List of Titles

Conducting statistical tests with data from clustered school samples

- Dorman, Jeffrey

Authors: Dorman, Jeffrey
Date: 2008
Type: Text , Journal article
Relation: International Journal of Research & Method in Education Vol. 31, no. 2 (2008 2008), p. 113-124
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Description: This article discusses issues associated with statistical testing conducted with data from clustered school samples. Empirical researchers often conduct tests of statistical inference on sample data to ascertain the extent to which differences exist within groups in the population. Typically, much school‐related data are collected from students. These data are hierarchical because students are nested within classes within schools. This article studies the influence of this nesting on tests of statistical significance conducted with the student as the unit of analysis. Theory that adjusts F‐test scores for nested data in multi‐group comparisons is presented and applied to a teacher interaction dataset. The article demonstrates the potential impact of data hierarchy on the results of statistical testing if clustering is ignored. Data analysis techniques that recognize the clustering of students in classes are essential, and it is recommended that either multilevel analysis or adjustments to statistical parameters be undertaken in studies involving nested data.

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Conducting suicide research in Australia in relation to the operation of Human Research Ethics Committees

- Macgill, Jennifer

Authors: Macgill, Jennifer
Date: 2008
Type: Text , Thesis , PhD
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Description: This thesis began with a research project on suicide that was abandoned after many hurdles were encountered in terms of reaching participants and after various applications to ethics committees. The ultimate research question was then recast as ‘Do Human Research Ethics Committees influence the conduct of suicide research in Australia?’ The conceptual framework for setting up the research was derived from literature on Critical Theory, Feminism and Weberian concepts of power and rationality. Subsidiary questions were then derived from this literature and the starting exemplar case of my own research attempts. These considered whether suicide research was problematic for ethics committees, the nature of the experiences of ethics committee members in making decisions regarding suicide research and whether the influences of disciplinary background, patriarchal medical dominance and pro-positivism were evident. In addition, questions were raised about whether and how other researchers who sought approval to conduct research into suicide-related issues were appraised. [...]
Description: Doctor of Philosophy

Confronting the pedagogical challenges of online asynchronous discussion groups

- Edmondson, Elizabeth

Authors: Edmondson, Elizabeth
Date: 2008
Type: Text , Journal article
Relation: The International Journal of Learning Vol. 14, no. 12 (2008), p. 101-108
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Description: This paper argues that online asynchronous discussion groups suffer from inherent pedagogical limitations, in spite of their abilities to provide sites for content focussed discussion and support for students. Discussion groups cannot overcome their structural limitations in constructing question and answer trees because they create end of learning cycle outputs rather than facilitating learning processes. In distance education, online discussion groups suffer an additional pedagogical weakness by constructing student-teacher discussions as semi-public discussions. Their mediated environment contributes implicit ‘veils of uncertainty’ that limit meaningful connectedness between learners and teachers. Developing an awareness of these problems can assist teachers and designers in identifying appropriate supports to student learning.

Constrained action selection in children with developmental coordination disorder

- Pettit, Lewis, Charles, Jennifer, Wilson, Andrew, Plumb, Mandy, Brockman, Anne, Williams, Justin, Mon-Williams, Mark

Authors: Pettit, Lewis , Charles, Jennifer , Wilson, Andrew , Plumb, Mandy , Brockman, Anne , Williams, Justin , Mon-Williams, Mark
Date: 2008
Type: Text , Journal article
Relation: Human Movement Science Vol. 27, no. 2 (2008), p. 286-295
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Description: The effect of advance ('precue') information on short aiming movements was explored in adults, high school children, and primary school children with and without developmental coordination disorder (n=10, 14, 16, 10, respectively). Reaction times in the DCD group were longer than in the other groups and were more influenced by the extent to which the precue constrained the possible action space. In contrast, reaction time did not alter as a function of precue condition in adults. Children with DCD showed greater inaccuracy of response (despite the increased RT). We suggest that the different precue effects reflect differences in the relative benefits of priming an action prior to definitive information about the movement goal. The benefits are an interacting function of the task and the skill level of the individual. Our experiment shows that children with DCD gain a benefit from advance preparation in simple aiming movements, highlighting their low skill levels. This result suggests that goal-directed RTs may have diagnostic potential within the clinic.

