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Children's mathematics concept learning of informal length measurement:Conceptual PlayWorld as an innovative approach in the beginning of primary school period
No full textMeasurement is an essential and valuable mathematics concept closely linked to everyday life and is often one of the first few mathematics concepts children learn in educational contexts. Currently, limited research exists that investigates how implementing imaginary play could create conditions in supporting children's learning of informal length measurement as they transition to school. To support children's learning of informal length measurement, this study adapted Li and Disney's (2021) Conceptual PlayWorld [CPW] in mathematics to conduct an educational experiment investigating how the implementation of CPW creates the conditions to support children's learning during the transition to school. We argue that in the CPW, the use of imagination and the teacher's dramatisation of the mathematics conceptual problems allowed opportunities for children to demonstrate and explore informal length measurement using their everyday understanding of concepts. In turn, it supports the teacher in embedding mathematical learning opportunities in the imaginary play context. CPW can be considered an alternative pedagogical approach that incorporates mathematical exploration through imaginary play, creates opportunities to support children to engage with and understand measurement concepts.</p
Correction to:Variable Mapper: Developing, Implementing, and Evaluating an Online Tool for Multidimensional Spatial Data Visualization (Journal of Geovisualization and Spatial Analysis, (2025), 9, 1, (18), 10.1007/s41651-025-00219-2)
No full textThere are errors in footnote 1 on the article first page. The footnote should read: Variable Mapper Version 2.0 is available online at https://app.urbandiversity.cloud.edu.au/, with its source code archived at https://doi.org/10.26180/24785424.v1.</p
Washington, Paris, Dublin, New Delhi? An analytical tour through potential republican constitutional models for headships of state for Australia and other Commonwealth realms
No full textWith the accession of a new Monarch in the United Kingdom, Commonwealth realms now find that they have a new head of state. In some realms, the end of the long and iconic reign of Elizabeth II may revive discussion of whether those states may wish to consider having their own heads of state, albeit remaining within the Commonwealth. If so, debate will focus on the historically developed republican models – presidential, semi-presidential and prime ministerial. The third model is notable for the separation of the roles of head of state and head of government. Yet the models may intersect, particularly where popular election is instituted for a ceremonial head of state leading to a heightened status. The ceremonial head of state will also retain key reserve powers and their role in proroguing the Parliament was recently considered in the UK Supreme Court decision of Miller v The Prime Minister [2019] UKSC 41. How monarchical reserve powers translate into powers of a republican head of state, and how such head of state is appointed, are key issues in the republican debate in Australia as exemplified in the republican models that have been postulated there and are here also considered
Analysis of international life expectancies with manifold learning and neural networks
No full textManifold learning can be utilised to obtain a low-dimensional representation of data and recover the underlying structure of the data. In this paper, we apply three manifold learning techniques, including Laplacian Eigenmaps, t-SNE, and UMAP, to analyse life expectancies at birth for a larger number of populations. We categorise the populations into appropriate clusters based on manifold learning embedding and then employ neural networks and vector autoregressive models to perform multi-population modelling for each cluster. This approach offers a more informative description of the changes in international life expectancies, allowing for the potential co-movements between related populations. There are a number of major findings in this study. First, we observe that the more developed nations exhibit homogeneous temporal patterns within their respective clusters. Comparatively, we notice that the developing nations demonstrate a greater extent of heterogeneity amongst them. Moreover, the proposed approach enhances the overall accuracy of forecasting life expectancies of multiple populations.</p
Gender identity and mental health inequalities 2001-2022:population-level evidence from an Australian cohort study
No full textBackground Trans, non-binary and gender-diverse (TGD) people experience poorer mental health relative to cisgender populations. However, we know little on how TGD mental health inequalities are changing over time. With newly available information on gender identity within Australia's largest longitudinal household survey, we aimed to provide the first nationally representative estimates of temporal trends in TGD mental health inequalities. Methods We used the 2001-2022 Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey, a national probability sample of Australian adults. Using questions about sex at birth and gender identity, asked in the 2022 wave, we compared temporal trends in mental health among TGD and cisgender respondents. Mental health was measured using the five-item Mental Health Inventory (MHI). Adjusting for age, income and other observable characteristics, we calculated annual population-weighted estimates of mean MHI Scores for TGD and cisgender respondents and corresponding TGD mental health inequalities. Results Across the 22-year period, TGD respondents consistently reported poorer mental health than cisgender respondents. Prior to 2010, differences in MHI Scores were more variable, but TGD MHI Scores were generally lower than cisgender respondents. From 2010 onwards, there was a trend of widening inequalities, with TGD-cisgender MHI inequalities ranging from -5.1 (95% CI -10.6, 0.3) in 2010 to -7.6 (95% CI -10.8, -4.4) in 2022, indicating clinically relevant differences in mental health. Effects were driven by younger populations. Conclusion TGD-cisgender mental health inequalities are increasing in Australia, with inequalities more apparent between 2010 and 2022. Policy action and greater protections for gender-diverse Australians are urgently needed.</p
Towards resource-efficient reactive and proactive auto-scaling for microservice architectures
