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Following the industrial crisis of the 1920s and the Great Depression in the 1930s, consecutive provincial governments in Nova Scotia turned their efforts toward state-led economic development. After the election of Robert Stanfield and the Tories in 1956, a wholesale industrial planning model was unveiled. Indeed, Stanfieldian economic policy in Nova Scotia was predicated upon the belief that direct state-led interventionism was necessary to offset regional inequity. State corporate entities, such as Industrial Estates Limited, and renewed interest in a state-driven industrial relations paradigm were central in the province’s efforts to revitalize its flagging economy and offset predicted decline in the Cape Breton coal and steel industries. This article examines the fate of the Clairtone Sound Corporation, one of Nova Scotia’s “new industries” that emerged out of these state-led development efforts. A case study of this Stellarton-based firm reveals how structural processes of deindustrialization produced crisis even within sectors that were completely distinct from the province’s cornerstone industries of coal and steel. This case includes a reflection on the class composition of the modernist state in Nova Scotia and represents a convergence of the historiographical focus on state-led industrial development in the Maritimes and recent literature found within deindustrialization studies.

A recent UK Government commissioned study found concerning levels of unemployment among computing students from disadvantaged, black and minority ethnic backgrounds. The study highlighted that work experience was a factor in increased levels of graduate employment. As such, it is vital that students have equal access to such work experience. This study considers the availability of work experience to 140 computing students at two city centre UK universities. Data analysis considered socioeconomic background and ethnicity to determine if these influenced attitudes to work experience. While students' socioeconomic backgrounds and ethnicity had little influence on their interest in work experience, patterns of success in gaining work experience reflected worrying graduate (un)employment patterns, with those from disadvantaged, black or minority ethnic backgrounds less able to secure work experience. These findings have serious implications for university and government policies promoting work experience and highlight the need for national interventions.

This essay recounts a number of so-called “bizarre” news reports from Nova Scotia, and the reactions to them on social media, as a means of exploring the fruitfulness of a digital history approach to regionalism and the idea of the provincial “Folk.” Such stories might be considered a contemporary manifestation of the Folk - albeit one that is presented through a digital medium that creates opportunities for cultural producers and consumers to enter into conversation about the style, context, and meaning of such representations. The essay is exploratory and offers some tentative conclusions - particularly that the phenomenon of "bizarre" news reports from the province is very heavily affected by class conflict, but that social media allows a new generation of cultural producers the means to talk back to Folk representations of Nova Scotia. However, the essay is largely concerned with making a connection between media studies of what has been called “convergence culture” and more traditional studies of Atlantic Canadian society and culture.

This article describes the design and development of an online immersive learning environment focused on enhancing the general public's awareness of, and preparation for, crisis situations. This research has sought to answer the question “Is it possible to develop a timeline based immersive and engaging training environment for mass self-study education in crisis preparedness?” The system developed is based on the Pandora+ training environment and integrates original collaborative European research work carried out on eLearning and Crisis Management over the last ten years. The research reported here not only describes the design of the Pandora+ training environment but also the outputs from a pilot trial in Lisbon run by the POP-ALERT EU FP7 project. Where appropriate, the results were also compared to those from a large EU survey on crisis preparedness and attitudes, also undertaken within POP-ALERT. The results of this article have resulted in an original and innovative system that has significant potential to transform the education of the public in disaster preparedness.

Multi-agency crisis management represents one of the most complex real-world situations, requiring rapid negotiation and decision-making under extreme pressure. However, the training provided to Gold Commanders (strategic planners) typically lacks the stress of a real crisis, while research tells us that behavior and decision-making are significantly affected by stress. It is, therefore, vital that training puts trainees under the pressure of a real crisis situation as far as possible. The Pandora + system, developed from an EU FP7 research project, provides a unique, original, realistic, immersive, and augmented reality training environment in which the stress of each individual trainee can be managed by the trainer, during a training event, with the support of system intelligence. The system uses AI planning techniques to model an unfolding crisis scenario, realized as an event network, which can be dynamically updated by the trainer during a training event. This modeling includes points of decision for trainees managed by automated rules from a knowledge base, behavioral modeling of the trainees, and dynamic management of the environment to provide affective inputs to control and manage trainee stress. In this context, the system controls and reacts to trainee performance in relation to the events and decision points and can dynamically remodel and reconfigure the event network to respond appropriately to trainee decisions. The environment can also represent any missing trainees within the scenario and has the potential to provide training in any domain where a timeline-based scenario of events is required for training. This entire approach is completely novel in crisis training and has been rigorously tested in several trials, the most recent involving close to 150 participants, and has the potential to transform online learning in many domains, not just crisis management.

