The Disenchanted Assembly: The Consultation on Religious Observance in Scottish Schools
This article explores issues of social inclusion, social cohesion, culture and identity in education. The medium through which these themes are addressed is a critical analysis of the consultation on religious observance in Scottish schools. The consultation took place between November 2002 and March 2003, under the aegis of the Religious Observance Review Group (RORG). The written and oral submissions to the consultation were analysed by a research team based in The SCRE Centre in the Faculty of Education at the University of Glasgow. The consultation exercise generated a large number of responses — over 1,400. This is considerably in excess of the number of responses to other recent consultations, and is a measure of the level of public interest generated by the consultation. For example, the consultation exercise launched in the autumn of 2002 by the Expert Panel on School Meals generated a total of 208 responses (Lowden and Pirrie 2002).
A Very Scottish Affair: Catholic education and the State
This paper draws on key features of Scottish religious and political history as the backdrop to understanding the very particular place occupied by Catholic education in Scotland. This place, it is suggested, is quite different from that of religiously denominated schooling in other parts of the United Kingdom and is subject to a more comprehensive and sustained critique from politicians, academics and the media. Some of the criticisms levelled partake in general philosophical criticisms of publicly funded denominational schooling but are refracted through the lens of Scottish cultural history. The paper outlines three key issues worthy of reflection—divisiveness, church rights to approval of teachers and identity within the polity. It goes on to suggest that much of the opposition to the continued existence of such schools has philosophically and empirically weak foundations but that for Catholic schooling to continue to make a meaningful contribution to the polity it must remain ethically and culturally distinctive, while developing a self-critical sense and a willingness to be involved in the wider public conversation.
Thermal incompatibility analysis of metal-ceramic systems based on flexural displacement data.
The feasibility of simple tests or analytical methods for prediction of residual stress states in metal-ceramic (MC) prostheses has not been demonstrated. Biomaterial metal-ceramic strips have been proposed to provide sensitive measures of transient and residual stress states through the measurement of midpoint deflection after cooling from the ceramic sintering temperature. The objective of this study was to apply the elastic-viscoelastic analogy to calculate transient and residual midpoint deflections in MC biomaterial strips and to compare these values with deflections measured with a beam-bending viscometer (BBV). Calculations and measurements were made for five MC systems that were found from a clinical study to be "thermally compatible" systems. Metal strips, 64 mm in length, 3 mm wide, and either 0.5 mm, 1.0 mm, or 2.0 mm in thickness, were veneered with four 0.25-mm thick layers of opaque porcelain. Midpoint deflection of the MC strips (ceramic oriented in the posterior position) was measured during cooling from an initial temperature of 700 degrees C. In general, the directions of the measured residual deflections did not agree with the "textbook" convention that negative deflections are associated with positive thermal contraction mismatch (alpha(M) - alpha(c) > 0) regardless of metal thickness. For a metal thickness of 0.5 mm, the residual midpoint deflection for all thermal contraction mismatch cases, except one, was positive (upward deflection) whereas the residual midpoint deflections were all negative when the metal thickness was increased to 1 or 2 mm, independent of the thermal contraction mismatch. The best agreement between calculated and measured values of residual midpoint deflection (+16 microns vs. +14 +/- 2.3 microns, respectively was obtained for MC biomaterial strips with a Ni-Cr alloy (0.5 mm thick) while the largest difference (+346 microns vs. +61 +/- 43.8 microns) was obtained for MC bimaterial strips with a Au-Pd allow (0.5 mm thick). In all but one case, changes in deflection direction as a function of metal thickness were correctly predicted by the viscoelastic analysis. The results of this study indicate that a viscoelastic model is useful for estimating thermal compatibility conditions of MC systems.