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How teacher behaviour shapes foreign language learners’ enjoyment, anxiety and attitudes/motivation: a mixed modelling longitudinal investigation
Get PDFThe current study investigates how Foreign Language Enjoyment (FLE), Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety (FLCA) and Attitude/motivation (AM) of 360 learners of English, German, French and Spanish in a Kuwaiti university was shaped over the course of one semester by three teacher behaviours: frequency of using the FL in class, predictability and frequency of joking. Linear mixed modelling revealed a positive relationship between the three teacher behaviours and FLE as well as AM, but no significant relationship emerged with FLCA. Multiple comparison analyses showed that levels of FLE dropped significantly among students whose teacher joked very infrequently and infrequently. It thus seems that the absence of teacher jokes had a delayed cumulative effect on FLE. No interaction effects were found with time for FLCA and for AM. We conclude that teacher behaviours affect both AM and FLE, and that teachers’ absence of joking actually drains FLE over time
Diego Garcia: a novel
No full textBook synopsis: Edinburgh, 2014. Two writer friends, Damaris and Oliver Pablo, escape London, the city that killed his brother. They spend their days trying to get to the library, bickering over their tanking bitcoin, failing to write or resist the sadness. Then they meet Diego, a poet. He tells them he is named for his mother’s island in the Chagos Archipelago, which she and her community were forced to leave by British soldiers in 1973. Damaris and Oliver Pablo become obsessed with this notorious episode and the continuing resistance of the Chagossian people, and want to write in solidarity. But how to share a story that is not theirs to tell? And how to account for a loss not theirs to grieve? A tragicomedy interrogating the powers of literature alongside the crimes of the British government, Diego Garcia is a collaborative fiction that opens up possibilities for the novel and seeks other ways of living together
Oikonomia
No full textIn classical Athens the Greek word 'oikonomia' -from which the modern English word economy derives- referred to the management of the household which was considered a non-political space. In Christian Byzantium it meant the divine plan for the world. Philosopher Giorgio Agamben has used the notion to construct a genealogy of the process whereby managerialism overwhelms political and legal reasoning in late modernity. In this handbook on 'Law and Literature', in chapter 12 and under the sub-heading 'Governance,' this chapter explores this issue by analysing a wide range of literary texts from ancient Greek drama to contemporary science fiction
Sand dams for sustainable water management: Challenges and future opportunities
Get PDFSand dams are impermeable water harvesting structures built to collect and store water within the volume of sediments transported by ephemeral rivers. The artificial sandy aquifer created by the sand dam reduces evaporation losses relative to surface water storage in traditional dams. Recent years have seen a renaissance of studies on sand dams as an effective water scarcity adaptation strategy for drylands. However, many aspects of their functioning and effectiveness are still unclear. Literature reviews have pointed to a range of research gaps that need further scientific attention, such as river corridors and network dynamics, watershed-scale impacts, and interaction with social dynamics. However, the scattered and partially incomplete information across the different reviews would benefit from an integrated framework for directing future research efforts. This paper is a collaborative effort of different research groups active on sand dams and stems from the need to channel future research efforts on this topic in a thorough and coherent way. We synthesize the pivotal research gaps of a) unclear definition of “functioning” sand dams, b) lack of methodologies for watershed-scale analysis, c) neglect of social aspects in sand dam research, and d) underreported impacts of sand dams. We then propose framing future research to better target the synthesized gaps, including using the social-ecological systems framework to better capture the interconnected social and biophysical research gaps on sand dams, fully utilizing the potential of remote sensing in large-scale studies and collecting sand dam cases across the world to create an extensive database to advance evidence-based research on sand dams
Development of a self-management intervention for memory changes linked to Androgen deprivation therapy for prostate cancer
