Everybody Loves a Baby ...

I use my 1961 Webster\u27s Third New International Dictionary, backed up by a 1945 Second Edition. I was raised, literally, on an old Funk and Wagnalls which lifted my five inches closer to the dining room table top

Equity and quality in the early years of schooling

For most of the latter part of the twentieth century, the issues of quality and equity have been part of the agenda of compulsory schooling in Australia. However it is only more recently that the two have been brought together, which has drawn attention to the quest to create high quality and high equity schooling. The outcomes of this union have been the focus of analyses undertaken using data from the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which show that several features of Nordic secondary schools have produced high quality and high equity schooling. This article concentrates on the early years of school and considers the role of curriculum and syllabus documents in creating high quality and high equity in the early years, including the non-compulsory prior-to-school year. It draws on recent research in education generally to identify issues of significance that are instructive in the quest to produce high quality and high equity schooling in the early years. These issues include equity of access, syllabus design and curriculum, and transition to school; but before they are considered, I discuss the context of moves to create high quality and high equity schooling

Beyond a battery hen model?: A computer laboratory, micropolitics and educational change

This paper investigates what happened in one Australian primary school as part of the establishment, use and development of a computer laboratory over a period of two years. As part of a school renewal project, the computer lab was introduced as an ‘innovative’ way to improve the skills of teachers and children in information and communication technologies (ICT) and to lead to curriculum change. However, the way in which the lab was conceptualised and used worked against achieving these goals. The micropolitics of educational change and an input-output understanding of computers meant that change remained structural rather pedagogical or philosophical

Stellenregister zu Bonneau, Le régime administratif de l'eau du Nil

Mit dem hier vorgelegten Stellenregister wird die Nutzbarkeit eines der Standardwerke zum ägyptischen Bewässerungswesen (D. Bonneau: Le Régime administratif de l'eau du Nil dans l'Égypte Grecque, Romaine et Byzantine) verbessert

German-English Word Squares

In the last paragraph of Russian-English Word Squares in the February 1977 Word Ways, I suggested that readers might want to form some other bilingual word squares, possibly German-English or French-English. In these languages the complete alphabets are practically the same -- not just twelve mutual Russian-English letters. On an impulse, I decided to try my hand at German-English squares, since my surname befits that foreign language more than Russian. The results are shown at the end of this article, following a bit of discussion on these two-language squares

Russian-English Word Squares

The Russian alphabet, called Cyrillic, is reported to have been invented by St. Cyril in the 9th century. He assigned one letter to each different sound that he heard spoken -- no S for both s and sh, no C for both c and k, no OUGH for uff, ow, off, etc. At the turn of the 20th century there were 36 Cyrillic letters. In 1918 the Bolsheviks eilminated four letters entirely , and about 98 per cent of a fifth, leaving only 32 for current use. Of these 32, twelve look like our English letters, but are not necessarily pronounced the same

A hybrid genetic-greedy approach to the skills management problem.

The Naval Surface Warfare Center wishes to create a task assignment schedule with a minimal training cost for workers to raise their skills to the required levels. As the number of workers, skills, and tasks increase, the problem quickly becomes too large to solve through brute force. Already several greedy heuristics have been produced, though their performance degrades for larger data sets. As Genetic Algorithms (GA) are effective for large combinatorial problems, their application to the task assignment problem may prove successful. The innovation in applying a GA to this problem is the utilization of existing greedy heuristics in the crossover operator. As the population begins to converge in the GA, the greedy algorithm benefits by having fewer tasks to assign. Likewise, the GA benefits from the addition of the greedy heuristic by increasing the likelihood of good valid solutions within the population. To explore the effectiveness of the proposed method, several different crossover operators are defined. The first method is purely random to act as a control, as the only improvements will be due to the genetic algorithm. The second method provides a basic heuristic to improve upon the random crossover operator, while still primarily stochastic and therefore relying on the GA for convergent behavior. The final two techniques incorporate existing greedy heuristics. The four crossover operators are tested against several data sets of varying sizes to ascertain their relative performance. Crossover methods are compared based on the best score found over all runs. In addition, the evolution and convergence of populations for the different operators are examined, offering further insight into their performance. The combination of a greedy heuristic and genetic algorithm proves to be an effective method for approaching the task assignment problem. This method compares favorably to existing techniques, as well as a purely genetic approach. While the greedy genetic approach suffers some shortcomings, the success of the combined algorithm warrants further development of this methodology