Rethinking multiculturalism, reassessing multicultural education report 2

Rethinking Multiculturalism/Reassessing Multicultural Education Project Report Number 2: Perspectives on Multiculturalism is the second report of Rethinking Multiculturalism/Reassessing Multicultural Education (RMRME), an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Project between the University of Western Sydney (UWS), the NSW Department of Education and Communities (DEC) and the Board of Studies, Teaching and Educational Standards (BOSTES) incorporating the former NSW Institute of Teachers (NSWIT) and the Board of Studies. It follows an earlier report, Rethinking Multiculturalism/Reassessing Multicultural Education Project Report Number 1: Surveying NSW Public School Teachers and will be followed by a final report Rethinking Multiculturalism/Reassessing Multicultural Education Project Report Number 3: Knowledge Translation and Action Research. This second report provides an analysis of 42 focus groups involving a total of 222 parents, teachers and students in the 14 targeted schools. These included primary and secondary schools from a range of contexts: urban and rural, high and low socio-economic status (SES), and high and low levels of cultural diversity (see Table 1, p.9). The views recounted here are not intended to be representative of the schools themselves (which remain anonymous) nor of teachers, parents and students in NSW as a whole. Nevertheless, they provide a useful record of diverse perspectives to be found across NSW schools regarding multiculturalism and multicultural education. The report documents the complex array of cultural backgrounds and forms of identification amongst students, parents and teachers in NSW public schools, which challenges conventional wisdom about the nature of cultural diversity. It finds, however, that there is something of a mismatch between this complexity and teachers’ experience and expertise in multicultural education

Disposed to Acts

A review of Bernard Lahire, The Plural Actor (Polity 2010)

The Face of Evil: Demonising the Arab Other in Contemporary Australia

The ‘face of evil’ has become a recurring image in recent years in accounts of international terrorism. Yet it has also become a frequent figure in debates around ‘ethnic crime’ and ‘race rape’. It is a motif that demonstrates the ethnicisation of a moralised discourse of good and evil, particularly in the face of religious fundamentalism and moral panic around men of Arabic or Muslim background. The physicality of evil is often obscured in abstract discussions of moral panic. The face of evil ‘fixes’ evil in terms of a certain appearance and manner that are evidence of a deeper ‘truth’ of moral danger

Rethinking multiculturalism, reassessing multicultural education report 1

This report provides insights into the current practices of multicultural education and the opinions and understandings of New South Wales (NSW) public school teachers around increasing cultural and linguistic diversity in schools and the broader Australian community. The report is the outcome of the first stage of the Rethinking Multiculturalism/ Reassessing Multicultural Education (RMRME) Project, a three-year Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Project between the University of Western Sydney, the NSW Department of Education and Communities (DEC) and the NSW Institute of Teachers. Surveying teachers about these and related matters seemed a useful first step in considering the state of multicultural education some forty years after its inception (Inglis, 2009). The project as a whole involved a state-wide survey – the focus of this report – as well as focus groups with teachers, parents and students in 14 schools in urban and regional NSW, and a professional learning program informing the implementation of action research projects in each school. Read also: Rethinking multiculturalism, reassessing multicultural education report 2: http://apo.org.au/node/42670 Rethinking multiculturalism, reassessing multicultural education report 3: http://apo.org.au/node/42671 &nbsp

Local Capacity for Energy Transition in Northern and Indigenous Communities: Analysis of Gwich’in Communities in Northwest Territories, Canada

Introducing local renewable energy solutions into the fossil fuel dominated energy mix of many northern and off-grid Indigenous communities has the potential to create new socio-economic opportunity and address historical energy injustices. However, energy systems are comprised not only of technology and infrastructure but also the communities who generate, use, and benefit from energy. The design of local energy systems that are community appropriate thus requires an understanding of a community’s socio-technical capacity, coupled with an understanding of the social processes that stimulate and sustain transitions and the longer-term, desired outcomes from local energy. This paper explores the socio-technical capacity for renewable energy transitions in northern and Indigenous communities, based on a case study of four Gwich’in communities in the Northwest Territories, Canada. Results show that the foundational attributes of socio-technical capacity for energy transition in northern communities are interconnected, and strengths or challenges in one area often reflect strengths or challenges in another. Several capacity strengths already exist to support energy transition, including community energy values inclusive of community vision and the embedded and transferable skillsets of communities, coupled with next generation leaders. In turn, there are areas where significant capacity building is required, including supports for local energy champion(s) and enabling inter-local energy networks. Results also demonstrate that recent scholarly literature regarding local capacity for community energy does not tightly align with, or reflect the nuances of, energy transition needs in northern and Indigenous communities

