Inclusive schools: Are teachers adequately prepared for inclusion?

This article will discuss one of the main topics on the educational and social agendas in Israel. Integrating children and adults with special needs into schools and the community is a worldwide issue. Many researchers have tried to find and evaluate the most effective integration methods, to assist people with special needs and enable them high quality of life and equality. In this article, we will look at the process of integrating students with special needs and the transition that took place during the last few decades regarding the idea of “inclusion”, which is now a top priority for the Ministry of Education’s directors. Based on recent studies, we will examine whether school teaching staff and student teachers are ready to implement inclusive programs in schools as required. We will then propose ways to optimize the training of the educational staff, towards the implementation of the inclusive programs.This article will discuss one of the main topics on the educational and social agendas in Israel. Integrating children and adults with special needs into schools and the community is a worldwide issue. Many researchers have tried to find and evaluate the most effective integration methods, to assist people with special needs and enable them high quality of life and equality. In this article, we will look at the process of integrating students with special needs and the transition that took place during the last few decades regarding the idea of “inclusion”, which is now a top priority for the Ministry of Education’s directors. Based on recent studies, we will examine whether school teaching staff and student teachers are ready to implement inclusive programs in schools as required. We will then propose ways to optimize the training of the educational staff, towards the implementation of the inclusive programs

Playful activism : memetic performances of palestinian resistance in TikTok #Challenges

Palestinians have long been using social media as a tool for activism. Each platform provides unique socio-technological affordances that shape users' communicative practices as networked publics. Focusing on the video-sharing platform TikTok, which has taken a "serious turn" in recent years, this article examines how Palestinian users performed playful acts of resistance during the escalation of violence between Palestinians and Israelis in May 2021. Applying a multimodal analysis to 500 TikTok videos posted during the conflict under #gazaunderattack, we identify three memetic templates (#challenge)-(1) lip-syncing, (2) duets, and (3) point-of-view-that unfold the ways TikTok's design and its play-based affordances ignite affective streams of audiovisual content that render playful activism in times of conflict. Driven by TikTok's culture of imitation and competition, playful activism enables the participation of ordinary users in political emerging events with the help of looping meme videos composed of collaborative, dialogic, and communal socio-technical functions. Playful activism transforms users' ritualized performances into powerful political instruments on TikTok and makes democratic participation more relatable, tangible, and accessible to various audiences

Aguu: From Acholi Post War Street Youth and Children to ‘Criminal Gangs’ in Modern Day Gulu City, Uganda

This paper analyses the origin and evolution of the Aguu, a group of street youth/children labelled as a criminal gang operating in the streets of Gulu, Uganda. Based on a series of interviews, focus group discussions, participant observations, archival work and literature review, the paper traces the origin of the Aguu to the conflict in Northern Uganda, and describes the transformation of the Aguu from street youth/children linked to war and displacement to their present day labelling as ‘criminal gang’. Anchored in an analysis based on Assemblage Theory, this paper demonstrates the complexity, multiplicity and fluidity of the Aguu identity as a group whose inception and evolution, both internal and external, occurs through a process of relationship between social, political, economic and infrastructural changes linked to war, culture, aid and politics, affecting present day security discourses in Gulu, Uganda.publishedVersio

Undersampled Phase Retrieval with Outliers

We propose a general framework for reconstructing transform-sparse images from undersampled (squared)-magnitude data corrupted with outliers. This framework is implemented using a multi-layered approach, combining multiple initializations (to address the nonconvexity of the phase retrieval problem), repeated minimization of a convex majorizer (surrogate for a nonconvex objective function), and iterative optimization using the alternating directions method of multipliers. Exploiting the generality of this framework, we investigate using a Laplace measurement noise model better adapted to outliers present in the data than the conventional Gaussian noise model. Using simulations, we explore the sensitivity of the method to both the regularization and penalty parameters. We include 1D Monte Carlo and 2D image reconstruction comparisons with alternative phase retrieval algorithms. The results suggest the proposed method, with the Laplace noise model, both increases the likelihood of correct support recovery and reduces the mean squared error from measurements containing outliers. We also describe exciting extensions made possible by the generality of the proposed framework, including regularization using analysis-form sparsity priors that are incompatible with many existing approaches.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figure

Models for Natural Killer Cell Repertoire Formation

Natural killer (NK) cells lyse only cells that do not express sufficient levels of self class I MHC molecules. Inhibition of lysis is mediated by inhibitory receptors expressed by NK cells, such as the murine Ly49 receptors, that bind to MHC class I molecules. Since inhibitory receptor genes and MHC class I genes are located on different chromosomes, and are hence not automatically co-inherited, NK cells apparently adapt to the MHC environment during their development. Two models have been proposed to account for this “education” process of NK cells. The two-step selection model postulates that developing NK cells initiate the stable expression of a random set of Ly49 genes, and then undergo two selection steps, one for cells that express a sufficient number of self-MHC receptors, and one against cells that express too many inhibitory receptors. The sequential model postulates that a cell keeps initiating the stable expression of additional inhibitory receptors until a sufficient expression level of self-MHC specific receptors is reached, and the cell matures. In this study we implement both models in computer simulations, and compare simulation results to experimental data, in order to evaluate the relative plausibility of the two models

