International student complaint behaviour: Understanding how East-Asian business and management students respond to dissatisfaction during their university experience

The higher education sector is characterised by intense global competition for international students. This is driving universities to place greater priority on the student experience and, in particular, student satisfaction and retention. However, an under-researched area is student complaint behaviour. By understanding how students react to poor experiences; the likely impact on the learning and teaching experience, satisfaction ratings and ultimately international student recruitment can be assessed, and appropriate strategies implemented. This study developed an instrument that measured East-Asian students’ preferred university complaint channels. The research focused on four categories of complaint behaviour: public, private, third party and non-behavioural, and data were collected from 135 East-Asian Business and Management students. A vignette questioning technique was used, providing respondents with hypothetical negative student experiences and recording their likely responses in terms of both how and where they would complain. Results suggest international students are pro-active in reporting dissatisfaction direct to the university, but also share these negative experiences with fellow students. The findings offer new insights to those responsible for managing the student experience and, in particular, for those tasked with handling student complaints

NASCAR as a Public Good

Abstract This paper looks for evidence that either a NASCAR track or NASCAR-sanctioned event influences the monthly rents on residential units. Data cover individual housing units in more than 140 SMSAs over the period spanning from 1993 until 2005. During this period, several new tracks opened, while some other tracks closed, and numerous races changed venues. These changes enable us to identify the capitalization of costs and benefits to a community from the presence of NASCAR tracks and events into rental values. The evidence is mixed, varying with the treatment of housing units located in or out of central cities of SMSAs, as well as the manner in which missing housing and community characteristics are treated in the analysis. The results are reasonably clear that presence of a track by itself has little effect, especially on housing units outside the central city of an SMSA. Specific types of races largely appear to have no impact, though in some specifications, the central city and non-central city impacts are about equal but have opposite signs. In these cases, the indication is that the NASCAR events affect non-central city rents, but not those in the central city. Overall, we must conclude that our results reject NASCAR as a source of either large benefits or costs to residents of the host community.tourism, economic impact, special events, NASCAR, auto racing

Cost Adaptation for Robust Decentralized Swarm Behaviour

Decentralized receding horizon control (D-RHC) provides a mechanism for coordination in multi-agent settings without a centralized command center. However, combining a set of different goals, costs, and constraints to form an efficient optimization objective for D-RHC can be difficult. To allay this problem, we use a meta-learning process -- cost adaptation -- which generates the optimization objective for D-RHC to solve based on a set of human-generated priors (cost and constraint functions) and an auxiliary heuristic. We use this adaptive D-RHC method for control of mesh-networked swarm agents. This formulation allows a wide range of tasks to be encoded and can account for network delays, heterogeneous capabilities, and increasingly large swarms through the adaptation mechanism. We leverage the Unity3D game engine to build a simulator capable of introducing artificial networking failures and delays in the swarm. Using the simulator we validate our method on an example coordinated exploration task. We demonstrate that cost adaptation allows for more efficient and safer task completion under varying environment conditions and increasingly large swarm sizes. We release our simulator and code to the community for future work.Comment: Accepted to IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 201

An evaluation of the school based action research project : 'making science more challenging for gifted primary children'

This thesis is a two part evaluation of an Action Research Project carried out in a primary school in southern England. The first part of the thesis investigates whether or not the action research project was successful and the second part looks at teachers' perceptions of action research as a method of professional development for teachers. The aim of the Action Research Project was to make science teaching more challenging for gifted children in all classes. Four teachers acted as teacher researchers who engaged in all aspects of the action research. Their colleagues, though not acting as researchers, supported the teacher researchers by being open to new ideas, trialling interventions designed to make their science teaching more challenging, and providing data to the teacher researchers so that they could assess the impact of the action research project. At the end of the Action Research Project science teaching had become more challenging across the school, but there had been a greater impact in the teacher researchers' classrooms. Data gathered from the teacher researchers indicated that they were very positive in their assessment of action research as a means of professional development as it integrated teaching with curriculum development, research and reflective practice. The thesis develops a model of professional development which has three inter linking and necessary components; external knowledge, creating knowledge and knowing-in-action. The model was formulated from experience gained when acting as a critical friend to the teacher researchers. Essentially, professional development aims at changing teachers' knowing-inaction. For professional development to be really effective and embedded in classroom practice, it needs to involve teachers in double-loop learning (in which teachers can utilise external knowledge to create their own knowledge). In this way both theory-in-use and espoused theory can be changed which in turn could have a long term impact on teachers' knowing-in-action

