Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Towards culturally inclusive teacher education with specific reference to Oceania

This paper describes attempts by educators in the island nations of the South Pacific to ensure that formal education is more culturally inclusive for learners as well as teachers. Now known by many as Oceania, the region continues to deal with its colonial legacy, educators being at the forefront of the struggle to cope with the impact of its particular circumstances and history. Indigenous knowledge and wisdom; teacher education; curriculum relevance; culturally inclusive education; Oceania SCHOOLING AS CULTURALLY ALIENATING European and US colonial activities in the islands of the Pacific Ocean resulted, among other things, in the introduction of schools and the teaching of European and AngloAmerican based knowledge, skills and values. This led to the transformation not only of the structures and processes of our cultures but also our worldviews. Today, the degree to which such processes influence the way we think and learn largely depends on our ability to clarify for ourselves the differences between our received wisdom (from our formal, mainly western education) and the wisdom of the (home) cultures in which we grew up and were socialised, and from which we continue to learn important knowledge, skills and values. In the context of formal education, the difference between these two sources is the “cultural gap”, which is small for those students whose home cultures are attuned to the culture of formal education but wide for those whose home culture is different.
Model-Based Approaches to Active Perception and Control

There is an on-going debate in cognitive (neuro) science and philosophy between classical cognitive theory and embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive (“4-Es”) views of cognition—a family of theories that emphasize the role of the body in cognition and the importance of brain-body-environment interaction over and above internal representation. This debate touches foundational issues, such as whether the brain internally represents the external environment, and “infers” or “computes” something. Here we focus on two (4-Es-based) criticisms to traditional cognitive theories—to the notions of passive perception and of serial information processing—and discuss alternative ways to address them, by appealing to frameworks that use, or do not use, notions of internal modelling and inference. Our analysis illustrates that: an explicitly inferential framework can capture some key aspects of embodied and enactive theories of cognition; some claims of computational and dynamical theories can be reconciled rather than seen as alternative explanations of cognitive phenomena; and some aspects of cognitive processing (e.g., detached cognitive operations, such as planning and imagination) that are sometimes puzzling to explain from enactive and non-representational perspectives can, instead, be captured nicely from the perspective that internal generative models and predictive processing mediate adaptive control loops.
Magnet-Facilitated Selection of Electrogenic Bacteria from Marine Sediment

Some bacteria can carry out anaerobic respiration by depositing electrons on external materials, such as electrodes, thereby creating an electrical current. Into the anode chamber of microbial fuel cells (MFCs) having abiotic air-cathodes we inoculated microorganisms cultured from a magnetic particle-enriched portion of a marine tidal sediment, reasoning that since some external electron acceptors are ferromagnetic, electrogenic bacteria should be found in their vicinity. Two MFCs, one inoculated with a mixed bacterial culture and the other with an axenic culture of a helical bacterium isolated from the magnetic particle enrichment, termed strain HJ, were operated for 65 d. Both MFCs produced power, with production from the mixed culture MFC exceeding that of strain HJ. Strain HJ was identified as a Thalassospira sp. by transmission electron microscopic analysis and 16S rRNA gene comparisons. An MFC inoculated with strain HJ and operated in open circuit produced 47% and 57% of the maximal power produced from MFCs inoculated with the known electrogen Geobacter daltonii and the magnetotactic bacterium Desulfamplus magnetomortis, respectively. Further investigation will be needed to determine whether bacterial populations associated with magnetic particles within marine sediments are enriched for electrogens.
A Hybrid Recommender System for Context-aware Recommendations of Mobile Applications

The goal of the work in this paper is towards the incorporation of context in recommender systems in the domain of mobile applications. The approach recommends mobile applications to users based on what other users have installed in a similar context. The idea is to apply a hybrid recommender system to deal with the added complexity of context. We have designed and realized the application to test our ideas. Users can select among several content-based or collaborative filtering components, including a rule-based module using information on point-of-interests in the vicinity of the user, and a component for the integration of traditional collaborative filtering. The implementation is integrated in a framework supporting the development and deployment of mobile services.
Technology and customer expectation in academic libraries: A special reference to technical/management libraries in Karnataka

Technology has transformed the way people live. Current day information seekers are empowered with multiple choices of information sources and libraries no longer remain the primary centre for information seekers. With diminishing time and geographical barriers the world has become a global village and information seekers are stressed with time constraints. It is the duty of library and information professionals to address these tech-savvy library users' needs and align their services to satisfy them. Recently, the author of this paper conducted a research study on the “Impact of technology on quality of services in technical and management libraries in Karnataka” sponsored by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), Government of India, New Delhi. The study was approved in 2005 and the final report was submitted to the government in 2007. This paper carries some of the results of this research study conducted by the author in Karnataka state in Southern India.
Mechanism of potassium uptake in neuropile glial cells in the central nervous system of the leech.

