Black and minority ethnic trainees’ experiences of physical education initial teacher training

The official published version can be accessed at the link below.This report draws together the findings of research that aimed to explore black and minority ethnic (BME) trainees’ experiences of Physical Education (PE) initial teacher training (ITT). Although the numbers of BME trainees opting to enter teaching have improved considerably over the last few years, PE remains one of three specific subject areas where they remain significantly under-represented. Current figures suggest that PE attracts approximately 3% of trainees from BME backgrounds, compared with 11% for new entrants into teaching overall. The relative lack of success in attracting BME trainees into PE teaching compared to other subject areas suggests that the subculture of the subject may be a compounding factor. Over the last decade or so, a number of studies have explored the impact of ethnicity on teachers’ professional socialisation and their experiences as teachers in school, but none have focused on experiences within specific subject cultures. The centrality of the body in PE, and the link between this and the perceived low status of the subject, are influencing factors highlighted in the broader literature, including sports studies. For example, research exploring racism and the under-representation of BME participants in sport has highlighted the prevalence of stereotypical attitudes about their physicality and abilities held by coaches, administrators and spectators. Other research has suggested that some minority ethnic groups favour higher status, better paid, careers in areas such as law or medicine rather than teaching. As yet, there has been little attention to ‘race’ and ethnicity within PEITT, although studies have shown the impact of gender on trainees’ developing professional identities, and how teachers’ gendered bodies are important ‘tools’ of their work. In addition, there has been little research that has acknowledged trainees’ multiple identities, or the complex ways in which ‘race’, ethnicity, class and gender and other identity markers intersect to impact on the professional socialisation process. The research on which this report is based sought to fill some of these gaps in our understandings of BME trainees’ experiences of PEITT, and to identify strategies that might help in their recruitment and retention in the longer term. The research was funded through a small Recruitment and Retention Challenge Grant from the Teacher Development Agency (TDA). These grants form part of the TDA’s wider policy agenda to widen the diversity of new intakes opting into teaching. Higher education institutions have been encouraged, through targets and financial support and incentives, to develop specific strategies aimed at widening the diversity of their cohorts. Examples of such strategies include the provision of specialist admission help for BME prospective trainees; opportunities to gain experience in schools; open days and ‘taster’ events; advertising in the ethnic minority media, and the development of good practice guides and staff training to help ITT providers address issues of ‘race’ and ethnicity. 5 The impetus for this research resulted, in part, from presentations and discussions at a one day PEITT Network1 staff seminar on diversity held in October, 2007. The quantitative research conducted by the Association for Physical Education (AfPE) and the Ethnic Minority Foundation (EMF) presented here, showed the extent of the national under-representation of BME students in PEITT. Although the day focused on addressing reasons for BME under representation and strategies that might be used for improving recruitment, we felt it was also important to learn about the qualitative experiences of trainees that have been attracted into PEITT. Understanding the experiences of our current BME trainees might offer useful insights into how we might recruit and retain future such trainees. Our choice of qualitative research was supported by a national study published shortly after the network day, investigating the links between gender, ethnicity and degree attainment (Higher Education Academy, HEA, 2008), which specifically calls for further qualitative studies of students’ experiences of different subject areas.Funding from the Training and Development Agency (TDA

Integral Human Pose Regression

State-of-the-art human pose estimation methods are based on heat map representation. In spite of the good performance, the representation has a few issues in nature, such as not differentiable and quantization error. This work shows that a simple integral operation relates and unifies the heat map representation and joint regression, thus avoiding the above issues. It is differentiable, efficient, and compatible with any heat map based methods. Its effectiveness is convincingly validated via comprehensive ablation experiments under various settings, specifically on 3D pose estimation, for the first time

Influence of fluoride on the mineralization of collagen via the polymer-induced liquid-precursor (PILP) process.

ObjectiveThe polymer-induced liquid-precursor (PILP) mineralization process has been shown to remineralize artificial dentin lesions to levels consistent with those of native dentin. However, nanoindentation revealed that the moduli of those remineralized lesions were only ∼50% that of native dentin. We hypothesize that this may be due to the PILP process having been previously optimized to obtain high amounts (∼70wt%) of intrafibrillar crystals, but without sufficient interfibrillar mineral, another significant component of dentin.MethodsFluoride was added to the PILP-mineralization of collagen from rat tail tendon at varying concentrations to determine if a better balance of intra- versus inter-fibrillar mineralization could be obtained, as determined by electron microscopy. Nanoindentation was used to determine if fluoridated apatite could improve the mechanical properties of the composites.ResultsFluoride was successfully incorporated into the PILP-mineralization of rat tail tendon and resulted in collagen-mineral composite systems with the mineral phase of hydroxyapatite containing various levels of fluoridation. As the fluoride concentration increased, the crystals became larger and more rod-like, with an increasing tendency to form on the fibril surfaces rather than the interior. Nanomechanical testing of the mineralized tendons revealed that fluoride addition did not increase modulus over PILP mineralization alone. This likely resulted from the separated nature of collagen fibrils that comprise tendon, which does not provide lateral reinforcement and therefore may not be suited for the compressive loads of nanoindentation.SignificanceThis work contributes to the development of minimally invasive approaches to caries treatment by determining if collagen can be functionally mineralized

Development of novel multiplex microsatellite polymerase chain reactions to enable high-throughput population genetic studies of Schistosoma haematobium

© 2015 Webster et al. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. The attached file is the published version of the article

Hyperinsulinemia in African-American Adolescents Compared With Their American White Peers Despite Similar Insulin Sensitivity: A reflection of upregulated β-cell function?

