Service for Thanksgiving Day

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Service on the occasion of the visit of Abraham Defehr of Surinam to the synagogue

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Connecting for innovation: Four universities collaboratively preparing pre-service teachers to teach in rural and remote Western Australia

In 2010 a group of teacher educators from four universities, experienced in rural and remote education, formed the Tertiary Educators Rural, Regional and Remote Network (TERRR Network). The collaborative goal was to improve the quality of graduates taking appointments beyond the metropolitan areas of Western Australia. The TERRR Network developed a research project to improve the capacity of universities to prepare teachers for employment in rural and remote locations. A range of outcomes emerged from the project, including: 1) the development of seven rural and remote-oriented curricula modules linked to the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers; 2) a cross-institutional field experience, and; 3) the development of a community of practice involving the Department of Education, universities and schools to address the logistical implications of placing pre-service students in rural and remote locations. This paper reports on the five phases of the project design, with a focus on learning in the field and concludes with reflections on the collaborative process used by the four universities in order to ensure that research evidence informs future policy and program development.

Going bush: Preparing pre-service teachers to teach in regional Western Australia

This paper reports on outcomes of Phases One and Two of the ALTC Competitive Research and Development Project "Developing Strategies at the Pre-Service Level to Address Critical Teacher Attraction and Retention Issues in Australian Rural, Regional and Remote Schools." This project funded over two years aims to strengthen the capacity and credibility of universities to prepare rural, regional and remote educators, similar to the capacity and credibility that has been created in preparing Australia's rural, regional and remote health workers. There is a strong recognition of the fundamental importance of quality teaching experiences rural, regional and remote schools and throughout this project over 200 pre-service teachers have participated in a curriculum module/object and completed a survey that encourages them to consider teaching in regional Western Australia. The project has mapped current Western Australian rural, regional and remote pre-service teacher education curriculum and field experience model. This mapping completed a comparison of national information with the identification of rural, regional and remote education curriculum and/or field experience models used nationally and internationally. In particular results from Phase One and Two will be presented reporting on the findings of the first year of the project.

New Frontiers or old certainties: The pre-service teacher internship

Teacher education in Australia has a rich history of evolution from apprenticeships to university education. In this chapter the teacher education internship is examined. More specifically, the chapter outlines the Western Australian Combined Universities Training School (WACUTS) project, with its focus on reducing the gap between theory and practice through a collaborative and reflective approach. The successes and challenges faced in the first six months of implementation are presented

Regional resilience: Pre-service teacher preparation to teach in the bush

This paper reports on the outcomes of a two year ALTC Competitive Research and Development Project that aimed to "Develop Strategies at the Pre-Service Level to Address Critical Teacher Attraction and Retention Issues in Australian Rural, Regional and Remote Schools". As well as developing a ‘training framework’ and teaching guides to increase the capacity and credibility of four universities to prepare educators who might venture out of the metropolitan area to teach, data were gathered from pre-service and graduate teachers to analyse regional resilience. It was found that there was a strong likelihood to participate in a regional practicum and stay in a non-metropolitan community once they graduated from university if they had a positive attitude to regional Western Australia either through a family connection or previous experience. Recommendations from this study emphasise the importance of having pre-service students participate in positive regional experiences early in their university study.

Dental Service Utilization, Dental Health Production and Equity in Dental Care: the Finnish Experience