This research design discusses different approaches to the concept of results in higher education, especially related to engineering and IT education. The main topics are the means to measure quality of both the learning process and the learning outcomes. The paper also discusses and outlines some techniques on how to implement real life trials using the presented concepts. It shows how it is possible to use a games-based quality measurement model to obtain live quality feedback, to academic and administrative staff, during the learning process.

Developmental Dyslexia (DD) is a common language-based learning difficulty which occurs across all cultures. Whilst various interventions are implemented to aid with reading difficulties, research suggests that phonics is still the most promising approach, yet the challenge in this approach has always been keeping pupils engaged and interested. Multisensory approaches have shown promise in keeping pupils engaged but they are time consuming and require high levels of teacher involvement. This paper suggests using 3D environments and gaming technology as a multisensory intervention to aid reading in Dyslexia. The paper proposes an initial framework and indicates the development and evaluation strategy for the framework.

Scenario-based e-learning can be used to enable students to develop expertise, in situations that are rare or infrequent, too hazardous for the inexperienced, too expensive to permit practice and failure, or simply not available. Developing automated courses requires significant technical ability, separate from the subject expertise of the educator. This paper introduces a framework developed to simplify this process, along with a scenario authoring and cloud-based training environment, Pandora+

In security/safety-critical applications, such as community policing, citizens and Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs) need a safe and realistic environment to support their learning in handling challenging situations. In this context, the use of games can prove crucial in helping citizens improve awareness and better understand the potential value that can be developed in building relationships with Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) providing support within a specific area.

The authors have a significant history of research in online learning, and in recent years have published their work at the LACCEI conference. This paper focuses on the issues caused by the major skills gaps in STEM industries identified in the popular press, and confirmed through empirical research, and the changes to the workforce occasioned by the growing tide of automation. Both of these issues have a similar result on the STEM workforce, in the need to upskill and reskill staff to be productive in the changed landscape brought about by these issues and the accelerating pace of change through technological development. Fundamentally, they argue that there is a need to change the existing model of workplace learning to integrate learning as an integral component of the workplace, rather than an activity that takes place separate from that workplace, often in a separate location. From their own previous research they have encountered both worker and employer resistance to such integration, but they argue the need for cultural and technological change, to enable greater efficiency and availability of appropriate learning resources directly related to workplace activities. By integrating learning environments and resources with the primary information systems in the workplace, and enabling ""drill-down"" capability to link specific working issues with relevant learning resources, staff efficiency can be improved, better solutions can be developed, and acquisition of skills and knowledge can be improved. The authors provide an example of a working solution, in the tourism domain, from the Tourism Monitor project, which provides both an exemplar and some practical lessons that are relevant to the STEM industries. The Tourism Monitor dashboard provides statistical information collected by the Norwegian government on a number of key tourism datasets, providing information to support the management of tourism services and service organisations. By linking it to an instance of the Sakai VLE, and through that to learning materials developed by the project partners and the local University College, staff development can run alongside the creation and management of tourism services. The authors suggest that a similar model could be used for workplace learning in STEM industries, referencing their own work on developing online learning for collaborative heavyweight processes, such as dCCD, as reported at LACCEI last year. The model developed is novel and built from a considerable body of prior research, and provides an answer to the research question “How could the model of workforce education be changed to ensure the supply of IT and engineering skills in the workforce keeps up with demand?”

