International students in Australia: read ten thousand volumes of books and walk ten thousand miles

A number of international students, predominately from Asian countries, are present in universities in the UK, United States, and Australia. There is little research exploring their experiences as they negotiate the disciplinary requirements of their courses. This paper investigates students' agency as they write their first assignment for their Master's of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages course and the academics who teach them. Talk around texts and the positioning theory are used to analyse the data. It is argued that the students demonstrate strategic agency, which allows them to better understand the academic requirements of their disciplines. The analysis reveals the complexities involved in international students' adaptation to disciplinary discourse and the implications for teaching and learning in higher education.

Investigating Facebook groups through a random graph model

Facebook disseminates messages for billions of users everyday. Though there are log files stored on central servers, law enforcement agencies outside of the U.S. cannot easily acquire server log files from Facebook. This work models Facebook user groups by using a random graph model. Our aim is to facilitate detectives quickly estimating the size of a Facebook group with which a suspect is involved. We estimate this group size according to the number of immediate friends and the number of extended friends which are usually accessible by the public. We plot and examine UML diagrams to describe Facebook functions. Our experimental results show that asymmetric Facebook friendship fulfills the assumption of applying random graph models.

Network traffic clustering using random forest proximities

The recent years have seen extensive work on statistics-based network traffic classification using machine learning (ML) techniques. In the particular scenario of learning from unlabeled traffic data, some classic unsupervised clustering algorithms (e.g. K-Means and EM) have been applied but the reported results are unsatisfactory in terms of low accuracy. This paper presents a novel approach for the task, which performs clustering based on Random Forest (RF) proximities instead of Euclidean distances. The approach consists of two steps. In the first step, we derive a proximity measure for each pair of data points by performing a RF classification on the original data and a set of synthetic data. In the next step, we perform a K-Medoids clustering to partition the data points into K groups based on the proximity matrix. Evaluations have been conducted on real-world Internet traffic traces and the experimental results indicate that the proposed approach is more accurate than the previous methods.

Physical environmental factors that invite older adults to walk for transportation

Knowledge on the physical environmental factors that invite older adults to walk for transportation is limited. The current study aimed to investigate the relationships between environmental factors and invitingness to walk for transportation and the potential moderating effects of gender, functional limitations and current walking for transportation behavior. Sixty older participants evaluated 40 panoramic photographs on their invitingness in two ways: a forced choice (first impressions) and a rating task (more deliberate evaluation). Presence of vegetation, benches, and surveillance significantly positively related to both invitingness-measures. Upkeep and presence of historic elements significantly positively related to the assigned invitingness-ratings. For the forced choice task, significant positive relationships emerged for land use and separation between sidewalk and cycling path, but only in functionally limited participants. Environments offering comfort, safety from crime, and pleasantness may attract older adults to walk for transportation. Experimental and on-site studies are needed to elaborate on current findings.

Secure universal designated verifier signature without random oracles

In Asiacrypt 2003, the concept of universal designated verifier signature (UDVS) was introduced by Steinfeld, Bull, Wang and Pieprzyk. In the new paradigm, any signature holder (not necessarily the signer) can designate the publicly verifiable signature to any desired designated verifier (using the verifier’s public key), such that only the designated verifier can believe that the signature holder does have a valid publicly verifiable signature, and hence, believes that the signer has signed the message. Any other third party cannot believe this fact because this verifier can use his secret key to create a valid UDVS which is designated to himself. In ACNS 2005, Zhang, Furukawa and Imai proposed the first UDVS scheme without random oracles. In this paper, we give a security analysis to the scheme of Zhang et al. and propose a novel UDVS scheme without random oracles based on Waters’ signature scheme, and prove that our scheme is secure under the Gap Bilinear Diffie Hellman assumption

Thinking with the body: Mind and movement in the work of Wayne McGregor | Random Dance

Thinking with the Body was an exhibition at London's Wellcome Collection, offering a glimpse into Wayne McGregor | Random Dance's interdisciplinary research and the impact it has in the rehearsal studio. Staged in the run-up to the first performances of Atomos at Sadler's Wells (Oct 2013), the exhibition featured the results of over a decade of interdisciplinary research into choreographic creativity which has been applied in the studio, in dance education, and to increase public understanding.

Wellcome Collection is a free visitor destination exploring the connections between medicine, life and art in the past, present and future. Wellcome Collection is part of the Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation dedicated to achieving improvements in human and animal health.

The exhibition finished on 27 October 2013, but the film exhibits are still available to view online.

Salt intake assessed by 24 h urinary sodium excretion in a random and opportunistic sample in Australia

The gold standard method for measuring population sodium intake is based on a 24 h urine collection carried out in a random population sample. However, because participant burden is high, response rates are typically low with less than one in four agreeing to provide specimens. At this low level of response it is possible that simply asking for volunteers would produce the same results.