1. Ion-selective double-barreled microelectrodes (ISME) were used to measure intracellular K+ (aKi), Na+ (aNai), and Cl- (aCli) activities of neuropile glial (NG) cells in the central nervous system of the medicinal leech Hirudo medicinalis. Ion fluxes were induced by an increase in extracellular K+ concentration [( K+]o) and analyzed to elucidate the ionic mechanism of the K+ uptake occurring under such conditions. 2. In addition, the K+ concentration of the extracellular space of the nerve cell body region (NCBR) and the neuropile (N) was measured with neutral carrier K(+)-ISME. In normal saline (4 mM K+), a concentration of 4.2 mM was measured in both extracellular spaces. No differences between the K+ concentration of the bathing fluid and the extracellular spaces were found at higher (i.e., 10 and 40 mM) K+ concentrations. 3. In normal saline, the mean membrane potential (Em) was -68 mV, and the mean aKi, aNai, and aCli were found to be 77, 10, and 7 mM, respectively. The corresponding equilibrium potentials were -81, 56, and -66 mV. The chloride equilibrium potential (ECl) was similar to Em, and it is concluded that chloride is passively distributed across the NG cell membrane. 4. When [K+]o was transiently increased 10-fold (i.e., to 40 mM), aKi and a Cli increased transiently by 22 and 25 mM, respectively, and the membrane depolarized to -28 mV, which was similar to both K+ equilibrium potential (EK) and ECl. The KCl uptake was accompanied by a transient decrease in aNai to 5 mM. 5. After incubation for at least 1 h in Na(+)-free saline, NG cells accumulated K+ in the absence of extracellular Na+ to levels similar to those observed in the presence of Na+. Therefore the uptake of K+ was not dependent on external--and probably also internal--Na+. 6. Changes in cell volume induced by the increase in [K+]o were estimated by loading NG cells with choline and monitoring its intracellular concentration with Corning-K(+)-ISME. In saline containing 40 mM K+, NG cell volume increased to approximately 150% of its volume in normal saline. 7. It is concluded that the mechanism of K+ uptake in NG cells is by passive KCl and water influx, which causes cell swelling.
Brainbank learning-building topic maps-based e-portfolios

BrainBank Learning (BBL) is a suite of intuitive tools for learning of concepts and their content, and how they relate. The core of the suite is BrainBank®, the ontology of a topic map for acquired knowledge in a lifelong perspective. Topic Maps is a standard that defines an effective way of representing information. BBL is a web-based topic maps editor that works with standard Internet browsers. This means that educational institutions are not dependent on local installations or state of the art equipment to use this computer aided learning software. Users enter the application through individual accounts. Topics are entered and described and eventually connected to other topics as associations with names and/or descriptions. Digital resources such as documents, pictures, movies and sound clips can be attached to the topics, and these resources can either remain external and be linked to or be uploaded to and stored in BrainBank. Topics can be grouped in themes or courses (e.g. classes), but they can also be interconnected across subjects and levels/grades and can thus serve as a scaffold in lifelong and lifewide learning perspectives. A research project with 8th grade pupils from in Norway has shown that in addition to the well-documented advantages of using concept-based tools in learning, the pupils became aware that they were actually building their own content/knowledge management system, and they were additionally motivated by this.
Modelling Wireless Signal Fading in Boreal Forests

Both the spatial and temporal distributions of received signal power in wireless communications are often modeled as log-normal without any further discussion. This paper presents a field study of temporal signal fading in a test site situated in an area of boreal forest near Mandy Lake, Alberta. In it we give a statistical verification of the assumption that temporal signal fading obeys the log-normal distribution. Some conclusions based on wireless signal propagation are also made.
A microphone array for hearing aids

A directional acoustic receiving system is constructed in the form of a necklace including an array of two or more microphones mounted on a housing supported on the chest of a user by a conducting loop encircling the users neck. Signal processing electronics contained in the same housing receive and combine the microphone signals in such a manner as to provide an amplified output signal which emphasizes sounds of interest arriving in a direction forward of the user. The amplified output signal drives the supporting conducting loop to produce a representative magnetic field. An electroacoustic transducer including a magnetic field pick up coil for receiving the magnetic field is mounted in or on the users ear and generates an acoustic signal representative of the sounds of interest. The microphone output signals are weighted (scaled) and combined to achieve desired spatial directivity responses. The weighting coefficients are determined by an optimization process. By bandpass filtering the weighted microphone signals with a set of filters covering the audio frequency range and summing the filtered signals, a receiving microphone array with a small aperture size is caused to have a directivity pattern that is essentially uniform over frequency in two or three dimensions. This method enables the design of highly-directive-hearing instruments which are comfortable, inconspicuous, and convenient to use. The invention provides the user with a dramatic improvement in speech perception over existing hearing aid designs, particularly in the presence of background noise, reverberation, and feedback.
Learning of grasp adaptation through experience and tactile sensing

