3,225 research outputs found
Schooling the 'other' : the representation of gender and national identities in Pakistani curriculum texts
Until relatively recently, educational research in developing countries has focused mainly on issues of access for addressing gender inequalities in education. This paper argues that challenging patriarchal relations in schooling and education requires moving beyond access to understanding the ways the curriculum acts as a set of discursive practices which position girls and boys unequally and differently constitute them as gendered and nationalised/ist subjects. Using curriculum texts from Pakistan, the paper explores how gender and national identities intersect in a dynamic way in the processes of schooling. The paper illustrates the ideological power of both curriculum and school experiences in fashioning the reciprocal performance and construction of gender and national identities in Pakistan. It contends that in its current form, education is a means of maintaining, reproducing and reinforcing the gender hierarchies that characterise Pakistan
On leadership development in the national health service Scotland
The National Health Service (NHS), which delivers healthcare to all in the UK, is undergoing profound change, from the role of the primary-care providers, the general practitioners, to the specialist hospital managers. There is a drive that ranges from greater care in the community to more effective use of highly specialist resources in hospitals. This is linked to the restructuring of the management in the NHS, requiring a new breed of leaders to achieve organisational change, and to attain development and growth. To develop the new cadre of managers, an exciting Programme is being established for Leadership and Organisational Development. This paper reflects on the background to the change in the NHS, and provides an account of the Leadership Development Programme that is being implemented in the NHS Scotland
The glass ceiling : is it a state of mind?
Much is written in the literature and press about women having to break through the glass ceiling, but is there indeed any truth in this theory? For some women, working their way up the promotion ladder can be a challenge, but is it really as difficult as it is perceived? It would be naïve to think that all women are as ambitious as to want to break through the glass ceiling, and indeed in certain categories of employment such as advertising and marketing, they do appear to have made their mark, but science, engineering and technology, do not seem to attract females in the same numbers. We would argue that this lack of advancement is not necessarily due to a lack of opportunity. This paper addresses the role of women in science, engineering, and technology, assessing the support mechanisms offered to them to succeed in their chosen occupations. The investigation identifies factors that have led to women achieving senior levels in higher education, business, and government in the UK, thus making it through the glass ceiling. The methodology undertaken in this study includes, desk-based research, analysis of surveys, observations from literature search and surveys, and interviews/case studies of a number of prominent and internationally successful women; and final conclusions. All comprise the three components of the Triple Helix - influence of government through legislation, uptake in academia, and attendant support mechanisms, and impact in industry
The role of numeracy skills in graduate employability
Purpose – The purpose of this article is to explore the role and importance of numeracy skills in graduate recruitment within a diversity of employment sectors.
Design/methodology/approach – The results of a mixed-methods study, involving three online surveys (including an employer survey), student focus group sessions and interviews with tutors, are presented.
Findings – The results reveal the importance that employers attach to graduates’ numeracy skills and the extent to which employers use numeracy tests in graduate recruitment. They thus highlight the potential for poor numeracy skills to limit any graduate's acquisition of employment, irrespective of their degree subject; especially since numeracy tests are used predominantly in recruitment to the types of jobs commensurate with graduates’ career aspirations and within sectors that attract graduates from across the diversity of academic disciplines, including the arts and humanities.
Research limitations/implications – Since participants were self-selecting any conclusions and inferences relate to the samples and may or may not be generalisable to wider target populations.
Practical implications – The paper highlights what actions are necessary to enhance undergraduates’ numeracy skills in the context of graduate employability.
Social implications – The vulnerability of particular groups of students (e.g. females, those not provided with any opportunities to practise or further develop their numeracy skills whilst in higher education, those with no (or low) pre-university mathematics qualifications, and mature students) is highlighted.
