The systematic observation of teacher behaviour in physical education : the design of an instrument

Compared with research in classrooms, the teaching of physical education has not proved to be a popular research topic. The reasons for this apparent neglect can be seen in the lack of suitable research instruments to describe the teaching of physical education and the complex technical problems of recording lessons which take place out of doors in large, open spaces. This study set out to design an instrument which could be used to describe the teaching of physical education in any setting (indoors and outdoors). The investigation consisted of three studies. The first was the production of an instrument (BOS 1) with 42 categories which recorded every item of teacher behaviour in a lesson. The system was difficult to learn, required a great deal of time to analyse and was found to be unsuitable for live coding....cont'

Hierarchical Cluster Analysis to Aid Diagnostic Image Data Visualization of MS and Other Medical Imaging Modalities

Perceiving abnormal regions in the images of different medical modalities plays a crucial role in diagnosis and subsequent treatment planning. In medical images to visually perceive abnormalities’ extent and boundaries requires substantial experience. Consequently, manually drawn region of interest (ROI) to outline boundaries of abnormalities suffers from limitations of human perception leading to inter-observer variability. As an alternative to human drawn ROI, it is proposed the use of a computer-based segmenta- tion algorithm to segment digital medical image data. Hierarchical Clustering-based Segmentation (HCS) process is a generic unsupervised segmentation process that can be used to segment dissimilar regions in digital images. HCS process generates a hierarchy of segmented images by partitioning an image into its constituent regions at hierarchical levels of allowable dissimilarity between its different regions. The hierarchy represents the continuous merging of similar, spatially adjacent, and/or disjoint regions as the allowable threshold value of dissimilarity between regions, for merging, is gradually increased. This chapter discusses in detail first the implementation of the HCS process, second the implementa- tion details of how the HCS process is used for the presentation of multi-modal imaging data (MALDI and MRI) of a biological sample, third the implementation details of how the process is used as a perception aid for X-ray mammogram readers, and finally the implementation details of how it is used as an interpreta- tion aid for the interpretation of Multi-parametric Magnetic Resonance Imaging (mpMRI) of the Prostate

Experimental Electron Density and Neutron Diffraction Studies on the Polymorphs of Sulfathiazole

High resolution X-ray diffraction data on forms I–IV of sulfathiazole and neutron diffraction data on forms II–IV have been collected at 100 K and analyzed using the Atoms in Molecules topological approach. The molecular thermal motion as judged by the anisotropic displacement parameters (adp’s) is very similar in all four forms. The adp of the thiazole sulfur atom had the greatest amplitude perpendicular to the five-membered ring, and analysis of the temperature dependence of the adps indicates that this is due to genuine thermal motion rather than a concealed disorder. A minor disorder (1–2%) is evident for forms I and II, but a statistical analysis reveals no deleterious effect on the derived multipole populations. The topological analysis reveals an intramolecular S–O···S interaction, which is consistently present in all experimental topologies. Analysis of the gas-phase conformation of the molecule indicates two low-energy theoretical conformers, one of which possesses the same intramolecular S–O···S interaction observed in the experimental studies and the other an S–O···H–N intermolecular interaction. These two interactions appear responsible for “locking” the molecular conformation. The lattice energies of the various polymorphs computed from the experimental multipole populations are highly dependent on the exact refinement model. They are similar in magnitude to theoretically derived lattice energies, but the relatively high estimated errors mean that this method is insufficiently accurate to allow a definitive stability order for the sulfathiazole polymorphs at 0 K to be determined