Midcourse Corrections to a Major Initiative: A Report on The James Irvine Foundation's CORAL Experience

Draws lessons from the reorientation of the Communities Organizing Resources to Advance Learning (CORAL) Initiative, a $60 million initiative aimed at improving educational achievement in low-performing schools in five California cities

Constraint specification by example in a Meta-CASE tool

CASE tools are very helpful to software engineers in different ways and in different phases of software development. However, they are not easy to specialise to meet the needs of particular application domains or particular software modelling requirements. Meta-CASE tools offer a way of providing such specialisation by enabling a designer to specify a tool which is then generated automatically. Constraints are often used in such meta-CASE tools as a technique for governing the syntax and semantics of model elements and the values of their attributes. However, although constraint definition is a difficult process it has attracted relatively little research attention. The PhD research described here presents an approach for improving the process of CASE tool constraint specification based on the notion of programming by example (or demonstration). The feasibility of the approach will be demonstrated via experiments with a prototype using the meta-CASE tool Diagram Editor Constraints System (DECS) as context

Investing, Improving, and Measuring Workplace Skills

Despite evidence that workplace literacy programs can be effective at improving the lives of workers and the bottom line of businesses, the lack of a dedicated funding source is likely to diminish the number and/or capacity of these programs significantly. Still, the growing skills gap facing the nation creates an ongoing imperative that the Congress and the federal government continue to fund strategies that are aimed specifically at upgrading the literacy and technical skills of the workforce. This paper describes some of the economic and demographic factors that impact program strategies; draws on recent research on promising programmatic and system strategies for concurrently addressing the needs of workers and businesses; and concludes with a set of recommendations for policymakers to consider that, if implemented, would support these strategies

Agile development for a multi-disciplinary bicycle stability test bench

Agile software development methods are used extensively in the software industry. This paper describes an argument to explain why these methods can be used within a multi-disciplinary project and provides a concrete description on how to implement such a method, using a case-study to support the rationale. The SOFIE (Intelligent Assisted Bicycle) project was created to develop mechatronic appliances to make bicycles more stable, i.e. safer. A bicycle stability test bench is created within this project and is used as the case study for this research. The relative complexity of the test bench development and partner structure within the SOFIE project has many similarities with large-scale complex projects found in industry. Thus it provides a good environment to research the application of Agile software methods to a multi-disciplinary project