To perform robust grasping, a multi-fingered robotic hand should be able to adapt its grasping configuration, i.e., how the object is grasped, to maintain the stability of the grasp. Such a change of grasp configuration is called grasp adaptation and it depends on the controller, the employed sensory feedback and the type of uncertainties inherit to the problem. This paper proposes a grasp adaptation strategy to deal with uncertainties about physical properties of objects, such as the object weight and the friction at the contact points. Based on an object-level impedance controller, a grasp stability estimator is first learned in the object frame. Once a grasp is predicted to be unstable by the stability estimator, a grasp adaptation strategy is triggered according to the similarity between the new grasp and the training examples. Experimental results demonstrate that our method improves the grasping performance on novel objects with different physical properties from those used for training.
Development of a UK Online 24-h Dietary Assessment Tool: myfood24

Assessment of diet in large epidemiological studies can be costly and time consuming. An automated dietary assessment system could potentially reduce researcher burden by automatically coding food records. myfood24 (Measure Your Food on One Day) an online 24-h dietary assessment tool (with the flexibility to be used for multiple 24 h-dietary recalls or as a food diary), has been developed for use in the UK population. Development of myfood24 was a multi-stage process. Focus groups conducted with three age groups, adolescents (11–18 years) (n = 28), adults (19–64 years) (n = 24) and older adults (≥65 years) (n = 5) informed the development of the tool, and usability testing was conducted with beta (adolescents n = 14, adults n = 8, older adults n = 1) and live (adolescents n = 70, adults n = 20, older adults n = 4) versions. Median system usability scale (SUS) scores (measured on a scale of 0–100) in adolescents and adults were marginal for the beta version (adolescents median SUS = 66, interquartile range (IQR) = 20; adults median SUS = 68, IQR = 40) and good for the live version (adolescents median SUS = 73, IQR = 22; adults median SUS = 80, IQR = 25). Myfood24 is the first online 24-h dietary recall tool for use with different age groups in the UK. Usability testing indicates that myfood24 is suitable for use in UK adolescents and adults.
Steering control of nonholonomic control systems using model decomposition: A fire truck example

This paper presents a simple feedback control strategy for steering the nonholonomic control systems based on the construction of a cost function V which is the sum of two semi-positive definite functions V1 and V2. These semi-positive definite functions are obtained by decomposing the system into two subsystems. The task of the control strategy is to decay the non-differentiable cost function V along the controlled system trajectories in an average sense by first decaying the function V1 using the trajectory interception approach and then decaying the function V2 by using sinusoidal inputs. The individual functions are hence not restricted to decrease monotonically but their oscillations are limited and coordinated in a way to guarantee convergence. The effectiveness of the strategy is tested on a fire truck model which is a typical example of nonholonomic control systems. This approach does not necessitate the conversion of the system model into a “chained form”, and thus does not rely on any special transformation techniques. The approach presented is general and can be employed to control a variety of mechanical systems with velocity constraints.
Assessment of Wound Healing in the Alloxan-Induced Diabetic Rabbit Ear Model

The enhancement of diabetic wound healing represents a major clinical challenge to researchers. The challenge faced is to identify a suitable animal model that best represents the human situation. However, the majority of diabetic wound healing models are in rodents and are hindered by rapid contraction and thus do not reflect epithelial cell migration, as seen in the human wound. The alloxan-induced diabetic rabbit model is a cheap, reproducible model and offers the advantage of providing a noncontractile avascular wound bed. This study aimed to compare the effects of acute hyperglycemia in the alloxan model to normal rabbit controls on wound healing, using methods of stereology. Alloxan was administered 7 days prior to surgery. Four full-thickness punch biopsy wounds were created on each ear (n = 4). Wounds were excised at 7 and 14 days and prepared for stereological analysis from Masson's trichrome-stained histological sections. It was noted that the alloxan-treated animals showed an increase in the number of inflammatory cells and fibroblasts at 14 days. In addition, it was noted that the length density of blood vessels was reduced in the alloxan-induced diabetic rabbits, representing a greater radial diffusion distance between vessels and a less efficient network for nutrient exchange. This is the first study to take a stereological approach to defining the effects of diabetes mellitus on wound healing in a noncontractile model.
Cross Modal Associations between aggression and light