OBJECTIVE—African-American (AA) children are hyperinsulinemic and insulin resistant compared with American white (AW) children. Previously, we demonstrated that insulin secretion relative to insulin sensitivity was ∼75% higher in AA compared with AW children, suggesting that hyperinsulinemia in AA children is not merely a compensatory response to lower insulin sensitivity. The aim of the present investigation was to assess whether glucose-stimulated insulin response is higher in AA versus AW adolescents who have comparable in vivo insulin sensitivity

Educational innovation for infection control in Tanzania: Bridging the policy to practice gap

The incidence of hospital acquired infection in developing countries is between two to 20 times higher than in developed countries and is attributable to multiple causes. Evidence-based international policies and guidelines developed to improve infection prevention and control are often not used in practice in these countries. To combat this challenge, this article presents an innovative educational framework used to bridge the gap between policy written by global health agencies and the realities of practice in Tanzania

Pattern Reduction in Paper Cutting

A large part of the paper industry involves supplying customers with reels of specified width in specifed quantities. These 'customer reels' must be cut from a set of wider 'jumbo reels', in as economical a way as possible. The first priority is to minimize the waste, i.e. to satisfy the customer demands using as few jumbo reels as possible. This is an example of the one-dimensional cutting stock problem, which has an extensive literature. Greycon have developed cutting stock algorithms which they include in their software packages. Greycon's initial presentation to the Study Group posed several questions, which are listed below, along with (partial) answers arising from the work described in this report. (1) Given a minimum-waste solution, what is the minimum number of patterns required? It is shown in Section 2 that even when all the patterns appearing in minimum-waste solutions are known, determining the minimum number of patterns may be hard. It seems unlikely that one can guarantee to find the minimum number of patterns for large classes of realistic problems with only a few seconds on a PC available. (2) Given an n → n-1 algorithm, will it find an optimal solution to the minimum- pattern problem? There are problems for which n → n - 1 reductions are not possible although a more dramatic reduction is. (3) Is there an efficient n → n-1 algorithm? In light of Question 2, Question 3 should perhaps be rephrased as 'Is there an efficient algorithm to reduce n patterns?' However, if an algorithm guaranteed to find some reduction whenever one existed then it could be applied iteratively to minimize the number of patterns, and we have seen this cannot be done easily. (4) Are there efficient 5 → 4 and 4 → 3 algorithms? (5) Is it worthwhile seeking alternatives to greedy heuristics? In response to Questions 4 and 5, we point to the algorithm described in the report, or variants of it. Such approaches seem capable of catching many higher reductions. (6) Is there a way to find solutions with the smallest possible number of single patterns? The Study Group did not investigate methods tailored specifically to this task, but the algorithm proposed here seems to do reasonably well. It will not increase the number of singleton patterns under any circumstances, and when the number of singletons is high there will be many possible moves that tend to eliminate them. (7) Can a solution be found which reduces the number of knife changes? The algorithm will help to reduce the number of necessary knife changes because it works by bringing patterns closer together, even if this does not proceed fully to a pattern reduction. If two patterns are equal across some of the customer widths, the knives for these reels need not be changed when moving from one to the other

Train Positioning Using Video Odometry

Reliable Data Systems have developed a video-based odometry system that enables trains to measure velocities and distances travelled without the need for trackside infrastructure. The Study Group was asked to investigate ways of improving the accuracy of such a system, and to suggest any improvements that might be made. The work performed in the week followed along these strands: (a). Elimination of errors in video odometery induced by pitch and height; (b) Robust calculation of (i) the train velocity and (ii) the track curvature; (c). Accurate determination of the position of a train on a track by assimilating Curvature information; (d). Determining where on UK’s railway map a train journey takes place, based purely on video odometry and (e). Drawing a track map

High-density geometric morphometric analysis of intraspecific cranial integration in the barred grass snake (Natrix helvetica) and green anole (Anolis carolinensis)

How do phenotypic associations intrinsic to an organism, such as developmental and mechanical processes, direct morphological evolution? Comparisons of intraspecific and clade-wide patterns of phenotypic covariation could inform how population-level trends ultimately dictate macroevolutionary changes. However, most studies have focused on analyzing integration and modularity either at macroevolutionary or intraspecific levels, without a shared analytical framework unifying these temporal scales. In this study, we investigate the intraspecific patterns of cranial integration in two squamate species: Natrix helvetica and Anolis carolinensis. We analyze their cranial integration patterns using the same high-density 3-D geometric morphometric approach used in a prior squamate-wide evolutionary study. Our results indicate that Natrix and Anolis exhibit shared intraspecific cranial integration patterns, with some differences, including a more integrated rostrum in the latter. Notably, these differences in intraspecific patterns correspond to their respective interspecific patterns in snakes and lizards, with few exceptions. These results suggest that interspecific patterns of cranial integration reflect intraspecific patterns. Hence, our study suggests that the phenotypic associations that direct morphological variation within species extend across micro- and macroevolutionary levels, bridging these two scales