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37588 results in Cambridge Textbooks

Page 1461 of 1880

  • Foreword

  • Nadine Louise McCrea, University of New England, Australia
  • Book:
    Leading and Managing Early Childhood Settings
    Published online:
    12 August 2019
    Print publication:
    13 February 2015, pp vii-ix

  • Summary

    Like the author I am approaching retirement, so I have also been reflecting deeply on my own professional journey and how the field of early childhood education has changed since I landed my first teaching position in 1968. In my teaching and writing, I use the overarching term ‘early childhood administrator’ to describe both the leadership and management functions of directors of center-based programs. I was delighted to see how Nadine has embraced the unifying role descriptor leader-manager throughout this book. In my thinking, leadership functions relate to the broad view of helping an organization clarify and affirm values, set goals, articulate a vision, and chart a course of action to achieve that vision. Management functions relate to the actual orchestration of tasks and the setting up of systems to carry out the organizational mission (Bloom, 2014; Talan & Bloom 2011). In the day-to-day world of early childhood administrators, leadership and management functions are really two sides of the same coin.

    How appropriate then that this book begins with an opportunity for the reader to dive deep into an exploration of core values and to gain an understanding of how background and dispositions impact one’s effectiveness as a leader-manager. The capacity to reflect and engage in candid introspection is at the heart of achieving self-awareness. Having a better understanding of oneself is the first step to having a better relationship with others, because self-awareness provides a window to expand our understanding about other points of view and perspectives. The goal of this kind of reflection is not merely to see who we are and better understand ourselves today, but to envision what we might become tomorrow (Bloom, 2007). As one who is stepping down the ladder and nearing retirement, I can attest that it is a lifelong process – a journey of self-discovery,meaningmaking, and identity shaping.

  • Part 1 - Thinking About People and Places

  • Nadine Louise McCrea, University of New England, Australia
  • Book:
    Leading and Managing Early Childhood Settings
    Published online:
    12 August 2019
    Print publication:
    13 February 2015, pp 7-8

  • Summary

    This section of the book includes three chapters that focus on people in early childhood settings, their interactions with others and the places where they work. In Chapter 1, you will explore concepts to help deepen your understanding of self. This part of your journey includes asking yourself: ‘Who am I?’ This self-exploration includes a look at leading with managing. In Chapter 2, we explore our language, the powerfulness of words, and communicating for meaning. In Chapter 3, you will contemplate workplaces and the importance of settings and spaces within and beyond early childhood settings.

  • Chapter 5 - A professional role – a policy designer

  • from Part 2 - Thinking About Practices as Roles
  • Nadine Louise McCrea, University of New England, Australia
  • Book:
    Leading and Managing Early Childhood Settings
    Published online:
    12 August 2019
    Print publication:
    13 February 2015, pp 102-119

  • Summary

    Policy … moves beyond the dictionary definition and is construed as a multi-faceted, multi-dimensional social and political phenomenon which includes a cycle of strategies bound by time, resources, players and performances with dynamic and often contested political sites.

    Ann Farrell (2001, p. 241)

    Broad concepts

    In this chapter, your professional journey takes you to the challenging hills of this leading-managing path. While considering policy from the heights of agreed values, you may look up for further inspiration. You may look back down, viewing gaps across the profession as a valley. You may even look forward along the horizon for creative insights, meaningful aspirations, future dreams and ethical visions. There are professional rewards to be gained from this kind of investigation. As you read this chapter, you will be thinking about the following Steps:

  • What are the leading and managing facets of a policy designer role?

  • What policies are needed and why?

  • How are policies created and cared for?

    • Policy designer

    A policy designer is actively engaged in an early childhood setting and usually collaborates with others. Rather than referring to this role as a policy ‘writer’ or ‘author’, ‘developer’ or ‘documenter’, the noun ‘designer’ implies that those involved are more creative and original, rather than just being functional or mechanical. This ought to mean that any resulting policies have been more carefully conceived and thus professionally sketched. Designing policy involves encountering values, ideas and ideals alongside everyday practices. Design also involves thinking about and responding to lots of questions. Investigating the policy designer role encompasses both positional and situational leader-managers. There will also be times when this leading-managing project of policy work is centred with others as a collective within early childhood services. However, in essence, for policy work to be suitably relevant and educationally effective, this development must be undertaken with:

  • Due attention to authentic relationships among contributors

  • Serious consideration that policy topics and themes are in-context, sensitive and meaningful

  • An eye looking for continuous transformation of ideas and society.