This thesis is grounded on four articles. Article I generally examines the factors affecting dental service utilization. Article II studies the factors associated with sector-specific utilization among young adults entitled to age-based subsidized dental care. Article III explores the determinants of dental ill-health as measured by the occurrence of caries and the relationship between dental ill-health and dental care use. Article IV measures and explains income-related inequality in utilization. Data employed were from the 1996 Finnish Health Care Survey (I, II, IV) and the 1997 follow-up study included in the longitudinal study of the Northern Finland 1966 Birth Cohort (III). Utilization is considered as a multi-stage decision-making process and measured as the number of visits to the dentist. Modified count data models and concentration and horizontal equity indices were applied. Dentist s recall appeared very efficient at stimulating individuals to seek care. Dental pain, recall, and the low number of missing teeth positively affected utilization. Public subvention for dental care did not seem to statistically increase utilization. Among young adults, a perception of insufficient public service availability and recall were positively associated with the choice of a private dentist, whereas income and dentist density were positively associated with the number of visits to private dentists. Among cohort females, factors increasing caries were body mass index and intake of alcohol, sugar, and soft drinks and those reducing caries were birth weight and adolescent school achievement. Among cohort males, caries was positively related to the metropolitan residence and negatively related to healthy diet and education. Smoking increased caries, whereas regular teeth brushing, regular dental attendance and dental care use decreased caries. We found equity in young adults utilization but pro-rich inequity in the total number of visits to all dentists and in the probability of visiting a dentist for the whole sample. We observed inequity in the total number of visits to the dentist and in the probability of visiting a dentist, being pro-poor for public care but pro-rich for private care. The findings suggest that to enhance equal access to and use of dental care across population and income groups, attention should focus on supply factors and incentives to encourage people to contact dentists more often. Lowering co-payments and service fees and improving public availability would likely increase service use in both sectors. To attain favorable oral health, appropriate policies aimed at improving dental health education and reducing the detrimental effects of common risk factors on dental health should be strengthened. Providing equal access with respect to need for all people ought to take account of the segmentation of the service system, with its two parallel delivery systems and different supplier incentives to patients and dentists.

See you in class: Promoting a quality program for pre-service educators in regional locations through a virtual classroom

The quality of an online university degree is paramount to the student, the reputation of the university and most importantly, the profession that will be entered. At the School of Education within Curtin University, we aim to ensure that students within rural and remote areas are provided with high quality degrees equal to their city counterparts who access face-to-face classes on campus.In 2010, the School of Education moved to flexible delivery of a fully online Bachelor of Education degree for their rural students. In previous years, the degree had been delivered in physical locations around the state. Although this served the purpose for the time, it restricted the degree to only those rural students who were able to access the physical campus. The new model in 2010 allows access for students in any rural area who have a computer and an internet connection, regardless of their geographical location. As a result enrolments have seen a positive increase in new students. Academic staff had previously used an asynchronous environment to deliver learning modules housed within a learning management system (LMS). To enhance the learning environment and to provide high quality learning experiences to students learning at a distance, the adoption of synchronous software was introduced. This software is a real-time virtual classroom environment that allows for communication through Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and videoconferencing, along with a large number of collaboration tools to engage learners. This research paper reports on the professional development of academic staff to integrate a live e-learning solution into their current LMS environment. It involved professional development, including technical orientation for teaching staff and course participants simultaneously. Further, pedagogical innovations were offered to engage the students in a collaborative learning environment. Data were collected from academic staff through semi-structured interviews and participant observation. The findings discuss the perceived value of the technology, problems encountered and solutions sought.

Större frihet - bättre lokalt anpassad service? : Förvaltningsreformer och kommunernas service för utvecklingsstörda 1994-2000

In the beginning of the 1990s the legislation regarding the municipalities and the system of central government transfers were reformed in Finland. This resulted in a move from detailed governmental control to increased municipal autonomy. The purpose of this decentralization was to enable the municipalities to better adapt their administration and service supply to local needs. The aim of this study was to explore the effects of the increased municipal autonomy on the organization of services for people with intellectual disabilities. Did the increased autonomy cause the municipalities to alter their service supply and production and did the services become more adapted to local needs? The data consists of statistical information on service use and production, and also of background data such as demographics, economics and political elections on 452 municipalities in Finland from the years 1994 and 2000. The methods used are cluster analysis, discriminant analysis and factor analysis. The municipalities could be grouped in two categories: those which offered mainly one kind of residential services and others which had more varied mixes of services. The use of institutional care had decreased and municipalities which used institutional care as their primary form of service were mostly very small municipalities in 2000. The situation had changed from 1994, when institutional care was the primary service for municipalities of all sizes. Also the service production had become more differentiated and the municipalities had started using more varied ways of production. More municipalities had started producing their own services and private production had increased as well. Furthermore, the increase in local autonomy had opened up possibilities for local politics to influence both the service selection and methods of production. The most significant motive for changes in the service structure was high unemployment and an increasing share of elderly people in the population, particularly in sparsely populated areas. Municipalities with a low level of resources had made more changes in their service organization while those with more resources had been able to carry on as before. Key words: service structure, service for people with intellectual disabilities, municipalities, contingency theory, New Public Management

