Evaluation, whether in schools and colleges, LEAs or TECs is now universally recognised as an essential part of any effective educational and training system. There are, however, two major problems in its implementation: lack of time and a perceived lack among middle and senior managers of the special skills necessary for an evaluation to have external validity. This book provides a solution to both problems. It offers evaluation processes which accept time limitations and work within them an it strips away the mystique of evaluation to describe methods and procedures which will enable educational and training staff at all levels to organise and carry out useful evaluations. Administrators, teachers and trainers as well as the staff of local and national inspectorates will welcome its cogent and realistic guidance.

Machine Translation and the Information Soup! Over the past fty years, machine translation has grown from a tantalizing dream to a respectable and stable scienti c-linguistic enterprise, with users, c- mercial systems, university research, and government participation. But until very recently, MT has been performed as a relatively distinct operation, so- what isolated from other text processing. Today, this situation is changing rapidly. The explosive growth of the Web has brought multilingual text into the reach of nearly everyone with a computer. We live in a soup of information, an increasingly multilingual bouillabaisse. And to partake of this soup, we can use MT systems together with more and more tools and language processing technologies|information retrieval engines, - tomated text summarizers, and multimodal and multilingual displays. Though some of them may still be rather experimental, and though they may not quite t together well yet, it is clear that the future will o er text manipulation systems that contain all these functions, seamlessly interconnected in various ways.

Transaction processing is an established technique for the concurrent and fault tolerant access of persistent data. While this technique has been successful in standard database systems, factors such as time-critical applications, emerg ing technologies, and a re-examination of existing systems suggest that the performance, functionality and applicability of transactions may be substan tially enhanced if temporal considerations are taken into account. That is, transactions should not only execute in a "legal" (i.e., logically correct) man ner, but they should meet certain constraints with regard to their invocation and completion times. Typically, these logical and temporal constraints are application-dependent, and we address some fundamental issues for the man agement of transactions in the presence of such constraints. Our model for transaction-processing is based on extensions to established mod els, and we briefly outline how logical and temporal constraints may be ex pressed in it. For scheduling the transactions, we describe how legal schedules differ from one another in terms of meeting the temporal constraints. Exist ing scheduling mechanisms do not differentiate among legal schedules, and are thereby inadequate with regard to meeting temporal constraints. This provides the basis for seeking scheduling strategies that attempt to meet the temporal constraints while continuing to produce legal schedules.

Providing students and practitioners with a comprehensive introduction to evaluation research, this book shows how social research methods and methodologies can be applied in a variety of evaluation contexts. The author: - illustrates the contribution both quantitative and qualitative methods can make to evaluation; - stresses the important part played by theory in the evaluation enterprise; - introduces some of the conceptual, methodological and practical problems encountered when undertaking this type of applied research, especially in the areas of criminal justice, health care and education.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applcations, DEXA 2003, held in Prague, Czech Republic, in September 2003. The 91 revised full papers presented together with an invited paper and a position paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 236 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on XML, data modeling, spatial database systems, mobile computing, transactions, bioinformatics, information retrieval, multimedia databases, Web applications, ontologies, object-oriented databases, query optimization, workflow systems, knowledge engineering, and security.

Much has been written on the styles, strategies and tactics associated with educational research and evaluation, but relatively little on the social processes associated with the methodology. Few books consider the relationship of research and evaluation to policy and practice and this book opens up key debates in that field. It identifies, through contributions from the USA and Britain, some of the major processes involved, examines the problems of conducting research and evaluation and the ways in which they can be overcome, and details case studies in which problems and processes are encountered.; Probably of worldwide interest to students, researchers, academics, policy makers and practitioners, the authors present an examination of a range of different dimensions associated with educational research and evaluation conducted for policy and practice.

Praise for Previous Volumes "This book will be a useful reference to control engineers and researchers. The papers contained cover well the recent advances in the field of modern control theory."-IEEE GROUP CORRESPONDENCE"This book will help all those researchers who valiantly try to keep abreast of what is new in the theory and practice of optimal control."-CONTROL

Researchers and professionals in the appropriate subject areas will find this book an essential update on where research has got to in what is, after all, a hugely important area. It constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Systems, Architectures, Modeling, and Simulation, held in Samos, Greece, in July 2007. The 44 revised full papers presented together with 2 keynote talks were thoroughly reviewed and selected from 116 submissions

One of the key challenges in service-oriented systems engineering is the prediction and assurance of non-functional properties, such as the reliability and the availability of composite interorganizational services. Such systems are often characterized by a variety of inherent uncertainties, which must be addressed in the modeling and the analysis approach. The different relevant types of uncertainties can be categorized into (1) epistemic uncertainties due to incomplete knowledge and (2) randomization as explicitly used in protocols or as a result of physical processes. In this report, we study a probabilistic timed model which allows us to quantitatively reason about nonfunctional properties for a restricted class of service-oriented real-time systems using formal methods. To properly motivate the choice for the used approach, we devise a requirements catalogue for the modeling and the analysis of probabilistic real-time systems with uncertainties and provide evidence that the uncertainties of type (1) and (2) in the targeted systems have a major impact on the used models and require distinguished analysis approaches. The formal model we use in this report are Interval Probabilistic Timed Automata (IPTA). Based on the outlined requirements, we give evidence that this model provides both enough expressiveness for a realistic and modular specifiation of the targeted class of systems, and suitable formal methods for analyzing properties, such as safety and reliability properties in a quantitative manner. As technical means for the quantitative analysis, we build on probabilistic model checking, specifically on probabilistic time-bounded reachability analysis and computation of expected reachability rewards and costs. To carry out the quantitative analysis using probabilistic model checking, we developed an extension of the Prism tool for modeling and analyzing IPTA. Our extension of Prism introduces a means for modeling probabilistic uncertainty in the form of probability intervals, as required for IPTA. For analyzing IPTA, our Prism extension moreover adds support for probabilistic reachability checking and computation of expected rewards and costs. We discuss the performance of our extended version of Prism and compare the interval-based IPTA approach to models with fixed probabilities.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Formal Modeling and Analysis of Timed Systems, FORMATS 2013, held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in August 2013. The 18 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 41 submissions. The book covers topics of foundations and semantics (theoretical foundations of timed systems and languages; comparison between different models, such as timed automata, timed Petri nets, hybrid automata, timed process algebra, max-plus algebra, probabilistic models); methods and Tools (techniques, algorithms, data structures, and software tools for analyzing timed systems and resolving temporal constraints, e.g., scheduling, worst-case execution time analysis, optimization, model checking, testing, constraint solving, etc.); applications (adaptation and specialization of timing technology in application domains in which timing plays an important role, e.g., real-time software, hardware circuits, and problems of scheduling in manufacturing and telecommunications).