Teaching University Students to Read and Write

Recent government initiatives have required universities to include specific literacy and numeracy targets for the students. The authors – both members of the English discipline at Charles Sturt University – were invited to develop and run a two-semester program for all students studying to become early childhood, primary, and secondary teachers. This article outlines the nature of the two subjects which comprise the program: the first focused on reading and comprehension, the second on writing and composition. These subjects were conceived from collegial dialogues between academics in education and the humanities, and then developed from these different assumptions and starting points. Over the last five years, the shared experiences of teaching these prospective teachers has grown into a strongly coherent first year of study. This article seeks the describe the experiences of teaching literacy to first-year education students, and it is by turns hypothesising and speculative, reflective and qualitative, in its approach. In the process, this article offers colleagues across the country a reflection on the hypotheses of literacy education, some new ideas for teaching literacy, and some optimism for the future of the teaching profession, and the dignity of those who aspire to be a part of it

The Difference Between Semiotics and Semiology

What is the relationship between semiotics and semiology? Received wis­dom tells us that the "semiotics" of Charles Sanders Peirce largely overlaps in function and meaning with the "semiology" of Ferdinand de Saussure. Among semioticians more attentive to the nuances of each system, such as Sebeok, Deely, and Eco, semiology occupies that part of semiotics which relates either to conventional communication, or intentional communica­tion, or some other subset of semiotic acts. In this essay I aim to demon­strate quite a different relation between the two fields of study. Drawing upon close readers of Saussure such as Harris and Weber, I will contrast semiotics as an act of "representation" with semiology as an act of "artic­ulation". What I will propose is that semiotics and semiology form wholly separate but contiguous domains of explanation

Expressing the Behavior of Three Very Different Concurrent Systems by Using Natural Extensions of Separation Logic

Separation Logic is a non-classical logic used to verify pointer-intensive code. In this paper, however, we show that Separation Logic, along with its natural extensions, can also be used as a specification language for concurrent-system design. To do so, we express the behavior of three very different concurrent systems: a Subway, a Stopwatch, and a 2x2 Switch. The Subway is originally implemented in LUSTRE, the Stopwatch in Esterel, and the 2x2 Switch in Bluespec

Can Comparative Risk Be Used to Develop Better Environmental Decisions?

This thesis investigates the design of atria for daylighting in large scale buildings. Athree dimensional test building with a central atrium was constructed and various parameters of the atrium altered. The impact of these changes was studied through computer simulations of annual daylight distribution by implementing state of theart software. Daylight autonomy is simulated for an annual climate file for Stockholm, Sweden. In the thesis, notion is made of basic daylighting concepts, the importance of bringing daylight into buildings is argued, and the daylighting criteria of three environmental certification tools introduced. Furthermore, a detailed comparison is made on several well known daylight simulation tools. A newly developed, state of the art, daylight simulation tool called Honeybee, is used in the simulation process. The tool utilizes the calculation engines of wellknown daylight simulation software Radiance and Daysim, which apply backward ray-tracing to reach accurate results. Honeybee is coupled to the graphical algorithmeditor Grasshopper for Rhinoceros 3D, which allows for an efficient way of parametric modelling. The comparison of five different daylight simulation tools showed that Honeybee outweighs the capabilities of many of them by offering a wast range of simulation capabilities and also giving the user exceptional control of result data within multiple zones of the test building. The results of the daylight study have been compiled into a document which purpose is to serve as early stage design guidelines of atria for architects. Many factors have been shown through simulation to have a dramatic impact on daylighton an annual basis, and several suggestions have been made on how to maximize the quantity of daylight within buildings containing atria

A dimensionality reduction method to select the most representative daylight illuminance distributions

One challenge when evaluating daylight distribution is dealing with the large amount of temporal and spatial data, visualisations and variability in illuminances that are assessed in buildings. Using a dimensionality reduction method based on principal component analysis, we identified the most representative annual daylight distributions. We modelled a rectangular room containing an analysis grid of 3200 illuminance sensor points and simulated 3285 different temporal daylight conditions using an annual occupancy schedule ranging from 08:00 to 17:00 with one-hour sampling intervals in two locations: Singapore and Oakland, California. Our approach explained 98 % of the illuminance variability with three daylight distributions in Singapore, and 92 % using six in Oakland, California. Our dimensionality reduction strategy was also generalised using a complex building geometry showing the utility of the method. We think this approach can be used to provide a more efficient and reliable method to analyse daylight performance in building practice

On Time-Bounded Incompressibility of Compressible Strings and Sequences

For every total recursive time bound $t$, a constant fraction of all compressible (low Kolmogorov complexity) strings is $t$-bounded incompressible (high time-bounded Kolmogorov complexity); there are uncountably many infinite sequences of which every initial segment of length $n$ is compressible to $\log n$ yet $t$-bounded incompressible below ${1/4}n - \log n$; and there are countable infinitely many recursive infinite sequence of which every initial segment is similarly $t$-bounded incompressible. These results are related to, but different from, Barzdins's lemma.Comment: 9 pages, LaTeX, no figures, submitted to Information Processing Letters. Changed and added a Barzdins-like lemma for infinite sequences with different quantification oreder, a fixed constant, and uncountably many sequence

Business expectations and preferences regarding the introduction of daylight saving in Queensland

This paper examines the role of organisational, industry and regional characteristics in determining business support for the introduction of daylight saving in Queensland, Australia. The data employed is drawn from a survey of seven hundred and eight businesspersons in 2002 that assayed support for the statewide introduction of daylight saving in Queensland and an alternative policy where daylight saving would be restricted to the more urbanised southeast regions of Brisbane and/or the Gold Coast. Organisational characteristics examined include assessment of current and future business conditions, expectations of the impact of daylight saving on profits, sales, administration costs and staffing and the number of employees. Industry and region identifiers were also specified. Binary logit models are used to identify the source and magnitude of factors associated with business support for the introduction of daylight saving. The evidence provided suggests that support for the introduction of daylight saving is a function of positive expectations regarding staffing, sales and administration costs and is primarily associated with businesses providing electricity, gas, water and communications, finance and insurance and cultural and recreational services. There also appears to be strong rural and regional resistance to the introduction of daylight saving in Queensland, even among the business community.daylight saving time; organisational, industry and regional characteristics

Daylight savings: what an answer to the perceptual variation problem cannot be

Significant variations in the way objects appear across different viewing conditions pose a challenge to the view that they have some true, determinate color. This view would seem to require that we break the symmetry between multiple appearances in favor of a single variant. A wide range of philosophical and non-philosophical writers have held that the symmetry can be broken by appealing to daylight viewing conditions—that the appearances of objects in daylight have a stronger, and perhaps unique, claim to reveal their true colors. In this note we argue that, whatever else its merits, this appeal to daylight is not a satisfactory answer to the problem posed by perceptual variation

Losing sleep at the market: An empirical note on the daylight saving anomaly in Australia

The ‘daylight saving effect’ predicts that the mean weekend return following the spring and fall/autumn changes in daylight saving time is less than the mean weekend return throughout the rest of the year. With this market anomaly, the change in market participants’ behaviour is linked with sleep desynchronosis and the change in circadian rhythm and its negative impact on sleep patterns. This study investigates the purported daylight saving effect in Australian equity market returns over the period 1979/80-2002/03 using parametric testing and regression analysis. After adjustments are made for heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation in the data, neither the transition to nor the movement from daylight saving is associated with returns that differ from other days. The results also show the absence of any significant weekend effect in the Australian equity market.Daylight saving time, daylight saving effect, weekend effect, market anomalies.