Critical review of time-dependent shortest path algorithms: A multimodal trip planner perspective

A multimodal trip planner that produces optimal journeys involving both public transport and private vehicle legs has to solve a number of shortest path problems, both on the road network and the public transport network. The algorithms that are used to solve these shortest path problems have been researched since the late 1950s. However, in order to provide accurate journey plans that can be trusted by the user, the variability of travel times caused by traffic congestion must be taken into consideration. This requires the use of more sophisticated time-dependent shortest path algorithms, which have only been researched in depth over the last two decades, from the mid-1990s. This paper will review and compare nine algorithms that have been proposed in the literature, discussing the advantages and disadvantages of each algorithm on the basis of five important criteria that must be considered when choosing one or more of them to implement in a multimodal trip planner.

1000 voices: reflective online multimodal narrative inquiry as a research methodology for disability research

This article outlines the research approach used in the international 1000 Voices Project. The 1000 Voices project is an interdisciplinary research and public awareness project that uses a customised online multimodal storytelling platform to explore the lives of people with disability internationally. Through the project, researchers and partners have encouraged diverse participants to select the modes of storytelling (e.g. images, text, videos and combinations thereof) that suit them best and to self-define what both ‘disability’ and ‘life story’ mean to them. The online reflective component of the approach encourages participants to organically and reflectively develop story events and revisions over time in ways that suit them and their emerging lives. This article provides a detailed summary of the project's theoretical and methodological development alongside suggestions for future development in social work and qualitative research.

Time, space, and text in the elementary school digital writing classroom

Theorists of multiliteracies, social semiotics, and the New Literacy Studies have drawn attention to the potential changing nature of writing and literacy in the context of networked communications. This article reports findings from a design-based research project in Year 4 classrooms (students aged 8.5-10 years) in a low socioeconomic status school. A new writing program taught students how to design multimodal and digital texts across a range of genres and text types, such as web pages, online comics, video documentaries, and blogs. The authors use Bernstein’s theory of the pedagogic device to theorize the pedagogic struggles and resolutions in remaking English through the specialization of time, space, and text. The changes created an ideological struggle as new writing practices were adapted from broader societal fields to meet the instructional and regulative discourses of a conventional writing curriculum.

Troubling silences and taboo texts : constructing safer and more positive school climates for same-sex attracted high school students in Australia

This chapter offers three insights into the relationship between curriculum decision making, positive school climate, and academic achievement for same-sex attracted (SSA) students, highlighting the need for students to be offered more than heteronormative narratives and silence on issues of sexuality in the official school curriculum. The authors firstly provide a review of research and report on findings of a doctoral study (Mikulsky, 2007) explaining the impact of SSA students’ perceptions of school climate on their motivation and academic self-concept. Situating the work in the context of the Australian Curriculum for English and associated classroom texts, the dominant discourse of ‘straight, white female’ heroines as exemplified in the globally popular young adult novel The hunger games and other texts popular with Australian students are critiqued, with an argument made for expanding notions of what it means to ‘attend to’ gender and sexuality through textual choice and critical pedagogy. The authors show how texts that feature LGBTQ characters and storylines continue to be marginalized and constructed as taboo and demonstrate how curricular choices can and do impact academic outcomes for marginalized students. Issues of gender and sexuality are framed as a cross-curriculum imperative, with recommendations made for the explicit inclusion of materials exploring gender and sexuality in the official curriculum of all key learning areas.

Touching Texts : Adaptations of Australian Picture Books for Tablets

In order to explore some of the possibilities and constraints of picture books on tablets, this chapter addresses adaptations of contemporary Australian picture books for tablet devices. It considers how publishing technologies shape form and meaning of picture books, and attends particularly to the impact of interactivity and adaptation on such meaning. After discussing some contextual issues for electronic literature, this chapter explores the print and tablet versions of three picture books: Libby Gleeson and Freya Blackwood’s Look, A Book! (2011), Nick Bland’s The Wrong Book (2009), and Shaun Tan’s Rules of Summer (2013).

Teaching persuasive texts : building a language of evaluation through hedging and moderated intensification

We identify two persuasive writing techniques – hedging and intensification – that pose difficulty for students in the middle years. We use examples of student writing from 3000 work samples collected as part of a larger Australian Research Council Linkage Project, URLearning (2009–2013). To realise the effective power of rhetorical persuasion, students need to be explicitly taught a range of hedging techniques to use to their advantage, and an expanded lexicon that does not rely on intensifiers. Practical teaching tips are provided for teachers.

