Walking Basketball Program: : Evaluation Report for Basketball Victoria

Modified sport programs were initially developed for young children and were aimed at providing an opportunity to participate in a modified version of the adult-based sport. This involved modifying the sport to suit young participants and included changing the equipment, rules and/or physical space, in an effort to make sport more accessible and enjoyable for young children. In the past seven years, this concept has been further developed to cater for adults and older adults, by accommodating those with reduced physical capabilities, such as injury rehabilitation, or for those seeking to re-engage with sport. The most popular iteration has been walking sports. Walking football (soccer) was first developed in the U.K. in 2011, before rugby, netball and basketball organisations similarly modified their rules and game structure, to make sport more accessible for those who do not engage with sport in its traditional format. In most of these walking sport programs, the participants tend to be older adults. The aim of this report was to, firstly, understand current older adult participation trends in basketball, using the Sport and Recreation Spatial project data. The second component of this report was to evaluate Basketball Victoria’s walking basketball program, by evaluating two current programs in the Melbourne metropolitan area. The evaluation involved interviewing the program facilitators and conducting focus groups with the program participants

Camera System Performance Derived from Natural Scenes

The Modulation Transfer Function (MTF) is a well-established measure of camera system performance, commonly employed to characterize optical and image capture systems. It is a measure based on Linear System Theory; thus, its use relies on the assumption that the system is linear and stationary. This is not the case with modern-day camera systems that incorporate non-linear image signal processes (ISP) to improve the output image. Non-linearities result in variations in camera system performance, which are dependent upon the specific input signals. This paper discusses the development of a novel framework, designed to acquire MTFs directly from images of natural complex scenes, thus making the use of traditional test charts with set patterns redundant. The framework is based on extraction, characterization and classification of edges found within images of natural scenes. Scene derived performance measures aim to characterize non-linear image processes incorporated in modern cameras more faithfully. Further, they can produce ‘live’ performance measures, acquired directly from camera feeds

Noise Power Spectrum Scene-Dependency in Simulated Image Capture Systems

The Noise Power Spectrum (NPS) is a standard measure for image capture system noise. It is derived traditionally from captured uniform luminance patches that are unrepresentative of pictorial scene signals. Many contemporary capture systems apply non- linear content-aware signal processing, which renders their noise scene-dependent. For scene-dependent systems, measuring the NPS with respect to uniform patch signals fails to characterize with accuracy: i) system noise concerning a given input scene, ii) the average system noise power in real-world applications. The scene- and-process-dependent NPS (SPD-NPS) framework addresses these limitations by measuring temporally varying system noise with respect to any given input signal. In this paper, we examine the scene-dependency of simulated camera pipelines in-depth by deriving SPD-NPSs from fifty test scenes. The pipelines apply either linear or non-linear denoising and sharpening, tuned to optimize output image quality at various opacity levels and exposures. Further, we present the integrated area under the mean of SPD-NPS curves over a representative scene set as an objective system noise metric, and their relative standard deviation area (RSDA) as a metric for system noise scene-dependency. We close by discussing how these metrics can also be computed using scene-and-process- dependent Modulation Transfer Functions (SPD-MTF)

Foreign Investment in Agricultural Development : The Past of the Present in Zambia

This study grounds a highly charged debate on agriculture in developing countries within economic theory, by establishing a structured analytical framework for considering the potential role of foreign investment in supporting agricultural development. The framework is developed to be time and space neutral, such that it can be utilized in various geographic settings and across different time periods, enabling the assessment of continuity and change over time. The general analytical framework developed is then applied to assess the impact of foreign investment in agriculture in the case of Zambia. The study considers long term impacts of foreign investment in agriculture, atall times seeking to balance the need for historical context with the theoretical underpinnings of the analytical framework. To do this, the study compares the colonial administration of Northern Rhodesia (1924-1964) and the modern multi-party democracy era (1992-2016), two periods of broad openness to foreign investment, while also assessing the post-independence era of the first and second republics (1965-1991). In doing so, the study considers how foreign investment has impacted the development of Zambian agriculture, considers whether the Zambian experience conforms to received theoretical wisdom and assesses the extent to which there exist reoccurring patterns of foreign investment behavior from the colonial era to the present day

Origin of fluids in the shallow geothermal environment of Savo, Solomon Islands.

