Garbage Box (G-Box) Designing and Monitoring

This paper describes a G-Box, a garbage box that can be monitored using mobile phone. The G-Box is designed to attract, to stimulate, to educate, and to train the kids to throw the garbage in the correct place, so that the clean environment can be achieved. The system of the garbage box in this research is designed in two parts, i.e. G-Box (Garbage Box) and P-Box (Prize Box). The G-Box and P-Box can communicate using Bluetooth. When the kids have thrown the garbage in the G-Box, the G-Box will give the notification trough MP3 player by saying “Thank you very much, please get your candy in the P-Box”. The G-Box also sends the signal to the PBox to throw away the candy from the P-Box as the prize for the kids that have thrown away the garbage in the correct place (in this case, the G-Box)

Scoping the Potential Use of Serious Games for Public Engagement with Tree and Plant Health

After the devastating introduction of Chalara ash dieback into Great Britain in 2012, all devolved GB governments agreed on the need for increased public engagement in protecting tree and plant health. Serious games have been proposed as a tool for achieving this. This thesis explores two questions. Firstly, to what extent is there an appetite for using Serious Games among plant health professionals and the general public? Furthermore, when compared to traditional methods of presenting information in public engagement, can Serious Games improve participant engagement and retention of information? To address the first question, we conducted two studies of attitudes to Serious Games. In the first study, we conducted face-to-face structured interviews of tree and plant health professionals. In this group, we found that there was interest in the potential use of Serious Games; however, a lack of game development skills emerged as a challenge. In the second study, we used an online survey aimed at the general public to ask about attitudes, preferences, and experiences with Serious Games. Again, we found that there was an interest in the use of games with some reservations. In addressing the second question, two experiments were conducted comparing game and non-game methods of presenting identical information to participants. These experiments measured enjoyment and retention of information. In both experiments, the non-game treatment participants had higher quiz results, suggesting that the Serious Game treatment did not improve information retention. This may be because the learning content was not sufficiently related to the games. Additionally, despite Game players reporting a higher perceived level of learning in the second experiment this did not translate to longer term retention of information. We conclude that Serious Games can be useful in arousing interest; however, careful design is needed if they are to promote, rather than distract from, learning

October 1997

At Deadline To be or to be,City manager Terminal raises old conflict Route 66: The covert that wasn’t Xerox host digital printing seminar Assault victims find solace at Loma Linda Commentary:No time for retreat Pro-cons: City chambers Close up: Beverly griffen d’errico Corporate profile: new age communications open enrollment: what is it Bone marrow transplant needed List: Largest pager vendors Turning dreams into reality List: computer retailers Copyrights and the internet Water : the real California gold Icc is a friend to business around the globe Exporting The employers Be a parent: go to school Bankruptcies people, places and events Managing Managers must accept chaos The family medical leave act Law List: long distance companies Pcs: the next stop in corporate communications Restaurant review Mead on wine Wireless internet hits the airwaves List: interconnect/telecommunications firm Barstow, more than just trivia List: internet service providers Computer/ software Calendar Executive time-ou

The Globalization of English: Its Impact on English Language Education in the Tertiary Education Sector in Taiwan