Transcending disciplinary, cultural and national boundaries: Emergent technologies, new education landscape and the cloud workshop project

As technology continues to become more accessible, miniaturised and diffused into the environment, the potential of wearable technology to impact our lives in significant ways becomes increasingly viable. Wearables afford unique interaction, communication and functional capabilities between users, their environment as well as access to information and digital data. Wearables also demand an inter-disciplinary approach and, depending on the purpose, can be fashioned to transcend cultural, national and spatial boundaries. This paper presents the Cloud Workshop project based on the theme of ‘Wearables and Wellbeing; Enriching connections between citizens in the Asia-Pacific region’, initiated through a cooperative partnership between Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) and Griffith University (GU). The project was unique due to its inter-disciplinary, inter-cultural and inter-national scope that occurred simultaneously between Australia and Hong Kong.

A Distributed Robotic Vision Service

Robotic vision is limited by line of sight and onboard camera capabilities. Robots can acquire video or images from remote cameras, but processing additional data has a computational burden. This paper applies the Distributed Robotic Vision Service, DRVS, to robot path planning using data outside line-of-sight of the robot. DRVS implements a distributed visual object detection service to distributes the computation to remote camera nodes with processing capabilities. Robots request task-specific object detection from DRVS by specifying a geographic region of interest and object type. The remote camera nodes perform the visual processing and send the high-level object information to the robot. Additionally, DRVS relieves robots of sensor discovery by dynamically distributing object detection requests to remote camera nodes. Tested over two different indoor path planning tasks DRVS showed dramatic reduction in mobile robot compute load and wireless network utilization.

An open source service oriented Mobile Business Intelligence Tool (MBIT)

Corporate executives require relevant and intelligent business information in real-time to take strategic decisions. They require the freedom to access this information anywhere and anytime. There is a need to extend this functionality beyond the office and on the fingertips of the decision makers. Mobile Business Intelligence Tool (MBIT) aims to provide these features in a flexible and cost-efficient manner. This paper describes the detailed architecture of MBIT to overcome the limitations of existing mobile business intelligence tools. Further, a detailed implementation framework is presented to realize the design. This research highlights the benefits of using service oriented architecture to design flexible and platform independent mobile business applications. © 2009 IEEE.

Effects of transit quality of service characteristics on daily bus ridership

A case study of Brisbane, the capital city of Queensland, Australia, explored how explicit measures of transit quality of service (e.g., service frequency, service span, and travel time ratio) and implicit environmental predictors (e.g., topographic grade factor) influenced bus ridership. The primary hypothesis tested was that bus ridership was higher in suburbs with high transit quality of service than in suburbs with limited service quality. Multiple linear regression, used to identify a strong positive relationship between route intensity (bus-km/h-km2) and bus ridership, indicated that both increased service frequency and spatial route density corresponded to higher bus ridership. Additionally, the travel time ratio (i.e., the ratio of in-vehicle transit travel time to in-vehicle automobile travel time) had a significant negative association with suburban ridership: transit use declined as travel time ratio increased. In contrast, topographic grade and service span did not significantly affect suburban bus ridership. The study findings enhance the fundamental understanding of traveler behavior, which is informative to urban transportation policy, planning, and provision.