Complexity, strategic thinking and organisational change

Comparative considerations of strategy from complexity paradigm and Newtonian paradigm perspectives are discussed in the light of three ideological dispositions towards the future. We term them defensive, opportunist, and goal oriented. Over the years, the strategy literature has identified a number of strategic archetypes (e.g. Miller and Freisen, 1978). What is interesting from our point of view is the patterns of reasoning that underpin them. The study of ideology has identified qualitative patterns of reasoning which underpin different types of strategic decision in both the fields of politics and strategic management. This paper considers three patterns of reasoning and considers how they relate to the complexity and Newtonian paradigms

Media Literacy: An Alternative to Censorship

Media literacy education has come a long way since the 1970s, when the first "critical thinking" courses were introduced in a few American schools. Most educators today understand that with the revolutionary changes in communication that have occurred in the last half-century, media literacy has become as essential a skill as the ability to read the printed word. Equally important, media literacy education can relieve the pressures for censorship that have, over the last decade, distorted the political process, threatened First Amendment values, and distracted policymakers from truly effective approaches to widely shared concerns about the mass media's influence on youth

Improving The Understanding Of The Arithmetic Concept Through Realistic Mathematic Education (RME)

This study aims to improve the arithmetic concept understanding of the second grade students of Percobaan 2 Yogyakarta elementary school through Realistic Mathematic Education (RME). This study was a classroom action research. This study was conducted in two cycles. The participants were the students and teacher of second grade (IIA) of Percobaan 2 Yogyakarta Elementary School. The data were collected by observation form, manual interview, and test. Observations were used to collect the data of the students’s activities in mathematics teaching and learning. The test was used to collect the data of the students’s arithmetic concept understanding. The results of the study show that RME improve the students’s arithmetic concept understanding of Percobaan 2 Yogyakarta Elementary School. There are the improvements of arithmetic concept understanding after doing mathematic teaching and learning through RME. The improvements are: (a) repeating a concept ability increases from 79.9798% to 84.3434%, (b) classifying objects according their characteristics increases from 70,9090% to 86.3636% , (c) giving the example and non-example ability increase from 94.8864% to 95.4545%, (d) presenting the concept in all of represented mathematics increases from 73.8634% to 89.3939%, (e) developing the sufficient and necessary condition ability of a concept increases from 46.9697% to 79.5454%, (f) Using and deciding a particular procedure increases from 71.9697% to 78.0303%, (g) aplying concept increases from 71.2121% to 78,7879%. Generally, the arithmetic concept understanding increases from 72.7273% to 85.0000%. Key words: arithmetic concept understanding, realistic mathematic educatio

Organic residues - a resource for arable soils

An increased recirculation of urban organic residues to arable soils has several environmental benefits, but there is a need for reliable test systems to ensure that soil quality is maintained. In this thesis, soil microbial, chemical and physical properties were included in an integrated evaluation to reflect the positive and negative effects of amending arable soils with organic residues. Efficient statistical tools and methods to describe intrinsic spatial variation are important when evaluating soil data. A new method was developed, combining near infrared reflectance (NIR) spectroscopy with principal component analysis (PCA). The first principal component (PC1) of NIR data described spatial soil variation better than the conventional soil variables total carbon, clay content and pH. A long-term field trial was established in which the soil was amended annually with organic residues (compost, biogas residues, sewage sludge) and fertilizers (pig manure, cow manure and mineral fertilizer, NPS). Annual measurements of soil and crop quality as well as yield revealed that biogas residues performed best among the organic residues. It improved several important microbiological properties, such as substrate-induced respiration (SIR) and potential ammonium oxidation (PAO), and it compared well with mineral fertilizer in terms of grain quality and harvest yield. Altogether, the results from the field trial showed no negative effects from any of the organic residues. Short- and moderately long-term effects of wood ash and compost on potential denitrification activity (PDA) and PAO were evaluated in a laboratory incubation experiment. Wood ash application had a profound toxic effect on PDA both in the short- and long-term. This toxic effect was mitigated when compost was added to the soil

The quality and relevance of staff training to deliver adult basic education (ABE) and English for speakers of other languages (ESOL)

"This report is published in response to a request in the annual Ministerial remit to Estyn for 2009-2010 to evaluate the quality and relevance of staff training to deliver ABE and ESOL... Evidence is taken from questionnaires, inspection reports, interviews with teachers and trainers and meetings with providers of national training initiatives." - introduction

An A Posteriori Error Indicator for Discontinuous Galerkin Approximations of Fourth Order Elliptic Problems

We introduce a residual-based a posteriori error indicator for discontinuous Galerkin discretizations of the biharmonic equation with essential boundary conditions. We show that the indicator is both reliable and efficient with respect to the approximation error measured in terms of a natural energy norm, under minimal regularity assumptions. We validate the performance of the indicator within an adaptive mesh refinement procedure and show its asymptotic exactness for a range of test problems

Moore, Melinda (FA 913)

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 913. Project titled: “Collecting Project.” Project includes note cards with brief descriptions of folk beliefs in Indiana. Note cards include a brief description, informant’s name, and the motif index number