2,208 research outputs found
The development of direct payments in the UK: implications for social justice
Direct payments have been heralded by the disability movement as an important means to
achieving independent living and hence greater social justice for disabled people through
enhanced recognition as well as financial redistribution. Drawing on data from the ESRC
funded project Disabled People and Direct Payments: A UK Comparative Perspective,
this paper presents an analysis of policy and official statistics on use of direct payments
across the UK. It is argued that the potential of direct payments has only partly been
realised as a result of very low and uneven uptake within and between different parts
of the UK. This is accounted for in part by resistance from some Labour-controlled local
authorities, which regard direct payments as a threat to public sector jobs. In addition,
access to direct payments has been uneven across impairment groups. However, from a
very low base there has been a rapid expansion in the use of direct payments over the
past three years. The extent to which direct payments are able to facilitate the ultimate
goal of independent living for disabled people requires careful monitoring
Analyzing X-ray variability by State Space Models
In recent years, autoregressive models have had a profound impact on the
description of astronomical time series as the observation of a stochastic
process. These methods have advantages compared with common Fourier techniques
concerning their inherent stationarity and physical background. If
autoregressive models are used, however, it has to be taken into account that
real data always contain observational noise often obscuring the intrinsic time
series of the object. We apply the technique of a Linear State Space Model
which explicitly models the noise of astronomical data and allows to estimate
the hidden autoregressive process. As an example, we have analysed a sample of
Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) observed with EXOSAT and found evidence for a
relationship between the relaxation timescale and the spectral hardness.Comment: 4 pages, Latex, uses Kluwer Style file crckapb.cls To appear in Proc.
of Astronomical Time Series, Tel Aviv, 199
Classroom assessment and education: challenging the assumptions of socialisation and instrumentality
The opportunity offered by the Umea Symposium to probe the intersection of quality and assessment immediately brings into focus a wider issue – that of the quality of education which assessment aspires to support. Prompted by recent research into formative assessment in Scottish primary school contexts, the paper explores how formative assessment has become associated with an overly benign understanding of learning which misrecognises the possibility of undesirable learning and does not seem to address the inherently political nature of education. Having illuminated the potential inequities of formative assessment practices, the paper then asks what role formative assessment might play to support an understanding of education that is not simply about the transmission of traditional social norms, but also aspires to illuminate their social construction and their political nature
Glass transition and alpha-relaxation dynamics of thin films of labeled polystyrene
The glass transition temperature and relaxation dynamics of the segmental
motions of thin films of polystyrene labeled with a dye,
4-[N-ethyl-N-(hydroxyethyl)]amino-4-nitraozobenzene (Disperse Red 1, DR1) are
investigated using dielectric measurements. The dielectric relaxation strength
of the DR1-labeled polystyrene is approximately 65 times larger than that of
the unlabeled polystyrene above the glass transition, while there is almost no
difference between them below the glass transition. The glass transition
temperature of the DR1-labeled polystyrene can be determined as a crossover
temperature at which the temperature coefficient of the electric capacitance
changes from the value of the glassy state to that of the liquid state. The
glass transition temperature of the DR1-labeled polystyrene decreases with
decreasing film thickness in a reasonably similar manner to that of the
unlabeled polystyrene thin films. The dielectric relaxation spectrum of the
DR1-labeled polystyrene is also investigated. As thickness decreases, the
-relaxation time becomes smaller and the distribution of the
-relaxation times becomes broader. These results show that thin films
of DR1-labeled polystyrene are a suitable system for investigating confinement
effects of the glass transition dynamics using dielectric relaxation
spectroscopy.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figures, 2 Table
Teachers as agents of change: An exploration of the concept of teacher agency
