Lister and Leaney (Lister and Leaney, 2003b) presented a "coherent, explicit grading philosophy based on Bloom's taxonomy". I applied this philosophy to a second year, first semester subject in object-oriented analysis. My motivation to do so was based on a complexity of issues similar to those encountered by Lister et al. I report on the implementation of the philosophy, the lessons learned, a...

This paper compares gender and ethnic inequalities in Bolivia, Guatemala and Peru, the three countries with the largest shares of indigenous population in Latin America. Horizontal Inequalities (HIs) are estimated for a wide array of variables in the following dimensions: education, health, employment, housing quality and poverty. A selected sub-set of these variables is used to analyse the cha...

The Value of Sampling This is a first draft. Comments are welcome. This paper investigates consumer welfare implication of commercial breaks during television programmings. The conventional wisdom dictates that consumers prefer watching television without the disruption of commercial breaks. However, we argue that commercial breaks may improve the welfare of consumers under certain conditions. ...

Editorial about Book Prices: In the first draft of this column I had the following comment about Beck’s book on Combinatorial Games: The books is expensive and not online. I assume that the author is more interested in getting the material out to people who want to read it rather than in making money. Yet the book has a high price tag and is not online. The entire math-book-publishing business ...

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The Virtual Observatory (VO) will revolutionise the way we do Astronomy, by allowing easy access to all astronomical data and by making the handling and analysis of datasets at various locations across the globe much simpler and faster. I report here on the need for the VO and its status in Europe, including the first ever VO-based astronomical paper, and then give two specific applications of ...

We explore the determinants of yield differentials between long-term sovereign bonds in the Euro area. There is a common trend in yield differentials, which is correlated with a measure of the international risk factor. In contrast, liquidity differentials display sizeable heterogeneity and no common factor. We present a model that predicts that yield differentials should increase in both liqui...

To survive and prosper in a networked economy, organizations must learn how to act as part of a wider value network. Key firm capabilities are thus the positioning in a value network and the providing of services that are attractive for the market. In this article I report from a longitudinal study targeting a team that has been forced to handle a re-positioning within its value network. The te...

This report identifies those design principles for a (possibly new) query and transformation language for the Web supporting inference that are considered essential. Based upon these design principles an initial strawman is selected. Scenarios for querying the Semantic Web illustrate the design principles and their reflection in the initial strawman, i.e., a first draft of the query language to...

This afternoon, the government published revised regulations under Section 75 of the Health & Social Care Act 2012. The government has hastily re-written these regulations, the first draft of which would have forced commissioners to open just about every part of the NHS up to private sector competition. Howls of protest from grassroots [2] groups [3], healthcare professionals [4], all the [5] R...