The assessment of complex learning outcomes

The Engineering Professors' Council (EPC) produced an output standard in 2000 containing a setof 26 generic statements of what an engineering graduate should have an ability to tackle. In addition, Higher Education (HE) is concerned with the promotion of complex or advanced understanding of subject matter. This leads to complex learning outcomes, which need to be adequately assessed. Changing demands mean changing assessment practices. While good practice is being used in many cases, there is a need to ensure assessment stimulates complex learning. The article seeks to address these issues

Towards a Research Strategy on Learning & Teaching. Report of a study to assist HEFCE in the development of a long-term research and evaluation plan to underpin its policies on learning and teaching

The Council commissioned the Centre for Higher Education Research and Information (CHERI) to conduct a scoping study to assist in the development of the Council’s longterm research and evaluation strategy for learning and teaching. Members of the project team have conducted interviews with a large number of HEFCE staff and with staff and representatives of other national bodies and higher education institutions, have scrutinised HEFCE research and evaluation reports, and have investigated the approaches and experiences of a number of other countries

Recycling of quantum information: Multiple observations of quantum clocks

How much information about the original state preparation can be extracted from a quantum system which already has been measured? That is, how many independent (non-communicating) observers can measure the quantum system sequentially and give a nontrivial estimation of the original unknown state? We investigate these questions and we show from a simple example that quantum information is not entirely lost as a result of the measurement-induced collapse of the quantum state, and that an infinite number of independent observers who have no prior knowledge about the initial state can gain a partial information about the original preparation of the quantum system.Comment: 4 page

Dissipation-assisted quantum computation in atom-cavity systems

The principal obstacle to quantum information processing with many qubits is decoherence. One source of decoherence is spontaneous emission which causes loss of energy and information. Inability to control system parameters with high precision is another possible source of error. Strategies aimed at overcoming one kind of error typically increase sensitivity to others. As a solution we propose quantum computing with dissipation-assisted quantum gates. These can be run relatively fast while achieving fidelities close to one. The success rate of each gate operation can, at least in principle, be arbitrary close to one.Comment: proceedings for the SPIE conference on Fluctuations and Noise, June 2003 in Santa Fe, 12 pages, minor change

Generating optimal states for a homodyne Bell test

Published versio

Reading the Market

Americans pay famously close attention to "the market," obsessively watching trends, patterns, and swings and looking for clues in every fluctuation. In Reading the Market, Peter Knight explores the Gilded Age origins and development of this peculiar interest. He tracks the historic shift in market operations from local to national while examining how present-day ideas about the nature of markets are tied to past genres of financial representation.Drawing on the late nineteenth-century explosion of art, literature, and media, which sought to dramatize the workings of the stock market for a wide audience, Knight shows how ordinary Americans became both emotionally and financially invested in the market. He analyzes popular investment manuals, brokers’ newsletters, newspaper columns, magazine articles, illustrations, and cartoons. He also introduces readers to fiction featuring financial tricksters, which was characterized by themes of personal trust and insider information. The book reveals how the popular culture of the period shaped the very idea of the market as a self-regulating mechanism by making the impersonal abstractions of high finance personal and concrete.From the rise of ticker-tape technology to the development of conspiracy theories, Reading the Market argues that commentary on the Stock Exchange between 1870 and 1915 changed how Americans understood finance—and explains what our pervasive interest in Wall Street says about us now

Cavity-free nondestructive detection of a single optical photon

Detecting a single photon without absorbing it is a long standing challenge in quantum optics. All experiments demonstrating the nondestructive detection of a photon make use of a high quality cavity. We present a cavity free scheme for nondestructive single-photon detection. By pumping a nonlinear medium we implement an inter-field Rabi-oscillation which leads to a ?pi phase shift on weak probe coherent laser field in the presence of a single signal photon without destroying the signal photon. Our cavity-free scheme operates with a fast intrinsic time scale in comparison with similar cavity-based schemes. We implement a full real-space multimode numerical analysis of the interacting photonic modes and confirm the validity of our nondestructive scheme in the multimode case.Comment: 4 figures, 5 page

The importance of combined pathological and clinical examination in the diagnosis of mental diseases especially in relation to syphilis of the central nervous system

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