From a Distance

An exhibition of very large scale documentary photographs of the Elephant and Castle exhibited at London College of Communication. From a Distance was a commission given to photographer Paul Reas to respond to the regeneration of the Elephant and Castle in south London. Paul Reas was chosen for his track record of personal, socially committed documentary work. From a Distance forms part of the Elephant Vanishes project, a long-term documentation of the changes facing this area. The exhibition was curated by Patrick Sutherland and Paul Reas and co-curated by Monica Takvam and the accompanying catalogue (Fieldstudy 16) was edited by Patrick Sutherland and Monica Takvam, with a commissioned essay by Giles Fraser, the Guardian's "Loose Canon" columnist. Installation shots by Monica Takvam

Dictionary-based lip reading classification

Visual lip reading recognition is an essential stage in many multimedia systems such as “Audio Visual Speech Recognition” [6], “Mobile Phone Visual System for deaf people”, “Sign Language Recognition System”, etc. The use of lip visual features to help audio or hand recognition is appropriate because this information is robust to acoustic noise. In this paper, we describe our work towards developing a robust technique for lip reading classification that extracts the lips in a colour image by using EMPCA feature extraction and k-nearest-neighbor classification. In order to reduce the dimensionality of the feature space the lip motion is characterized by three templates that are modelled based on different mouth shapes: closed template, semi-closed template, and wideopen template. Our goal is to classify each image sequence based on the distribution of the three templates and group the words into different clusters. The words that form the database were grouped into three different clusters as follows: group1(‘I’, ‘high’, ‘lie’, ‘hard’, ‘card’, ‘bye’), group2(‘you, ‘owe’, ‘word’), group3(‘bird’)

Conscious in the Machine: The Plight of the Animal in Industrial Culture

A joint paper on a documentary film in progress by Paul Judge and Bridget Sutherland. We are currently in the process of making a film on animals in relation to industrial culture. We propose to reflect on some of the questions and content arising from this project. The film focuses on animals as sentient beings, conscious of their suffering and loss of freedom within the machine of industrial capitalism. The paper discusses the challenges we face as film-makers in attempting to portray the sheer size of this machine alongside inspiring empathy for animals, respect for species integrity and recognition of their physical and emotional lives. An examination of the nature of sentience will focus on the animal sanctuary as a site of resistance to the animal industrial complex and the parallel attack on wildlife. The aim is not so much to show the visible horrors of techno- industrial farming as to create empathy in the viewer for animals filmed in the process of being rescued or already living out their lives in a sanctuary. In confronting the problems in the representation of the animal, we also intend to explore the psychological foundations of speciesism and the ways in which this ancient form of cultural self-deception is being played out in the mass media. Excerpts from the film will be screened, including interviews with Jeffrey Masson, Lynley Tulloch and footage of rescued farm animals. Paul Judge is a writer and filmmaker and tutors on the Moving Image program at the School of Media Arts, Waikato Institute of Technology. His recent film, Don Driver Magician, screened in the New Zealand International Film Festival in 2013. Bridget Sutherland is a writer, painter and filmmaker and teaches on the arts program at Eastern Institute of Technology, Napier. She has directed a film on NZ musician David Kilgour, Far Off Town: Dunedin to Nashville (2006) and a film on internationally renowned sculptor Anish Kapoor, Infinity on Trial. (2012

Miners

Experimental film. Painted poem on 16mm, with film archive material, transferred to digital video. Based on the poem Miners by Wilfred Owen

Win-Win Labor-Management Collaboration in Education: Breakthrough Practices to Benefit Students, Teachers, and Administrators

Edited by the Rennie Center, written by Linda Kaboolian and Paul Sutherland, and published by Education Week Press, Win-Win Labor-Management Collaboration in Education is a handbook for union leaders, teachers and managers offering innovative best practices on how to reform the collective bargaining process for the benefit of students.Covering topics like "peer review," "pay for performance," and "school intervention processes," this book provides a unique national review of path-breaking collective-bargaining agreements and illustrates how districts and unions are putting their shared interests in students and learning at the forefront of their work together. Strides made by districts throughout the nation are highlighted, as well as best practices implemented in major urban regions.Research for the book was made possible by the Barr Foundation and the Jessie B. Cox Charitable Trust, as well as through generous support from the Noyce Foundation and the Nellie Mae Education Foundation. Production of Win-Win Labor-Management Collaboration in Education is a component of the Rennie Center's multi-year initiative involving research, convening and working with districts to transform professional relationships between superintendents, teacher unions, and school committees

Improving Student Transition and Retention; a Netnographic Insight into Information Exchange and Conversation Topics for Pre-arrival Students.

