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The article presents information on the British institute Ofquals' plan to grade exams based on their value for money. Other topics mentioned in this article include examination fees in Great Britain, the British education system and possible reforms, as well as the General Certificate of Secondary Education examination (GCSE).

The article examines whether the doctoral thesis has become obsolete in British universities and colleges. Topics covered include how the average doctoral student spends almost six months of their four-year programme writing their thesis and another six months waiting for it to be examined and the pros and cons of an integrated format for doctoral papers. INSETS: 'AN ATHLETE DOES THOUSANDS OF LAPS ON THE TRACK WITH NO ONE...;CUT TO THE PAPER CHASE: A HAPPY EXAMPLE OF THE INTEGRATED....

• Refining crude oil is a highly complex industrial process, subject to a large number of variables. • We propose a novel preprocessing methodology for obtaining quality data and extracting information from the data involved in the crude oil refining process. • The methodology incorporates dynamic knowledge, treatment of noise, reduction of the dimensionality, feature selection and introduction of slopes. • The proposal is validated through optimization of three state-of-the-art regressors: GB, RF and SVR. • This methodology along with SVR offer useful information for the expert of the refining process. This paper proposes a novel preprocessing methodology, framed within the field of time series forecasting. The aim is to get quality data and to extract information on the most important variables involved in a real-world crude oil refining process. To achieve this objective, the methodology incorporates the addition of dynamic knowledge, treatment of the noise present in the data, reduction of the dimensionality, feature selection and the introduction of slopes in the variables. Predictions are made for each step of the methodology and evaluated based on four measures: MAE, MSE, SMAPE and the delay in the prediction as compared to the original variable. The final solution is chosen based on these four measures and delivered to the experts so that they can optimize the crude oil refining process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In article the author talks about the revival of scholarship and entrance general papers for the rise of unconventionality and creativity to intellectually liberate young people in the education sector in Great Britain. Topics include the end of such exams by the University of Oxford; and impact of creativity which can encourage risk taking, innovation and problem solving.

The article reports on Great Britain Government's white paper, Success as a Knowledge Economy: Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility and Student Choice, on access to higher education and higher education participation. It informs that the Government's aim is to go ahead with proposals to make it easier for "challenger institutions" to award their own degrees and it plans to give students more information about teaching standards and job prospects.

The article present response of professor Les Ebdon towards higher education green paper in Great Britain and announced that Office for Fair Access (OFFA) would provide ingredients to double the rate of young people from entering higher education by 2020. Topics discussed include opportunities that the proposed new Office for Students might brought to maximize the impact of fair access work, retainment of high profile powers by the director of fair access and focus on public agenda.

The article discusses the views of higher education policy expert David Watson on the Green Paper on higher education in Great Britain, released in November 2015.

The article highlights the issues raised by "Fulfilling Our Potenial: Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility and Student Choice," the higher education Green Paper published by the British government on November 6, 2015. Topics covered include graduate employability, teaching standards, wider participation in higher education, the role of universities in increasing the productivity of the British economy, Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), and Research Excellence Framework.

The article reports on the research program of the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation (Ofqual) of Great Britain which evaluated the difficulty of exam board's sample math papers and their approach to mathematical problem solving assessment. Topics discussed are the refinement of higher foundation tier papers to differentiate across student abilities, grade rewarding for mathematics General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE), and proper qualifications for math papers.

The article informs that according to a study led by Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom Government's Research Excellence Framework (REF) may encourage academics to produce a higher quantity but lower quality of work. It mentions that the study also found that after the REF assessments, researchers produced fewer, higher quality papers and were more likely to experiment in novel areas.

The article reviews the British government's Green Paper, "Building our Industrial Strategy," which tackles issues relevant to technical education, skills and the work of the Department of Education. Proposals in the paper to address the challenges of providing technical skills to workers include creation of a new system of technical education and addressing the shortage of STEM skills. The consultation also left questions such as how to improve basic skills and one about apprenticeships.

The article reports on the position of the Society of Occupational Medicine and the Faculty of Occupational Medicine on the Building Our Industrial Strategy of the Australian government.

The article informs on a report "Children's Task and Finish Group: Paper on Higher Education Settings" by the Children's Task and Finish Group on the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on Great Britain higher education settings. It mentions about the investigation of cumulative confirmed cases and seroprevalence in students at a researchintensive provincial university, and REACT-2 antibody prevalence data.

