Constructing Priors that Penalize the Complexity of Gaussian Random Fields

Priors are important for achieving proper posteriors with physically meaningful covariance structures for Gaussian random fields (GRFs) since the likelihood typically only provides limited information about the covariance structure under in-fill asymptotics. We extend the recent Penalised Complexity prior framework and develop a principled joint prior for the range and the marginal variance of one-dimensional, two-dimensional and three-dimensional Mat\'ern GRFs with fixed smoothness. The prior is weakly informative and penalises complexity by shrinking the range towards infinity and the marginal variance towards zero. We propose guidelines for selecting the hyperparameters, and a simulation study shows that the new prior provides a principled alternative to reference priors that can leverage prior knowledge to achieve shorter credible intervals while maintaining good coverage. We extend the prior to a non-stationary GRF parametrized through local ranges and marginal standard deviations, and introduce a scheme for selecting the hyperparameters based on the coverage of the parameters when fitting simulated stationary data. The approach is applied to a dataset of annual precipitation in southern Norway and the scheme for selecting the hyperparameters leads to concervative estimates of non-stationarity and improved predictive performance over the stationary model

Kompetente nyutdannede lærere: Et spørgsmål om gode lærerteam - eller om den rette mentorordning?

Artikkelen pointerer at det er mulig å forstå hvorfor en inkluderende arbeidsplasskultur og faglig og emosjonelt støttende samarbeidsformer kan være minst like viktig for mestringsforventning og trygghet som hvor lenge man har arbeidet som lærer. Mentorordningen kan understøtte dette. Dens funksjon kan imidlertid også primært være å støtte de individualistiske trekkene ved skolenes læringskultur. På mange skoler skjer det gjennom den kollegiale veiledningen en reproduksjon av en tradisjonell lærerprofesjonalitet og en innordning under en rådende skolekultur. Når det skjer blir mentorordningen en sovepute og ikke en stimulans til kontinuerlig profesjonell utvikling. Ikke sjelden argumenteres det med at det er lite rom for å prioritere annerledes. Skal dette endres, så gjelder det å tenke annerledes. Man må begynne i det små å fremheve og anerkjenne de initiativ hos ens kolleger som kan understøtte en mer felles profesjonslæring. Alle fora der lærere og skolens ledelse møtes er her viktige, men lærerteamene er viktigst fordi det er i dem man kommer tettest på undervisningsarbeidets konkrete, daglige utfordringer

Autonomy, Candour and Professional Teacher Practice: A Discussion Inspired by the Later Works of Michel Foucault

Autonomy is considered to be an important feature of professionals and to provide a necessary basis for their informed judgments. In this article these notions will be challenged. In this article I use Michel Foucault’s deconstruction of the idea of the autonomous citizen, and his later attempts to reconstruct that idea, in order to bring some new perspectives to the discussion about the foundation of professionalism. The turning point in Foucault’s discussion about autonomy is to be found in his proposal for an ethics of the self. This ethics invites a break with the normalising discourses of modernity. As I see it, this makes it particularly relevant to a discussion about the principles of professionalism. The conception of parrhesia is central. I use the role of the teacher to illustrate my arguments

The Marine Environment and Maritime Security in Southeast Asia: Controlling Oil Tanker Traffic in The Strait of Malacca

Assertion of regional autonomy over control of navigation in the Strait(s) of Malacca appeared at one time to threaten the maritime security of this vital sea route. The resolution to date of the environmental and safety concerns of the coastal states of the Straits illustrates the effective working of international law to resolve the conflicting claims of such coastal states and major outside users

Læring i yrket : i møtet mellom erfarne og nyutdannede

Nyutdannede og erfarne lærere som samarbeider systematisk om planleggingen og gjennomføringen av undervisningen har høyere opplevd mestring enn de som ikke gjør det. Kollegiale fellesskap er viktige for både nyutdannede og erfarne læreres opplevelse av støtte. Lærere finner likevel ofte lite rom for å prioritere systematisk kollegialt samarbeid, som beskrives som for tidskrevende. Lærere sier på tross av at det at de ofte savner å samarbeide. Hvorvidt lærere har møteplasser, anledninger og meningsfulle oppgaver å samarbeide om er viktig, men kan likevel bare delvis forklare lærernes oppfatninger om samarbeidets betydning

Self-Interest, Markets, and the Four Problems of Economic Life

Book description:The Annual, the journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, offers access to a wide variety of the most recent work in Christian and religious ethics. It is an essential source for student and faculty to keep abreast of new developments in the discipline and to locate sources for research

A Framework to Generate and Label Synthetic/Real Video Data to Feed Temporal Segment Networks

In this project, we propose an action prediction and a data generation pipeline. While, the former makes use of Deep Learning, the latter results in a pipeline that makes possible the generation of real and synthetic data. Moreover, to feed the deep learning method a large amount of annotated data is needed. For this purpose an action tagging tool is also featured. Furthermore, in order to supply the lack of data, we have also proposed a video data augmentation pipeline for action recognition purposes. While the 3DPLab team developed a photorealistic synthetic data generator called UnrealRox, we will use this system working with some sequences recorded with a mocap to generate the necessary synthetic data. We have generated a total of 5 different useful sequences with a complex setup of 3 kinects and a capture motion suit. Finally, we have deployed and tested the novel Temporal Segment Network with the state of the art Action Recognition dataset UCF-101