Problems in the context evaluation of individualized courses

From 1970 to 1974 an Individualized Study System (ISS) for mathematics courses for first year engineering students was developed. Because of changes in the curriculum, new courses had to be developed from August 1974. The context evaluation of these new courses (ISS-calculus) consisted mainly of the evaluation of the mathematics courses developed during the preceding years. After a year the Department decided to suspend ISS as a teaching system for calculus partly because of dissatisfaction of the teachers with ISS-calculus.\ud This paper consists of two parts. Part one (sections 1,2) is a case study and summarizes the development of the system from 1970 to 1975. It examines in detail the problems encountered in this development with special attention to the role of the executive teacher. The organization of an ISS-course and the planning decisions to be taken become more complex according to the number of executive teachers. In part two (sections 3,4) we provide a classification of ISS courses to illustrate the complexity of the system and we offer some general advice on the management of individualized study systems

Biofuel scenarios in a water perspective: the global blue and green water footprint of road transport in 2030

The trend towards substitution of conventional transport fuels by biofuels requires additional water. The EU aims In the last two centuries, fossil fuels have been our major source of energy. However, issues concerning energy security and the quality of the environment have given an impulse to the development of alternative, renewable fuels. Particularly the transport sector is expected to steadily switch from fossil fuels to a larger fraction of biofuels - liquid transport fuels derived from biomass. Many governments believe that biofuels can replace substantial volumes of crude oil and that they will play a key role in diversifying the sources of energy supply in the coming decades. The growth of biomass requires water, a scarce resource. The link between water resources and (future) biofuel consumption, however, has not been analyzed in great detail yet. Existing scenarios on the use of water resources usually only consider the changes in food and livestock production, industry and domestic activity. The aim of this research is to assess the change in water use related to the expected increase in the use of biofuels for road transport in 2030, and subsequently evaluate the contribution to potential water scarcity. The study builds on earlier research on the relation between energy and water and uses the water footprint (WF) methodology to investigate the change in water demand related to a transition to biofuels in road transport. Information about this transition in each country is based on a compilation of different energy scenarios. The study distinguishes between two different bio-energy carriers, bio-ethanol and biodiesel, and assesses the ratio of fuel produced from selected first-generation energy crops per country. For ethanol these crops are sugar cane, sugar beet, sweet sorghum, wheat and maize. For biodiesel they are soybean, rapeseed, jatropha, and oil palm

Overschooling and unemployment

Although overschooling is regarded as the result of imperfect allocation in the labour market, hardly any attention has been given to the influence of another imperfection, unemployment. Several researchers report about an increasing incidence of overschooling in the Netherlands. Although a lot of research has been done in the Netherlands on overschooling, this is not a phenomenon restricted to the Netherlands. Overschooling was found and measured in the United States, Germany, Spain, Portugal the United Kingdom and may be around in other Western European countries as well. Remarkably, however, is that in this line of research no attention has been paid to the effect of unemployment on overschooling. Because it can be argued that almost all unemployed are overschooled, the incidence and amount of overschooling and its rate of return should be directly affected by the unemployment rate in a country. However for the Netherlands we cannot find a relation between the unemployment rate and the amount of overschooling. The amount of overschooling is in 1998, a year with low unemployment, as high as in 1985, a year with high unemployment. After correcting the selectivity bias, caused by the unemployed, we also do not find changes in the rate of return on education, suggesting that wages in the Netherlands are rather sticky. Therefore efficiency wage theory seems to be a better candidate in explaining overschooling than a matching model as propesed by Hartog.

Temporal dynamics of travelling theta wave activity in infants responding to visual looming

A fundamental property of most animals is the ability to see whether an object is approaching on a direct collision course and, if so, when it will collide. Using high-density electroencephalography in 5- to 11-month-old infants and a looming stimulus approaching under three different accelerations, we investigated how the young human nervous system extracts and processes information for impending collision. Here we show that infants' looming related brain activity is characterized by theta oscillations. Source analyses reveal clear localised activity in the visual cortex. Analysing the temporal dynamics of the source waveform, we provide evidence that the temporal structure of different looming stimuli is sustained during processing in the more mature infant brain, providing infants with increasingly veridical time-to-collision information about looming danger as they grow older and become mobile

Granular Motor in the Non-Brownian Limit

In this work we experimentally study a granular rotor which is similar to the famous Smoluchowski-Feynman device and which consists of a rotor with four vanes immersed in a granular gas. Each side of the vanes can be composed of two different materials, creating a rotational asymmetry and turning the rotor into a ratchet. When the granular temperature is high, the rotor is in movement all the time, and its angular velocity distribution is well described by the Brownian Limit discussed in previous works. When the granular temperature is lowered considerably we enter the so-called Single Kick Limit, where collisions occur rarely and the unavoidable external friction causes the rotor to be at rest for most of the time. We find that the existing models are not capable of adequately describing the experimentally observed distribution in this limit. We trace back this discrepancy to the non-constancy of the deceleration due to external friction and show that incorporating this effect into the existing models leads to full agreement with our experiments. Subsequently, we extend this model to describe the angular velocity distribution of the rotor for any temperature of the gas, and obtain a very good agreement between the model and experimental data

Granular fountains: Convection cascade in a compartmentalized granular gas

This paper extends the two-compartment granular fountain [D. van der Meer, P. Reimann, K. van der Weele, and D. Lohse, Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 184301 (2004)] to an arbitrary number of compartments: The tendency of a granular gas to form clusters is exploited to generate spontaneous convective currents, with particles going down in the well-filled compartments and going up in the diluted ones. We focus upon the bifurcation diagram of the general K-compartment system, which is constructed using a dynamical flux model and which proves to agree quantitatively with results from molecular dynamics simulations

Theoretical study on the protonation of AZA-aromatics

The protonation of azanaphthalenes and azabenzenes has been studied theoretically using CNDO/2 wavefunctions and perturbation theory in order to examine the correlation between pKa values and quantum-mechanical quantities