'Becoming experts': learning through mediation

Purpose – This study is largely founded on Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, Feuerstein’s theory of Mediated Learning Experience and Lave and Wenger’s ‘community of practice’, which concerned building a community of learners that places mediation as central in learning and teaching. While the overall study involved Malaysian Year One English and Mathematics classrooms, this article focuses only on the latter. Two research questions were posed: 1) How does the teacher/peers mediate learning? 2) How does mediation influence the individual’s identity? Method – This qualitative study was conducted within a period of three months. Data collection included intense classroom observations, interviews, classroom discourse and dialogic discussions with teachers and pupils. Microgenetic analyses of transcripts were made to show moment-to moment changes observed.Findings – Four types of mediation emerged from the data : Environmental mediation, cognitive mediation, affective mediation and metacognitive mediation (i.e., an ECAM model for mediation).Findings suggest that mediation enabled the Mathematics teacher to change, to take ownership and to sustain her new pedagogical approaches within the classroom. This re-focusing benefited her pupils, and dramatically changed a particular less able pupil from one who was initially ‘lost in his world,’ into one who was able to engage in the learning process, take ownership of his own learning, as well as mediate other pupils’ learning. Value – Hence it is argued that the ECAM model for mediation provided opportunities for this teacher and her pupil to expand their capacity to learn and develop their identities as individuals capable of learning and becoming ‘experts’

Localised states in the Zhang-Vinals equations

Can the Zhang–Vinals (ZV) equations be used to understand the underlying mechanism that has led, in certain experimental settings, to highly localised, oscillating states within the Faraday wave system? The Faraday wave system has been found to be quite versatile in terms of the patterns that can be formed on the surface of a fluid undergoing vertical vibrations. A simple Faraday wave experiment places a layer of fluid on a rigid, horizontal plate that is vibrated vertically at a certain frequency and acceleration (in a sinusoidal manner). When a critical acceleration (or critical forcing) is surpassed, the patternless surface loses stability to patterns whose symmetry depends on the parameters of the system. The contribution of the Faraday system to the field of fluid dynamics can be measured by the longevity of interest in its rich dynamics, dating from the early recordings of Faraday (1831) to more recent experiments that display a range of fascinating surface patterns. The stability of various patterns that have been observed has been investigated theoretically, and it is evident (see Cross and Hohenberg 1993 and Miles and Henderson 1990 for reviews) that the types of models that aim to describe the Faraday wave system exhibit interesting nonlinear behaviour regarding pattern formation. Most analytical investigations have focused on global patterns (patterns that fill the experimental domain, for example). However, highly localised patterns have been found in the Faraday system that have so far received less attention. Localised patterns that oscillate in time have been termed oscillons (Gleiser, 1994). These oscillons can exist in both a homogeneous and a patterned background, and form as peaks and craters on the fluid surface. Experimentally they have been shown to exist in a variety of situations in both Newtonian (Arbell and Fineberg, 2000) and non-Newtonian (Lioubashevski et al., 1999) fluids. The experiments of Umbanhowar et al. (1996) show that oscillons also exist in granular media with similar characteristics to those excited in fluids. The Zhang–Vinals (ZV) model is a fluid dynamics model that is derived from first principles in the limit of small viscosity (via a reduction of the Navier–Stokes equations) and has been shown to include properties critical to global pattern formation. The ZV model’s potential contribution to the understanding of localised states within the Faraday system has not previously been explored in detail. A derivation is presented in this thesis that closely accounts for the relative sizes of the fluid properties near onset of instability which is supported by results from a linear stability analysis of the Navier–Stokes equations. A previously unidentified scaling assumption was highlighted from the derivation. In order to neglect nonlinear viscous terms in the derivation of the ZV equations, the size of the surface displacement must be small relative to the thickness of the viscous boundary layer near the surface. This may be indirectly related to the “uncontrolled approximation” present in the original derivation (Zhang and Vinals, 1997a,b; Chen and Vinals, 1999). Results from a combination of analytical and numerical techniques are presented to outline a methodology for searching for localised states in the ZV equations. Guided by the experiments of Arbell and Fineberg (2000), the new methodology is presented for localised hexagonal patterns which oscillate harmonically with respect to a two-frequency forcing in the ratio 2:3. A parameter range was found where solutions to numerical simulations of the ZV equations converged to temporally harmonic, localised hexagonal patterns existing among a flat (patternless) background. The localised patterns were distinguished by the number of fully formed peaks present on a local hexagonal lattice. Distinct patterns with 31, 43, and 55 localised peaks were found. The existence of localised solutions in a system describing the Faraday wave phenomenon that is derived from first principles is a new and important result which aids further investigation regarding localised states in the ZV equations. Localised oscillating states have been found in model PDEs which incorporate periodic forcing (Alnahdi et al., 2018), the theory of which may be extended to the ZV system within the parameter range highlighted in the presented work

TennisSense: a multi-sensory approach to performance analysis in tennis

The TennisSense Project, that is run in collaboration with Tennis Ireland, aims to create the infrastructure required to digitally capture physical, tactical and physiological data from tennis players in order to assist in their coaching and improved performance. This study examined the potential for using Wireless Inertial Monitoring Units (WIMU) to model the biomechanical aspects of the tennis stroke and for developing coaching tools that utilise this information. There is significant evidence in the current literature that the ability to accurately capture and model the accelerations, angular velocities and orientations involved in the tennis stroke could facilitate a major step forward in the application of biomechanics to tennis coachin

Defense Monitor: Where is America Going? Five Years After Sept. 11

This special issue of the Defense Monitor is a collection of articles released on the fifth anniversary of September 11th. The collection includes: Where is America Going? Five Years After Sept. 11; In the Name of Fighting Terrorism: The United States is Still Arming the World; The War on Terrorism: Winning the Un-Winnable; Defense Budget Tutorial: So, You Think You Know the Costs of the Wars

Wearable wireless inertial measurement for sports applications

The advent of MEMS inertial sensors has reduced the size, cost and power requirements of 6 Degrees-of-Freedom inertial measurement systems to a level where their use can be considered for wearable wireless monitoring devices. Many applications for such Wearable Wireless Inertial Measurement Units exist in the area of sports and sports science. Such a system would be critical in providing data for the analysis of the kinematic motion data of an athlete - to characterise a player’s technique or track progress and provide accurate, quantitative feedback to player and coach in near real time. A small, lightweight and low power device with the ability to sense the full range of human motion at a high sampling rate is required for such applications. It must also be robust, well sealed and comfortable to wear. Further development and miniaturisation of such devices coupled with progress in energy scavenging may lead to their use in other areas and their near ubiquity, with the potential to be embedded within clothes, buildings, materials, objects and people for health monitoring, location tracking and other purpose

A bayesian meta-analysis of multiple treatment comparisons of systemic regimens for advanced pancreatic cancer

© 2014 Chan et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Background: For advanced pancreatic cancer, many regimens have been compared with gemcitabine (G) as the standard arm in randomized controlled trials. Few regimens have been directly compared with each other in randomized controlled trials and the relative efficacy and safety among them remains unclear