Student researchers in the middle : using visual images to make sense of inclusive education

Using ‘visual narrative’ theoretically and practically, this paper explores issues of inclusive education, during a period of curriculum reform and renewal in Australia. In Australia, the middle years of schooling, Years 5 to 9, are well researched and known as a period when students disengage with learning and participation in schooling. Research in the middle years affirms the importance of engaging with ‘student voice’. In this special edition, we are aiming to highlight how the use of visual imagery can be a rich source of understanding, illustrating students’ self-knowledge of schooling. Methodologically we refer to our research approach as ‘visual narrative’. Other writers in this edition use the term ‘photo voice’. For researchers it is important to highlight the differing orientations that ‘visual narrative’ and ‘photo voice’ signify. The terms are not mutually exclusive but highlight differing research possibilities and emphasis. Our argument, through the use of visual narrative produced by middle years’ students, is that visual texts open out some innovative possibilities for understanding inclusive education and supporting new relationships with our research community. Such approaches are not new; however, in a field such as special education that purports to support marginalised groups, liberatory research methods are under-represented. This paper aims to open out these discussions and provide a way forwards for teachers and researchers interested in breaking apart why it is that inclusive education remains a never-ending struggle.

Actual/ideal body images of high school girls and how it affects their self-esteem : implications for educational and clinical institutions

Given that adolescence is a critical period for the development of a positive self-concept and body image, it is imperative that educators have an understanding of adolescent students' body image and their dieting practises and behaviours. Negative body image is an issue that is rife within the adolescent student population in Australia and around the world, and is a factor that is commonly associated with and linked to disturbed eating behaviours and chronic eating disorders like Anorexia Nervosa (AN). Despite the intuitive appeal and importance of investigating adolescents' body image in terms of what adolescents would like to look like and what they think that they look like now, very little research has investigated these concepts. Furthermore, very little research has explored whether there is a difference between these two constructs how this may affect adolescents' self-esteem. This study therefore aimed to explore the actual and ideal body images of adolescent high school girls aged between 12 and 18 years in two samples of adolescents, one with eating disorders (n=76, clinical sample) and one without (n=823 high school sample). Additionally, this study investigates these constructs in relation to self-esteem levels. The results of this study have important implications for educators and clinicians within educational and clinical settings.

Automated detection of lung nodules in computed tomography images: a review

Lung nodules refer to a range of lung abnormalities the detection of which can facilitate early treatment for lung patients. Lung nodules can be detected by radiologists through examining lung images. Automated detection systems that locate nodules of various sizes within lung images can assist radiologists in their decision making. This paper presents a study of the existing methods on automated lung nodule detection. It introduces a generic structure for lung nodule detection that can be used to represent and describe the existing methods. The structure consists of a number of components including: acquisition, pre-processing, lung segmentation, nodule detection, and false positives reduction. The paper describes the algorithms used to realise each component in different systems. It also provides a comparison of the performance of the existing approaches.

Children, visual images, and narratives

Book reviews of 
- Colomer, Teresa, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, and Cecilia Silva-Diaz, eds. New Directions in Picturebook Research. New York: Routledge, 2010
- Edwards, Gail, and Judith Saltman. Picturing Canada: A History of Canadian Children’s Illustrated Books and Publishing. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2010
- Harding, Jennifer, and Pat Pinsent, eds. What Do You See? International Perspectives on Children’s Book Illustration. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008
- Lerner, Loren, ed. Depicting Canada’s Children. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2009
- Pantaleo, Sylvia. Exploring Student Response to Contemporary Picturebooks. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009

Images of cross sections of some surgical suture thread

The data represents characterisation of future threads for orthopedic applications.

Image retrieval based on bag of images

Conventional relevance feedback schemes may not be suitable to all practical applications of content-based image retrieval (CBIR), since most ordinary users would like to complete their search in a single interaction, especially on the web search. In this paper, we explore a new approach to improve the retrieval performance based on a new concept, bag of images, rather than relevance feedback. We consider that image collection comprises of image bags instead of independent individual images. Each image bag includes some relevant images with the same perceptual meaning. A theoretical case study demonstrates that image retrieval can benefit from the new concept. A number of experimental results show that the CBIR scheme based on bag of images can improve the retrieval performance dramatically.

One image reduction algorithm for RGB color images

We investigate the problem of combining or aggregating several color values given in coding scheme RGB. For this reason, we study the problem of averaging values on lattices, and in particular on discrete product lattices. We study the arithemtic mean and the median on product lattices. We apply these aggregation functions in image reduction and we present a new algorithm based on the minimization of penalty functions on discrete product lattices.

Representing images by means of interval-valued fuzzy sets. Application to stereo matching

Stereo matching tries to find correspondences between locations in a pair of displaced images of the same scene in order to extract the underlying depth information. Pixel correspondence estimation suffers from occlusions, noise or bias. In this work, we introduce a novel approach to represent images by means of interval-valued fuzzy sets to overcome the uncertainty due to the above mentioned problems. Our aim is to take advantage of this representation in the stereo matching algorithm. The image interval-valued fuzzification process that we propose is based on image segmentation in a different way to the common use of segmentation in stereo vision. We introduce interval-valued fuzzy similarities to compare windows whose pixels are represented by intervals. In the experimental analysis we show the goodness of this representation in the stereo matching problem. The new representation together with the new similarity measure that we introduce shows a better overall behavior with respect to other very well-known methods.

Paper and fire : the images and ashes of Rudolf Steiner's architecture

On New Years Eve, 1922, the massive double-domed timber structure of Rudolf Steiner’s First Goetheanum was engulfed in flames and reduced to ashes. In an effort to make his spiritual teachings accessible to all people through the medium of architecture, Steiner had dedicated ten years to the project. Growing hostility towards his occult philosophy however, pointed to arson as the probable cause of the blaze. Not to be defeated, Steiner embarked upon a new design for a second Goetheanum that endeavoured to fulfil the same aim as its predecessor but on an even grander scale. Yet despite being borne out of the same ideational basis, the architectural expression of the second building was vastly different from the first. This paper examines these differences and investigates how the methods Steiner used to create his architecture influenced the final architectural products. Steiner recognised drawing as a creative instrument that could enrich the conceptual potential of his theoretical work, however, with no formal training as an architect and limited drawing ability, this exchange was somewhat limited. The ambiguity of Steiner’s drawings is countered to some extent though by the maquettes and models he produced, which help negotiate the gap between the immaterial idea and the material object. The shared three-dimensional nature of model making and architecture allowed Steiner a more direct means of articulating and mediating his esoteric ideas in built form than the two-dimensional nature of drawing, particularly given the undulating organic forms he enthusiastically employed. Nevertheless, models are still a form of architectural abstraction capable of leaving their own trace on the built work and the distinctive character of Steiner’s non-conventional models serve to illustrate this point. A comparison between Steiner’s models and the buildings themselves reveal the intimate relationship between process and product that exists in his work. While the loss of the first Goetheanum came as a crushing blow to Steiner, its destruction and reconstruction offered him a unique opportunity to reconsider aspects of the design that may have been flawed in the first instance – a situation he embraced unequivocally. What images recurred in his work and why? How did his architecture evolve? This essay will demonstrate how paper and plasticine were utilised in a highly individualised manner by Steiner as a bridge between idea and artefact, to allow new architectural forms to rise from the ashes and produce one of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary buildings.