PISA, national and regional education policies and their effect on mathematics teaching in England and Germany

To consider how processes of education governance linking the work of international organisations and national and regional policy-making in two contrasting policy environments affect policy enactment in schools, differences in mathematics teaching between English and German secondary schools were analysed using Bernstein’s account of pedagogic practice. This allowed the opportunities for achievement provided to different groups of students to be identified. The findings suggest that, as a result of strong governance pressures, English higher achievers have more opportunities to make progress than lower achievers, a concern which is consistent with standardised assessment data. Despite policy changes, similarities in the teaching of higher and lower achieving students in Germany remain and these account, in part, for the narrower gap in achievement there. </jats:p

The Effectiveness of Co-Determination Laws in Cooperative and Adversarial Employment Relations: When Does Regulation Have Bite?

The German Codetermination Law grants workers of establishments with 200 or more employees the right to have a works councillor who is fully exempted from his or her regular job duties while still paid a regular salary. This article analyses theoretically and empirically how this de jure right to exemption translates into de facto practice, and explicitly takes into account the nature of the employment relations participation regime. It is found that the right of exemption has no effect in cooperative employment relations because exemptions are granted even in the absence of legal rights, but does make a difference in adversarial relations when exemptions are only granted above the threshold where legal rights force employers to do so, i.e. legal rights do make a decisive difference in exactly those situations where the legislators’ intent would not be realized without the right to legal enforcemen

Stability of Mine Car Motion in Curves of Invariable and Variable Radii

We discuss our experiences adapting three recent algorithms for maximum common (connected) subgraph problems to exploit multi-core parallelism. These algorithms do not easily lend themselves to parallel search, as the search trees are extremely irregular, making balanced work distribution hard, and runtimes are very sensitive to value-ordering heuristic behaviour. Nonetheless, our results show that each algorithm can be parallelised successfully, with the threaded algorithms we create being clearly better than the sequential ones. We then look in more detail at the results, and discuss how speedups should be measured for this kind of algorithm. Because of the difficulty in quantifying an average speedup when so-called anomalous speedups (superlinear and sublinear) are common, we propose a new measure called aggregate speedup

Pseudovector vs. pseudoscalar coupling in one-boson exchange NN potentials

We examine the effects of pseudoscalar and pseudovector coupling of the pi and eta mesons in one-boson exchange models of the NN interaction using two approaches: time-ordered perturbation theory unitarized with the relativistic Lippmann-Schwinger equation, and a reduced Bethe-Salpeter equation approach using the Thompson equation. Contact terms in the one-boson exchange amplitudes in time-ordered perturbation theory lead naturally to the introduction of s-channel nucleonic cutoffs for the interaction, which strongly suppresses the far off-shell behavior of the amplitudes in both approaches. Differences between the resulting NN predictions of the various models are found to be small, and particularly so when coupling constants of the other mesons are readjusted within reasonable limits.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figure

Institutions as constraints and resources: explaining cross-national divergence in performance management

This article compares performance management practices in call centres from four telecommunications firms in the UK, France, Denmark, and Germany. Findings show that different combinations of institutional constraints, such as strong job security protections, and participation resources supporting worker voice were influential in shaping choices among HRM policies to motivate and discipline workers. Performance management most closely approached a high involvement model where both constraints and resources were high: where worker representatives were able both to restrict management’s use of sanctions and to establish procedures that improved the perceived fairness of incentives. Findings contribute to debates concerning the role of contextual factors in the design and effectiveness of HRM

SUNNY-CP : a Sequential CP Portfolio Solver

International audienceThe Constraint Programming (CP) paradigm allows to model and solve Constraint Satisfaction / Optimization Problems (CSPs / COPs). A CP Portfolio Solver is a particular constraint solver that takes advantage of a portfolio of different CP solvers in order to solve a given problem by properly exploiting Algorithm Selection techniques. In this work we present sunny-cp: a CP portfolio for solving both CSPs and COPs that turned out to be competitive also in the MiniZinc Challenge, the reference competition for CP solvers