23,294 research outputs found
An exploration of the language within Ofsted reports and their influence on primary school performance in mathematics: a mixed methods critical discourse analysis
This thesis contributes to the understanding of the language of Ofsted reports, their similarity to one another and associations between different terms used within ‘areas for improvement’ sections and subsequent outcomes for pupils. The research responds to concerns from serving headteachers that Ofsted reports are overly similar, do not capture the unique story of their school, and are unhelpful for improvement. In seeking to answer ‘how similar are
Ofsted reports’ the study uses two tools, a plagiarism detection software (Turnitin) and a discourse analysis tool (NVivo) to identify trends within and across a large corpus of reports.
The approach is based on critical discourse analysis (Van Dijk, 2009; Fairclough, 1989) but shaped in the form of practitioner enquiry seeking power in the form of impact on pupils and practitioners, rather than a more traditional, sociological application of the method.
The research found that in 2017, primary school section 5 Ofsted reports had more than half of their content exactly duplicated within other primary school inspection reports published that same year. Discourse analysis showed the quality assurance process overrode variables such as inspector designation, gender, or team size, leading to three distinct patterns of duplication: block duplication, self-referencing, and template writing. The most unique part of a report was found to be the ‘area for improvement’ section, which was tracked to externally verified outcomes for pupils using terms linked to ‘mathematics’. Those
required to improve mathematics in their areas for improvement improved progress and attainment in mathematics significantly more than national rates. These findings indicate that there was a positive correlation between the inspection reporting process and a beneficial impact on pupil outcomes in mathematics, and that the significant similarity of one report to another had no bearing on the usefulness of the report for school improvement purposes
within this corpus
An iterative warping and clustering algorithm to estimate multiple wave-shape functions from a nonstationary oscillatory signal
Nonsinusoidal oscillatory signals are everywhere. In practice, the
nonsinusoidal oscillatory pattern, modeled as a 1-periodic wave-shape function
(WSF), might vary from cycle to cycle. When there are finite different WSFs,
, so that the WSF jumps from one to another suddenly, the
different WSFs and jumps encode useful information. We present an iterative
warping and clustering algorithm to estimate from a
nonstationary oscillatory signal with time-varying amplitude and frequency, and
hence the change points of the WSFs. The algorithm is a novel combination of
time-frequency analysis, singular value decomposition entropy and vector
spectral clustering. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm
with simulated and real signals, including the voice signal, arterial blood
pressure, electrocardiogram and accelerometer signal. Moreover, we provide a
mathematical justification of the algorithm under the assumption that the
amplitude and frequency of the signal are slowly time-varying and there are
finite change points that model sudden changes from one wave-shape function to
another one.Comment: 39 pages, 11 figure
Operational meanings of a generalized conditional expectation in quantum metrology
A unifying formalism of generalized conditional expectations (GCEs) for
quantum mechanics has recently emerged, but its physical implications regarding
the retrodiction of a quantum observable remain controversial. To address the
controversy, here I offer operational meanings for a version of the GCEs in the
context of quantum parameter estimation. When a quantum sensor is corrupted by
decoherence, the GCE is found to relate the operator-valued optimal estimators
before and after the decoherence. Furthermore, the error increase, or regret,
caused by the decoherence is shown to be equal to a divergence between the two
estimators. The real weak value as a special case of the GCE plays the same
role in suboptimal estimation -- its divergence from the optimal estimator is
precisely the regret for not using the optimal measurement. For an application
of the GCE, I show that it enables the use of dynamic programming for designing
a controller that minimizes the estimation error. For the frequentist setting,
I show that the GCE leads to a quantum Rao-Blackwell theorem, which offers
significant implications for quantum metrology and thermal-light sensing in
particular. These results give the GCE and the associated divergence a natural,
useful, and incontrovertible role in quantum decision and control theory.Comment: 17 pages, 3 figures. v4: polished everything and added more
reference
Time-varying STARMA models by wavelets
The spatio-temporal autoregressive moving average (STARMA) model is
frequently used in several studies of multivariate time series data, where the
assumption of stationarity is important, but it is not always guaranteed in
practice. One way to proceed is to consider locally stationary processes. In
this paper we propose a time-varying spatio-temporal autoregressive and moving
average (tvSTARMA) modelling based on the locally stationarity assumption. The
time-varying parameters are expanded as linear combinations of wavelet bases
and procedures are proposed to estimate the coefficients. Some simulations and
an application to historical daily precipitation records of Midwestern states
of the USA are illustrated
Rational-approximation-based model order reduction of Helmholtz frequency response problems with adaptive finite element snapshots
We introduce several spatially adaptive model order reduction approaches tailored to non-coercive elliptic boundary value problems, specifically, parametric-in-frequency Helmholtz problems. The offline information is computed by means of adaptive finite elements, so that each snapshot lives in a different discrete space that resolves the local singularities of the analytical solution and is adjusted to the considered frequency value. A rational surrogate is then assembled adopting either a least squares or an interpolatory approach, yielding a function-valued version of the standard rational interpolation method (V-SRI) and the minimal rational interpolation method (MRI). In the context of building an approximation for linear or quadratic functionals of the Helmholtz solution, we perform several numerical experiments to compare the proposed methodologies. Our simulations show that, for interior resonant problems (whose singularities are encoded by poles on the V-SRI and MRI work comparably well. Instead, when dealing with exterior scattering problems, whose frequency response is mostly smooth, the V-SRI method seems to be the best performing one
Countermeasures for the majority attack in blockchain distributed systems
La tecnología Blockchain es considerada como uno de los paradigmas informáticos más importantes posterior al Internet; en función a sus características únicas que la hacen ideal para registrar, verificar y administrar información de diferentes transacciones. A pesar de esto, Blockchain se enfrenta a diferentes problemas de seguridad, siendo el ataque del 51% o ataque mayoritario uno de los más importantes. Este consiste en que uno o más mineros tomen el control de al menos el 51% del Hash extraído o del cómputo en una red; de modo que un minero puede manipular y modificar arbitrariamente la información registrada en esta tecnología. Este trabajo se enfocó en diseñar e implementar estrategias de detección y mitigación de ataques mayoritarios (51% de ataque) en un sistema distribuido Blockchain, a partir de la caracterización del comportamiento de los mineros. Para lograr esto, se analizó y evaluó el Hash Rate / Share de los mineros de Bitcoin y Crypto Ethereum, seguido del diseño e implementación de un protocolo de consenso para controlar el poder de cómputo de los mineros. Posteriormente, se realizó la exploración y evaluación de modelos de Machine Learning para detectar software malicioso de tipo Cryptojacking.DoctoradoDoctor en Ingeniería de Sistemas y Computació
On Monte Carlo methods for the Dirichlet process mixture model, and the selection of its precision parameter prior
Two issues commonly faced by users of Dirichlet process mixture models are: 1) how to appropriately select a hyperprior for its precision parameter alpha, and 2) the typically slow mixing of the MCMC chain produced by conditional Gibbs samplers based on its stick-breaking representation, as opposed to marginal collapsed Gibbs samplers based on the Polya urn, which have smaller integrated autocorrelation times.