Narrative and multimodality in English language arts curricula : a tale of two nations

In this policy column within this special edition on "The Arts in Language Arts", we critique the current place of multimodality and narratives in research and curriculum policy. This is a vital issue of significance for literacy educators, researchers, and policy makers because the narrative texts that circulate in our everyday lives are multimodal, tied to the ever-broadening range of narratives forms in digital sites of display. Here, we critically evaluate the place of multimodality and narratives in the language arts or English curriculum policies of two nations, the USA and Australia. In particular, we highlight the silence on multimodality within the Common Core State Standards, USA, and the contrasting centrality of multimodality in the National Curriculum: English, Australia.

Children's emotions and multimodal appraisal of places : walking with the camera

This sensory ethnography explores the affordances and constraints of multimodal design to represent emotions and appraisal associated with experiencing local places. Digital video production, walking with the camera, and the use of a think-aloud protocol to reflect on the videos, provided an opportunity for the primary school children to represent their emotions and appraisal of places multimodally. Applying a typology from Martin and White's (2005) framework for the Language of Evaluation, children's multimodal emotional responses to places in this study tended toward happiness, security, and satisfaction. The findings demonstrate an explicit connection between children's emotions in response to local places through video, while highlighting the potential for teachers to use digital filmmaking to allow children to reflect actively on their placed experiences and represent their emotional reactions to places through multiple modes.

Reterritorializing multimodal design in the classroom through a socially mediated Indigenous heritage

National or International Significance Flows of cultural heritage in textual practices are vital to sustaining Indigenous communities - a national and international priority (Commonwealth of Australia, 2011). Indigenous heritage, whether passed on by oral tradition or ubiquitous social media, can be seen as a "conversation between the past and the future" (Fairclough, 2012, p. xv). Indigenous heritage involves appropriating memories within a cultural flow to pass on a spiritual legacy. This presentation reports ethnographic research of social media practices in a small independent Aboriginal school in Southeast Queensland, Australia that is resided over by the Yuggera elders and an Aboriginal principal. Quality of Research The purpose was to rupture existing notions of white literacies in schools, and to deterritorialize the uses of digital media by dominant cultures in the public sphere. Examples of learning experiences included the following: i. Integrating Indigenous language and knowledge into media text production; ii. Classroom visits from Indigenous elders; and iii. Publishing oral histories through digital scrapbooking. The program aligned with the Australian National Curriculum English (ACARA, 2014), which mandates the teaching of multimodal text creation. Data sources included a class set of digital scrapbooks collaboratively created in a preparatory-one primary classroom. The digital scrapbooks combined digitally encoded words, images of material artifacts, and digital music files. A key feature of the writing and digital design task was to retell and digitally display and archive a cultural narrative of significance to the Indigenous Australian community and its memories and material traces of the past for the future. Data analysis of the students' digital stories involved the application of key themes of negotiated, material, and digitally mediated forms of heritage practice. It drew on Australian Indigenous research by Keddie et al. (2013) to guard against the homogenizing of culture that can arise from a focus on a static view of culture. The interpretation of findings located Indigenous appropriation of social media within broader racialized politics that enables Indigenous literacy to be understood as a dynamic, negotiated, and transgenerational flows of practice. It demonstrates that Indigenous children's use of media production reflects "shifting and negotiated identities" in response to changing media environments that can function to sustain Indigenous cultural heritages (Appadurai, 1696, p. xv). Impact on practice, policy or theory The findings are important for teachers at a time when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures is a cross-curricular policy priority in the Australian Curriculum (ACARA, 2014). The findings show how curriculum policies can be applied to classroom practice in ways that are epistemologically consistent with Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Theoretically, it demonstrates how the children's experiences of culture are layered over time, as successive generations inherit, interweave, and hear others' cultural stories or maps. Practically, recommendations are provided for an approach to appropriating social media in schools that explicitly attends to the dynamic nature of Indigenous practices, negotiated through intercultural constructions and flows, and opening space for a critical anti-racist approach to multimodal text production. Timeliness The research is timely in the context of the accessibility and role of digital and multimodal forms of communication, including for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

Analysing children’s persuasive texts : the use of hedging and intensification

Research Quality This is a dialogue between two Australian literacy scholars about two persuasive writing techniques that posed difficulty for the students in our research. This dialogue flows from the analysis of Year 6 writing samples from an ARC Linkage Project, URLearning (2009-2013) - the focus of the symposium. We use vivid examples of writing from students’ handwritten persuasive texts on topics that were chosen by teachers. The persuasive structure in the texts followed the Toulmin (2003) model: a thesis statement, three arguments with evidence, and a conclusion. The findings show that to realise the effective power of rhetorical persuasion, students need an expanded lexicon that does not rely on intensifiers, and which employs a greater range of advanced hedging techniques to use to their advantage. National & International Importance The study is potentially of national and international relevance, given that argumentation or persuasion is a key life skill in many professional, personal, and discourses. It is also a requirement in the International English Language Testing Systems (IELTS) tests, which are a critical gateway for tertiary studies in many English-speaking countries (Coffin, 2004). Timeliness The research is timely given the Australian Curriculum English, in which persuasive texts figure prominently from Preparatory to Year 10 (ACARA, 2014). The recommendations are also timely in the context of educational policies in other parts of the world. For example, in the United States, the Common Core Standards: English Language Arts, mandates the teaching of persuasive texts (Council of Chief State School Officers & National Governors Association, 2013) Implications for practice/policy The findings of the study have specific practical implications for teachers, who can address the persuasive writing techniques of hedging and intensification with which children need targeted support and explicit instruction. The presentation is positioned at the nexus of teacher practice to better address the national priorities of the Australian Curriculum: English (ACARA, 2014), while having implications for applied linguistics research by identifying common problems in students' persuasive writing.

