The WiSE Approach to Engineering Educational Environments

Developing teaching laboratories for complex applied technical fields can be expensive and carries significant risk for the sponsoring University or institution. Laboratories are typically developed as projects requiring development of sophisticated systems (including hardware, software and curriculum) delivered as a functioning whole that is: useful to staff, attractive to students and produces the required educational outcomes. All within constraints of cost, time, space and staffing

Education

In the late twentieth century historians of education came to argue that the urban experience can only be fully understood through the social processes and social relations associated with schooling. The new 'social history' of education has thus often been closely aligned to the history of cities. In Australia the 'new' social history of the city has often been written in terms of family formation, sometimes related to the history of childhood, but there has only been marginal attention to the specific nature of education in Sydney as an urban phenomenon. This essay focuses on Sydney schools and other educational institutions, although it raises questions about social processes and social formations. It suggests that the history of education in Sydney can be understood in a number of phases and themes, each related to the changing social history of Sydney. Informal education had long been part of the culture of indigenous society prior to the British invasion of 1788. In the early colonial period, up to about 1830, governments established schools for the children of convicts based in Sydney and even for Aboriginal children. There were also 'private venture' schools for the sons and sometimes daughters of free settlers. In the period from 1830 to 1870 the city of Sydney emerged as a metropolitan centre of educational establishments including schools, colleges and the University. From around 1870 to the end of World War II, with the growth of the city of Sydney and its suburbs, schooling was increasingly related to social class, gender and religion as part of suburban life. From 1945, the 'neighbourhood' school and even the 'local' university has become part of a pattern of regional differences associated with the expansion of the city through migration and population growth

Gigaflop performance on a CRAY-2: Multitasking a computational fluid dynamics application

The methodology is described for converting a large, long-running applications code that executed on a single processor of a CRAY-2 supercomputer to a version that executed efficiently on multiple processors. Although the conversion of every application is different, a discussion of the types of modification used to achieve gigaflop performance is included to assist others in the parallelization of applications for CRAY computers, especially those that were developed for other computers. An existing application, from the discipline of computational fluid dynamics, that had utilized over 2000 hrs of CPU time on CRAY-2 during the previous year was chosen as a test case to study the effectiveness of multitasking on a CRAY-2. The nature of dominant calculations within the application indicated that a sustained computational rate of 1 billion floating-point operations per second, or 1 gigaflop, might be achieved. The code was first analyzed and modified for optimal performance on a single processor in a batch environment. After optimal performance on a single CPU was achieved, the code was modified to use multiple processors in a dedicated environment. The results of these two efforts were merged into a single code that had a sustained computational rate of over 1 gigaflop on a CRAY-2. Timings and analysis of performance are given for both single- and multiple-processor runs

Proprioceptive perception of phase variability

Previous work has established that judgments of relative phase variability of 2 visually presented oscillators covary with mean relative phase. Ninety degrees is judged to be more variable than 0° or 180°, independently of the actual level of phase variability. Judged levels of variability also increase at 180°. This pattern of judgments matches the pattern of movement coordination results. Here, participants judged the phase variability of their own finger movements, which they generated by actively tracking a manipulandum moving at 0°, 90°, or 180°, and with 1 of 4 levels of Phase Variability. Judgments covaried as an inverted U-shaped function of mean relative phase. With an increase in frequency, 180° was judged more variable whereas 0° was not. Higher frequency also reduced discrimination of the levels of Phase Variability. This matching of the proprioceptive and visual results, and of both to movement results, supports the hypothesized role of online perception in the coupling of limb movements. Differences in the 2 cases are discussed as due primarily to the different sensitivities of the systems to the information