Putting theory into practice : moving from student identity to teacher identity

As teaching is a highly skilled and complex profession, pre-service teachers’ need to develop a series of attributes for their practice in relation to pedagogy, content, student learning, classroom management and their ability to engage in reflection. Through reflective narrative, this article seeks to share how a tertiary music educator prepares her generalist primary pre-service teachers to engage, explore and experience music education within the Bachelor of Education (Primary) course at Unnamed University. It also presents one pre-service teacher’s experience of teaching music during her school placements in 2009 in what she calls ‘putting theory into practice’ moving from student identity to teacher identity. Although the ‘hands-on’ approach to teaching and learning on-campus and when on school placement provide pre-service teachers with knowledge, skills and understanding, the continued support of professional learning is well recognised and will be an ongoing process as pre-service teachers create their own professional identity.

Brand salience for fast-moving consumer goods : an empirically based model

Brand salience, or the prominence of a brand in memory, has been linked to brand choice and purchase by consumers. The research reported in this paper proposed and tested a model of brand salience for fast-moving consumer goods, which incorporates knowledge, media consumption, and brand image as antecedents. A quasi-experimental method was utilised, where 270 respondents undertook a free recall exercise using category cues, and then completed multiitem measures of brand knowledge, brand associations, and purchase likelihood. Analysis of the data using SEM found support for an empirical model of brand salience where there was a relationship between brand salience and purchase likelihood. The empirical evidence supports building a brand in a primary category, in order to build the depth and breadth of the brand’s associations in consumer memory.

Maximum likelihood approach for tracking multiple mobile agents with a moving doppler radar system

Tracking mobile agents with a Doppler radar system mounted on a moving vehicle is considered in this paper. Dopplers modulated from mobile agents on the single frequency continuous wave signals are analyzed in order to estimate the positions and velocities of multiple mobile agents. The measurement noise is assumed to be Gaussian and the maximum likelihood estimation is utilized to enhance the localization accuracy.

Personal identity : moving beyond essence

Education's ancient and profoundly important pursuit to 'know thyself', is often realised through engaging with the question 'who am I?' In order to the identify who in this search, it is argued in this paper that personal identity should be understood to be embedded in the purposes one has for one's life through how one relates, and is therefore spiritual. This spiritual quality of personal identity is therefore existential in character - not essential.

However, often when children respond to this question 'who am I?', they rely upon socially constructed categories and labels such as religious, feminine, cool, punk and the like. The application of such labelling assumes that meaningfulness lies in their essence; that is, they identify what is. This can become most problematic when individuals accept and apply such essentialist labelling to themselves, because such a process can only answer 'what am I?' and not the educationally more important question of 'who am I?' This paper therefore challenges the inadequacy of such an approach and offers a conceptualisation of personal identity which is spiritually embedded in a purpose for one's life.

Single molecule conductance through rigid norbornylogous bridges with zero average curvature

A new homologous series of norbornylogous (NB) bridges has been synthesized in which the average curvature of the bridges is very small. The molecules are rigid and have two thiol moieties at each end to allow them to form self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) and to connect to two gold electrodes to form a molecular junction. The SAMs formed were characterized using electrochemistry to determine the surface coverage of molecules on gold surface and to provide an indication of the packing of the NB bridges while ellipsometry and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) were used to provide an indication of the SAM thickness and orientation. Single molecule conductance of NB bridges was measured as a function of the molecular length. The conductance was found to decrease exponentially with the length with a decay constant that is exactly correlated with photoelectron transfer and other studies at the multiple molecule level. The molecule−electrode contact resistance was determined and compared with that of related alkanedithiol molecular junctions.

The performance of trauma in moving image art

This thesis argues that the perceptual apparatus required to view abstract and graphic films can illuminate our understanding of trauma as a social/medical concept. such 'materialist' films predict the new contemporary 'Gestalt of the senses' ushered in by digital media.

A robust solution to the stereo-vision-based simultaneous localization and mapping problem with steady and moving landmarks

The problem of visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is examined in this paper using recently developed ideas and algorithms from modern robust control and estimation theory. A nonlinear model for a stereo-vision-based sensor is derived that leads to nonlinear measurements of the landmark coordinates along with optical flow-based measurements of the relative robot-landmark velocity. Using a novel analytical measurement transformation, the nonlinear SLAM problem is converted into the linear domain and solved using a robust linear filter. Actually, the linear filter is guaranteed stable and the SLAM state estimation error is bounded within an ellipsoidal set. A mathematically rigorous stability proof is given that holds true even when the landmarks move in accordance with an unknown control input. No similar results are available for the commonly employed extended Kalman filter, which is known to exhibit divergence and inconsistency characteristics in practice. A number of illustrative examples are given using both simulated and real vision data that further validate the proposed method.

Patient perspective workshop : moving towards OMERACT guidelines for choosing or developing instruments to measure patient-reported outcomes

The workshop Choosing or Developing Instruments held at the Outcome Measures in Rheumatology (OMERACT) 10 meeting was designed to help participants think about the underlying methods of instrument development. Conference pre-reading material and 3 brief introductory presentations elaborated the issues, and participants broke into discussion groups before reconvening to share insights, engage in a more general discussion of the issues, and vote on recommendations. Trade offs between using current imperfect measures and the long and complex process of developing new instruments were considered, together with the need for rigor in patient-reported outcome (PRO) instrument development. The main considerations for PRO instrument development were listed and a research agenda for action produced. As part of the agenda for action, it is recommended that researchers and patient partners work together to tackle these issues, and that OMERACT bring forward proposals for acceptable instrument development protocols that would meet an enhanced “Truth” statement in the OMERACT Filter.

Parent participation in disadvantaged schools : moving beyond attributions of blame

Although facilitating community participation in disadvantaged schools can be difficult, this article argues that, given the structuring of schooling in contemporary western democracies, it is even more difficult than we might imagine. Drawing on Bourdieu, we attempt to elucidate the complex relations between schooling and socio·cultural contexts which can lead to inequalities of opportunity for parent participation in schooling and which work to maintain disadvantage for marginalised students. Recognitive justice, with its positive regard for social difference and centrality of social democratic processes, offers us another way of advancing this discussion beyond simplistic attributions of blame. In particular, a polities of recognition is concerned with opening up the processes of schooling to groups who often have been excluded. This article uses interview data from a small Australian secondary school located in a regional community with high welfare dependency and a large indigenous population.

Optimal hedge ration with moving least squares - an empirical study using Indian single stock futures data

The use of commodity, currency and stock index futures to hedge risky exposures in the underlying assets is well documented in financial literature. However single stock futures are a relatively new addition to the family of futures and as such, academic research on its use as a hedging tool is relatively thin. In this study we have explored the efficacy of two different methodological approaches that may be applied when hedging a long position in the underlying stock with a single stock future. We use daily trading data covering years 2002 to 2007 from the Indian market, where single stock futures have been really thriving in terms of volume of trade, to extract the optimal hedge ratios using both static OLS as well as 30-day, 60-day and 90-day moving least squares. The method of moving least squares has been in use by market practitioners for some time primarily as a trend analysis and charting tool. Our results indicate that the moving least squares approach outperforms the static OLS in terms of the hedging efficiency, which has been measured by the root mean square hedging error.