Multilingual lexical resources to detect cognates in non-aligned texts

The identification of cognates between two distinct languages has recently start- ed to attract the attention of NLP re- search, but there has been little research into using semantic evidence to detect cognates. The approach presented in this paper aims to detect English-French cog- nates within monolingual texts (texts that are not accompanied by aligned translat- ed equivalents), by integrating word shape similarity approaches with word sense disambiguation techniques in order to account for context. Our implementa- tion is based on BabelNet, a semantic network that incorporates a multilingual encyclopedic dictionary. Our approach is evaluated on two manually annotated da- tasets. The first one shows that across different types of natural text, our method can identify the cognates with an overall accuracy of 80%. The second one, con- sisting of control sentences with semi- cognates acting as either true cognates or false friends, shows that our method can identify 80% of semi-cognates acting as cognates but also identifies 75% of the semi-cognates acting as false friends.

The use of multimodal technologies to enhance reflective writing in teacher education

For preservice teachers new to the teaching profession, reflective practice can be a difficult process. Yet reflective writing, once mastered, has the capacity to support preservice teachers to make connections between teaching theory and professional practice, and to start to take control of their own professional learning journey. The reflective practice described in this chapter was scaffolded through a framework for writing, the use of annotated work samples and explicit teaching. This approach was enhanced through multimodal resources including written peer assessment, audio teacher feedback and a video recording of the class presentation. The video footage assisted the preservice teachers to reconcile the feedback that they received from multiple sources. This chapter describes and analyses the implementation of the PRT Pattern (Prompting Reflection using Technology). Results of this practice revealed that the multiple forms of feedback assisted the preservice teachers to analyse their performance in terms of their developing professional identity and practice.

A multimodal physiotherapy programme plus deep water running for improving cancer-related fatigue and quality of life in breast cancer survivors

The aim of the study was to assess the feasibility and effectiveness of aquatic‐based exercise in the form of deep water running ( DWR ) as part of a multimodal physiotherapy programme ( MMPP ) for breast cancer survivors. A controlled clinical trial was conducted in 42 primary breast cancer survivors recruited from community‐based P rimary C are C entres. Patients in the experimental group received a MMPP incorporating DWR , 3 times a week, for an 8‐week period. The control group received a leaflet containing instructions to continue with normal activities. Statistically significant improvements and intergroup effect size were found for the experimental group for P iper F atigue S cale‐ R evised total score ( d = 0.7, P = 0.001), as well as behavioural/severity ( d = 0.6, P = 0.05), affective/meaning ( d = 1.0, P = 0.001) and sensory ( d = 0.3, P = 0.03) domains. Statistically significant differences between the experimental and control groups were also found for general health ( d = 0.5, P < 0.05) and quality of life ( d = 1.3, P < 0.05). All participants attended over 80% of sessions, with no major adverse events reported. The results of this study suggest MMPP incorporating DWR decreases cancer‐related fatigue and improves general health and quality of life in breast cancer survivors. Further, the high level of adherence and lack of adverse events indicate such a programme is safe and feasible.

A quay crane scheduling methodology for multimodal container terminals

This thesis develops an operational decision support tool for container terminal managements. The tool generates efficient schedules for shore cranes handling containers carried by mega container vessels.

Some Reflections on the Emergence of Multimodal Assemblages of Meaning

In this commentary I reflect upon the conceptualisation of human meaning-making, utilised in the two target articles, that relies heavily on speech as the main mode of semiosis and considers time only in its chronological form. Instead I argue that human existence is embodied and lived through multiple modalities, and involves not only sequential experience of time, but also experience of emergence. In order to move towards a conception of meaning-making that takes this into account, I introduce the social-semiotic theory of multimodality (Kress 2010) and discuss notions of ‘real duration’ (Bergson 1907/1998) and ‘lived time’ (Martin-Vallas 2009). I argue that dialogical (idiographic) researchers need to develop analytic and methodological tools that allow exploring the emergence of multimodal assemblages of meaning in addition to trying to avoid the monologisation of complex dynamic dialogical phenomena.