A model for curricula integration using the Australian curriculum

Targeting students’ learning is at the centre of education. In addition, education is promoted as a solution on various issues; consequently educators seek ways for teachers to address societal needs, students’ learning needs, and the overcrowded curriculum. There are definition debates and issues around integrating curricula. However, the rationale for primary students undertaking curricula integrated learning can provide motivation for primary teachers to devise and implement curricula integrated lessons in the classroom. More exploration is required to present models for the practical implementation of curricula integration. This paper provides practical ideas for curricula integration that focus on combining achievement standards from the Australian Curriculum: Science and other key learning areas.

TiltZoom : tilt-based zooming control for easy one-handed mobile interactions

In this paper, we present TiltZoom, a collection of tilt-based interaction techniques designed for easy one-handed zooming on mobile devices. TiltZoom represents novel gestural interaction techniques, implemented using rate-of-rotation readings from a gyroscope, a sensor commonly embedded on current generation smart phones. We designed and experimented three variants of TiltZoom - Tilt Level, Tilt and Hold and Flip Gesture. The design decisions for all three variants are discussed in this paper and their performance, as well as subjective user experience are evaluated and compared against conventional touch-based zooming techniques. TiltZoom appears to be a worthy addition to current established collection of gesture-based mobile interaction techniques for zooming controls, especially when user has only one hand available when moving about.

Design Integration Workshops 2012

Businesses will learn how design integration can increase growth and productivity, and gain a sustainable competitive advantage. This hands on two-day workshop will demystify design thinking and introduce you to both theory and practice for the latest, world-class design integration methods. Design integration will transform your business and boost resilience in the face of current global, social and economic challenges.

BabelFuse data fusion unit with precision wireless clock synchronisation

A significant issue encountered when fusing data received from multiple sensors is the accuracy of the timestamp associated with each piece of data. This is particularly important in applications such as Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) where vehicle velocity forms an important part of the mapping algorithms; on fastmoving vehicles, even millisecond inconsistencies in data timestamping can produce errors which need to be compensated for. The timestamping problem is compounded in a robot swarm environment due to the use of non-deterministic readily-available hardware (such as 802.11-based wireless) and inaccurate clock synchronisation protocols (such as Network Time Protocol (NTP)). As a result, the synchronisation of the clocks between robots can be out by tens-to-hundreds of milliseconds making correlation of data difficult and preventing the possibility of the units performing synchronised actions such as triggering cameras or intricate swarm manoeuvres. In this thesis, a complete data fusion unit is designed, implemented and tested. The unit, named BabelFuse, is able to accept sensor data from a number of low-speed communication buses (such as RS232, RS485 and CAN Bus) and also timestamp events that occur on General Purpose Input/Output (GPIO) pins referencing a submillisecondaccurate wirelessly-distributed "global" clock signal. In addition to its timestamping capabilities, it can also be used to trigger an attached camera at a predefined start time and frame rate. This functionality enables the creation of a wirelessly-synchronised distributed image acquisition system over a large geographic area; a real world application for this functionality is the creation of a platform to facilitate wirelessly-distributed 3D stereoscopic vision. A ‘best-practice’ design methodology is adopted within the project to ensure the final system operates according to its requirements. Initially, requirements are generated from which a high-level architecture is distilled. This architecture is then converted into a hardware specification and low-level design, which is then manufactured. The manufactured hardware is then verified to ensure it operates as designed and firmware and Linux Operating System (OS) drivers are written to provide the features and connectivity required of the system. Finally, integration testing is performed to ensure the unit functions as per its requirements. The BabelFuse System comprises of a single Grand Master unit which is responsible for maintaining the absolute value of the "global" clock. Slave nodes then determine their local clock o.set from that of the Grand Master via synchronisation events which occur multiple times per-second. The mechanism used for synchronising the clocks between the boards wirelessly makes use of specific hardware and a firmware protocol based on elements of the IEEE-1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP). With the key requirement of the system being submillisecond-accurate clock synchronisation (as a basis for timestamping and camera triggering), automated testing is carried out to monitor the o.sets between each Slave and the Grand Master over time. A common strobe pulse is also sent to each unit for timestamping; the correlation between the timestamps of the di.erent units is used to validate the clock o.set results. Analysis of the automated test results show that the BabelFuse units are almost threemagnitudes more accurate than their requirement; clocks of the Slave and Grand Master units do not di.er by more than three microseconds over a running time of six hours and the mean clock o.set of Slaves to the Grand Master is less-than one microsecond. The common strobe pulse used to verify the clock o.set data yields a positive result with a maximum variation between units of less-than two microseconds and a mean value of less-than one microsecond. The camera triggering functionality is verified by connecting the trigger pulse output of each board to a four-channel digital oscilloscope and setting each unit to output a 100Hz periodic pulse with a common start time. The resulting waveform shows a maximum variation between the rising-edges of the pulses of approximately 39¥ìs, well below its target of 1ms.

Students’ beliefs about willingness to access complementary and alternative therapies (CAT) training for future integration into psychology practice.

It is suggested that all psychologists gain basic training in the types of complementary and alternative therapies (CAT) their clients may be using. As psychology students are the next cohort of health professionals who will inform future initiatives in the field, it is important to first understand the factors which influence their decisions about CAT integration. Drawing on the Theory of Planned Behavior, we investigated the beliefs that differentiate between psychology students who are high or low on willingness to access training in CAT for future practice use. Psychology students (N = 106) completed a questionnaire assessing the likelihood of both positive and negative consequences of accessing training and utilizing CAT within a psychological practice, important others approval, and barriers preventing them from this integration behavior. Those students high compared to low on willingness more likely to endorse positive outcomes (e.g., offering a more holistic approach to therapy) of accessing CAT training for future practice use and to believe that important others (e.g., clients) would support this behavior. We identified important beliefs of student psychologists related to decisions about undertaking CAT training for future professional use and can inform educators and policy-makers about CAT training and integration in psychology practice.

Improving asset management process modelling and integration

Asset management (AM) processes play an important role in assisting enterprises to manage their assets more efficiently. To visualise and improve AM processes, the processes need to be modelled using certain process modelling methodologies. Understanding the requirements for AM process modelling is essential for selecting or developing effective AM process modelling methodologies. However, little research has been done on analysing the requirements. This paper attempts to fill this gap by investigating the features of AM processes. It is concluded that AM process modelling requires intuitive representation of its processes, ‘fast’ implementation of the process modelling, effective evaluation of the processes and sound system integration.

Practical insights into curricula integration for primary science

As indicated in a previous Teaching Science article, effective planning for curricula integration requires using standards from two (or more) subject areas (e.g., science and English, science and art or science and mathematics), which also becomes the assessment foci for teaching and learning. Curricula integration of standards into an activity necessitates pedagogical knowledge for developing students’ learning in both subject areas. For science education, the skills and tools for curricula integration include the use of other key learning areas (KLAs). A balance between teacher and student-centred science education programs that draw on democratic processes (e.g., Beane, 1997) can be used to make real-world links to target students’ individual needs. This article presents practical ways to commence thinking about curricula integration towards using Australian curriculum standards.

Combinatorial design of key distribution mechanisms for wireless sensor networks

Secure communications in wireless sensor networks operating under adversarial conditions require providing pairwise (symmetric) keys to sensor nodes. In large scale deployment scenarios, there is no prior knowledge of post deployment network configuration since nodes may be randomly scattered over a hostile territory. Thus, shared keys must be distributed before deployment to provide each node a key-chain. For large sensor networks it is infeasible to store a unique key for all other nodes in the key-chain of a sensor node. Consequently, for secure communication either two nodes have a key in common in their key-chains and they have a wireless link between them, or there is a path, called key-path, among these two nodes where each pair of neighboring nodes on this path have a key in common. Length of the key-path is the key factor for efficiency of the design. This paper presents novel deterministic and hybrid approaches based on Combinatorial Design for deciding how many and which keys to assign to each key-chain before the sensor network deployment. In particular, Balanced Incomplete Block Designs (BIBD) and Generalized Quadrangles (GQ) are mapped to obtain efficient key distribution schemes. Performance and security properties of the proposed schemes are studied both analytically and computationally. Comparison to related work shows that the combinatorial approach produces better connectivity with smaller key-chain sizes.

Efficient route update and maintenance processes for multipath routing in large-scale industrial wireless sensor networks

Reliable communications is one of the major concerns in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Multipath routing is an effective way to improve communication reliability in WSNs. However, most of existing multipath routing protocols for sensor networks are reactive and require dynamic route discovery. If there are many sensor nodes from a source to a destination, the route discovery process will create a long end-to-end transmission delay, which causes difficulties in some time-critical applications. To overcome this difficulty, the efficient route update and maintenance processes are proposed in this paper. It aims to limit the amount of routing overhead with two-tier routing architecture and introduce the combination of piggyback and trigger update to replace the periodic update process, which is the main source of unnecessary routing overhead. Simulations are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed processes in improvement of total amount of routing overhead over existing popular routing protocols.

