Fundamental elements in examining a child’s right to education : a study of home education research and regulation in Australia

Home education provides valuable educational and developmental opportunities for children. An examination of Australia’s research indicates many best educational practices, including more informed mediation, contextualised learning, and opportunities to exercise autonomy. Key features include learning embedded in communities and program modification in response to students’ needs. Current state and territory legal requirements are examined within the context of this research and Australia’s obligations to international human rights treaties. All jurisdictions accept home education as one way to meet compulsory education requirements. The extent to which respective laws then reflect understanding of home education research and practice varies. Most jurisdictions allow for a variety of educational approaches. Some oversight regulation could however be modified to reflect a better understanding of home education. Consultation with home educators and reference to research would assist the development of more uniform legislation and policy across Australia, and enable better regulatory practice.

High torsional energy disulfides : relationship between cross-strand disulfides and right-handed staples

Redox-active disulfides are capable of being oxidized and reduced under physiological conditions. The enzymatic role of redox-active disulfides in thiol-disulfide reductases is well-known, but redox-active disulfides are also present in non-enzymatic protein structures where they may act as switches of protein function. Here, we examine disulfides linking adjacent β-strands (cross-strand disulfides), which have been reported to be redox-active. Our previous work has established that these cross-strand disulfides have high torsional energies, a quantity likely to be related to the ease with which the disulfide is reduced. We examine the relationship between conformations of disulfides and their location in protein secondary structures. By identifying the overlap between cross-strand disulfides and various conformations, we wish to address whether the high torsional energy of a cross-strand disulfide is sufficient to confer redox activity or whether other factors, such as the presence of the cross-strand disulfide in a strained β-sheet, are required.

Watermarking protocol for protecting user's right in content based image retrieval

Content based image retrieval (CBIR) is a technique to search for images relevant to the user’s query from an image collection.In last decade, most attention has been paid to improve the retrieval performance. However, there is no significant effort to investigate the security concerning in CBIR. Under the query by example (QBE) paradigm, the user supplies an image as a query and the system returns a set of retrieved results. If the query image includes user’s private information, an untrusted server provider of CBIR may distribute it illegally, which leads to the user’s right problem. In this paper, we propose an interactive watermarking protocol to address this problem. A watermark is inserted into the query image by the user in encrypted domain without knowing the exact content. The server provider of CBIR will get the watermarked query image and uses it to perform image retrieval. In case where the user finds an unauthorized copy, a watermark in the unauthorized copy will be used as evidence to prove that the user’s legal right is infringed by the server provider.

A right to respond? Monopolisation of 'voice' in CMS

This paper explores the power effects of, and possible justifications for, the differential 'voice' and 'silence' accorded to academic and non-academic subjects within Critical Management Studies (CMS). I explore these issues through a discussion of the practice of 'giving voice' to some subjects critiqued in CMS journal articles by providing them with the opportunity to publish a 'response'. I question the justification for extending this right only to academic subjects, and use this example to provoke CMS to question further its institutional orientation to issues of voice and silence in relation to the non-academic research subject.

Multimedia authoring : human-computer partnership for harvesting metadata from the right sources

This chapter takes a look at the task of creating multimedia authoring tools for the amateur media creator, and the problems unique to the undertaking. It argues that a deep understanding of both the media creation process, together with insight into the precise nature of the relative strengths of computers and users, given the domain of application, is needed before this gap can be bridged by software technology. These issues are further demonstrated within the context of a novel media collection environment, including a real- world example of an occasion filmed in order to automatically create two movies of distinctly different styles. The authors hope that such tools will enable amateur videographers to produce technically polished and aesthetically effective media, regardless of their level of expertise.

An evaluation of equivalence in body dissatisfaction measurement across cultures

We evaluated gender-based and cross-cultural equivalence of the Body Dissatisfaction Scale of the Body Change Inventory in a sample of 4,005 adolescents from 7 cultures that represent diverse body image ideals and response styles. Results of multigroup confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated equivalence of the scale across gender but not across cultures. Follow-up analyses identified small but significant cross-cultural differences in response styles (specifically, acquiescence and middle response option endorsement) as the source of this noninvariance. We recommend use of this scale for gender-based comparisons but caution that researchers should evaluate the presence of response biases before making substantive conclusions about cross-cultural differences in body dissatisfaction.