Get PDFAndrogen deprivation therapy (ADT) is a hormone treatment for prostate cancer and is linked to altered cognition, including memory changes, which can have detrimental effects on quality of life (QOL). The aim of this research was to develop an intervention to support men with memory changes associated with ADT. The Intervention Mapping framework guided intervention development through a series of rigorous steps. A self-management booklet called MEMORY MANager was developed, which incorporated education, self-assessment, compensatory strategies and techniques to improve mood. It was found to be an acceptable means of supporting men. This booklet could be valuable to healthcare professionals and patients as a means of improving QOL among men who undergo ADT. This is the first reported self-management intervention developed for managing cognitive changes in men who undergo ADT. Although preliminary, findings appear promising. More research is needed to evaluate effectiveness of the intervention and its implementatio
QuadNet: quadruplet loss for multi-view learning in baggage re-identification
Get PDFRecently, baggage re-identification (ReID) has become an attractive topic in computer vision because it plays an important role in intelligent surveilance. However, the wide variations in different views of baggage items degrade baggage ReID performance. In this paper, a novel QuadNet is proposed to solve the multi-view problem in baggage ReID at three levels. At the sample level, we propose a multi-view sampling strategy which samples hard examples from multiple identities in multiple views. The sampled baggage items are used to construct quadruplets. At the feature level, view-aware attentional local features are extracted from discriminative regions in each view. These local features are fused with global features to obtain better representations of the quadruplets. At the loss level, a multi-view quadruplet loss operating on the representations of quadruplets is proposed to reduce the intra-class distances caused by view variations and increase the inter-class distances of baggage items captured in the same view. A random local blur data augmentation is proposed to handle the motion blur which is often found in baggage images. The multi-task learning of materials is introduced to obtain discriminative features based on the materials of baggage surfaces.
Extensive experiments on three ReID datasets, MVB, Market-1501 and VeRi-776, indicate the remarkable effectiveness and good generalization of the QuadNet model. It has achieved the state-of-the-art performance on the three datasets
Oxytocin but not naturally occurring variation in caregiver touch associates with infant social orienting
Get PDFCaregiver touch is crucial for infants’ healthy development, but its role in shaping infant cognition
has been relatively understudied. In particular, despite strong premises to hypothesize its function
in directing infant attention to social information, little empirical evidence exists on the topic. In
this study, we investigated the associations between naturally occurring variation in caregiver touch
and infant social attention in a group of 6- to 13-month old infants (n = 71). Additionally, we
measured infant salivary oxytocin as a possible mediator of the effects of touch on infant social
attention. The hypothesized effects were investigated both short-term, with respect to touch
observed during parent-infant interactions in the lab, as well as long-term, with respect to parentreported
patterns of everyday touching behaviours. We did not find evidence that caregiver touch
predicts infant social attention or salivary oxytocin levels, short-term or long-term. However, we
found that salivary oxytocin predicted infant preferential attention to faces relative to non-social
objects, measured in an eye tracking task. Our findings confirm the involvement of oxytocin in
social orienting in infancy, but raise questions regarding the possible environmental factors
influencing the infant oxytocin system
Accessibility in São Paulo: an individual road to equity?
Get PDFUnequal access to urban opportunities is a challenge for planners and policy makers, particularly in cities of the Global South. This study investigates inequalities in accessibility in São Paulo from an individual-based perspective, adopting a methodological approach that overcomes the high computational and data requirements that typically hinder large-scale applications of individual-based accessibility metrics. The adoption of individual accessibility metrics that can be aggregated a posteriori by economic class, transport mode use, and spatially, produced increased understanding of accessibility patterns both across and within population groups. The analysis revealed that individuals from the upper classes have access to significantly more opportunities than their lower-class counterparts. Results across modes of transport showed that inequalities related to transport modes reinforce and aggravate inequalities originated from distinct location patterns. The study produced evidence that the use of cars and motorbikes enable individuals to improve their own accessibility levels with a positive effect on equity levels across economic classes. The effects of such individual initiatives on equity are, however, unsustainable in the longer run, highlighting the need for public policies that address the roots of access inequality in São Paulo: an inequitable public transport system and strong disparity in locational advantages across economic classes
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