Nebulous goobledegook : the politics of (re)learning how and what to teach in Australia

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Socially inclusive teaching: belief, design, action as pedagogic work

Like other western nations such as the United States and the United Kingdom, Australia’s record of education outcomes for marginalized groups is troubling, whether the comparisons are made within the nation or with other OECD nations. Although recent Australian Governments have sought to overhaul funding for schools and universities, on their own, more resources for educational institutions are not enough to redress problems of disadvantage and to achieve social justice. Also required is a focus on the pedagogic work (PW) of teachers and, by implication, their teacher educators. Central to this article is the argument that pedagogy is the most strategic place to begin this work because of its location as a central message system in education. In this article we conceive of PW as comprising of belief, design, and action. From these are derived three principles on which to build a socially inclusive pedagogy that creates opportunities for all students, whatever their circumstances, to participate more fully in education. Our focus on advancing a conceptual understanding of socially inclusive pedagogy is informed by a theory and politics of transformation, which seek to engage with the deep structures that generate injustice within schools and teacher education

Leveraging L2 academic writing: Digital translanguaging in higher education

Although the literature on computer-assisted language learning has demonstrated that digital tools such as online translators offer affordances to second or foreign language writers of English to solve lexical and syntactic issues, the extent to which digital technology supports multilingual students in producing academic texts has been underexplored. In this study we investigate what digital technology enables and does not enable students to do in communicating meaning by examining the writing experiences of two multilingual students. The data were derived through screen sharing and online stimulated recall interviews and analyzed using the concept of digital translanguaging, which focuses on meaning making using students’ entire meaning making repertoire. The findings suggest digital translanguaging afforded students to self-resolve their linguistic issues to varying degrees. However, it also became evident that these affordances hit a wall at a certain point beyond which no further progress could be made, constraining their ability to communicate intended ideas in L2. We conclude by providing insights into instructional and strategic support to effectively support multilingual students to offer greater opportunities to achieve their communication goals and create equitable higher education spaces.&nbsp

The reporting experiences and support needs of victims of online fraud

Although fraud has been practiced throughout history, the advent of the internet has created new and effective avenues for targeting potential victims. Victims of online fraud experience substantial financial and other harms, resulting in annual losses in Australia of more than $2b, significant organisational disruption and devastating human suffering. Prior research in this area has generally been conducted through victim surveys and the analysis of official administrative datasets, but little research has involved speaking with victims of online fraud about their experiences. This paper presents the results of in-depth interviews conducted with a sample of 80 individuals from across Australia who lodged complaints of online fraud involving losses of$10,000 or more over the preceding four years. Their stories illustrate the financial impact of fraud and the emotional, psychological, interpersonal and physical impacts of their victimisation. They also document the barriers they faced in reporting these crimes. The paper concludes by identifying the support needs of victims of online fraud. Online fraud poses a substantial threat to the financial and overall wellbeing of Australians. An estimated $8m to$10m is sent overseas every month by Australians as a result of dishonest online invitations (Bradley 2013). The latest report of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC 2015) indicates that Australians reported the loss of almost $82m to consumer fraud in 2014; this estimate is based only on reports made to the ACCC and excludes reports made to other organisations and the many cases that are not officially reported. The Australian Institute of Criminology estimates fraud costs Australian victims in excess of$6b a year, and online fraud is responsible for a considerable proportion of this amount (Smith, Jorna, Sweeney & Fuller 2014). The present study explores the nature of these harms, victims’ experiences of reporting to authorities, how victims deal with their fraud victimisation and what support they require to do so. Fraud involves tricking a victim into providing something of value to an offender such as money, personal details, or explicit images. The technological advances of recent years have seen opportunities and mechanisms for perpetrating fraud proliferate. The internet is one of the principal tools for committing consumer or personal fraud. It provides an efficient means of contacting potential victims, a rich source of personal information and a practical way of securing payments. Consequently, online fraud has developed considerably over the past two decades. Online fraud victimisation can be defined as ‘the experience of an individual who has responded via the internet to a dishonest invitation, request, notification or offer by providing personal information or money [which] has led to the suffering of a financial or non-financial loss or impact of some kind’ (Cross, Smith & Richards 2014:1)

Sex, Age, and Breed Related Changes in Bovine Testosterone and Intramuscular Collagen

Castration of the male in meat-producing animals has long been a traditional practice in the production of commercial livestock. Numerous research studies have indicated that intact bovine males grow more rapidly, utilize feed more efficiently, and produce a higher yielding carcass than castrates. Even though young bulls have obvious growth and leanness advantages over steers, their meat is usually lower and more variable in tenderness than steers. These differences in tenderness have been attributed to differences in fatness or differences in connective tissue. Factors influencing the amount and strength of intramuscular collagen have been linked to animal age, sex, and breed. The literature strongly indicates that collagen solubility decreases significantly with animal age and that most of these changes take place from birth to about 2 years of age. Results have illustrated that the age-related changes in tenderness are significantly more pronounced in bulls than in steers and heifers, particularly in muscles high in collagen. These findings suggest that age-related changes in the cross-linking of collagen might be related to the sex of the animals. Several workers reported an increase in collagen content in young bulls at about 12 months of age. Others have suggested that the increase in collagen content at this age, which was accompanied by an increased solubility, was due to an increase in collagen synthesis related to the hormonal changes occurring during puberty in young bulls. The objective of this phase of our research was to investigate the influence of animal age, breed, and sex condition (bull vs steer) on the content and solubility of intramuscular collagen using muscle biopsies in the longissimus muscle

