The last decade has seen decline in the fortunes of the Library and Information Science (LIS) sector in the United Kingdom (UK), both in professional practice and in higher education. This paper sets out to assess the health and wellbeing of LIS teaching and research and to identify key strategies for its future survival. Over the past decade many…

The purpose of this study is to investigate into the acute and perennial under-representation of women in Nigerian Politics. In Nigeria women make up half of the population and they have been known to have contributed in no small measure to the development and sustenance of the society yet they are hardly there in the political scene. We have…

Panda-hugger and dragon-slayer are phrases used to describe two different kinds of China-watchers, and increasingly, two different types of people in the general public. A panda-hugger is someone who says that almost everything going on in China is good, that China's progress is a great thing for the world, and that any problems are peripheral. A…

Background: Youth participation (or lack thereof) has been a subject of continued concern over the past 20 years. This decline has prompted huge interest in understanding how young people practice citizenship and in identifying measures that can help increase participation and interest. Purpose: The aim of this article is to examine how young…

This article examines the racial diversity of the teacher population in Canada. In particular, we compare the number of teachers of colour in Canadian elementary and secondary schools from the 2001 and 2006 Census data with the diversity of the student and general populations. We also explore ways to understand the gap between the proportion of…

This article investigates enrolment trends in mathematical sciences in Australian universities. Data has been difficult to extract and the coding for mathematical disciplines has made investigation challenging. We show that the number of mathematics major undergraduates in Australia is steadily declining though the number studying…

Social institutions that have been around for thousands of years generally change slowly, when they change at all. But that's not the way things have been playing out with marriage and family since the middle of the 20th Century. Some scholars argue that in the past five decades, the basic architecture of these age-old institutions has changed as…

We performed a secondary analysis of the data collected by the Observatory of the North-West (a mail panel representative of the Italian population over 18), describing the trends in the distribution of fear of crime (FC) and of concern about crime as a social problem (CC) in Italy between the end of 2002 and the beginning of 2004. After analyzing…

Scholars of Israeli children's literature have recently noticed an interesting socio-literary phenomenon: the emergence of an entirely new branch in Israeli children's literature, namely ultra-orthodox children's literature. The books belonging to this special category are easily distinguished from "regular" Israeli children's books by…

The author reviews the history of international concerns regarding disabled persons, and suggests that a prime reason for society's discrimination and rejection of the disabled is fear. He describes the emphasis in the United States on rights and independence of disabled people and asserts that each country must build upon its own traditions,…

Three demographic rates and the social reality they measure signify important, continuing changes in the Swedish family. As compared with the rest of the industrial world, the Swedish now have the lowest marriage rate, the highest non-marital cohabitation rate, and possibly the highest family dissolution rate. Contents of this article focus on the…

The result of trips by American special educators to Italy in 1984 and 1986, this paper reviews laws, public policy, and events in Italy's recent history leading to widespread desegregation of the disabled special schools and other institutions. The review of legislation focuses on National Law 517 (1977) with such specified strategies for pupil…

A brief history of care for handicapped individuals on Guam is traced from early refusal to acknowledge their existence, to their increased visibility and current efforts toward least restrictive placement for education and care. It is explained that societal attitudes toward the handicapped in Guam are characterized by pity, neglect and repulsion…

First in a series of seven volumes containing the proceedings of the 1983 Australian Family Research Conference, this publication deals with the formation, structure, and values of family life in Australia. Papers and authors included are: "Priorities in Family Research and Family Law" (Gareth Evans), "The Baby Boom Generation as…

The document presents the text of a speech comparing American and German attitudes toward history, followed by a discussion of issues raised in the speech by conference participants. The first part of the speech identifies aspects of American and German history which are of importance to citizens of each country. American history is characterized…