title: Heavy Metal, identity and the social negotiation of a community of practice

authors: Snell, Dave

subjects: psychology

abstract: Psychologists have raised concerns about Heavy Metal music and possible links with substance misuse and youth suicide. This paper moves beyond this traditional disciplinary focus on negative messages to document the media-related practices through which a Heavy Metal community is negotiated. Six participants contributed to ethnographic observations, interviews and photo-voice projects. Results illustrate how socio-material practices such as dressing a certain way, frequenting a bar and dancing are central to community maintenance and the reaffirmation of shared identities. Findings highlight the need for community psychology research to document the material and symbolic nature of contemporary communal life.

text: Heavy Metal, identity and the social negotiation of a community of practice Psychologists have raised concerns about Heavy Metal music and possible links with substance misuse and youth suicide. This paper moves beyond this traditional disciplinary focus on negative messages to document the media-related practices through which a Heavy Metal community is negotiated. Six participants contributed to ethnographic observations, interviews and photo-voice projects. Results illustrate how socio-material practices such as dressing a certain way, frequenting a bar and dancing are central to community maintenance and the reaffirmation of shared identities. Findings highlight the need for community psychology research to document the material and symbolic nature of contemporary communal life.

year: 2007

title: Pruning feature extractor stacking for cross-domain few-shot learning

authors: Wang, Hongyu

subjects: computer science

abstract: Combining knowledge from source domains to learn efficiently from a few labelled instances in a target domain is a transfer learning problem known as cross-domain few-shot learning (CDFSL). Feature extractor stacking (FES) is a state-of-the-art CDFSL method that maintains a collection of source domain feature extractors instead of a single universal extractor. FES uses stacked generalisation to build an ensemble from extractor snapshots saved during target domain fine-tuning. It outperforms several contemporary universal model-based CDFSL methods in the Meta-Dataset benchmark. However, it incurs higher storage cost because it saves a snapshot for every fine-tuning iteration for every extractor. In this work, we propose a bidirectional snapshot selection strategy for FES, leveraging its cross-validation process and the ordered nature of its snapshots, and demonstrate that a 95% snapshot reduction can be achieved while retaining the same level of accuracy.

text: Pruning feature extractor stacking for cross-domain few-shot learning Combining knowledge from source domains to learn efficiently from a few labelled instances in a target domain is a transfer learning problem known as cross-domain few-shot learning (CDFSL). Feature extractor stacking (FES) is a state-of-the-art CDFSL method that maintains a collection of source domain feature extractors instead of a single universal extractor. FES uses stacked generalisation to build an ensemble from extractor snapshots saved during target domain fine-tuning. It outperforms several contemporary universal model-based CDFSL methods in the Meta-Dataset benchmark. However, it incurs higher storage cost because it saves a snapshot for every fine-tuning iteration for every extractor. In this work, we propose a bidirectional snapshot selection strategy for FES, leveraging its cross-validation process and the ordered nature of its snapshots, and demonstrate that a 95% snapshot reduction can be achieved while retaining the same level of accuracy.

year: 2025

title: Commentary on 'Family obligations in Micronesian cultures: implications for educators'

authors: Bishop, Russell

subjects: education

abstract: The paper makes some interesting observations about the need for educators to understand the cultural positionings of Micronesian students and by implication challenges readers to extend these understandings to other migrant and minoritised student groups. I would like to take up this challenge and illustrate how useful it is to theorise from a relational discourse when seeking solutions to what many educators are suggesting as the greatest problem we face in contemporary education, i.e. the seemingly immutable and growing educational disparities that accompany the increasing diversity of our student bodies in association with the continuing dominance of monocultural and deficit explanations by teachers about the causes of the disparities. This problem negatively affects indigenous students and students of colour along with migrant students and the paper rightly points to the need for solutions.

text: Commentary on 'Family obligations in Micronesian cultures: implications for educators' The paper makes some interesting observations about the need for educators to understand the cultural positionings of Micronesian students and by implication challenges readers to extend these understandings to other migrant and minoritised student groups. I would like to take up this challenge and illustrate how useful it is to theorise from a relational discourse when seeking solutions to what many educators are suggesting as the greatest problem we face in contemporary education, i.e. the seemingly immutable and growing educational disparities that accompany the increasing diversity of our student bodies in association with the continuing dominance of monocultural and deficit explanations by teachers about the causes of the disparities. This problem negatively affects indigenous students and students of colour along with migrant students and the paper rightly points to the need for solutions.

year: 2010