The kids are alright : outcome of a safety programme for addressing childhood injury in Australia

Globally, injuries are the leading cause of death and represent the highest burden of ongoing disease amongst children 1–16 years of age. Increasingly, prevention programmes are recognising a growing need for intervention strategies that target children. The purpose of this study was to determine the efficacy of the SeeMore Safety Programme, designed to teach children (4–6 years of age) how to make conscious decisions about their own capabilities related to safety and how to manage risk. This retrospective study examined de-identified pre- and post-programme data from a sample of 1027 4 to 6-year-old pre-school children over the four-year period who participated in the SeeMore Safety Programme. Results show a significant improvement in each of the post-test scores and when compared to the pre-test scores (p < 0.001). Children from rural areas, as well as those from areas of greater disadvantage, also showed significant improvement in their pre- and post-test scores (p < 0.001). Overall, the findings highlight that the SeeMore Safety Programme over the four-year period demonstrates an increase in the children’s capacity to recognise and identify danger and safety amongst all children, offering great promise for reducing the burden of injury on children, their families and society

Toward Seamless Solutions for Students

An interview with Susan L. Krinsky, Associate Dean for Students and Student Service

Learning viewpoint invariant object representations using a temporal coherence principle

Invariant object recognition is arguably one of the major challenges for contemporary machine vision systems. In contrast, the mammalian visual system performs this task virtually effortlessly. How can we exploit our knowledge on the biological system to improve artificial systems? Our understanding of the mammalian early visual system has been augmented by the discovery that general coding principles could explain many aspects of neuronal response properties. How can such schemes be transferred to system level performance? In the present study we train cells on a particular variant of the general principle of temporal coherence, the "stability” objective. These cells are trained on unlabeled real-world images without a teaching signal. We show that after training, the cells form a representation that is largely independent of the viewpoint from which the stimulus is looked at. This finding includes generalization to previously unseen viewpoints. The achieved representation is better suited for view-point invariant object classification than the cells' input patterns. This property to facilitate view-point invariant classification is maintained even if training and classification take place in the presence of an - also unlabeled - distractor object. In summary, here we show that unsupervised learning using a general coding principle facilitates the classification of real-world objects, that are not segmented from the background and undergo complex, non-isomorphic, transformation

Bursting the bubble or opening the door? Appraising the impact of austerity on playwork and playwork practitioners in the UK

Introductory essay for special issue on 'Playwork in Times of Austerity

Relativistic electrons generated at Earth's quasi-parallel bow shock.

Plasma shocks are the primary means of accelerating electrons in planetary and astrophysical settings throughout the universe. Which category of shocks, quasi-perpendicular or quasi-parallel, accelerates electrons more efficiently is debated. Although quasi-perpendicular shocks are thought to be more efficient electron accelerators, relativistic electron energies recently observed at quasi-parallel shocks exceed theoretical expectations. Using in situ observations at Earth's bow shock, we show that such relativistic electrons are generated by the interaction between the quasi-parallel shock and a related nonlinear structure, a foreshock transient, through two betatron accelerations. Our observations show that foreshock transients, overlooked previously, can increase electron acceleration efficiency at a quasi-parallel shock by an order of magnitude. Thus, quasi-parallel shocks could be more important in generating relativistic electrons, such as cosmic ray electrons, than previously thought

The Crescent Student Newspaper, November 15, 1985

Student newspaper of Pacific College (later George Fox University). 4 pages, black and white.https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/the_crescent/2005/thumbnail.jp

Normal Uterine Size in Women of Reproductive Age in Jos, Nigeria: An Ultrasonographic Investigation.

A cross-sectional study of normal uterine size of 70 women aged 20-40 years was conducted by ultrasonographic measurements. Mean uterine size was found to be 8.24cm x 4.75cm x3.77cm (Length x width x AP diameter) for overall total, 7.46cm x 4.22cm x 3.30cm for Nulliparous women, 8.49cm x 4.87cm x 3.81cm for Primiparous  women and 9.10cm x 5.36cm x 4.36cm for Multiparous women. Mean age was 27.99 ± 5.43 years. Uterine size was significantly correlated with parity and age. Linear multiple regression lines to predict uterine size (length,width and AP diameter) using parity and age were also modelled. Keywords: Ultrasonography, Uterine size, Nulliparous, Primiparous, Multiparou

Performance after mass privatisation : the case of Slovenia

Initial ownership structures resulting from the mass privatisation programme were intended as transitional, whereas optimal would be set up gradually and would result from secondary transactions. Therefore, mass privatisation is typically considered successful if secondary transactions lead to improved ownership, in particular, with emergence of strategic investors. If this approach is correct, positive effects of mass privatisation are thus not shown only by companies remaining in control of initial owners but mostly by the companies that have already gone through secondary privatisation. Accordingly, the success of secondary sales is to be evaluated by how successfully companies perform after the sale to new owners. This paper attempts to verify empirically those assumptions. The econometric analysis of panel data, after correcting for a selection bias, shows that TFP (total factor productivity) growth is highest in public companies. In addition we found that the secondary privatisation has had practically no positive effect on economic efficiency in the period 1995-99. We interpret these results as supporting evidence for the theoretical approach, which argues that the impact of strategic investors on performance may be ambiguous and that the quality of the capital market institutions is more important than ownership effects. The former creates incentives for performance by increasing the cost of expropriation of minority shareholders