Mission 2007 Training Commons: Developing a Living Curriculum for Telecentre Workers in India

Mission 2007: Every Village a Knowledge Centre was formed to establish telecentres offering shared access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) in each of India's 600,000 villages by the year 2007. The telecentres would support community development and poverty reduction, and would be run by managers trained in specific skill sets that would allow them to serve the diverse needs of the communities they support. The Mission 2007 Training Commons initiative, a collaborative, open content approach drawing on existing trainer expertise, was established to develop resources that could support trainers through a 'living curriculum': materials that were free, accessible online, and easily adapted. The primary objective of the Training Commons case study was to understand and document the practices, processes, successes, and challenges of the partnership and the content development, and to assess the overall impact on stakeholders. Several key learnings were identified that hold relevance to other OER projects, including 1) the role of culture in securing and maintaining open content partnerships, 2) the importance of workflow creation and supports and 3) incorporating user feedback early on to facilitate localization of content and differentiation of content among key types of users; resulting in content that is adaptable and draws on the expertise of multiple partners and individuals

CurriculumNet: Creating Freely Available Curriculum Materials to Meet Uganda's Growing Student Population

The National Curriculum Development Center (NCDC), an office under the Ugandan government's Ministry of Education and Sports has using Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to assist in addressing the curriculum needs of the growing student population in both rural and urban schools in Uganda. With funding from the Canadian International Development and Research Centre (IDRC), the NCDC developed CurriculumNet, the goal of which has been to develop, test, and integrate ICT-based instructional materials and teaching into existing Ugandan curriculum. This report presents key practices and learnings of the CurriculumNet project in terms of its collaborative curriculum development process, as well as the opportunities and challenges faced by the project overall. Through analysis of the projects internal documentation, as well as interviews with the CurriculumNet project leader, this report documents how the project developed and disseminated content to meet curriculum needs while also addressing funding and infrastructure related challenges

Between Policy Making and the Public Sphere: The Role of Rhetoric in Anglo-French Imperial Relations, 1940-1945

The long history of Anglo-French relations has often been acrimonious. After the German defeat of France in June 1940 the right to represent the French nation was contested by Philippe Pétain’s Vichy government and Charles de Gualle’s London-based Free French resistance movement. This thesis will examine the highly complex relationship between Britain and these two competing sources of Frenchness between 1940 and 1945. It will do so through a series of empire-themed “crisis points,” which contributed to a heightened state of Anglo-French tension affecting all three actors. This study uses rhetoric as a means to link decision makers or statesman to the public sphere. It argues that policy makers, whether in the British War Cabinet, de Gaulle’s headquarters at Carlton Gardens, or Pétain’s ministries at Vichy anticipated how their policies were likely to be received by a group or groups of individuals. These were individuals who contributed towards what decision makers believed to be public opinion. Perceptions of public opinion, in other words, played a vital role in policy creation. In turn, the desire to get one or more sectors of the public “on board” with a particular policy or wartime operation gave rhetoric a place of primary importance. Specifically, we will see how policy makers carefully constructed and revised public statements and speeches. When these external communications and explanations are placed side by side with internal official discussions, it will become evident that rhetoric is itself a vital strategic tool. The grammatical constructions and vocabulary that made up official statements and mass media responses shed light on broader wartime themes including victory and defeat, allies and enemies, power, sovereignty, neutrality and morality. Ultimately, acknowledging that rhetoric is an inherent part of policy making allows us to better understand the links between the governing bodies of a nation and those who have a stake in its policies. At the same time, it allows us to see how less tangible normative factors continue to impact this process.The Leverhulme TrustThe University of ExeterThe Royal Historical SocietyThe Economic History SocietySantander Postgraduate Research Fun

AWARENESS, ACCEPTANCE, AND EQUANIMITY: RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN TRAIT MINDFULNESS, STRESS, AND BLOOD PRESSURE

Hypertension (HTN) is associated with stress and unhealthy emotion regulation. Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) are said to help address stress-related diseases like cardiovascular disease by impacting stress and emotion regulation, yet studies of MBIs on cardiovascular health show inconsistent findings. Limited research has examined the basic links between trait mindfulness and cardiovascular health, leaving the active components of MBIs in this context unclear. Therefore, the current study examined the relationship between trait mindfulness and blood pressure (BP) in individuals with pre-hypertension (pre-HTN). Latent variables representing two conceptualizations of trait mindfulness -Monitor and Accept Theory (MAT) and Equanimity- were calculated using facets of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ), and their relationships with BP tested (n=296) using structural equation modeling and moderated multiple regression. Higher equanimity associated with higher BP at a level not reaching clinical relevance, and this relationship was not moderated by stress or mediated by rumination or suppression. Trait mindfulness as described in MAT did not predict lower SBP or DBP. Validity concerns regarding the FFMQ, and the state of the mindfulness research field are discussed in relation to the current study results. Subsequent recommendations for improving trait mindfulness measurement are described

