Internationalisation and Intercultural Skills: Using Role Play Simulations to Build Bridges of Tolerance and Understanding

Although the notion of internationalisation does not have a settled meaning, its main theme focuses on enriching ‘the international dimension’ of the higher education experience. Internationalisation traditionally includes promoting student mobility and embedding international elements in existing curriculum. Yet, in order to achieve true internationalisation, teachers also need to consider how students develop intercultural skills. The literature indicates that it may be difficult to implement learning strategies that achieve these outcomes. In an attempt to fill this gap, this paper evaluates a project that the authors undertook, which utilised role-play simulations in order to build bridges of tolerance and understanding amongst a diverse student cohort. The project reflected an integrative approach that incorporated international elements into the existing curriculum. It was conducted in two stages, commencing with a pilot exercise in an undergraduate law subject taught to business students and concluding with a workshop designed to shed light on some of the challenges underscored by the pilot exercise. In particular, the workshop explored findings that role-play simulations were an effective tool in encouraging students to engage with each other at a disciplinary and personal level, but somewhat less effective in facilitating meaningful intercultural exchange. Both the pilot project and the workshop highlight the need for teachers to build on their role as intercultural facilitators and to innovate and explore all students’ experiences of ‘internationalisation’. Moreover, while educational institutions consider internationalisation to be one of their strengths, more work needs to be done to assist teachers in developing and implementing internationalisation of the curriculum at the subject, course and program levels

KASR: A Reliable and Practical Approach to Attack Surface Reduction of Commodity OS Kernels

Commodity OS kernels have broad attack surfaces due to the large code base and the numerous features such as device drivers. For a real-world use case (e.g., an Apache Server), many kernel services are unused and only a small amount of kernel code is used. Within the used code, a certain part is invoked only at runtime while the rest are executed at startup and/or shutdown phases in the kernel's lifetime run. In this paper, we propose a reliable and practical system, named KASR, which transparently reduces attack surfaces of commodity OS kernels at runtime without requiring their source code. The KASR system, residing in a trusted hypervisor, achieves the attack surface reduction through a two-step approach: (1) reliably depriving unused code of executable permissions, and (2) transparently segmenting used code and selectively activating them. We implement a prototype of KASR on Xen-4.8.2 hypervisor and evaluate its security effectiveness on Linux kernel-4.4.0-87-generic. Our evaluation shows that KASR reduces the kernel attack surface by 64% and trims off 40% of CVE vulnerabilities. Besides, KASR successfully detects and blocks all 6 real-world kernel rootkits. We measure its performance overhead with three benchmark tools (i.e., SPECINT, httperf and bonnie++). The experimental results indicate that KASR imposes less than 1% performance overhead (compared to an unmodified Xen hypervisor) on all the benchmarks.Comment: The work has been accepted at the 21st International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions, and Defenses 201

A Low-Flow Self-Cleaning Drainage System for Fish Rearing Tanks

A float-stopper mechanism was designed to drain fish holding tanks directly from the bottom. Unlike traditional, top-drawn standpipe systems, it allows continuous flushing of settled solid waste. It also prevents the accumulation of these wastes between the two standpipes that are used in bottom-drawn, double-walled standpipe systems. When suspended solids are forced upward between the outer and inner standpipes of such systems, a minimum velocity must be maintained to prevent sediment accumulation. This minimum velocity determines the minimum flow rate through the tank. The system described in this report flushes well over a wide range of flow rates

Experiment K-6-09. Morphological and biochemical investigation of microgravity-induced nerve and muscle breakdown. Part 1: Investigation of nerve and muscle breakdown during spaceflight; Part 2: Biochemical analysis of EDL and PLT muscles

The present findings on rat hindlimb muscles suggest that skeletal muscle weakness induced by prolonged spaceflight can result from a combination of muscle fiber atrophy, muscle fiber segmental necrosis, degeneration of motor nerve terminals and destruction of microcirculatory vessels. Damage was confined to the red adductor longus (AL) and soleus muscles. The midbelly region of the AL muscle had more segmental necrosis and edema than the ends. Macrophages and neutrophils were the major mononucleated cells infiltrating and phagocytosing the cellular debris. Toluidine blue-positive mast cells were significantly decreased in Flight AL muscles compared to controls; this indicated that degranulation of mast cells contributed to tissue edema. Increased ubiquitination of disrupted myofibrils may have promoted myofilament degradation. Overall, mitochondria content and SDH activity were normal, except for a decrease in the subsarcolemmal region. The myofibrillar ATPase activity shifted toward the fast type in the Flight AL muscles. Some of the pathological changes may have occurred or been exacerbated during the 2 day postflight period of readaptation to terrestrial gravity. While simple atrophy should be reversible by exercise, restoration of pathological changes depends upon complex processes of regeneration by stem cells. Initial signs of muscle and nerve fiber regeneration were detected. Even though regeneration proceeds on Earth, the space environment may inhibit repair and cause progressive irreversible deterioration during long term missions. Muscles obtained from Flight rats sacrificed immediately (within a few hours) after landing are needed to distinguish inflight changes from postflight readaptation

Using humanoid robots to study human behavior

Our understanding of human behavior advances as our humanoid robotics work progresses-and vice versa. This team's work focuses on trajectory formation and planning, learning from demonstration, oculomotor control and interactive behaviors. They are programming robotic behavior based on how we humans “program” behavior in-or train-each other

Population Change of Counties and Incorporated Places in South Dakota: 1950-180

This publication is thirteenth in the population update series based on South Dakota\u27s 1980 population. The tables in this report have been assembled to provide a convenient source of population information for the counties and incorporated places of South Dakota. The basic data have been taken from the U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1980 Census of Population � South Dakota PC80-l-A43 and the 1960 Census of Population-South Dakota PC (1) -43A. The figures are final population counts from the various census