Towards providing quality secondary education : training and retaining quality teachers in Malaysia

With the gradual attainment of universal primary education, governments are shifting their attention to secondary education. Responding to the increasing demand for secondary education presents serious challenges and major opportunities in the quest for Education For All (EFA), and countries are striving to find policy responses to address these emergingissues. It is clear that teachers play a fundamental role in addressing challenges faced by secondary education. Ensuring the presence of competent secondary teachers in urban and rural areas is a major concern in both quantitative and qualitative terms. Existing studies on teacherrelated issues and analyses of teacher policy in developing countries tend to focus on primary education, probably due to the special emphasis given to primary education in the EFA process. In order to fill the gaps and respond to the increasing demand for quality secondaryeducation, the Education Policy and Reform (EPR) unit of the UNESCO Asia and Pacific Regional Bureau for Education (UNESCO Bangkok) coordinated a regional research study on secondary teacher policy and management in 2007 and 2008. This series includes a regional synthesis paper on comparative assessment of issues and policies affecting secondary teachers in East and South-East Asia, and five case studies: Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Malaysia, People’s Republic of China, Republic of Korea, and Thailand. Three major areas related to secondary teachers are discussed in the case studies: quantitative analysis of demand and supply of secondary teachers, quality of secondaryteachers, and compensation. Each study is presented as a summary of the original study, and gives an overview of the status and issues of the country’s secondary education system. Researchers and officials from several universities and education ministries collaborated in thepreparation of the study. UNESCO Bangkok would like to sincerely thank all those individuals and institutions who provided their expertise and professional experience to this research. The findings presented in the series are intended to help governments gain insight into policyfor secondary teachers across a diverse range of countries, and draw lessons for possible policy responses to challenges and problems in the expansion of secondary education.

Machine-to-machine communications with in-network data aggregation, processing, and actuation for large-scale cyber-physical systems

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) paradigm enables machines (sensors, actuators, robots, and smart meter readers) to communicate with each other with little or no human intervention. M2M is a key enabling technology for the cyber-physical systems (CPSs). This paper explores CPS beyond M2M concept and looks at futuristic applications. Our vision is CPS with distributed actuation and in-network processing. We describe few particular use cases that motivate the development of the M2M communication primitives tailored to large-scale CPS. M2M communications in literature were considered in limited extent so far. The existing work is based on small-scale M2M models and centralized solutions. Different sources discuss different primitives. Few existing decentralized solutions do not scale well. There is a need to design M2M communication primitives that will scale to thousands and trillions of M2M devices, without sacrificing solution quality. The main paradigm shift is to design localized algorithms, where CPS nodes make decisions based on local knowledge. Localized coordination and communication in networked robotics, for matching events and robots, were studied to illustrate new directions.

Religion and development in the Asia-Pacific : sacred places as development spaces

The book considers theories of ‘place’ as a component of successful development interventions and expands this analysis to consider the specific role that sacred places – buildings and social networks – have in planning, implementing and promoting sustainable development. A series of case studies examine various sacred places as sites for development activities. These case studies include Christian churches and disaster relief in Vanuatu; Muslim shrines and welfare provision in Pakistan; a women’s Buddhist monastery in Thailand advancing gender equity; a Jewish aid organisation providing language training to Muslim Women in Australia; and Hawaiian sacred sites located within a holistic retreat centre committed to ecological sustainability.Religion and Development in the Asia-Pacific demonstrates the important role that sacred spaces can play in development interventions, covering diverse major world religions, interfaith and spiritual contexts, and as such will be of considerable interest for postgraduate students and researchers in development studies, religious studies, sociology of religion and geography.

Educational leadership and Nancy Fraser

Drawing on the work of Nancy Fraser, this book offers a critical view of contemporary educational leadership and reform discourses, exploring how her key concepts of redistribution, recognition and representation may apply to social and therefore educational justice.Fraser offers a political and pragmatic reconciliation between feminist, neo-Marxist, critical and post-structuralist theories. This book outlines how Fraser has worked on and worked over theories of social justice and how this can inform how we can understand educational theory, policy and practice generally. In particular, the book focuses on the field of educational administration and leadership (ELMA) as it relates to equity issues such as school choice and inequality, gender and inclusive leadership, and alternative schooling. Fraser’s argument about ‘scaling up’ social justice theory is shown to be highly salient given the emergence of the field of transnational education policy and its role in the context of intensified nation-state and edu-business competition.Overall, through the lens of Nancy Fraser’s unitary framework, this book considers epistemological questions about the nature of knowledge, examines the relationship between the state, the individual, education and social movements, addresses the difficulties and dilemmas which arise due to the intersections of gender, class, race, sexuality and culture in a globalized context, and illustrates how the principles of social justice can be mobilized by leaders in everyday practice.

Iowa Medication Safety and Effectiveness Statewide Strategic Plan, August 4, 2015

Improve the effectiveness, coordination, and safety of medication use in Iowa.

Iowa Physician Orders for Scope of Treatment (IPOST) Work Plan, April 21, 2014

To promote community care coordination and advanced care planning. Seamless communication and execution of individual patient care choices across the healthcare continuum.

Transportation Coordination in Iowa (2016)

Iowa Code section 324A.4, subsection 2, states the Iowa Department of Transportation (DOT) “shall biennially prepare a report to be submitted to the general assembly and the governor prior to December 15 of even-numbered years. The report shall recommend methods to increase transportation coordination and improve the efficiency of federal, state, and local government programs used to finance public transit services and may address other topics as appropriate.” Iowa has long been a leader in transportation coordination, from designated public transit agencies covering all 99 counties with little duplication, to requiring any agency receiving public dollars for the provision of transportation to first coordinate with the local public transit agency before providing the transportation on their own, to the creation of the Iowa Transportation Coordination Council. Coordination allows Iowa to provide much needed transportation services to the citizens of Iowa with the most efficient use of public funds. Coordination has been an important topic in Iowa for many years, but during these times of economic constraint and restraint and Iowa’s changing demographics, coordination of transportation services becomes even more critical.

Modelling the distribution of Bonelli's eagle in Spain: Implications for conservation planning

Bonelli’s eagle, Hieraaetus fasciatus , has recently suffered a severe population decline and is currently endangered. Spain supports about 70% of the European population. We used stepwise logistic regression on a set of environmental, spatial and human variables to model Bonelli’s eagle distribution in the 5167 UTM 10 × 10 km quadrats of peninsular Spain. We obtained a model based on 16 variables, which allowed us to identify favourable and unfavourable areas for this species in Spain, as well as intermediate favourability areas. We assessed the stepwise progression of the model by comparing the model’s predictions in each step with those of the final model, and selected a parsimonious explanatory model based on three variables — slope, July temperature and precipitation — comprising 76% of the predictive capacity of the