What influences the emergence of a new subject in schools? The case of environmental education

New subjects are always emerging but only some gain a place in the formal school curriculum. In fact, most of the now accepted conventional school subjects have, at some stage, struggled to become established. This paper presents findings of a three-year study of teacher and school responses to the introduction of environmental education (EE) as a new subject within the Taiwan national curriculum. School leaders and teachers were interviewed the year prior to the introduction of the new curriculum and during the first two years of implementation. Findings substantiate the importance of six themes (such as examination status and a university pathway) raised in elaborations of the traditional Layton/Goodson model. However, the complex community-school relationships and the value accorded in EE to community-based and even global action, as opposed to academic outcomes, highlighted the need for curriculum policy makers to consider expanding the traditional model with another five themes and most importantly introducing three particular themes. When seeking to promote the emergence of a holistic and integrative subject such as environmental education there is a need to also consider local environment involvement, the transformative nature of EE within whole school involvement, and linkages with a national cooperation network. Without these factors it appears EE may struggle to gain a place in the curriculum

Finite Computational Structures and Implementations

What is computable with limited resources? How can we verify the correctness of computations? How to measure computational power with precision? Despite the immense scientific and engineering progress in computing, we still have only partial answers to these questions. In order to make these problems more precise, we describe an abstract algebraic definition of classical computation, generalizing traditional models to semigroups. The mathematical abstraction also allows the investigation of different computing paradigms (e.g. cellular automata, reversible computing) in the same framework. Here we summarize the main questions and recent results of the research of finite computation.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, will be presented at CANDAR'16 and final version published by IEEE Computer Societ

Promoting Handwashing and Sanitation: Evidence From a Large-Scale Randomized Trial in Rural Tanzania

This paper presents the results of two large-scale, government-led handwashing and sanitation promotion campaigns in rural Tanzania. Their results highlight the importance of focusing on intermediate outcomes of take-up and behavior change as a critical first step in large-scale programs before realizing the changes in health that sanitation and hygiene interventions aim to deliver

Fuzzy Content Mining for Targeted Advertisement

Content-targeted advertising system is becoming an increasingly important part of the funding source of free web services. Highly efficient content analysis is the pivotal key of such a system. This project aims to establish a content analysis engine involving fuzzy logic that is able to automatically analyze real user-posted Web documents such as blog entries. Based on the analysis result, the system matches and retrieves the most appropriate Web advertisements. The focus and complexity is on how to better estimate and acquire the keywords that represent a given Web document. Fuzzy Web mining concept will be applied to synthetically consider multiple factors of Web content. A Fuzzy Ranking System is established based on certain fuzzy (and some crisp) rules, fuzzy sets, and membership functions to get the best candidate keywords. Once it is has obtained the keywords, the system will retrieve corresponding advertisements from certain providers through Web services as matched advertisements, similarly to retrieving a products list from Amazon.com. In 87% of the cases, the results of this system can match the accuracy of the Google Adwords system. Furthermore, this expandable system will also be a solid base for further research and development on this topic