Academic achievement in male secondary students : a thesis in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology

This study explored academic underachievement of fourth form boys in male secondary schools within the Auckland area. There were two aspects to this study; firstly, to identify students who are underachieving relative to their abilities and secondly, to explore possible psychological differences between underachievers and non-underachievers. An underachiever for the purpose of this study is a student who is achieving lower grades than expected in accordance with his abilities (McCall, Evahn & Kratzer, 1992). 598 of the 770 students enrolled in the participating schools had the necessary data for regression analyses to identify underachievers. Of the 598 students with valid data, 315 consented to participate in the questionnaire. The sample for this study comprised 315 fourth form boys. A discrepancy model using regression analysis was carried out on the 315 students to identify underachievers within the schools. 82 students were identified as underachievers using this method, which resulted in 13.9% of the sample being defined as underachievers. In addition, a self-report questionnaire was administered to the 770 students. The questionnaire measured six psychological dimensions that have been identified in previous research to be related to academic achievement. The responses of the underachieves and non-underachievers were compared to ascertain whether these two groups differ on the psychological dimensions measured. These psychological constructs measured in the questionnaire included study strategies (cognitive/self-regulation, persistence/effort, and disorganisation), social support, self- efficacy, test anxiety, intrinsic motivation/interest in school subjects, and outcome expectancies. There was a significant mean difference between non-underachievers and underachievers on the disorganisation scale. This finding suggests that underachievers had more disorganised study habits than their non-underachieving comparison group. There were also significant mean differences between underachievers and non-underachievers for intrinsic value in English and science. These findings suggested that underachievers were more intrinsically motivated in English than their non-underachieving comparison group, but less intrinsically motivated in Science

Establishment of quality and reliability standards and development of screening techniques for MOS microelectronic devices Final report

Quality and reliability standard development and screening test results for MOS microelectronic device

On the Resurrection of the Body: Discussion with Trenton Merricks

In a recent discussion, Trenton Merricks concludes that we cannot understand how God might miraculously bring it about that there will be the resurrection of the body. It is contended to the contrary, that it is not utterly mysterious how God might give us our bodies bac

Beat histogram features from NMF-based novelty functions for music classification

In this paper we present novel rhythm features derived from drum tracks extracted from polyphonic music and evaluate them in a genre classification task. Musical excerpts are analyzed using an optimized, partially fixed Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) method and beat histogram features are calculated on basis of the resulting activation functions for each one out of three drum tracks extracted (Hi-Hat, Snare Drum and Bass Drum). The features are evaluated on two widely used genre datasets (GTZAN and Ballroom) using standard classification methods, concerning the achieved overall classification accuracy. Furthermore, their suitability in distinguishing between rhythmically similar genres and the performance of the features resulting from individual activation functions is discussed. Results show that the presented NMF-based beat histogram features can provide comparable performance to other classification systems, while considering strictly drum patterns

Moral tragedy

Polemizując z poglądami niektórych filozofów moralności, autor broni tezy, iż jednoznacznie dobrzy ludzie mogą być pewni spokoju swej duszy

GEOS-20 m cable boom mechanism

The GEOS cable boom mechanism allows the controlled deployment of a 20 m long cable in a centrifugal force field. In launch configuration the flat cable is reeled on a 240 mm diameter drum. The electrical connection between the rotating drum and the stationary housing is accomplished via a flexlead positioned inside the drum. Active motion control of this drum is achieved by a self locking worm gear, driven by a stepper motor. The deployment length of the cable is monitored by an optical length indicator, sensing black bars engraved on the cable surface

Visual analysis for drum sequence transcription

A system is presented for analysing drum performance video sequences. A novel ellipse detection algorithm is introduced that automatically locates drum tops. This algorithm fits ellipses to edge clusters, and ranks them according to various fitness criteria. A background/foreground segmentation method is then used to extract the silhouette of the drummer and drum sticks. Coupled with a motion intensity feature, this allows for the detection of ‘hits’ in each of the extracted regions. In order to obtain a transcription of the performance, each of these regions is automatically labeled with the corresponding instrument class. A partial audio transcription and color cues are used to measure the compatibility between a region and its label, the Kuhn-Munkres algorithm is then employed to find the optimal labeling. Experimental results demonstrate the ability of visual analysis to enhance the performance of an audio drum transcription system