Canine-centered interface design: supporting the work of diabetes alert dogs

Many people with Diabetes live with the continuous threat of hypoglycaemic attacks and the danger of going into coma. Diabetic Alert Dogs are trained to detect the onset of an attack before the human handler they are paired with deteriorates, giving them time to take action. We investigated requirements for designing an alert system allowing dogs to remotely call for help when their human falls unconscious before being able to react to an alert. Through a multispecies ethnographic approach we focus on teasing out the requirements for a physical canine user interface, involving both dogs, their handlers and trainers in the design. We discuss tensions between the requirements for the canine and the human users, argue the need for increased sensitivity towards the needs of individual dogs that goes beyond breed specific physical characteristics and reflect on how we can move from designing for dogs to designing with dogs

Saving face: Managing rapport in a Problem-Based Learning group

This qualitative study investigated the complex social aspects of communication required for students to participate effectively in Problem-Based Learning and explored how these dynamics are managed. The longitudinal study of a group of first-year undergraduates examined interactions using Rapport Management as a framework to analyse communication with regard to the concepts of face, sociality rights and interactional goals. Problem-Based Learning requires students to engage in potentially face-threatening interactions as they discuss subjects of which they have little prior knowledge, placing them in situations that require negotiation using face-saving strategies in order to meet objectives to share their learning with others. The study described within this article focuses on the key role of the Problem-Based Learning chair and shows how failure by the chair to manage rapport effectively can influence the quality of group learning. The findings suggest that educators need to understand the complex interactional demands students have to face in undertaking Problem-Based Learning and support students to overcome these difficulties considering the three bases of rapport managemen

Index of National Fundraising Performance: 2009 First Calendar Quarter Results

Analyzes donor transaction data collected through March 2009. Covers the fields of animal welfare, arts & culture, environment, health, human services, international relief, religion, and societal benefit

2008 DonorCentrics Internet Giving Benchmarking Analysis

Over the past three years, Target Analytics, a Blackbaud company, has held a series of annual meetings with a total of twenty-four major national non-profit organizations on the subject of online fundraising. The primary purposes of this effort were to give each participating organization the information needed to benchmark their own online fundraising program performance against that of peer organizations and to provide a forum for sharing best practices about online fundraising techniques and developing a successful integrated marketing strategy.A separate goal of the project was to use the aggregated organization data to derive a set of general discoveries about internet giving in the context of an overall fundraising program. Target published a summary of initial discoveries following the meeting of the first twelve participants in 2006. This document is an update to those findings that incorporates two more years of analysis and giving data from double the number of organizations

Re-centering multispecies practices: a canine interface for cancer detection dogs

We report on participatory design research where interaction designers, and canine behavioral specialists, together with their cancer detection dogs, teamed up to better support the dogs’ life-saving work. We discuss interspecies communication challenges in cancer detection training, requiring the dogs to use human signaling conventions that perturb their detection work. We describe our effort to develop a technology that could resolve those challenges, and how in the process our design focus gradually shifted from a human-centered to a canine-centered interaction model. The resulting interface, based on honest signaling, re-centers cancer detection practices on the dogs themselves, enabling them to better express their potential as cancer detection workers; it also provides a model for re-thinking human-computer interactions

Understanding what principals value about leadership, teaching and learning: A philosophical approach

Contemporary views of educational leadership are increasingly focussed on two aspects of the role of school principals - the affective qualities of school leaders and the attention given to pedagogy within the school. Moral and ethical values are seen as important considerations in the leadership role and in the training of school leaders. Understanding the nature of principal value systems including the processes by which particular values develop is an important area of leadership theorising and empirical research. One way forward in this field is to apply a philosophical approach in which value systems are considered as a manifestation of educational philosophy. With regard to leading pedagogy, effective leadership of teacher instruction and student learning is also contingent on the philosophical orientation of the principal. That is, the influence of the principal on the school's pedagogy is dependent on how strongly the principal values this dimension of the leadership role. The authors contend there is a need to investigate exercise of pedagogic leadership within schools from the perspective of philosophic inquiry - to ask questions about the ontology, epistemology and methodology applied by principals as leaders of teaching and learning in the school