The making of songs is an important, yet under-explored tradition amongst steel workers throughout North America. Steel making has been an essential part of Cape Breton Island’s economy and landscape since the mid-nineteenth century. The first steel mill was constructed in Sydney Mines in the 1870s; a larger mill was built in the newly emerging city of Sydney, the island’s largest centre, by 1901. Distinctive traditions of work and leisure began to emerge amidst the grid-patterned streets and company-owned homes of workers and managers. In the early years of the twentieth century, a close-knit working-class consciousness had taken root in the steel making centre of Sydney, Cape Breton Island. Songs explore topics such as the harsh conditions of work in the steel plant, personalities and places, tragedies, the industrial conflicts of the 1920s, and the attitudes of workers toward management. Many are often tinged with satire and witty analysis of working-class life.Sydney, as with many communities in North America, has profoundly experienced the process of deindustrialization in the latter part of the twentieth century. The last operating coal mines closed in Cape Breton the 1990s and the Sydney Steel plant shut its doors in 2000. This paper explores the questions: what role did songs about steel play in the development of class consciousness during the development of the steel industry in Sydney? Do songs play an equally significant role in the latter part of the twentieth century when the community was undergoing the process of deindustrialization? What types of songs about steel making and the steel mill are found in each of these significant periods in Sydney’s history? An exploration of some of these songs reveal much about how human beings respond to the processes of industrialization and deindustrialization., La composition de chansons chez les travailleurs de l’acier en Amérique du Nord constitue une tradition importante, bien que peu étudiée. L’industrie de l’acier a joué un rôle majeur dans l’économie et le paysage de l’île du Cap-Breton depuis le milieu du XIXe siècle. La première aciérie a été construite à Sydney Mines dans les années 1870, et une usine plus grande a été construite dans la ville naissante de Sydney, le plus grand centre urbain de l’île, en 1901. Des traditions distinctes de travail et de loisirs ont commencé à émerger au sein du quadrillage de rues et des habitations de la compagnie pour ses travailleurs et gestionnaires. Dans les premières années du XXe siècle, une conscience de la classe ouvrière avait pris racine au coeur de l’industrie de l’acier à Sydney. Leurs chansons traitaient de sujets tels que les conditions difficiles de travail dans l’aciérie, les lieux et ses grandes personnalités, les tragédies, les conflits de travail dans les années 1920, et l’attitude des travailleurs envers la direction. Beaucoup de ces chansons étaient souvent teintées de satire et témoignaient d’un regard acerbe de la vie de la classe ouvrière.Sydney, comme de nombreuses communautés nord-américaines, a profondément subi le processus de désindustrialisation de la fin du XXe siècle. Les dernières mines de charbon du Cap-Breton ont cessé leurs activités dans les années 1990 et l’usine Sydney Steel ferma ses portes en 2000. Cet article explore les questions suivantes: quel rôle a joué des chansons sur le développement d’une conscience de classe au cours du développement de l’industrie de l’acier à Sydney? Ces chansons ont-elles joué un rôle tout aussi important dans la dernière partie du XXe siècle, lorsque la communauté a subi les processus de désindustrialisation? Quels types de chansons sur l’industrie de l’acier trouve-t-on pour chacune de ces périodes dans l’histoire de Sydney? Une analyse de certaines de ces chansons révèle somme toute beaucoup sur la façon dont les êtres humains réagissent aux processus d’industrialisation et de désindustrialisation.

The furious pace of expansion during the second industrial revolution enlivens the early pages of Andrew Perchard’s Aluminiumville. The book represents a careful scrutiny of the British Aluminium C...

Multi-agency crisis management represents one of the most complex of real-world situations, requiring rapid negotiation and decision-making under extreme pressure. However, the training offered to strategic planners, called Gold Commanders, does not place them under any such pressure. It takes the form of paper-based, table-top exercises, or expensive, real-world, limited-scope simulations. The Pandora project has developed a rich multimedia training environment for Gold Commanders, based on a crisis scenario, timeline-based, event network, with which the trainees and their trainer interact dynamically. Pandora uses the emotional intelligence of the trainees, through a behavioural modelling component, to support group dynamic and decision-making. It applies systemic emotional intelligence, based on inferred user state and rule-based affective inputs, to impact the stress levels of the trainees. Pandora can impose variable stress on trainees, to impact their decision-making, and model their behaviour and performance under stress, potentially resulting in more effective and realisable strategies. Copyright © 2013, IGI Global.

Mobile governance (m-governance), which is considered as an extension of electronic governance (e-governance), has enormous opportunity to flourish in the developing countries due to the rapid increase of mobile phone subscribers. There are also a number of challenges accompanying the opportunities for design and implementation of mobile governance in developing countries. In this paper a conceptual framework is proposed based on secondary research to justify the current mobile governance situation of developing countries, with Bangladesh being selected as the case study, by explaining the essential components of a mobile governance system and the surrounding environmental factors that have influence upon it.

