Applied linguistics and mathematics education: More than words and numbers

The preceding set of papers has explored various aspects of the role of language in mathematics education. The papers reflect the work of individual contributors. An important part of our collaboration, however, has been the conversation between us. This paper reflects aspects of that conversation, as we draw together some of the themes that have emerged during our work. In particular, we discuss some of the implications of our analyses for theory, policy, practice and inter-disciplinarity in mathematics education and applied linguistics

3D Reconstruction through Segmentation of Multi-View Image Sequences

We propose what we believe is a new approach to 3D reconstruction through the design of a 3D voxel volume, such that all the image information and camera geometry are embedded into one feature space. By customising the volume to be suitable for segmentation, the key idea that we propose is the recovery of a 3D scene through the use of globally optimal geodesic active contours. We also present an extension to this idea by proposing the novel design of a 4D voxel volume to analyse the stereo motion problem in multi-view image sequences

A comparative study on the strengths and weaknesses of the students between China and Hong Kong

In August 1999, three lecturers and fourteen students of Zhejiang University of Technology (ZUT) and Hangzhou Institute Applied Engineering (HIAE) were invited by the Department of Electrical & Communications Engineering (EE) of Institute of Vocational & Education Tsing Yi (IVE/TY) coming to Hong Kong for a Student Exchange Summer Camp. Joining the camp were seven year 1 Higher Diploma students from the EE department. The objectives of the camp were three folds: (a) to find out any difference in the command of English for the post secondary school students from China and Hong Kong; (b) to substantiate an effective means for the learning of Putonghu ; and (c) to investigate the practical skills and mentality of these students. A series of activitie s were organized for the students and their performances in all activities were analyzed to achieve the objectives of the comparative study for these two groups of students

Enhanced hydrogen storage in Ni/Ce composite oxides

The properties of dried (but not calcined) coprecipitated nickel ceria systems have been investigated in terms of their hydrogen emission characteristics following activation in hydrogen. XRD and BET data obtained on the powders show similarities to calcined ceria but it is likely that the majority of the material produced by the coprecipitation process is largely of an amorphous nature. XPS data indicate very little nickel is present on the outermost surface of the particles. Nevertheless, the thermal analytical techniques (TGA, DSC and TPD-MS) indicate that the hydrogen has access to the catalyst present and the nickel is able to generate hydrogen species capable of interacting with the support. Both unactivated and activated materials show two hydrogen emission features, viz. low temperature and high temperature emissions (LTE and HTE, respectively) over the temperature range 50 and 500 °C. A clear effect of hydrogen interaction with the material is that the activated sample not only emits much more hydrogen than the corresponding unactivated one but also at lower temperatures. H2 dissociation occurs on the reduced catalyst surface and the spillover mechanism transfers this active hydrogen into the ceria, possibly via the formation and migration of OH− species. The amount of hydrogen obtained (0.24 wt%) is 10× higher than those observed for calcined materials and would suggest that the amorphous phase plays a critical role in this process. The affiliated emissions of CO and CO2 with that of the HTE hydrogen (and consumption of water) strongly suggests a proportion of the hydrogen emission at this point arises from the water gas shift type reaction. It has not been possible from the present data to delineate between the various hydrogen storage mechanisms reported for ceria

Component-based car detection in street scene images

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (p. 67-71).Recent studies in object detection have shown that a component-based approach is more resilient to partial occlusions of objects, and more robust to natural pose variations, than the traditional global holistic approach. In this thesis, we consider the task of building a component-based detector in a more difficult domain: cars in natural images of street scenes. We demonstrate reasonable results for two different component-based systems, despite the large inherent variability of cars in these scenes. First, we present a car classification scheme based on learning similarities to features extracted by an interest operator. We then compare this system to traditional global approaches that use Support Vector Machines (SVMs). Finally, we present the design and implementation of a system to locate cars based on the detections of human-specified components.by Brian Leung.M.Eng