Two Alternative Yet Complementary Conceptual Frameworks for Financing American Education

Outlines strategies to integrate systemic performance-based reform, which assumes that improving the school system will help all students meet standards, and out-of-school interventions, which attempts to mitigate the effects of poverty and other factors

NASA Contributions to Development of Special-Purpose Thermocouples. A Survey

The thermocouple has been used for measuring temperatures for more than a century, but new materials, probe designs, and techniques are continually being developed. Numerous contributions have been made by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and its contractors in the aerospace program. These contributions have been collected by Midwest Research Institute and reported in this publication to enable American industrial engineers to study them and adapt them to their own problem areas. Potential applications are suggested to stimulate ideas on how these contributions can be used

Some aspects of the contribution to British archaeology of Charles Roach Smith (1806-90)

From around 1838 to 1861, Charles Roach Smith played a central role in the revival and development of British archaeology. Among the first to whom archaeology was no longer subservient to history. Smith adopted and encouraged a strongly positivist approach and, influenced by Douglas and the comte de Caylus, effectively inaugurated the study of minor antiquities within Britain. His comparative artifact research, regional and international in scope, led to the development of Dark Age archaeology as an international field of study. Smith's ideas on the organisation of British archaeology were derived from Northern France, where the democratisation of knowledge was more advanced. His aims were to extend to the middle classes the opportunity for involvement in archaeological research and publication (which was vital in view of the rising scale of archaeological destruction), to obtain government support (since they had little by way of private funds), and to improve standards by emphasising meritocracy rather than aristocracy in the ruling bodies of the discipline. Modelled on the Societe Frangaise pour la Conservation des Monuments Historiques, the British Archaeological Association, which Smith jointly inaugurated, was one tangible result. The campaign to induce the British Museum's aristocratic trustees to purchase his Museum of London Antiquities as the core of the national archaeological collection was another. This thesis comprises an outline of Smith's life and career to 1861, with a detailed discussion of his contributions to the archaeology of Roman and medieval London and Anglo-Saxon England, and the developing institutions of British archaeology. In view of the centrality of Smith's position, it constitutes a logical first step towards a general history of early Victorian archaeology. This may be further advanced by the summary catalogue of Smith's manuscripts (some as yet untraced), which comprise an hitherto unrecognised archive of international importance

Can Social Contagion Help Global Health ‘Jump the Shark’?; Comment on “How to Facilitate Social Contagion?”

The instrumental use of social networks has become a central tenet of international health policy and advocacy since the Millennium project. In asking, ‘How to facilitate social contagion?’, Karl Blanchet of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine therefore reflects not only on the recent success, but also hints to growing challenges; the tactics of partnerships, alliances and platforms no longer seem to be delivering at the same rate and maybe reversing. A better understanding of how social networks work may therefore be needed to strengthen a tactical instrument that has been used to remarkable recent effect. But in focusing on the unbounded rhetoric and narrative options of Global Health, the danger will surely be on missing the fundamental factors constraining network growth. Future growth will depend on understanding these constraints, and Global Health may do well to think of social networks not only instrumentally, but also analytically in terms of the strategic contexts and environments in which such instruments are deployed

Learning and Production of Movement Sequences: Behavioral, Neurophysiological, and Modeling Perspectives

A growing wave of behavioral studies, using a wide variety of paradigms that were introduced or greatly refined in recent years, has generated a new wealth of parametric observations about serial order behavior. What was a mere trickle of neurophysiological studies has grown to a more steady stream of probes of neural sites and mechanisms underlying sequential behavior. Moreover, simulation models of serial behavior generation have begun to open a channel to link cellular dynamics with cognitive and behavioral dynamics. Here we summarize the major results from prominent sequence learning and performance tasks, namely immediate serial recall, typing, 2XN, discrete sequence production, and serial reaction time. These populate a continuum from higher to lower degrees of internal control of sequential organization. The main movement classes covered are speech and keypressing, both involving small amplitude movements that are very amenable to parametric study. A brief synopsis of classes of serial order models, vis-à-vis the detailing of major effects found in the behavioral data, leads to a focus on competitive queuing (CQ) models. Recently, the many behavioral predictive successes of CQ models have been joined by successful prediction of distinctively patterend electrophysiological recordings in prefrontal cortex, wherein parallel activation dynamics of multiple neural ensembles strikingly matches the parallel dynamics predicted by CQ theory. An extended CQ simulation model-the N-STREAMS neural network model-is then examined to highlight issues in ongoing attemptes to accomodate a broader range of behavioral and neurophysiological data within a CQ-consistent theory. Important contemporary issues such as the nature of working memory representations for sequential behavior, and the development and role of chunks in hierarchial control are prominent throughout.Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency/Office of Naval Research (N00014-95-1-0409); National Institute of Mental Health (R01 DC02852

Frontiers of reason: on epistemology and mystery

This thesis has two parts. The first part is a development of Dionysius the Areopagites' theophanic notion of being, what I call his notion of the mystery of being-as-ikon, in relation to his epistemology and theory of language. The second part is an application of this notion to certain epistemological and linguistic issues in western philosophy. The purpose of the thesis is to develop a Dionysian philosophical theology through the notion of being-as-ikon in dialogue with western philosophy