Assessment in vocational programmes in the further education sector in England: report from the Inspectorate (National survey report, January 1995)

This national survey report is concerned with the assessment of students attending all types of vocational education and training programmes offered by further education sector colleges in England. The impact of National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) and General National Vocational Qualifications (GNVQs) on assessment practices in colleges is also examined. Previous reports from the inspectorate include two national survey reports: National Vocational Qualifications in the Further Education Sector in England, September 1994, and General National Vocational Qualifications in the Further Education Sector in England, November 1994

Geometrical Product Specification and Verification as toolbox to meet up-to-date technical requirements

The ISO standards for the Geometrical Product Specification and Verification (GPS) define an internationally uniform description language, that allows expressing unambiguously and completely all requirements for the geometry of a product with the corresponding requirements for the inspection process in technical drawings, taking into account current possibilities of measurement and testing technology. The practice shows that the university curricula of the mechanical engineering faculties often include only limited classes on the GPS, mostly as part of curriculum of subjects like Metrology or Fundamentals of Machine Design. This does not allow students to gain enough knowledge on the subject. Currently there is no coherent EU-wide provision for vocational training (VET) in this area. Consortium, members of which are the authors of this paper, is preparing a proposal of an EU project aiming to develop appropriate course

Binary Biometrics: An Analytic Framework to Estimate the Bit Error Probability under Gaussian Assumption

In recent years the protection of biometric data has gained increased interest from the scientific community. Methods such as the helper data system, fuzzy extractors, fuzzy vault and cancellable biometrics have been proposed for protecting biometric data. Most of these methods use cryptographic primitives and require a binary representation from the real-valued biometric data. Hence, the similarity of biometric samples is measured in terms of the Hamming distance between the binary vector obtained at the enrolment and verification phase. The number of errors depends on the expected error probability Pe of each bit between two biometric samples of the same subject. In this paper we introduce a framework for analytically estimating Pe under the assumption that the within-and between-class distribution can be modeled by a Gaussian distribution. We present the analytic expression of Pe as a function of the number of samples used at the enrolment (Ne) and verification (Nv) phases. The analytic expressions are validated using the FRGC v2 and FVC2000 biometric databases

The EU IUU Regulation: Building on success EU progress in the global fight against illegal fishing

As the world's largest import market for fish products, the European Union plays a pivotal role in reforming the global trade in fisheries products. This analysis charts the progress of the EU's efforts to shut out illegal catch and end IUU fishing.The Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF), Oceana, The Pew Charitable Trusts and WWF are working together to secure the harmonised and effective implementation of the EU Regulation to end illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing