Student characteristics and academic success: An econometric study of the performance of "equity groups"

Like previous volumes in the Educational Innovation in Economics and Business Series, this book is genuinely international in terms of its coverage. With contributions from nine different countries and three continents, it reflects a global interest in, and commitment to, innovation in business education, with a view to enhancing the learning experience of both undergraduates and postgraduates. It should prove of value to anyone engaged directly in business education, defined broadly to embrace management, finance, marketing, economics, informational studies, and ethics, or who has responsibility for fostering the professional development of business educators. The contributions have been selected with the objective of encouraging and inspiring others as well as illustrating developments in the sphere of business education. This volume brings together a collection of articles describing different aspects of the developments taking place in today’s workplace and how they affect business education. It describes strategies for breaking boundaries for global learning. These target specific techniques regarding teams and collaborative learning, transitions from academic settings to the workplace, the role of IT in the learning process, and program-level innovation strategies. This volume addresses issues faced by professionals in higher and further education and also those involved in corporate training centers and industry.

The application of adaptive partitioned random search in feature selection problem

Feature selection is one of important and frequently used techniques in data preprocessing. It can improve the efficiency and the effectiveness of data mining by reducing the dimensions of feature space and removing the irrelevant and redundant information. Feature selection can be viewed as a global optimization problem of finding a minimum set of M relevant features that describes the dataset as well as the original N attributes. In this paper, we apply the adaptive partitioned random search strategy into our feature selection algorithm. Under this search strategy, the partition structure and evaluation function is proposed for feature selection problem. This algorithm ensures the global optimal solution in theory and avoids complete randomness in search direction. The good property of our algorithm is shown through the theoretical analysis.

Hegemonic gender in Japanese as a foreign language education: Australian perspectives

This chapter contests the current practice of Japanese language teaching which perpetuates and reproduces gender stereotyping and gendered language norms. It is the first of its kind which examines this question from both learner's and teacher's perspectives.

Global poly(A) mRNA expression profile measured in individual bovine oocytes and cleavage embryos

The objective of this article was to estimate quantitative differences for GAPDH transcripts and poly(A) mRNA: (i) between oocytes collected from cumulus-oocyte complexes (COCs) qualified morphologically as grades A and B; (ii) between grade A oocytes before and after in vitro maturation (IVM); and (iii) among in vitro-produced embryos at different developmental stages. To achieve this objective a new approach was developed to estimate differences between poly(A) mRNA when using small samples. The approach consisted of full-length cDNA amplification (acDNA) monitored by real-time PCR, in which the cDNA from half of an oocyte or embryo was used as a template. The GAPDH gene was amplified as a reverse transcription control and samples that were not positive for GAPDH transcripts were discarded. The fold differences between two samples were estimated using delta Ct and statistical analysis and were obtained using the pairwise fixed reallocation randomization test. It was found that the oocytes recovered from grade B COCs had quantitatively less poly(A) mRNA (p < 0.01) transcripts compared with grade A COCs (1 arbitrary unit expression rate). In the comparison with immature oocytes (I arbitrary unit expression rate), the quantity of poly(A) mRNA did not change during IVM, but declined following IVF and varied with embryo culture (p < 0.05). Amplification of cDNA by real-time PCR was an efficient method to estimate differences in the amount of poly(A) mRNA between oocytes and embryos. The results obtained from individual oocytes suggested an association between poly(A) mRNA abundance and different morphological qualities of oocytes from COCs. In addition, a poly(A) mRNA profile was characterized from oocytes undergoing IVM, fertilization and blastocyst heating.