A Preliminary Study of Three-dimensional Sonographic Measurements of the Fetus

OBJECTIVES: This study was aimed at establishing an ideal method for performing three-dimensional measurements of the fetus in order to improve the estimation of fetal weight. METHODS: The study consisted of two phases. Phase I was a prospective cross-sectional study performed between 28 and 40 weeks\u27 gestation. The study population (n=110) comprised low-risk singleton pregnancies who underwent a routine third-trimester sonographic estimation of fetal weight. The purpose of this phase was to establish normal values for the fetal abdominal and head volumes throughout the third trimester. Phase II was a prospective study that included patients admitted for an elective cesarean section or for induction of labor between 38 and 41 weeks\u27 gestation (n=91). This phase of the study compared the actual birth weight to two- (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) measurements of the fetus. Conventional 2D ultrasound fetal biometry was performed measuring the biparietal diameter (BPD), head circumference (HC), abdominal circumference (AC), and femur diaphysis length (FL). Volume estimates were computed utilizing Virtual Organ Computer-aided AnaLysis (VOCAL), and the correlation between measured volumes and actual neonatal weight was calculated. RESULTS: Overall, this longitudinal study consisted of 110 patients between 28 and 41 weeks\u27 gestation. Normal values were computed for the fetal abdomen and head volume throughout the third trimester. Ultrasound examination was performed within three days prior to delivery on 91 patients. A good correlation was found between birth weight and abdominal volume (r=0.77) and between birth weight and head volume (r=0.5). Correlation between bidimensional measurements and actual fetal weights was found to be comparable with previously published correlations. CONCLUSION: Volume measurements of the fetus may improve the accuracy of estimating fetal size. Additional studies using different volume measurement of the fetus are necessary

A Preliminary Study of Three-dimensional Sonographic Measurements of the Fetus

Objectives: This study was aimed at establishing an ideal method for performing three-dimensional measurements of the fetus in order to improve the estimation of fetal weight. Methods: The study consisted of two phases. Phase I was a prospective cross-sectional study performed between 28 and 40 weeks’ gestation. The study population (n=110) comprised low-risk singleton pregnancies who underwent a routine third-trimester sonographic estimation of fetal weight. The purpose of this phase was to establish normal values for the fetal abdominal and head volumes throughout the third trimester. Phase II was a prospective study that included patients admitted for an elective cesarean section or for induction of labor between 38 and 41 weeks’ gestation (n=91). This phase of the study compared the actual birth weight to two- (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) measurements of the fetus. Conventional 2D ultrasound fetal biometry was performed measuring the biparietal diameter (BPD), head circumference (HC), abdominal circumference (AC), and femur diaphysis length (FL). Volume estimates were computed utilizing Virtual Organ Computer-aided AnaLysis (VOCAL), and the correlation between measured volumes and actual neonatal weight was calculated. Results: Overall, this longitudinal study consisted of 110 patients between 28 and 41 weeks’ gestation. Normal values were computed for the fetal abdomen and head volume throughout the third trimester. Ultrasound examination was performed within three days prior to delivery on 91 patients. A good correlation was found between birth weight and abdominal volume (r=0.77) and between birth weight and head volume (r=0.5). Correlation between bidimensional measurements and actual fetal weights was found to be comparable with previously published correlations. Conclusion: Volume measurements of the fetus may improve the accuracy of estimating fetal size. Additional studies using different volume measurement of the fetus are necessary

Advances in Genomic Data Compression

The rapid growth in the number of individual whole genome sequences and metagenomic datasets is generating an unprecedented volume of genomic data. This is partly due to the continuous drop in the cost of sequencing as well as growth in the utility of sequencing for research and clinical purposes. We are now reaching a point whereby the lion share of the cost is shifting from the actual sequencing to processing and storing the resulting data. With genomic datasets reaching the petabyte scale in hospitals and medium to large research groups, it is clear that there is an urgent need to store the data more efficiently - not only to reduce current costs, but also to make sequencing even more affordable to an even larger set of use cases, thereby accelerating the pace of adoption of genomic data for a widening range of research projects and clinical applications. In Chapter 1 of this thesis, I lay the groundwork for a new approach to compressing genomic data—one that is based on an extensible software platform, which I called Genozip. This initial proof of concept allows compression of data in a widely used format, namely the Variant Call Format, or VCF (Danecek et al. 2011) . In Chapter 2, I expand on the work of Chapter 1, showing how the software architecture is designed to support the addition of genomic file formats, compression methods, and codecs. Benchmarking results show that Genozip generally performs better and faster than the leading tools for compression of common genomic data formats such as VCF, SAM (Li et al. 2009) and FASTQ (Cock et al. 2010) . In Chapter 3, I take a detour from compression, and demonstrate how potentially Genozip, with its detailed internal data structures for genomic file processing, could be used for other types of data manipulation. As an example, I introduce DVCF, or Dual-coordinate VCF—an extension of the VCF format that allows representation of genetic variants concurrently in two coordinate systems defined by two different reference genomes (Lan 2021) . It is possible to use a DVCF file in a pipeline where each step of the pipeline accesses the data in either of the coordinate systems. I also developed novel methods for lifting over data from one coordinate system to another, and show the superiority of my methods compared to the two leading tools in that space, namely GATK LiftoverVCF (McKenna et al. 2010) and CrossMap (Zhao et al. 2014) . Overall, the Genozip software package is a high quality and versatile bioinformatic tool that is already adopted by dozens of research and clinical laboratories worldwide. Through reduction of the cost of whole genome sequencing data processing and storage, Genozip is likely to further encourage the use of genomics in research and clinical settings.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Biological Sciences, 202

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