Guidance in eastern Europe: from ideological formation to an emerging service model

This article analyzes major changes that have occurred in east-European guidance over the past decades. The emphasis has gradually shifted from purely ideological concerns to an interest in serving the needs of individuals. Whereas in the initial stage structural uniformity was of great importance, current views accept a degree of diversification in guidance services on the basis of regional needs and sociocultural traditions. Tangible differences seem to exist between guidance strategies that are prevalent in the Soviet Union and in certain areas of east-central Europe.University of South Florida     

Impacts on college administration: Management information systems and management by objectives systems

Forty-nine private liberal arts colleges received grants from the Exxon Education Foundation to improve their management procedures. Research was conducted to determine the success of the management innovations, and the impact of the process on the college's management. About half the colleges had innovations that completely failed because of staff turnover, inadequate administrative support, or other causes. In the other, more successful group the research showed a number of positive impacts of the projects: (1) Management Information Systems were quite useful in providing comprehensive management data, in analyzing hot spots of trouble, and increasing sophistication of administrators; (2) Management by Objectives projects increased administrative and faculty morale and insured more adequate planning, and (3) combinations of both MIS and MBO projects produced the strongest positive impact. Both types of projects, however, failed to link planning with budgeting, a major flaw.     

On rectangular systems of differential equations and their application to circuit theory

A system of differential equations A(d/dt) x = Bx+f, along with the initial condition x(0) = k, is considered where A and B are m x n matrices. Generalized inverses of the matrix A are used to derive algebraic conditions for the existence and uniqueness of a solution. An example is presented to illustrate application of the results to circuit theory.     

Agency problem, institutions, and technology policy: Explaining Taiwan's semiconductor industry development

Taiwan has made significant progress in the semiconductor industry with government agencies and bureaucrats as the driving forces over the past 30 years. Taiwan's impressive achievement in the semiconductor industry clearly indicates that the government failures and agency problem usually associated with deep government involvement did not occur in Taiwan. Why is that the case? This paper proposes a principal-agent framework for technology policy and applies the framework to discuss the institutional arrangements through which bureaucrats were controlled effectively in executing the semiconductor industry policies in Taiwan. By analyzing the institutional and organizational arrangements Taiwanese leaders made to mitigate the agency problem, this paper brings bureaucrats into the popular developmental state theory and emphasizes that the success of state intervention should not be taken for granted, and it also brings politics into technology policy analysis and stresses the importance and complexity of agency problem in technology policy.     

Assessing dialogic argumentation in online environments to relate structure,grounds, and conceptual quality

The national science standards, along with prominent researchers, call for increased focus on scientific argumentation in the classroom. Over the past decade, researchers have developed sophisticated online science learning environments to support these opportunities for scientific argumentation. Assessing the quality of dialogic argumentation, however, has proven challenging. Existing analytic frameworks assess dialogic argumentation in terms of the nature of students' discourse, formal argumentation structure, interactions, and epistemic forms of reasoning. Few frameworks, however, connect these assessments to conceptual quality. We present an analytic framework for assessing argumentation in online science learning environments that relates levels of opposition with discourse moves, use of grounds, and conceptual quality. We then apply the proposed framework to students' dialogic argumentation within a representative online science learning environment to investigate the framework's potential affordances as well as to assess issues of reliability and appropriateness. The results suggest that the framework offers significant affordances and that it also offers high interrater reliability for trained coders. The applicability of the framework for offline contexts and future extensions of the framework are discussed in light of these results. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 45: 293–321, 2008     

“年龄”的表达方式

1.表示“整岁”,直接用基数词或year,age。例如“他20岁”可表示为:He is twenty.He is twenty years old.He is a twenty-year-old man.He is aged twenty.He is at age twenty.He is at the age of twenty.He is twenty years of age.2.表示“在某人几十多岁”,用“in one’s 基数词复数形式”,例如:他70多岁。He is in his seventies.(从70岁到79岁之间)她50多岁。She is in her fifties.(从50岁到59岁之间)另外,还可以借助early,middle,late来表达得更明确一些,例如:女孩今年二十二三岁。The girl is in her earlytwenties.他今年十…     

The 2001 Benjamin Franklin medal in physics presented to Alan Guth, Ph.D. of Cambridge, Massachusetts

The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, awarded the 2001 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics to Alan H. Guth for his efforts to advance our knowledge of physical science and its application of the inflationary scenario, in which the universe undergoes a rapid expansion in the first stages of the Big Bang.     

The Adoption of Microcomputers for Instruction: Implications for Emerging Instructional Media Implementation

Using the five-stage innovation decision-making process established by Rogers, it was determined that the overwhelming majority of Pennsylvania business education teachers have adopted microcomputer technology and use it to deliver instruction on a routine basis. In addition, it was determined that three factors demonstrated a significant relationship with adoption behavior, even though they had a low ability to predict such behavior. However, it appears that three other factors, i.e., attitude towards microcomputers, the characteristics of microcomputers, and a critical threshold mark for the adoption of microcomputers, may also have influenced the decision of Pennsylvania business education teachers to adopt microcomputers in their classroom. These findings suggest that, perhaps, in the adoption of a new instructional method, what really matters are individual's attitude towards the new method, the characteristics of the new method, and the critical threshold mark for adopting the specific method.