Setting Standards in the West: C. B. Conway, Science, and School Reform in British Columbia, 1938–1974

C. B. Conway headed the British Columbia Department of Education’s Division of Tests, Standards, and Research from the late 1930s to the mid-1970s. Through Conway and his research bureau, the department began to modernize its pedagogical foundations by embracing the scientific measurement movement that had been transforming education in the United States since the early 1900s. But more than this, Conway’s career provides a vantage point from which to see larger changes within educational government from the implementation of the so-called progressive reforms in the late 1930s, couched in ration- alism and science, to the neoprogressive reforms of the early 1970s, that were increasingly defined in political terms. C. B. Conway a dirigé la division des examens, des normes et de la recherche du mini- stère de l’Éducation de la Colombie-Britannique de la fin des années 30 au milieu des années 70. Grâce à M. Conway et à son bureau de recherche, le ministère a commencé à moderniser ses principes pédagogiques en adhérant au mouvement en faveur des mesures scientifiques, lequel transforme l’éducation aux États-Unis depuis le début des années 1990. La carrière de M. Conway constitue en outre un excellent filon pour analyser des changements plus vastes ayant trait aux politiques éducatives: de l’implan- tation, à la fin des années 30, des réformes dites progressives faisant appel au rationalisme et à la science jusqu’aux réformes néoprogressives du début des années 70, lesquelles ont été de plus en plus définies en termes politiques.

Impacts of unconventional gas development on rural community decline

AbstractThis paper looks at the impact of a new extractive industry, namely unconventional natural gas, on rural decline. Rural decline is defined as comprising loss of rural youth, reduced human capital and increasing rural poverty. Since the start of the current century, the unconventional natural gas industry has been expanding around the world, often in close proximity to pre-existing agricultural communities. The social impacts of this new industry represent a growing area of interest in rural studies. We contribute to this new research area through a case study of coal seam gas (CSG) development in Queensland, Australia, comparing regions where gas development occurred between 2001 and 2011 against a control group of similar regions without gas development. The study eliminated the influence of non-resident workforces by analysing census data based on place of usual residence as well as place of enumeration. A key finding of the study is that regions with CSG development have experienced a growing youth share of the population and, of particular note, a growing female youth share of the population. CSG regions had a higher proportion of youth with university degrees and advanced technical training compared to other rural regions. Poverty reduction was also observed in some specific CSG regions. The extensive spatial footprint of unconventional gas and increased female rural youth populations indicate a diversion from traditional boomtown social impacts observed in previous energy booms. Taken together, the results show signs of mitigating and reversing rural community decline

Allocation and Optimisation of Mixed Criticality Cyclic Executives

Incorporating applications of differing levels of criticality onto the same platform in an efficient manner is a challenging problem. Highly critical applications require stringent verification and certification while lower criticality work may seek to make greater use of modern processing power with little to no requirement for verification. Much study into mixed criticality systems has considered this issue by taking scheduling paradigms designed to provide good platform utilisation at the expense of predictability and attempting to provide mechanisms that will allow for the verification of higher criticality work. In this thesis we take the alternative approach, we utilise a cyclic executive scheduler. Such schedulers are used extensively in industrial practice and provide very high levels of determinism making them a strong choice for applications with strict certification requirements. This work provides a platform which supports the highly critical work, alongside work of lower criticalities in a cyclic executive context. The aim being to provide a near-future platform which is able to support existing legacy highly critical software alongside newer less critical software which seeks to utilise multi-core architectures. One of the fundamental challenges of designing a system for a static scheduler is the allocation of applications/tasks to the cores and, in the case of cyclic executives, minor cycles of the system. Throughout this work we explore task allocation, we make extensive use of Linear Programming to model and allocate work. We suggest a limited task splitting technique to aid in system design and allocation. Finally, we propose two ways in which an allocation of work might be optimised to meet some design goal. This thesis proposes a scheduling policy for mixed criticality multi-core systems using a cyclic executive scheduler and explores the design, allocation and optimisation of such a system

Multi-core Cyclic Executives for Safety-Critical Systems

In a cyclic executive, a series of pre-determined frames are executed in sequence; once the series is complete the sequence is repeated. Within each frame individual units of computation are executed, again in a pre-specified sequence. The implementation of cyclic executives upon multi-core platforms is considered. A Linear Programming (LP) based formulation is presented of the problem of constructing cyclic executives upon multiprocessors for a particular kind of recurrent real-time workload – collections of implicit-deadline periodic tasks. Techniques are described for solving the LP formulation under different kinds of restrictions in order to obtain preemptive and non-preemptive cyclic executives