Key Management in Wireless Sensor Networks

This chapter presents a comparative survey of recent key management (key distribution, discovery, establishment and update) solutions for wireless sensor networks. We consider both distributed and hierarchical sensor network architectures where unicast, multicast and broadcast types of communication take place. Probabilistic, deterministic and hybrid key management solutions are presented, and we determine a set of metrics to quantify their security properties and resource usage such as processing, storage and communication overheads. We provide a taxonomy of solutions, and identify trade-offs in these schemes to conclude that there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

Improved foreground detection via block-based classifier cascade with probabilistic decision integration

Background subtraction is a fundamental low-level processing task in numerous computer vision applications. The vast majority of algorithms process images on a pixel-by-pixel basis, where an independent decision is made for each pixel. A general limitation of such processing is that rich contextual information is not taken into account. We propose a block-based method capable of dealing with noise, illumination variations, and dynamic backgrounds, while still obtaining smooth contours of foreground objects. Specifically, image sequences are analyzed on an overlapping block-by-block basis. A low-dimensional texture descriptor obtained from each block is passed through an adaptive classifier cascade, where each stage handles a distinct problem. A probabilistic foreground mask generation approach then exploits block overlaps to integrate interim block-level decisions into final pixel-level foreground segmentation. Unlike many pixel-based methods, ad-hoc postprocessing of foreground masks is not required. Experiments on the difficult Wallflower and I2R datasets show that the proposed approach obtains on average better results (both qualitatively and quantitatively) than several prominent methods. We furthermore propose the use of tracking performance as an unbiased approach for assessing the practical usefulness of foreground segmentation methods, and show that the proposed approach leads to considerable improvements in tracking accuracy on the CAVIAR dataset.

Combinatorial design of key distribution mechanisms for wireless sensor networks

Key distribution is one of the most challenging security issues in wireless sensor networks where sensor nodes are randomly scattered over a hostile territory. In such a sensor deployment scenario, there will be no prior knowledge of post deployment configuration. For security solutions requiring pairwise keys, it is impossible to decide how to distribute key pairs to sensor nodes before the deployment. Existing approaches to this problem are to assign more than one key, namely a key-chain, to each node. Key-chains are randomly drawn from a key-pool. Either two neighboring nodes have a key in common in their key-chains, or there is a path, called key-path, among these two nodes where each pair of neighboring nodes on this path has a key in common. Problem in such a solution is to decide on the key-chain size and key-pool size so that every pair of nodes can establish a session key directly or through a path with high probability. The size of the key-path is the key factor for the efficiency of the design. This paper presents novel, deterministic and hybrid approaches based on Combinatorial Design for key distribution. In particular, several block design techniques are considered for generating the key-chains and the key-pools.

Custom digital workflows : a new framework for design analysis integration

Flexible information exchange is critical to successful design-analysis integration, but current top-down, standards-based and model-oriented strategies impose restrictions that contradicts this flexibility. In this article we present a bottom-up, user-controlled and process-oriented approach to linking design and analysis applications that is more responsive to the varied needs of designers and design teams. Drawing on research into scientific workflows, we present a framework for integration that capitalises on advances in cloud computing to connect discrete tools via flexible and distributed process networks. We then discuss how a shared mapping process that is flexible and user friendly supports non-programmers in creating these custom connections. Adopting a services-oriented system architecture, we propose a web-based platform that enables data, semantics and models to be shared on the fly. We then discuss potential challenges and opportunities for its development as a flexible, visual, collaborative, scalable and open system.

Custom digital workflows : a new framework for design analysis integration

Flexible information exchange is critical to successful design integration, but current top-down, standards-based and model-oriented strategies impose restrictions that are contradictory to this flexibility. In this paper we present a bottom-up, user-controlled and process-oriented approach to linking design and analysis applications that is more responsive to the varied needs of designers and design teams. Drawing on research into scientific workflows, we present a framework for integration that capitalises on advances in cloud computing to connect discrete tools via flexible and distributed process networks. Adopting a services-oriented system architecture, we propose a web-based platform that enables data, semantics and models to be shared on the fly. We discuss potential challenges and opportunities for the development thereof as a flexible, visual, collaborative, scalable and open system.