The extent to which selected elementary, junior, and senior high school textbooks confirm certain misconceptions in United States history

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

The extent to which selected elementary, junior, and senior high school textbooks confirm certain misconceptions in United States history

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Concentric Black Rings

We present new supersymmetric solutions of five-dimensional minimal supergravity that describe concentric black rings with an optional black hole at the common centre. Configurations of two black rings are found which have the same conserved charges as a single rotating black hole; these black rings can have a total horizon area less than, equal to, or greater than the black hole with the same charges. A numerical investigation of these particular black ring solutions suggests that they do not have closed timelike curves.Comment: 7 pages, minor alterations, typos corrected. Version to be published in PR

A long-term in vitro silicon-based microelectrode-neuron connection

A novel method for long-term recording and simulation applicable to cultured neurons has been developed. Silicon-based microelectrodes have been fabricated using integrated-circuit technology and micromachining. The chronic connection is made by positioning the tip of the `diving-board electrode' into contact with the top of the cell body. The electrode support structure is then glued to the bottom of the culture dish. Two-way electrical connections to Helisoma B19 neurons have been maintained for up to four days. This capability makes it possible to conduct experiments that are not practical using conventional techniques

The rise of character education in Britain: heroes, dragons and the myths of character

What is character education? Why has it risen up the political agenda in the UK in recent years? And what does it mean in pedagogical practice? The Rise of Character Education in Britain addresses these questions, challenging the individualistic and moralistic ideas underlying the clamour amongst politicians, educators and authors to promote ‘grit’, ‘resilience’ and ‘character’ in schools. Closely examining a range of teaching resources, the book shows that the development of character is wrongly presented as the solution to a wide variety of social problems, with individual citizens expected to accommodate themselves to the realities of the contemporary economic context, rather than enhancing their capacities to engage in civic and political activities to bring about changes they wish to see. The book argues that there is a tried and tested alternative to character education, which is far more likely to strengthen British democracy, namely: citizenship education

Lessons in character education: Incorporating neoliberal learning in classroom resources

This article examines a number of teaching resources produced by the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, the leading centre for character education in the UK, in the light of the claim advanced by Kristján Kristjánsson, the centre’s deputy director, that various criticisms of character education are best regarded as ‘myths’. The analysis provided in this article highlights significant shortcomings with these teaching resources, suggesting that far from being mythical, concerns about character and virtue being unclear, redundant, old fashioned, essentially religious, paternalistic, anti-democratic, anti-intellectual, conservative, individualistic, and relative, would seem, at least in the resources produced by the centre at which Kristjánsson works, to be very well-founded

A Package of LISP Functions for Making Movies and Demos

Work reported herein was conducted at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology research program supported in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense and monitored by the Office of Naval Research under Contract Number N00014-70-A-0362-0005. Vision Flashes are informal papers intended for internal use.A collection of functions have been written to allow LISP users to record display calls in a disk file. This file can be UREAD into a small LISP to reproduce the display effects of the program without doing the required computations. Such a file can be regarded as a 'movie' or 'demo' file and can easily be used with the KODAK movie camera to produce a hard copy.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Robotics Sectio

On Pair Creation of Extremal Black Holes and Kaluza-Klein Monopoles

Classical solutions describing charged dilaton black holes accelerating in a background magnetic field have recently been found. They include the Ernst metric of the Einstein-Maxwell theory as a special case. We study the extremal limit of these solutions in detail, both at the classical and quantum levels. It is shown that near the event horizon, the extremal solutions reduce precisely to the static extremal black hole solutions. For a particular value of the dilaton coupling, these extremal black holes are five dimensional Kaluza-Klein monopoles. The euclidean sections of these solutions can be interpreted as instantons describing the pair creation of extremal black holes/Kaluza-Klein monopoles in a magnetic field. The action of these instantons is calculated and found to agree with the Schwinger result in the weak field limit. For the euclidean Ernst solution, the action for the extremal solution differs from that of the previously discussed wormhole instanton by the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy. However, in many cases quantum corrections become large in the vicinity of the black hole, and the precise description of the creation process is unknown.Comment: 45 pages, 5 figures, EFI-93-74, UCSBTH-93-38. (Omitted acknowledgements added, typos fixed

Normative Surrender

It is submitted, at the risk of being accused of idealism, that those who most conspicuously don the mantle of realism are also guilty of normative sloppiness, a form of sloppiness which deserves the name normative surrender because it concedes large areas of the law to the will and whim of States. This article will examine the phenomenon of normative surrender and provide some examples of it