4,249 research outputs found
Standards in English education: An enduring historical issue
This article is available open access from the publisher’s website at the link below.This article closely examines the development of education in England,
taking special account of educational standards — of the official
measurable kind, but also the perceived kind — in the various sectors of
education. It argues that, today, and in the past, the ‘problems’ associated
with education standards mostly relate to a ‘long tail’ of underperforming
schools serving urban areas and attended by relatively underprivileged
children. At the other end of the scale, it is suggested that England’s
leading schools, both in the public and private sectors, remain the subject
of admiration. The same remains true of England’s leading, and typically
oldest, universities, which occupy a more privileged position than institutions
chartered in the relatively recent past. The article presents a story of
persistent unequal educational opportunities over time, which, worryingly,
does not seem to be improving in the second decade of the twenty-first
century
Investigation of seismicity and related effects at NASA Ames-Dryden Flight Research Facility, Computer Center, Edwards, California
This report discusses a geological and seismological investigation of the NASA Ames-Dryden Flight Research Facility site at Edwards, California. Results are presented as seismic design criteria, with design values of the pertinent ground motion parameters, probability of recurrence, and recommended analogous time-history accelerograms with their corresponding spectra. The recommendations apply specifically to the Dryden site and should not be extrapolated to other sites with varying foundation and geologic conditions or different seismic environments
Are food exposures obtained through commercial market panels representative of the general population? Implications for outbreak investigations
Current methods of control recruitment for case-control studies can be slow (a particular issue for outbreak investigations), resource-intensive and subject to a range of biases. Commercial market panels are a potential source of rapidly recruited controls. Our study evaluated food exposure data from these panel controls, compared with an established reference dataset. Market panel data were collected from two companies using retrospective internet-based surveys; these were compared with reference data from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey (NDNS). We used logistic regression to calculate adjusted odds ratios to compare exposure to each of the 71 food items between the market panel and NDNS participants. We compared 2103 panel controls with 2696 reference participants. Adjusted for socio-demographic factors, exposure to 90% of foods was statistically different between both panels and the reference data. However, these differences were likely to be of limited practical importance for 89% of Panel A foods and 79% of Panel B foods. Market panel food exposures were comparable with reference data for common food exposures but more likely to be different for uncommon exposures. This approach should be considered for outbreak investigation, in conjunction with other considerations such as population at risk, timeliness of response and study resources
Dynamically-Coupled Oscillators -- Cooperative Behavior via Dynamical Interaction --
We propose a theoretical framework to study the cooperative behavior of
dynamically coupled oscillators (DCOs) that possess dynamical interactions.
Then, to understand synchronization phenomena in networks of interneurons which
possess inhibitory interactions, we propose a DCO model with dynamics of
interactions that tend to cause 180-degree phase lags. Employing an approach
developed here, we demonstrate that although our model displays synchronization
at high frequencies, it does not exhibit synchronization at low frequencies
because this dynamical interaction does not cause a phase lag sufficiently
large to cancel the effect of the inhibition. We interpret the disappearance of
synchronization in our model with decreasing frequency as describing the
breakdown of synchronization in the interneuron network of the CA1 area below
the critical frequency of 20 Hz.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure
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