Transient response of piles-bridge under horizontal excitation

Moving ships and other objects drifting on water often impact a bridge's pile foundation. The mechanical model of the piles-bridge structure under horizontal forcing was established, and a time-domain approach based on Finite-difference Method was developed for analyzing the dynamic response of the piles-bridge structure. For a single pile, good agreement between two computed results validated the present approach. The slenderness ratio of the pile, the pile-soil stiffness ratio and the type of the structure influence the dynamic response of the piles-bridge structure. The computed results showed that the stiffness of the structure determines the dynamic response of the piles-bridge structure under horizontal forcing. Project (No. 001110442) supported by the Science and Technology Bureau of Zhejiang Province, China.     

Job change in later life: A process of marginalization?

Adopting a longitudinal approach, this article examines downward occupational mobility (DOM) later in working life and its effects on job satisfaction and perceptions of working conditions of older workers in Europe. The main aim was to test whether the risk that workers will be negatively impacted and marginalized in the labor market due to demotion into lower quality jobs is offset by benefits. Based on an ordinal logistic regression of merged Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe and English Longitudinal Study of Ageing datasets, the study found a positive significant impact of DOM on overall job satisfaction. Moreover, DOM was associated with a statistically significant reduction in workload pressure, although it did increase physical work demand. This article adds to the literature on marginalization of workers with indications that the lower income and status associated with DOM at older ages may have offsetting benefits.     

Exploring Understandings and Responses to Science: A Program of Longitudinal Studies

This paper will report on the development of a research program by a group of science educators at Kristianstad University, which has its roots in a longitudinal study I conducted concerning students’ developing understandings of ecological processes. Following the insights generated in this first study concerning the nature of student understandings, and the potential of the longitudinal design, a research group has developed at Kristianstad which has extended this work into related areas. This paper will describe my own work and its development, and link it with three projects that use a longitudinal design, which we have subsequently undertaken and in some cases completed. The emphasis within the paper will be on the findings generated by these studies on student learning and response to science, and the particular features of the longitudinal design that allow such insights to emerge. The paper will explore patterns of change, and continuity, as a way of appreciating the particular contributions of longitudinal studies.     

Adding automatic evaluation to interactive virtual labs

Automatic evaluation is a challenging field that has been addressed by the academic community in order to reduce the assessment workload. In this work we present a new element for the authoring tool Easy Java Simulations (EJS). This element, which is named automatic evaluation element (AEE), provides automatic evaluation to virtual and remote laboratories built with EJS by using the server application Goodle grading management system (GMS). The integration of both tools entitles a professor to create interactive virtual and remote laboratories and automatically evaluate the work of their students. As a test bed two case studies are presented; a non-linear controller design virtual laboratory used in an advanced control master course and a servomechanism virtual laboratory used in an undergraduate basic control course.     

Zoltán Bay on education and science teaching

The present article is based on Zoltán Bay's Old Education, New Teaching — an unpublished paper written for the XXVIIth National Meeting of Secondary School Physics Teachers (5–7th April, 1984 Veszprém, Hungary).     

Learning design and learning analytics in mobile and ubiquitous learning: A systematic review

Mobile and Ubiquitous Learning (m/u-learning) are finding an increasing adoption in education. They are often distinguished by hybrid learning environments that encompass elements of formal and informal learning, in activities that happen in distributed settings (indoors and outdoors), across physical and virtual spaces. Despite their purported benefits, these environments imply additional complexity in the design, monitoring and evaluation of learning activities. The research literature on learning design (LD) and learning analytics (LA) has started to deal with these issues. This paper presents a systematic literature review of LD and LA, in m/u-learning. Apart from providing an overview of the current research in the field, this review elicits elements of common ground between both communities, as shown by the similar learning contexts and complementary research contributions, and based on the research gaps, proposes to: address m/u-learning beyond higher education settings, reinforce the connection between physical and virtual learning spaces, and more systematically align LD and LA processes.     

Privatisation,Decentralisation and Education in the United Kingdom: The Role of the State

Since the early 1950s, the axis centralisation–decentralisation, especially as thematised in the work of Isaac Kandel, has represented a major focus of comparative studies in education. Kandel argued that issues relating to the internal conduct of the classroom (interna) should, so far as possible, be decentralised, while issues relating to administration, school structure and organisation of the educational system (externa) might safely be centralised. After 1988, successive governments in the United Kingdom have undertaken reforms which have placed more central control on the curriculum and even methods of teaching (interna), while school finance and administration (externa) have been devolved to the school level. The present essay argues that a simplistic approach to centralisation and decentralisation is not likely to be fruitful. Instead, we should acknowledge the role of the State in creating a permissive framework for educational systems. Local action can then be seen as part of a policy accommodating or resisting the implications of that framework.     

Flourishing as the aim of education: towards an extended, ‘enchanted’ Aristotelian account

Flourishing, understood along Aristotelian or quasi-Aristotelian lines as objective eudaimonic well-being, is re-emerging as a paradigm for the ideal aim of education in the 21st century. This paper aims to venture beyond the current accounts and Aristotle’s own, by arguing that both suffer from a kind of ‘flatness’ or ‘disenchantedness’ in failing to pay heed to the satisfaction of certain impulses that have been proven to give fullness to our lives: impulses having to do with awe-inspiring emotional attachments to transpersonal ideals. I thus argue that while Aristotelian flourishing is a necessary place to begin, it is not a sufficient one to conclude, a study of human flourishing, either generally or in classroom contexts; it needs to be extended and ‘enchanted’ in order to do so. That venture does not necessitate an embrace of supernaturalism, however.     

Aidan Chambers’ <Emphasis Type="Italic">Breaktime</Emphasis>: Class Conflict and Anxiety in the Work of a Scholarship-Boy Writer

Aidan Chambers’ Breaktime (1978) is famous for its unique narrative style and sexual content. This focus has obscured another significant aspect of the novel: the role of social class in Breaktime and Chambers’ working-class background have rarely been explored. Chambers was an example of what Richard Hoggart calls “the scholarship boy,” a working-class boy educated in a grammar school in mid-twentieth-century Britain. In this article, Haru Takiuchi argues that Chambers’ scholarship-boy experiences are crucial for understanding Breaktime. For his analysis of the cultural and psychological aspects of class that concern representations of scholarship boys in British children’s literature of the 1960s and 1970s, he draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of class habitus, more focused studies of class in Britain and research into the experiences of scholarship boys. Using material from the author’s archive supplemented with interviews, Haru Takiuchi highlights Chambers’ unique representation of the scholarship boy and social class in the book.