Assessment of Design Based Project Work

Since the introduction of the C.S.E., project work has become an accepted and important aspect of most external examinations in the materials subjects. Responsibility for assessing projects in both C.S.E. and G.C.E. has fallen squarely on the shoulders of teachers who supervise pupils undertaking projects, and there is an indication that this may be continued if 'a common system of examinating' is introduced

On a notion of maps between orbifolds, I. function spaces

This is the first of a series of papers which are devoted to a comprehensive theory of maps between orbifolds. In this paper, we define the maps in the more general context of orbispaces, and establish several basic results concerning the topological structure of the space of such maps. In particular, we show that the space of such maps of C^r-class between smooth orbifolds has a natural Banach orbifold structure if the domain of the map is compact, generalizing the corresponding result in the manifold case. Motivations and applications of the theory come from string theory and the theory of pseudoholomorphic curves in symplectic orbifolds.Comment: Final version, 46 pages. Accepted for publication in Communications in Contemporary Mathematics. A preliminary version of this work is under a different title "A homotopy theory of orbispaces", arXiv: math. AT/010202

Une preuve analytique de la conjecture de J. Rosenberg

Il est exposé une nouvelle démonstration de l'invariance birationnelle de la classe fondamentale en K-théorie d'une variété analytique complexe en utilisant la K-homologie analytique de G. Kasparov. Une généralisation au cas des familles du théorème d'indice de Gromov-Lawson est établie

The strong Novikov conjecture for low degree cohomology

We show that for each discrete group G, the rational assembly map K_*(BG) \otimes Q \to K_*(C*_{max} G) \otimes \Q is injective on classes dual to the subring generated by cohomology classes of degree at most 2 (identifying rational K-homology and homology via the Chern character). Our result implies homotopy invariance of higher signatures associated to these cohomology classes. This consequence was first established by Connes-Gromov-Moscovici and Mathai. Our approach is based on the construction of flat twisting bundles out of sequences of almost flat bundles as first described in our previous work. In contrast to the argument of Mathai, our approach is independent of (and indeed gives a new proof of) the result of Hilsum-Skandalis on the homotopy invariance of the index of the signature operator twisted with bundles of small curvature.Comment: 11 page

Classical limit of Lie groupoid C^*-algebras

Let G be a Lie groupoid and L his Lie algebroid. We give a definition of the classical limit of a C^*-bundle and we use the tangent groupoid associated to G to show that the Poisson structure on L is the classical limit of a C^*-bundle.Comment: 4 pages, in french, LaTeX 2.09, submitted to Comptes Rendus Acad. Sci. Pari