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Citizenship education: building for the future
Get PDFThis chapter deals with many of the issues that are discussed in greater detail elsewhere in this book. It approaches them from the practical perspective of the Association for Citizenship Teaching (ACT)1 in the UK, which is a membership organisation promoting high quality citizenship education for all. At the time this book was produced Citizenship had been a national curriculum subject in England for twenty years. This period generated a wealth of school-based experiments and saw the development of a cadre of experienced subject specialist teachers, which led to some principles that inform the work of ACT and which underpin its planning for the future. Our starting point is that good Citizenship teachers address the emotional dimension, the role of knowledge and rational argument, and the need for citizenship to be enacted. This approach continues to inform how teachers are responding to significant on-going and emergent challenges. In considering five of these challenges this chapter reflects on what the next twenty years might hold, and what Citizenship in schools might look like in the near future
"If I had had a me": the benefits and challenges of involving children with lived experience in youth justice services
Get PDFThis article presents the findings from an ongoing evaluation of a partnership project between a youth justice service and an independent charity which supports the involvement of children with lived experience of youth justice services in work with other young people who have offended and with policy makers and service providers. The research involved the secondary analysis of project records and 15 semi-structured interviews with youth justice managers and practitioners and the charity's staff as well as representatives from external organisations with whom it has worked. The analysis focuses on the nature of activities undertaken, the 'theory of change' driving these activities, the perceived benefits of the work as well as some of the challenges involved. The findings suggest positive outcomes for children in terms of increased engagement and participation, improvements in confidence and self-esteem and the development of personal, social, health and educational skills. The project represents a compelling example of what child first diversion looks like in practice. The article adds to existing knowledge of the benefits and challenges of involving children with recent experience of the youth justice system in service delivery and in co-production work with policy makers and service providers. It also offers insights into recent changes in youth justice policy in England and Wales, in particular the commitment to treating children as children first
Federated learning for performance prediction in multi-operator environments
Get PDFTelecom vendors and operators deliver services with strict requirements on performance, over complex and sometimes partly shared network infrastructures. A key enabler for network and service management in such environments is knowledge sharing, and the use of data-driven models for performance prediction, forecasting, and troubleshooting. In this paper, we outline a multi-operator service metrics prediction framework using federated learning that allows privacy-preserved knowledge-sharing across operators for improved model performance, and also reduced requirements on data transfer within an operator network. Federated learning is compared against local and central learning strategies for multi-operator performance prediction, and it is shown to balance the requirements on data privacy, model performance, and the network overhead. Further, the paper provides insights on how data heterogeneity affects model performance, where the conclusion is that standard federated learning has certain robustness to data heterogeneity. Finally, we discuss the challenges related to training a federated learning model with a limited budget on the communication rounds. The evaluation is performed using a set of realistic publicly available data traces, that are adapted specifically for the purpose of studying multi-operator service performance prediction
Prediabetes and the risk of type 2 diabetes: investigating the roles of depressive and anxiety symptoms in the Lifelines cohort study
Get PDFBackground
Depression and anxiety may increase the risk of progressing from prediabetes to type 2 diabetes. The present study examined the interactions between prediabetes status and elevated depressive and anxiety symptoms with the risk of type 2 diabetes.
Methods
Participants (N=72,428) were adults aged 40 years and above without diabetes at baseline from the Lifelines Cohort Study (58% female; mean age=51.4 years). The Mini-International Neuropsychiatric Interview screened for elevated symptoms of major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder. Glycated hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) levels determined prediabetes status at baseline (2007-2013), and HbA1c and self-reported diabetes diagnoses determined diabetes status at follow-up (2014-2017). Groups were formed for elevated depressive and anxiety symptoms, respectively, and prediabetes status at baseline (elevated depressive/anxiety symptoms with prediabetes, elevated depressive/anxiety symptoms alone, and prediabetes alone), and compared to a reference group (no prediabetes or anxiety/depression) on the likelihood of developing diabetes during the follow-up period.
Findings
N=1,300 (1.8%) participants developed diabetes. While prediabetes alone was associated with incident diabetes (OR=5.94; 95% CI=5.10-6.90, p<.001), the group with combined prediabetes and depressive symptoms had the highest likelihood of developing diabetes over follow-up (OR=8.29; 95% CI=5.58-12.32, p<.001). Similar results were found for prediabetes and anxiety symptoms (OR=6.57; 95% CI=4.62-9.33, p<.001), compared to prediabetes alone (OR=6.09; 95% CI=5.23-7.11, p<.001), though with a smaller effect. The interaction between depressive symptoms and prediabetes was synergistic in age-and-sex adjusted analyses.
