Modernisation of the school D&T curriculum with special reference to disruptive technologies; a case study of trainee teachers’ responses

New and emerging technologies are a feature of the design & technology National Curriculum (for pupils aged 5-13 years) in England and the proposed new GCSE design & technology course (for pupils aged 14-16 years). These features are part of the modernisation of design & technology that is taking place in England. This paper reports a small case study of an ‘understanding new and emerging technologies’ activity in which trainee design & technology teachers at a university in England were required to research particular disruptive technologies (Barlex, Givens & Steeg 2015), develop presentations about these technologies to the other trainees undertaking the activity who then had to summarise their understanding of each disruptive technology in a short piece of writing (around 600 words) dealing with both the nature of the technology and its potential to be disruptive. In addition they had to justify its inclusion and suggest how it might be taught. The paper will describe the responses of the trainees, consider the extent to which they found this work challenging and comment on the way in which an understanding of such technologies might be taught to secondary school pupils as part of a modernised design & technology curriculum which develops the essential 21st century skill of technological perspective

Customs Enforcement and the NAFTA.

Abstract Forthcoming

United States Customs Law Affecting the Movement of Goods into and out of Mexico.

Trade between the United State and Mexico rose dramatically over the past decade. Several factors account for this increase in trade. These factors include the relative weakness of the Mexican currency, growth of the maquiladora industry, and increased Mexican production of exportable products generally. Other factors include Mexico’s 1986 accession to General Agreements Tariff and Trade (GATT), the resultant lowering of Mexican customs duties, and a good long-term working relationship between the two countries. If ongoing negotiations culminate in a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) the trend will accelerate. Laws regulating the importation of merchandise into the United States are primarily enforced by the United States Customs Service, with the cooperation of other agencies. The governing laws are mainly the customs laws, which are codified in Title 19 of the United States Code. Nevertheless, many other laws ordinarily enforced by other agencies are also included. These laws are later enforced at the border in tandem with other involved agencies. The customs laws regulating imports are as protective today as ever before in the history of this country. Although by international agreements rates of duty on imports into the United States have dramatically fallen since the Smoot Hawley Act of 1930, other insidious impediments to the easy flow of trade have multiplied in number and force. Hard-nosed enforcement by the United States Customers Service and its sister agencies have replaced duty rates as impediments to trade. The pending NAFTA under negotiation between Mexico and the United States promises to eliminate duties on most imports and exports over a relatively short time and to eliminate all duties and quantitative restraint rates on trade between the two countries. Other non-tariff barriers to trade are under negotiation. These changes may or may not affect the character of enforcement by the Customs Service

Effect of milk type and processing on iodine concentration of organic and conventional winter milk at retail: implications for nutrition

Milk is the largest source of iodine in UK diets and an earlier study showed that organic summer milk had significantly lower iodine concentration than conventional milk. There are no comparable studies with winter milk or the effect of milk fat class or heat processing method. Two retail studies with winter milk are reported. Study 1 showed no effect of fat class but organic milk was 32.2% lower in iodine than conventional milk (404 vs. 595 μg/L; P < 0.001). Study 2 found no difference between conventional and Channel Island milk but organic milk contained 35.5% less iodine than conventional milk (474 vs. 306 μg/L; P < 0.001). UHT and branded organic milk also had lower iodine concentrations than conventional milk (331 μg/L; P < 0.001 and 268 μg/L: P < 0.0001 respectively). The results indicate that replacement of conventional milk by organic or UHT milk will increase the risk of sub-optimal iodine status especially for pregnant/lactating women

Four agendas for research and policy on emissions mitigation and well-being

The climate crisis requires nations to achieve human well-being with low national levels of carbon emissions. Countries vary from one another dramatically in how effectively they convert resources into well-being, and some nations with low levels of emissions have relatively high objective and subjective well-being. We identify urgent research and policy agendas for four groups of countries with either low or high emissions and well-being indicators. Least studied are those with low well-being and high emissions. Understanding social and political barriers to switching from high-carbon to lower-carbon modes of production and consumption, and ways to overcome them, will be fundamental

Fusing face and body display for Bi-modal emotion recognition: Single frame analysis and multi-frame post integration

This paper presents an approach to automatic visual emotion recognition from two modalities: expressive face and body gesture. Pace and body movements are captured simultaneously using two separate cameras. For each face and body image sequence single "expressive" frames are selected manually for analysis and recognition of emotions. Firstly, individual classifiers are trained from individual modalities for mono-modal emotion recognition. Secondly, we fuse facial expression and affective body gesture information at the feature and at the decision-level. In the experiments performed, the emotion classification using the two modalities achieved a better recognition accuracy outperforming the classification using the individual facial modality. We further extend the affect analysis into a whole image sequence by a multi-frame post integration approach over the single frame recognition results. In our experiments, the post integration based on the fusion of face and body has shown to be more accurate than the post integration based on the facial modality only. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005

Correspondence

quantification, real-time PCR, rumen, stearic acid producers

Monte Carlo study of the Widom-Rowlinson fluid using cluster methods

The Widom-Rowlinson model of a fluid mixture is studied using a new cluster algorithm that is a generalization of the invaded cluster algorithm previously applied to Potts models. Our estimate of the critical exponents for the two-component fluid are consistent with the Ising universality class in two and three dimensions. We also present results for the three-component fluid.Comment: 13 pages RevTex and 2 Postscript figure