103,223 research outputs found
Pilot Evaluation of the Mexican Model of Dual TVET in the State of Mexico
Since the first public announcement of the Mexican Model of Dual TVET (MMFD) in June 2013, more than 5,000 apprentices have enrolled in the programme and around 2,000 already graduated. The Ministry of Education (SEP and CONALEP), the Chambers of Commerce (i.e. COPARMEX) and the German Cooperation Agencies (i.e. CAMEXA) have been collaborating with state authorities, families, schools and companies to turn this initial idea into a significant and sustainable initiative. Although the numbers are still small, it seemed necessary to undertake a pilot evaluation study of the implementation and impact of this program on its participants to inform those responsible for this policy. We decided to focus our study on the State of Mexico because of the higher number of apprentices in this state and because of the access that the CONALEP authorities gave us to the informants.
The report that you are about to read is structured in four main sections. In the first one we reviewed the international evidence on the experiences of policy transfer of Dual TVET. Transferring international good practice sin TVET is always a complex process that requires careful attention to the experiences and lessons from those that tried to do it before. In the second section, we present the main characteristics of the Mexican Model of Dual TVET and the specificities of its implementation in the State of Mexico. In a federal country like Mexico, it is important to understand that national policies may largely vary across states in terms of design and implementation. The third section outlines the methodology of the study, which is inspired by the realist evaluation principles. Realist evaluation, not only tries to measure the impact of interventions on beneficiaries, but also to understand the causal mechanisms that explain why this policy is more effective in certain contexts and with certain beneficiary populations than in others. In the final section, the results of the interviews and the survey with 25 apprentices that completed their studies under the MMFD in the State of Mexico are presented. Obviously, the reduced sample of the study limits the representativeness of our findings but it will offer some expected and unexpected results that should not be ignored by those involved in this policy in the State of Mexico and nationally
An Institutional Framework for Heterogeneous Formal Development in UML
We present a framework for formal software development with UML. In contrast
to previous approaches that equip UML with a formal semantics, we follow an
institution based heterogeneous approach. This can express suitable formal
semantics of the different UML diagram types directly, without the need to map
everything to one specific formalism (let it be first-order logic or graph
grammars). We show how different aspects of the formal development process can
be coherently formalised, ranging from requirements over design and Hoare-style
conditions on code to the implementation itself. The framework can be used to
verify consistency of different UML diagrams both horizontally (e.g.,
consistency among various requirements) as well as vertically (e.g.,
correctness of design or implementation w.r.t. the requirements)
Implementation of a Port-graph Model for Finance
In this paper we examine the process involved in the design and
implementation of a port-graph model to be used for the analysis of an
agent-based rational negligence model. Rational negligence describes the
phenomenon that occurred during the financial crisis of 2008 whereby investors
chose to trade asset-backed securities without performing independent
evaluations of the underlying assets. This has contributed to motivating the
search for more effective and transparent tools in the modelling of the capital
markets.
This paper shall contain the details of a proposal for the use of a visual
declarative language, based on strategic port-graph rewriting, as a visual
modelling tool to analyse an asset-backed securitisation market.Comment: In Proceedings TERMGRAPH 2018, arXiv:1902.0151
Changing boundaries and meanings of middle class houses in Sri Lanka
Houses are distinctively organised spatial networks that embody social norms and meaning of a given culture. Normally it is accepted that visually identifiable house ‘types’ which also closely fit the culture of a group are adopted by society. In Sri Lanka, there was popular house ‘types’ among the middle class until about 1980. Today, house forms of the middle class are diverse with apparent new trends in recent years. If contemporary middle class house forms are not visually characterized by type/s, how does ‘culture’ influence house form? This paper explores whether there are ‘types’ with distinctive spatial networks among the diverse house forms and the nature of embodied social norms. In the context of apparent change, such exploration advances the understanding of the association of house form and culture for the contemporary society of Sri Lanka.
By using space syntax analysis, this paper argues that although eclectic in visual appearance, middle class houses share a cultural ‘gene’ in their spatial configuration as a ‘genotype’ that operate beneath the visual. Analysis of forty houses revealed that an older genotype named as the O model is diminishing and that a new genotype named as the M model had stabilised after 1980. The contemporary ‘genotype’ classifies space to accommodate meanings of a new everyday home life. The older genotype which classified space to accommodate meaning of a by-gone lifestyle is no longer popular. The negotiation between the new genotype and heterogeneous phenotypes allow for the affirming of class solidarities in new ways in contemporary Sri Lank
The role of regional institutional entrepreneurs in the emergence of clusters in nanotechnologies
In the case of new technologies like nanotechnology, institutional entrepreneurs appear who have to act at different levels (organizational, regional, national) at the same time. We reconstruct, in some detail, the history of two cases, in Grenoble and in Twente/Netherlands. An intriguing finding is that institutional entrepreneurs build their environment before changing their institution. They first mobilize European support to convince local and national levels before actual cluster building occurs. Only later will there be reactions against any de-institutionalisation caused at the base location. The Dutch case shows another notable finding: when mobilizing support the entrepreneur will have to agree to further conditions, and then ends up in a different situation (a broad national consortium) than originally envisaged (the final cluster involved a collaboration of Twente with two other centres). In general, an institutional entrepreneur attempts to create momentum, and when this is achieved, he has to follow rather than lead it.INSTITUTIONAL ENTREPRENEUR; DEINSTITUTIONALISATION; CLUSTER; LOCATION; EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES; PROMISE; NANOTECHNOLOGY
The covering radius problem for sets of perfect matchings
Consider the family of all perfect matchings of the complete graph
with vertices. Given any collection of perfect matchings of
size , there exists a maximum number such that if ,
then there exists a perfect matching that agrees with each perfect matching in
in at most edges. We use probabilistic arguments to give
several lower bounds for . We also apply the Lov\'asz local lemma to
find a function such that if each edge appears at most times
then there exists a perfect matching that agrees with each perfect matching in
in at most edges. This is an analogue of an extremal result
vis-\'a-vis the covering radius of sets of permutations, which was studied by
Cameron and Wanless (cf. \cite{cameron}), and Keevash and Ku (cf. \cite{ku}).
We also conclude with a conjecture of a more general problem in hypergraph
matchings.Comment: 10 page
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