The Teacher Agency and Curriculum Change project began in March 2011, and will run until May 2012. The project is conducted at the University of Stirling, in partnership with a Scottish Local Authority. It is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The research team is: Dr Mark Priestley (Principal Investigator), Professor Gert Biesta (Co-Investigator), Dr Sarah Robinson (Research Fellow). The project comprises a number of in-depth ethnographic case studies in three Scottish schools (primary and secondary). The immediate context for the research is the implementation of Scotland's new Curriculum for Excellence, a policy that aims to change the structure, content and method of Scottish education, and which is an example of modern curricular reform in which teachers are explicitly positioned as agents of change. The project focuses on the ways in which and the extent to which experienced teachers achieve agency in their day to day working contexts, against the background of the introduction of the new curriculum, and on the factors that promote or inhibit such agency. The project has two key aims: to trial a set of methodologies for identifying the factors that impact upon teacher agency, to develop an understanding of key factors that impact upon such agency in contexts of educational change. This paper is one of a series of working papers being produced as part of the research. This, along with other working papers (as they become available) may be downloaded from the project website at http://www.ioe.stir.ac.uk/events/tacc.php
Gender as Name
Many people believe that if you identify as a particular gender, then you are that gender. This paper is my attempt at making sense of this claim. I propose to conceive of genders as names: determined by the individual and not requiring any specific biological or psychological qualities, yet still important to the bearer
The global dimension in education and education for global citizenship: genealogy and critique
Encouraged by transnational organisations, curriculum policy makers in the UK have called for curricula in schools and higher education to include a global dimension and education for global citizenship that will prepare students for life in a global society and work in a global economy. We argue that this call is rhetorically operating as a ‘nodal point’ in policy discourse – a floating signifier that different discourses attempt to cover with meaning. This rhetoric attempts to bring three educational traditions together: environmental education, development education and citizenship education. We explore this new point of arrival and departure and some of the consequences and critiques. Key Words: education for global citizenship, environmental education, development education, citizenship education
In praise of partially interpretable predictors
Often there is an uninterpretable model that is statistically as good as, if not better than, a successful interpretable model. Accordingly, if one restricts attention to interpretable models, then one may sacrifice predictive power or other desirable properties. A minimal condition for an interpretable, usually parametric, model to be better than another model is that the first should have smallermean-squared error or integratedmean-squared error.We show through a series of examples that this is often not the case and give the asymptotic forms of a variety of interpretable, partially interpretable, and noninterpretable methods. We find techniques that combine aspects of both interpretability and noninterpretability in models seem to give the best results
Characterization of the Crab Pulsar's Timing Noise
We present a power spectral analysis of the Crab pulsar's timing noise,
mainly using radio measurements from Jodrell Bank taken over the period
1982-1989. The power spectral analysis is complicated by nonuniform data
sampling and the presence of a steep red power spectrum that can distort power
spectra measurement by causing severe power ``leakage''. We develop a simple
windowing method for computing red noise power spectra of uniformly sampled
data sets and test it on Monte Carlo generated sample realizations of red
power-law noise. We generalize time-domain methods of generating power-law red
noise with even integer spectral indices to the case of noninteger spectral
indices. The Jodrell Bank pulse phase residuals are dense and smooth enough
that an interpolation onto a uniform time series is possible. A windowed power
spectrum is computed revealing a periodic or nearly periodic component with a
period of about 568 days and a 1/f^3 power-law noise component with a noise
strength of 1.24 +/- 0.067 10^{-16} cycles^2/sec^2 over the analysis frequency
range 0.003 - 0.1 cycles/day. This result deviates from past analyses which
characterized the pulse phase timing residuals as either 1/f^4 power-law noise
or a quasiperiodic process. The analysis was checked using the Deeter
polynomial method of power spectrum estimation that was developed for the case
of nonuniform sampling, but has lower spectral resolution. The timing noise is
consistent with a torque noise spectrum rising with analysis frequency as f
implying blue torque noise, a result not predicted by current models of pulsar
timing noise. If the periodic or nearly periodic component is due to a binary
companion, we find a companion mass > 3.2 Earth masses.Comment: 53 pages, 9 figures, submitted to MNRAS, abstract condense
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