Multi-core cyclic executives for safety-critical systems

In a cyclic executive, a series of pre-determined frames are executed in sequence; once the series is complete the sequence is repeated. Within each frame individual units of computation are executed, again in a pre-specified sequence. Although they suffer from a number of limitations, cyclic executives have the advantage of being fully deterministic, and may be implemented with very low runtime overhead; as a consequence of these advantages, run-time schedulers in highly safety-critical real-time systems have historically been implemented as cyclic executives. Industrial applications of the cyclic executive framework are currently primarily restricted to uniprocessor platforms; in this paper, we consider the implementation of cyclic executives upon multi-core platforms. We present a Linear Programming (LP) based formulation of the problem of constructing cyclic executives upon multiprocessors for a particular kind of recurrent real-time workload — collections of implicit-deadline periodic tasks. We describe techniques for solving the LP formulation under different kinds of restrictions in order to obtain preemptive and non-preemptive cyclic executives. Our algorithms for constructing preemptive cyclic executives have running time polynomial in the size of the cyclic executive. We present an exact algorithm for constructing non-preemptive cyclic executives that has worst-case running time exponential in the size of the cyclic executive; however, state-of-the-art LP solvers appear to often be able to construct fairly large cyclic executives in a reasonable amount of time. We also present an approximation algorithm for constructing non-preemptive cyclic executives that does run in polynomial time, and evaluate the effectiveness of this approximation algorithm both theoretically via the speedup factor metric, and experimentally via experiments on synthetically generated workloads. We additionally identify a particular restricted kind of workload that is quite commonly found in practice, for which non-preemptive cyclic executives can be constructed more efficiently than in the general case

Lattice Gauge Theories at the Energy Frontier

This White Paper has been prepared as a planning document for the Division of High Energy Physics of the U. S. Department of Energy. Recent progress in lattice-based studies of physics beyond the standard model is summarized, and major current goals of USQCD research in this area are presented. Challenges and opportunities associated with the recently discovered 126 GeV Higgs-like particle are highlighted. Computational resources needed for reaching important goals are described. The document was finalized on February 11, 2013 with references that are not aimed to be complete, or account for an accurate historical record of the field.Comment: Submitted for the Snowmass 2013 e-Proceedings with 44 pages, 10 figures, and 3 table

A Conceptual Model of the Socioeconomic Impacts of Unconventional Fossil Fuel Extraction

As global energy demand increases, the rapid expansion of the unconventional fossil fuel sector has triggered an urgent need for social, economic and policy research to understand and predict how this sector affects host communities and how governance systems can respond to changes presented by this sector. In response to this need, this paper addresses three linked objectives. The first is to review the literature on regional impacts of energy extraction, presented in the form of a framework of hierarchical effects. The second is to consider how these are playing out differently in the context of conventional compared with unconventional fossil fuels. The third is to draw attention to the institutional avenues for addressing these impacts, including an overview of the lessons from existing research on the human and policy dimensions associated with conventional energy industries. In particular, we consider the importance of multi-stakeholder dialogue, which plays an important role in how regions respond to the challenges brought about through extractive industries. Overall, we demonstrate that experiences from conventional energy development provide a useful starting point for navigating the human and policy dimensions of unconventional energy for host communities and discuss how these experiences differ when unconventional energy seeks to co-exist with other land uses such as agriculture. The paper draws attention to the dispersed nature of impacts (positive and negative) and how this may shape winners and losers from unconventional energy development, particularly in regions with pre-existing land uses such as agriculture

A Conceptual Model of the Socioeconomic Impacts of Unconventional Fossil Fuel Extraction

As global energy demand increases, the rapid expansion of the unconventional fossil fuel sector has triggered an urgent need for social, economic and policy research to understand and predict how this sector affects host communities and how governance systems can respond to changes presented by this sector. In response to this need, this paper addresses three linked objectives. The first is to review the literature on regional impacts of energy extraction, presented in the form of a framework of hierarchical effects. The second is to consider how these are playing out differently in the context of conventional compared with unconventional fossil fuels. The third is to draw attention to the institutional avenues for addressing these impacts, including an overview of the lessons from existing research on the human and policy dimensions associated with conventional energy industries. In particular, we consider the importance of multi-stakeholder dialogue, which plays an important role in how regions respond to the challenges brought about through extractive industries. Overall, we demonstrate that experiences from conventional energy development provide a useful starting point for navigating the human and policy dimensions of unconventional energy for host communities and discuss how these experiences differ when unconventional energy seeks to co-exist with other land uses such as agriculture. The paper draws attention to the dispersed nature of impacts (positive and negative) and how this may shape winners and losers from unconventional energy development, particularly in regions with pre-existing land uses such as agriculture

Corrections to and Discussion of "Implementation and Evaluation of Mixed-criticality Scheduling Approaches for Sporadic Tasks"

The AMC-IA mixed-criticality scheduling analysis was proposed as an improvement to the AMC-MAX adaptive mixed-criticality scheduling analysis. However, we have identified several necessary corrections to the AMC-IA analysis. In this letter we motivate and describe those corrections, and discuss and illustrate why the corrected AMC-IA analysis cannot be shown to outperform AMC-MAX