Ogbu and the debate on educational achievement: an exploration of the links between education, migration, identity and belonging

This paper looks at some of the issues raised by Ogbu’s work in relation to the education of different minority ethnic groups. Ogbu poses questions such as the value attached to education, its links to the future and its measurable outcomes in terms of ‘success’ as experienced by black participants. The desire for better life chances leads families to consider migration to a new country or resettlement within the same country, thus making migration both a local and a global phenomenon. As an example, attention is drawn to the situation facing South Asian children and their families in the UK. In terms of ethnicity and belonging, the wider question that is significant for many countries in the West after ‘Nine-Eleven’ is the education of Muslim children. A consideration of this current situation throws Ogbu’s identification of ‘autonomous minority’ into question. It is argued that a greater understanding of diverse needs has to be accompanied by a concerted effort to confront racism and intolerance in schools and in society, thus enabling all communities to make a useful contribution and to avoid the ‘risk’ of failure and disenchantment

On Links To Be: Exercises in Style #2

This contribution extends the discussion of the types and uses of links bootstrapped by Mason and Bernstein’s “On Links: Exercises in Style”, focusing on how authors use marginalia and annotations as links to the future. We argue that the development of a common semantics of “links to be” is needed in order to systematise individual authorial practices, provide greater interpretive understanding for readers and enable the development of new tools. We present examples on different types of annotations from the Holographic Vernon Lee project (HoL) and provide our own exercises to formulate a preliminary framework of links to be

Investment in Rural Broadband Technologies

Internet use has grown rapidly over the last two decades and so has the digital economy’s integration into the rural economy. Connecting to the Internet via high-speed technology such as DSL lines, cable, satellite, and wireless networks increases bandwidth and makes the Internet much more useful to businesses, households, and governments. Rural communities have not been left out of the ever changing Information economy, though there has been an issue of equal access across the rural-urban milieu, but what is driving the investment of broadband Internet technologies in rural areas. We use recently collected data on broadband availability and historical economic and demographic data in our exploration of causal relationships. We use logistic regressions and the geographic levels of measurement are county and sub-county areas. Our analysis, consistent with profit-maximizing firm behavior, clearly shows the effect of population density and per capita income levels have on industry investment and indicate the challenges rural communities have in obtaining and maintaining modern Internet access.

Improving Knowledge-Based Systems with statistical techniques, text mining, and neural networks for non-technical loss detection

Currently, power distribution companies have several problems that are related to energy losses. For example, the energy used might not be billed due to illegal manipulation or a breakdown in the customer’s measurement equipment. These types of losses are called non-technical losses (NTLs), and these losses are usually greater than the losses that are due to the distribution infrastructure (technical losses). Traditionally, a large number of studies have used data mining to detect NTLs, but to the best of our knowledge, there are no studies that involve the use of a Knowledge-Based System (KBS) that is created based on the knowledge and expertise of the inspectors. In the present study, a KBS was built that is based on the knowledge and expertise of the inspectors and that uses text mining, neural networks, and statistical techniques for the detection of NTLs. Text mining, neural networks, and statistical techniques were used to extract information from samples, and this information was translated into rules, which were joined to the rules that were generated by the knowledge of the inspectors. This system was tested with real samples that were extracted from Endesa databases. Endesa is one of the most important distribution companies in Spain, and it plays an important role in international markets in both Europe and South America, having more than 73 million customers

Wireless communication techniques, the right path to smart grid distribution systems: A review

The quality and reliability of electric power supply are the key_index_factors in the development of a society. However, most of issues of worry are in the distribution system (DS), which, in the newest designs of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system is being monitored by a central computer (CC). The CC in a DS is supplied by electronic devices, named Feeder_Remote Terminal_Units (FRTU), with operation data like current and voltage. The FRTUs found throughout the DS have the capabilities to start triggering actions to separate the portion of DS suffering an abnormal condition. However, the present grid suffers from its one way data communication installations. To address the challenges of the existing power grids, the use of the innovative communication technologies that have emerged over the recent past years along with wireless sensor network (WSN) play a fundamental role—leading eventually to the creation of smart grid Systems. This paper reviews the development of wireless communication technologies envisioned as full-duplex information exchange medium in the on-going discussion of Smart Grid Systems