Understanding Ziegler–Natta catalysis through your laptop

This article focuses on the different components that make up Ziegler–Natta olefin polymerization systems and shows how investigating the interactions between these components through computational approaches provide crucial information about the chemistry of these systems. Hence, the necessity of theory acting as a counterpoint to experiment is revealed, underlining the importance of computational chemistry in attacking important problems of the day.     

Free final time fractional optimal control problems

A formulation and solution scheme of free final time fractional optimal control problems is presented in this paper. The dynamic constraint is described by a fractional differential equation. Performance index considered is a function of both the state and control variables. The necessary conditions of optimality and the transversality condition are obtained using Lagrange multiplier technique. A numerical technique similar to Shooting method is used for solving the optimal conditions. Numerical example is provided to show the effectiveness of the formulation and numerical solution scheme. It is interesting to note that the final time changes with the interchange of the boundary conditions, which does not occur in classical optimal control problems.     

Use of Social Networking Sites by LIS Professionals in Higher Education Institutions in India: A Study

The study investigates how library and information science professionals working in higher education institutions in India integrate social networking sites (SNS) into their routine work. It was revealed through the questionnaire that the majority of respondents are members of the institution's official group on the SNS, whereas only one fifth are members of an unofficial student group. These information professionals use SNS to socialize, keep themselves up-to-date, find jobs, and acquire information about conferences and seminars in their respective fields. Some of the legitimate concerns of library and information science professionals are privacy and cyberbullying. To increase use, social networking applications must be incorporated into the curriculum of master's degree courses for library and information science.     

Fourth Way in action? the evolution of Singapore’s education system

Hargreaves and Shirley’s The Fourth Way offers a valuable framework for considering the challenges and dilemmas that confront education change practitioners. In this article, I consider how well their framework fits the evolution and more recent changes in Singapore education. History, context culture and aspirations are seen as providing for significant differences in the Singapore education story.     

Age modulates attitudes to whole body donation among medical students

Managing a whole body donor program is necessary for facilitating a traditional dissection‐based anatomy curriculum in medicine and health sciences. Factors which influence body donations to medical science can therefore affect dissection‐based anatomy teaching. In order to determine whether age influences the attitudes of medical students to donations, this study surveyed, by Likert‐type questionnaires, first‐year graduate‐entry medical students attending a dissection‐based anatomy course. In contrast to attitudes among younger traditional‐entry medical students, initial support for whole body donation by an unrelated stranger (83.8%), a family member (43.2%) or by the respondent (40.5%) did not decrease among graduate‐entry medical students after exposure to dissection although there was a significant shift in strength of support for donation by stranger. This suggests that older medical students do not readily modify their pre‐established attitudes to the idea of whole body donation after exposure and experience with dissection. Initial ambivalence among respondents to the idea of donation by family member was followed by opposition to this type of donation. These findings demonstrate that age modulates the influences on a priori attitudes to whole body donation that exposure to dissection causes in younger medical students. Anat Sci Educ 2:167–172, 2009. © 2009 American Association of Anatomists.     

The memory of science: Inflation,myopia, and the knowledge network

Scientific production is steadily growing, exhibiting 4% annual growth in publications and 1.8% annual growth in the number of references per publication, together producing a 12-year doubling period in the total supply of references, i.e. links in the science citation network. This growth has far-reaching implications for how academic knowledge is connected, accessed and evaluated. Against this background, we analyzed a citation network comprised of 837 million references produced by 32.6 million publications over the period 1965–2012, allowing for a detailed analysis of the ‘attention economy’ in science. Our results show how growth relates to ‘citation inflation’, increased connectivity in the citation network resulting from decreased levels of uncitedness, and a narrowing range of attention – as both very classic and very recent literature are being cited increasingly less. The decreasing attention to recent literature published within the last 6 years suggests that science has become stifled by a publication deluge destabilizing the balance between production and consumption. To better understand these patterns together, we developed a generative model of the citation network, featuring exponential growth, the redirection of scientific attention via publications’ reference lists, and the crowding out of old literature by the new. We validate our model against several empirical benchmarks, and then use perturbation analysis to measure the impact of shifts in citing behavior on the synthetic system's properties, thereby providing insights into the functionality of the science citation network as an infrastructure supporting the memory of science.     

Reforming University Education in Hong Kong and Singapore

University education has been thrust into the limelight by policymakers in Hong Kong and Singapore in recent years. Reforming university education thus has become a norm for both city-states. This article reviews and compares some recent developments in the university reforms in both city-states. It argues university education, as a public policy area, is not immune from the profound influence of such concepts as accountability, performativity, quality assurance and market relevance, which prevail in a wider policy context of public sector reforms and governance changes. Hong Kong and Singapore's university reforms are similarly extensive, ranging from the admission mechanisms through to the governance and funding systems. This article has four main sections. The first sketches a paradigm shift in the policymaking process and the changing state-university relationships in the age of globalization. The second reviews and compares some recent developments of the university reforms in both city-states. The third turns to assess the impacts of the reforms on university stakeholders. The final section is the conclusion.     

Om： One tool for many （Indian） languages

INTRODUCTION India is a nation with pluralistic culture, a large number of cultures, ethnicities, languages and relig- ions coexisting with each other. While the culture and faith unify the country under one umbrella either by similarity or by tolerance, the language is what separates them. In the 1951 census, the first census after India attained independence, 845 languages (dialects) were identified, of which 60 were spoken by at least 100000 people each. The Indian constitu- tion iden…     

Student Performance and the Cost of Failure

This paper examines student performance and calculates the theoretical cost of academic failure by Australian undergraduates, using factors implicit in government funding formulae. In order to survive, higher education institutions have had to diversify their funding base and at the same time the government appears now to perceive its contributions as a subsidy to university students, rather than as being an investment in society's broad human infrastructure. The demand for accountability has increased, and output-based funding is much discussed. The ultimate university output is student success, and governments could place a monetary value on this in a very direct way. This paper takes a methodological approach in analysing the cost of failure.     

Middle school students’ attitudes toward physical education

The purpose of this study was to determine middle school students’ attitudes toward physical education using an attitude instrument grounded in attitude theory. In addition, this investigation also sought to ascertain if gender and grade level influence student attitudes toward the subject matter. Participants for this study were 995 students from grades 6 to 8. A previously validated attitude instrument based on a two-component view of attitude with scores that showed evidence of reliability and validity was used. Overall all students had moderately positive attitudes toward physical education. There was, however, a decline in attitude scores as students progressed in grade level. Higher grades had lower mean scores.