Overskill

A very wise person once conjectured about the relative merits of teaching children individual sounds in isolation before allowing them to speak. Only after a child had demonstrated mastery of phonemes (sound units) could s/he be allowed to advance to morphemes (meaning units). Thought units (T units or sentences) would follow. Under such a highly structured, individualized learning program, students could easily learn to say, I hate school, by the end of second or third grade (depending on intelligence, socio-economic status, and motivation of course)

Selling Reading

Reading teachers hope all their students will become lifelong readers. Students who can successfully propel themselves through print and who view reading as a worthwhile activity are most likely to form this type of permanent attachment to reading. Thus, there should be two ultimate goals of all reading instruction: the evolution of both competent and avid readers

Partially ample line bundles on toric varieties

In this note we study properties of partially ample line bundles on simplicial projective toric varieties. We prove that the cone of q-ample line bundles is a union of rational polyhedral cones, and calculate these cones in examples. We prove a restriction theorem for big q-ample line bundles, and deduce that q-ampleness of the anticanonical bundle is not invariant under flips. Finally we prove a Kodaira-type vanishing theorem for q-ample line bundles.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures; v.2: proofs simplified, lots of material added, new autho

Unravelling the Myth of Effective Teaching in Mathematics

Effective teaching is the backbone of any successful education system with many arguing that it is the single biggest contributor to student success. However despite such importance, significant differences in teacher effectiveness are still evident in Irish classrooms at all levels of education. This research investigates the influence that individual teachers can have on students’ enjoyment of mathematics at second level and attempts to unravel the myth of effective teaching. The research started out as a followon study that further analysed data collected by the authors when they designed a pedagogical framework with the aim of promoting student interest in algebra through effective teaching of the domain. This paper focuses entirely upon the quantitative results of the evaluation of that study with regard to whether there are differences in the enjoyment scores of students’ in different classes as a result of their individual teachers. The paper also looks to unravel the myth of effective teaching through a series of focus group interviews and a detailed literature review

MEDIUM-TERM ANALYSIS OF FISCAL POLICY IN IRELAND: A MACROECONOMETRIC STUDY OF THE PERIOD 1967-1980. ESRI General Research Series Paper No. 122, July 1985

The decade of the 1970s was characterised by fluctuations in the world economy of a kind whicb had not been experienced in peacetime since the 1930s. Even with the wisest and most prudent fiscal and monetary policies it would have been impossible to protect the Irish economy fully from the world-wide recession. Our objective in this paper is to investigate what effect fiscal policies had on tile evolution of the Irish economy over the period 1967 to 1980 and, with the benefit of hindsight, to attempt to formulate a judgement as to the manner in which fiscal policy was planned and executed. The "hindsight" from which we benefit has two major components: first our access to data which are at once more detailed and accurate than those available to successive Ministers of Finance at the time when they planned their budget strategies and second our use of a formal model of how the various sectors and agents in the economy interact with each other and evolve over time. While the first component (more accurate data) is an unqualified benefit, the second component (the model) is much more controversial since there is no absolute consensus in the economics profession on broad areas of macroeconomic theory and modelling practice. We are fully conscious of this problem and hope that the reader will not interpret our formal and detailed quantitative analysis as implying either ignorance or arrogance on our part in respect of the current very active international research into the foundations of macroeconomic theory and practice. It remains, of course, for the reader to decide whether our judgement, in relation to the gross simplifications needed in order to construct an operation’,d model of the economy, has been good or bad

Atherosclerosis differentially affects calcium signalling in endothelial cells from aortic arch and thoracic aorta in Apolipoprotein E knockout mice

Apolipoprotein-E knockout (ApoE-/-) mice develop hypercholesterolemia and are a useful model of atherosclerosis. Hypercholesterolemia alters intracellular Ca2+ signalling in vascular endothelial cells but our understanding of these changes, especially in the early stages of the disease process, is limited. We therefore determined whether carbachol-mediated endothelial Ca2+ signals differ in plaque-prone aortic arch compared to plaque-resistant thoracic aorta, of wild-type and ApoE-/- mice, and how this is affected by age and the presence of hypercholesterolemia. The extent of plaque development was determined using en-face staining with Sudan IV. Tissues were obtained from wild-type and ApoE-/- mice at 10 weeks (pre-plaques) and 24 weeks (established plaques). We found that even before development of plaques, significantly increased Ca2+ responses were observed in arch endothelial cells. Even with aging and plaque formation, ApoE-/- thoracic responses were little changed, however a significantly enhanced Ca2+ response was observed in arch, both adjacent to and away from lesions. In wild-type mice of any age, 1-2% of cells had oscillatory Ca2+ responses. In young ApoE-/- and plaque-free regions of older ApoE-/-, this is unchanged. However a significant increase in oscillations (~13-15%) occurred in thoracic and arch cells adjacent to lesions in older mice. Our data suggest that Ca2+ signals in endothelial cells show specific changes both before and with plaque formation, that these changes are greatest in plaque-prone aortic arch cells, and that these changes will contribute to the reported deterioration of endothelium in atherosclerosis