What is a categorical model of arrows?

We investigate what the correct categorical formulation of Hughes’ Arrows should be. It has long been folklore that Arrows, a functional programming construct, and Freyd categories, a categorical notion due to Power, Robinson and Thielecke, are somehow equivalent. In this paper, we show that the situation is more subtle. By considering Arrows wholly within the base category we derive two alternative formulations of Freyd category that are equivalent to Arrows—enriched Freyd categories and indexed Freyd categories. By imposing a further condition, we characterise those indexed Freyd categories that are isomorphic to Freyd categories. The key differentiating point is the number of inputs available to a computation and the structure available on them, where structured input is modelled using comonads

A Quasi-Experimental Study of the Classroom Practices of English Language Teachers and the English Language Proficiency of Students, in Primary and Secondary Schools in Bangladesh

English in Action (EIA) is an English language teacher development project based in Bangladesh that was intended to run from 2008 to 2017, but which was extended at the request of the Government of Bangladesh, with additional funding from UKAID, for a further year to 2018. By the time of the design of this study (2014-2015) EIA was drawing to the end of upscaling (phase III, 2011-2014) and entering institutionalisation and sustainability (phase IV, 2014-17, extended 2018). Successive prior studies had indicated substantial success in improving both teachers’ classroom practices and student learning outcomes, over the pre-project baseline (e.g. EIA 2011, 2012). The 2014 Annual Review of EIA recommended that in the final phase, EIA should explore whether it would be possible to carry out a study that compared a ‘counterfactual’ or control-group of teachers and students, to the ‘EIA’ or treatment schools: i.e. a Randomised Control Trial or Quasi-Experimental study. A proposal for a Quasi-Experimental study was developed in collaboration with DFID’s South Asia Research Hub (SARH), which also provided the additional funding necessary to implement such a study. The teachers and students who were the subject of this study, were the fourth cohort to participate in English in Action (together with teachers from ‘control’ schools, in the same Upazilas). This fourth EIA cohort included Schools, Teachers and Students from approximately 200 Upazilas (of approximately 500 in total) across Bangladesh, including some of the most disadvantaged areas (with reference to UNICEF deprivation index), such as Char, Hoar and Monga districts. Teachers took part in a school-based teacher development Programme, learning communicative language teaching approaches through carrying out new classroom activities, guided by teacher development videos that showed teachers, students and schools similar to those across the country. Teachers also had classroom audio resources for use with students. All digital materials were available offline, on teachers own mobile phones, so there is no dilution of the Programmes core messages about teaching and learning, by some intermediary coming between the teacher and the materials. Teachers were supported through these activities, by other teachers in their schools, by their head teachers and by local education officers. Some teachers from each area were also given additional support and guidance from divisional EIA staff, to act as Teacher Facilitators, helping teachers work through activities and share their experiences at local cluster meetings. Whereas previous cohorts of teachers had attended eight local teacher development meetings over their participation in the project, for Cohort Four, this was reduced to four meetings, with a greater emphasis being placed on support in school by head teachers, as well as support from local education officers. This change was part of the move towards institutionalisation and sustainability of project activities within and through government systems and local officers. The purpose of this study was both to provide the evaluation evidence required for the final phase of the EIA project and to contribute to the international body of research evidence on effective practices in teacher development in low-to-middle income country contexts

Changing Expectations of Privacy and the Fourth Amendment

Public attitudes about privacy are central to the development of fourth amendment doctrine in two respects. These are the two “reasonableness” requirements, which define the scope of the fourth amendment (it protects only “reasonable” expectations of privacy), and provide the key to determining compliance with its commands (it prohibits “unreasonable” searches and seizures). Both requirements are interpreted in substantial part through evaluation of societal norms about acceptable levels of privacy from governmental intrusions. Caselaw, poll data, newspaper articles, internet sites, and other vehicles for gauging public attitudes after the September 11 attacks indicate that public concerns about terrorism and the erosion of personal privacy by governmental responses to terrorism have had significant effects on fourth amendment law. These include both a cutting back on overall fourth amendment coverage and treating as reasonable security intrusions that previously would not have been permitted. Results include less judicial scrutiny, additional intrusions based on security, possibly legal and political support for racial profiling in law enforcement

