191 research outputs found
Undergraduate statistics: an empirical comparison of blended and traditional learning, and national origin
For an undergraduate statistics subject in a business degree at an Australian university, this observational study looks into the effects on final exam results of two different approaches to tutorials: one uses traditional pencil-and-paper problem-solving, the other uses web-based exercises with such user-friendly features as animated graphs and interactive drag-and-drop diagrams. In addition, this study also looks at differences between the performance of students from different national backgrounds, including from China, India, and Vietnam. These measurements of exam performance shed light on two issues. One is the comparison between teaching done on a fully face-to-face manner and a blended approach with computer-aided tutorials but face-to-face teaching. The other issue is to critically evaluate the notion that it is good to learn declarative knowledge ("what is") by learning procedural knowledge ("how to"), which is what these exercises in statistics are supposed to be achieving. The exam results were collected over a 2 1/2 year period, observing over 300 students in total
'Irish Fever' in Britain During the Great Famine:immigration, disease and the legacy of ‘Black ’47’
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Implementing and administering the New Poor Law in the industrial north: a case study of Preston union in regional context, 1837-1861
This thesis examines Poor Law administration in the urban industrial union of Preston, Lancashire, from the introduction of the Poor Law Amendment Act in the region in 1837 to the eve of the Lancashire Cotton Famine in 1861. For many years historiography has emphasised that, despite the attempt to engender a greater degree of uniformity through unionisation and the creation of a London based central authority, diversity was a defining characteristic of relief administration at local level under the New Poor Law just as it had been under the Old. Local studies are therefore essential to understanding how the Poor Law operated in practice, and this thesis answers repeated calls for more of them. Lancashire has received little empirical attention from welfare historians for the period after 1837, particularly at the level of individual unions, and the study therefore primarily seeks to shed new light on how policy was formed and relief provided at local level in a region that was both the most industrialised in the country and located within the heartland of the anti-Poor Law movement. It is argued that policy and practice in Preston union, like any union, was shaped by a number of broad interconnected variables, the nature and relative importance of which were each determined by local circumstances. Isolated local studies, however, can only tell us so much. Thus, the thesis seeks to draw wider and more significant conclusions by setting Preston union within a broader regional and sub-regional framework. The approach reflects recent historiography which has argued that, in spite of local differences, Poor Law administration varied considerably by region, with a particularly marked distinction having been drawn between an inclusive, perhaps generous, south and east and a less inclusive, perhaps harsh, north and west. Most research in this area has focussed on the Old Poor Law, and this study questions whether, and the extent to which, such distinctions endured into the New. The thesis challenges the notion that spatial patterns of relief at regional level indicate relative levels of generosity. It argues, instead, that socio-economic conditions were chiefly responsible for observable differences at the regional and sub-regional levels, with the durability of the makeshift economy important in the case of the former. Further, it argues that variation at all levels occurred within rather narrow parameters, and that the Poor Law fundamentally served much the same purpose across the country
‘Irish fever’ in Britain during the Great Famine: immigration, disease and the legacy of ‘Black ‘47’
During the worst year of the Great Irish Famine, ‘Black ‘47’, tens of thousands of people fled across the Irish Sea from Ireland to Britain, desperately escaping the starvation and disease plaguing their country. These refugees, crowding unavoidably into the most insalubrious accommodation British towns and cities had to offer, were soon blamed for deadly outbreaks of epidemic typhus which emerged across the country during the first half of 1847. Indeed, they were accused of transporting the pestilence, then raging in Ireland, over with them. Typhus mortality rates in Ireland and Britain soared, and so closely connected with the disease were the Irish in Britain that it was widely referred to as ‘Irish fever’. Much of what we know about this epidemic is based on a handful of studies focussing almost exclusively on major cities along the British west-coast. Moreover, there has been little attempt to understand the legacy of the episode on the Irish in Britain. Taking a national perspective, this article argues that the ‘Irish fever’ epidemic of 1847 spread far beyond the western ports of entry, and that the epidemic, by entrenching the association of the Irish with deadly disease, contributed significantly to the difficulties Britain’s Irish population faced in the 1850s
Destination Tag Routing Techniques Based on a State Model for the IADM Network
A state model is proposed for solving the problem of routing and rerouting messages in the Inverse Augmented Data Manipulator (IADM) network. Using this model, necessary and sufficient conditions for the reroutability of messages are established, and then destination tag schemes are derived. These schemes are simpler, more efficient and require less complex hardware than previously proposed routing schemes. Two destination tag schemes are proposed. For one of the schemes, rerouting is totally transparent to the sender of the message and any blocked link of a given type can be avoided. Compared with previous works that deal with the same type of blockage, the timeXspace complexity is reduced from O(logN) to O(1). For the other scheme, rerouting is possible for any type of link blockage. A universal rerouting algorithm is constructed based on the second scheme, which finds a blockage-free path for any combination of multiple blockages if there exists such a path, and indicates absence of such a path if there exists none. In addition, the state model is used to derive constructively a lower bound on the number of subgraphs which are isomorphic to the Indirect Binary N-Cube network in the IADM network. This knowledge can be used to characterize properties of the IADM networks and for permutation routing in the IADM networks
Bridging the gap: A case study of a partnership approach to skills development through student engagement in bristol’s green capital year
© 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. HEIs are well placed to engage with local communities, and can connect students with organisations through several pathways, such as volunteering opportunities, placements, internships, or projects. The University of the West of England, Bristol (UWE), the University of Bristol and their respective Students’ Unions have been working in partnership with the city and local communities, using HEFCE Catalyst funding to promote student involvement in sustainability activity during Bristol’s year as European Green Capital. The Green Capital Student Capital project has created a broad programme of citywide impact through mobilising the enthusiasm of the city’s student body. It delivered a wide-ranging programme of engagement in city sustainability and in so doing developed skills, knowledge and attributes in the student body that support the development of graduate attributes and amore sustainable lifestyle. The project demonstrates how institutions can collaborate across cities and communities to have internal and external impacts for sustainability
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