99 per cent of London is not burning. We should not over-react to the weekend’s riots

Saturday and Sunday saw large scale rioting in Tottenham as well as in other parts of the capital. Tony Travers argues that while these riots have been damaging in specific areas, if things remain calm, there is no need for over-reaction, or even for senior politicians to return from their summer holidays. It is for the Metropolitan police to deal with, and they must now tread very carefully and ensure they communicate very openly and closely with local communities

Experimental investigation of peripheral-wall injection techniques in a water vortex tube

Effect of peripheral wall injection technique used to drive water vortex tube on structure and thickness of turbulent mixing region and on flow patterns in boundary layer

Complicated Choices: Struggling to Meet NCLB Requirements AND Remain Faithful to a School's Educational Vision and Practice

In an era of high-stakes accountability, school leaders often face contradictory pressures as they strive to improve student performance. They must meet the federal mandate of NCLB for student achievement; at the same time, many believe that NCLB constrains their professional judgment about how to best teach and assess students in the context of their own schools. The case of Baker, a K-8 school in Philadelphia, is illustrative. The case study discusses the complicated choices school leaders made as they attempted to meet the needs of all students. As Baker implemented the school district's highly prescriptive approach to curriculum and instruction, using a Managed Instruction System, it struggled to maintain its progressive educational philosophy and 'best' practices. The school's pedagogical goals included: student-centered and project-based learning, teaching for life-long learning, performance-based assessments, and an emphasis on higher order thinking. Baker was a successful learning community for students and adults, whose significant accomplishments were obscured by the fact that it never had made AYP. If the U.S. Department of Education had permitted the state to use its valued-added growth model, the Pennsylvania Value-Added Assessment, as an alternative to the status achievement metric that focused on the percentage of proficient students, Baker would have made AYP in 2006-07, the last year of this research

London’s choice of mayor will give a tantalising hint of which party will be favourites to win the next general election

Kicking off our London Mayoral Election 2012 coverage, Tony Travers looks at the state of the race for City Hall. As the Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats offer up ‘repeat’ candidates, he wonders what this election might tell us about the state of the parties and their prospects for the next general election

Fundamental Researcher Attributes: Reflections on Ways to Facilitate Participation in Community Psychology Doctoral Dissertation Research

As novice researchers, Community Psychology doctoral students encounter fresh challenges when they attempt to facilitate participation by members of the community in their dissertation projects. This article presents the merit in adopting fundamental researcher attributes, which have been described in published academic literature as personal characteristics that facilitate participation by members of the community in research studies. The value of these researcher attributes is exemplified in the discussion of one of the author’s experiences in the early stages of his dissertation research process. This article also presents new researcher attributes for facilitating participation by community members that the author recognised after critical reflection on his experiences during the same research process. Cultural humility, shared vulnerability, reflexivity, methodological flexibility, academic assiduity and creative resourcefulness are researcher attributes doctoral students should consider adopting and developing if they intend to facilitate participation by members of the community in their dissertation projects

Infinite Excess Entropy Processes with Countable-State Generators

We present two examples of finite-alphabet, infinite excess entropy processes generated by invariant hidden Markov models (HMMs) with countable state sets. The first, simpler example is not ergodic, but the second is. It appears these are the first constructions of processes of this type. Previous examples of infinite excess entropy processes over finite alphabets admit only invariant HMM presentations with uncountable state sets.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures; http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/compmech/pubs/ieepcsg.ht