41 research outputs found
Indigenous education and literacy policy in Australia: bringing learning back to the debate
In a policy landscape dominated by forces that seek to continually reshape education according to market
logics, there are particular impacts on the seemingly intractable crisis of Indigenous education policy making.
Entrenched discourses of deficit result in education policy continually being ‘done to’ communities, with little
heed paid to the effects of such efforts on the learning opportunities available to young Indigenous learners,
particularly those living in remote communities. This paper examines the contemporary network of policy
levers that come to shape how literacy policy is framed for Indigenous Australians through narratives of failure
and crisis. In doing so, we ask what learning is made (im)possible and what are some of the ‘flattening’ effects
on literacy curriculum and pedagogy as a result? Further, this paper seeks to open up the conversation around
what learning is possible when the policy landscape is unflattened, when policy is ‘done with’ communities,
and when pedagogical practices are opened up, rather than closed down
Anticipating explanations in relative clause processing
We show that comprehenders’ expectations about upcoming discourse coherence relations influence the resolution of local structural ambiguity. We employ cases in which two clauses share both a syntactic relationship and a discourse relationship, and hence in which syntactic and discourse processing might be expected to interact. An off-line sentence-completion study and an on-line self-paced reading study examined readers’ expectations for high/low relative clause attachments following implicit-causality and non-implicit-causality verbs (John detests/babysits the children of the musician who…). In the off-line study, the widely reported low-attachment preference for English is observed in the non-implicit causality condition, but this preference gives way to more high attachments in the implicit causality condition in cases in which (i) the verb’s causally implicated referent occupies the high-attachment position and (ii) the relative clause provides an explanation for the event described by the matrix clause (e.g., …who are arrogant and rude). In the on-line study, a similar preference for high attachment emerges in the implicit causality context—crucially, before the occurrence of any linguistic evidence that the RC does in fact provide an explanation—whereas the low-attachment preference is consistent elsewhere. These findings constitute the first demonstration that expectations about ensuing discourse coherence relationships can elicit full reversals in syntactic attachment preferences, and that these discourse-level expectations can affect on-line disambiguation as rapidly as lexical and morphosyntactic cues
Verb aspect, event structure, and coreferential processing
We used an off-line story continuation task and an online ERP reading task to investigate coreferential processing following sentences that portrayed transfer-of-possession events as either ongoing or completed, using imperfective and perfective verb aspect (e.g., Amanda was shifting/shifted some poker chips to Scott). The story continuation task demonstrated that people were more likely to begin continuations with references to the Goal than to the Source, but that perfective aspect strengthened this bias. In the ERP task we probed expectations for Source and Goal referents by employing pronouns that matched one of the referents in gender. The ERP results were consistent with the biases revealed in the story continuation task and demonstrate that the difference in Goal bias for the two forms of aspect was manifested differently in the brain. These results provide novel behavioral and neurocognitive evidence that verb aspect influences the construction of situation models during language comprehension
Multi-messenger observations of a binary neutron star merger
On 2017 August 17 a binary neutron star coalescence candidate (later designated GW170817) with merger time 12:41:04 UTC was observed through gravitational waves by the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors. The Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor independently detected a gamma-ray burst (GRB 170817A) with a time delay of ~1.7 s with respect to the merger time. From the gravitational-wave signal, the source was initially localized to a sky region of 31 deg2 at a luminosity distance of 40+8-8 Mpc and with component masses consistent with neutron stars. The component masses were later measured to be in the range 0.86 to 2.26 Mo. An extensive observing campaign was launched across the electromagnetic spectrum leading to the discovery of a bright optical transient (SSS17a, now with the IAU identification of AT 2017gfo) in NGC 4993 (at ~40 Mpc) less than 11 hours after the merger by the One- Meter, Two Hemisphere (1M2H) team using the 1 m Swope Telescope. The optical transient was independently detected by multiple teams within an hour. Subsequent observations targeted the object and its environment. Early ultraviolet observations revealed a blue transient that faded within 48 hours. Optical and infrared observations showed a redward evolution over ~10 days. Following early non-detections, X-ray and radio emission were discovered at the transient’s position ~9 and ~16 days, respectively, after the merger. Both the X-ray and radio emission likely arise from a physical process that is distinct from the one that generates the UV/optical/near-infrared emission. No ultra-high-energy gamma-rays and no neutrino candidates consistent with the source were found in follow-up searches. These observations support the hypothesis that GW170817 was produced by the merger of two neutron stars in NGC4993 followed by a short gamma-ray burst (GRB 170817A) and a kilonova/macronova powered by the radioactive decay of r-process nuclei synthesized in the ejecta
