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What do others think is the point of design and technology education?
As a result of a national curriculum review in England (Department for Education [DfE], 2011), a new curriculum for design and technology (D&T) is being taught in secondary schools from September 2014 (Department of Education [DoE], 2013a). This curriculum is compulsory for a decreasing number of schools; two potential consequences are the nature of D&T in secondary schools changing to reflect local perceptions of the subject and maybe D&T being removed from the curriculum completely. The pressure on D&Tâs curriculum content is likely to come from different stakeholders such as senior school leaders, D&T teachers, and pupils. D&T school departments could respond to this pressure by adapting the curriculum to popularise the subject or produce high exam results with a consequence that much of the subjectâs value is lost. This paper reports on a small research project conducted in two secondary schools where stakeholder representatives were interviewed to identify their values of D&T. These different stakeholders were interviewed using the active interview method (Holstein & Gubrium, 1995), coded following Aurebach and Silversteinâs method (2003) and their values compared to Hardyâs values framework (Hardy, 2013b). Analysis shows most stakeholders believe a key value of D&T is to provide âpractical life skillsâ (Hardy, p.226), whilst only one recognizes that learning in D&T involves âidentifying problems to be solvedâ. The outcomes from the research are being used to support critically reflective conversations within both D&T departments (Zwozdiak-Myers, 2012) framing their evaluation of their local curriculum and making changes to their curriculum
Approximation properties of certain operator-induced norms on Hilbert spaces
We consider a class of operator-induced norms, acting as finite-dimensional
surrogates to the L2 norm, and study their approximation properties over
Hilbert subspaces of L2 . The class includes, as a special case, the usual
empirical norm encountered, for example, in the context of nonparametric
regression in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHS). Our results have
implications to the analysis of M-estimators in models based on
finite-dimensional linear approximation of functions, and also to some related
packing problems
Curvature blow up in Bianchi VIII and IX vacuum spacetimes
The maximal globally hyperbolic development of non-Taub-NUT Bianchi IX vacuum
initial data and of non-NUT Bianchi VIII vacuum initial data is C2
inextendible. Furthermore, a curvature invariant is unbounded in the incomplete
directions of inextendible causal geodesics.Comment: 20 pages, no figures. Submitted to Classical and Quantum Gravit
A geometric approach to scalar field theories on the supersphere
Following a strictly geometric approach we construct globally supersymmetric
scalar field theories on the supersphere, defined as the quotient space
. We analyze the superspace geometry of the
supersphere, in particular deriving the invariant vielbein and spin connection
from a generalization of the left-invariant Maurer-Cartan form for Lie groups.
Using this information we proceed to construct a superscalar field action on
, which can be decomposed in terms of the component fields, yielding a
supersymmetric action on the ordinary two-sphere. We are able to derive
Lagrange equations and Noether's theorem for the superscalar field itself.Comment: 38 pages, 1 figur
Measurements of the short-term stability of quartz crystal resonators: A window on future developments in crystal oscillators
Recent measurements of the inherent short-term stability of quartz crystal resonators are presented. These measurements show that quartz resonators are much more stable for times less than 1s than the best available commercial quartz oscillators. A simple model appears to explain the noise mechanism in crystal controlled oscillators and points the way to design changes which should permit more than 2 orders of magnitude improvement in their short-term stability. Calculations show that a reference signal at 1 THz, derived from frequency multiplying a 5 MHz source with the above measured crystal stability, should have an instantaneous or fast linewidth of order 1 Hz. These calculations explicitly include the noise contribution of our present multiplier chains and are briefly outlined
Neuroscientistsâ everyday experiences of ethics: The interplay of regulatory, professional, personal and tangible ethical spheres
Copyright @ 2013 The Authors. This article has been published using OnlineOpen. Re-use of this article is permitted in accordance with the Terms and Conditions set out at http://wileyonline
library.com/onlineopen#OnlineOpen_Terms.The ethical issues neuroscience raises are subject to increasing attention, exemplified in the emergence of the discipline neuroethics. While the moral implications of neurotechnological developments are often discussed, less is known about how ethics intersects with everyday work in neuroscience and how scientists themselves perceive the ethics of their research. Drawing on observation and interviews with members of one UK group conducting neuroscience research at both the laboratory bench and in the clinic, this article examines what ethics meant to these researchers and delineates four specific types of ethics that shaped their day-to-day work: regulatory, professional, personal and tangible. While the first three categories are similar to those identified elsewhere in sociological work on scientific and clinical ethics, the notion of âtangible ethicsâ emerged by attending to everyday practice, in which these scientistsâ discursive distinctions between right and wrong were sometimes challenged. The findings shed light on how ethical positions produce and are, in turn, produced by scientific practice. Informing sociological understandings of neuroscience, they also throw the category of neuroscience and its ethical specificity into question, given that members of this group did not experience their work as raising issues that were distinctly neuro-ethical.Wellcome Trus
Cosmic No Hair for Collapsing Universes
It is shown that all contracting, spatially homogeneous, orthogonal Bianchi
cosmologies that are sourced by an ultra-stiff fluid with an arbitrary and, in
general, varying equation of state asymptote to the spatially flat and
isotropic universe in the neighbourhood of the big crunch singularity. This
result is employed to investigate the asymptotic dynamics of a collapsing
Bianchi type IX universe sourced by a scalar field rolling down a steep,
negative exponential potential. A toroidally compactified version of M*-theory
that leads to such a potential is discussed and it is shown that the isotropic
attractor solution for a collapsing Bianchi type IX universe is supersymmetric
when interpreted in an eleven-dimensional context.Comment: Extended discussion to include Kantowski-Sachs universe. In press,
Classical and Quantum Gravit
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