Quality Enhancement Themes: the First Year Experience. Curriculum Design for the First Year

This report outlines the work and outcomes of a practice-focused development project 'Curriculum design for the first year'. The project was one of nine funded by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) under the First-Year Experience Enhancement Theme of the Scottish quality enhancement agenda. The stages of this curriculum design project included: completing a literature review; running staff workshops to gather and disseminate information; holding student focus groups to gather students, views and experiences of the curriculum; collecting case studies of interest to the sector; and reporting findings to the sector. Key findings from the literature are presented in this report. They include the need to adopt student-centred active learning strategies (Harvey, Drew and Smith, 2006; Oliver-Hoyo and Allen, 2005; Barefoot, 2002) and the importance of providing early formative feedback to students (Davidson and Young, 2005; Barefoot, 2002). Many suggestions for improving learning and teaching strategies have been adopted at module level, but could be implemented strategically across the breadth of a programme curriculum. Kift and Nelson (2005) supported this view and argued that it is equally important to support these principles with systemic university-wide change, including administrative and support programmes that are also integrated with the curriculum and student needs

Modeling Players with Random "Data Access"

I present an approach to static equilibrium modeling with non-rational expectations, which is based on enriching players’ typology. A player is characterized by his “data access”, consisting of: (i) “news access”, which corresponds to a conventional signal in the Harsanyi model, and (ii) “archival access”, a novel component representing the player’s piecemeal knowledge of steady-state correlations. Drawing on prior literature on correlation neglect and coarse reasoning, I assume the player extrapolates a well-specified probabilistic belief from his “archival data” according to the maximum-entropy criterion. I show with a series of examples how this formalism extends our ability to represent and analyze strategic interactions without rational expectations

The Visualization and Representation of Electroacoustic Music

In Chapters 1 and 2 there are definitions and a review of electroacoustic music, and then visualization generally and as applied to music. Chapter 3 is a review of specific and relevant literature as regards to the visualization of electroacoustic music. Chapter 4 introduces the concepts of imagining as opposed to discovering new sound, and what is important to this research about these terms; in addition what is meant and indicated by them. Chapter 5 deals with the responses that composers currently working have made to the enquiry concerning visualization. In this chapter these responses are dealt with as case studies. In a similar way, Chapter 6 looks at some examples of historical work in electroacoustic music, again as case studies. In Chapter 7 a taxonomical structure for the use of visualization in electroacoustic composition is established and derived from the case study results. Chapter 8 looks at relevant examples of software and how they offer visualization case studies. Chapter 9 looks at the place of the archive in various stages of the compositional process. Chapter 10 investigates the problems of visualizing musical timbre as possible evidence for future strategies. Chapter 11 offers some conclusions and implications as to the main research questions, as well as more specific outlines of potential strategies for the visualization of electroacoustic music

Deciphering infant mortality. Part 1: empirical evidence

This paper is not (or at least not only) about human infant mortality. In line with reliability theory, "infant" will refer here to the time interval following birth during which the mortality (or failure) rate decreases. This definition provides a systems science perspective in which birth constitutes a sudden transition which falls within the field of application of the "Transient Shock" (TS) conjecture put forward in Richmond et al. (2016c). This conjecture provides predictions about the timing and shape of the death rate peak. (i) It says that there will be a death rate spike whenever external conditions change abruptly and drastically. (ii) It predicts that after a steep rising there will be a much longer hyperbolic relaxation process. These predictions can be tested by considering living organisms for which birth is a multi-step process. Thus, for fish there are three states: egg, yolk-sac phase, young adult. The TS conjecture predicts a mortality spike at the end of the yolk-sac phase, and this timing is indeed confirmed by observation. Secondly, the hyperbolic nature of the relaxation process can be tested using high accuracy Swiss statistics which give postnatal death rates from one hour after birth up to the age of 10 years. It turns out that since the 19th century despite a great overall reduction in infant mortality, the shape of the age-specific death rate has remained basically unchanged. This hyperbolic pattern is not specific to humans. It can also be found in small primates as recorded in the archives of zoological gardens. Our ultimate objective is to set up a chain of cases which starts from simple systems and then moves up step by step to more complex organisms. The cases discussed here can be seen as initial landmarks.Comment: 46 pages, 14 figures, 4 table