The authors consider a number of the issues that arise when developing online engineering courses, with a particular focus on group-based collaborative working and learning. They argue that these issues are more difficult to address in STEM subjects, where there is an expectation that students will work with heavyweight processes, requiring significant sharing of expertise and resources, rather than the lighter weight processes experienced by open, discursive groups in other subject areas. The paper considers the history of collaborative and cooperative working and learning in computer supported environments, leading to the current models of online support for such activities. It identifies the key challenges and success factors when developing online learning courses, drawn from both the research and the authors’ own experience. It considers the challenges of moving from face-to-face to online learning, and how these have been addressed, before focusing more closely on collaborative learning, particularly in Engineering and related subjects. The authors then report on the experience of running a MOOC for an EU research project, in which they attempted to use a heavyweight Engineering Design process, Concurrent Design (CCD) to support collaborative activities within the course. The design and development of the course is described, and then the operation of the MOOC and the experience of the students and tutors, concluded by a statistical view of the outcomes. The paper then draws some conclusions for the design and development of online courses in Engineering, and a consideration of how to deal with preparing students to engage with heavyweight processes, like CCD, in such online courses. Techniques involving pre-selection, filtering and blended learning are discussed, and considerations of the motivation of students when undertaking courses as part of qualification studies. We must develop techniques to support collaborative learning in online courses, as they represent the future.

Despite the growth of advanced communication technologies, smart devices etc. the main approach to training strategic planners for crisis management (Gold Commanders) continues to be a paper-based, collective group dynamic exercise. The Pandora project has developed an advanced smart environment for the training of Gold Commanders which uses AI planning techniques to provide a crisis scenario modelled as an event network. This includes points of decision for trainees managed by automated rules from a knowledge base, behavioural modelling of the trainees, and ambient management of the environment to provide affective inputs to control and manage trainee stress. In this context, the system controls and reacts to trainee performance in relation to the events and decision points and can dynamically remodel and reconfigure the event network to respond appropriately to trainee decisions. Trainees can also be pressurised through compression of the timelines or ambient management of the multimedia information presented within the environment, causing them to make decisions under stress or with inadequate information. The environment can also represent any missing trainees within the scenario, which provides the potential to offer a completely autonomous facility for scenario design and test, and potentially a decision support facility, based on a build-up of empirical evidence from real world and training situations. In summary, the Pandora system integrates its computational intelligence, with the intelligence of the trainer and the trainees, to provide an emotionally engaging, augmented reality/virtual reality training environment for crisis managers.

Owing to their ease of engagement and motivational nature, especially for younger age groups, games have been omnipresent in education since earliest times. More recently, computer video games have become widely used, particularly in secondary and tertiary education, to impart core knowledge in some subject areas and as an aid to attracting and retaining students. Academics have proposed a number of approaches, using games-based learning (GBL), to impart theoretical and applied knowledge, especially in the computer science discipline. Our research is concerned with the design of an innovative educational game framework focused on the development of Computational Thinking (CT) skills, and herein we introduce a serious game, based on our framework, which encourages the development of CT skills to facilitate learning introductory computer programming. We describe how a limited number of key introductory computer programming concepts have been mapped onto the game-play, and how an equivalent set of skills characterising CT can be acquired through playing the game. A survey response group of 25 students, following computer science and related degree programmes but with very diverse backgrounds and experience, provided initial usability feedback on the game. Their feedback confirmed that they found the game enjoyable, and also universally believed that this approach would be beneficial in helping students learn problem-solving skills for introductory computer programming. Feedback from this group will be incorporated in a revised version of the game, which will now be subject to rigorous experimental evaluation and analysis, to provide structured empirical evidence in support of our approach.

This paper outlines an innovative game-based approach to learning introductory programming that is grounded in the development of computational thinking at an abstract conceptual level, but also provides a direct contextual relationship between game-play and learning traditional introductory programming. The paper proposes a possible model for, and guidelines in support of, this games-based approach contextualized by an analysis of existing research into the issues of learning programming and game based learning approaches. Furthermore, the proposed game-based learning model focuses not only on procedural and applied knowledge and associated skills acquisition in computational thinking, but also provides contextualised theoretical knowledge on Computer Science concepts. By way of illustration, the authors introduce a game prototype currently being developed to combine a puzzle solving game-play that uses Computer Science concepts as the game elements.

