A conceptual approach to secure electronic elections based on patterns

Electoral processes are complex and need to be secure, reliable, and auditable. It is then important to define ways to evaluate their functional completeness and correction as well as their security and reliability. Many solutions to specific aspects of voting have been proposed but we do not know of any holistic view of this process. We present a unified approach to elections based on a conceptual model built using software patterns. A set of analysis patterns describe the structure and management of an election. The patterns describe voter registration, ballot structure, election day management, voting process, and the complete election. A conceptual model is built from the analysis patterns and defines precisely the functional properties of such a system together with its security requirements. The conceptual model is defined using UML diagrams that can be extended or complemented with formal methods to make the system verifiable. We show how to continue to the design phase for this system. While the model will not apply exactly to all elections it can be used as a reference architecture for voting applications and to show explicitly the security considerations for these kind of events. It can also be used for existing elections to verify that they have the required security provisions. The model can also be used as a reference for researchers to integrate their solutions in the complete process.     

The Effects of Vertical Integration on the Release of New Films

This article both theoretically and empirically addresses how a vertical structure in the motion pictures industry determines the number of prints a distributor releases of a new film. A simple theoretical model shows that the optimal number of copies is increasing on the expected demand for the film and the revenue share of the distributor and decreasing on the cost of each copy. The model also predicts that the optimal number of copies will decrease with the number of theaters that are vertically integrated with the distributor, as long as running a cinema requires financing a non-negligible cost of capital. The theoretical results are empirically tested using a very rich dataset of films' exhibition patterns in the major Chilean markets. The empirical results show that, on average, a non-integrated distributor releases 8 more copies than an integrated distributor.     

From Global Sustainability to Inclusive Education: Understanding urban children’s ideas about the food system

The purpose of this paper is to report our findings from a qualitative study intended to develop our understandings of: what high‐poverty urban children understand and believe about food and food systems; and how such children transform and use that knowledge in their everyday lives (i.e. how do they express their scientific literacies including content understandings, process understandings, habits of mind in these content areas). This qualitative study is part of a larger study focused on understanding and developing science and nutritional literacies among high‐poverty urban fourth‐grade through sixth‐grade students and their teachers and caregivers.     

Dialogic/Authoritative Discourse and Modelling in a High School Teaching Sequence on Optics

In this paper we aim to establish a link between two theoretical frames: modelling and its use in the design and analysis of scientific teaching sequences, and the communicative approaches as they alternate in classroom activities. In this case study, we follow the interactions between the teacher and a pair of students during an entire teaching sequence in Optics (grade 11). We focus on the way the teacher managed the dialogicity and the modelling processes in the classroom discourse. A qualitative analysis shows some difficulties in such an achievement, and their consequences on students’ meaning making.     

Faith in school: immigrant families’ attitudes towards education in Spain

This paper is based on a preliminary exploration of the in‐depth interviews and focus groups that are part of a more extensive research project on the education of children of immigrants in Spain. In the process of migration, families undergo profound transformations that are often complicated by extended periods of separation—not only from extended family members, but also from the nuclear family. Though many immigrant families are involved in transnational separation and reunion processes of this kind, there has been little research on the impact of these forms of family transformations on the vision of education held by immigrants. This impact seems to be two‐fold. On one hand, family separation and living or work conditions hamper educational support and monitoring; on the other, the experience of migration poses a tremendous faith in the benefits of education and makes families highly motivated in education. The main idea underlying this paper is that an accurate knowledge of the schooling experience of the children of immigrants has to be related to the moral and psychological effects of this adaptive transformation and, in a very special way, to the weave of projects, expectations and frustrations that permeate the life of an immigrant family. The psychosocial consequences of the processes of adjustment and relearning that immigration entails, the need for a comparative perception of success and the willingness to make an effort and work hard make immigrant families strongly meritocratic and—contrary to some common beliefs—able to show a high level of commitment and expectations in relation to the education of their children.     

¿Podemos favorecer el aprendizaje autónomo del significado de palabras?

Se presenta aquí un programa de adquisición del vocabulario y desarrollo de la comprensión a partir de contextos naturales. El programa, que abandona otras rutinas tradicionales de enseñanza de vocabulario, trata de mejorar la capacidad de inferencia y comprensión textual de los alumnos para dotarles de mayor autonomía lectoescrita.