Perception of sign language and its application to visual communications for deaf people

Video communication systems for deaf people are limited in terms of quality and performance. Analysis of visual attention mechanisms for sign language may enable optimization of video coding systems for deaf users. Eye-movement tracking experiments were conducted with profoundly deaf volunteers while watching sign language video clips. Deaf people are found to fixate mostly on the facial region of the signer to pick up small detailed movements associated with facial expression and mouth shapes. Lower resolution, peripheral vision is used to process information from larger, rapid movements of the signer in the video clips. A coding scheme that gives priority to the face of the signer may be applied to improve perception of video quality for sign language communication.     

Resilience in higher education students: a scoping review

ABSTRACT

The health, wellbeing and employability of university students are key considerations within higher education. In response, interest in student resilience is on the rise. Reviews of contemporary resilience literature highlight both conceptual and methodological weaknesses, issues which hamper attempts to design effective resilience interventions. To inform the design of a student resilience program, to be piloted at three Australian universities, a scoping review of resilience specific to the higher education context was undertaken. Searches of three electronic databases (PsychINFO, CINAHL and ProQuest) were conducted. Seventy-two peer-reviewed articles published between 2007 and 2017 were included in the review. While the review reaffirms the conceptual and methodological issues found in previous resilience research, it provides a useful critique of key issues in relation to university student resilience and interventions to enhance students’ resilience. Recommendations for educators and researchers are provided.     

Examining the ethical environment in higher education

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) across the world have found themselves faced with new challenges on issues of ethics. Much of this has been centred on issues of assessment: plagiarism, buying essays, sharing/lending of previously passed work and the stealing of marked/returned work of others. Institutions still treat academic misconduct as largely a behavioural difficulty rather than an issue of ethics (or education), suggesting that academia places a far greater emphasis on combating new forms of dishonesty than it does on encouraging ethical habits and a healthy ethical environment. To date, the majority of research in this area has examined these forms of academic misconduct from the point of view of the student and/or the university, with the perspective of academics receiving very limited attention. Our hypothesis is that academics are perhaps best placed to provide the education needed to create and sustain an ethical environment, and we argue that being ‘ethically aware’ is a critical factor in the development of academic competence for all parties. This study adds to existing research in three ways: firstly, by highlighting the importance of an overall framework for an ethical environment within HEIs; secondly, by suggesting an ecological model of key parties (the university, students and academics) with responsibility for this environment in assessment; and thirdly, by including new evidence (generated by a survey of academics) to extend our understanding of their views on these issues.     

The accuracy of computational fluid dynamics analysis of the passive drag of a male swimmer

The aim of this study was to build an accurate computer-based model to study the water flow and drag force characteristics around and acting upon the human body while in a submerged streamlined position. Comparisons of total drag force were performed between an actual swimmer, a virtual computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of the swimmer, and an actual mannequin based on the virtual model. Drag forces were determined for velocities between 1.5 m/s and 2.25 m/s (representative of the velocities demonstrated in elite competition). The drag forces calculated from the virtual model using CFD were found to be within 4% of the experimentally determined values for the mannequin. The mannequin drag was found to be 18% less than the drag of the swimmer at each velocity examined. This study has determined the accuracy of using CFD for the analysis of the hydrodynamics of swimming and has allowed for the improved understanding of the relative contributions of various forms of drag to the total drag force experienced by submerged swimmers.     

Culturalisation and devices: what is culture in cultural economy?

Theorisation of culture is often absent from research on production in the creative and cultural sector. Further, cultural production has been largely untouched by the insights of the cultural economy approach. Culturalisation is a means of addressing the question of what constitutes culture and thus a cultural (economy) approach. It is the process by which culture and cultural production combine in the ‘operationalisation of the real.’ Culturalisation underpins much scholarship in this journal by posing the (economic) real as a problem of definition in order to illustrate the operations involved in its temporary resolution. The implications of this position need further addressing. There is a feedback between culture as a problem of definition and a cultural approach. Devices can interrogate the relationship between processes of cultural definition and the conceptual parameters of a cultural economy approach. Workshopping, projects and events are put forward as cultural devices emerging from a 10-month ethnography of literary performance in Bristol, England. This illustration shows firstly, how culturalisation occurs in a designated cultural sector to contingently realise culture; and secondly, the implicit logic of cultural economy as culturalisation, typified by the device as method, so as to open a debate concerning its implications.