Re-thinking school–university partnerships: A Swedish case study

All trends in educational reform point away from the traditional isolation of teachers and teacher educators from their colleagues and from other stakeholders towards an increased sense of being in rather than outside the broader community. In the case of relationships between universities and schools, however, co-operation and collaboration is often complicated by their different cultures and traditions. As yet, there have been few systematic attempts to conceptualise the territory for teacher and school level development and change in relation to the sustained strategic roles which universities may play. This paper presents the results of an independent evaluation of an innovative cluster of seven partnership projects between teachers, schools, and researchers and teacher educators in a university in Sweden. It concludes that differentiated strategic partnerships are necessary in order to meet the different, ideological, generative and capacity building needs of schools and teachers.     

The Indian monsoon 5. Prediction of the monsoon

In this article we first consider the importance of prediction of the monsoon, and events such as the intense rainfall event over Mumbai in July 2005. We then discuss how meteorologists make short-, medium-, and long-range forecasts and the concept of the limit of predictability in a chaotic system such as the atmosphere. Problems and prospects of prediction on different time-scales are discussed by using one example of short-range forecasts and the prediction of the monsoon by dynamical and statistical methods. Finally we consider measures of the skill of a forecast and how high the skill has to be for it to be useful for applications.     

Quantum computing 1. Building blocks of a quantum computer

In this article we have seen how the principles of quantum physics can be exploited in making a computational device. However, we still haven’t seen the kind of algorithms a quantum computer would use and how they would be different from traditional algorithms. We will look at these issues in the next part of this article, with the help of Shor’s famous factorization algorithm. We will also briefly mention some practical issues and the progress achieved so far.     

Electronic commerce 1. What is e-commerce?

In this part of the series, we define different types of e-commerce and list their advantages and disadvantages     

Fascinating organic transformations 2. The ubiquitous hydrogen bond

Hydrogen bonds can transform simple molecules into beautiful architectures. This is well illustrated in this article.     

Molecule matters Dinitrogen

Dinitrogen (N₂) is a very stable and inert molecule due to the formation of a triple bond between the two atoms. Surprisingly isoelectronic molecules are quite reactive making dinitrogen very useful and unique.