On the shopfloor: exploring the impact of teacher trade unions on school-based industrial relations

Teachers are highly unionised workers and their trade unions exert an important influence on the shaping and implementation of educational policy. Despite this importance there is relatively little analysis of the impact of teacher trade unions in educational management literature. Very little empirical research has sought to establish the impact of teacher unions at school level. In an era of devolved management and quasi-markets this omission is significant. New personnel issues continue to emerge at school level and this may well generate increased trade union activity at the workplace. This article explores the extent to which devolved management is drawing school-based union representation into a more prominent role. It argues that whilst there can be significant differences between individual schools, increased school autonomy is raising the profile of trade union activity in the workplace, and this needs to be better reflected in educational management research

Nuclear Transparency to Intermediate-Energy Protons

Nuclear transparency in the (e,e'p) reaction for 135 < Tp < 800 MeV is investigated using the distorted wave approximation. Calculations using density-dependent effective interactions are compared with phenomenological optical potentials. Nuclear transparency is well correlated with proton absorption and neutron total cross sections. For Tp < 300 MeV there is considerable sensitivity to the choice of optical model, with the empirical effective interaction providing the best agreement with transparency data. For Tp > 300 MeV there is much less difference between optical models, but the calculations substantially underpredict transparency data and the discrepancy increases with A. The differences between Glauber and optical model calculations are related to their respective definitions of the semi-inclusive cross section. By using a more inclusive summation over final states the Glauber model emphasizes nucleon-nucleon inelasticity, whereas with a more restrictive summation the optical model emphasizes nucleon-nucleus inelasticity; experimental definitions of the semi-inclusive cross section lie between these extremes.Comment: uuencoded gz-compressed tar file containing revtex and bbl files and 5 postscript figures, totalling 31 pages. Uses psfi

Electrostatic boundary value problems in the Schwarzschild background

The electrostatic potential of any test charge distribution in Schwarzschild space with boundary values is derived. We calculate the Green's function, generalize the second Green's identity for p-forms and find the general solution. Boundary value problems are solved. With a multipole expansion the asymptotic property for the field of any charge distribution is derived. It is shown that one produces a Reissner--Nordstrom black hole if one lowers a test charge distribution slowly toward the horizon. The symmetry of the distribution is not important. All the multipole moments fade away except the monopole. A calculation of the gravitationally induced electrostatic self-force on a pointlike test charge distribution held stationary outside the black hole is presented.Comment: 18 pages, no figures, uses iopart.st

Classification of bicovariant differential calculi on the Jordanian quantum groups GL_{g,h}(2) and SL_{h}(2) and quantum Lie algebras

We classify all 4-dimensional first order bicovariant calculi on the Jordanian quantum group GL_{h,g}(2) and all 3-dimensional first order bicovariant calculi on the Jordanian quantum group SL_{h}(2). In both cases we assume that the bicovariant bimodules are generated as left modules by the differentials of the quantum group generators. It is found that there are 3 1-parameter families of 4-dimensional bicovariant first order calculi on GL_{h,g}(2) and that there is a single, unique, 3-dimensional bicovariant calculus on SL_{h}(2). This 3-dimensional calculus may be obtained through a classical-like reduction from any one of the three families of 4-dimensional calculi on GL_{h,g}(2). Details of the higher order calculi and also the quantum Lie algebras are presented for all calculi. The quantum Lie algebra obtained from the bicovariant calculus on SL_{h}(2) is shown to be isomorphic to the quantum Lie algebra we obtain as an ad-submodule within the Jordanian universal enveloping algebra U_{h}(sl(2)) and also through a consideration of the decomposition of the tensor product of two copies of the deformed adjoint module. We also obtain the quantum Killing form for this quantum Lie algebra.Comment: 33 pages, AMSLaTeX, misleading remark remove

Theorems on shear-free perfect fluids with their Newtonian analogues

In this paper we provide fully covariant proofs of some theorems on shear-free perfect fluids. In particular, we explicitly show that any shear-free perfect fluid with the acceleration proportional to the vorticity vector (including the simpler case of vanishing acceleration) must be either non-expanding or non-rotating. We also show that these results are not necessarily true in the Newtonian case, and present an explicit comparison of shear-free dust in Newtonian and relativistic theories in order to see where and why the differences appear.Comment: 23 pages, LaTeX. Submitted to GR

Deciphering the functional role of spatial and temporal muscle synergies in whole-body movements

International audienceVoluntary movement is hypothesized to rely on a limited number of muscle synergies, the recruitment of which translates task goals into effective muscle activity. In this study, we investigated how to analytically characterize the functional role of different types of muscle synergies in task performance. To this end, we recorded a comprehensive dataset of muscle activity during a variety of whole-body pointing movements. We decomposed the electromyographic (EMG) signals using a space-by-time modularity model which encompasses the main types of synergies. We then used a task decoding and information theoretic analysis to probe the role of each synergy by mapping it to specific task features. We found that the temporal and spatial aspects of the movements were encoded by different temporal and spatial muscle synergies, respectively, consistent with the intuition that there should a correspondence between major attributes of movement and major features of synergies. This approach led to the development of a novel computational method for comparing muscle synergies from different participants according to their functional role. This functional similarity analysis yielded a small set of temporal and spatial synergies that describes the main features of whole-body reaching movements

Fractal Nanotechnology

Self-similar patterns are frequently observed in Nature. Their reproduction is possible on a length scale 102–105 nm with lithographic methods, but seems impossible on the nanometer length scale. It is shown that this goal may be achieved via a multiplicative variant of the multi-spacer patterning technology, in this way permitting the controlled preparation of fractal surfaces

Movement Timing and Invariance Arise from Several Geometries

Human movements show several prominent features; movement duration is nearly independent of movement size (the isochrony principle), instantaneous speed depends on movement curvature (captured by the 2/3 power law), and complex movements are composed of simpler elements (movement compositionality). No existing theory can successfully account for all of these features, and the nature of the underlying motion primitives is still unknown. Also unknown is how the brain selects movement duration. Here we present a new theory of movement timing based on geometrical invariance. We propose that movement duration and compositionality arise from cooperation among Euclidian, equi-affine and full affine geometries. Each geometry posses a canonical measure of distance along curves, an invariant arc-length parameter. We suggest that for continuous movements, the actual movement duration reflects a particular tensorial mixture of these canonical parameters. Near geometrical singularities, specific combinations are selected to compensate for time expansion or compression in individual parameters. The theory was mathematically formulated using Cartan's moving frame method. Its predictions were tested on three data sets: drawings of elliptical curves, locomotion and drawing trajectories of complex figural forms (cloverleaves, lemniscates and limaçons, with varying ratios between the sizes of the large versus the small loops). Our theory accounted well for the kinematic and temporal features of these movements, in most cases better than the constrained Minimum Jerk model, even when taking into account the number of estimated free parameters. During both drawing and locomotion equi-affine geometry was the most dominant geometry, with affine geometry second most important during drawing; Euclidian geometry was second most important during locomotion. We further discuss the implications of this theory: the origin of the dominance of equi-affine geometry, the possibility that the brain uses different mixtures of these geometries to encode movement duration and speed, and the ontogeny of such representations