Brightness is associated with positivity and goodness. As a consequence, we might expect that increasing the luminance in public settings (e.g., outside clubs and cafe’s) could positively influence aggressive behavior in situations that are at risk of escalating. However, based on work of Osgood and colleagues (1957), an increase in luminance intensity can be associated with an increase in activity. Also, the dynamic nature of a light stimulus can affect the associations people have between brightness and aggression. With two studies we provide support for the presence of cross modal associations between aggression and dynamic achromatic (i.e. white versus black) and luminance (i.e. light versus dark) brightness differences. We asked people to report explicit associations between brightness stimuli and evaluation, potency, activity, and aggression, using either achromatic (Study 1a) or luminance stimuli (Study 1b). In addition, we examined cross-model associations between brightness and aggression using an implicit association test for achromatic stimuli (Study 2a). Our data show that the differences between static and dynamic stimuli, as well as the differences between achromatic brightness and luminance brightness, are crucial for understanding which associations emerge between brightness and aggression. On the conference, we will present these results together with the results of the implicit association tests with luminance brightness stimuli (Study 2b, planned for October).
Associations Between Alcohol Consumption and Insulin Sensitivity and Cardiovascular Disease Risk Factors

A large body of cross-sectional and cohort data suggests that light-to-moderate consumption of alcoholic beverages (1–2 alcoholic drinks/day) is associated with a reduced risk of cardio-vascular disease (CVD) morbidity and mortality compared with abstainers and heavy consumers (1–16). This U-or J-shaped relationship might be accounted for by nutritional components of alcoholic beverages or through alcohol' s mediating of CVD risk factors, such as insulin sensitivitysure (24,25), or some combination of these factors. Previous research has shown that light-to-moderate alcohol consumption is associated with an insulin profile favoring reduced CVD risk compared with nondrinkers and heavy drinkers (17–20,26,27). Prospective population-based data have shown an inverse association between light-to-moderate alcohol consumption and the development of type 2 diabetes (28–31). Three other prospective population-based studies show a positive association between alcohol intake and risk of type 2 diabetes in men but not in women (32–34). Despite these findings, there are some gaps in this current body of knowledge. A wide array of measures has been used to estimate S I , such as fasting insulin only (19,20,27), or fasting or 2-h postload insulin and glucose to calculate a surrogate measure of S I (17,18), or fasting and 1-, 2-, and 3-h postchallenge plasma insulin and glucose concentrations and a modified insulin suppression test (26), limiting to some degree the quality of this outcome measure. Measurement of self-reported alcohol consumption can also prove to be problematic. Alcohol intake assessed in epi-demiologic studies is typically derived from a food item listed on a food-frequency questionnaire (FFQ) and less frequently by a questionnaire designed specifically for alcohol intake. Issues that need to be addressed to adequately assess alcohol intake include patterns of alcohol use, types of beverages consumed, and history of alcohol use. Other gaps in our understanding of the relationship between alcohol consumption and S I include the influence of race/ethnic-ity, as well as diabetes status, on this association. This study aims to illustrate the relation between alcohol consumption and S I in an ethnically diverse population using a sensitive measure of S I and a rigorous standardized method of assessing alcohol intake. Relations between alcohol consumption and other CVD risk factors (lipids A table elsewhere in this issue shows conventional and Système International (SI) units and conversion factors for many substances. OBJECTIVE — Light-to-moderate alcohol consumption has been associated with reduced car-diovascular disease (CVD) mortality, which may be explained by increased insulin sensitivity (S …
Uncertainty analysis of phased mission systems with probabilistic timed automata

A phased mission is one in which the requirements may alter over time. We present a novel approach to analyse phased mission systems using probabilistic timed automata (PTA). We show how to construct PTA models which allow one to reflect system uncertainty, and how to analyse these models using the PRISM probabilistic model checker. We illustrate our approach via a simple case study, namely path planning for a Mars exploration rover, since the mission of the rover can be expected to be an instance of phased mission systems.
Queue utilization with hop based enhanced arbitrary inter frame spacing MAC for saturated ad HOC networks

Path length of a multi hop Ad Hoc networks has an adverse impact on the end-to-end throughput especially during network saturation. The success rate of forwarding packets towards destination is limited due to interference, contention, limited buffer space, and bandwidth. Real time applications streaming data fill the buffer space at a faster rate at the source and its nearby forwarding nodes since the channel is shared. The aim of this paper is to increase the success rate of forwarding the packets to yield a higher end-to-end throughput. In order to reduce loss of packets due to buffer overflow and enhance the performance of the network for a saturated network, a novel MAC protocol named Queue Utilization with Hop Based Enhanced Arbitrary Inter Frame Spacing based (QU-EAIFS) MAC is proposed for alleviating the problems in saturated Ad Hoc networks. The protocol prioritises the nodes based on its queue utilization and hops travelled by the packet and it helps achieving higher end-to-end performance by forwarding the packets with higher rate towards the destination during network saturation. The proposed MAC enhances the end-to-end performance by approximately 40% and 34% for a 5hop and 6hop communication respectively in a chain topology as compared to the standard IEEE802.11b. The performance of the new MAC also outperforms the performance of IEEE 802.11e MAC. In order to validate the protocol, it is also tested with short hops and varying packet sizes and more realistic random topologies.