54,311 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
Systems thinking and Equity-focused evaluations
Questions about access to resources - who gets what? - ought not to be seen in isolation from related questions of power - who owns what? They also ought not to be seen in isolation from questions of knowledge and expertise - who does what? Moreover these questions relate to important questions regarding legitimacy - who gets affected by what some people get? Such questions are often more easily avoided in a normal evaluation for fear of the ethics and politics involved in addressing them. But such questions as formulated above also may not be easy to grasp or work with in terms of an approach to evaluating an intervention. To the systems thinker C. West Churchman (1913-2004), such ethical and political questions were profoundly important. It was Churchman's life-long task to surface the need to address such questions. One of the most significant insights offered by Churchman in order to address ethical issues was the need to engage meaningfully with different perspectives
Recommended from our members
Issues of quality assurance in the management of plagiarism in blended learning environments
Increasing access to and availability of electronic resources presents students with a rich
library of opportunities for independent study. But students also find themselves in the
confusing territory of how they should best use these resources within their assessment
activities. Likewise, teaching institutions are faced with the problems of plagiarism and
collusion, and the challenges of educating, deterring, detecting, and dealing with breaches of
policy in a fair and consistent way across all disciplines.
This paper examines issues of quality assurance in the management of plagiarism by
discussing the following questions:
– How can effective automated plagiarism detection services be introduced and managed
across the institution?
– What teaching and assessment practices can be adopted to deter plagiarism?
– What part should collusion and plagiarism detection tools play in educating and deterring
students?
– What are appropriate penalties for plagiarism and collusion and how can these be
applied consistently across disciplines?
Drawing together three distinct strands of research, in both distance and campus based
institutions, the authors discuss how practice and policy have evolved in recent years in an
attempt to reduce the incidence of plagiarism and collusion. The paper will illustrate this
evolution by reporting on recent developments in assessment strategy, detection tools, and
policy within two UK HE Institutions: The UK Open University and Manchester Metropolitan
University
NLO predictions for a lepton, missing transverse momentum and dijets at the Tevatron
n this letter we investigate the various processes that can contribute to a
final state consisting of a lepton, missing transverse momentum and two jets at
Next to Leading Order (NLO) at the Tevatron. In particular we consider the
production of W/Z + 2 jets, diboson pairs, single top and the tt process with
both fully leptonic and semi-leptonic decays. We present distributions for the
invariant mass of the dijet system and normalisations of the various processes,
accurate to NLO.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure
Secular evolution in action: central values and radial trends in the stellar populations of boxy bulges
We determine central values and radial trends in the stellar populations of
the bulges of a sample of 28 edge-on S0-Sb disk galaxies, 22 of which are
boxy/peanut-shaped (and therefore barred). Our principal findings are the
following. (1) At a given velocity dispersion, the central stellar populations
of galaxies with boxy/peanut-shaped bulges are indistinguishable from those of
early-type (elliptical and S0) galaxies. Either secular evolution affects
stellar populations no differently to monolithic collapse or mergers, or
secular evolution is not important in the central regions of these galaxies,
despite the fact that they are barred. (2) The radial metallicity gradients of
boxy/peanut-shaped bulges are uncorrelated with velocity dispersion and are, on
average, shallower than those of unbarred early-type galaxies. This is
qualitatively consistent with chemodynamical models of bar formation, in which
radial inflow and outflow smears out pre-existing gradients.Comment: MNRAS Letters accepted. 5 page
Heavy MSSM Higgs production at the LHC and decays to WW,ZZ at higher orders
In this paper we discuss the production of a heavy scalar MSSM Higgs boson H
and its subsequent decays into pairs of electroweak gauge bosons WW and ZZ. We
perform a scan over the relevant MSSM parameters, using constraints from direct
Higgs searches and several low-energy observables. We then compare the possible
size of the pp -> H -> WW,ZZ cross sections with corresponding Standard Model
cross sections. We also include the full MSSM vertex corrections to the H ->
WW,ZZ decay and combine them with the Higgs propagator corrections, paying
special attention to the IR-divergent contributions. We find that the vertex
corrections can be as large as -30% in MSSM parameter space regions which are
currently probed by Higgs searches at the LHC. Once the sensitivity of these
searches reaches two percent of the SM signal strength the vertex corrections
can be numerically as important as the leading order and Higgs self-energy
corrections and have to be considered when setting limits on MSSM parameters
A note on area variables in Regge calculus
We consider the possibility of setting up a new version of Regge calculus in
four dimensions with areas of triangles as the basic variables rather than the
edge-lengths. The difficulties and restrictions of this approach are discussed.Comment: 4 pages, amstex. Revision has minor changes and more precise
conclusion
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