EDITORIAL.TECHNOLOGY AS A SUPPORT TO TRADITIONAL ASSESSMENT PRACTICES

Assessment in education is under pressure to change. Some drivers for change result from new ways of thinking about assessment and its educational purposes. Other drivers are external and are the result of wider changes in society. Technology falls into this second category. This special issue is concerned with change at the intersection of assessment and technology in education

The realities of life from a Hindu Sindi perspective

Before the partitioning of India in 1947, the Kori, a Koli caste who migrated from Gujarat at the turn of the century, were accorded low status by Sind's Muslims and Hindus alike. Their occupation as land-less labourers and their semi-nomadic lifestyle reinforced their designation as "Scheduled Caste". When the higher caste Hindus fled Sind after Partition, the situation changed. The majority of Kori remained behind. Their aspirations to higher status benefitted from the departure of the higher caste Hindus, allowing them to engineer their rise on the ladder of caste at the expense of the other Scheduled Caste Hindu groups. The reality of absolute Muslim dominance has prevented this from having any real impact upon the Koris' relative political and economic position, however. They remain a powerless minority group, high caste in theory but not in practice, for their Hindu ideals are not shared by the Muslim majority.This situation of the Kori has obviously had some impact upon their perceptions of reality. While they see themselves as Hindu, they are aware of the scorn of their dominant landlords and neighbours whom they, in turn, despise for being Muslims. It is interesting that, in this social climate, many Kori beliefs and practices have altered over the years to take up a course parallel to those of the Muslims. While the outsider might see this as an attempt to gain respectability, this is something the Kori have to deny, for to acknowledge it would be to acknowledge the inferiority of Hinduism to Islam.This thesis is a study of the beliefs and certainties expressed by a minority group in a society dominated by a majority which does not share its total ethos. It is also an attempt to come to terms with the problems posed for the ethnographer, whose task it is to distinguish between what, to those studied, might be belief, fact, or opinion, and what, if related to the situation in which they arose, might merely be expressions of collective justification

Planetary temperatures in the presence of an inert, nonradiative atmosphere

This study considers solid planets at about 300 K and an inert atmosphere having no interaction with associated radiation. Processes considered include transfer of energy from the surface skin to underlying layers depending on thermal properties. Temperatures of the surface depend on the rates of transfer of energy between soil layers. The atmosphere is warmed at base by contact with the surface, convection and turbulence distributing higher temperatures through the air. Comparisons between theoretical and measured temperatures show a close similarity. Mean planetary temperatures are calculated, depending on thermal parameters and the intensity of light/radiation from the particular solar system

The current management of penetrating cardiac trauma

Includes bibliographical references.The vast majority of patients with penetrating cardiac injuries do not reach the hospital alive as the pre-hospital mortality rate for these injuries is in the region of 86%. The patients that do reach the hospital alive are potential survivors and it is obviously crucial that any cardiac injury is detected and managed appropriately. Most of these injuries present with either cardiac tamponade or hypovolaemic shock and are relatively straightforward to diagnose and require immediate surgery. There is, however, a group of patients that are relatively stable with an underlying cardiac injury and it is in these patients that a potential or occult cardiac injury needs to be identified

A time-series method to identify and correct range sidelobes in meteorological radar data

The use of pulse compression techniques to improve the sensitivity of meteorological radars has become increasingly common in recent years. An unavoidable side-effect of such techniques is the formation of ‘range sidelobes’ which lead to spreading of information across several range gates. These artefacts are particularly troublesome in regions where there is a sharp gradient in the power backscattered to the antenna as a function of range. In this article we present a simple method for identifying and correcting range sidelobe artefacts. We make use of the fact that meteorological targets produce an echo which fluctuates at random, and that this echo, like a fingerprint, is unique to each range gate. By cross-correlating the echo time series from pairs of gates therefore we can identify whether information from one gate has spread into another, and hence flag regions of contamination. In addition we show that the correlation coefficients contain quantitative information about the fraction of power leaked from one range gate to another, and we propose a simple algorithm to correct the corrupted reflectivity profile

Recurrence statistics for the space of interval exchange maps and the Teichmüller flow on the space of translation surfaces

MT was partially supported by NSF grant DMS 110958.In this paper we show that the transfer operator of a Rauzy–Veech–Zorich renormalization map acting on a space of quasi-Hölder functions is quasicompact and derive certain statistical recurrence properties for this map and its associated Teichmüller flow. We establish Borel–Cantelli lemmas, Extreme Value statistics and return time statistics for the map and flow. Previous results have established quasicompactness in Hölder or analytic function spaces, for example the work of M. Pollicott and T. Morita. The quasi-Hölder function space is particularly useful for investigating return time statistics. In particular we establish the shrinking target property for nested balls in the setting of Teichmüller flow. Our point of view, approach and terminology derive from the work of M. Pollicott augmented by that of M. Viana.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe