Teachers' Values and Expectations of Technology in Northern Territory Primary Schools

Educational outcomes are particularly poor for the 43 percent of Australia‟s Northern Territory students who are Indigenous, many of whom lag significantly behind their non-Indigenous peers (see ACARA, 2011.) The heavy investment by many NT schools in computers, interactive whiteboards and other educational technologies can be seen in part as an attempt to ameliorate their inherent disadvantage, thus equalising the learning opportunities in remote locations. Technology is a response to the need to better engage students and improve educational outcomes. This research examined motivational, pedagogical and systemic factors that affect the way technology is used in the classroom. Expectancy-value theory was used as a framework to organise and understand motivations when attempting to integrate technology into their teaching and how their expectation of the technology influenced their pedagogical goals. This research investigated what factors impact teachers‟ perceptions of ICT integration in their classes by looking at skills, practices, attitudes and ability to confidently integrate technology as a teaching tool. Data were gathered through observations of technology-based lessons and semi-structured interviews with teachers in Australia‟s Northern Territory schools. Results showed teachers placed high value on using technology for education; however, expectancy of its success was frequently diminished when teachers perceived barriers beyond their immediate control such as the lack of human resources to support the technology, and a lack of effective professional development resulting in teachers lacking confidence to successfully deliver a technology based lesson

How is Europe positioned for a re-emergence of Schmallenberg virus?

The Schmallenberg virus (SBV) caused a large scale epidemic in Europe from 2011–2013 infecting ruminants and causing fetal deformities after infection of pregnant animals. The main impacts of the virus were financial losses due to animal, meat and semen trade restrictions. Even though effective vaccines were produced, their uptake was never high. This along with the subsequent decline in new SBV infections and natural replacement of previously exposed livestock has resulted in a drop in the number of protected animals. Recent surveillance has found a large population of naïve animals currently present in Europe and the virus circulating at a low level. These changes in animal status in combination with favourable conditions for the insect vectors may open the door to the re-emergence of the virus and another large-scale outbreak in Europe. This review details the potential and preparedness for SBV re-emergence in Europe, discusses possible co-ordinated sentinel monitoring programmes both for ruminant seroconversion and the presence of virus in the insect vectors and provides an overview of the economic impact associated with diagnosis, control and the effect of non-vaccination

PDBe-KB: a community-driven resource for structural and functional annotations.

The Protein Data Bank in Europe-Knowledge Base (PDBe-KB, https://pdbe-kb.org) is a community-driven, collaborative resource for literature-derived, manually curated and computationally predicted structural and functional annotations of macromolecular structure data, contained in the Protein Data Bank (PDB). The goal of PDBe-KB is two-fold: (i) to increase the visibility and reduce the fragmentation of annotations contributed by specialist data resources, and to make these data more findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) and (ii) to place macromolecular structure data in their biological context, thus facilitating their use by the broader scientific community in fundamental and applied research. Here, we describe the guidelines of this collaborative effort, the current status of contributed data, and the PDBe-KB infrastructure, which includes the data exchange format, the deposition system for added value annotations, the distributable database containing the assembled data, and programmatic access endpoints. We also describe a series of novel web-pages-the PDBe-KB aggregated views of structure data-which combine information on macromolecular structures from many PDB entries. We have recently released the first set of pages in this series, which provide an overview of available structural and functional information for a protein of interest, referenced by a UniProtKB accession

New genetic loci link adipose and insulin biology to body fat distribution.

Body fat distribution is a heritable trait and a well-established predictor of adverse metabolic outcomes, independent of overall adiposity. To increase our understanding of the genetic basis of body fat distribution and its molecular links to cardiometabolic traits, here we conduct genome-wide association meta-analyses of traits related to waist and hip circumferences in up to 224,459 individuals. We identify 49 loci (33 new) associated with waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for body mass index (BMI), and an additional 19 loci newly associated with related waist and hip circumference measures (P < 5 × 10(-8)). In total, 20 of the 49 waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for BMI loci show significant sexual dimorphism, 19 of which display a stronger effect in women. The identified loci were enriched for genes expressed in adipose tissue and for putative regulatory elements in adipocytes. Pathway analyses implicated adipogenesis, angiogenesis, transcriptional regulation and insulin resistance as processes affecting fat distribution, providing insight into potential pathophysiological mechanisms

Plant diversity patterns in neotropical dry forests and their conservation implications

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from American Association for the Advancement of Science via the DOI in this record.Seasonally dry tropical forests are distributed across Latin America and the Caribbean and are highly threatened, with less than 10% of their original extent remaining in many countries. Using 835 inventories covering 4660 species of woody plants, we show marked floristic turnover among inventories and regions, which may be higher than in other neotropical biomes, such as savanna. Such high floristic turnover indicates that numerous conservation areas across many countries will be needed to protect the full diversity of tropical dry forests. Our results provide a scientific framework within which national decision-makers can contextualize the floristic significance of their dry forest at a regional and continental scale.This paper is the result of the Latin American and Caribbean Seasonally Dry Tropical Forest Floristic Network (DRYFLOR), which has been supported at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh by a Leverhulme Trust International Network Grant (IN-074). This work was also supported by the U.K. Natural Environment Research Council grant NE/I028122/1; Colciencias Ph.D. scholarship 529; Synthesys Programme GBTAF-2824; the NSF (NSF 1118340 and 1118369); the Instituto Humboldt (IAvH)–Red colombiana de investigación y monitoreo en bosque seco; the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI; Tropi-Dry, CRN2-021, funded by NSF GEO 0452325); Universidad Nacional de Rosario (UNR); and Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET). The data reported in this paper are available at www.dryflor.info. R.T.P. conceived the study. M.P., A.O.-F., K.B.-R., R.T.P., and J.W. designed the DRYFLOR database system. K.B.-R. and K.G.D. carried out most analyses. K.B.-R. R.T.P., and K.G.D. wrote the manuscript with substantial input from A.D.-S., R.L.-P., A.O.-F., D.P., C.Q., and R.R. All the authors contributed data, discussed further analyses, and commented on various versions of the manuscript. K.B.-R. thanks G. Galeano who introduced her to dry forest research. We thank J. L. Marcelo, I. Huamantupa, C. Reynel, S. Palacios, and A. Daza for help with fieldwork and data entry in Peru

‘BOYS MOSTLY JUST WANT TO HAVE SEX’: YOUNG INDIGENOUS PEOPLE TALK ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS AND SEXUAL INTIMACY IN REMOTE, RURAL AND REGIONAL AUSTRALIA

This article seeks to understand Indigenous Australian young people’s relationships and their experiences of sexual intimacy. A cohort of Indigenous 16–25-year-olds from urban, rural and remote communities were invited to participate in a collaborative method involving scenario-based body mapping. In these activities, young people dis cussed the range and complexity of their relationships and how constructions and interpretations of relationships contribute to both positive and negative experiences. These rich understandings provide important insights into adolescent sexuality as ‘multidimensional, socially constructed and negotiated’. However, they also point to the continued gendered power inequalities that subordinate young women’s lives to the desires and control of young me

The need for a comprehensive survey of youth wellbeing in the Northern Territory

There is a lack of comprehensive data available to measure the wellbeing of young people in the Northern Territory which means that programs and policies are developed largely without an evidence base negatively impacting on the relevance and sustainability of these programs. This paper argues that there is a need for a comprehensive survey to be conducted which addresses current gaps in data collection particularly in relationship to the measurement of wellbeing of young people. The need to measure wellbeing is discussed. The types of wellbeing measures and measurement frameworks which could be used are described and recommendations made for the development of a survey

\u27As long as he\u27s coming home to me\u27: vulnerability, jealousy and violence in young people\u27s relationships in remote, rural and regional Australia

Drawn from a sample of 88 Indigenous young people in five locations in urban and remote Northern Australia, this research utilised a combination of qualitative approaches to encourage young people to discuss their ideas about sexual relationships and violence. Indigenous youth discussed highly public displays of violence, as well as violence within intimate settings and the interrelationships between these two arenas. A key finding of this research was that young people described violence as an accepted part of their sexual relationships and this normalisation led to significant tensions in their experiences and management of their everyday relationships. While violence around young people\u27s relationships in remote communities was reported to some extent as being controlled through both the public and controlled form they take, we found that the increasing mobility of young people from remote to urban locations due to education opportunities and the impact of social media can lead to more serious forms of violence and tension in the maintenance of young people\u27s sexual relationships. This contributes new findings to the literature on Indigenous young people\u27s experiences in relationship forming and management, an area that has received little attention in the academic literature

The Need for a Comprehensive Survey of Youth Wellbeing in the Northern Territory

There is a lack of comprehensive data available to measure the wellbeing of young people in the Northern Territory which means that programs and policies are developed largely without an evidence base negatively impacting on the relevance and sustainability of these programs. This paper argues that there is a need for a comprehensive survey to be conducted which addresses current gaps in data collection particularly in relationship to the measurement of wellbeing of young people. The need to measure wellbeing is discussed. The types of wellbeing measures and measurement frameworks which could be used are described and recommendations made for the development of a survey