“Community Aware” education policy: Enhancing individual and community vitality

This paper advances the theoretical and applied connection between education policy and community development. We call this community-aware education policy, and it is based on Dean’s (2012) conception of human need that is thick (i.e., accounts for a relational context), rather than relying solely on a thin conception (i.e., instrumental view with an individualistic focus). It is our contention that contemporary policy initiatives can be better designed and implemented so that individual and professional goals are attained while family and community well-being are enhanced. Using literature from the field of community development highlighting social support concepts, we “thicken” the concept of social policy to arrive at our theory of community-aware education policy. This theory is then applied to two cases in different national policy contexts: universal pre-kindergarten in New York State (US) and full-service schools in England (UK). Ultimately, we argue for a thick approach to need that results in the provision of a range of services and activities to serve children in schools better, and also the communities in which they reside

Experiments With The Oregon Trail Knapsack Problem

This paper presents hybrid algorithms for a variation of the Bounded Knapsack Problem which we call the Oregon Trail Knapsack. Our problem entails imposing a cost as well as a weight limit, constraining the values of types of items by means of a variety of value functions, and allowing the value of one item type to be dependent on the presence or absence of another type in the knapsack. These modifications to the original problem make it more complex and require adaptations of known knapsack algorithms. To solve this problem, we combine constraint propagation techniques and domain pruning with classic branch and bound approaches that require a sorting of the items. Our experments compare a constraint-language implementation with a simulation of the constraint-based system in a procedural language. Results indicate that the constraint-based solution is natural to the problem and efficient enough to solve large problem instances typical of the application

Experiments With The Oregon Trail Knapsack Problem

This paper presents hybrid algorithms for a variation of the Bounded Knapsack Problem which we call the Oregon Trail Knapsack. Our problem entails imposing a cost as well as a weight limit, constraining the values of types of items by means of a variety of value functions, and allowing the value of one item type to be dependent on the presence or absence of another type in the knapsack. These modifications to the original problem make it more complex and require adaptations of known knapsack algorithms. To solve this problem, we combine constraint propagation techniques and domain pruning with classic branch and bound approaches that require a sorting of the items. Our experiments compare a constraint-language implementation with a simulation of the constraint-based system in a procedural language. Results indicate that the constraint-based solution is natural to the problem and efficient enough to solve large problem instances typical of the application. © 2000

Experiments with the "Oregon Trail Knapsack Problem"

This paper presents hybrid algorithms for a variation of the Bounded Knapsack Problem which we call the Oregon Trail Knapsack. Our problem entails imposing a cost as well as a weight limit, constraining the values of types of items by means of a variety of value functions, and allowing the value of one item type to be dependent on the presence or absence of another type in the knapsack. These modifications to the original problem make it more complex and require adaptations of known knapsack algorithms. To solve this problem, we combine constraint propagation techniques and domain pruning with classic branch and bound approaches that require a sorting of the items. Our experiments compare a constraint-language implementation with a simulation of the constraint-based system in a procedural language. Results indicate that the constraint-based solution is natural to the problem and efficient enough to solve large problem instances typical of the application. 1. Introduction The knapsack..