The article offers information on the government's command paper on the future of agriculture in Great Britain that is waiting for the response from farmers in Great Britain. It mentions that the command paper is useful in shaping agriculture in Great Britain outside European Union (EU) according to National Farmers' Union (NFU). It also mentions need for farrmers to respond to Great Britain's Dept. for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs' Brexit paper according to Defra secretary Michael Gove.

The article focuses on educational accountability in schools in Great Britain. The author agrees that teaching is an important job and accountability does matters. She comments on the idea of some sort of evidence or paper trail for every lesson one teaches, which has become exhausting and time consuming. She further observes that in trying hard to prove that the jobs are well done, the teachers are giving less time to do it well.

Giardia duodenalis is a ubiquitous flagellated protozoan parasite known to cause giardiasis throughout the world. Potential transmission vehicles for this zoonotic parasite are both water and food sources. As such consumption of water contaminated by feces, or food sources washed in contaminated water containing parasite cysts, may result in outbreaks. This creates local public health risks which can potentially cause widespread infection and long-term post-infection sequelae. This paper provides an up-to-date overview of G. duodenalis assemblages, sub-assemblages, hosts and locations identified. It also summarizes knowledge of potential infection/transmission routes covering water, food, person-to-person infection and zoonotic transmission from livestock and companion animals. Public health implications focused within the UK, based on epidemiological data, are discussed and recommendations for essential Giardia developments are highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses introduction of T levels, the British government's proposed flagship technical qualifications that are intended to be equal in status to A levels. It mentions that the Federation of Awarding Bodies (FAB) served legal papers on the Department for Education and the Institute for Apprenticeships regarding T levels. It mentions views of education secretary Damian Hinds, on same.

The article offers information on the publication of a white paper by the British government about education. It mentions eight chapters covered by the paper such as vision, great teachers, and total academisation along with prevention of underperformance, fair stretching accountability, and right resources. It features insight from British State Education Secretary Nicky Morgan about bills for education in the country.

The article focuses on the recommendations of Education Policy Institute (EPI) on how the government should proceed with testing and examinations for the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) and A-level exams in England in 2021. Some of the recommendations include providing greater optionality in exam papers so that students would have a better chance of answering questions, allowing some grade inflation and also forming a back-up plan for exams in the case of cancellation.

The author comments on the British government's ambition to create an education system that offers all children, whatever their background, with schooling that will aid them attain their potential. He says that the intention that selective schools should sponsor a non-selective school, or that an independent school would give greater benefit to ordinary families by setting up a free school is not probably to expand the number of good school places available to all families.

The article offers information on the Next Steps for Computer Sciences in Higher Education conference on fundamental skills that computer science graduates learn in Great Britain in February 2016 and offers the views of Susan Eisenbach from the Imperial College London on the same.

The article mentions the views of Sorana Vieru, vice-president of the National Union of Students, on the impact of teaching excellence framework on curricula and standards which will be a disadvantage for staff and students from minority backgrounds.

The article discusses a collaboration between Working for You and Citizens U.K. to campaign for funded school and college counseling in England. It highlights the organization's response to a government white paper acknowledging mental health links to problem gambling and it describes an amendment to the victims and prisoners bill to protect rape survivors by limiting police requests for necessary and proportionate material, including therapy notes.

The article discusses the annual cancer diagnosis rates conducted by general practitioners which shows the number of cancer referrals made via the urgent two-week wait pathway correlated with the number of cancer diagnoses in Great Britain.

This paper outlines a day-long group intervention for children over the Christmas period who have experienced the loss of a family member. Christmas can be a painful time for children and families as intense feelings of grief may emerge and can be difficult to manage. Group interventions with bereaved children have been demonstrated to be effective and a group intervention was developed that encouraged Christmas to be seen as a time for remembrance, enjoyment and for the development of coping skills. The content and structure of the group is described. Findings from evaluations are reported and issues about the intervention are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article informs on a position paper, "Ark Position Paper on the Level 3 Landscape" published by Ark Schools, which argues for the retention of Applied General Qualifications such as BTECs in Great Britain. It mentions it is urging the Department for Education to reverse plans to remove funding from most of these programmes in 2024.

The article discusses the publication of the Levelling Up White Paper on 2 February, 2022 in United Kingdom. Topics include the thought through concepts and creative and robust implementation theories and techniques; joined-up action that has the individual at the centre of lifelong learning and all government policy making, and objectives of the programme including the moral, social and economic aspects for the whole of government.

