FOREIGN TRADE ISSUES

International Relations/Trade,

How People Get Their Water

This demonstration shows how ground water can act as a reservoir and will help students understand the role of reservoirs in maintaining a reliable supply of drinking water. The site contains a list of materials needed, objective, teachers notes, activity directions, and questions to expand students thinking. Educational levels: Intermediate elementary, Middle school, Primary elementary

Non-Point Source Pollution

This activity is designed to demonstrate to students what an average storm drain collects during a rainfall event and how the water from storm drains can impact the water quality and aquatic environments of local streams, rivers, and bays. Students will discover how the pollutant damages the environment, that the people who are responsible for the pollutant do not want to damage the environment, and that this type of pollution can be stopped through education. After adding all of the pollutants, the students will examine the contents of the waterway and discuss how the waterway has changed and how viewing this change makes them feel. Educational levels: Intermediate elementary, Middle school

Probing quantum state space: does one have to learn everything to learn something?

Determining the state of a quantum system is a consuming procedure. For this reason, whenever one is interested only in some particular property of a state, it would be desirable to design a measurement setup that reveals this property with as little effort as possible. Here we investigate whether, in order to successfully complete a given task of this kind, one needs an informationally complete measurement, or if something less demanding would suffice. The first alternative means that in order to complete the task, one needs a measurement which fully determines the state. We formulate the task as a membership problem related to a partitioning of the quantum state space and, in doing so, connect it to the geometry of the state space. For a general membership problem we prove various sufficient criteria that force informational completeness, and we explicitly treat several physically relevant examples. For the specific cases that do not require informational completeness, we also determine bounds on the minimal number of measurement outcomes needed to ensure success in the task.Comment: 23 pages, 4 figure

Incentives to Learn

We report results from a randomized evaluation of a merit scholarship program for adolescent girls in Kenya. Girls who scored well on academic exams had their school fees paid and received a cash grant for school supplies. Girls eligible for the scholarship showed significant gains in academic exam scores (average gain 0.12-0.19 standard deviations) and these gains persisted following the competition. There is also evidence of positive program externalities on learning: boys, who were ineligible for the awards, also showed sizeable average test gains, as did girls with low pretest scores, who were unlikely to win. Both student and teacher school attendance increased in the program schools. We discuss implications both for understanding the nature of educational production functions and for the policy debate surrounding merit scholarships.