Developing a culturally responsive pedagogy: making the national curriculum more inclusive and relevant to pupils' lives and identities

Contribution to a collection of recommendations for change by Black researchers and practitioners

Nods of Agreement: Webcam-Driven Avatars Improve Meeting Outcomes and Avatar Satisfaction Over Audio-Driven or Static Avatars in All-Avatar Work Videoconferencing

Avatars are edging into mainstream videoconferencing, but evaluation of how avatar animation modalities contribute to work meeting outcomes has been limited. We report a within-group videoconferencing experiment in which 68 employees of a global technology company, in 16 groups, used the same stylized avatars in three modalities (static picture, audio-animation, and webcam-animation) to complete collaborative decision-making tasks. Quantitatively, for meeting outcomes, webcam-animated avatars improved meeting effectiveness over the picture modality and were also reported to be more comfortable and inclusive than both other modalities. In terms of avatar satisfaction, there was a similar preference for webcam animation as compared to both other modalities. Our qualitative analysis shows participants expressing a preference for the holistic motion of webcam animation, and that meaningful movement outweighs realism for meeting outcomes, as evidenced through a systematic overview of ten thematic factors. We discuss implications for research and commercial deployment and conclude that webcam-animated avatars are a plausible alternative to video in work meetings

“I’m gonna tap you in the face with this hammer”: Torture and the Ethics of Spectatorship in Dennis Kelly’s Works

Detention without charge, severe physical and mental pain and suffering, intimidation, coercion, and other forms of torture set out in the United Nations Convention against Torture, have become justified and normalized since the start of the twenty-first century in order supposedly to guarantee national security and maintain law, order, freedom and democracy. This chapter derives its theoretical premise from Hannah Arendt’s On Violence (1970), to illustrate how a number of Dennis Kelly’s plays testify to the torture and other human rights abuses taking place not only in totalitarian regimes, but also in states that supposedly uphold civil liberties. The chapter illustrates both how Kelly exposes the torture that habitually takes place in covert locations behind a façade of ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’, and also the ethics implicit in how audiences spectate the abusive degradation of others from the safety of our television screens, or of our theatre seats

Ray of Light

Expanded version of paper given at the colloquium celebrating the work of Nicholas Royle on the occasion of his retirement

Next-Generation Healthcare: Digital Twin Technology and Monkeypox Skin Lesion Detector Network Enhancing Monkeypox Detection - Comparison with Pre-trained Models

The rise of digital healthcare has led to the adoption of various technologies aimed at enhancing health operations, patient well-being, and healthcare costs. Digital Twin (DT) technology is a pivotal innovation in this domain. Monkeypox virus (MPXV), a zoonotic virus, poses a significant public health risk, particularly in remote regions of Central and West Africa. Early diagnosis of monkeypox lesions is crucial but challenging due to similarities with other skin conditions. Many studies have employed deep-learning models to detect the monkeypox virus. However, those models often require substantial storage space. This research introduces the Monkeypox Skin Lesion Detector Network (MxSLDNet), an automated digital twin framework designed to enhance digital healthcare operations by enabling early detection and classification of monkeypox and non-monkeypox lesions. Monkeypox Skin Lesion Detector Network (MxSLDNet) significantly advances monkeypox lesion identification, outperforming conventional models like Visual Geometry Group 19 (VGG-19), Densely Connected Network 121 (DenseNet-121), Efficient Network B4 (EfficientNet-B4) and Residual Network 101 (ResNet-101) regarding precision, recall, F1-score, and accuracy, while requiring less storage. This innovation addresses the critical issue of storage demands, making the Monkeypox Skin Lesion Detector Network (MxSLDNet) a viable solution for early monkeypox lesion detection in resource-limited healthcare settings. Utilizing the “Monkeypox Skin Lesion Dataset” with 1428 monkeypox and 1764 non-monkeypox images, Monkeypox Skin Lesion Detector Network (MxSLDNet) achieves high recall, precision, and F1-scores of 0.96, 0.95, and 0.95, respectively. Integrating digital twins into healthcare promises to create a scalable, intelligent, and comprehensive health ecosystem, enhancing treatments by connecting patients and healthcare providers

Digital Twin: Securing IoT-Networks using integrated ECC with Blockchain for Healthcare Ecosystem

Digital Twin (DT) innovation is becoming increasingly prevalent in numerous areas. This is often particularly genuine in healthcare, which depends increasingly on Internet of Things (IoT) systems. But this combination brings up enormous issues with security, security, and being able to develop. Since information is private, it is exceptionally critical to keep it secure from individuals who shouldn't have gotten to it and from being stolen. This consideration proposes a modern framework that combines Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) with blockchain innovation to bargain with these issues. The system is implied to ensure IoT systems by making demonstrative apparatuses in healthcare more secure. A Genetic Algorithm-based Random Forest demonstration (GAO-RF) is additionally utilized to form include choice work way better, which makes it beyond any doubt that information taking care of and analysis go easily. The GAO-RF show includes the body of unused thoughts by progressing the method of choosing highlights, which is exceptionally critical for proficiently overseeing colossal sums of private information. The model that was put into activity works exceptionally well, as appeared by its execution measurements as an F1-Score of 97.3%, an accuracy of 98.4%, a precision of 97.3%, a recall of 97.4%, an MCC of 97.69%, and a kappa measurement (KS) of 97.31%. These results show an exceptionally strong framework that can handle and protect private health data. The safety and security of understanding information in IoT systems have enormously progressed by including ECC and blockchain in the DT system. A Genetic Algorithm has been shown to work well in the Random Forest model for feature selection, which has led to better security methods. This study has big effects on the healthcare field because it gives us a strong way to keep patient information safe. This method creates trust in the healthcare system by making sure that private data is handled in an honest and safe way. It could change how patient data is protected in this digital age

Embodied time travel in VR: from witnessing climate change to action for prevention

This study explores the impact of embodied experiences in Virtual Reality (VR) on individuals’ attitudes and behavior towards climate change. A total of 41 participants were divided into two groups: an embodied group that interacted with a virtual environment through full-body avatars, and a non-embodied group that observed the scenarios from an invisible observer’s point of view. The VR experience simulated the progressive consequences of climate change across three generations within a family, aiming to make the abstract and relatively distant concept of climate change a tangible and personal issue. The final scene presented an optimistic scenario of a future where humans had successfully combated climate change through collective action. The evidence suggests that there is an effect of the scenario on the carbon footprint response, even 6 weeks after the VR exposure, irrespective of condition. Additionally, increases were found in participants’ perceived influence on climate action and engagement in pro-environmental behaviors, with the embodied group showing a more pronounced response in the short term. These findings suggest that immersive VR experiences that incorporate virtual embodiment can be an effective tool in enhancing awareness and motivating pro-environmental behavior by providing a powerful and personal perspective on the impacts of climate change