Contextualizing the Competency-Based Schooling

To a classroom teacher the current debate about work-related competencies might appear far removed from his/her classroom and have no significance for teacher education. Yet the proposed policy changes are likely to affect the work and the professional status of teachers in a very direct way. As Whitty and Willmott (1991: 312) point out, one of the fundamental problems of competency-based teaching/training (CBT) approach consists in the difficulty to define just how narrow or broad the competencies might be. A too narrow definition based on observable work-related skills might indicate a radical departure from the traditional role teachers played in the old and more liberal educational system, and consequently the status of the reflective professional might be questioned if teachers becomes mere technical instructors and skills assessors. A too broad definition, on the other hand, can make it impossible to define criteria of competence in any meaningful way. The second, and no less important ramification of the CBT approach is related to the capacity of a CBT system to produce intellectually autonomous and reflective citizens. The consequences of having skilled but not necessarily intelligent citizenry might not become apparent in a short term; however, the future social and moral developments of our civilization might be threatened should the CBT system prove inefficient in delivering such desired outcomes

Dunkl operators and a family of realizations of osp(1|2)

In this paper, a family of radial deformations of the realization of the Lie superalgebra osp(1|2) in the theory of Dunkl operators is obtained. This leads to a Dirac operator depending on 3 parameters. Several function theoretical aspects of this operator are studied, such as the associated measure, the related Laguerre polynomials and the related Fourier transform. For special values of the parameters, it is possible to construct the kernel of the Fourier transform explicitly, as well as the related intertwining operator.Comment: 28 pages, some small changes, accepted in Trans. Amer. Math. So

Curved Casimir Operators and the BGG Machinery

We prove that the Casimir operator acting on sections of a homogeneous vector bundle over a generalized flag manifold naturally extends to an invariant differential operator on arbitrary parabolic geometries. We study some properties of the resulting invariant operators and compute their action on various special types of natural bundles. As a first application, we give a very general construction of splitting operators for parabolic geometries. Then we discuss the curved Casimir operators on differential forms with values in a tractor bundle, which nicely relates to the machinery of BGG sequences. This also gives a nice interpretation of the resolution of a finite dimensional representation by (spaces of smooth vectors in) principal series representations provided by a BGG sequence

An analysis of interplanetary solar radio emissions associated with a coronal mass ejection

Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are large-scale eruptions of magnetized plasma that may cause severe geomagnetic storms if Earth-directed. Here we report a rare instance with comprehensive in situ and remote sensing observa- tions of a CME combining white-light, radio, and plasma measurements from four different vantage points. For the first time, we have successfully applied a radio direction-finding technique to an interplanetary type II burst detected by two identical widely separated radio receivers. The derived locations of the type II and type III bursts are in general agreement with the white light CME recon- struction. We find that the radio emission arises from the flanks of the CME, and are most likely associated with the CME-driven shock. Our work demon- strates the complementarity between radio triangulation and 3D reconstruction techniques for space weather applications