Elemental analysis of New Zealand Nephrite Jade (pounamu) for forensic purposes

Pounamu (NZ jade), or nephrite, is a protected mineral in its natural form following the transfer of ownership back to Ngai Tahu under the Ngai Tahu (Pounamu Vesting) Act 1997. Any theft of nephrite is prosecutable under the Crimes Act 1961. Scientific evidence is essential in cases where origin is disputed. A robust method for discrimination of this material through the use of elemental analysis and compositional data analysis is required. Initial studies have characterised the variability within a given nephrite source. This has included investigation of both in situ outcrops and alluvial material. Methods for the discrimination of two geographically close nephrite sources are being developed. Key Words: forensic, jade, nephrite, laser ablation, inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry, multivariate analysis, elemental analysis, compositional data analysis

Visual SLAM for underwater vehicles using video velocity log and natural landmarks

A visual SLAM system has been implemented and optimised for real-time deployment on an AUV equipped with calibrated stereo cameras. The system incorporates a novel approach to landmark description in which landmarks are local sub maps that consist of a cloud of 3D points and their associated SIFT/SURF descriptors. Landmarks are also sparsely distributed which simplifies and accelerates data association and map updates. In addition to landmark-based localisation the system utilises visual odometry to estimate the pose of the vehicle in 6 degrees of freedom by identifying temporal matches between consecutive local sub maps and computing the motion. Both the extended Kalman filter and unscented Kalman filter have been considered for filtering the observations. The output of the filter is also smoothed using the Rauch-Tung-Striebel (RTS) method to obtain a better alignment of the sequence of local sub maps and to deliver a large-scale 3D acquisition of the surveyed area. Synthetic experiments have been performed using a simulation environment in which ray tracing is used to generate synthetic images for the stereo system

La Video grabación de la práctica docente, una estrategia para el desarrollo de la docencia reflexiva

En el caso que nos ocupa, el trabajo a desarrollar con los videos estuvo enfocado principalmente a reconocer las formas de interacción que se dan entre la docente en formación y los niños, las habilidades para utilizar el cuerpo como una herramienta de expresión y comunicación, el uso de la voz como una herramienta que genera motivación, integración a la tarea, aceptación o rechazo, agrado, desagrado y construcción simbólica por mencionar las más importantes y en un menor nivel de importancia, pero también como una posibilidad, el reconocer aspectos didácticos de la práctica como son: pertinencia de la actividad, respuesta de los niños, situaciones que hayan alterado la práctica e incidentes críticos en general