  • Part 2 - Thinking About Practices as Roles

  • Nadine Louise McCrea, University of New England, Australia
  • Book:
    Leading and Managing Early Childhood Settings
    Published online:
    12 August 2019
    Print publication:
    13 February 2015, pp 81-82

  • Summary

    Building on your understandings of people and places, you will now spend time exploring four professional roles: team stakeholder, policy designer, pedagogy creator and rights advocate. Each chapter includes a broad outline of one role before encouraging you to scrutinise and reflect deeply on it. You might wonder, why these four roles and not others? These focal roles reveal much about how early childhood settings function and how both positional and situational leading-managing happens.

    It is important to remember that the ‘team’ of staff are vital participants and contributors to everyday life in early childhood settings. Without staff there would not be settings for children to attend and families to interact with. Designing ‘policy’ initially involves the integration of people’s philosophical or theoretical views and their workplace positions. Furthermore, creating a ‘pedagogical’ scene for young children is really the essence of early childhood settings. Finally, ‘advocating’ for all kinds of human rights reflects serious and beyond-the-fence professionalism.

  • Chapter 4 - A professional role – a team stakeholder

  • from Part 2 - Thinking About Practices as Roles
  • Nadine Louise McCrea, University of New England, Australia
  • Book:
    Leading and Managing Early Childhood Settings
    Published online:
    12 August 2019
    Print publication:
    13 February 2015, pp 83-101

  • Summary

    Compassion means ‘cumt passio’, suffering-with … In compassion, the distance between you and the other is crossed … In compassion the other and the world are realized as your very self.

    S. Rao (comp./ed.) (2002, p. 95)

    Broad concepts

    Here your journey along a professional leading-managing path encompasses concepts about being a team stakeholder or a person focused on staff and staffing. You will be thinking about the following Steps:

  • What are the leading and managing facets of a team stakeholder role?

  • Which staffing responsibilities are key?

  • Where do rights and rules fit into staff sharing and workplace give-and-take?

    • Team and stakeholder

    This chapter begins with an exploration of what we mean by ‘team’ and ‘stakeholder’. Pausing here on your professional pathway gives you a little time to think about: ‘How would I explain or define being a “team stakeholder”?’ A team is a collection of people, but it is also much more. For example, forming and being a team implies interactions, relationships and shared commitments. There are sports teams, community service teams (usually called committees), and there are education teams. Within early childhood settings the collection of all staff is often referred to as a ‘team’. Teams and their teamwork do not just happen; they have to be worked at. It takes time for people to share, engage and solidify their ideas and relationships. Teams also grow and change over time, as the surrounding world alters and as staff members come and go from a workplace. Some people are called ‘team players’, especially when they collaborate and willingly contribute to the common good.

  • 3 - Optimal power flow

  • Joshua Adam Taylor, University of Toronto
  • Book:
    Convex Optimization of Power Systems
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    12 February 2015, pp 43-80

  • Summary

    In the late 1880s, Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse fought the so-called War of the Currents to decide whether the incumbent direct current or Nicola Tesla's alternating current technology would become the standard for future power systems. Endnotes [1, 2] provide excellent historical accounts. The winning argument was that it was much easier using the technology of the time, transformers, to change voltage levels in AC power systems, enabling efficient high-voltage transmission of power and lower voltage generation and end usage (see (2.6) in Section 2.5.1). Beyond pride, part of Edison's opposition to AC transmission was rooted in the higher level of mathematics necessary to understand it.

    Today, power electronics have enabled direct current to make a comeback in certain applications like long-distance transmission and microgrids, cf. Section 3.5.1. Some even say that we are now constrained by the mathematical model of AC power flow, which while simple to write down is a quagmire for analysis and computation. Here we tackle this issue head on in one of its purest forms, optimal power flow.