In this thesis, we analyse the most common approaches to hyperprior selection for alpha, we identify their limitations, and we propose a new methodology to overcome them.
To address slow mixing, we revisit three label-switching Metropolis moves from the literature (Hastie et al., 2015; Papaspiliopoulos and Roberts, 2008), improve them, and introduce a fourth move. Secondly, we revisit two i.i.d. sequential importance samplers which operate in the collapsed space (Liu, 1996; S. N. MacEachern et al., 1999), and we develop a new sequential importance sampler for the stick-breaking parameters of Dirichlet process mixtures, which operates in the stick-breaking space and which has minimal integrated autocorrelation time. Thirdly, we introduce the i.i.d. transcoding algorithm which, conditional to a partition of the data, can infer back which specific stick in the stick-breaking construction each observation originated from. We use it as a building block to develop the transcoding sampler, which removes the need for label-switching Metropolis moves in the conditional stick-breaking sampler, as it uses the better performing marginal sampler (or any other sampler) to drive the MCMC chain, and augments its exchangeable partition posterior with conditional i.i.d. stick-breaking parameter inferences after the fact, thereby inheriting its shorter autocorrelation times
Nonparametric Two-Sample Test for Networks Using Joint Graphon Estimation
This paper focuses on the comparison of networks on the basis of statistical
inference. For that purpose, we rely on smooth graphon models as a
nonparametric modeling strategy that is able to capture complex structural
patterns. The graphon itself can be viewed more broadly as density or intensity
function on networks, making the model a natural choice for comparison
purposes. Extending graphon estimation towards modeling multiple networks
simultaneously consequently provides substantial information about the
(dis-)similarity between networks. Fitting such a joint model - which can be
accomplished by applying an EM-type algorithm - provides a joint graphon
estimate plus a corresponding prediction of the node positions for each
network. In particular, it entails a generalized network alignment, where
nearby nodes play similar structural roles in their respective domains. Given
that, we construct a chi-squared test on equivalence of network structures.
Simulation studies and real-world examples support the applicability of our
network comparison strategy.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figure
Projected Multi-Agent Consensus Equilibrium (PMACE) for Distributed Reconstruction with Application to Ptychography
Multi-Agent Consensus Equilibrium (MACE) formulates an inverse imaging
problem as a balance among multiple update agents such as data-fitting terms
and denoisers. However, each such agent operates on a separate copy of the full
image, leading to redundant memory use and slow convergence when each agent
affects only a small subset of the full image. In this paper, we extend MACE to
Projected Multi-Agent Consensus Equilibrium (PMACE), in which each agent
updates only a projected component of the full image, thus greatly reducing
memory use for some applications.We describe PMACE in terms of an equilibrium
problem and an equivalent fixed point problem and show that in most cases the
PMACE equilibrium is not the solution of an optimization problem. To
demonstrate the value of PMACE, we apply it to the problem of ptychography, in
which a sample is reconstructed from the diffraction patterns resulting from
coherent X-ray illumination at multiple overlapping spots. In our PMACE
formulation, each spot corresponds to a separate data-fitting agent, with the
final solution found as an equilibrium among all the agents. Our results
demonstrate that the PMACE reconstruction algorithm generates more accurate
reconstructions at a lower computational cost than existing ptychography
algorithms when the spots are sparsely sampled
Diffusion Maps for Group-Invariant Manifolds
In this article, we consider the manifold learning problem when the data set
is invariant under the action of a compact Lie group . Our approach consists
in augmenting the data-induced graph Laplacian by integrating over orbits under
the action of of the existing data points. We prove that this -invariant
Laplacian operator can be diagonalized by using the unitary irreducible
representation matrices of , and we provide an explicit formula for
computing the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of . Moreover, we show that the
normalized Laplacian operator converges to the Laplace-Beltrami operator
of the data manifold with an improved convergence rate, where the improvement
grows with the dimension of the symmetry group . This work extends the
steerable graph Laplacian framework of Landa and Shkolnisky from the case of
to arbitrary compact Lie groups
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