Digital or Diligent? Web 2.0's challenge to formal schooling

This paper explores the tensions that arise for young people as both 'digital kids' and 'diligent students'. It does so by drawing on a study conducted in an elite private school, where the tensions between 'going digital' and 'being diligent' are exacerbated by the high value the school places on academic achievement, and on learning through digital innovation. At the school under study, high levels of intellectual and technological resourcing bring with them an equally high level of expectation to excel in traditional academic tasks and high-stakes assessment. The students, under constant pressure to perform well in standardised tests, need to make decisions about the extent to which they take up school-sanctioned digitally enhanced learning opportunities that do not explicitly address academic performance. The paper examines this conundrum by investigating student preparedness to engage with a new learning innovation – a student-led media centre – in the context of the traditional pedagogical culture that is relatively untouched by such digital innovation. The paper presents an analysis of findings from a survey of 481 students in the school. The survey results were subjected to quantitative regression tree modelling to flesh out how different student learning dispositions, social and technological factors influence the extent to which students engage with a specific digital learning opportunity in the form of the Web 2.0 Student Media Centre (SMC) designed to engage the senior school community in flexible digital-networked learning. What emerges from the study is that peer support, perceived ease of use and usefulness, learning goals and cognitive playfulness are significant predictors of the choices that students make to negotiate the fundamental tensions of being digital and/or diligent. In scrutinising the tensions around a digital or a diligent student identity in this way, the paper contributes new empirical evidence to understanding the problematic relationship between student-led learning using new digital media tools and formal schooling

GROWTH THEORY AND ACCOUNTING FOR GROWTH OF THE TAIWANESE ECONOMY

A growth accounting and an econometric exercise are used to provide insights into the evolution of the Taiwanese economy over the period 1966-96. The approach links the GDP function of a multiple sector neoclassical growth model to growth accounting and, subsequently to the estimation of the parameters of this function. The growth accounting results show that the contribution of total factor productivity (TFP) to growth in GDP averaged about 32 percent over the period, and this contribution increased as the economy approached its long-run equilibrium during the decade of the 1980s, with evidence of some departure during 1991-96. Growth in TFP increased output growth in industry and services while growth in skilled labor benefited all sectors. Growth in capital stock increased the growth of the industrial sector the most, followed by services, but the effect on agricultural output growth was negative. Growth in TFP and capital stock appear to have increased the capacity of the industrial and service sectors to pull resources from agriculture.economic growth, productivity, technological change, International Development, Productivity Analysis, O3, O4, O5,

Measurements of SCRF cavity dynamic heat load in horizontal test system

The Horizontal Test System (HTS) at Fermilab is currently testing fully assembled, dressed superconducting radio frequency (SCRF) cavities. These cavities are cooled in a bath of superfluid helium at 1.8K. Dissipated RF power from the cavities is a dynamic heat load on the cryogenic system. The magnitude of heat flux from these cavities into the helium is also an important variable for understanding cavity performance. Methods and hardware used to measure this dynamic heat load are presented. Results are presented from several cavity tests and testing accuracy is discussed.Comment: 6 pp. Cryogenic Engineering Conference and International Cryogenic Materials Conference 28 Jun - 2 Jul 2009. Tucson, Arizon

A left-right symmetric model with SU(2)-triplet fermions

We consider an $SU(3)_c \otimes SU(2)_L \otimes SU(2)_R \otimes U(1)_{B-L}$ left-right symmetric model with three Higgs scalars including an $SU(2)_L$ doublet, an $SU(2)_R$ doublet and an $SU(2)_L \otimes SU(2)_R$ bidoublet. In addition to usual SU(2)-doublet fermions, our model contains SU(2)-triplet fermions with Majorana masses. The neutral components of the left-handed triplets can contribute a canonical seesaw while the neutral components of the right-handed triplets associated with the right-handed neutrinos can contribute a double/inverse-type seesaw. Our model can be embedded into an SO(10) grand unification theory where the triplets belong to the $45=(1,3,1,0) \oplus (1,1,3,0)\oplus ...$ representations.Comment: 4 pages. To appear in Phys. Rev.

Radiative seesaw in left-right symmetric model

There are some radiative origins for the neutrino masses in the conventional left-right symmetric models with the usual bi-doublet and triplet Higgs scalars. These radiative contributions could dominate over the tree-level seesaw and could explain the observed neutrino masses.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures. Revised version with minor change. Accepted by PR

Magnetostratigraphy of the Lower Triassic beds from Chaohu(China) and its implications for the Induan–Olenekian stage boundary.

A magnetostratigraphic study was performed on the lower 44 m of the West Pingdingshan section near Chaohu city, (Anhui province, China) in order to provide a magnetic polarity scale for the early Triassic. Data from 295 paleomagnetic samples is integrated with a detailed biostratigraphy and lithostratigraphy. The tilt-corrected mean direction from the West Pingdingshan section, passes the reversal and fold tests. The overall mean direction after tilt correction is D=299.9º, I=18.3º (κ=305.2, α95=1.9, N=19). The inferred paleolatitude of the sampling sites (31.6ºN, 117.8ºE) is about 9.4º, consistent with the stable South China block (SCB), though the declinations indicate some 101o counter-clockwise rotations with respect to the stable SCB since the Early Triassic. Low-field anisotropy of magnetic susceptibility indicates evidence of weak strain. The lower part of the Yinkeng Formation is dominated by reversed polarity, with four normal polarity magnetozones (WP2n to WP5n), with evidence of some thinner (<0.5 m thick) normal magnetozones. The continuous magnetostratigraphy from the Yinkeng Formation, provides additional high-resolution details of the polarity pattern through the later parts of the Induan into the lowest Olenekian. The magnetostratigraphic and biostratigraphic data shows the conodont marker for the base of the Olenekian (first presence of Neospathodus waageni) is shortly prior to the base of normal magnetozone WP5n. This provides a secondary marker for mapping the base of the Olenekian into successions without conodonts. This section provides the only well-integrated study from a Tethyan section across this boundary, but problems remain in definitively relating this boundary into Boreal sections with magnetostratigraphy