CryptoVerif: a Computationally-Sound Security Protocol Verifier (Initial Version with Communications on Channels)

This document presents the security protocol verifier CryptoVerif.CryptoVerif does not rely on the symbolic, Dolev-Yao model, but on the computational model. It can verify secrecy, correspondence (which include authentication), and indistinguishability properties. It produces proofs presented as sequences of games, like those manually written by cryptographers; these games are formalized in aprobabilistic process calculus. CryptoVerif provides a generic method for specifying security properties of the cryptographic primitives.It produces proofs valid for any number of sessions of the protocol, and provides an upper bound on the probability of success of an attack against the protocol as a function of the probability of breaking each primitive and of the number of sessions. It can work automatically, or the user can guide it with manual proof indications

Verifying Accountability for Unbounded Sets of Participants

Little can be achieved in the design of security protocols without trusting at least some participants. This trust should be justified; or, at the very least, subject to examination. A way of strengthening trustworthiness is to hold parties accountable for their actions, as this provides strong incentives to refrain from malicious behavior. This has lead to an increased interest in accountability in the design of security protocols. In this work, we combine the accountability definition of K\"unnemann, Esiyok, and Backes, with the notion of case tests to extend its applicability to protocols with unbounded sets of participants. We propose a general construction of verdict functions and a set of verification conditions which achieve soundness and completeness. Expressing the verification conditions in terms of trace properties allows us to extend Tamarin---a protocol verification tool---with the ability to analyze and verify accountability properties in a highly automated way. In contrast to prior work, our approach is significantly more flexible and applicable to a wide range of protocols.Comment: 40 page

Gating as exclusionary commoning in a post-socialist city

New-build gated condominiums at the periphery of a post-socialist city are a well-studied phenomenon. However, in Poland, recent years have seen an expansion of residential gating into old inner-city neighbourhoods and socialist large housing estates. The resulting fragmentation and privatisation of public space have raised much controversy and debate on appropriation of urban common good. This paper presents outcomes of a research on the changing discourse of gating in Gdańsk, based on a discourse analysis of newspaper articles and interviews with key urban stakeholders. On the one hand, gating is seen as an anti-commoning practice criticised for its elitist character and undesirable socio-spatial consequences. On the other, a narrative of exclusionary commons has emerged to justify the need of gating in specific cases. Considering the varying motivations and types of gating in different urban areas, the authors have attempted a classification, relating gating practices to commoning strategies and their justification in localities typically characterised by atomistic individualism and social disintegration

What Will Be Already Exists: Temporalities of Cold War Archives in East-Central Europe and Beyond

How do artist archives survive and stay authentic in radically changed contexts? The volume addresses the challenge of continuity, sustainability, and institutionalization of archives established by Eastern European artists. At its center stands the 40th anniversary of the Artpool Art Research Center founded in 1979 in Budapest as an underground institution based on György Galántai's "Active Archive" concept. Ten internationally renowned scholars propose contemporary interpretations of this concept and frame artist archives not as mere sources of art history but as models of self-historicization. The contributions give knowledgeable insights into the transition of Cold War art networks and institutional landscapes

What Will Be Already Exists

How do artist archives survive and stay authentic in radically changed contexts? The volume addresses the challenge of continuity, sustainability, and institutionalization of archives established by Eastern European artists. At its center stands the 40th anniversary of the Artpool Art Research Center founded in 1979 in Budapest as an underground institution based on György Galántai's »Active Archive« concept. Ten internationally renowned scholars propose contemporary interpretations of this concept and frame artist archives not as mere sources of art history but as models of self-historicization. The contributions give knowledgeable insights into the transition of Cold War art networks and institutional landscapes