Frame-by-frame annotation of video recordings using deep neural networks

Funding: Scottish Government (Grant Number(s): Marine Mammal Scientific Support Research Program); Homebrew Films; National Research Foundation of South Africa (Grant Number(s): 105782, 90782).Video data are widely collected in ecological studies, but manual annotation is a challenging and time‐consuming task, and has become a bottleneck for scientific research. Classification models based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have proved successful in annotating images, but few applications have extended these to video classification. We demonstrate an approach that combines a standard CNN summarizing each video frame with a recurrent neural network (RNN) that models the temporal component of video. The approach is illustrated using two datasets: one collected by static video cameras detecting seal activity inside coastal salmon nets and another collected by animal‐borne cameras deployed on African penguins, used to classify behavior. The combined RNN‐CNN led to a relative improvement in test set classification accuracy over an image‐only model of 25% for penguins (80% to 85%), and substantially improved classification precision or recall for four of six behavior classes (12–17%). Image‐only and video models classified seal activity with very similar accuracy (88 and 89%), and no seal visits were missed entirely by either model. Temporal patterns related to movement provide valuable information about animal behavior, and classifiers benefit from including these explicitly. We recommend the inclusion of temporal information whenever manual inspection suggests that movement is predictive of class membership.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Second Set of Spaces

This document describes the Gloss infrastructure supporting implementation of location-aware services. The document is in two parts. The first part describes software architecture for the smart space. As described in D8, a local architecture provides a framework for constructing Gloss applications, termed assemblies, that run on individual physical nodes, whereas a global architecture defines an overlay network for linking individual assemblies. The second part outlines the hardware installation for local sensing. This describes the first phase of the installation in Strathclyde University

The Popular Education Network of Australia (PENA) and Twenty-First-Century critical education

Drawing on the philosophies and writings of Paulo Freire regarding education as activism, this paper will explore the history and activities of the Popular Education Network of Australia (PENA). The network, founded in 2009, involves educators, academics and community workers, working together on issues relating to critical pedagogy and social change in schools, communities and adult education contexts. Two symposia have been organised on critical education in Australia. In 2010, ‘Teaching and Learning for Social Justice and Action’ was the inaugural gathering. In 2012, ‘Freire Reloaded: Learning and Teaching to Change the World’ featured a diverse range of workshops and Professor Antonia Darder as keynote speaker and observer. Through the perspectives and experiences of five academics involved in PENA, this paper will explore the group’s activities and reflect on the inspiration drawn from the work of Freire, Darder and others. Creating spaces for discussion of critical pedagogy affords opportunities for academics, educators, teachers and activists to reflect on their practice and also leads to further spontaneous networking and planning of action. In this paper we argue that there is continuing importance, in fact urgency, in producing places and spaces for conscientisation to occur, and for examples of critical education to be shared amongst 21st century educators

Vertebrate Hosts as Islands: Dynamics of Selection, Immigration, Loss, Persistence, and Potential Function of Bacteria on Salamander Skin.

Skin bacterial communities can protect amphibians from a fungal pathogen; however, little is known about how these communities are maintained. We used a neutral model of community ecology to identify bacteria that are maintained on salamanders by selection or by dispersal from a bacterial reservoir (soil) and ecological drift. We found that 75% (9/12) of bacteria that were consistent with positive selection, <1% of bacteria that were consistent with random dispersal and none of the bacteria that were consistent under negative selection had a 97% or greater match to antifungal isolates. Additionally we performed an experiment where salamanders were either provided or denied a bacterial reservoir and estimated immigration and loss (emigration and local extinction) rates of bacteria on salamanders in both treatments. Loss was strongly related to bacterial richness, suggesting competition is important for structuring the community. Bacteria closely related to antifungal isolates were more likely to persist on salamanders with or without a bacterial reservoir, suggesting they had a competitive advantage. Furthermore, over-represented and under-represented operational taxonomic units (OTUs) had similar persistence on salamanders when a bacterial reservoir was present. However, under-represented OTUs were less likely to persist in the absence of a bacterial reservoir, suggesting that the over-represented and under-represented bacteria were selected against or for on salamanders through time. Our findings from the neutral model, migration and persistence analyses show that bacteria that exhibit a high similarity to antifungal isolates persist on salamanders, which likely protect hosts against pathogens and improve fitness. This research is one of the first to apply ecological theory to investigate assembly of host associated-bacterial communities, which can provide insights for probiotic bioaugmentation as a conservation strategy against disease