Comparison of Two Methods of Studying History

This study examined the effects of team teaching on selected attitudes and achievement of ninth grade students in English and World History after 1 year. Seventy-four ninth grade students from a local school were randomly assigned to a team teaching treatment group while the remaining seventy-one members of the freshman class received traditional instruction in three separate classrooms. A teacher constructed test was employed to measure achievement in subject matter, and a personality inventory was used to measure changes in selected attitudes. The findings indicated that the team teaching approach did not appear to complement academic growth over traditional teaching methods but it did have a significant impact on student attitudes toward teachers, interest in subject matter, sense of personal freedom, and self-reliance.     

Complacent and conflicting scientific expertise in British and American drug regulation: clinical risk assessment of triazolam

This paper presents a case study in the production and interpretation of regulatory science, focusing on the conflicting British and American clinical risk assessments of triazolam (Halcion) - the most controversial sleeping pill in the world. The regulation of triazolam is shown to be more permissive in the USA than in the UK. Six principal socio-political factors are put forward to explain this; differential regulatory trust; regulators' socio-technical data selections; medico-scientific disciplinary influences; organizational and professional interests; conflicts of interest of expert advisers; and the growth of the neo-liberal regulatory state. The risk assessments of both the British and American regulatory agencies are shown to be complacent relative to technical standards which the agencies themselves later accepted. It is suggested that, when the interests of pharmaceutical manufacturers and patients diverge, regulatory assessments are crucially affected by whether regulators are predisposed to award the benefit of the scientific doubts to the manufacturers or patients, and by the balance of such predispositions both within and between regulatory institutions of scientific expertise. The triazolam case indicates that the amount of trust placed in the pharmaceutical industry by the British American regulatory systems may hamper detection of flaws in manufacturers' medical data in a timely manner and, as a consequence, compromise patients' interests. Some policy implications for drug regulation are sketched.     

Optimization of configurations of field problem grids using network models

Optimization of grid configurations decreases the discretization error in the numerical solution of field problems. In this paper, the theoretical and algorithmic aspects of optimizing configurations of grids used in equilibrium, potential-type field problems is presented. The criterion for establishing the optimum grid and the steps required to move to the optimum grid are given. Sensitivity network modelling is invoked to systematically form matrices required in the algorithm. One-dimensional examples are presented to illustrate the validity of the approach.