A Discrimination Aware Model to Predict Childhood Literacy Levels

It is illegal in Ireland to discriminate in the provision of education on the basis of multiple characteristics including gender, race and religion. While the increased use of machine learning models can open multiple avenues to identify early intervention strategies in education, caution must be exercised to ensure that any intervention does not discriminate with respect to a protected class. Poor literacy in childhood can have long term effects as the child ages, including on employment and mental health outcomes. Early intervention is key in mitigating this. In this dissertation, a model was created that predicted the outcome of a literacy test at age 9 based on information about the individual child at ages 9 months, 3 years and 5 years, including their development, parental education levels and literac

The influence of Sport Education on student motivation in physical education

Background: Physical educators are faced with trying to provide motivating and enjoyable experiences in physical education. Sport Education is an instructional model that aims to provide positive motivational sport experiences by simulating the features of authentic sport. Research support for Sport Education is positive, however, the effects on student motivation and the motivational climate are not well understood.Purpose: To investigate the influence of the Sport Education model on student motivation (intrinsic/extrinsic motivation, goal orientations, and perceived motivational climate) in secondary physical education.Setting: Six classes were selected according to teacher and class availability in the sports of soccer, hockey, and football codes in a co-educational government school.Participants: Participants were 115 (male = 97, female = 18) Year-8 students (aged 13-14 years), in a Sport Education condition (n = 41) and a Traditional condition (n = 74).Measures: At pre- and post-test, all participants completed three questionnaires: the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory, the Task and Ego Orientation in Sport Questionnaire, and the Perceived Motivational Climate in Sport Questionnaire.Intervention: Participants completed either a Sport Education condition or a Traditional condition for one double period (100 minutes) one day per week for 10 weeks (Sport Education condition) or for five weeks (Traditional condition). The Sport Education condition incorporated six distinctive features: seasons, affiliation, formal competition, record keeping, festivity, and a culminating event. The Traditional condition used whole-group instruction led by the teacher.Research design: The study used a non-equivalent control group design with pre- and post-test procedures. The independent variable was teaching condition and the dependent variable was student motivation (assessed by intrinsic motivation, goal orientations, and motivational climate). The groups were already established and selected for convenience purposes.Data collection and analysis: Participants completed pre-test measures and then participated in their pre-established classes. Post-test measures were completed in the last class in each condition. A reliability analysis on measures was conducted using Cronach\u27s alphas. A pre-test manipulation check was performed to check for any initial differences in motivation. To compare the difference in changes between conditions on motivation, a series of 2 times 2 repeated measures analyses of variance were conducted. A comparison of the relationship between motivation measures was conducted using Pearson\u27s product moment correlation coefficients.Findings: There was a significant difference between the conditions on changes in perceived competence, task orientation, and mastery climate, with the Traditional condition decreasing significantly from pre- to post-test compared with the Sport Education condition. There were no significant differences on interest/enjoyment, effort/importance, pressure/tension, ego orientation, or performance climate. A mastery climate was positively related to task orientation and intrinsic motivation and a performance climate was related to ego orientation.Conclusions: The Sport Education condition was more successful in maintaining high levels of intrinsic motivation, task orientation, and mastery climate than the Traditional condition. That is, the Traditional condition was associated with a decrease in adaptive aspects of motivation for students, whereas the Sport Education condition maintained existing levels of motivation. <br /

Die sensorische Lateralität als Indikator für emotionale und kognitive Reaktionen auf Umweltreize beim Tier. The use of sensory laterality for indicating emotional and cognitive reactions on environmental stimuli in animals

Zusammenfassung Viele Tiere zeigen eine eindeutige sensorische Lateralität, sprich sie benutzen bevorzugt ein Auge, ein Ohr, oder eine Nüster zur Aufnahme von Sinneseindrücken. Dies korreliert in den meisten Fällen nicht mit der motorischen Lateralität, sondern wird viel mehr durch die einseitige Verarbeitung von Informationen in den jeweiligen Gehirnhemisphären bedingt. So werden emotionale Reaktionen von der rechten, reaktiven Gehirnhemisphäre und rationale Reaktionen von der linken, kognitiven Gehirnhemisphäre gesteuert. Da die Gehirnhälften zum Großen Teil mit den kontrolateralen Sinnesorganen verbunden sind lässt die Seite mit welcher Sinneseindrücke aufgenommen werden Schlüsse auf deren Informationsgehalt zu. So zeigen Tiere bei linksseitiger Aufnahme von Sinneseindrücken vermehrt reaktive, emotionalen Reaktionen, wie etwa bei Angst oder freudige Erregung, und bei rechtsseitig aufgenommene Sinneseindrücke eher rationales, gesteuertes Verhalten. Zudem verstärkt sich die sensorische Lateralität wenn Tiere Stress erfahren, sprich wenn sie wiederholt mit Situationen anthropogenen oder natürlichen Ursprungs konfrontiert werden denen sie nicht gewachsen sind, wie etwa bei unpassenden Haltungs- und Trainingsbedingungen, oder bei unausweichlichem Raubtierdruck und sozialer Konkurrenz. Eine stark ausgeprägte, zunehmende sensorische Lateralität kann daher auf ein beeinträchtigtes Wohlergehen der Tiere hinweisen. Summary Many animals are lateralized when using sensory organs such as the eyes, ears or nostrils. Sensory laterality is not, as previously believed, caused by adjustment to motor laterality, but rather by one sided information processing in the particular brain hemispheres. While the right hemisphere predominantly analyses emotional information, the left hemisphere governs controlled rational, cognitive decisions. Since the brain hemispheres are largely connected with contralateral sensory organs, it is possible to infer how the information may be being interpreted by the side of preferred eye, ear or nostril used. The left eye usually dominates in emotional situations, i.e. fear or positive excitement, and the right eye in rational situations. Moreover, laterality increases when animals are stressed, e.g. when animals are confronted with anthropogenic or natural factors they can not handle, such as unsuitable housing or training conditions or unavoidable predation pressure and social competition. A strong or increasing laterality could therefore potentially indicate welfare issues