Shape oscillations of human neutrophil leukocytes: characterization and relationship to cell motility

When neutrophil leukocytes are stimulated by chemotactic factors or by substratum contact, they change their shape. Shape changes are a prerequisite for cellular migration and typically involve the extrusion of thin, veil-like lamellipods and the development of morphological polarity. Stimulation also leads to changes in the neutrophil content of filamentous actin (F-actin), which is the major cytoskeletal component. Suspensions of human neutrophils stimulated with chemoattractants exhibit sinusoidal light-scattering oscillations with a period of approximately 8 s at 37°C. These oscillations arise from periodic fluctuations in the cell body size caused by lamellipod extension and retraction cycles. The light-scattering oscillations are paralleled by corresponding oscillations in F-actin content. This raises the interesting possibility that cyclic actin polymerization constitutes the driving force for shape oscillations of suspended neutrophils. Similar periodic shape changes are present in neutrophils crawling on a surface, suggesting that shape oscillations are important for neutrophil motion. This review summarizes our present knowledge about shape oscillations in suspended and crawling neutrophils and discusses a possible role for these oscillations in neutrophil motility

A Comparison of Two Mesic Sand Forests in Mason County, Illinois

The present study included surveys of a four hectare section of Barkhausen Conservation Area and a two hectare forested section in the Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve. This study examines the floristic composition and structure of these forests, and some of the ecological parameters that may be responsible for their existence. In this study, the number, size and species of all living and dead standing trees (above 10 cm dbh) were recorded for each quadrat. The relative dominance, relative density, importance value, average diameter, density in broad diameter classes and basal area were then calculated for each species. Nested circular plots were randomly located in the 25 m x 25 m quadrats in order to obtain seedling and sapling densities. Seedlings under 40 cm in height, seedlings over 40 cm in height and sapling were tallied in nested circular plots of 0.0001, 0.001, and 0.01 ha in size. Soils were tested for pH and soil texture using the Bouyoucos Hydrometer Method. Barkhausen Conservation Area which was dominated by black oak (IV = 111.2), blackjack oak (IV = 61.5), and hickory spp. (IV = 22.0); and had a density (trees/ha) of 237.9 with a basal area of 16.3 (m2/ha). A total of 20 woody species were recorded in the woods of which 9 were canopy trees and 11 were understory trees, shrubs and vines. These results are also similar to the forest of the Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve which were dominated by black oak (IV = 180.4), blackjack oak (IV = 15.1), and hickory spp. (IV = 4.2); and had a density (trees/ha) of 394.5 with a basal area of 20.3 (m2/ha). This area contained 12 woody species of which 5 were canopy species and 7 were understory trees, shrubs and vines. These closed forests seem to be fairly stable in composition, since the relatively shade-intolerant dominant species tend to reproduce themselves due to the lack of competition in extremely xeric conditions, and the periodic burns which keep the canopy open. The fact that black oak and black hickory have a large number of individuals in the lower diameter classes, and have sufficient seedling and saplings for future replacement of veteran trees, tends to support these findings. Barkhausen Conservation Area and the Sand Prairie-Scrub Oak Nature Preserve are typical examples of closed forest associated with sand dunes of the Illinois River Sand Area Section

Training Big Random Forests with Little Resources

Without access to large compute clusters, building random forests on large datasets is still a challenging problem. This is, in particular, the case if fully-grown trees are desired. We propose a simple yet effective framework that allows to efficiently construct ensembles of huge trees for hundreds of millions or even billions of training instances using a cheap desktop computer with commodity hardware. The basic idea is to consider a multi-level construction scheme, which builds top trees for small random subsets of the available data and which subsequently distributes all training instances to the top trees' leaves for further processing. While being conceptually simple, the overall efficiency crucially depends on the particular implementation of the different phases. The practical merits of our approach are demonstrated using dense datasets with hundreds of millions of training instances.Comment: 9 pages, 9 Figure

Toward a Phenomenology of Place and Place-Making: Interpreting Landscape, Lifeworld and Aesthetics

Places and place-making are two significant notions in current environmental and architectural literature. Phenomenological research, which is concerned with the essential nature of human experience and consciousness, indicates that the notion of place crystallizes and focuses one essential aspect of human existence - the inescapable requirement to always be somewhere..