How initial vocational education and training (IVET) teachers in Sweden perceive their prospects of being able to prepare upper secondary school pupils for a future occupation

Vocational teachers in Swedish upper secondary schools are a heterogeneous category of teachers, connected to different types of trade. These teachers represent a broad set of trade skills varying in content and character. In their teacher role, they continue to wear the clothes, speak the language, share the culture and remain mentally in their former professions. Still, it is central that they keep up this contact to be able to school the pupils into the environment of the trade in question, but also to help them to understand what skills a profession demands. However, the individual teacher also has to distance himself from the negative elements in the culture of the profession: patterns and habits that, for various reasons, have to be broken or changed. This paper draws attention to the ways in which a group of vocational teachers, who were participants in a project that aimed to train unauthorized vocational teachers, expressed their ambitions to prepare the pupils for a future professional career. When collecting information, we used the degree dissertations they produced and discussed in seminars, and informal dialogues. The result shows that it is important that the instruction location resembles a real working site as far as possible. These places are more or less realistic copies of a garage, a restaurant kitchen, a hairdressing salon, and so on, in order to give the pupils a realistic setting for instruction. However, the fact that these simulated workplaces lack the necessary support functions that exist in a company creates problems, problems which make a lot of extra work for the teachers. Vocational teachers also have to instruct the pupil in the experienced practitioner’s professional skills and working situation, but the pupil herself/himself must learn the job by doing it in practice. Some vocational upper secondary programs lack relevant course literature and the businesses give little support. This also makes extra work for the teachers. Moreover, the distance between the vocational programs and the trainee jobs was experienced as being difficult to overcome. One reason seems to be differences between businesses and differing preconditions between small and big companies’ abilities to take care of these pupils. The upper secondary school vocational programs also play a role in cementing existing gender roles, as well as perpetuating class-related patterns on the labour market.

Hybrid and global kitchens - first and third world intersections (part 2)

Post-colonial movements for independence are voices of autonomy and independence before the onslaught of global organizations and cultures. This paper introduces the second set of themed papers in Gender, Place and Culture (see 13.2) which contains some of these voices, emanating from intensely private as well as communal and street kitchens; where women proclaim their visibility, economic value as food producers and transformers. The essays by Christie on the fiesta kitchens of central Mexico, Schroeder on the community kitchens of Bolivia and Peru, Robson on Islamic kitchens in rural Nigeria, Wardrop on the street vendors of south Durban and Pascali on Italian migrant kitchens in North East America, all acknowledge the vital contexts of 'development', urbanization, migration and industrialization to their stories, while also highlighting powerful elements of resistance and autonomy within the kitchen. As such the Western gaze records not so much the impacts of globalization as its cooking and transformation into something new, a hybrid dish, customized for local consumption.

The weight of the thing left its mark

The weight of the thing left its mark imagines and abstracts a domestic situation where the relationships are under constant negotiation and held by what has been left unsaid. Framed by the unexpected use of kitchen cutlery the performance has a loosely knit structure that makes the dancing immediate and the quality of attention very alive.

Communicating the 'unspeakability' of violent acts in cinema

This paper explores the forensic testimony employed in James Benning‟s experimental narrative film Landscape Suicide (1986, 16mm, 95min USA). As a belated example of Judith Walker‟s „Trauma Cinema‟, this film in part re-enacts the court transcripts of two perpetrators of physical violence: Ed Gein and Michelle Protti. Teenager Protti killed another student with a kitchen knife after having been subjected to bullying by a group of girls and Wisconsin farmer Gein shot a storekeeper‟s wife, took the body home to then skin and dissect it. Gein‟s case is said to have provided the model for the cinematic serial killers portrayed in Psycho (1959), The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). In its strategy of communicating or representing the overwhelming and traumatic impact of violence cinematically Landscape Suicide is contrasted to the melodrama and shock of mainstream violence in Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Silence of the Lambs for its ability to identify „unspeakable‟ aspects of overwhelming experience. This paper will concentrate on the representation of Ed Gein‟s violent acts, rather than Protti‟s and enlists recent neurological research that suggests a model for forgetting that is identifiable in the film‟s structure and content.

Migrant houses in Northcote, Melbourne, Australia, 1950‐1975

The data collection contains documentation of migrant houses in Northcote, Melbourne. It includes photographic documentation of the houses, interviews with the inhabitants, and drawings/sketches of the houses.

The focus of the research is on houses that were built between 1950 and 1975. These houses are themselves a product of the construction skills and processes of post-war immigrants and the waves of 1960s immigrants into Australia from Southern European countries. Typically, these houses are brick veneer and have a strict sense of order and endurance about their design and image of the facade. A series of outdoor and semi-outdoor spaces produce a complexity of inside-outside relations and make possible different lifestyles.

Stories of the migrant house suggest it is an example of what might be called an ‘eco-object’, an object through which ecological practices are interwoven with social and cultural orientations. The houses are also aesthetic artefacts that present a public image through their facades. The project has documented the ‘material history’ of the houses. It illustrates the significance of particular elements/processes including: the terrace, new nature (in the front garden and back vegetable garden), summer kitchen, ongoing construction and storage space.

