27,779 research outputs found
Meaning-filled metaphors enabling schools to create enhanced learning cultures
It is interesting to speculate on metaphor as an instrument capable of facilitating actions leading to powerful consequences. Metaphors remain in the consciousness longer than facts and therefore actions based on specific facts in one context become transferrable to another context through the use of metaphoric symbolism. Current research in schools that have undertaken the Innovative Designs for Enhancing Achievements in Schools (IDEAS) improvement process indicate that collectively developed metaphor use has the dynamic power to facilitate cognitive connections across whole school communities. In so doing, schools engaged in the IDEAS process are developing and utilising significant new knowledge for whole school achievement through cultures of collaboration and commitment. This chapter recognises that when schools are constantly bombarded with the need to undertake substantial changes in practice, the utilisation of a contextual unifying metaphor is capable of assisting wide spread and aligned change processes to unfold
Guidelines for testing and release procedures
Guidelines and procedures are recommended for the testing and release of the types of computer software efforts commonly performed at NASA/Ames Research Center. All recommendations are based on the premise that testing and release activities must be specifically selected for the environment, size, and purpose of each individual software project. Guidelines are presented for building a Test Plan and using formal Test Plan and Test Care Inspections on it. Frequent references are made to NASA/Ames Guidelines for Software Inspections. Guidelines are presented for selecting an Overall Test Approach and for each of the four main phases of testing: (1) Unit Testing of Components, (2) Integration Testing of Components, (3) System Integration Testing, and (4) Acceptance Testing. Tools used for testing are listed, including those available from operating systems used at Ames, specialized tools which can be developed, unit test drivers, stub module generators, and the use of format test reporting schemes
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Using topographic derivatives of high resolution data on Earth and Mars to determine active processes on Mars
Principles of Antifragile Software
The goal of this paper is to study and define the concept of "antifragile
software". For this, I start from Taleb's statement that antifragile systems
love errors, and discuss whether traditional software dependability fits into
this class. The answer is somewhat negative, although adaptive fault tolerance
is antifragile: the system learns something when an error happens, and always
imrpoves. Automatic runtime bug fixing is changing the code in response to
errors, fault injection in production means injecting errors in business
critical software. I claim that both correspond to antifragility. Finally, I
hypothesize that antifragile development processes are better at producing
antifragile software systems.Comment: see https://refuses.github.io
Similar Sublattices and Coincidence Rotations of the Root Lattice A4 and its Dual
A natural way to describe the Penrose tiling employs the projection method on
the basis of the root lattice A4 or its dual. Properties of these lattices are
thus related to properties of the Penrose tiling. Moreover, the root lattice A4
appears in various other contexts such as sphere packings, efficient coding
schemes and lattice quantizers.
Here, the lattice A4 is considered within the icosian ring, whose rich
arithmetic structure leads to parametrisations of the similar sublattices and
the coincidence rotations of A4 and its dual lattice. These parametrisations,
both in terms of a single icosian, imply an index formula for the corresponding
sublattices. The results are encapsulated in Dirichlet series generating
functions. For every index, they provide the number of distinct similar
sublattices as well as the number of coincidence rotations of A4 and its dual.Comment: 8 pages, paper presented at ICQ10 (Zurich, Switzerland
Entanglement Distillation Protocols and Number Theory
We show that the analysis of entanglement distillation protocols for qudits
of arbitrary dimension benefits from applying basic concepts from number
theory, since the set \zdn associated to Bell diagonal states is a module
rather than a vector space. We find that a partition of \zdn into divisor
classes characterizes the invariant properties of mixed Bell diagonal states
under local permutations. We construct a very general class of recursion
protocols by means of unitary operations implementing these local permutations.
We study these distillation protocols depending on whether we use twirling
operations in the intermediate steps or not, and we study them both
analitically and numerically with Monte Carlo methods. In the absence of
twirling operations, we construct extensions of the quantum privacy algorithms
valid for secure communications with qudits of any dimension . When is a
prime number, we show that distillation protocols are optimal both
qualitatively and quantitatively.Comment: REVTEX4 file, 7 color figures, 2 table
Space Laser Power Transmission System Studies
Power transmission by laser technique is addressed. Space to Earth and space to space configurations are considered
Fluid-solid transition in hard hyper-sphere systems
In this work we present a numerical study, based on molecular dynamics
simulations, to estimate the freezing point of hard spheres and hypersphere
systems in dimension D = 4, 5, 6 and 7. We have studied the changes of the
Radial Distribution Function (RDF) as a function of density in the coexistence
region. We started our simulations from crystalline states with densities above
the melting point, and moved down to densities in the liquid state below the
freezing point. For all the examined dimensions (including D = 3) it was
observed that the height of the first minimum of the RDF changes in an almost
continuous way around the freezing density and resembles a second order phase
transition. With these results we propose a numerical method to estimate the
freezing point as a function of the dimension D using numerical fits and
semiempirical approaches. We find that the estimated values of the freezing
point are very close to previously reported values from simulations and
theoretical approaches up to D = 6 reinforcing the validity of the proposed
method. This was also applied to numerical simulations for D = 7 giving new
estimations of the freezing point for this dimensionality.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figure
Professional boundaries: research report
In 2008 the General Social Care Council (GSCC) published Raising standards: Social work conduct in England 2003-2008. This constituted the GSCC’s first report covering the work undertaken to uphold standards and protect people who use social care services. The GSCC’s analysis revealed that a considerable proportion of conduct cases, some 40%, involved allegations of 'inappropriate relations'. In the light of this finding, and the release by the Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence (CHRE) of sexual boundaries guidance for healthcare workers at the beginning of this year (Halter et al, 2009), the GSCC committed itself to exploring the possibility of producing professional boundaries guidance for social workers.
To begin this exploration, the GSCC commissioned a study in early 2009.This is the report of that study. There were two main purposes. First, to establish what professional boundaries1 guidance currently exists for social workers, or for sections of the workforce that includes social workers in the United Kingdom, and the content of any such guidance. Secondly, to identify and discuss a number of other examples of professional boundaries guidance to act as points of reference for the GSCC’s project. The aim was to identify and discuss examples relevant to the GSCC’s project
The RAG Model: a new paradigm for genetic risk stratification in multiple myeloma
Molecular studies have shown that multiple myeloma is a highly genetically heterogonous disease which may manifest itself as any number of diverse subtypes each with variable clinicopathological features and outcomes. Given this genetic heterogeneity, a universal approach to treatment of myeloma is unlikely to be successful for all patients and instead we should strive for the goal of personalised therapy using rationally informed targeted strategies. Current DNA sequencing technologies allow for whole genome and exome analysis of patient myeloma samples that yield vast amounts of genetic data and provide a mutational overview of the disease. However, the clinical utility of this information currently lags far behind the sequencing technology which is increasingly being incorporated into clinical practice. This paper attempts to address this shortcoming by proposing a novel genetically based “traffic-light” risk stratification system for myeloma, termed the RAG (Red, Amber, Green) model, which represents a simplified concept of how complex genetic data may be compressed into an aggregate risk score. The model aims to incorporate all known clinically important trisomies, translocations, and mutations in myeloma and utilise these to produce a score between 1.0 and 3.0 that can be incorporated into diagnostic, prognostic, and treatment algorithms for the patient
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