Statistical Region Based Segmentation of Ultrasound Images

Segmentation of ultrasound images is a challenging problem due to speckle, which corrupts the image and can result in weak or missing image boundaries, poor signal to noise ratio, and diminished contrast resolution. Speckle is a random interference pattern that is characterized by an asymmetric distribution as well as significant spatial correla- tion. These attributes of speckle are challenging to model in a segmentation approach, so many previous ultrasound segmentation methods simplify the problem by assuming that the speckle is white and/or Gaussian distributed. Unlike these methods, in this paper we present an ultrasound-specific segmentation approach that addresses both the spatial correlation of the data as well as its intensity distribution. We first decorrelate the image and then apply a region-based active contour whose motion is derived from an appropri- ate parametric distribution for maximum likelihood image segmentation. We consider zero-mean complex Gaussian, Rayleigh, and Fisher-Tippett flows, which are designed to model fully formed speckle in the in-phase/quadrature (IQ), envelope detected, and display (log compressed) images, respectively. We present experimental results demon- strating the effectiveness of our method, and compare the results to other parametric and non-parametric active contours

Advancing local energy transitions: A global review of government instruments supporting community energy

The adoption and encouragement of community energy, that is, the incentive to develop renewable energy projects with community participation and ownership, is a key ingredient of energy transition. Government policies and other instruments can pose both barriers and opportunities for community energy development; however, there has been little analysis of the state of research on the range of government tools to facilitate energy transition and the implications of these instruments for community energy. This paper analyses the current scholarly research on government instruments for community energy, focusing on the multiple scales of governance. Our analysis identified 108 articles addressing government instruments and community energy. Research addressing government instruments and community energy has increased substantially in recent years, with most of the emphasis on national or state instruments, situated in the European context, and focused on grid-connected communities. We identified four global categories of government tools designed to support community energy: payment-based, grid access, environmental protection and community planning and capacity. Within these categories, nineteen different government instruments emerged with tools for financial support, feed-in-tariffs, grid services, and fiscal incentives receiving the most attention. Findings emphasize the need for further research on community-focused instruments for renewable energy, the importance of coordination between levels of government to support such instruments, and analysis of the suitability of current instruments for community-appropriate energy solutions in remote and off-grid communities."This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Grant no. 895-2019-1007, and Mitacs. We wish to acknowledge the Community Appropriate Sustainable Energy Security (CASES) partnership for supporting this work."https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221462962100441

The Impact of a Poverty Reduction Intervention on Infant Brain Activity

Early childhood poverty is a risk factor for lower school achievement, reduced earnings, and poorer health, and has been associated with differences in brain structure and function. Whether poverty causes differences in neurodevelopment, or is merely associated with factors that cause such differences, remains unclear. Here, we report estimates of the causal impact of a poverty reduction intervention on brain activity in the first year of life. We draw data from a subsample of the Baby's First Years study, which recruited 1,000 diverse low-income mother–infant dyads. Shortly after giving birth, mothers were randomized to receive either a large or nominal monthly unconditional cash gift. Infant brain activity was assessed at approximately 1 y of age in the child's home, using resting electroencephalography (EEG; n = 435). We hypothesized that infants in the high-cash gift group would have greater EEG power in the mid- to high-frequency bands and reduced power in a low-frequency band compared with infants in the low-cash gift group. Indeed, infants in the high-cash gift group showed more power in high-frequency bands. Effect sizes were similar in magnitude to many scalable education interventions, although the significance of estimates varied with the analytic specification. In sum, using a rigorous randomized design, we provide evidence that giving monthly unconditional cash transfers to mothers experiencing poverty in the first year of their children's lives may change infant brain activity. Such changes reflect neuroplasticity and environmental adaptation and display a pattern that has been associated with the development of subsequent cognitive skills

The Other America: A Photographic Journal

Catalog for the exhibition The Other America: A Photographic Journal held at the Seton Hall University Walsh Gallery, November 1 - December 17, 2004. Curated by Ellen Denuto. Includes essay and color illustrations