Constraint minimization for efficient modelling of gene regulatory network

- Ram, Ramesh, Chetty, Madhu, Bulach, Dieter

Authors: Ram, Ramesh , Chetty, Madhu , Bulach, Dieter
Date: 2008
Type: Text , Conference paper
Relation: Third IAPR International Conference, PRIB 2008 Melbourne
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Description: Due to various complexities, as well as noise and high dimensionality, reconstructing a gene regulatory network (GRN) from a high-throughput microarray data becomes computationally intensive.In our earlier work on causal model approach for GRN reconstruction, we had shown the superiority of Markov blanket (MB) algorithm compared to the algorithm using the existing Y and V causal models. In this paper, we show the MB algorithm can be enhanced further by application of the proposed constraint logic minimization (CLM) technique. We describe a framework for minimizing the constraint logic involved (condition independent tests) by exploiting the Markov blanket learning methods developed for a Bayesian network (BN). The constraint relationships are represented in the form of logic using K-map and with the aid of CLM increase the algorithm efficiency and the accuracy. We show improved results by investigations on both the synthetic as well as the real life yeast cell cycle data sets.

Content based image retrieval using curvelet transform

- Sumana, Ishrat, Islam, Md, Zhang, Dengsheng, Lu, Guojun

Authors: Sumana, Ishrat , Islam, Md , Zhang, Dengsheng , Lu, Guojun
Date: 2008
Type: Text , Conference paper
Relation: Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE 10th Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing p. 11-16
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Description: Feature extraction is a key issue in content-based image retrieval (CBIR). In the past, a number of texture features have been proposed in literature, including statistic methods and spectral methods. However, most of them are not able to accurately capture the edge information which is the most important texture feature in an image. Recent researches on multi-scale analysis, especially the curvelet research, provide good opportunity to extract more accurate texture feature for image retrieval. Curvelet was originally proposed for image denoising and has shown promising performance. In this paper, a new image feature based on curvelet transform has been proposed. We apply discrete curvelet transform on texture images and compute the low order statistics from the transformed images. Images are then represented using the extracted texture features. Retrieval results show, it significantly outperforms the widely used Gabor texture feature.

Context aware vertical soft handoff algorithm for heterogeneous wireless networks

- Yang, Kemeng, Gondal, Iqbal, Qiu, Bin

Authors: Yang, Kemeng , Gondal, Iqbal , Qiu, Bin
Date: 2008
Type: Text , Conference paper
Relation: Proceedings of the 68th IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference p. 1266-1270
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Description: Soft handoff in WCDMA systems allows multi connection between the user and base stations during handoff, in contrast to single connection in hard handoff. But multi connection flexibility leads to a trade-off between quality of service for the user and the system downlink capacity. The heterogeneous wireless networks consist of WCDMA and WLAN systems, which operate at different frequency with no direct interference. Therefore, a vertical soft handoff between downlink shared channels from WCDMA and WLAN will not suffer similar side effects as the horizontal soft handoff in WCDMA systems. In this paper, we present an analytical framework for vertical soft handoff and propose a context-aware vertical soft handoff algorithm (CAVSH) for heterogeneous wireless networks. CAVSH considers four user and system context parameters such as user required bandwidth, user traffic cost, access network utilization, and signal to interference-and-noise ratio (SINR). The results show that the proposed CAVSH can provide the system with lower dropping probability, lower average cost to the user and higher throughput, as compared with vertical hard handoff.

Corners-based composite descriptor for shapes

- Sajjanhar, Atul, Lu, Guojun, Zhang, Dengsheng, Zhou, Wanlei

Authors: Sajjanhar, Atul , Lu, Guojun , Zhang, Dengsheng , Zhou, Wanlei
Date: 2008
Type: Text , Conference paper
Relation: Proceedings of the First International Congress on Image and Signal Processing CISP2008 p. 714-718
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Description: In this paper, a composite descriptor for shape retrieval is proposed. The composite descriptor is obtained based upon corner-points and shape region. In an earlier paper, we proposed a composite descriptor based on shape region and shape contour, however, the descriptor was not effective for all perspective and geometric transformations. Hence, we modify the composite descriptor by replacing contour features with corner-points features. The proposed descriptor is obtained from Generic FourierDescriptors (GFD) of the shape region and the GFD ofthe corner-points. We study the performance of the proposed composite descriptor. The proposed method is evaluated using Item S8 within the MPEG-7 Still Images Content Set. Experimental results show that the proposed descriptor is effective.