No full textMicroservice architectures have become increasingly popular in both academia and industry, providing enhanced agility, elasticity, and maintainability in software development and deployment. To simplify scaling operations in microservice architectures, container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes feature Horizontal Pod Auto-scalers (HPAs) designed to adjust the resources of microservices to accommodate fluctuating workloads. However, existing HPAs are not suitable for resource-constrained environments, as they make scaling decisions based on the individual resource capacities of microservices, leading to service unavailability, resource mismanagement, and financial losses. Furthermore, the inherent delay in initializing and terminating microservice pods hinders HPAs from timely responding to workload fluctuations, further exacerbating these issues. To address these concerns, we propose Smart HPA and ProSmart HPA, reactive and proactive resource-efficient horizontal pod auto-scalers respectively. Smart HPA employs a reactive scaling policy that facilitates resource exchange among microservices, optimizing auto-scaling in resource-constrained environments. For ProSmart HPA, we develop a machine-learning-driven resource-efficient scaling policy that proactively manages resource demands to address delays caused by microservice pod startup and termination, while enabling preemptive resource sharing in resource-constrained environments. Our experimental results show that Smart HPA outperforms the Kubernetes baseline HPA, while ProSmart HPA exceeds both Smart HPA and Kubernetes HPA by reducing resource overutilization, overprovisioning, and underprovisioning, and increasing resource allocation to microservice applications.</p
Leveraging virtual brand community engagement and consumer brand identification as a bounce-back brand recovery strategy:role of brand endorsers
No full textBrand community engagement in the virtual environment during a brand crisis has gained attention from firms and marketing scholars due to innovative technologies. However, there is a limited empirical insight into its antecedents and consequences. This study, grounded in signaling and social identity theories, introduces the relationship between endorser credibility, virtual brand community engagement, and consumer brand identification as a pro-active brand recovery strategy. It also examines the impact of virtual brand engagement and consumer brand identification on brand love and forgiveness. The data were collected from online automobile brand community members. The results show that celebrity endorsers' trustworthiness, attractiveness, and expertise can be used as communication signals to expedite the process of consumer brand identification and virtual brand community engagement. Consumers who strongly identify with the brand and engage in its virtual community are more likely to develop an emotional bond with the brand and forgive it following a crisis. Interestingly, the study finds that the relationships between endorser credibility attractiveness and virtual consumer brand identification, endorser credibility trustworthiness and consumer brand identification, and consumer brand identification and virtual brand community are nonlinear.</p
The connection between sleep problems and emotional and behavioural difficulties in autistic children:a network analysis
No full textThe interactions between sleep problems, autism symptoms and emotional and behavioural difficulties were explored using network analysis in 240 autistic children (mean age: 8.8 years, range 5–13 years) with moderate to severe sleep problems. Findings revealed a highly connected and interpretable network, with three separate clusters identified of the modelled variables. Depression, anxiety and behavioural difficulties were the most central variables of the network. Depression, anxiety and restricted repetitive and stereotyped patterns behaviours (RRBs) were the strongest bridging variables in the network model, transmitting activation both within and between other symptom clusters. The results highlight that depression and anxiety were highly connected symptoms within the network, suggesting support in these areas could be helpful, as well as future research.</p
Dividend cuts and a firm's investment opportunity set
No full textThis paper re-examines corporate dividend payout policy by focusing on how investors evaluate dividend cuts. Our focus is to understand why despite the documented on average negative market response, many dividend-cutting firms experience a positive market response. We juxtapose a well-established literature on corporate payout policies with the literature on the role of prior information in investor evaluation of newly arrived information and document that the market responds positively to dividend cuts when firms have positive investment opportunity sets. Our results support the primary thesis that not all dividend cuts are bad news—it depends. We validate this result by documenting that firms cutting dividends in the presence of investment opportunities do make significant investments such as capital expenditures and merger and acquisition activities in future years. Furthermore, we also find that future operating profitability is higher for dividend-cutting firms with relatively higher investment opportunities. We also document that among dividend-cutting firms, there is a statistically significant difference in the buy-and-hold returns for up to 2 years, between firms with high versus low investment opportunities. This provides support for the economic significance of our results. These results provide new evidence on how investors interpret corporate payout policies to distinguish among dividend cuts.</p
Trust as a sensory mode of engaging culturally diverse communities in net zero futures
Get PDFThis article examines the role of trust–as a sensory mode of knowing and engaging in everyday environments–in generating community-based routes toward sustainable futures in a culturally diverse situation. To do this we outline a theory of trust and apply trust as a conceptual frame for understanding international students’ relationships to their everyday environments. We focus on how trust can participate in carving new pathways to net zero carbon emissions, in processes whereby decolonization and decarbonization become interwoven trajectories. In doing so, we draw on ethnographic research undertaken with culturally diverse local and international students and staff on a university campus committed to working toward net zero emissions. Treating such sites as living labs for investigating how net zero comes about simultaneously demonstrates and surfaces the role of sensory and embodied modes of trust and engagement in this process. Thus, we argue that trust and the sensory knowing it entails offer a conceptual and practical prism with applications across community initiatives.</p