Populating the semantic web: combining text and relational databases as RDF graphs

The Semantic Web promises a way of linking distributed information at a granular level by interconnecting compact data items instead of complete HTML pages. New data is gradually being added to the SemanticWeb but there is a need to incorporate existing knowledge. This thesis explores ways to convert a coherent body of information from various structured and unstructured formats into the necessary graph form. The transformation work crosses several currently active disciplines, and there are further research questions that can be addressed once the graph has been built. Hybrid databases, such as the cultural heritage one used here, consist of structured relational tables associated with free text documents. Access to the data is hampered by complex schemas, confusing terminology and difficulties in searching the text effectively. This thesis describes how hybrid data can be unified by assembly into a graph. A major component task is the conversion of relational database content to RDF. This is an active research field, to which this work contributes by examining weaknesses in some existing methods and proposing alternatives. The next significant element of the work is an attempt to extract structure automatically from English text using natural language processing methods. The first claim made is that the semantic content of the text documents can be adequately captured as a set of binary relations forming a directed graph. It is shown that the data can then be grounded using existing domain thesauri, by building an upper ontology structure from these. A schema for cultural heritage data is proposed, intended to be generic for that domain and as compact as possible. Another hypothesis is that use of a graph will assist retrieval. The structure is uniform and very simple, and the graph can be queried even if the predicates (or edge labels) are unknown. Additional benefits of the graph structure are examined, such as using path length between nodes as a measure of relatedness (unavailable in a relational database where there is no equivalent concept of locality), and building information summaries by grouping the attributes of nodes that share predicates. These claims are tested by comparing queries across the original and the new data structures. The graph must be able to answer correctly queries that the original database dealt with, and should also demonstrate valid answers to queries that could not previously be answered or where the results were incomplete

Attractiveness is influenced by the relationship between postures of the viewer and the viewed person

Many factors influence physical attractiveness, including degree of symmetry and relative length of legs. We asked a sample of 112 young adults to rate the attractiveness of computer-generated female bodies that varied in terms of symmetry and leg-to-body ratio. These effects were confirmed. However, we also varied whether the person in the image was shown sitting or standing. Half of the participants were tested standing and the other half sitting. The difference in the posture of the participants increased the perceived attractiveness of the images sharing the same posture, despite the fact that participants were unaware that their posture was relevant for the experiment. We conclude that our findings extend the role of embodied simulation in social cognition to perception of attractiveness from static images

Putting Hybrid Cultural Data on the Semantic Web

A prerequisite for joining the rapidly growing Semantic Web is to expose data as RDF triples. In the cultural heritage world the data in question is very often a mixture of structured database fields and associated textual documents. Transforming relational database (RDB) content to RDF is not altogether straightforward and the issues are examined as a preliminary to the much more difficult step of augmenting the RDB content by extracting structured RDF triples directly from natural language text, using a specially designed txt2rdf process. This opens the way to a true integration of the hybrid data so common in heritage management. Finally we lead up to experimental results showing structured queries (using SPARQL) that cannot be answered from the RDB material alone, but which are satisfied against the augmented graph. In this domain there are potentially vast amounts of textual material available for linking to structured records, so the future possibilities of the techniques described are exciting

e-Research and libraries: a perfect partnership?

Libraries have had long histories with many of the challenges facing e-research including interoperability, metadata creation, sustainability and ensuring that systems meet the needs of client communities.[1] By earmarking academic and research libraries as potential collaborators for e-research projects, both researchers and libraries can maximise limited budgets and draw from the complementary expertise of both sectors. This includes capitalising on existing librarianship knowledge bases such as classification, metadata schemas, ontologies, taxonomies and thesauri. Many of the demands of data management and respository services are similar to the demands of information management, the heartland of librarianship. However, potential benefits increase as other departments within an academic or research library are involved, allowing libraries to capitalise on existing relationships with researchers and exploit the library\u27s interdisciplinary focus and knowledge of projects, policies and networks across the university

The International Librarians Network

The International Librarians Network (ILN) peer-mentoring program is a facilitated program aimed at helping librarians develop international networks. We believe that innovation and inspiration can cross borders, and that spreading our networks beyond our home countries can make us better at what we do. Participants are matched with others outside their country and are supported by regular contact and discussion topics. The ILN is open to anyone working in the library and information industry around the world. The program remains free and the only requirements to participate are an Internet connection, half an hour each week and a desire to build professional connections and learn from colleagues. This poster describes the results of a participant survey conducted during the pilot phase of the program in the first half of 2013

Sensory laterality in affiliative interactions in domestic horses and ponies (Equus caballus)

Many studies have been carried out into both motor and sensory laterality of horses in agonistic and stressful situations. Here we examine sensory laterality in affiliative interactions within four groups of domestic horses and ponies (N = 31), living in stable social groups, housed at a single complex close to Vienna, Austria, and demonstrate for the first time a significant population preference for the left side in affiliative approaches and interactions. No effects were observed for gender, rank, sociability, phenotype, group, or age. Our results suggest that right hemisphere specialization in horses is not limited to the processing of stressful or agonistic situations, but rather appears to be the norm for processing in all social interactions, as has been demonstrated in other species including chicks and a range of vertebrates. In domestic horses, hemispheric specialization for sensory input appears not to be based on a designation of positive versus negative, but more on the perceived need to respond quickly and appropriately in any given situation.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe