Reviews

Steve McDowell and Phil Race, 500 Computing Tips for Trainers, London: Kogan Page, ISBN: 0–7494–2675–6. Paperback, 160 pages, £15.99

Reviews

Alan Clarke, Designing Computer‐Based Learning Materials, Aldershot: Gower, 2001. ISBN: 0–566–08320–5. Hardback, xviii+196 pages, £45.00

Reflections on equality, diversity and gender at the end of a media studies headship

This article reflects, from a feminist perspective, on a five-year period as Head of a School of Media. It considers the position of media studies within the new academic capitalism, and the re-masculinisation of the university that this has produced. It considers strategies employed by the field to stake its own claim to that masculinisation, in particular the embrace of ‘the digital’. Finally it describes the challenges this posed for the author, and tactics employed in dealing with them

Mask estimation based on sound localisation for missing data speech recognition

ABSTRACT This paper describes a perceptually motivated computational auditory scene analysis (CASA) system that combines sound separation according to spatial location with 'missing data' techniques for robust speech recognition in noise. Missing data time-frequency masks are produced using cross-correlation to estimate interaural time differenre (ITD) and hence spatial azimuth; this is used to determine which regions of the signal constitute reliable evidence of the target speech signal. Three experiments are performed that compare the effects of different reverberation surfaces, localisation methods and azimuth separations on recognition accuracy, together with the effects of two post-processing techniques (morphological operations and supervised learning) for improving mask estimation. Both post-processing techniques greatly improve performance; the best performance occurs using a learnt mapping

The Southampton Initiative for Health:A Complex Intervention to Improve the Diets and Increase the Physical Activity Levels of Women from Disadvantaged Communities

The Southampton Initiative for Health is a training intervention with Sure Start Children’s Centre staff designed to improve the diets and physical activity levels of women of childbearing age. Training aims to help staff to support women in making changes to their lifestyles by improving three skills: reflection on current practice; asking ‘open discovery’ questions; and goal-setting. The impact of the training on staff practice is being assessed. A before and after non-randomized controlled trial is being used to evaluate the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of the intervention in improving women’s diets and increasing their physical activity levels