The article offers information on the Computer Library industry as of June 2022. Topics discussed include Springer Nature is set to secure a transitional OA agreement for Nature, Nature research journals, and Palgrave journals; Elsevier has entered into an agreement to acquire Interfolio, which provides advanced faculty information solutions for higher education; and Aries Systems Corp. and Figshare have entered a partnership to promote and facilitate sharing the open data from academic papers.

The article discusses the "Levelling Up" White Paper which makes statements and promises about the role of employers, noting that an over-centralised approach to policy making has gone hand-in-hand with the lack of a clear role for business and civil society in helping to shape and deliver policy locally. Topics include observation on the Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs), crisis in adult upskilling and reskilling, and recommendations for the British government.

The article discusses the significance of arts education and the celebration of the Children's Art Week in Great Britain in 2022. Topics include a July 2021 report published in the "Guardian," which stated that schools in England face a creativity crisis, research papers which highlight the power of art to support the development of mathematical skills, and the prevalence of the power of art across all aspects of learning. A preview of the 2022 Children's Art Week is also offered.

The article offers world news briefs related to digital information as of October 2016. Topics include plan of the European Union to introduce value-added tax on electronic books to harmonize print and ebook rates; the National Library of Israel's plan to acquire papers of author Franz Kafka after the country's Supreme Court ruling that manuscripts are the property of the Library; and digitization of author William Shakespeare's Globe archive in London, England by publisher Adam Matthew.

As the government prepares to spend £4 billion on a drive for a paperless NHS, nurses might well ask: what does it mean for me? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section mentions that there were no consultation papers on education in Great Britain published as of November 16, 2022.

Four years after it started life as a white paper, the UK government's controversial Online Safety Bill has finally passed through Parliament and is set to become law in the coming weeks. If companies do not comply with the bill's rules, UK regulator Ofcom could fine them up to £18 million (US$22 million) or 10% of their global annual revenue, whichever is biggest. [Extracted from the article]

The article informs that the Local Government Association has agreed to give a back seat to directly lobbying for devolution after Great Britain government changed its policy priorities. It mentions that white paper suggests an opportunity to review the board's work and how it might most effectively influence this new agenda.

The history of the forced conversion to sponsored academy status of Castle Primary School in south Somerset is a tale of broken promises, lies and a blatant breach of statutory procedures. Yet the Department for Education, the local Member of Parliament (and schools minister) and the local authority stood by - sometimes participated - while a small academy trust rode roughshod over the wishes of governors, staff and parents. This article is an extract from a yet to be published study of the whole process, reflecting on the way that the law, and good practice, in the accountability of schools has shifted over recent years. It highlights many of the dangers that will be amplified by the proposals set out in the White Paper, Educational Excellence Everywhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the role of service quality to customers in the efficiency assessment of water companies in England and Wales. To achieve this, data envelopment analysis techniques are employed to compute the technical efficiency of the water companies following two approaches: (i) traditional assessment based on quantity variables (without the inclusion of service quality variables) and (ii) alternative assessment considering quantity and service quality variables as undesirable outputs. The analysis covers 22 water and sewerage companies and water only companies providing drinking water services. The results indicate that the traditional efficiency assessment reveals a high level of technical efficiency, suggesting that the English and Welsh water industry is mature and that one of the challenges it faces is improving service quality. When introducing service quality variables in the evaluation, the average scores of technical efficiency slightly decrease. This suggests that, on average, water companies do not necessarily provide high quality of service, meaning that the traditional efficiency assessment favours their performance. Quality of service supplied to customers within a water sector matters and should be taken into account during the benchmarking process as it could assist regulated companies and regulators to improve performance and incentives, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we compare how the term 'sovereignty' was used by MPs in parliamentary debates on the European Communities Bill in 1971-1972 and the European Union Bill in 2011. In both cases, the language of sovereignty was often a placeholder for deeper concerns about the erosion of the political power exercisable by domestic political institutions. Comparing parliamentary debates separated by almost forty years reveals a shift from concerns primarily about the erosion of sovereignty by the law-making powers of European political institutions towards concerns about its erosion by the courts, and the domestic courts at that. We reflect on these concerns to evaluate whether a possible UK withdrawal from the EU would lead to a 'regaining' of sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the emergence of the political economy program known as Distributism. Topics covered include the highlights of the book "The Outline of Sanity" by G. K. Chesterton, the definition of Capitalist State based on the book "The Servile State" by Hilaire Belloc, and the description of the poor based on the research paper "The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain" by David Meredith and Deborah Oxley. It also discusses the importance of private property for distributists.