The relationship between successful transition to university and student retention is well established. Fundamental to this success is the university’s ability to develop evidence-based interventions to support the initial phases of transition. Yet, gaining insight into the initial transitional processes is problematic. This is due to the university transition beginning when the student commences their information search for institutions and courses, rather than after they arrive for induction. Meaningful pre-arrival insights can, however, be acquired when the student begins to communicate their choices through their social media network. The aim of this study was to provide insight to inform proactive transition and retention interventions, by exploring pre-arrival social media communication exchanges. A twenty-one-month netnography of prospective student social media conversations, identified through a hashtag on Twitter and Instagram was undertaken. Thematic analysis of the netnographic data identified four consistent topics of conversation, revealing the expectations and tensions of a cohort from the initial transition stage until induction. This research makes the following contribution; employing proactive induction interventions that are informed by pre-arrival communication insights has the potential to positively impact retention and academic grades

Postsecularity, political resistance, and protest in the Occupy Movement

This paper examines and critically interprets the interrelations between religion and the Occupy movements of 2011. It presents three main arguments. First, through an examination of the Occupy Movement in the UK and USA—and in particular of the two most prominent Occupy camps (Wall Street and London Stock Exchange)—the paper traces the emergence of postsecularity evidenced in the rapprochement of religious and secular actors, discourses, and practices in the event-spaces of Occupy. Second, it examines the specific set of challenges that Occupy has posed to the Christian church in the UK and USA, arguing that religious participation in the camps served at least in part to identify wider areas of religious faith that are themselves in need of redemption. Third, the paper considers the challenges posed by religious groups to Occupy, not least in the emphasis on postmaterial values in pathways to resistance against contemporary capitalism

The Benefits of Artemisinin Combination Therapy for Malaria Extend Beyond the Individual Patient

Garner and Graves discuss the implications of a new study in PLoS Medicine that found that artemisinin combination treatment reduces infectiousnes

Properties of Hot Stars in the Wolf-Rayet galaxy NGC5253 from ISO Spectroscopy

ISO-SWS spectroscopy of the WR galaxy NGC5253 is presented, and analysed to provide estimates of its hot young star population. Our approach differs from previous investigations in that we are able to distinguish between the regions in which different infrared fine-structure lines form, using complementary ground-based observations. The high excitation nebular [SIV] emission is formed in a very compact region, which we attribute to the central super-star-nucleus, and lower excitation [NeII] nebular emission originates in the galactic core. We use photo-ionization modelling coupled with the latest theoretical O-star flux distributions to derive effective stellar temperatures and ionization parameters of Teff>38kK, logQ=8.25 for the compact nucleus, with Teff=35kK, logQ<8 for the larger core. Results are supported by more sophisticated calculations using evolutionary synthesis models. We assess the contribution that Wolf-Rayet stars may make to highly ionized nebular lines (e.g. [OIV]). From our Br(alpha) flux, the 2" nucleus contains the equivalent of approximately 1000 O7V star equivalents and the starburst there is 2-3Myr old; the 20" core contains about 2500 O7V star equivalents, with a representative age of 5Myr. The Lyman ionizing flux of the nucleus is equivalent to the 30 Doradus region. These quantities are in good agreement with the observed mid-IR dust luminosity of 7.8x10^8 L(sun) Since this structure of hot clusters embedded in cooler emission may be common in dwarf starbursts, observing a galaxy solely with a large aperture may result in confusion. Neglecting the spatial distribution of nebular emission in NGC5253, implies `global' stellar temperatures (or ages) of 36kK (4.8Myr) and 39kK (2.9 or 4.4Myr) from the observed [NeIII/II] and [SIV/III] line ratios, assuming logQ=8.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures, uses mn.sty, to appear in MNRA