THE INTERNATIONAL BACCALAUREATE (IB) INFLUENCE ON INTERNATIONALIZING THE CURRICULUM IN SOUTH KOREAN SECONDARY SCHOOLS: MAPPING CONSIDERATIONS FOR THE FUTURE DESIGN OF AN INTEGRATED K-20 SYSTEM

As globalization spreads, many people in South Korea have become aware of the importance of educating the next generation with internationalized curricula. This study examines the perspectives of schools, the government in South Korea, and transnational certifiers and curriculum designers to see how they define international curricula, what concepts they are ignoring, and what are the challenges in providing an internationally accredited curriculum such as the International Baccalaureate (IB) in the South Korean educational context. The study uses qualitative research methods, analysing documents written by the government, formal school administrators, and national associations acoording to criteria suggested by the literature. The study concludes by a map depicting the priorities and stances of the various stakeholders in the South Korea international education field. This figure is used to make recommendations regarding future actions for each stakeholder

Hybrid resampling methods for confidence intervals: comment

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Practical higher-order smoothing of the bootstrap

In the context of functional estimation, the bootstrap approach amounts to substitution of the empirical distribution function for the unknown underlying distribution in the definition of the functional. A smoothed bootstrap alternative substitutes instead a smoothed version of the empirical distribution function, obtained by kernel smoothing of the given data sample. It may be theoretically advantageous to base such a smoothed bootstrap estimator on a higher-order kernel density estimator. Such density estimators necessarily take negative values, which creates a practical problem when simulation is to be used in construction of the bootstrap estimator. We illustrate how a negativity correction may be combined with rejection sampling to make higher-order smoothing feasible in the bootstrap context. Estimation of the variance of a sample quantile is examined both theoretically and in a simulation study.published_or_final_versio

Distribution of likelihood-based p-values under a local alternative hypothesis

We consider inference on a scalar parameter of interest in the presence of a nuisance parameter, using a likelihood-based statistic which is asymptotically normally distributed under the null hypothesis. Higher-order expansions are used to compare the repeated sampling distribution, under a general contiguous alternative hypothesis, of pp-values calculated from the asymptotic normal approximation to the null sampling distribution of the statistic with the distribution of pp-values calculated by bootstrap approximations. The results of comparisons in terms of power of different testing procedures under an alternative hypothesis are closely related to differences under the null hypothesis, specifically the extent to which testing procedures are conservative or liberal under the null. Empirical examples are given which demonstrate that higher-order asymptotic effects may be seen clearly in small-sample contexts

Consistency of a hybrid block bootstrap for distribution and variance estimation for sample quantiles of weakly dependent sequences

Consistency and optimality of block bootstrap schemes for distribution and variance estimation of smooth functionals of dependent data have been thoroughly investigated by Hall, Horowitz & Jing (1995), among others. However, for nonsmooth functionals, such as quantiles, much less is known. Existing results, due to Sun & Lahiri (2006), regarding strong consistency for distribution and variance estimation via the moving block bootstrap (MBB) require that b→∞, where b=⌊n/ℓ⌋ is the number of resampled blocks to be pasted together to form the bootstrap data series, n is the available sample size, and ℓ is the block length. Here we show that, in fact, weak consistency holds for any b such that 1≤b=O(n/ℓ). In other words we show that a hybrid between the subsampling bootstrap (b=1) and MBB is consistent. Empirical results illustrate the performance of hybrid block bootstrap estimators for varying numbers of blocks

Understanding and Improving Platinum Anticancer Drugs - Phenanthriplatin

Approximately half of all patients who receive anticancer chemotherapy are treated with a platinum drug. Despite the widespread use of these drugs, the only cure that can be claimed is that of testicular cancer following cisplatin treatment. This article reviews some of our recent work on phenanthriplatin, a cisplatin derivative in which a chloride ion is replaced by phenanthridine, and on one of its analogues, the previously reported pyriplatin. These cationic complexes form monofunctional adducts on DNA that do not significantly distort the duplex, yet efficiently block transcription. Cell-based assays reveal altered cellular uptake properties and a cancer cell-killing profile different from those of established platinum drugs. Mechanistic work, including a crystal structure analysis of platinum-modified DNA in the active site of RNA polymerase II, is discussed herein.National Cancer Institute (U.S.) (Grant CA034992)Misrock Foundation (Postdoctoral Fellowship