‘You can't not go with the technological flow,can you?’ Constructing ‘ICT’ and ‘teaching and learning’

This paper seeks to show how ‘policy’, ‘management’ and ‘information and communications technology’ (ICT) were constructed for schools in England between 2000 and 2003 and to discuss some effects of these constructions on teaching and learning in the institutions involved in the InterActive Education Project. It argues that their contribution collectively constituted ‘ICT’ as a particular kind and form of challenge for schools, and that recognising the nature of this constitution is crucial to understanding the relationship between ICT and teaching and learning. Informed by an abductive methodology, this paper draws on analyses of policy documents and interviews with the head teachers of the educational institutions taking part in the InterActive Education Project to show how the possibilities and opportunities of using ICT were shaped by those constructions. It suggests that the main policy framing ICT in education over the period in question, the National Grid for Learning, had the provision of hardware and infrastructure as its main target, but offered little advice on how they might be used. This constituted the core of the management problem of ICT for schools. The final section of the paper outlines some of the mechanisms through which schools addressed these issues and discusses some possible implications for what counts as ‘teaching and learning’ with ‘ICT’.     

‘A or B’ to ‘A and B’

nal responses to such situations predominantly involve trade–off and compromise. This either/or thinking style almost invariably leads to lose–lose outcomes. This in turn despite the inordinate amount of literature and methodology available for ‘optimising’ those outcomes. Highly fashionable talk of ‘third ways’ or ‘win–win’ or ‘A and B’ solutions are an emerging counter to such thinking. Unfortunately, the literature–base for such approaches is largely non–existent, and hence win–win remains as precisely fashionable talk to most observers. This paper discusses the positive role TRIZ may be expected to play in beginning the task of turning win–win from nice idea to practical reality. Mass–customization is used as an exemplar contradiction problem.     

Identrus — the ‘Technical Platform’

In his outline of Identrus, John Bullard described the business rationale for its existence, and its fundamental principles of trust, global interoperability and simplicity. He has explained how the delivery of identity assurance services, within a supporting framework of operating rules, and governed through the application of private contract law, allows Identrus to deliver trusted digital signature services on a global basis. In this article we discuss how these services are realized by Identrus and its participants, in practice, and outline some of the technology underpinning the system.     

The NAG library ‘machine’

If a reliable, high quality numerical algorithms library is to be developed then it is essential that we recognize the need for collaboration between different technical communities in the development of the library. This paper suggests an ultimate design for the library and describes the implications of that design for the people involved in the development of the library.     

Revealing the ‘real’ me, searching for the ‘actual’ you: Presentations of self on an internet dating site

This paper considers the presentation of self on an internet dating site. Thirty men and 30 women were interviewed about their online dating experiences. They were asked about how they constructed their profiles and how they viewed other individuals’ profiles. Which types of presentations of self led to more successful offline romantic relationships were also investigated. Additionally, gender differences were examined. In line with previous research on presentation of self online, individuals were quite strategic in their online presentations. However, important differences between initiating a relationship on an internet dating site and other spaces (online and offline) included the type of self disclosed as well as the depth of breadth of information individuals self-disclosed about themselves before any one-on-one conversations took place.     

Experiments with ‘HP Java’

We consider the possible role of Java as a language for high performance computing. After discussing reasons why Java may be a natural candidate for a portable parallel programming language, we describe several case studies. These cover Java socket programming, message-passing through a Java interface to MPI, and class libraries for data-parallel programming in Java. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

New Media and the ‘Anchor Baby’ Boom

The term ‘anchor baby’ refers to children born in the U.S. to undocumented migrant parents who are thought to have been conceived in order to improve their parents' chances of attaining citizenship. Though the term is considered racist and dehumanizing by many, it has recently entered into common usage. This study investigates the process by which this has occurred. We test hypotheses derived from theories of mass and new media using multiple data sources and methods of analysis, and find that the main sources of the anchor baby boom are partisan news websites. The findings suggest that new media may be influencing mass media by creating unique and unprecedented opportunities for medium‐sized partisan news organizations.     

On the simplex algorithm ‘revised form’

The purpose of this paper is an amelioration of the ‘product form of the inverse’ related to the revised simplex method. We give an algorithm to compute the inverse of the current basic matrix. This calculation requires approximately m² operations by using a tensor product and matrix addition. We apply this idea to the Gauss and Gauss–Jordan algorithms.     

Relaxation labelling — the principle of ‘least disturbance’

A new approach to constrained labelling is described and applied to labelling edges in images. An initial labelling is adjusted iteratively, to reach the nearest labelling that satisfies given constraints. The iterative method is provably convergent.     

The ‘Completeness’ of the pascal test suite

The British Standards Institution aided by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) are setting up the framework for a national service which will validate Pascal compilers against the requirements of the ISO Standard for Pascal.¹ The basis of this service is the Pascal Compiler Validation Suite,² a large collection of test programs (produced jointly by NPL and the University of Tasmania) which were derived directly from the Standard, Naturally, the Suite must be as searching as possible, and Ideally all features of the language should be exercised by the Suite. This paper describes an investigation into the ‘completeness’ of the Suite; note that ‘completeness’ is not used in any formal sense throughout the paper. The investigation is carried out by passing the entire Suite through a model implementation of Pascal, the Standard Pascal Static Checker,³ to determine whether any parts of this implementation do not get exercised by the Suite. Further tests are then written to exercise these parts. A by-product of this work is a tool which produces an execution profile for a Pascal program; this paper describes the function of the tool.     

Building text classifiers using positive,unlabeled and ‘outdated’ examples

Learning from positive and unlabeled examples (PU learning) is a partially supervised classification that is frequently used in Web and text retrieval system. The merit of PU learning is that it can get good performance with less manual work. Motivated by transfer learning, this paper presents a novel method that transfers the ‘outdated data’ into the process of PU learning. We first propose a way to measure the strength of the features and select the strong features and the weak features according to the strength of the features. Then, we extract the reliable negative examples and the candidate negative examples using the strong and the weak features (Transfer‐1DNF). Finally, we construct a classifier called weighted voting iterative support vector machine (SVM) that is made up of several subclassifiers by applying SVM iteratively, and each subclassifier is assigned a weight in each iteration. We conduct the experiments on two datasets: 20 Newsgroups and Reuters‐21578, and compare our method with three baseline algorithms: positive example‐based learning, weighted voting classifier and SVM. The results show that our proposed method Transfer‐1DNF can extract more reliable negative examples with lower error rates, and our classifier outperforms the baseline algorithms. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.