A grey literature review of the Cultural Olympiad

This article considers the development of the UK Cultural Olympiad supporting London's successful bid to stage the Olympic Games in 2012. It suggests that the Cultural Olympiad is a complex event itself and needs to be better understood if any impacts are to be felt in a meaningful sense. The event is thus considered through review of over 50 documents relating to its management, in the context of a number of identified themes: cultural development, developing institutional frameworks, social benefit, educational benefit and promotional benefit.     

Characteristics of the start in women's World Cup skeleton

This study characterizes key elements of the start in elite female World Cup skeleton athletes. The top 20 female competitors in three World Cup races were videotaped within a calibrated space to allow the following components of the start to be quantified: (1) acceleration (velocity at 15-m mark, time to 15-m mark), (2) capacity (time to load, total number of steps to load), and (3) load (velocity at 45-m mark). A correlation analysis was used to establish the relationship between the variables of interest and overall start time (15- to 65-m mark). Velocity at the 15-m mark accounted for 86% of the variance in overall start time at St. Moritz and 85% at Sigulda. A stepwise regression analysis revealed that approximately 89% of the variation in start time could be explained by velocity at the 15-m mark, time to load, and velocity at the 45-m mark. Of the variables analysed in this study, rapid acceleration to attain a high velocity at the 15-m mark was the most important component of a fast overall start time. The importance of the time to load and velocity at the 45-m mark vary according to the different track characteristics.     

The missing link: an econometric analysis on the impact of curriculum standards on student achievement

Nationwide, state policy-makers have increasingly adopted curriculum standards as a means of improving education. However, relatively little empirical research has been done to investigate if a link actually exists between curriculum standards and student performance. Using data collected by the New York State Department of Education, the impact of standards on high school student achievement is examined through estimation of a one-way fixed-effects model of the education production function. Curriculum standards are operationalized as the award of a “50–64” variance, which is considered a means of increasing the number of students taking demanding courses. The findings suggest that curriculum standards can improve student performance, but they do little to improve equity. While larger portions of pupils pass curriculum-based assessment exams, continued associations between select student characteristics and student performance remain.     

Microliter-bioreactor array with buoyancy-driven stirring for human hematopoietic stem cell culture

This work presents the development of an array of bioreactors where finely controlled stirring is provided at the microliter scale (100–300 μl). The microliter-bioreactor array is useful for performing protocol optimization in up to 96 parallel experiments of hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) cultures. Exploring a wide range of experimental conditions at the microliter scale minimizes cost and labor. Once the cell culture protocol is optimized, it can be applied to large-scale bioreactors for stem cell production at the clinical level. The controlled stirring inside the wells of a standard 96-well plate is provided by buoyancy-driven thermoconvection. The temperature and velocity fields within the culture volume are determined with numerical simulations. The numerical results are verified with experimental velocity measurements using microparticle image velocimetry (μPIV) and are used to define feasible experimental conditions for stem cell cultures. To test the bioreactor array’s functionality, human umbilical cord blood-derived CD34⁺ cells were cultured for 7 days at five different stirring conditions (0.24–0.58 μm∕s) in six repeated experiments. Cells were characterized in terms of proliferation, and flow cytometry measurements of viability and CD34 expression. The microliter-bioreactor array demonstrates its ability to support HSC cultures under stirred conditions without adversely affecting the cell behavior. Because of the highly controlled operative conditions, it can be used to explore culture conditions where the mass transport of endogenous and exogenous growth factors is selectively enhanced, and cell suspension provided. While the bioreactor array was developed for culturing HSCs, its application can be extended to other cell types.     

Statistical Models for Monolingual and Bilingual Information Retrieval

This work reviews information retrieval systems developed at ITC-irst which were evaluated through several tracks of CLEF, during the last three years. The presentation tries to follow the progress made over time in developing new statistical models first for monolingual information retrieval, then for cross-language information retrieval. Besides describing the underlying theory, performance of monolingual and bilingual information retrieval models are reported, respectively, on Italian monolingual tracks and Italian-English bilingual tracks of CLEF. Monolingual systems by ITC-irst performed consistently well in all the official evaluations, while the bilingual system ranked in CLEF 2002 just behind competitors using commercial machine translation engines. However, by experimentally comparing our statistical topic translation model against a state-of-the-art commercial system, no statistically significant difference in retrieval performance could be measured on a larger set of queries.     

A case study of the development of WebPA: An online peer-moderated marking tool

Peer moderation of group work in higher education is rapidly advancing through the use of technological developments and is increasingly being informed by pedagogical research. The highly successful WebPA online assessment system has gone through a number of development phases over its 15-year history and has now evolved into a relatively mature and flexible tool for facilitating group work. This paper presents a case study of the approaches that have been used in the system's development from the technical perspective, and describes how the scope of the project has massively expanded and that the development has been continually backed by a sound and wide-ranging pedagogy. The benefits of using the online system are shown to be underpinned throughout by examples of good practice in the supervision of academic group work. A critical evaluation of the tool and surrounding pedagogical practices highlight future areas for technical expansion.     

Teaching subjects to pupils with profound and multiple learning difficultiesConsiderations for the new Framework

Nicola Grove, who lectures in speech and language therapy and works in a school for pupils with severe and profound learning difficulties, and Nick Peacey, Director of the Special Educational Needs Joint Initiative for Training (SENJIT) at the Institute of Education, discuss the development of a framework for teaching National Curriculum subjects to pupils with profound learning difficulties through discussion with mainstream specialists.