DEPARTMENTS: WORLDWATCH CLIMATEWATCH 'Creating a new UK carbon market will be the foundation on which the UK achieves net zero emissions cost-effectively', reads the government's new White Paper on Energy. It has promised to establish a UK ETS (Emission Trading Scheme) to replace the cap-and-trade system pioneered by the EU, in which energy-intensive businesses receive allowances to emit greenhouse gases and are obliged to buy more if they cross their threshold. The new white paper states that 'the UK is open to linking the UK ETS internationally and we are considering a range of options' - as if there were lots of options. [Extracted from the article]

The article presents questions and answers related to asbestos in maintained schools at the House of Lords in Great Britain in November 2017 including advice to schools on stripping asbestos from buildings, the Green Paper's consideration of geography in young people's mental health treatment assessment, and the number of prosecuted unregistered schools in 2016.

The COVID-19 epidemic continues to rage in many parts of the world. In the UK alone, an array of mathematical models have played a prominent role in guiding policymaking. Whilst considerable pedagogical material exists for understanding the basics of transmission dynamics modelling, there is a substantial gap between the relatively simple models used for exposition of the theory and those used in practice to model the transmission dynamics of COVID-19. Understanding these models requires considerable prerequisite knowledge and presents challenges to those new to the field of epidemiological modelling. In this paper, we introduce an open-source R package, comomodels, which can be used to understand the complexities of modelling the transmission dynamics of COVID-19 through a series of differential equation models. Alongside the base package, we describe a host of learning resources, including detailed tutorials and an interactive web-based interface allowing dynamic investigation of the model properties. We then use comomodels to illustrate three key lessons in the transmission of COVID-19 within R Markdown vignettes. • Compartmental models of transmission dynamics have been important determinants of public health policy for COVID-19. • Many important characteristics of the spread of COVID-19 can be deduced from relatively simple models. • The comomodels package and its associated GUI allow users to learn the characteristics of complex compartmental models in incremental fashion. • Estimating model parameters from data is generally difficult, and sensitivity analyses are key. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses issues in the higher education sector in Great Britain as of late 2014, particularly the lack of a common standard in performance assessment of university degrees. Also cited are the 2012 paper "A Handbook for External Examining" from the Higher Education Academy, the position by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) on the issue, and the work of the Student Assessment and Classification Working Group on the topic.

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has opened an initial review into the market for artificial intelligence systems, looking at the underlying foundational large language models that power chatbots such as ChatGPT alongside the opportunities and risks that AI could present. The CMA added that the review is in line with the UK government's aim to support "open, competitive markets", as outlined in a white paper published in March. [Extracted from the article]

The article reports on a survey by the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) of school and college headteachers and principals in England as of April 2021, which showed that exam-style papers will be used to assess students for General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) and other qualifications. The decision was made following the government's cancellation of public exams. Also mentioned is the comment by ASCL's Geoff Barton on their survey.

The article informs on a paper "Isaac Newton Institute: COVIDdiseases--tra-19 and universities" by the Higher Education Working Group at the Isaac Newton Institute on the imapct of COVID-19 pandemic on Great Britain universities. It mentions that transmission importations into the student population from the community AND to the community from student populations do occur.

The article highlights the author's favorite open search tools for finding open arts and humanities content. Topics discussed include the JURN search tool, which discovers the full text of open journals in the arts and humanities; the sister tool of JURN called GRAFT, which searches the world's academic repositories, and the extremely poor semantic interpretation of queries resulting in subsequent slowing down of Paperity, a multidisciplinary aggregator of OA journals and papers.

The article reports that publishing giant Elsevier has denied to force academics in Great Britain to sign up to its other services in order to use the newly acquired Social Science Research Network (SSRN) repository. Topics include Elsevier's purchase of SSRN marks attempt to maintain control over publishing, and view of open access advocates, who have been highly critical of Elsevier that the publisher could crack down on the free dissemination of papers.

The article offers information on Great Britain Government has released its long-awaited Energy White Paper on how the country's energy system will transition to net zero by 2050. Topics include the paper builds on the Government's ten-point plan for a green industrial revolution, and the covers areas including moving away from fossil fuels, increased use of renewables, support for more electric cars, and greener domestic heating.

The article informs that there are many schools around the world taking advantage of the offer by the Financial Times, Britain's business paper. It mentions pupils, teachers and the library get free access to the on-line edition, and offers free digital access to FT.com to students aged 16-19, their teachers and schools.