The construction of reflective practice in key policy documents in England

This article presents an analysis of the construction of reflection in relation to teacher's practice to be found in some key documents designed to present or implement the current educational policy in England and Wales. There is evidence in these key texts that there is a potentially fruitful approach to the harnessing of reflection and reflective practice in the pursuit of given goals. This is however in tension with bureaucratic and political imperatives to control and those imperatives win out in the actual implementation documents. In so far as these actually determine the experience of teachers training for the Literacy Hour, then in practice teachers will feel that their own reflection is considerably censored rather than legitimated.     

Making the team [project team building and leadership]

The author outlines the role of team building and team leadership in successful project management. Different teams work in radically dissimilar environments, although it can be argued that it is the project team environment that is the most complex to analyse, as each project is unique and the conditions for team selection and motivation are often less than ideal. All this implies an overwhelming case for giving more attention to the art and science of project team building. A variety of factors are invoked in building high-performing teams, including the contributions made by individual members, leadership, communications and internal power relationships. Each of these will have an effect on whether or not your team performs successfully. The characteristics of individual team members can be categorised by a combination of nine distinct roles. These comprise: plant, resource investigator, co-ordinator, shaper, monitor evaluator, team-worker, implementer, completer/finisher and specialist. Their contributions and weaknesses are outlined. Three styles of leadership are also briefly discussed: laissez-faire, transactional and transformational     

An MRI Receiver Coil Produced by Inkjet Printing Directly on to a Flexible Substrate

Inkjet printing has been used to produce resonant radio frequency coils that are comparable to those produced by conventional printed circuit board (PCB) methods. The coils, which consist of a conductive loop and in-series capacitors, form part of a receiver circuit that is used for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The resonant circuit is selective at the predetermined frequency of 400 MHz. The required electrical components (resistor, capacitor, and inductor) were produced by inkjet printing, with scaling experiments for resistor and capacitor performed before the complete loops with integrated capacitors were printed. Numerical simulation was used to determine the required values for the components. The inkjet printed circuit was combined with a small tuning and matching board before being connected to a network analyzer and the MRI hardware. With a matching of ${-}$ 38 dB at 400 MHz the achieved results were comparable to those from standard PCB techniques. The performance of the inkjet printed component as a receiver device for nuclear magnetic resonance and MRI was verified by imaging reference phantoms and a whole kiwifruit; it compares favorably to standard MRI devices. Inkjet printing can, therefore, be considered a feasible technique for producing MRI receiver circuits on flexible substrates.      

Improved safety and efficacy in adaptive control of arterial bloodpressure through the use of a supervisor

A dual approach to adaptive control of arterial blood pressure using sodium nitroprusside is presented. In the clinical environment, a controller must be aggressive to achieve specific step response characteristics (less than 10 min setting time, less than 10 mm Hg overshoot), yet conservative enough to prevent overreactions to large disturbances, which are common in both the operating room and the intensive care unit. These mutually exclusive requirements make it difficult to design a closed-loop controller for this environment. To prevent possible overreactions while maintaining proper step response, an aggressive adaptive controller has been designed to achieve the desired step response, and a supervisor has been designed around the adaptive controller to limit potential overreactions in the presence of disturbances. Simulations and dog experiments demonstrate the potential for increased safety and efficacy using this dual approach to the control of a complex physiological system     

Improved track following in magnetic disk drives using adisturbance observer

Improving the position control of the disk drive read/write heads is an important step in increasing the storage capacity of a drive, especially in the presence of internal and external disturbances. To address this problem, the typical feedback loop of a disk drive servo system was augmented with a disturbance observer. The disturbance observer uses the position error signal and a nominal model of the plant to create an estimate of the disturbance. This estimate is then used to compensate for the disturbance effects. No additional sensors are required, which is particularly relevant in products such as disk drives where cost is a major concern. The effectiveness of the disturbance observer in rejecting shock and vibration disturbances is demonstrated in simulation and shake table experiments. The vibration experiments showed a decrease in the position error of 61%-96% at frequencies below 100 Hz. The maximum position error due to an experimental shock disturbance was decreased by 59%. The effects of noise in the position error signal are also discussed     

Time-varying analysis-synthesis systems based on filter banks andpost filtering

Perfect reconstruction (PR) time-varying analysis-synthesis filter banks are those in which the filters are allowed to change from one set of PR filter banks to another as the input signal is being processed. Such systems have the property that, in the absence of coding, they faithfully reconstruct every sample of the input. Various methods have been reported for the time-varying filter bank design; all of them, however, utilize structures for conventional PR filter banks. These conventional structures that have been applied in the past result in different limitations in each method. This paper introduces a new structure for exactly reconstructing time-varying analysis-synthesis filter banks. This structure consists of the conventional filter bank followed by a time-varying post filter. The new method requires neither the redesign of the analysis sections nor the use of any intermediate analysis filters during transition periods. It provides a simple and elegant procedure for designing time-varying filter banks without the disadvantages of the previous methods     

A comparison of SS7 congestion control options during mass call-insituations

The ITU-T (International Telecommunications Union, Telecommunications Standardization Sector, formerly known as CCITT), in its specification of the SS7 protocol, describes a number of alternatives for congestion control. In this paper we provide a direct comparison of the effectiveness of some of these methods in dealing with a mass call-in situation. We find that the international option provides better call throughput and is more robust to threshold settings and delays in feeding back congestion information than the national option with congestion priorities and a combination of the two options. The results can provide guidance to those attempting to define application level overload procedures, to those studying internetworking issues for connection between countries employing different SS7 congestion control options, and to those preparing to formulate B-ISDN overload strategies     

提供过电流和过电压保护的断路器

图1中的断路器仅需几个廉价的元件,即可对过电流和过电压故障状态进行反应.电路的核心是可调节的精密分路电压调节器D2,置在一只3引脚的封装中,提供了电压参考、比较器和集电极开路输出.     

Effects of Feeding Protected Tallow on Composition of Milk and Milk Fat

Official methods were used to analyze composite samples of milk collected during the first 15 wk of lactation from 21 Holstein cows fed a milled ration containing 0 (basal), 15% (medium), or 30% (high) protected-tallow supplement (seven cows per treatment). Protein fractions and amino acid composition of the total proteins were determined from samples of individual milking. Melting characteristics of pooled samples were determined by nuclear magnetic resonance. Milk yield was similar for the three treatments, but percent fat and fat yield were higher for cows fed protected tallow. Percentages and yields of protein and solids-not-fat were decreased on the protected tallow treatments, especially for high tallow. The decrease in protein was in the casein fraction. Amino acid composition of the total proteins was similar for the three treatments. Feeding protected tallow caused decreases in all fatty acids except 4:0, 16:1, 18:0, and 18:1 which increased. Nuclear magnetic resonance indicated that butter from the basal group would be harder than that from cows fed protected tallow.