Young Australians, illness and education: report on the national database project

Chronically-ill children who need to take extended absences from school are neither officially acknowledged nor assisted to keep up, according to this report. Executive summary Australia’s health system faces many challenges related to chronic and complex health conditions. Major advances in biomedicine mean that children and young people are now surviving conditions that would have meant early death just a short time ago. This has major implications for Australia’s education systems.   A troubling side effect of this success in medicine is the number of children and young people who manage their chronic health conditions, but who can easily remain overlooked in education. In many ways this is a new frontier for teachers, schools and education systems. Never before have so many students been present in our classrooms, who have survived major health challenges, but who are not yet systematically supported to thrive in education.   This report provides a detailed summary of education, health and demographic information about Australian children and young people who live with significant health conditions. This study closely examined an important national database of 2360 such individuals.   This study is contextualised within recent international literature from the fields of education, medicine, oncology, public health, paediatric nursing, psychology, counselling, psychiatry and social policy. Socio-economic indexes developed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics were employed in the analysis of data.   As Australian government figures are not available about these young people as an educational cohort, the major purpose of this study was to provide an empirical base for policy recommendation and further investigation. An important secondary aim of the study was to contribute to the growing body of evidence about pressing educational issues related to these children and young people. Concern about the education of this group is expected to escalate as this cohort of Australian students continues to expand, due to advances in biomedicine

Cognitive spaces: Expanding participation framework by looking at signed language interpreters’ discourse and conceptual blending

We know from previous research (Wadenjso, 1998; Metzger, 1999; Roy, 2000) that interpreters are active participants within the interpreting event. We know that interpreters interact with the participants, and discourse by negotiating turn-taking, and adjusting the interpretation to meet cultural expectations. According to participation framework, speakers align themselves with the different participants in the communication event, or shift between different types of footing (Goffman, 1981). This framework has also been used to analyze interpreters, (Wadensjo, 1982, 1998; Metzger, 1999; Roy, 2000) to show how interpreters are not neutral participants in the event, but are interacting with many of the demands of the job, one of which is the discourse. In this research, which was an investigation of a monologue-interpreted event, the interpreters align themselves or blend the mental space of the original message with their interpreted message. In other words, the interpreters hold, at the minimum, two frames of footing active, simultaneously, instead of switching between the frames of footing. Cognitive linguistics, more specifically, the conceptual blending theory of Fauconnier & Turner (1996) can help expand the discussion of footing by using the theory of mental spaces (Fauconnier, 1985, 1997; Fauconnier & Turner, 1998). The data come from the discourse of six signed language interpreters who simultaneously interpret a lecture from English to American Sign Language (ASL). The discourse of the six interpreters supports the notion that interpreters blend a space, Narrator Space, with the author of the message. In addition to this space, interpreters also use a newly identified space, Interpreter Space. Interpreter Space is a mental space where the interpreters demonstrate their processes of their interpretations through a variety of linguistic features such as producing constructed action and dialogue in ASL when it was not present in English. In addition to these spaces being identified in the data, all six interpreters seamlessly negotiated and blended several different mental spaces by using the same types of linguistic features that Deaf signers use (i.e. eye gaze, blinking, head tilting/shifting, and body shifting) (Dudis, 1997, Thumann, 2010). This study proposes the notion of using the conceptual blending process to expand the framework of analyzing and teaching interpreting

On the discrete spectrum of quantum layers

Consider a quantum particle trapped between a curved layer of constant width built over a complete, non-compact, $\mathcal C^2$ smooth surface embedded in $\mathbb{R}^3$. We assume that the surface is asymptotically flat in the sense that the second fundamental form vanishes at infinity, and that the surface is not totally geodesic. This geometric setting is known as a quantum layer. We consider the quantum particle to be governed by the Dirichlet Laplacian as Hamiltonian. Our work concerns the existence of bound states with energy beneath the essential spectrum, which implies the existence of discrete spectrum. We first prove that if the Gauss curvature is integrable, and the surface is weakly $\kappa$-parabolic, then the discrete spectrum is non-empty. This result implies that if the total Gauss curvature is non-positive, then the discrete spectrum is non-empty. We next prove that if the Gauss curvature is non-negative, then the discrete spectrum is non-empty. Finally, we prove that if the surface is parabolic, then the discrete spectrum is non-empty if the layer is sufficiently thin.Comment: Clarifications and corrections to previous version, conjecture from previous version is proven here (Theorem 1.5), additional references include

The changing motivations of students' use of lecture podcasts across a semester: an extended theory of planned behaviour approach

We extended the previous work of Moss, O’Connor and White, to include a measure of group norms within the theory of planned behaviour (TPB), to examine the influences on students’ decisions to use lecture podcasts as part of their learning. Participants (N = 90) completed the extended TPB predictors before semester began (Time 1) and mid-semester (Time 2) and reported on their podcast use at mid-semester (Time 2) and end of semester (Time 3). We found that attitudes and perceived social pressures were important in informing intentions at both time points. At Time 1, perceptions of control over performing the behaviour and, at Time 2, perceptions of whether podcast use was normative among fellow students (group norms) also predicted intended podcast use. Intentions to use podcasting predicted self-reported use at both Time 2 and Time 3. These results provide important applied information for educators to encourage student use of novel on-line educational tools

Design Development Test and Evaluation (DDT and E) Considerations for Safe and Reliable Human Rated Spacecraft Systems

A team directed by the NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) collected methodologies for how best to develop safe and reliable human rated systems and how to identify the drivers that provide the basis for assessing safety and reliability. The team also identified techniques, methodologies, and best practices to assure that NASA can develop safe and reliable human rated systems. The results are drawn from a wide variety of resources, from experts involved with the space program since its inception to the best-practices espoused in contemporary engineering doctrine. This report focuses on safety and reliability considerations and does not duplicate or update any existing references. Neither does it intend to replace existing standards and policy