Conclusion
Individuals with elevated depressive, and to some extent anxiety, symptoms in combination with prediabetes may represent a high-risk subgroup for type 2 diabetes
Mothers who listen with more than ears: The phenomenological experience of the non-verbal communication between mothers and their child with complex cerebral palsy
Get PDFIn England, every 1000 babies born 1 will be left with complex cerebral palsy affecting all limbs and internal organs. Of those children by age 12, 43% will have no consistent way to communicate with the world. Empirically, many mothers of these children self-report that they can communicate effectively with their children in these cases in a way that possibly only the mother understands. Understanding the mother’s experience of living with a complex cerebral palsy non-verbal child is important for professionals and the society that supports them.
The aim of this research is not to prove or disprove this phenomenon but rather to explore the lived experience of mothers with disabled non-verbal cerebral palsy children, validating and giving a voice to an otherwise isolated abnormal form of mothering.
A homogenous sample was collected made up of 8 mothers who had non-verbal complex cerebral palsy as a result of Hypoxic Ischemic Encephalopathy at birth. The age range of the children was not > 3 and not <16. Interviews took place on a video link, semi-structured interviews were done and the six stages of a Heuristic Inquiry were used to analyse the transcribed data.
The results produced 7 universal themes: ‘The Choice to Communicate,’ ‘Communication Over Time’, Impediments to communication’, ‘Certainty and Uncertainty’, ‘Embodied Communication’, ‘Being Towards Communication’, and ‘Being in the World with Others’. These themes capture the essence of the experience that mothers have when confronted by a baby that is diagnosed with multiple disabilities and unable to verbalise. The findings that emerged are fundamentally existential and they are examined through an existential lens
Measuring interlimb asymmetry for strength and power: a brief review of assessment methods, data analysis, current evidence, and practical recommendations
Get PDFThe aim of this brief narrative review is to summarize the present evidence, provide recommendations for data analysis, and provide appropriate training methods to reduce strength and power asymmetries within athlete populations. Present evidence shows that a strong interest in the assessment of asymmetry exists. Despite the perceived associated relationship between asymmetry and injury and performance, a clear link is still missing. Practitioners need to be aware of this when they decide to assess asymmetries and later design training interventions. Several bilateral and unilateral tests could be used to assess asymmetries, such as isokinetic dynamometry, the isometric mid-thigh pull, squat, and Nordic hamstring exercise. Based on the current evidence, future investigations require further standardization of methodology and analysis to optimize interpretation (e.g., within session and between session), adoption, and implementation of interlimb asymmetry testing and appropriate interventions. In this review, 3 training interventions have been proposed to reduce existing lower limb asymmetries in sport populations: traditional resistance training, flywheel resistance training, and combined training interventions, with some evidence suggesting that such interventions can reduce lower limb asymmetries. Nonetheless, the number and quality of articles currently available are too limited to draw firm conclusions; therefore, further research is needed to verify whether training interventions can achieve these aims. To develop an understanding and application of interventions addressing interlimb asymmetries within the sport, greater methodological rigor should be applied toward study design, data analysis, and interpretation of future investigations and when appraising the current literature. [Abstract copyright: Copyright © 2023 National Strength and Conditioning Association.
Generative recorrupted-to-recorrupted: an unsupervised image denoising network for arbitrary noise distribution
Get PDFWith the great breakthrough of supervised learning in the field of denoising, more and more works focus on end-to-end learning to train denoisers. In practice, however, it can be very challenging to obtain labels in support of this approach. The premise of this method is effective is that there is certain data support, but in practice, it is particularly difficult to obtain labels in the training data. Several unsupervised denoisers have emerged in recent years; however, to ensure their effectiveness, the noise model must be determined in advance, which limits the practical use of unsupervised denoising.n addition, obtaining inaccurate noise prior to noise estimation algorithms leads to low denoising accuracy. Therefore, we design a more practical denoiser that requires neither clean images as training labels nor noise model assumptions. Our method also needs the support of the noise model; the difference is that the model is generated by a residual image and a random mask during the network training process, and the input and target of the network are generated from a single noisy image and the noise model. At the same time, an unsupervised module and a pseudo supervised module are trained. The extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and even surpass the accuracy of supervised denoising
Accenting agency: duets within interactive video installation
Get PDFThis PhD by Publication constitutes a research enquiry into creative agency within interactive video installations through reflection on six published works: Remote Dancing (2004-9), Doing (2008), Orbital (2010), Gravity Shift (2010), ByPasser (2010) and Weighting (2015). These installations have been documented and are presented on online.