The overall agenda for the research reported here grew out of semi-structured interviews with senior educational managers from a tertiary educational institution in Taiwan. These managers raised a number of issues, including the changing profile of tertiary students, the changing nature of English curricula, the increasing need for English teaching staff to be adaptable, highly qualified and research-active, and the growing pressure on institutions to introduce English language proficiency benchmarking. Each of these issues can be related to the impact of globalization and, in particular, the impact of the globalization of English, on the education sector. Following a critical review of selected literature on the impact of globalization on the teaching and learning of English, each of these issues, as it affects the tertiary education sector in Taiwan, was explored. Analysis of the Taiwanese national curriculum guidelines for schools, strongly influenced by academics in the tertiary education sector, revealed a number of problems relating to a lack of proficiency benchmarking and a lack of coherence, consistency and transparency in some areas. These problems may be associated with the initial phase of transition from a grammar-based curriculum to a more communicatively-oriented, outcomes-centered one. Problems of a similar type were indicated in responses to questions relating to curriculum matters included in a questionnaire distributed to a sample of teachers of English in the tertiary sector. Among other things revealed by questionnaire responses was the fact that many survey participants had received no training in English teaching. The results of a C-test (one that was initially used in a major European study) taken by a sample of entry-level and exit-level Bachelors degree students indicated a wide variation in proficiency, with individual scores differing by as much as 64 percentage points in the case of exit-level students. Furthermore, there was a difference of almost 10 percentage points between the mean scores of students from two different institutions who had majored in English. These results indicate some of the difficulties that Taiwan faces in attempting to establish graduation proficiency benchmarking. -ii- C-test participants completed a background questionnaire, the responses indicating a generally positive attitude towards English-speaking people, a general willingness to use English in situations where there was the option of not doing so, and a strong tendency towards instrumental motivation. Although one of the factors that appeared to have a positive impact on C-test performance was time spent in an English-speaking country, fewer than 18% of respondents had done so. Although there appears to be considerable anxiety and uncertainty associated with the teaching of English at tertiary level in Taiwan, and some genuine cause for concern, there are also many positive indicators of future success. Teachers and educational managers are aware of the problems they currently face and appear determined to resolve them. Taiwanese academics are increasingly involved in language-related research and increasingly prepared to interrogate their own practices, and Taiwan, unlike some other countries in Asia, is moving towards graduation proficiency benchmarking

The Feral, the Art Object and the Social

This practice-based research explores the nature of the feral, as manifested in an object-based installation practice of contemporary art that scavenges - physically, socially and metaphorically - in the gap between defined spaces. My conception of the feral draws out the political promise of this indeterminacy: the state of being partly wild and partly civilised. The page is also constructed materially, as a space where heterogeneous elements meet: different voices expressed through the writing and images of my practice. In claiming the feral as a critical concept, I reject its more common, derogatory, usage. In particular, during the 2011 London riots, the former British Lord Chancellor Kenneth Clarke labelled the rioters a “feral underclass”, seeking to fix them in this uncivilised, abject position. I unfix this separation, through a feral interpretation of my objects, as they interpenetrate domestic, institutional, and civilised public spheres. Mother’s milk solidifies as plaster-filled condom bombs, at once phallic and breast-like, poised to ignite a pyre of social theory texts in a gallery project space, a former factory; haphazard conglomerations of plant matter and urban debris are strung together in bunting on an inner-city community hall. The feral becomes here a rival concept to Julia Kristeva’s formulation of abjection, as the seeping bodily organs evoked by my objects are not defined in terms of the individual, but reflected on through the formless mass of the social body, the displaced undercommons of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, the wild of Jack Halberstam, the rioters of Joshua Clover. The feral has an antagonistic quality, but it cannot fit the relational models of art put forward by Chantal Mouffe and Claire Bishop that seek to civilise this antagonism. Neither can the positivity of Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman new materialism extract the hybridity of materials I use from the precariousness of the social conditions from which they are drawn. My practice, like the feral, resists these separations

Reviving boro: The transcultural reconstruction of Japanese patchwork

This thesis investigates boro as a revived cultural phenomenon, one that physically originated in Japan but that has been conceptually defined by other cultures. It excavates the layers of value and meaning embedded in boro as a result of making, collecting, exhibiting and design activities in order to reveal how and why people have begun to appreciate boro within a range of different cultural, spatial and social contexts. In doing so, this research challenges the existing literature documenting boro’s origins and authenticity and reveals the forces at play behind the transformation of boro from folk craft to the practice of contemporary art, design and fashion. Born out of necessity, boro combines materials, techniques and aesthetics that are rooted in Japanese mending culture and textile traditions. Drawing on Michael Thompson’s Rubbish Theory, the research demonstrates how, as boro’s functional value has decreased in the contemporary context, new values have been re-ascribed to it through its continued transcultural production in diverse contexts, in which boro has adopted a range of different roles from antique object and example of textile practice to vintage fashion style, a concept promoting sustainability, inspiration for creative practice and cultural symbol. This research critically evaluates these dimensions of the process of value creation through studies of personal and museum boro collections, new boro fashion design and recent boro practices of independent crafters. The return of boro in the global art and design landscape raises questions about how a revived phenomenon is translated in today’s diverse contexts and makes a special claim for boro’s original culture, how it communicates in other cultural spaces and how these are understood and reproduced in new possibilities. This thesis positions boro within a global context, demonstrating how the co-creation of meanings and values has developed through cultural connections and subsequent interpretations