Editing OWL through generated CNL

Abstract. Traditionally, Controlled Natural Languages (CNLs) are de-signed either to avoid ambiguity for human readers, or to facilitate auto-matic semantic analysis, so that texts can be transcoded to a knowledge representation language. CNLs of the second kind have recently been adapted to the requirements of knowledge formation in OWL for the Semantic Web. We suggest in this paper a variant approach based on automatic generation of texts in CNL (as opposed to automatic analy-sis), and argue that this provides the best of both worlds, allowing us to pursue human readability in addition to a precise mapping from texts to a formal language.

Automating class definitions from OWL to English

Text definitions for entities within bio-ontologies are a cor-nerstone of the effort to gain a consensus in understanding and usage of those ontologies. Writing these definitions is, however, a considerable effort and there is often a lag be-tween specification of the entities in the ontology and the development of the text-based definitions. As well as these text definitions, there can also be logical descriptions and definitions of an ontology's entities. The goal of natural lan-guage generation (NLG) from ontologies is to take the logi-cal description of entities and generate fluent natural lan-guage. We should be able to use NLG to automatically pro-vide text-based definitions from an ontology that has logical descriptions of its entities and thus avoid the bottleneck of authoring these definitions by hand. In this paper we present some early work in using NLG to provide such text definitions for the Experimental factor Ontology (EFO). We present our results, discuss issues in generating text definitions, and highlight some future work

La Villa de las Tres Cuturas: A Study of a New Tourist Festival in Frigiliana, al-Ándalus

This study focuses on a new tourist festival in the southern Andalusian village of Frigiliana. The festival began in 2006 and celebrates the village’s plural Jewish, Christian and Muslim past. The thesis argues that a recent tourist invention has moved beyond the confines of a four-day commercial event and into the everyday lives of the population. It argues that through the sustained management of culture, the organisers of the festival have consciously defined and configured an emergent local ethnicity. Festival Frigiliana 3 Culturas is a considered political move framed within national discourse relating to the recuperation of lost historical memories. The festival was created within this discursive field, but it is more than a symbolic gesture. It is a form of cultural activism that counters a dominant monocultural narrative in a somatic manner. Festival Frigiliana 3 Culturas playfully conjures up the past during a tourist event. Yet in doing so, it is playing with new myths and legends in the present. Within a festival atmosphere, locals claim ownership of their public space in order to express their myths and legends. The festival constructs a medieval sensorium through which the body encounters lost histories. Thus, the festival moves beyond symbolic constructions and creates a space where the internal organs of the body validate a recent notion of local identity, tradition and culture. The thesis argues that the internal organs of the body work in communion with reconfigured symbols. It argues that the inner body actively engages with the festival and attains the level of discourse required to transform “pure” blood into “plural” blood. It contends that the kitsch plastic realm of proletarian tourism realises the potential for social change. During this commercial process, Festival Frigiliana 3 Culturas creates a new ethnicity called al-Ándalus and it is the commercial component within the event that allows locals to claim ownership of their public space

Magnetic edge states and magnetotransport in graphene antidot barriers

Magnetic fields are often used for characterizing transport in nanoscale materials. Recent magnetotransport experiments have demonstrated that ballistic transport is possible in graphene antidot lattices (GALs). These experiments have inspired the present theoretical study of GALs in a perpendicular magnetic field. We calculate magnetotransport through graphene antidot barriers (GABs), which are finite rows of antidots arranged periodically in a pristine graphene sheet, using a tight-binding model and the Landauer-B\"uttiker formula. We show that GABs behave as ideal Dirac mass barriers for antidots smaller than the magnetic length, and demonstrate the presence of magnetic edge states, which are localized states on the periphery of the antidots due to successive reflections on the antidot edge in the presence of a magnetic field. We show that these states are robust against variations in lattice configuration and antidot edge chirality. Moreover, we calculate the transmittance of disordered GABs and find that magnetic edge states survive a moderate degree of disorder. Due to the long phase-coherence length in graphene and the robustness of these states, we expect magnetic edge states to be observable in experiments as well