56,713 research outputs found
The international movement of ideas and practices in education and social policy
This thesis comprises eight publications produced between 2000 and 2009 in addition to a critical review of that work. The review considers the contribution made by the author to the perspectives on policy making offered by the framework of policy transfer and its subsequent applications within global social policy and related sub disciplines. It develops to explore the author's use of critical policy sociology and methodological work in social policy, education and political science in order to enhance existing perspectives on policy transfer. In contrast to rational linear models of decision making, alternative recursive deliberate approaches are suggested throughout this work. The review also considers aspects of the author's work on integrated working or trans-professionalism in the public services. Those aspects of his work on policy theory which illuminate professional learning are critically assessed
The Advantages of Odd Exclusions
Every novel constitutes an interestingly complex set of linguistic experiments demonstrating some of the possibilities of its language to and by the exclusion of all the rest. Extreme cases may demonstrate these possibilities more clearly, and at least in English, no novel seems more arbitrarily extreme than Gadsby, which Ernest Vincent Wright apparently wrote in 1936-1937, with the E typebar of his typewriter tied down with string because, he said in his introduction, someone had told him he could not write coherent grammatical English without using its most common letter
Spatial discretization of partial differential equations with integrals
We consider the problem of constructing spatial finite difference
approximations on a fixed, arbitrary grid, which have analogues of any number
of integrals of the partial differential equation and of some of its
symmetries. A basis for the space of of such difference operators is
constructed; most cases of interest involve a single such basis element. (The
``Arakawa'' Jacobian is such an element.) We show how the topology of the grid
affects the complexity of the operators.Comment: 24 pages, LaTeX sourc
Smear fitting: a new deconvolution method for interferometric data
A new technique is presented for producing images from interferometric data.
The method, ``smear fitting'', makes the constraints necessary for
interferometric imaging double as a model, with uncertainties, of the sky
brightness distribution. It does this by modelling the sky with a set of
functions and then convolving each component with its own elliptical gaussian
to account for the uncertainty in its shape and location that arises from
noise. This yields much sharper resolution than CLEAN for significantly
detected features, without sacrificing any sensitivity. Using appropriate
functional forms for the components provides both a scientifically interesting
model and imaging constraints that tend to be better than those used by
traditional deconvolution methods. This allows it to avoid the most serious
problems that limit the imaging quality of those methods. Comparisons of smear
fitting to CLEAN and maximum entropy are given, using both real and simulated
observations. It is also shown that the famous Rayleigh criterion (resolution =
wavelength / baseline) is inappropriate for interferometers as it does not
consider the reliability of the measurements.Comment: 16 pages, 38 figures (some have been lossily compressed for
astro-ph). Uses the hyperref LaTeX package. Accepted for publication by the
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Societ
Properties of the solutions of delocalised coagulation and inception problems with outflow boundaries
Well posedness is established for a family of equations modelling particle
populations undergoing delocalised coagulation, advection, inflow and outflow
in a externally specified velocity field. Very general particle types are
allowed while the spatial domain is a bounded region of -dimensional space
for which every point lies on exactly one streamline associated with the
velocity field. The problem is formulated as a semi-linear ODE in the Banach
space of bounded measures on particle position and type space. A local
Lipschitz property is established in total variation norm for the propagators
(generalised semi-groups) associated with the problem and used to construct a
Picard iteration that establishes local existence and global uniqueness for any
initial condition. The unique weak solution is shown further to be a
differentiable or at least bounded variation strong solution under smoothness
assumptions on the parameters of the coagulation interaction. In the case of
one spatial dimension strong differentiability is established even for
coagulation parameters with a particular bounded variation structure in space.
This one dimensional extension establishes the convergence of the simulation
processes studied in [Patterson, Stoch. Anal. Appl. 31, 2013] to a unique and
differentiable limit
Widening the Scope of Standards Through Work-Based Learning
standards, work-based learning, education, labor
Hamiltonian boundary value problems, conformal symplectic symmetries, and conjugate loci
In this paper we continue our study of bifurcations of solutions of
boundary-value problems for symplectic maps arising as Hamiltonian
diffeomorphisms. These have been shown to be connected to catastrophe theory
via generating functions and ordinary and reversal phase space symmetries have
been considered. Here we present a convenient, coordinate free framework to
analyse separated Lagrangian boundary value problems which include classical
Dirichlet, Neumann and Robin boundary value problems. The framework is then
used to {prove the existence of obstructions arising from} conformal symplectic
symmetries on the bifurcation behaviour of solutions to Hamiltonian boundary
value problems. Under non-degeneracy conditions, a group action by conformal
symplectic symmetries has the effect that the flow map cannot degenerate in a
direction which is tangential to the action. This imposes restrictions on which
singularities can occur in boundary value problems. Our results generalise
classical results about conjugate loci on Riemannian manifolds to a large class
of Hamiltonian boundary value problems with, for example, scaling symmetries
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