the bound pronominal markers, expressing Subject in Mood system and the Participant in the transitivity system, expands Theme boundary to better reflect Arabic clause structure. As to Theme orientation, the semantic aspect of Theme function , it is seen that the interaction of the verbal-locution- projection, modalization of Theme, in particular, and other elements contributed to the saliency of interpersonal meanings. Though the Qurʾānic Arabic, of this narrative, lends itself for SFL analysis, the results should be interpreted as an approximation that needs further studies. That Theme, in this study, is register specific is too early to consider as comprehensive analysis of Qurʾānic narrative register is required to support these results. Finally, analyzing the Qurʾānic Arabic provides a support for SFL universality; and at the same time, SFL, as a sociosemiotic linguistic theory, offers new avenues to better understand the Qurʾānic texts in many ways
Using Machine Learning to Predict National Hockey League Average Home Game Attendance
No full textResearch predicting National Hockey League average attendance is presented. The seasons examined are the 2013 hockey season through the beginning of the 2017 hockey season. Multiple linear regression and three machine learning algorithms – random forest, M5 prime, and extreme gradient boosting – are employed to predict out-of-sample average home game attendance. Extreme gradient boosting generated the lowest out-of-sample root mean square error. The team identifier (team name), the number of Twitter followers (a surrogate for team popularity), median ticket price, and arena capacity have appeared as the top four predictor variables.
Market Efficiency and Fundamental Valuation. Evidence from the German Stock Exchange
No full textThe present paper tests whether the intrinsic value of firm, estimated with the residual income model (RIM), and the resulting value-to-price (V/P) ratio can explain the cross section of stocks returns. The study enhances the literature in the area of asset pricing by the introduction of a new intrinsic value risk factor in such a manner as to obtain a monotonic relation between risk and expected returns. Furthermore, we incorporate in the RIM, for the first time, a time series model that does not rely on analysts’ forecasts for the estimation of the key parameters of the model. A unique dataset from Germany is utilized, from 31/12/1989 to 30/6/2016, contributing by this way to the necessary accumulation of non-US research. The results show the existence for longer time periods of a V/P ratio effect that is persistent and cannot be explained by either the systematic risk, the size or the BE/ME ratio of the sample firms. The results of the regressions models indicated that the intrinsic value risk factor is positively related to stock returns and that it increases the explanatory power of the asset pricing models whenever it is explicitly included in them