Savo is a recently emergent volcano. An active geothermal system has been present for at least 50 years, expressed at the surface by numerous hot springs, fumaroles and steaming ground. Samples of water and steam were collected from geothermal features and non-thermal springs and wells, and representative samples of altered rocks and precipitates were collected from geothermal areas. Analysis of the waters for anion, cation and stable isotope composition shows that the waters discharging at the surface fall into two groups Reoka type fluids have the high sulfate, low pH, and enriched δ18O and δD values typical of steam heated acid sulfate waters, where shallow groundwater is heated by rising steam and gas. Isotopically light H2S is oxidised in the near surface environment to produce the sulfate content. Rembokola type fluids have chemistry distinct from the Reoka type fluids, despite the two being found within close proximity (<10 m). Rembokola Type fluids produce a carbonate sinter, so are assumed to be saturated with bicarbonate. The aqueous sulfate has heavy δ34S, suggesting that it is not exclusively produced by the oxidation of H2S in the near surface environment. We suggest that condensation of volcanic gases (including CO2 and isotopically heavy SO2) into meteoric-derived groundwater in the upper levels of the volcanic edifice produces these carbonate–sulfate waters. The presence of SO2 suggests that there is a degassing magma at depth, and potentially a high sulfidation-type epithermal system beneath the steam heated zone

Literature Review: Metacognition in Children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder: A Systematic Review; Empirical Paper: Metacognition in Children: How do the Emergent Awareness Abilities of Prediction, Error Detection and Evaluation Change by Age?

LITERATURE REVIEW Objective: Children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) may struggle with their metacognition due to having poor theory of mind; i.e., their lack of awareness of how others are feeling may also mean they lack self-awareness of their own cognitive strengths and weaknesses. This systematic review collated research that investigated metacognitive skills of emergent awareness (specifically prediction, error detection, and evaluation of own performance on a task) in children with and without ASD. The review addressed the question: do children with ASD have diminished emergent awareness compared to neuro-typical children? Method: Systematic searches were conducted in PsycINFO, Ovid Medline, EMBASE, Cochrane library, and Web of Science databases with specific search terms. Studies were published before December 2018. A total of 1,247 records were identified, which reduced to 620 once duplicates were removed. Screening these by title and abstract resulted in 24 full-text articles being assessed for eligibility. Fourteen were excluded and so ten articles were included in the review. Results: No included articles explored the emergent awareness ability of error detection in children with ASD. The studies suggested children with ASD did not have diminished prediction ability compared to those without ASD, but results were more mixed for the emergent awareness skill of evaluation. Conclusions: Not all components of emergent awareness appear to be diminished in children with ASD compared to typically developing children. Further research is required to address limitations of the lack of valid and reliable measures and experimenter blinding. EMPIRICAL PAPER Objective: Metacognition can be defined as an individual’s knowledge and beliefs about their thinking abilities (metacognitive knowledge) as well as the cognitive processes that monitor and regulate their actions (metacognitive skills). The current study explored children’s metacognitive skills of prediction, error detection, and evaluation (known as emergent awareness), and how these relate to their subjective metacognitive knowledge, in younger (M = 7.55, SD = 0.56) and older children (age M = 11.14, SD = 0.35). Methods: 135 participants (68 in the younger group), recruited from one Secondary School and two Primary Schools, were individually tested on measures of prediction, error detection and evaluation. They also completed a metacognitive knowledge questionnaire measuring their subjective awareness about their learning. Results: Independent t-tests found significant differences between younger and older participants’ predictive, error detecting, and evaluative emergent awareness. The differences suggested older children were more accurate than younger children on tasks of prediction and error detection but not evaluation. Older participants also scored significantly lower on the subjective metacognitive knowledge questionnaire, suggesting younger participants were more confident in their skills and strategies for learning. Correlation analysis found no relationships between the three emergent awareness abilities and metacognitive knowledge at either age, and only a significant difference between the prediction and evaluation correlation coefficients between age groups, suggesting the relationship between these abilities becomes weaker as children get older. Conclusion: This study provides support for the hypotheses that emergent awareness skills become more accurate as children get older, but only for error detection and prediction tasks. Younger children are more confident in their learning and the strategies they use to learn. The results also suggest that all of these abilities are different from each other and may become more differentiated as children get older