Raising the standards of learning that are achieved through school education is an important national priority. Governments have been vigorous in the last ten years in making changes in pursuit of this aim. National curriculum testing, the development of the GCSE, league tables of school

…Truth [is] being involved in an eternal conversation about things that matter, conducted with passion and discipline…truth is not in the conclusions so much as in the process of conversation itself…if you want to be in truth you must be in conversation. Parker Palmer

Recent empirical and case study evidence documents a strong association between the adoption of computers and increased use of college educated or non-production workers. With few exceptions, the conceptual link explaining how computer technology complements skilled labor or substitutes for unskilled labor is less well developed. This paper applies an understanding of what computers do – the execution of procedural or rules-based logic – to develop and test a simple model of how the widespread adoption of computers in the workplace might alter workplace skill demands. Two essential contentions of our framework are that computer capital (1) substitutes for a limited and well-defined set of human activities, those involving routine (repetitive) cognitive and manual tasks; and (2) complements a second set of activities, those involving non-routine problem solving and interactive tasks. Under the assumption that routine and non-routine tasks are imperfect substitutes, the task framework implies measurable changes in the task content of employment. We examine these changes using representative samples of workers from 1960 to 1998 where individual characteristics are augmented with Dictionary of Occupational Title variables describing their occupations ’ requirements for routine and non-routine cognitive and manual skills. We find that computerization is associated with declining relative industry

In this paper we show that application-aware adaptation, a collaborative partnership between the operating system and applications, offers the most general and effective approach to mobile information access. We describe the design of Odyssey, a prototype implementing this approach, and show how

This paper reviews recent research that grapples with the question: What happens after an exogenous shock to monetary policy? We argue that this question is interesting because it lies at the center of a particular approach to assessing the empirical plausibility of structural economic models

to this problem is based on machine learning techniques: a general inductive process automatically builds a classifier by learning, from a set of preclassified documents, the characteristics of the categories. The advantages of this approach over the knowledge engineering approach (consisting in the manual

An important question in neuroevolution is how to gain an advantage from evolving neural network topologies along with weights. We present a method, NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT), which outperforms the best fixed-topology method on a challenging benchmark reinforcement learning

and theory. Intrinsic motivation remains an important construct, reflecting the natural human propensity to learn and assimilate. However, extrinsic motivation is argued to vary considerably in its relative autonomy and thus can either reflect external control or true self-regulation. The relations of both

[Green and Bavelier, 2003] has grabbed national attention for suggesting that playing “action ” video and computer games has the positive effect of enhancing students ’ visual selective attention. But that finding is just one small part of a more important message that all parents and educators

Requirements analysis includes a preliminary acquisition step where a global model for the specification of the system and its environment is elaborated. This model, called requirements model, involves concepts that are currently not supported by existing formal specification languages, such as goals to be achieved, agents to be assigned, alternatives to be negotiated, etc. The paper presents an approach to requirements acquisition which is driven by such higher-level concepts. Requirements models are acquired as instances of a conceptual meta-model. The latter can be represented as a graph where each node captures an abstraction such as, e.g., goal, action, agent, entity, or event, and where the edges capture semantic links between such abstractions. Well-formedness properties on nodes and links constrain their instances - that is, elements of requirements models. Requirements acquisition processes then correspond to particular ways of traversing the meta-model graph to acquire approp...