Getting to Outcomes: A User's Guide to a Revised Indicators Framework for Education Organizing

Research for Action (RFA) has been among those engaged in education organizing research and has drawn on its previous efforts–as well as the knowledge built by community organizing groups and other researchers–to create this User's Guide. The Indicators Framework can serve as a tool to help education organizing groups engage in self-reflection and evaluation of their efforts. Communities for Public Education Reform (CPER) commissioned RFA to update its theory of change, developed in partnership with CPER in 2002. The theory of change explains how education organizing works to strengthen communities and improve schools. Accompanying this theory of change was a set of indicators that could be used to assess the outcomes of the organizing process. This updated Indicators Framework reflects the adaptations education organizing groups are making in response to the new education realities, and to over a decade of experience working to change schools in low-income neighborhoods

Swarm shape manipulation through connection control

The control of a large swarm of distributed agents is a well known challenge within the study of unmanned autonomous systems. However, it also presents many new opportunities. The advantages of operating a swarm through distributed means has been assessed in the literature for efficiency from both operational and economical aspects; practically as the number of agents increases, distributed control is favoured over centralised control, as it can reduce agent computational costs and increase robustness on the swarm. Distributed architectures, however, can present the drawback of requiring knowledge of the whole swarm state, therefore limiting the scalability of the swarm. In this paper a strategy is presented to address the challenges of distributed architectures, changing the way in which the swarm shape is controlled and providing a step towards verifiable swarm behaviour, achieving new configurations, while saving communication and computation resources. Instead of applying change at agent level (e.g. modify its guidance law), the sensing of the agents is addressed to a portion of agents, differentially driving their behaviour. This strategy is applied for swarms controlled by artificial potential functions which would ordinarily require global knowledge and all-to-all interactions. Limiting the agents' knowledge is proposed for the first time in this work as a methodology rather than obstacle to obtain desired swarm behaviour

Clinical stakeholders' opinions on the use of selective decontamination of the digestive tract in critically ill patients in intensive care units : an international Delphi study

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Literature review on the dynamics of social movements in fragile and conflict-affected states

This literature review assesses the available academic and policy-oriented literature on social movements in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. It examines who becomes involved in collective action and why, the barriers to mobilisation and, where social movements do emerge, how these are able to sustain mobilisation and broaden their membership base to reflect the interests of the wider community. Evidence from this review suggests the importance of considering the interplay of movement activity and state stability, and of taking into account existing state-society relationships. Donors could focus on creating a supportive environment for social movements

Galileo was wrong: The geometrical design of masonry arches

Since antiquity master builders have used always simple geometrical rules for designing arches. Typically, for a certain form, the thickness is a fraction of the span. This is a proportional design independent of the scale: the same ratio thickness/span applies for spans of 10 m or 100 m. The same kind of rules was also used for more complex problems, like the design of a buttress for a spatial cross-vault. Galileo attacked this kind of proportional design in his Dialogues. He stated the so-called square-cube law: internal stresses grow linearly with scale and therefore the elements of the structures must become thicker in proportion. This law has been accepted many times uncritically for engineering historians, who have considered the traditional geometrical design as unscientific and incorrect. In fact, Galileo’s law applies only to strength problems. Stability problems, such as the masonry arch problem, are governed by geometry. Therefore, Galileo was wrong in applying his reasoning to masonry buildings