882 research outputs found
Public funding of higher education : a comparative study of funding mechanisms in ten countries.
Higher education reform: getting the incentives right
This study is a joint effort by the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB) and the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies. It analyses a number of `best practicesÂż where the design of financial incentives working on the system level of higher education is concerned. In Chapter 1, an overview of some of the characteristics of the Dutch higher education sector is presented. Chapter 2 is a refresher on the economics of higher education. Chapter 3 is about the Australian Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS). Chapter 4 is about tuition fees and admission policies in US universities. Chapter 5 looks at the funding of Danish universities through the so-called taximeter-model, that links funding to student performance. Chapter 6 deals with research funding in the UK university system, where research assessments exercises underlie the funding decisions. In Chapter 7 we study the impact of university-industry ties on academic research by examining the US policies on increasing knowledge transfer between universities and the private sector. Finally, Chapter 8 presents food for thought for Dutch policymakers: what lessons can be learned from our international comparison
Certification of tactics and strategies in aviation
The paper suggests that the 'tactics and strategies' notion is a highly suitable paradigm to describe the cognitive involvement of human operators in advanced aviation systems (far more suitable than classical functional analysis), and that the workload and situational awareness of operators are intimately associated with the planning and execution of their tactics and strategies. If system designers have muddled views about the collective tactics and strategies to be used during operation, they will produce sub-optimum designs. If operators use unproven and/or inappropriate tactics and strategies, the system may fail. The author wants to make a point that, beyond certification of people or system designs, there may be a need to go into more detail and examine (certify?) the set of tactics and strategies (i.e., the Operational Concept) which makes the people and systems perform as expected. The collective tactics and strategies determine the information flows and situational awareness which exists in organizations and composite human-machine systems. The available infrastructure and equipment (automation) enable these information flows and situational awareness, but are at the same time the constraining factor. Frequently, the tactics and strategies are driven by technology, whereas we would rather like to see a system designed to support an optimized Operational Concept, i.e., to support a sufficiently coherent, cooperative and modular set of anticipation and planning mechanisms. Again, in line with the view of MacLeod and Taylor (1993), this technology driven situation may be caused by the system designer's and operator job designer's over-emphasis on functional analysis (a mechanistic engineering concept), at the expense of a subject which does not seem to be well understood today: the role of the (human cognitive and/or automated) tactics and strategies which are embedded in composite human-machine systems. Research would be needed to arrive at a generally accepted 'planning theory' which can elevate the analysis, description and design of tactics and strategies from today's cottage industry methods to an engineering discipline. The available infrastructure and equipment (automation) enable these information flows and situational awareness, but are at the same time the constraining factor. Frequently, the tactics and strategies are driven by technology, whereas we would rather like to see a system designed to support an optimized Operational Concept, i.e., to support a sufficiently coherent, cooperative and modular set of anticipation and planning mechanisms. Again, in line with the view of MacLeod and Taylor (1993), this technology driven situation may be caused by the system designer's and operator job designer's over-emphasis on functional analysis (a mechanistic engineering concept), at the expense of a subject which does not seem to be well understood today: the role of the (human cognitive and/or automated) tactics and strategies which are embedded in composite human-machine systems. Research would be needed to arrive at a generally accepted 'planning theory' which can evaluate the analysis, description and design of tactics and strategies from today's cottage industry methods to an engineering discipline
The funding of universities in the Netherlands:developments and trends
Recently, the Dutch Minister of Education, Culture and Science proposed that the funding system of Dutch universities be drastically altered by introducing a system of capacity funding. The intention is to abandon the current (direct) student dependence in funding and, instead, to offer a stable, long-term funds perspective. If this capacity funding is actually adopted, a trend break in the funding system of higher education and research in the Netherlands will occur. This article describes the developments in the funding of Dutch universities over the past decades and the (expected) developments for the future. With regard to the near future and in addition to the capacity funding intended the author will also discuss other developments anticipated by him. It will be shown that during the last forty years four “generations” of funding models have been used in the Netherlands. Soon the changeover to the fifth generation will possibly be made. A number of issues will be discussed, such as the introduction (and enlargement) of lump sum funding, elements of output funding (performance based funding) and competition on the basis of quality. First, some basic characteristics of funding systems in general will be presented. They will be used to analyse the relevant developments in the Dutch higher education allocation systems
Vouchers for higher education?:A survey of the literature Commissioned by the Hong Kong University Grants Committee
Renormalization Group theory outperforms other approaches in statistical comparison between upscaling techniques for porous media
Determining the pressure differential required to achieve a desired flow rate
in a porous medium requires solving Darcy's law, a Laplace-like equation, with
a spatially varying tensor permeability. In various scenarios, the permeability
coefficient is sampled at high spatial resolution, which makes solving Darcy's
equation numerically prohibitively expensive. As a consequence, much effort has
gone into creating upscaled or low-resolution effective models of the
coefficient while ensuring that the estimated flow rate is well reproduced,
bringing to fore the classic tradeoff between computational cost and numerical
accuracy. Here we perform a statistical study to characterize the relative
success of upscaling methods on a large sample of permeability coefficients
that are above the percolation threshold. We introduce a new technique based on
Mode-Elimination Renormalization-Group theory (MG) to build coarse-scale
permeability coefficients. Comparing the results with coefficients upscaled
using other methods, we find that MG is consistently more accurate,
particularly so due to its ability to address the tensorial nature of the
coefficients. MG places a low computational demand, in the manner that we have
implemented it, and accurate flow-rate estimates are obtained when using
MG-upscaled permeabilities that approach or are beyond the percolation
threshold.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures, Physical Review
- …