    In words, optimal power flow is the problem of minimizing some function of voltage, current, and power, subject to the resulting flow being able to feasibly traverse a transmission or distribution system. Since its introduction by Carpentier [3], virtually every algorithm for continuous optimization has been applied, cf. endnotes [4–12] and the surveys [13–15]. Optimal power flow had similar but separate beginnings in the Russian academic literature [16]. System operators solve optimal power flow routines to do long-term planning, days- to hour-ahead scheduling, real-time dispatch, and pricing (to name a few), making it one of the most frequently employed optimization routines in power systems. As will be seen over the course of this book, many other power system optimizations are essentially optimal power flow models with additional layers of detail.

  • 5 - Infrastructure planning

  • Joshua Adam Taylor, University of Toronto
  • Book:
    Convex Optimization of Power Systems
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    12 February 2015, pp 112-131

  • Summary

    This chapter zooms out to consider the design of power systems. For example, if a city's power consumption has grown in support of new industry or increased population, should it become the home of a new generator or the destination of a new transmission line? What if there are 100 such choices, all within the same interconnected power system? Additionally, each generation project will take five years to complete and each transmission project ten, over which the energy consumption landscape may change significantly. Finally, each element of the design must respect environmental restrictions, harmonize with a potentially poorly designed legacy system, and be separately financed. It's no wonder that the evolution of power systems looks as much like the product of organic synthesis as deliberate design. It is hence somewhat more reasonable to plan power systems and then hope that plans stay consistent with reality to yield efficient and reliable infrastructures.

    Even in the absence of the factors listed above, power system planning remains a source of intractable problems because it almost always entails the use of integer variables. Unfortunately, any plan that builds a one-micron-thick transmission line or a two-watt nuclear power plant is not very useful. This makes many power system planning problems NP-hard, and thus very hard to solve. Fortunately, although these problems cannot be solved in polynomial time, powerful mixed-integer programming heuristics like cutting planes and branch-and-bound make moderate-sized problems tractable.

    This chapter ignores many of the above real-world details of power system planning and focuses on its underlying mathematical skeleton. This approach is to respect discrete constraints and seek formulations that have convex continuous relaxations, as discussed in Section 2.2.4. More precisely, if the problem we'd like to solve is

    minimize f(x, y)

    subject to gi(x, y) ≤ 0

    yi ∈ ℤ,

    then we want f(x, y) and each gi(x, y) to be convex.

  • 1 - Basic concepts

  • from I - Difference equations
  • Gerhard Sorger, Universität Wien, Austria
  • Book:
    Dynamic Economic Analysis
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    12 February 2015, pp 3-28

  • Summary

    Difference equations are formal models of dynamical systems in which time is assumed to evolve in discrete periods. Models of this kind are used in many areas of economic research, including macroeconomics, monetary economics, resource economics, game theory, etc. In this chapter, we introduce some basic concepts and illustrate them by a number of selected examples. Throughout the book, we restrict the presentation to deterministic systems, that is, we do not consider any models involving uncertainty.

    One of the simplest types of difference equations arises through repeated iterations of one-dimensional maps. Because of their conceptual simplicity, we start our discussion of difference equations with these models, proceeding rather informally and without proving any theorems. Later in chapter 4, we shall see that even these simple difference equations can generate surprisingly rich dynamics. In section 1.2, we continue by introducing a general class of explicit difference equations and by extending the basic concepts to this framework. We also increase the level of rigor and formally prove several properties of the solutions of explicit difference equations including their existence and their uniqueness for a complete set of initial or boundary conditions. Finally, in section 1.3, we argue that economic models often take the form of implicit difference equations. Unfortunately, neither the existence nor the uniqueness of solutions to such equations can be ensured, a fact that we illustrate by means of a detailed economic example.

    One-dimensional maps

    Suppose that the economic system under consideration can be described by a single variable x ∈ X, where X ⊆ ℝ is a non-empty interval on the real line. Depending on the context, the variable x can measure the productive capital available in the economy, the price of a commodity, the stock of a resource, the fraction of the population with a certain characteristic, etc. We shall refer to x as the system variable and to X as the system domain. The system domain contains all possible values of the system variable.

Page 1461 of 1880