Nutritionally Enhanced Staple Food Crops
Crop biofortification is a sustainable and cost-effective strategy to address
malnutrition in developing countries. This review synthesizes the progress
toward developing seed micronutrient-dense cereals and legumes cultivars by
exploiting natural genetic variation using conventional breeding and/or transgenic
technology, and discusses the associated issues to strengthen crop biofortification
research and development. Some major QTL for seed iron and zinc,
seed phosphorus, and seed phytate in common bean, rice,J;md wheat have been
mapped. An iron reductase QTL associated with seed-iron ~QTL is found in common bean where the genes coding for candidate enzymes involved in phytic
acid synthesis have also been mapped. Candidate genes for Ipa co segregate with
mutant phenotypes identified in rice and soybean. The Gpe-B1 locus in wild
emmer wheat accelerates senescence and increases nutrient remobilization
from leaves to developing seeds, and another gene named TtNAM-B1 affecting
these traits has been cloned. Seed iron-dense common bean and rice in Latin
America; seed iron-dense common bean in eastern and southern Africa;....
Some aspects of toxic contaminants in herbal medicines.
A World Health Organisation survey indicated that about 70-80% of the world populations rely on non-conventional medicine mainly of herbal sources in their primary healthcare. In recent years, we have witnessed the increasing growth in popularity of over-the-counter (OTC) health foods, nutraceuticals, and medicinal products from plants or other natural sources in developed countries. This indirectly indicates that the public is not satisfied with their orthodox medical (OM) treatment. Such increase in popularity has also brought concerns and fears over the professionalism of practitioners, and quality, efficacy and safety of their treatment methods and products from herbal and natural sources available in the market. Over the past decade several news-catching episodes in developed communities indicated adverse effects, sometimes life threatening, allegedly arisen consequential to taking of OTC herbal products or traditional medicines from various ethnic groups. These OTC products may be contaminated with excessive or banned pesticides, microbial contaminants, heavy metals, chemical toxins, and for adulterated with orthodox drugs. Excessive or banned pesticides, heavy metals and microbial contaminants may be related to the source of these herbal materials, if they are grown under contaminated environment or during collection of these plant materials. Chemical toxins may come from unfavourable or wrong storage conditions or chemical treatment due to storage. The presence of orthodox drugs can be related to unprofessional practice of manufacturers. Some of these environment related factors can be controlled by implementing standard operating procedures (SOP) leading to Good Agricultural Practice (GAP), Good Laboratory Practice (GLP), Good Supply Practice (GSP) and Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) for producing these medicinal products from herbal or natural sources. The public's belief that herbal and natural products are safer than synthetic medicines can only be ascertained by imposing regulatory standards on these products that should be manufactured using these Good Practices. Using Chinese medicines, as examples, this paper illustrate how advances in chemical and biomedical analysis would help to detect intentional and unintentional toxic contaminants in herbal substances. The paper also summarises how modernization and progress are being carried out to get the best out of Chinese medicines for public healthcare
Why do we eat cereal but not lamb chops at breakfast? Investigating Americans’ beliefs about breakfast foods
The Uranie platform: an open-source software for optimisation, meta-modelling and uncertainty analysis
The high-performance computing resources and the constant improvement of both numerical simulation accuracy and the experimental measurements with which they are confronted bring a new compulsory step to strengthen the credence given to the simulation results: uncertainty quantification. This can have different meanings, according to the requested goals (rank uncertainty sources, reduce them, estimate precisely a critical threshold or an optimal working point), and it could request mathematical methods with greater or lesser complexity. This paper introduces the Uranie platform, an open-source framework developed at the Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), in the nuclear energy division, in order to deal with uncertainty propagation, surrogate models, optimisation issues, code calibration, etc. This platform benefits from both its dependencies and from personal developments, to offer an efficient data handling model, a C++ and Python interface, advanced graphi graphical tools, several parallelisation solutions, etc. These methods can then be applied to many kinds of code (considered as black boxes by Uranie) so to many fields of physics as well. In this paper, the example of thermal exchange between a plate-sheet and a fluid is introduced to show how Uranie can be used to perform a large range of analysis