Early jump-out corner detectors

We present two new corner detectors; one works by using dissimilarity along the contour direction to detect curves in the image contour and the other estimates image curvature along the contour direction. These operators are fast, robust to noise, and require no subjective thresholding.

Edge evaluation using necessary components

We classify all the different kinds of errors that can occur in edge detection and then develop measures for quantifying these errors. It is shown that these sets of measures are complete and independent and form necessary components of an edge-evaluation scheme. The principle that an edge-evaluation measure should have certain qualitative properties is used to develop a method for combining these error components into a single combined measure.

Early jump-out corner detectors

Two corner detectors are presented, one of which works by testing similarity of image patches along the contour direction to detect curves in the image contour, and the other of which uses direct estimation image curvature along the contour direction. The operators are fast, robust to noise, and self-thresholding. An interpretation of the Kitchen-Rosenfeld corner operator is presented which shows that this operator can also be viewed as the second derivative of the image function along the edge direction.

A probabilistic approach to the anxious home for activity monitoring

This paper describes an approach to representing normal activities in a smart house based on the concept of anxiety. Anxiety is computed as a function of time and is kept low by interactions of an occupant with the various devices in a house. Abnormality is indicated by a lack of activity or the wrong activity which will cause anxiety to rise ultimately raising an alarm, querying the occupant and/or alerting a carer in real-time. Anxiety is formulated using probabilistic models that describe how people interact with devices in combinations. These models can be learnt interactively as the smart house acts pessimistically enquiring of the occupant if what they are doing is normal. Results are presented for a number of kitchen scenarios and for different formulations of anxiety.

The dissimilarity corner detector

We present a corner detector that works by using dissimilarity along the contour direction to detect curves in the image contour. The operator is fast, robust to noise and almost self-thresholding. The standard deviation of the image noise must be specified, but this value is easily measured and the explicit modeling of image noise contributes to the robustness of the operator to noise. We also present a new interpretation of the Kitchen-Rosenfeld corner operator (1982) in which we show that this operator can also be viewed as the second derivative of the image function along the edge direction.

Visionnaire

Visionnaire : A screening of postgraduate and masters films

All I Have Left - Merei, Daniel
The Score - Holland, Thomas,
The Beard Fairy - Morrison, Luke
Retracing the End - Biviano, Shannon, Lee, David, Ooi, Zihui, Joo, James, Partovifar, Hadi, Karantzas, Alexandra
Armed - Francisco, Mia, Weise, Timothy, Benyaminovich, Mark, Medew, Sarah, Barker, Nic, Walker, James E.
The Library Museum - Song, Miru, Larmour-Reid, Ezra, Yii, Emily, Mentzoni, Kristoffer, Janssen, Hans, Yong, King
Children Can Write Poetry - Carolan, Olivia, Wilson, Robert, Sebastian, Justin, Noonan, Sam, Wally, Joe, Huang, Janet
Ill Will - Evans, Sheridan, Thorborg, Oscar, Tofteberg, Lise, Vawdrey, Michael, Moraes, Jamie, Meyer, Nina
The Toothpick Man - Devandran, Yogashree, Arntzen, Kim, Sheah, Ju Er, Kusdina, Karina, Rahim, Amir Abdul
Necare - Thomas, Rohan, Wijananda, Adi, Graham, Alice, Low, Nicholas, Wong, Aaron, Kitchen, Zachary
Glass - Stringer, Blake, Anderson, Robert, Kelada, Matthew, Hafner, Katrina, Warner, Timothy, Vivian-Williams, Olivia
Brick Road - Moore, Kimberley, Cleeve, Guy, Kennedy, Ryan, Terry, James, herbert, Robert, Wilson, Eleanor
Ties - Rondos, Maximo, Gordes, Liam, Ruddy, Dylan, Blakley, Jock, Pitches, Devan, Mitchell, Robert

Functional imaging to understand biomechanics : a critical tool for the study of biology, pathology and the development of pharmacological solutions

We present four case studies of the literature discussing the effects of physical forces on biological function. While the field of biomechanics has existed for many decades, it may be considered by some a poor cousin to biochemistry and other traditional fields of medical research. In these case studies, including cardiovascular and respiratory systems, we demonstrate that, in fact, many systems historically believed to be controlled by biochemistry are dominated by biomechanics. We discuss both the previous paradigms that have advanced research in these fields and the changing paradigms that will define the progressions of these fields for decades to come. In the case of biomechanical effects of flowing blood on the endothelium, this has been well understood for decades. In the cases of platelet activation and liquid clearance from the lungs during birth, these discoveries are far more recent and perhaps not as universally accepted. While only a few specific examples are examined here, it is clear that not enough attention is paid to the possible mechanical links to biological function. The continued development of these research areas, with the inclusion of physical effects, will hopefully provide new insight into disease development, progression, diagnosis and effective therapies.