Accessible bounds for general quantum resources

The recent development of general quantum resource theories has given a sound basis for the quantification of useful quantum effects. Nevertheless, the evaluation of a resource measure can be highly non-trivial, involving an optimisation that is often intractable analytically or intensive numerically. In this paper, we describe a general framework that provides quantitative lower bounds to any resource quantifier that satisfies the essential property of monotonicity under the corresponding set of free operations. Our framework relies on projecting all quantum states onto a restricted subset using a fixed resource non-increasing operation. The resources of the resultant family can then be evaluated using a simplified optimisation, with the result providing lower bounds on the resource contents of any state. This approach also reduces the experimental overhead, requiring only the relevant statistics of the restricted family of states. We illustrate the application of our framework by focusing on the resource of multiqubit entanglement and outline applications to other quantum resources

Yngre elevers lärande om naturen En studie av kommunikation om modeller i institutionella kontexter

Abstract The aim of the study is to draw attention to and examine how young students (approximately 5-13 years) are involved in communication about nature, what approaches to nature are mediated in the social practices of preschool, school, and a science center, and how functional these approaches may be as providing learners with tools for making sense in other situations in everyday life and society. Empirical investigations were carried out by observations, tape recordings and video recordings of interaction in different educational contexts and presented in three studies. The first study is about a group of preschool children (5 years old) and their teacher visiting an exhibition about the water flow at a science center and the teacher communicating with the children about their visit during circle time at the preschool. The second study is about conversations about the water cycle between teachers and young students (8-10 years old) at a primary school, with a prop in the form of a photograph taken in a real rainforest. The third study is about students (12-13 years old) working in pairs in a computer-simulated micro world of ecological processes on an African savanna. Taking a sociocultural perspective, the results indicate that in all the studied contexts, the conversations between the students and teachers were characterized by being indistinct, i.e. not being conducted within a distinct discourse. The students had difficulties following the teachers’ communication strategies. It seemed to be important for the teachers that the students themselves understood what the conversation was about and to arrive at the right answer. Students’ possibility to express their knowledge is closely dependent on the adults’ strategies. The most successful strategy for students is to follow the teacher’s way of speaking. This leads to the fact that some students succeed to talk in such a way that is expected by the teacher in the conversation. When the teacher is absent the students make sense by referring to their previous experience. Without support by the teacher the students thus thematize nature on their own terms. In the investigated activities the models are handled as if being self-illustrative. Models, as such, and how they are related to what they refer to was never explained by the teachers in the studied activities

Rurality and education relations: Metro-centricity and local values inrural communities and rural schools

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in six different types of rural area and their schools in different parts of Sweden, this article identifies how rural schools relate to the local place and discusses some of the educational implications from this. Recurrent references to the local community were present in some schools and people there explicitly positioned themselves in the local rural context and valorised rurality positively in education exchanges, content and interactions, with positive effects on young people’s experiences of participation and inclusion. These factors tended to occur in sparsely populated areas. An emphasis on nature and its value as materially vital in people’s lives was present as was a critique of middle-class metrocentricity. Such values and critique seemed to be absent in other areas, where rurality was instead often represented along the metrocentric lines of a residual space in modernizing societies

Educational and spatial justice in rural and urban areas in three Nordic countries : A meta-ethnographic analysis

This article is based on a meta-ethnographic analysis of educational research from rural and urban areas in Finland, Norway and Sweden following the reorganisation of educational supply there in line with market policies. Edward Soja’s concept of spatial justice shapes the analysis. Using meta-ethnography, we try to present a contextualising narrative account of spatial justice and injustice in the education systems in the three countries. Thirtyone Nordic ethnographic publications (a mix of monographs, book chapters and articles) have been used in the meta-analysis. Just over half of them come from Sweden, and most are from urban education studies. The other half are relatively evenly divided between Norway and Finland. All were published between 2000 and 2017. Sweden represents an extreme position in relation to the new politics of education markets. Its promotion of school choice and schools-for-profit has attracted significant attention from ethnographic researchers in recent decades and is given particular attention in the article.Peer reviewe