The New Zealand social studies curriculum struggle 1993-1997: An "insider" analysis.

The development of Social Studies in the New Zealand Curriculum over the 1993-1997 period was highly contested. The authors were directly involved in the social studies development over this period, and this paper reflects on some of the major events in the development, from our "insiders" viewpoint. The paper argues that the contest was strongly influenced by two major "dominant voice groups with very different views on what a social studies curriculum should be like and by key elements of the political and economic reform agenda of the day. The paper traces the rise and fall in influence of each "dominant voice" group and also examines the way in which the reform agenda changed throughout the development. It argues that in the end the inclusive and liberal-democratic voice was dominant over the neo-liberal and educationally conservative one. It also suggests that a return to a more cooperative, negotiated style of curriculum development, rather than a pure "market-contract model" approach, was needed to bring the development to a satisfactory conclusion

Connecting key competencies and social inquiry in primary social studies pedagogy: initial teacher education students' planning decisions and reflections.

Over 2007-2009 we have worked with the national curriculum's key competencies to establish their place and purpose in the social sciences learning area. As a result, our initial teacher education (ITE) primary social studies programmes involve pedagogy that conceives key competencies as analogous to social inquiry thinking and skills processes. Our team was keen to research ways ITE students identify and embed key competencies in their social inquiry planning decisions. The research also sought student reflection of how engagement with key competencies might influence their future social studies teaching and learning. The article offers a storying of ways the curriculum element of key competencies has been developed, implemented, researched and reflected upon within ITE primary social studies curriculum

Visual ageing of human faces in three dimensions using morphable models and projection to latent structures

We present an approach to synthesising the effects of ageing on human face images using three-dimensional modelling. We extract a set of three dimensional face models from a set of two-dimensional face images by fitting a Morphable Model. We propose a method to age these face models using Partial Least Squares to extract from the data-set those factors most related to ageing. These ageing related factors are used to train an individually weighted linear model. We show that this is an effective means of producing an aged face image and compare this method to two other linear ageing methods for ageing face models. This is demonstrated both quantitatively and with perceptual evaluation using human raters.Postprin

Quantitative games with interval objectives

Traditionally quantitative games such as mean-payoff games and discount sum games have two players -- one trying to maximize the payoff, the other trying to minimize it. The associated decision problem, "Can Eve (the maximizer) achieve, for example, a positive payoff?" can be thought of as one player trying to attain a payoff in the interval $(0,\infty)$. In this paper we consider the more general problem of determining if a player can attain a payoff in a finite union of arbitrary intervals for various payoff functions (liminf, mean-payoff, discount sum, total sum). In particular this includes the interesting exact-value problem, "Can Eve achieve a payoff of exactly (e.g.) 0?"Comment: Full version of CONCUR submissio

Presence and persistence of Ebola or Marburg virus in patients and survivors: A rapid systematic review

Background: The 2013-15 Ebola outbreak was unprecedented due to sustainedtransmission within urban environments and thousands of survivors. In 2014 the World Health Organization stated that there was insufficient evidence to give definitive guidance about which body fluids are infectious and when they pose a risk to humans. We report a rapid systematic review of published evidence on the presence of filoviruses in body fluids of infected people and survivors. Methods: Scientific articles were screened for information about filovirus in human body fluids. The aim was to find primary data that suggested high likelihood of actively infectious filovirus in human body fluids (viral RNA). Eligible infections were from Marburg virus (MARV or RAVV) and Zaire, Sudan, Taï Forest and Bundibugyo species of Ebola. [1] Cause of infection had to be laboratory confirmed (in practice either tissue culture or RT-PCR tests), or evidenced by compatible clinical history with subsequent positivity for filovirus antibodies or inflammatory factors. Data were extracted and summarized narratively. Results: 6831 unique articles were found, and after screening, 33 studies were eligible. For most body fluid types there were insufficient patients to draw strong conclusions, and prevalence of positivity was highly variable. Body fluids taken >16 days after onset were usually negative. In the six studies that used both assay methods RT-PCR tests for filovirus RNA gave positive results about 4 times more often than tissue culture. Conclusions: Filovirus was reported in most types of body fluid, but not in every sample from every otherwise confirmed patient. Apart from semen, most non-blood, RT-PCR positive samples are likely to be culture negative and so possibly of low infectious risk. Nevertheless, it is not apparent how relatively infectious many body fluids are during or after illness, even when culture-positive, not least because most test results come from more severe cases. Contact with blood and blood-stained body fluids remains the major risk for disease transmission because of the known high viral loads in blood

Vegetation and floristic diversity in Gibraltar Range and part of Washpool National Parks, New South Wales

The vegetation of Gibraltar Range National Park and adjoining parts of eastern Washpool National Park, 65 km east of Glen Innes (29° 31’S 152° 18’E) on the eastern escarpment of New South Wales is described. In total 124, 20m x 50m full vascular plant floristic sites were recorded and information from an additional 53 sites was collated. Thirteen vegetation assemblages are defined based on flexible UPGMA analysis of cover-abundance scores of all vascular plant taxa. Many of the vegetation communities are typical of what is found along the north eastern escarpment of NSW. Three communities are considered to be rare and two vulnerable. A total of 878 vascular plant taxa from 138 families were recorded, of which only 21 (2%) were of introduced origin and 81 (9%) were found to be of conservation significance. Pattern diversity, species density, species accumulation and average geographic range size, along with general measures of richness and diversity, were analysed for all communities. Each of the communities described varied considerably in the diversity attributes measured. Communities with a high number of shrubs had greater constancy between sites compared to those that contained a high number of closed forest species. The community from rock outcrops had the largest average geographical range size