Assessing gender mainstreaming in the education sector: depoliticised technique or a step towards women's rights and gender equality?

In 1995 the Beijing Conference on Women identified gender mainstreaming as a key area for action. Policies to effect gender mainstreaming have since been widely adopted. This special issue of Compare looks at research on how gender mainstreaming has been used in government education departments, schools, higher education institutions, international agencies and NGOs .1 In this introduction we first provide a brief history of the emergence of gender mainstreaming and review changing definitions of the term. In the process we outline some policy initiatives that have attempted to mainstream gender and consider some difficulties with putting ideas into practice, particularly the tensions between a technical and transformative interpretations . Much of the literature about experiences with gender mainstreaming tends to look at organizational processes and not any specificities of a particular social sector. However, in our second section, we are concerned to explore whether institutional forms and particular actions associated with education give gender mainstreaming in education sites some distinctive features. In our last section we consider some of the debates about global and local negotiations in discussions of gender policy and education and the light this throws on gender mainstreaming. In so doing, we place the articles that follow in relation to contestations over ownership, political economy, the form and content of education practice and the social complexity of gender equality

On the multiple spots and streamers exhibited by the (111) dynamic reflections in diamond

This article does not have an abstract

Probabilistic Temporal Databases, II: Calculus and Query Processing

There is a vast class of applications in which we know that a certain event occurred, but do not know exactly when it occurred. However, as studied by Dyreson and Snodgrass \cite{ds98}, there are many natural scenarios where probability distributions exist and quantify this uncertainty. Dekhtyar et. al. extended Dyreson and Snodgrass's work and defined an extension of the relational algebra to handle such data. The first contribution of this paper is a declarative temporal probabilistic (TP for short) calculus which we show is equivalent in expressive power to the temporal probabilistic algebra of Dekhtyar et. al. Our second major contribution is a set of equivalence and containment results for the TP-algebra. Our third contribution is the development of cost models that may be used to estimate the cost of TP-algebra operations. Our fourth contribution is an experimental evaluation of the accuracy of our cost models and the use of the equivalence results as rewrite rules for optimizing queries by using an implementation of TP-databases on top of ODBC. (Also referenced as UMIACS-TR-2001-79

Gender violence in schools: taking the ‘girls-as-victims’ discourse forward

This paper draws attention to the gendered nature of violence in schools. Recent recognition that schools can be violent places has tended to ignore the fact that many such acts originate in unequal and antagonistic gender relations, which are tolerated and ‘normalised’ by everyday school structures and processes. After examining some key concepts and definitions, we provide a brief overview of the scope and various manifestations of gender violence in schools, noting that most research to date has focused on girls as victims of gender violence within a heterosexual context and ignores other forms such as homophobic and girl violence. We then move on to look at a few interventions designed to address gender violence in schools in the developing world and end by highlighting the need for more research and improved understanding of the problem and how it can be addressed

On profiling bots in social media

Submit request for dataset at https://larc.smu.edu.sg/twitter-bot-profiling</p

The Brexit Botnet and User-Generated Hyperpartisan News

In this paper we uncover a network of Twitterbots comprising 13,493 accounts that tweeted the U.K. E.U. membership referendum, only to disappear from Twitter shortly after the ballot. We compare active users to this set of political bots with respect to temporal tweeting behavior, the size and speed of retweet cascades, and the composition of their retweet cascades (user-to-bot vs. bot-to-bot) to evidence strategies for bot deployment. Our results move forward the analysis of political bots by showing that Twitterbots can be effective at rapidly generating small to medium-sized cascades; that the retweeted content comprises user-generated hyperpartisan news, which is not strictly fake news, but whose shelf life is remarkably short; and, finally, that a botnet may be organized in specialized tiers or clusters dedicated to replicating either active users or content generated by other bots

Comparing Redundant and Sky-model-based Interferometric Calibration: A First Look with Phase II of the MWA

© 2018. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.. Interferometric arrays seeking to measure the 21 cm signal from the epoch of reionization (EOR) must contend with overwhelmingly bright emission from foreground sources. Accurate recovery of the 21 cm signal will require precise calibration of the array, and several new avenues for calibration have been pursued in recent years, including methods using redundancy in the antenna configuration. The newly upgraded Phase II of Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is the first interferometer that has large numbers of redundant baselines while retaining good instantaneous UV coverage. This array therefore provides a unique opportunity to compare redundant calibration with sky-model-based algorithms. In this paper, we present the first results from comparing both calibration approaches with MWA Phase II observations. For redundant calibration, we use the package OMNICAL and produce sky-based calibration solutions with the analysis package Fast Holographic Deconvolution (FHD). There are three principal results: (1) We report the success of OMNICAL on observations of ORBComm satellites, showing substantial agreement between redundant visibility measurements after calibration. (2) We directly compare OMNICAL calibration solutions with those from FHD and demonstrate that these two different calibration schemes give extremely similar results. (3) We explore improved calibration by combining OMNICAL and FHD. We evaluate these combined methods using power spectrum techniques developed for EOR analysis and find evidence for marginal improvements mitigating artifacts in the power spectrum. These results are likely limited by the signal-to-noise ratio in the 6 hr of data used, but they suggest future directions for combining these two calibration schemes