Assessing Change in a Personality Profile

We tested the validity of 6 methods (mean difference, variance difference, bivariate, profile agreement, pattern similarity, and intraclass) to assess change in a personality profile. During their first 2 months of college, 372 students completed reactive and spontaneous measures of their personality. Eight weeks later, 300 returned to complete a second set of the same measures and noted change in their spontaneous personality list. Sixty participants returned during their second semester to complete a third set of assessments. The bivariate and intraclass change coefficients showed consistent convergent, discriminant, and concurrent validity across time points. Recommendations and caveats for using these coefficients are discussed

First-principles DFT Insights into the adsorption of hydrazine on bimetallic β1-NiZn catalyst: implications for direct hydrazine fuel cells

We present a systematic first-principles density functional theory study with dispersion corrections (DFT-D3) of hydrazine adsorption on the experimentally observed (111), (110) and (100) surfaces of the binary β1-NiZn alloy. A direct comparison has been drawn between the bimetallic and monometallic Ni and Zn counterparts to understand the synergistic effect of alloy formation. The hydrazine adsorption mechanism has been characterised through adsorption energies, Bader charges, the d-band centre model, and the coordination number of the active site - which is found to dictate the strength of the adsorbate-surface interaction. The bimetallic β1-NiZn nanocatalyst is found to exhibit higher activity towards adsorption and activation of hydrazine compared to the monometallic Ni and Zn counterparts. The Ni-sites of the bimetallic NiZn surfaces are found to be generally more reactive than Zn sites, which is suggested to be due to the higher d-band centre of -0.13 eV (closer to the Fermi level), forming higher energy anti-bonding states through Ni-N interactions. The observed synergistic effects derived from surface composition and electronic structure modification from Ni and Zn alloying should provide new possibilities for the rational design and development of low-cost bimetallic Ni-Zn alloy catalysts for direct hydrazine fuel cell (DHFC) applications

Completeness II: A signal-to-noise approach for completeness estimators applied to galaxy magnitude-redshift surveys

This is the second paper in our completeness series which addresses some of the issues raised in the previous article by Johnston, Teodoro & Hendry (2007) in which we developed statistical tests for assessing the completeness in apparent magnitude of magnitude-redshift surveys defined by two flux limits. The statistics, Tc and Tv, associated with these tests are non-parametric and defined in terms of the observed cumulative distribution function of sources; they represent powerful tools for identifying the true flux limit and/or characterising systematic errors in magnitude-redshift data. In this paper we present a new approach to constructing these estimators that resembles an "adaptive smoothing" procedure - i.e. by seeking to maintain the same amount the information, as measured by the signal-to-noise ratio, allocated to each galaxy. For consistency with our previous work, we apply our improved estimators to the Millennium Galaxy Catalogue (MGC) and the Two Degree Field Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS) data, and demonstrate that one needs to use a signal-to-noise appropriately tailored for each individual catalogue to optimise the performance of the completeness estimators. Furthermore, unless such an adaptive procedure is employed, the assessment of completeness may result in a spurious outcome if one uses other estimators present in the literature which have not been designed taking into account "shot noise" due to sampling.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, MNRAS accepte

Improved workflow for quantification of left ventricular volumes and mass using free-breathing motion corrected cine imaging.

BACKGROUND: Traditional cine imaging for cardiac functional assessment requires breath-holding, which can be problematic in some situations. Free-breathing techniques have relied on multiple averages or real-time imaging, producing images that can be spatially and/or temporally blurred. To overcome this, methods have been developed to acquire real-time images over multiple cardiac cycles, which are subsequently motion corrected and reformatted to yield a single image series displaying one cardiac cycle with high temporal and spatial resolution. Application of these algorithms has required significant additional reconstruction time. The use of distributed computing was recently proposed as a way to improve clinical workflow with such algorithms. In this study, we have deployed a distributed computing version of motion corrected re-binning reconstruction for free-breathing evaluation of cardiac function. METHODS: Twenty five patients and 25 volunteers underwent cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) for evaluation of left ventricular end-systolic volume (ESV), end-diastolic volume (EDV), and end-diastolic mass. Measurements using motion corrected re-binning were compared to those using breath-held SSFP and to free-breathing SSFP with multiple averages, and were performed by two independent observers. Pearson correlation coefficients and Bland-Altman plots tested agreement across techniques. Concordance correlation coefficient and Bland-Altman analysis tested inter-observer variability. Total scan plus reconstruction times were tested for significant differences using paired t-test. RESULTS: Measured volumes and mass obtained by motion corrected re-binning and by averaged free-breathing SSFP compared favorably to those obtained by breath-held SSFP (r = 0.9863/0.9813 for EDV, 0.9550/0.9685 for ESV, 0.9952/0.9771 for mass). Inter-observer variability was good with concordance correlation coefficients between observers across all acquisition types suggesting substantial agreement. Both motion corrected re-binning and averaged free-breathing SSFP acquisition and reconstruction times were shorter than breath-held SSFP techniques (p \u3c 0.0001). On average, motion corrected re-binning required 3 min less than breath-held SSFP imaging, a 37 % reduction in acquisition and reconstruction time. CONCLUSIONS: The motion corrected re-binning image reconstruction technique provides robust cardiac imaging that can be used for quantification that compares favorably to breath-held SSFP as well as multiple average free-breathing SSFP, but can be obtained in a fraction of the time when using cloud-based distributed computing reconstruction