Zafar,so good: middle‐class students,school habitus and secondary schooling in the city of Buenos Aires (Argentina)

This article examines how students from the ‘loser’ sections of the middle class dealt with the game of secondary schooling in a ‘good’ state school in the city of Buenos Aires (Argentina). It engages with Bourdieu’s theory of social practice and, in particular, with its concepts of game, habitus and cultural capital. It argues that middle‐class students embody a school habitus, which I call zafar. Zafar (a Spanish slang word) refers to students’ dispositions, practices and strategies towards social and educational demands of teachers and their school. Zafar propels middle‐class students to be just ‘good enough’ students, and promote an instrumental approach to schooling and learning. Although this paper offers an account within which the reproduction of relative educational advantage of a group of middle‐class students takes place, it also poses questions about their future educational and occupational opportunities.     

Gender Gaps in Collegiate Teaching Style: Variations by Course Characteristics

Using data from over 9,000 faculty members that participated in the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement (FSSE), this study examined the moderating role a range of course characteristics played on the effects of gender on the percentage of class time spent on various activities, a measure of teaching style. Results revealed gender differences, but that the gaps between men and women in lecturing and active classroom practices varied by disciplinary area, course level, and the number of times a course had been taught by the same instructor. The results confirm that gender effects depend on context, which implies that efforts to improve teaching and learning must also adapt to the instructional context.     

Do increased resources increase educational attainment during a period of rising expenditure? Evidence from English secondary schools using a dynamic panel analysis

This article estimates the effects of school expenditure on school performance at Key Stage 4 in England, over the period 2003–07 during which real per pupil expenditure increased rapidly. It adds to previous investigations by using dynamic panel analysis to: exploit time series data on individual schools that only recently has become available; adjust for the potential endogeneity not only of expenditure but also of other determinants of performance; and differentiate the short‐run and the (higher) long‐run attainment effects of spending changes. Consistent with other recent work, the article reports a generally significant but small effect of expenditure on school performance, but it also finds that the effect varies between specialist and non‐specialist schools, with the effect on the latter being larger. Further, the article identifies significant dynamics in the school improvement process, quantifies the long‐run effect of expenditure changes, suggests that spending effects increase with socio‐economic disadvantage, and quantifies absence effects.     

Engineering the race car wing: application of the vortex panel numerical method

This study examined aerodynamic properties and boundary layer stability in five cambered airfoils operating at the low Reynolds numbers encountered in motor racing. Numerical modelling was carried out in the flow regime characterised by Reynolds numbers 0.82–1.29 × 10⁶. The design Reynolds number of 3 × 10⁶ was used as a reference. Aerodynamics variables were computed using AeroFoil 2.2 software, which uses the vortex panel method and integral boundary layer equations. Validation of AeroFoil 2.2 software showed very good agreement between calculated aerodynamic coefficients and wind tunnel experimental data. Drag polars, lift/drag ratio, pitching moment coefficient, chordwise distributions (surface velocity ratio, pressure coefficient and boundary layer thickness), stagnation point, and boundary layer transition and separation were obtained at angles of attack from −4° to 12°. The NASA NLF(1)-0414F airfoil offers versatility for motor racing with a wide low-drag bucket, low minimum profile drag, high lift/drag ratio, laminar flow up to 0.7 chord, rapid concave pressure recovery, high resultant pressure coefficient and stall resistance at low Reynolds numbers. The findings have implications for the design of race car wings.     

A relational vector space model using an advanced weighting scheme for image retrieval

In this paper, we lay out a relational approach for indexing and retrieving photographs from a collection. The increase of digital image acquisition devices, combined with the growth of the World Wide Web, requires the development of information retrieval (IR) models and systems that provide fast access to images searched by users in databases. The aim of our work is to develop an IR model suited to images, integrating rich semantics for representing this visual data and user queries, which can also be applied to large corpora.     

Retrieval constraints and word frequency distributions a log-logistic model for IR

We first present in this paper an analytical view of heuristic retrieval constraints which yields simple tests to determine whether a retrieval function satisfies the constraints or not. We then review empirical findings on word frequency distributions and the central role played by burstiness in this context. This leads us to propose a formal definition of burstiness which can be used to characterize probability distributions with respect to this phenomenon. We then introduce the family of information-based IR models which naturally captures heuristic retrieval constraints when the underlying probability distribution is bursty and propose a new IR model within this family, based on the log-logistic distribution. The experiments we conduct on several collections illustrate the good behavior of the log-logistic IR model: It significantly outperforms the Jelinek-Mercer and Dirichlet prior language models on most collections we have used, with both short and long queries and for both the MAP and the precision at 10 documents. It also compares favorably to BM25 and has similar performance to classical DFR models such as InL2 and PL2.     

Decentralising the patent system

Modern patent systems are slow, inefficient, expensive, and may result in outcomes that actively harm technological progress. This paper proposes a substantive re-think of these systems and lays a foundation upon which practical solutions can be built. Many solutions proposed in the past, such as prior-art bounties, outsourced examination, and dynamic fee setting, have gone unheeded due to the cost of administering them and the rigidity of the patent system. We explore how distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) enable these major changes by altering the way stakeholders are able to interact with the patent records system. We find that transitioning to a DLT-based patent records system can enable many previously suggested improvements to current patent systems in a flexible, scalable, and transparent manner. The case for such a transition is strengthened when jointly considering the complex but common roots of problems facing modern patent systems, rather than a balkanised set of technical solutions to address each issue independently. Noting that a DLT-based system is not a panacea, we also provide comment on the political, legal, and organisational challenges that must be overcome for such changes to be implemented at scale.     

Implementation of the flipped classroom and its longitudinal impact on improving academic performance

Educational technology research and development - The objective has been to know the impact of the flipped classroom methodology on the academic performance of students during their training...     

Fostering parents-professional collaboration for facilitating the school inclusion of students with ASD: design of the “ToGather” web-based prototype

Educational technology research and development - In recent years, many psycho-educational technologies were studied to address the school-related difficulties encountered by students with autism...