The Aula EspaZio Gela and the Master of Space Science and Technology in the Universidad del País Vasco (University of the Basque Country)

We present the Aula EspaZio Gela, a facility dedicated to teaching Space Science and Technology at the master and doctorate level at the University of the Basque Country (Spain), and to promoting the development of this field in both public and private sectors. The one-year master's degree in Space Science and Technology (60 ECTS (European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System)) offers a group of compulsory courses which give way afterwards to a set of elective matters in which students choose one of two tracks: the scientific, primarily oriented to basic research at the University, or the technological, leading to the space industry and space agencies. After completion of the master thesis, our students have direct access to a PhD in both curricular lines. Here we detail the main features of the master's degree and the experience acquired in three years, including a comparative opinion survey to the students. We also describe the facilities at the Faculty of Engineering consisting of a specific classroom (Aula EspaZio Gela), an Astronomical Observatory, and different laboratories.     

马尔克斯——为拉丁美洲发声

正【阅读难度:】耽字迷文,阅读是一种受益终生的习惯。拉丁美洲作家马尔克斯于2014年4月17日辞世,享年87岁。他是拉丁美洲魔幻现实主义文学的代表人物,20世纪最有影响力的作家之一,1982年诺贝尔文学奖得主。他将现实主义与幻想结合起来,创造了一部风云变幻的哥伦比亚和整个南美大陆的神话般的历史。     

Faculty Employment Trends in Criminology and Criminal Justice

The academic job search process is perhaps one of the most important and stressful events for scholars hoping to gain full‐time employment in academia. The stress that this process induces is due, at least in part, to the fact that candidates are forced to make important, life‐changing decisions with very little information. The goal of the present study is to provide an update on faculty employment trends in criminology and criminal justice by examining faculty position announcements posted in The Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) from August 2004 to July 2009. Findings reveal that candidates seeking assistant professor positions will have the most choice, as positions posted at this rank make up the largest category of advertisements. Furthermore, when a specialization was included in the announcement, most departments sought those with a law enforcement focus, followed by generalists.     

Instrucción directa en estrategias de comprensión lectora

Muchos sistemas pedagógicos parecen haber asumido que la enseñanza de la lectoescritura implica toda una serie de problemas y tópicos pero que la comprensión no está entre ellos, sino que se produce o se desprende implícitamente, como efecto secundario de la alfabetización que no es preciso promocionar específicamente. Los fracasos sistemáticos en comprensión de muchos alumnos que dominan instrumentalmente la lectoescritura ha llevado en los últimos años a desarrollar modelos y estrategias específicas para la instrucción directa de la comprensión lectora.

Este artículo resume las estrategias más empleadas y expone ejemplificada, aunque resumidamente, su aplicación.     

Review of The 2009 UNESCO framework for cultural statistics

The main goal of the 2009 UNESCO Framework for Cultural Statistics is to facilitate comparisons through a common understanding of culture and the use of standardized definitions and classifications. This review contains an in-depth analysis of the 2009 Framework's contribution to the existing literature on measuring the economic impact of culture, and it concludes by suggesting future avenues of research. By achieving international consensus on the concept of culture and its measurement, we will be able to progress in our studies of the competitive advantages that allow cultural firms to generate wealth nowadays.     

Using Dialogic Writing Assessment to Support the Development of Historical Literacy

Though discipline-specific approaches to literacy instruction can support adolescents' academic literacy and identity development, scant attention has been paid to ways of targeting such instruction to address individual student needs. Dialogic writing assessment is an approach to conducting writing conferences that foregrounds students' composing process so that teachers can assess and support that process with instructional feedback. Because such feedback is immediate, teachers can observe how students take it up. While dialogic assessment has shown promise as an approach to revealing and supporting students' writing processes in English Language Arts classrooms, it remains to be explored how this approach can support developing writers in other subject areas. This paper offers an analytic narrative account of how a high school social studies teacher used this method to support the writing process of one student, exploring what the method revealed about the challenges the student faced in writing about history, the gaps and misconceptions in their understanding of history and the intersection between the two. We discuss how certain ‘mediational moves’ the teacher employed enabled the student to compose collaboratively with the teacher, and in this collaborative composing, to capture ideas that she later used in her independent writing.     

Discrete-time synchronization strategy for input time-delay mobile robots

This paper considers a synchronization strategy for a group of differentially driven mobile robots subject to input time-delayed control signals. The continuous time model of the vehicles is exactly discretized in order to obtain a larger dimension representation free of delays. The control strategy is based on the concept of synchronization, under two main assumptions: a specific formation for the group of robots and the tracking of a particular desired trajectory. The control strategy proposed in this work allows the consideration of causal feedback laws avoiding the use of an additional prediction strategy that counteracts the undesired input time-delay effects. The performance of the synchronization strategy is evaluated by real-time experiments with the help of a group of three mobile robots and an indoor absolute localization system based on artificial vision.     

Validity and reliability evidence for motor competence assessments in children and adolescents: A systematic review

ABSTRACT

Valid and reliable tests of motor competence are necessary to allow researchers and practitioners to quantify levels of motor competence, identify skill deficiencies, and determine the effectiveness of motor skill interventions. The primary study aim was to systematically review the validity and reliability of scores derived from gross motor competence tests for typically developing child and adolescent populations. The secondary aim of this review was to identify the most prevalent motor skills assessed across all instruments. A search of seven electronic databases identified 57 different skill assessment tools from 107 studies. Construct validity was the most common measurement property examined (60 studies; 56%). Content validity (21 studies; 20%) was the least commonly explored measurement property. Scores derived from the Test of Gross Motor Development – second and third edition had the most support for validity and reliability. The most common skills included in these skill batteries were the overhand throw (n = 33), catch (n = 32), jump (n = 31) and hop (n = 26). Research efforts should focus on: (1) further investigation of measurement properties of existing tools rather than developing new assessments and (2) further investigation of existing tools and their measurement properties in adolescent populations.     

Learning in the wild: coding for learning and practice on Reddit

Learning on and through social media is becoming a cornerstone of lifelong learning, creating places not only for accessing information, but also for finding other self-motivated learners. Such is the case for Reddit, the online news sharing site that is also a forum for asking and answering questions. We studied learning practices found in ‘Ask’ subreddits AskScience, Ask_Politics, AskAcademia, and AskHistorians to develop a coding schema for informal learning. This paper describes the process of evaluating and defining a workable coding schema, one that started with attention to learning processes associated with discourse, exploratory talk, and conversational dialogue, and ended with including norms and practices on Reddit and the support of communities of inquiry. Our ‘learning in the wild’ coding schema contributes a content analysis schema for learning through social media, and an understanding of how knowledge, ideas, and resources are shared in open, online learning forums.     

Evolutionary learning of document categories

This paper deals with a supervised learning method devoted to producing categorization models of text documents. The goal of the method is to use a suitable numerical measurement of example similarity to find centroids describing different categories of examples. The centroids are not abstract or statistical models, but rather consist of bits of examples. The centroid-learning method is based on a Genetic Algorithm for Texts (GAT). The categorization system using this genetic algorithm infers a model by applying the genetic algorithm to each set of preclassified documents belonging to a category. The models thus obtained are the category centroids that are used to predict the category of a test document. The experimental results validate the utility of this approach for classifying incoming documents.