Timor leste collaborative project: a short report

This report discusses findings from a small-scale scoping study, which is part of a larger curriculum project—a collaborative venture between staff from the Universidade Nacional Timor Lorosa'e (UNTL) and a New Zealand university. The aim of the wider project is to develop a context-sensitive English language curriculum for students at UNTL who are undergoing pre-service training to be teachers of English as a foreign language in local secondary schools. (Details of the institutional and linguistic context are provided in the appendix.) According to Norton (2000), investment by learners is a key factor in the successful implementation of a new curriculum: "if learners invest in a second language, they do so with the understanding that they will acquire a wider range of symbolic and material resources, which will increase their value in the social world" (Norton, 2000, pp. 165-166). Thus, when designing the curriculum, it is important to ensure that the students will not only understand how to use the specific learning tasks but that it also expands their repertoire of skills and knowledge for application in their subsequent professional and social lives. The report begins by outlining the history and objectives of the project before explaining the specific research questions posed for the scoping study. The means of collecting data will be outlined and examples of the participants' attitudes will be presented based on open-ended questionnaire responses. These findings will be discussed in terms of how they might lead to the design of a curriculum which is internationally-framed and context-sensitive in terms both of its content and implementation. The report will conclude with the further steps that are being taken to move the project to its next phase

Computed Chaos or Numerical Errors

Discrete numerical methods with finite time-steps represent a practical technique to solve initial-value problems involving nonlinear differential equations. These methods seem particularly useful to the study of chaos since no analytical chaotic solution is currently available. Using the well-known Lorenz equations as an example, it is demonstrated that numerically computed results and their associated statistical properties are time-step dependent. There are two reasons for this behavior. First, chaotic differential equations are unstable so that any small error is amplified exponentially near an unstable manifold. The more serious and lesser-known reason is that stable and unstable manifolds of singular points associated with differential equations can form virtual separatrices. The existence of a virtual separatrix presents the possibility of a computed trajectory actually jumping through it due to the finite time-steps of discrete numerical methods. Such behavior violates the uniqueness theory of differential equations and amplifies the numerical errors explosively. These reasons imply that, even if computed results are bounded, their independence on time-step should be established before accepting them as useful numerical approximations to the true solution of the differential equations. However, due to these exponential and explosive amplifications of numerical errors, no computed chaotic solutions of differential equations independent of integration-time step have been found. Thus, reports of computed non-periodic solutions of chaotic differential equations are simply consequences of unstably amplified truncation errors, and are not approximate solutions of the associated differential equations.Comment: pages 24, Figures

Intelligent XML Tag Classification Techniques for XML Encryption Improvement

Flexibility, friendliness, and adaptability have been key components to use XML to exchange information across different networks providing the needed common syntax for various messaging systems. However excess usage of XML as a communication medium shed the light on security standards used to protect exchanged messages achieving data confidentiality and privacy. This research presents a novel approach to secure XML messages being used in various systems with efficiency providing high security measures and high performance. system model is based on two major modules, the first to classify XML messages and define which parts of the messages to be secured assigning an importance level for each tag presented in XML message and then using XML encryption standard proposed earlier by W3C [3] to perform a partial encryption on selected parts defined in classification stage. As a result, study aims to improve both the performance of XML encryption process and bulk message handling to achieve data cleansing efficiently