An application of document filtering in an operational system

This paper describes an applied document filtering system embedded in an operational watch center that monitors disease outbreaks worldwide. At the initial time of this writing, the system effectively supported monitoring of 23 geographic regions by filtering documents in several thousand daily news sources in 11 different languages. This paper describes the filtering algorithm, statistical procedures for estimating Precision and Recall in an operational environment, summarizes operational performance data and suggests lessons learned for other applications of document filtering technology. Overall, these results are interpreted as supporting the general utility of document filtering and information retrieval technology and offers recommendations for future applications of this technology.     

Pathways to resilience: how drawings reveal pre-service teachers’ core narratives underpinning their future teacher-selves

For this study of teacher-identity, which is part of a larger research project on teacher resilience, preservice teachers were invited to draw “the kind of teacher you hope to become”. In this, our study recognises drawing as a semiotic system of meaning-making and communication. The drawings were examined in terms of the “stories” they told. Using an emergent design approach to the data, drawings were synthesised into categories that were distilled into theme clusters. A hermeneutic reading revealed the core identity narrative underpinning each teacher-identity story. This story was told in sociocultural terms, or constructed around functioning at work or couched in terms of personal validation and achievement. These core identity narratives signal what “matters” to preservice teachers’ sense of their teacher-selves. Since there is an observed correlation between teacher-identity and resilience, knowing what matters is a helpful basis for building resilience.     

Subtractive Schooling and Identity: A Case Study of Ethnic Minority Students in Vietnam

This article examines the impact of subtractive schooling, including language use in education, on the identity of a group of ethnic minority students in Central Highlands of Vietnam. Drawing on semistructured interview data, a deeper look is taken into the ways in which these students identify themselves with their languages, cultures, and social relations. Findings reveal that the subtractive power of the school language and the institutional milieu profoundly influenced their identity construction by creating the conditions for (a) the devaluation of their language and cultural identity as a consequence of the invasion of their sociocultural territory by the dominant language and culture and (b) the segregation and disunity that affected their identity construction through social relations. Although subtractive schooling apparently facilitated students’ integration into the mainstream, its invisible power forced them not only to integrate but also to bear the full burden of constructing new identities to adjust to the school environment and the mainstream society.     

Middle leaders and middle leadership in schools: exploring the knowledge base (2003–2017)

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to explore the development of the knowledge base on middle leadership in schools. Since the seminal reviews conducted by Bennett a contemporary scan only of the scholarly literature on middle leaders/leadership in schools has not been undertaken. Consequently, this article looks at outputs relating to this topic by examining research papers indexed in the Web of Science and in SCOPUS between 2003 and 2017. The prime purpose of this review is to offer some reflections on the development of the empirical base on middle leadership in schools since 2003 and to highlight some of the implications for future research. The article concludes that middle leadership in schools remains an ongoing focus of research inquiry in a growing number of countries but suggests that the knowledge base would benefit from more sophisticated empirical studies and greater theoretical analysis.     

Video-stimulated recall in cross-cultural research in education: a case study in Vietnam

This paper examines incorporating video-stimulated recall (VSR) as a data collection technique in cross-cultural research. With VSR, participants are invited to watch video-recordings of particular events that they are involved in; they then recall their thoughts in relation to their observations of their behaviour in relation to the event. The research draws on a larger Ph.D. project completed at an Australian university that explored Vietnamese lecturers’ beliefs about learner autonomy. In cross-cultural research, using the VSR technique provided significant challenges including time constraints of participants, misunderstandings of the VSR protocol and the possibility of participants’ losing face when reflecting on their teaching episodes. Adaptations to the VSR technique were required to meet the cultural challenges specific to this population, indicating a need for flexibility and awareness of the cultural context for research.     

The teacher as a ‘colony’: a case study of agentive responses to ‘colonising’ education policy in Vietnam

Neo-liberal educational policies that are being implemented globally work to foster competition among schools and teachers, as well as among children. In this situation, teachers must often come to accept the dominant representations of curricular policy developed by higher authorities. In this study, a case study design is used to describe how one school in Vietnam shifted away from this state of ‘colonisation’ by reforming the school under the framework of lesson study for learning community (LSLC). This paper subsequently argues that there is a need for school-level policies that democratise school culture and practices, resisting the negative impacts of colonising policies.     

Acute phase reactants, challenge in the near future of animal production and veterinary medicine

INTRODUCTION The systemic acute phase reaction known to occur on infection, inflammation, trauma, burns, ma- lignancies and tissue damage in general, has been studied by scientists from various disciplines. In the last decade, emphasis has been laid on application of blood tests for acute phase reactants to monitor ani-mal health in general, as well as for human patients suffering from specified classes of diseases (Gruys et al., 2005). However, basic mechanistic patterns as- sociated wit…     

Streaming and congestion control using scalable video coding based on H.264/AVC

INTRODUCTION Streaming of multimedia data over the Internet has rapidly increased in recent years. All commercial applications and most research in video streaming use conventional hybrid video coding. To adapt the data transmission rate on the server to the varying bandwidth caused by congestion in the Internet or to different available bandwidths of different clients, the simulcast solution is widely applied (Balk et al., 2003; Feamster et al., 2001; Schierl and Wiegand, 2004). A larg…     

Professional Development for Teachers Working with International Students

The commercialisation of education and the massive recruitment of international students across different vocational education and training (VET) systems including the US, UK, Canada and Australia have led to significant changes in the VET teaching and learning landscape. This situation compels the VET sector to design and develop new professional development programs to support the immediate and changing needs of teachers working with the diverse international student cohort. However, to date, teacher professional development in response to the growing population of international students has not been an explicit focus of empirical study and theoretical conceptualisation in VET research. This study responds to this paucity. It draws on a broader three-year research project funded by the Australian Research Council (2014–2017) that involves fieldwork, participation in and observation of staff professional development activities and interviews with 102 VET staff in Australia. It uses positioning theory as a conceptual framework to examine how VET teachers position themselves and their professional development needs in response to international students. The results call for a critical need to re-examine the focus of the current professional development programs offered for VET teachers. The current context requires teacher professional development in international VET to focus on developing teachers’ capabilities to re-examine their pedagogical beliefs and practices and to understand international students’ various needs and cultural backgrounds. The study also stresses the importance of ongoing professional learning to equip teachers with the skills and knowledge to appropriate their pedagogical practices in response to the critical need to prepare all students for the intercultural labour market and to use students’ diversity as a resource for teaching and learning.     

Anticipation to Social and Nonsocial Dynamic Cues in Preschool-Age Children

The ability to learn from expectations is foundational to social and nonsocial learning in children. However, we know little about the brain basis of reward expectation in development. Here, 3- to 4-year-olds (N = 26) were shown a passive associative learning paradigm with dynamic stimuli. Anticipation for reward-related stimuli was measured via the stimulus preceding negativity (SPN). To our knowledge, this is the first study to measure an SPN in children younger than age 6. Our findings reveal distinct anticipatory neural signatures for social versus nonsocial stimuli, consistent with previous research in older children. This study suggests an SPN can be elicited in preschoolers and is larger for social than nonsocial stimuli.