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Crank or Proto-Monetarist? : J.K Gifford and the cost-push inflation fallacy

- King, John E., Millmow, Alex

Authors: King, John E. , Millmow, Alex
Date: 2008
Type: Text , Journal article
Relation: History of Economics Review Vol. 47, no. Winter (2008), p. 54-71
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Description: Abstract: This paper examines the career and contribution of J. K. Gifford (1899-1987), the Foundation Professor of Economics and first Head of the Department of Economics at the University of Queensland, and one of the first in Australia to write an introductory textbook. Gifford's publications were often poorly written and with few references. They focussed mainly on monetary theory and inflation and towards the end of his career concentrated on challenging the notion of a wage-price spiral. Much of his work on the 'cost-push fallacy' seems to have been based on a crude kind of monetarist thinking: governments were prone to allow monetary growth to sustain high profit levels that businesses enjoyed in an inflationary environment. However, his policy proposals were not those of the freemarket Right and focussed on safeguarding employees' interests by ensuring that their wages increased at the rate of inflation plus productivity growth, thereby limiting the scope for employers to benefit from inflation. Although he saw the money supply as exogenous and prone to be mismanaged by governments, be did not articulate a model of the demand for money or defend the stability of the velocity of circulation. His most important article, a brief paper in the Journal of Political Economy in 1968, came about from his objections to the original Phillips analysis, and argued that correlation does not establish causation. Precisely this argument could also be levelled against the monetarist thinking of Milton Friedman and it was not long before the paper's basic argument was used by Nicholas Kaldor in this way
Description: C1
Description: 2003006062

Creating learning spaces for refugees : The role of multicultural organisations in Australia

- Miralles-Lombardo, Beatriz, Miralles, Judith, Golding, Barry

Authors: Miralles-Lombardo, Beatriz , Miralles, Judith , Golding, Barry
Date: 2008
Type: Text , Book
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Description: Through the experiences of refugees from Bosnia, Iraq and Sudan, this research sought to explore the role multicultural community organisations play in creating important informal networks and learning spaces that connect people from refugee backgrounds to the wider Australian community. In particular, the research sought to identify how such organisations assist refugees in their learning of English language and work skills.
Description: 2003006698

Critically engaged learning : Connecting to young lives

- Smyth, John, Angus, Lawrence, Down, Barry, McInerney, Peter

Authors: Smyth, John , Angus, Lawrence , Down, Barry , McInerney, Peter
Date: 2008
Type: Text , Book
Relation: Adolescent cultures, school & society No. 42
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Description: This book - the finale in a trilogy by the authors - traces the way in which a number of disadvantaged schools and communities were able to move beyond deficit, victim-blaming and pathologizing approaches and access resources of trust, relationships, connectedness and hope. It describes how these Australian schools and communities were able to benefit from working with 'street-level' bureaucrats who had reinvented themselves around notions of socially just forms of capacity-building. The book provides a set of insights into what is possible from a critical engagement for school and community renewal perspective, by working with the resources that exist within disadvantaged contexts, even in damaging neoliberal policy times.
Description: 2003006329

Curriculum differentiation : An innovative Australian secondary school program to extend academic talent

- Kronborg, Leonie, Plunkett, Margaret

Authors: Kronborg, Leonie , Plunkett, Margaret
Date: 2008
Type: Text , Journal article
Relation: Australasian Journal of Gifted Education Vol. 17, no. 1 (2008), p. 19-29
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Description: Within Australia, the response to giftedness, whilst undoubtedly influenced by the educational policies of both Britain and the United States, has followed a slightly different developmental trajectory. Individual states and territories have retained the responsibility for primary and secondary education, resulting in quite distinct educational provisioning for gifted and talented students depending on where one lives. The state of Victoria offers a range of options, including some unique programs that appear to be successfully meeting the needs of highly able students in a range of different learning environments. While a number of requirements appear to be vital to any successful programmatic response to meeting the needs of high ability students, curriculum differentiation inevitably emerges as perhaps the most important of all. This paper outlines the results of an evaluation of an Extended Curriculum Program (ECP) in an independent inner city school, where a complex structure of curriculum differentiation was combined with acceleration and ability grouping to provide for a large and diverse range of student needs.

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Decomposability of polytopes

- Przeslawski, Krzysztof, Yost, David

Authors: Przeslawski, Krzysztof , Yost, David
Date: 2008
Type: Text , Journal article
Relation: Discrete & Computational Geometry Vol. 39, no. 1-3 (Mar 2008), p. 460-468
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Description: A known characterization of the decomposability of polytopes is reformulated in a way which may be more computationally convenient, and a more transparent proof is given. New sufficient conditions for indecomposability are then deduced, and illustrated with some examples.
Description: C1

Degrees of maximums of linear mappings

- Hajilarov, Eldar

Authors: Hajilarov, Eldar
Date: 2008
Type: Text , Journal article
Relation: Optimization Vol. 57, no. 4 (2008), p. 505-514
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Description: In this article, we introduce the notion of (topological) degree for maximums of linear mappings (MLM) and study its properties. It is shown, that in E2 the only possible values for the degrees of MLMs are 0 and ± 1, whereas for En with n > 2 the degrees can take arbitrary integer values. © 2008 Taylor & Francis.
Description: C1

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