Key to the discussion, is the notion of agency arising through the intersections within intermedial environments (Scott & Barton, 2019). By viewing interactive video installations from this perspective, I examine how activity within works can be viewed as co-agential taking the form of a duet between participant and filmic content. Through the choreographic concept of a ‘relational net’ (Rubidge & Schiller, 2014) I recognise and place importance on spatial provision for the whole-body movement across both physical and filmic space to encourage greater agency within installations.
To progress the analysis, I identify specific forms of encounter and engagement a participant experiences as they interact with installations, drawing on observations around dwelling (Giddens, 2019) and intimacy (Hill & Paris, 2014) as significant contributors to agential involvement. As practical ways to support the development of future work in the field, I articulate modulation and destabilisation as techniques to highlight and stimulate active participant involvement. These techniques blend in embodied film theory (Sobchack, 1982), highlighting how the intentionality of the camera emphasises each participant’s awareness of their physical engagement and subsequent agential action within interactive video installation
Pedagogical innovation for children’s agency in the classroom: building knowledge together
No full textThis book presents insights on the use of facilitation to promote children’s agency, which is considered an essential ingredient of dialogic pedagogy. Such insights are founded on a thoughtful consideration of previous research and theoretical literature and, more importantly it is believed, they develop from observations of practices of pedagogical innovation that used facilitation as a methodology to promote children’s agency, expressed as authorship of knowledge during classroom conversations. In particular, observations concerned workshops with children in two primary schools classrooms in the city of London (year 3 of the English school system, 7-8 years of age). Workshops were designed by the authors as a practice of pedagogical innovation to offer children an opportunity to narrate memories encrypted in photographs chosen, or taken, by them. During the workshops, the use of facilitation aimed to promote children’s access to the agentic role of authors of knowledge in the classroom. More specifically, the use of facilitation during the workshops aimed to create favourable conditions for the expression of children’s self-determination as autonomous choices concerning the access to the role of: 1) authors narratives; 2) commentators of narratives; 3) facilitators of others’ participation. Based on the observation and analysis of interactions during the workshops, this book discerns how a range of facilitative actions can position children as authors of knowledge. It also discusses how children can make a difference in the context of their interactions with adults and peers, by taking the role of authors of knowledge and organisers of conversations. The underpinning idea, supported by previous international research, was that the use of facilitation can promote self-determination and agency of children by positioning them as authors of knowledge in adults-children interactions, thus supporting: 1) a participative approach to learning based on equality of opportunities, 2) empathic reflections on the background of personal memories; 3) expectations of participation and interactions based on personal expressions rather than role performances. Equality, empathy and expectations of personal expressions are three core elements of dialogue (Bohm, 1996; Wierbicka, 2006; Hendry, 2009; Shier, 2010a, 2010b; Baraldi, 2014, Baraldi et al., 2021). The following sections in this chapter introduce the key concepts and philosophy underpinning the book, as well as its ambition to contribute to pedagogical innovation, impact, and sustainability
Value of information in the mean-square case and its application to the analysis of financial time-series forecast
Get PDFThe advances and development of various machine learning techniques has lead to practical solutions in various areas of science, engineering, medicine and finance. The great choice of algorithms, their implementations and libraries has resulted in another challenge of selecting the right algorithm and tuning their parameters in order to achieve optimal or satisfactory performance in specific applications. Here we show how the value of information (V(I)) can be used in this task to guide the algorithm choice and parameter tuning process. After estimating the amount of Shannon's mutual information between the predictor and response variables, V(I) can define theoretical upper bound of performance of any algorithm. The inverse function I(V) defines the lower frontier of the minimum amount of information required to achieve the desired performance. In this paper, we illustrate the value of information for the mean-square error minimization and apply it to forecasts of cryptocurrency log-returns