Review of Gaelic medium early education and childcare

The National Plan for Gaelic 2007-2012 contains ambitious targets for the expansion of Gaelic medium (GM) primary school education, aiming for 4000 children enrolled in P1 by 2021. GM early years education and childcare plays a crucial role in attracting parents to the 'Gaelic system' and the great majority of children who enrol in GM primary have experienced GM preschool provision at nursery or playgroup. If the target numbers entering GM primary school are to be achieved then there will have to be a considerable expansion in the preschool sector too, given that there were just over 700 children enrolled in GM nurseries for session 2008-09. The National Plan includes a specific commitment to review GM early years education and childcare. The study reported here is a response to that call. It aims to clarify existing provision, identify gaps and make recommendations for changes or developments needed to ensure that the goals of the National Plan are achieved

The Arts Advantage: Expanding Arts Education in the Boston Public Schools

Presents findings from a survey on the availability of arts education in the city's public schools, relevant school traits, funding needs, and partners. Offers recommendations and strategies for a three-year expansion plan. Highlights best practices

The challenge of sustainable suburbia

This paper explores issues raised with the expansion of Milton Keynes and the dilemmas in seeking to plan for sustainable travel behaviour. The 1970 design of Milton Keynes was for a car-oriented low density land use pattern served by a one-kilometre grid of dual carriageway roads. Today, bus services in Milton Keynes are the poorest for any town of its size and the low density design makes most trips too long to walk and cycle. Hence Milton Keynes has a level of car use more characteristic of a rural shire than an aspiring city. Furthermore traffic is even starting to overwhelm the grid roads in a casebook SACTRA manner. Today the Plan for Milton Keynes would be viewed as environmentally irresponsible, economically extravagant and socially divisive, so proposals for the town’s expansion involve medium-density developments in new areas served not by 70 mph grid roads but 20-30mph ‘city streets’ with bus priority measures and maximising facilities within walking and cycling distance. These proposals have sparked a big local debate. A widespread view is that this will throw away what has made Milton Keynes good and economically successful, and many advocate retaining the ethos of a ‘city built for the car’. A counter expansion plan, backed by an e-petition, proposes a continuation of low density development and grid roads. This raises questions that have a generic application in the transport debate. Is there only one way for places like Milton Keynes to move towards transport sustainability? There seems to be a single model for transport sustainability based around high density living and traditional forms of public transport, but for the majority of suburban and semi-urban Britain perhaps more emphasis is needed on institutional initiatives rather than highly compact urban forms

Highligts of the contract year, 1 February 1974 to 31 January 1975

Two major marketing programs were initiated during 1974: (1) the unlimited search plan, and (2) the sales representative plan for northern California. The unlimited search plan was a six month program designed to offer clients multiple searches for a fixed fee. Although initial response was quite favorable, interest waned, and the plan was not renewed. Expansion and improvement of the on-line retrieval service continued. The ERIC thesaurus was added to the system. This thesaurus is an important acquisition as it gives the user greater flexibility in determining the best strategy for his search. Total terminal output time was reduced with a change to the direct access work file

The Kolmogorov Law of turbulence: what can rigorously be proved?

Conferencia plenaria por invitaciónWe define a mathematical framework in which we can specify the Reynolds decomposition and the correlation tensors of an incompressible locally homogeneous and isotropic turbulent flow. After having fixed the technical background and some probabilistic tools, we focus on the 2-order correlation tensor, which is the covariance matrix of the velocity vectors at two different points of the flow. We perform a Taylor expansion of this matrix when the two points are close to one another. We characterize the principal part of this expansion, for which we prove the law of the 2/3 by a mathematical similarity principle.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech. Conferencias plan propio de investigación de la UM

Whalesong

Athletic association supports UAJ growth in intercollegiate sports -- Library finally plays with full deck -- Editorials: Where have the farmlands gone? -- Guest editorial by Vern Metcalf: Pride expressed in UAJ's "phenomenal expansion." -- Channels -- Career counselor helps others plan lives -- Athletic association... -- Mini-course stretches minds and bodies -- SEAA to recognize SE HS athletes -- Alaska history classes begin -- Students call for tightening of loan program -- Fourth month entertainment -- Baleen cuisine -- Swimming once again availabl

Analysis of potential benefits of integrated-gasifier combined cycles for a utility system

Potential benefits of integrated gasifier combined cycle (IGCC) units were evaluated for a reference utility system by comparing long range expansion plans using IGCC units and gas turbine peakers with a plan using only state of the art steam turbine units and gas turbine peakers. Also evaluated was the importance of the benefits of individual IGCC unit characteristics, particularly unit efficiency, unit equivalent forced outage rate, and unit size. A range of IGCC units was analyzed, including cases achievable with state of the art gas turbines and cases assuming advanced gas turbine technology. All utility system expansion plans that used IGCC units showed substantial savings compared with the base expansion plan using the steam turbine units

Long-Run Cost Functions for Electricity Transmission

Electricity transmission has become the pivotal industry segment for electricity restructuring. Yet, little is known about the shape of transmission cost functions. Reasons for this can be a lack of consensus about the definition of transmission output and the complexitity of the relationship between optimal grid expansion and output expansion. Knowledge of transmission cost functions could help firms (Transcos) and regulators plan transmission expansion and could help design regulatory incentive mechanisms. We explore transmission cost functions when the transmission output is defined as point-to-point transactions or financial transmission right (FTR) obligations and particularly explore expansion under loop-flows. We test the behavior of FTR-based cost functions for distinct network topologies and find evidence that cost functions defined as FTR outputs are piecewise differentiable and that they contain sections with negative marginal costs. Simulations, however, illustrate that such unusual properties do not stand in the way of applying price-cap incentive mechanisms to real-world transmission expansion.Electricity transmission, cost function, incentive regulation, merchant investment, congestion management

Stepwise investment plan optimization for large scale and multi-zonal transmission system expansion

This paper develops a long term transmission expansion optimization methodology taking the probabilistic nature of generation and demand, spatial aspects of transmission investments and different technologies into account. The developed methodology delivers a stepwise investment plan to achieve the optimal grid expansion for additional transmission capacity between different zones. In this paper, the optimization methodology is applied to the Spanish and French transmission systems for long term optimization of investments in interconnection capacity

Impact of Forecast Errors on Expansion Planning of Power Systems with a Renewables Target

This paper analyzes the impact of production forecast errors on the expansion planning of a power system and investigates the influence of market design to facilitate the integration of renewable generation. For this purpose, we propose a stochastic programming modeling framework to determine the expansion plan that minimizes system-wide investment and operating costs, while ensuring a given share of renewable generation in the electricity supply. Unlike existing ones, this framework includes both a day-ahead and a balancing market so as to capture the impact of both production forecasts and the associated prediction errors. Within this framework, we consider two paradigmatic market designs that essentially differ in whether the day-ahead generation schedule and the subsequent balancing re-dispatch are co-optimized or not. The main features and results of the model set-ups are discussed using an illustrative four-node example and a more realistic 24-node case study