THE ROUNDTABLE ON HIGHER EDUCATION: CREATING A NORTH DAKOTA UNIVERSITY SYSTEM FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

The Roundtable on Higher Education brought together the key stakeholders of the North Dakota University System (a unified system of 11 colleges and universities, including 5 community colleges) to establish consensus on a common vision, a clear set of expectations and the results for which the system would be held accountable. The roundtable effectively engaged these stakeholders at the front end of the process in a manner that made them active participants and led to the stakeholders taking ownership of the effort. Although there was an element of risk in this approach, the benefits have far exceeded expectations. This initiative is resulting in the development of a new relationship between the University System and the state's executive and legislative branches, as well as a new relationship between the University System and the private sector. Roundtable members refer to this new way of doing business as "public and private partnerships built upon mutual trust and a common purpose." Building these meaningful partnerships has taken a considerable commitment in North Dakota, but the results will likely have a major impact on the future of the state. The Roundtable on Higher Education has reached a level of accomplishment beyond the expectations of the State Board of Higher Education, the college and university presidents and those directly involved in the roundtable. For example, the landmark and comprehensive legislation passed during the 2001 legislative session was virtually identical to what was submitted. The State Board of Higher Education has authorized an entirely new funding model for the University System (as recommended by the roundtable), and the legislature granted the University System "flexibility with accountability"--a change that will be vitally important to the system's ability to play an expanded role in growing the state's economy. One challenge will be to maintain the momentum of this initiative, as well as the engagement of key stakeholders, especially since the initiative does not have an anticipated end date. Rather, it will be an evolving process with continued involvement by the key stakeholders. As targets are met and needs change, new recommendations will need to be defined. A high level of commitment will be essential to realizing the full potential of the roundtable. It is anticipated, however, that the project's success will help sustain it. The fundamental concept of engaging key stakeholders in developing consensus upon which to build a visionary plan is not original, nor is it unique to this initiative. Executive and legislative branch leaders in a number of states are attempting to better connect the tremendous resources and power of their higher education systems to the public agenda of their respective states. What is original and somewhat uncommon about this initiative is the application of effective leadership principles that help transform "knowing what needs to be done" into "making it happen." This leadership component is, undoubtedly, the most critical factor in the success of the Roundtable on Higher Education to date.     

Why Do We Really Get Tattoos?

A theory. It is the first morning of our vacation.I wake up bright and early and trot down to the 0cean where I make a shocking and bone-chilling discovery:I am the only personae on the beach whose epidermis is unadorned with tattoos.Everyone is inked up except moi.According to the FDA,more than 45 million Americans are now tatted up.This past weekend,they all hit     

Imagining the New Order Nation: Materiality and Hyperreality in Indonesia

This paper examines the tension between the materiality of information and communications technologies and the hyperreality which they are thought to produce. The setting for our analysis is Indonesia, where the most recent innovations in communications technologies co-exist alongside ancient – but still functional – ‘predecessor’ devices. Building upon Benedict Anderson's work on late-colonial Indonesia and Chandra Mukerji's work on seventeenth-century French formal gardens, we examine how the national imaginaries specific to Suharto's New Order state are embedded in the materiality of the present.     

Efficacy of using non-linear pedagogy to support attacking players’ individual learning objectives in elite-youth football: A randomised cross-over trial

ABSTRACT

The present study examined the efficacy of a coaching curriculum, based on non-linear pedagogy, on improving attacking players’ individual learning objectives (ILOs) in elite-youth football. Participants included 22 attacking players (i.e., centre-forwards, wide-players and attacking midfield players) from a professional football academy in England. The players were randomly appointed to both control (CON) and intervention (INT) periods following baseline measures. The INT (non-linear) and CON (linear) periods were both designed to support the ILOs provided to each player as part of the elite player performance plan. The study adopted a randomised cross-over design and ILOs considered important for attacking players (i.e., strong foot finishing, weak foot finishing, 1-v-1 and decision-making) were evaluated using the Loughborough Shooting Skill Test. The results showed significant differences for INT in 1-v-1 (P< 0.02) and decision-making (P< 0.01). However, there were no significant differences for strong foot finishing, weak foot finishing or time taken. These results support non-linear pedagogy in developing 1-v-1 game play and decision-making but not for technical shooting proficiency.     

Document retrieval on repetitive string collections

Most of the fastest-growing string collections today are repetitive, that is, most of the constituent documents are similar to many others. As these collections keep growing, a key approach to handling them is to exploit their repetitiveness, which can reduce their space usage by orders of magnitude. We study the problem of indexing repetitive string collections in order to perform efficient document retrieval operations on them. Document retrieval problems are routinely solved by search engines on large natural language collections, but the techniques are less developed on generic string collections. The case of repetitive string collections is even less understood, and there are very few existing solutions. We develop two novel ideas, interleaved LCPs and precomputed document lists, that yield highly compressed indexes solving the problem of document listing (find all the documents where a string appears), top-k document retrieval (find the k documents where a string appears most often), and document counting (count the number of documents where a string appears). We also show that a classical data structure supporting the latter query becomes highly compressible on repetitive data. Finally, we show how the tools we developed can be combined to solve ranked conjunctive and disjunctive multi-term queries under the simple \({\textsf{tf}}{\textsf{-}}{\textsf{idf}}\) model of relevance. We thoroughly evaluate the resulting techniques in various real-life repetitiveness scenarios, and recommend the best choices for each case.     

Regression Models with Errors in the Predictor Variable

In this article Simon Day describes a computer simulation exploring one of the fundamental assumptions of regression analysis which causes students difficulties.     

ENGLISH JOKES

(A)Ned:Why do you always wear two watches?Ted:I need to see how slow the other one is.(B)Passenger1:Excuse me,does this train stop at New Town?Passenger2:Yes,just watch me and get off one station beforeme.(C)Diner:Waiter,your finger is in my soup.Waiter:That's all right.It's so used to(惯常)the heat,I hardlynotice it.(D)Customer:I'd like to try on(试穿)that dress in the window(橱窗).Salesgirl:Sorry,madam,but you'll have to use the dressingroom(试衣间).(E)     

Precision Education Initiative: Moving Toward Personalized Education

This article propose the Precision Education Initiative, which is the tailoring of education to the specific characteristics of the individual student. Mirroring precision medicine, the author lays out both near‐term and longer term goals that educational research, and importantly educational practice, should follow.