A Study of the Effect of Electrode Dimensions on Scaling Up ERT Applications

Electrical Tomography is a versatile and non-invasive, and robust imaging technique that is vastly applied for both industrial and medical process imaging. One of the crucial factors that influence the quality of image reconstruction is the dimension of electrodes. When implementing ERT in a real industrial setting, the scaling-up procedure from lab-scaled model, is typically based on researchers' past experiences. This work investigates the effect of varying electrode dimensions with respect to the scaled-up dimension on ERT imaging. Sensitivity analysis was done to investigate the effect of the different widths of electrodes. However, the results were found to be inconclusive, as there are insignificant differences in sensitivity magnitudes, regardless of the widths of electrodes. A comparative study for the image reconstruction obtained using different width of a 16electrodes model is used as a platform for this illustration. Results show that images reconstructed produced from the wider electrodes provides better quality in terms of colour contrast and estimation of dimension of the imaged object, using image reconstructed from lab scale model as reference

Measuring the Effect of ITPP on Tumor Hypoxia with Multispectral Optoacoustic Tomography

https://openworks.mdanderson.org/sumexp22/1035/thumbnail.jp

3D tomographic imaging using ad hoc and mobile sensors

The aim of this research is to explore the integration of ad hoc and mobile sensors into a conventional Electrical Resistance Tomography (ERT) system. This is motivated by the desire to improve the spatial resolution of 3D reconstructed images that are produced using ERT. The feasibility of two approaches, referred to as the Extended Electrical Tomography (EET) and Augmented Electrical Tomography (AET) are considered. The approaches are characterized according to the functionality of the sensors on the ad hoc 'pills'. This thesis utilizes spectral and numerical analysis techniques, with the goal of providing a better understanding of reconstruction limitations, including quality of measurements, sensitivity levels and spatial resolution. These techniques are applied such that an objective evaluation can be made, without having to depend heavily on visual inspection of a selection of reconstructed images when evaluating the performance of different set-ups. In EET, the sensors on the pills are used as part of the ERT electrode system. Localized voltage differences are measured on a pair of electrodes that are located on an ad hoc pill. This extends the number of measurements per data set and provides information that was previously unobtainable using conventional electrode arrangements. A standalone voltage measurement system is used to acquire measurements that are taken using the internal electrodes. The system mimics the situation that is envisaged for a wireless pill, specifically that it has a floating ground and is battery-powered. For the present exploratory purposes, the electronic hardware is located remotely and the measured signal is transmitted to the PC through a cable. The instrumentation and data acquisition circuits are separated through opto-isolators which essentially isolates both systems. Using a single pill located in the centre of a vessel furnished with 16 electrodes arranged in a single plane, spectral analysis indicates that 15 of the 16 extended measurements acquired using the adjacent current injection strategy are unique. Improvement is observed for both the sensitivity and spatial resolution for the voxels in the vicinity of the ad hoc pill when comparing the EET approach with the conventional ERT approach. This shows the benefit of the EET approach. However, visual inspection of reconstructed images reveals no apparent difference between images produced using a regular and extended dataset. Similar studies are conducted for cases considering the opposite strategy, different position and orientation of the pill, and the effect of using multiple pills. In AET, the sensors on the ad hoc pills are used as conductivity probes. Localized conductivity measurements provide conductivity values of the voxels in a discretized mesh of the vessel, which reduces the number of unknowns to be solved during reconstruction. The measurements are incorporated into the inverse solver as prior information. The Gauss-Newton algorithm is chosen for implementation of this approach because of its non-linear nature. Little improvement is seen with the inclusion of one localized conductivity measurement. The effect on the neighbouring voxels is insignificant and there is a lack of control over how the augmented measurement influences the solution of its neighbouring voxels. This is the first time that measurements using ad hoc and 'wireless' sensors within the region of interest have been incorporated into an electrical tomography system.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Analysis of Surface Electromyography for On-Off Control

Myogram on-and-off controller is important for improving or assisting the elderly people. One of the most important aspects of the controller development is to determine the on and off time with respect to the body movement. In this project, high accuracy signal filtering, high gain amplifier, signal converter, microcontroller and electrodes are used for circuit simulation and development to obtain muscle signal (Electromyogram). Precision rectifier is used to solve the ordinary semiconductor problem to avoid signal block. To ensurethe user-friendliness in the development of this device, non-invasive electrodes are used in this project instead of invasive electrodes