Citizenship training in school from the perspective of future primary education teachers

The aim of this paper is to recognize the images that prospective elementary school teachers have about citizenship and citizenship education in school. The qualitative methodology with an ethnographic approach is used for that deep interview of ethnographic kind and analysis of institutional documents, for example, curricula, course syllabus and graduated profi le. The revision of documents helps to a better understanding of discourses. The analysis of the corpus obtained after the application of the paradigm of codifi cation proposed in the established theory. As the principal fi ndings we way point out that the concept of citizens that is common among prospective elementary school teachers is reduced to the school environment because they consider that the promotion of citizenship helps to the incorporation of children to society, thus reproducing a propaedeutic view of education.

A flexible bandwidth resource provisioning system with agent-enhanced SLA negotiation

Paper describes an effcicient approach for provisioning of network resources based on SLAs and a range of negotiating agents. The work arose from direct collboration with Fujitsu research and invlolved a worldwide press reslease of their agent brokering system which was based on this; also, a plenary address: A.Marshall (QUB) & A.Campbell (Columbia, USA) at 4th IFIP/IEEE International conference on Management of Multimedia Networks and Services' 2001 (MMNS'01). ISSN: 0926-6801

A k-round Elimination Contention Scheme for WLANs

currently in press. This is the first published attempt to engineer QoS into a contention-based MAC layer protocol. The work was based on a cross-layer approach to providing programmability into wireless LANs. The work arose from an EPSRC grant in the "programmable networks" call, with Philips / STM research in Italy (Dr Melpignano). Subsequent follow-on includes the formation of a spin-out company (TOM) based on the idea.

Rasch Analysis of the Daily Living Tasks Dependent on Vision (DLTV)

PURPOSE. To examine internal consistency, refine the response scale, and obtain a linear scoring system for the visual function instrument, the Daily Living Tasks Dependent on Vision (DLTV). METHODS. Data were available from 186 participants with a clinical diagnosis of AMD who completed the 22-item DLTV (DLTV-22) according to four-point ordinal response scale. An independent group of 386 participants with AMD were administered a reduced version of the DLTV with 11 items (DLTV-11), according to a five-point response scale. Rasch analysis was performed on both datasets and used to generate item statistics for measure order, response odds ratios per item and per person, and infit and outfit mean square statistics. The Rasch output from the DLTV-22 was examined to identify redundant items and for factorial validity and person item measure separation reliabilities. RESULTS. The average rating for the DLTV-22 changed monotonically with the magnitude of the latent person trait. The expected versus observed average measures were extremely close, with step calibrations evenly separated for the four-point ordinal scale. In the case of the DLTV-11, step calibrations were not as evenly separated, suggesting that the five-point scale should be reduced to either a four- or three-point scale. Five items in the DLTV-22 were removed, and all 17 remaining items had good infit and outfit mean squares. PCA with residuals from Rasch analysis identified two domains containing 7 and 10 items each. The domains had high person separation reliabilities (0.86 and 0.77 for domains 1 and 2, respectively) and item measure reliabilities (0.99 and 0.98 for domains 1 and 2, respectively). CONCLUSIONS. With the improved internal consistency, establishment of the accuracy and precision of the rating scale for the DLTV and the establishment of a valid domain structure we believe that it constitutes a useful instrument for assessing visual function in older adults with age-related macular degeneration.

The practical implications of using standardized estimation equations in calculating the prevalence of chronic kidney disease

Background. Kidney Disease Outcomes Quality Initiative (KDOQI) chronic kidney disease (CKD) guidelines have focused on the utility of using the modified four-variable MDRD equation (now traceable by isotope dilution mass spectrometry IDMS) in calculating estimated glomerular filtration rates (eGFRs). This study assesses the practical implications of eGFR correction equations on the range of creatinine assays currently used in the UK and further investigates the effect of these equations on the calculated prevalence of CKD in one UK region Methods. Using simulation, a range of creatinine data (30–300 µmol/l) was generated for male and female patients aged 20–100 years. The maximum differences between the IDMS and MDRD equations for all 14 UK laboratory techniques for serum creatinine measurement were explored with an average of individual eGFRs calculated according to MDRD and IDMS 30 ml/min/1.73 m2. Observed data for 93,870 patients yielded a first MDRD eGFR 3 months later of which 47 093 (71%) continued to have an eGFR

Estimating the Heading of a Husky Mobile Robot with a LiDAR Compass based on Direction Maps

Without an absolute position sensor (e.g., GPS), an accurate heading estimate is necessary for proper localization of an autonomous unmanned vehicle or robot. This paper introduces direction maps (DMs), which represent the directions of only dominant surfaces of the vehicle’s environment and can be created with negligible effort. Given an environment with reoccurring surface directions (e.g., walls, buildings, parked cars), lines extracted from laser scans can be matched with a DM to provide an extremely lightweight heading estimate that is shown, through experimentation, to drastically reduce the growth of heading errors. The algorithm was tested using a Husky A200 mobile robot in a warehouse environment over traverses hundreds of metres in length. When a simple a priori DM was provided, the resulting heading estimation showed virtually no error growth.

Towards Extracting Absolute Roughness From Underground Mine Drift Profile Data

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate a technique to utilize underground mine drift profile data for estimating absolute roughness of an underground mine drift in order to implement the Darcy-Weisbach equation for mine ventilation calculations. This technique could provide mine ventilation engineers with more accurate information upon which they might base their ventilation systems designs. This paper presents preliminary work suggesting that it is possible to estimate the absolute roughness of drift-like tunnels by analyzing profile data (e.g., collected using a scanning laser rangefinder). The absolute roughness is then used to estimate the friction factor employed in the Darcy-Weisbach equation. The presented technique is based on an analysis of the spectral characteristics of profile ranges. Simulations based on real mine data are provided to illustrate the potential viability of this method. It is shown that mining drift roughness profiles appear similar to Gaussian profiles