Originality/value – The article is timely in view of national policy to extend the graduate employability performance indicators within quality assurance measures for UK higher education
Performance Analysis of Arbitrarily-Shaped Underlay Cognitive Networks: Effects of Secondary User Activity Protocols
This paper analyzes the performance of the primary and secondary users (SUs)
in an arbitrarily-shaped underlay cognitive network. In order to meet the
interference threshold requirement for a primary receiver (PU-Rx) at an
arbitrary location, we consider different SU activity protocols which limit the
number of active SUs. We propose a framework, based on the moment generating
function (MGF) of the interference due to a random SU, to analytically compute
the outage probability in the primary network, as well as the average number of
active SUs in the secondary network. We also propose a cooperation-based SU
activity protocol in the underlay cognitive network which includes the existing
threshold-based protocol as a special case. We study the average number of
active SUs for the different SU activity protocols, subject to a given outage
probability constraint at the PU and we employ it as an analytical approach to
compare the effect of different SU activity protocols on the performance of the
primary and secondary networks.Comment: submitted to possible IEEE Transactions publicatio
A Novel User Pairing Scheme for Functional Decode-and-Forward Multi-way Relay Network
In this paper, we consider a functional decode and forward (FDF) multi-way
relay network (MWRN) where a common user facilitates each user in the network
to obtain messages from all other users. We propose a novel user pairing
scheme, which is based on the principle of selecting a common user with the
best average channel gain. This allows the user with the best channel
conditions to contribute to the overall system performance. Assuming lattice
code based transmissions, we derive upper bounds on the average common rate and
the average sum rate with the proposed pairing scheme. Considering M-ary
quadrature amplitude modulation with square constellation as a special case of
lattice code transmission, we derive asymptotic average symbol error rate (SER)
of the MWRN. We show that in terms of the achievable rates, the proposed
pairing scheme outperforms the existing pairing schemes under a wide range of
channel scenarios. The proposed pairing scheme also has lower average SER
compared to existing schemes. We show that overall, the MWRN performance with
the proposed pairing scheme is more robust, compared to existing pairing
schemes, especially under worst case channel conditions when majority of users
have poor average channel gains.Comment: 30 pages, 6 figures, submitted for journal publicatio
Optimal Compression and Transmission Rate Control for Node-Lifetime Maximization
We consider a system that is composed of an energy constrained sensor node
and a sink node, and devise optimal data compression and transmission policies
with an objective to prolong the lifetime of the sensor node. While applying
compression before transmission reduces the energy consumption of transmitting
the sensed data, blindly applying too much compression may even exceed the cost
of transmitting raw data, thereby losing its purpose. Hence, it is important to
investigate the trade-off between data compression and transmission energy
costs. In this paper, we study the joint optimal compression-transmission
design in three scenarios which differ in terms of the available channel
information at the sensor node, and cover a wide range of practical situations.
We formulate and solve joint optimization problems aiming to maximize the
lifetime of the sensor node whilst satisfying specific delay and bit error rate
(BER) constraints. Our results show that a jointly optimized
compression-transmission policy achieves significantly longer lifetime (90% to
2000%) as compared to optimizing transmission only without compression.
Importantly, this performance advantage is most profound when the delay
constraint is stringent, which demonstrates its suitability for low latency
communication in future wireless networks.Comment: accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Wireless
Communicaiton
Underlay Drone Cell for Temporary Events: Impact of Drone Height and Aerial Channel Environments
Providing seamless connection to a large number of devices is one of the
biggest challenges for the Internet of Things (IoT) networks. Using a drone as
an aerial base station (ABS) to provide coverage to devices or users on ground
is envisaged as a promising solution for IoT networks. In this paper, we
consider a communication network with an underlay ABS to provide coverage for a
temporary event, such as a sporting event or a concert in a stadium. Using
stochastic geometry, we propose a general analytical framework to compute the
uplink and downlink coverage probabilities for both the aerial and the
terrestrial cellular system. Our framework is valid for any aerial channel
model for which the probabilistic functions of line-of-sight (LOS) and
non-line-of-sight (NLOS) links are specified. The accuracy of the analytical
results is verified by Monte Carlo simulations considering two commonly adopted
aerial channel models. Our results show the non-trivial impact of the different
aerial channel environments (i.e., suburban, urban, dense urban and high-rise
urban) on the uplink and downlink coverage probabilities and provide design
guidelines for best ABS deployment height.Comment: This work is accepted to appear in IEEE Internet of Things Journal
Special Issue on UAV over IoT. Copyright may be transferred without notice,
after which this version may no longer be accessible. arXiv admin note: text
overlap with arXiv:1801.0594
- …