A Directly Elected Upper House: Lessons from Italy and Australia

One obvious way of achieving the 'more democratic' upper house which the Labour government has promised would be for its members to be elected. Many other countries elect their upper houses and this briefing looks at what lessons can be drawn from two of them - Italy and Australia. Would a directly elected second chamber simply mirror the lower house? Would it be too powerful? What electoral system would it be appropriate to use? What would be the impact on the British political system? The briefing seeks to answer some of these questions

A Vocational Upper House?: Lessons from Ireland

The government has expressed a commitment to maintain an independent element in the reformed second chamber, and not to hand overall control to any one party. This raises the question of how independent members are selected for the house. Appointment is one solution, but others include ex-officio seats for defined vocational groups, or election from these groups. Ireland is the only country in the world where such a system is used for the bulk of second chamber members - through elections using vocational categories, with nominations from voluntary and professional organisations. This briefing looks at the Irish system and lessons to be learnt for the reformed House of Lords

An Appointed Upper House: Lessons from Canada

The abolition of hereditary peers' rights will leave the UK with a wholly appointed transitional upper house. The second stage will be decided only after a Royal Commission has reported. This briefing looks at the lessons to be learned from the only other wholly appointed upper house in a western democracy: the Canadian Senate. Experience from Canada suggests that without proper safeguards there could be high levels of cynicism about the transitional appointed house. It will be essential to reform the appointments system to the new chamber, and to ensure that momentum is kept up for the second stage. Despite consensus on the need to change, the Canadian Senate still remains unreformed after a century of debate. This is the first in a series of briefings about lessons from second chambers around the world

Assessing-to-learn; enriching the assessment process

Original article can be found at: http://www.ineer.org/Welcome.htmAssessment has a profound effect on learning - it focuses the students’ attention and actively encourages out-of-class engagement with the learning resources. Indeed it is repeatedly quoted as being the single most important activity with respect to encouraging learning. Further, in engineering disciplines the class-room activities (often) only appear to come alive when students are exposed to laboratory or hands-on activities. Coupling these notions together generally brings the need for students to produce formal laboratory reports. For the busy lecturer the marking of such reports, particularly as student numbers continue to grow, brings time demands that often conflicts with recognised good practice in terms of the quality and timing of the feedback. This work presents the findings from an alternative assessment approach which seeks to maintain the laboratory provision but uses the students, as well as desktop technology, to both help the assessment process as well as to enrich the learning opportunities. The paper draws out some of the opportunities and identifies the possible pitfalls of this approach. The findings have already indicated the merits of the approach hence this paper is likely to be of immense value to colleagues interested in i) developing learners and ii) engaging with experiential learning

Evaluating the Weekly-Assessed Tutorial Sheet approach to assessment: background, pedagogy and impact

This paper presents the results of using student-unique, weekly-assessed tasks to overcome a low examination performance in a first-year engineering module. In this instance, the weekly assessment tasks were created by off-the-shelf and bespoke software to form an integrated computer-assisted assessment (CAA) programme. This programme set, delivered, collected, marked and provided prompt feedback on the students’ work. The CAA was a set of student-unique Weekly-Assessed Tutorial Sheets (WATS). The rationale for the modified assessment strategy is presented together with the examination performance figures before and after the introduction of WATS.Peer reviewe

Reopening the Emmett Till Case: Lessons and Challenges for Critical Race Practice

As part of the symposium panel on Re- Trying Racial Injustices, I devote this Essay to an expansion of themes addressed in my earlier work on the reopening of civil rights era prosecutions. I draw upon this work, as well as upon the insights of my co-panelists Anthony Alfieri and Sherrilyn Ifill, to examine the reopening of the Emmett Till case and its critical race practice possibilities. In this Essay, I consider other aspects of these cleansing moments. Are they illusory? Do they provide a misleading sense of closure at the expense of the ongoing hard work of racial justice that leads up to -and must proceed from-those moments? What lessons or teaching moments might these cases create for critical race lawyers in their ongoing social justice work? In notable respects, the impetus to reopen long-dormant cases shares with critical legal theory a justified skepticism of the construct of finality and an idealistic vision of the possibilities for ultimate justice. Procedural and substantive bulwarks of finality may be necessary in a legalistic sense, but they do not signify closure or justice, particularly when structural inequality persists. Reopening, with its promise of restorative justice through racial healing and reconciliation, has the potential to provide the closure that mere finality lacks, but only if that restorative justice is authentic and far-reaching. This Essay proceeds to address the above concerns as follows. In Part I, I discuss the Emmett Till case in greater detail, with brief contextual reference to two historical eras that frame it chronologically and thematically: lynching in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, and the civil rights movement of the mid-to late1950s. In Part II, I focus on the significance of the 2004 Till case reopening and lessons that it may offer for critical race practice. These lessons dovetail with recurrent questions in the literature of critical race theory and offer suggestions for fostering the integration of theory and practice (race praxis). Finally, I conclude that the Till case and other similar reopenings will yield transcendent meaning and closure only if a self-reflective approach propels them past the transitory cleansing moments toward a deeper commitment to restorative justice

An explicit bijection between semistandard tableaux and non-elliptic sl_3 webs

The sl_3 spider is a diagrammatic category used to study the representation theory of the quantum group U_q(sl_3). The morphisms in this category are generated by a basis of non-elliptic webs. Khovanov- Kuperberg observed that non-elliptic webs are indexed by semistandard Young tableaux. They establish this bijection via a recursive growth algorithm. Recently, Tymoczko gave a simple version of this bijection in the case that the tableaux are standard and used it to study rotation and joins of webs. We build on Tymoczko's bijection to give a simple and explicit algorithm for constructing all non-elliptic sl_3 webs

Biological Altruism and the cultural-evolutionary roots of religion

The unselfish, altruistic behavior of insect societies can be explained by way of unusually close genetic relatedness, while the cooperative behavior of chimpanzee and other distantly related mammalian social groups results from their daily, social \"fit-for-tat\" trading of favors. These sociobioiogical explanations, however, are inadequate to explain altruistic behavior among human groups with members numbering in the thousands or millions, groups consisting for the most part of genetically unrelated individuals with little or no daily social contact. Religion, cultural evolutionary theory suggests, may be the glue that binds them together