Does school time matter?—On the impact of compulsory education age on school dropout

A straightforward way to prevent students from leaving education without a higher secondary diploma is increasing the compulsory education age. The idea is that, by staying longer in school, more students eventually obtain a higher secondary diploma. This paper examines the impact of a one-year increase in compulsory school-age on dropping out of secondary education by a difference-in-differences analysis. For this, we exploit a recent compulsory education policy reform in the Netherlands. After controlling for confounding factors and observable covariates, we find that the one year increase in compulsory school-age reduces dropout by 2.5 percentage points. The effect, however, is entirely situated in the group non-liable to the policy reform. We observe that native Dutch vocational students, mostly without retention in grade, but also without a higher secondary diploma at hand, more often left school in the immediate period before the policy reform. Given the economic revival at that time, this may reflect anticipation of labor market opportunities.     

Anatomical Sciences Education Vol. 4, Issue 3, 2011 Cover Image

Medical Gross Anatomy lecture at the University of Padova, Italy. Gross Anatomy at the University of Padova is taught utilizing both traditional and technological resources, which are integrated with practical laboratory exercises (mainly on plastic models and plastinated specimens) as well as radiological anatomy. In this issue of ASE, Dr. Veronica Macchi and her colleagues from the Department of Human Anatomy and Physiology at the University of Padova discuss an innovative pilot project with their University Hospital in which they obtain body parts removed from patients during surgical procedures and utilize them for gross anatomy education. The cover photograph shows one of the co‐authors of this paper, Professor Raffaele De Caro and his students, performing dissection of the distal forearm and hand in the anatomy lecture theater at the University of Padova.     

Leader-following consensus for multi-agent systems with actuator faults via adaptive event-triggered control

In this paper, the leader-following consensus problem is investigated by event-triggered control for multi-agent systems subject to time-varying actuator faults. Firstly, for a case of the leader without control input, a distributed event-triggered fault-tolerant protocol is proposed with the help of adaptive gains. Secondly, the proposed protocol is developed by an auxiliary nonlinear function to compensate the effect of the leader’s unknown bounded input. It is shown that under the both obtained protocols the tracking errors converge to an adjustable neighborhood around the origin, meanwhile the Zeno behavior is avoided. Moreover, the protocols are fully distributed in sense that any global information associated with the network is no longer utilized. Finally, numerical examples are presented to show the validity of the obtained protocols.     

体育游戏在中学体育教学中的运用现状研究

在体育课教学中,运用游戏作为教学辅助手段,能更有效地达到健身作用和教育作用,提高学生的积极性和求知欲。文章运用文献资料法、调查法和数理统计法等方法,分析了在体育课教学过程中运用游戏教学的现状及原因,提出合理地运用体育游戏进行教学,可以使学生更快地掌握动作技术,提高教学质量。     

金融危机预警报道的缺失与美国新闻的变质

美国媒体金融危机预警报道等方面的缺失和公信力的大幅下降,反映了新自由主义经济政策影响下美国媒体日趋垄断化,导致新闻日益商业化和娱乐化,发生了根本性的质变。     

State of the library and information science blogosphere after social networks boom: A metric approach

A metric analysis of blogs on library and information science (LIS) between November 2006 and June 2009 indexed on the Libworm search engine characterizes the community's behavior quantitatively. An analysis of 1108 personal and corporate blogs with a total of 275,103 posts is used to calculate survival rate, production (number of posts published), and visibility via such indicators as links received, Technorati authority, and Google's PagePank. Over the study period, there was a 52% decrease in the number of active blogs. Despite the drop in production over this period, the average number of posts per blog remained constant (14 per month). The most representative blogs in the discipline are identified. The emergence of such platforms as Facebook and Twitter seems to have meant that both personal and corporate blogs have lost some of their prominence.     

高校图书馆员的知识服务能力建设

加强高校图书馆员知识服务能力建设是图书馆有效开展知识服务的基础。本文分析高校图书馆知识服务方面存在的问题,探讨高校图书馆员知识服务能力的构成要素,并从服务理念、人才管理、学术素养、信息素质、服务增值、激励机制等方面提升高校图书馆员知识服务能力与水平,以满足读者的需求。     

运动想象机制研究

运动想象已被广泛地应用在BCI系统上。传统对脑电信号分析主要集中在特征提取和分类上,本文分别从左右想象脑电信号的频域、时域和脑地形图上进行分析,从而获取左右想象脑电信号的特征。     

民办高校Java程序设计实训课程教学探讨

随着软件业的高速发展,各个高校为了应对不断进步的软件技术,提高软件人才的市场竞争力,很多高校把Java语言作为自己的软件专业教学语言,并针对Java语言教学模式改革和教学内容展开研究和探讨,民办院校和普通高职高专相比更具有灵活性,更加针对市场需求等特点就更加要求软件教学面向市场需求,本文从Java语言的市场需求和自身特点出发,结合民办高校特点,对民办高校Java语言课程实训课程教学进行探讨。