In this paper, the authors evaluate the flexibility and richness of two well-established text analysis plagiarism tools, through a consideration of the use of plagiarism detection software as a mechanism for the automated assessment of student-created narrative in a virtual learning environment (VLE). The authors are currently engaged in a project creating a prototype VLE, using technologies for multilevel and multiplayer games, based on the inherent support such an environment would provide for constructivist learning, engagement, and contextual socialization. Progress between levels in the VLE will be based on the creation, by the student, of a narrative linking together a number of conceptual elements obtained through game-play at that level. Support for the narrative creation process will help the student to contextualize the conceptual elements, providing the necessary linking elements or themes to enable the student to produce a coherent description of their understanding of the concepts. A particular challenge in such environments is the need for fast, real-time feedback to students to maintain the level of engagement and to support the game-play metaphor. Additionally, the student must be able to make as many attempts to progress as they need and it will be their decision when and how often to submit for assessment. Since the student narrative will be in a textual form and can therefore be related to a sample solution narrative, generated by the author of the level within the learning environment, the idea of using plagiarism detection software as the mechanism for automated comparison and assessment was considered appropriate for investigation. While the limitation of such tools would appear to be that they are seeking direct copies of text elements, the authors wanted to investigate whether they offered sufficient richness and fuzziness to detect common conceptually-linked texts. The initial decision was to experiment with text-analytic tools, since they are both widely used and readily available. The tools chosen were TurnItIn, a commercial tool provided to the U.K. higher education community by the U.K. Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and VALT/VAST, a set of tools created at the Centre for Interactive Systems Engineering at London South Bank University, London, U.K., the workings of which are based on recognized and well-published research. An experiment using a small group of students in a traditional assessment situation was carried out, and is described in detail. The rationale for this approach was that there is not yet a fully working prototype of the VLE in which to carry out such an experiment, but that the conditions necessary to test the hypothesis that plagiarism tools could be utilized for such a purpose could be replicated sufficiently to make such an experiment viable. The results of the experiment demonstrated neither a correlation between the sample solution and student solutions, nor any correlation between the individual student solutions, proving the null hypothesis. This result demonstrates that these tools are not useful for the development of automated assessment within the VLE, and the authors are now giving consideration to the use of lexical analysis/tokenizer and other tools. However, it also suggests that these text-analytic plagiarism tools are too firmly focused on direct copy, which does raise the question of whether or not they offer enough richness and fuzziness to detect a sophisticated plagiarism attempt using, for example, text replacement tools. An ongoing close relationship between research in automated assessment and plagiarism detection is also proposed, to achieve mutual benefit.

We present an ensemble method to classify Parkinson patients and healthy people. C&R Tree, Bayes Net and C5.0 are used to generate ensemble method. Using supervised learning technique, the proposed method generates rules to distinguish Parkinson patients from healthy people. The proposed method uses single classifier to generate rules which are used as input for the next used classifier and in this way final rules are generated to predict more accurate results than individual classifier used to generate ensemble method. This method shows lower number of misclassification instances than single classifiers used to build model. Ensemble method shows better results for training and testing accuracy than single classifier.

Myosin 5a is a dual-headed molecular motor that transports cargo along actin filaments. By following the motion of individual heads with interferometric scattering microscopy at nm spatial and ms temporal precision we found that the detached head occupies a loosely fixed position to one side of actin from which it rebinds in a controlled manner while executing a step. Improving the spatial precision to the sub-nm regime provided evidence for an ångstrom-level structural transition in the motor domain associated with the power stroke. Simultaneous tracking of both heads revealed that consecutive steps follow identical paths to the same side of actin in a compass-like spinning motion demonstrating a symmetrical walking pattern. These results visualize many of the critical unknown aspects of the stepping mechanism of myosin 5 including head–head coordination, the origin of lever-arm motion and the spatiotemporal dynamics of the translocating head during individual steps. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.05413.001, eLife digest Cells use motor proteins that to move organelles and other cargos from one place to another. The myosins are a family of motor proteins that pull cargo along filaments made of another protein called actin. The ‘head’ end of myosin attaches to the actin filament and the ‘tail’ end binds to the cargo. The head and tail are connected by a flexible linker that allows the protein to change shape. The tails of two myosin molecules bind together to form a two-headed motor that can move along an actin filament by taking 74 nm steps. At the start of each step, both heads are attached to the actin with one in front of the other. The leading head remains attached while the rear head detaches from actin and moves in front of the leading head reattaching to actin. These movements are repeated many times to allow the motor to move along the filament, much like a tightrope walker walking along a wire. However, it is not known how the motor can move so efficiently along the actin while managing to avoid falling off its track. Here, Andrecka et al. analyzed the movement of the myosin 5 motor in real time using a method called ‘interferometric scattering microscopy’. The experiments show that when a head detaches from the actin, it is temporarily held out to one side of the actin filament. From here, this detached head sways back and forth, until it takes a step forward and binds firmly to the next position on the filament. Both heads follow identical paths along the actin filament, and so the movement resembles the way that a drawing or dividing compass can be used to measure distances on a map. Andrecka et al.'s findings shed new light on how myosin motors move along actin. This may become a blueprint for efficient nano-mechanical motion and could therefore be important for designing artificial machines that operate on the nanoscale. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.05413.002