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For kernel-based estimators, smoothness conditions ensure that the asymptotic rate at which the bias goes to zero is determined by the kernel order. In a finite sample, the leading term in the expansion of the bias may provide a poor approximation. We explore the relation between smoothness and bias and provide estimators for the degree of the smoothness and the bias. We demonstrate the existence of a linear combination of estimators whose trace of the asymptotic mean-squared error is reduced relative to the individual estimator at the optimal bandwidth. We examine the finite-sample performance of a combined estimator that minimizes the trace of the MSE of a linear combination of individual kernel estimators for a multimodal density. The combined estimator provides a robust alternative to individual estimators that protects against uncertainty about the degree of smoothness.

Changes in digital communication technologies have impacted on society so rapidly that educational researchers, policy makers and teachers are challenged by the application of these changes for curriculum design, pedagogy and assessment. The multimedia facilities of digital technologies, particularly mobile hand held devices and touch pads, encourage the processing of several modes simultaneously. Thus the traditional concept of literacy as reading and writing has changed as these rarely occur in isolation within digital communication. Many students are engaged in more sophisticated use of technologies outside school than they experience at school. Moreover, participation in gaming and social networking has created significant social and cultural change.

At the same time there have been many initiatives in classrooms to adapt to the learning potential of new technologies with schools introducing laptops, iPads, or students’ own devices. While issues such as pedagogy and equity offer challenges there are new and exciting ways forward for literacy education in an inclusive learning environment. This chapter will examine attempts to re-define literacy with theories such as ‘multiliteracies’, ‘multimodality’ and ‘new literacies’. These have developed to explain the changes in communication and to offer educators ways to balance the incorporation of new modes of communication with those skills of reading and writing that are seen as core for a literate person.

This chapter discusses the development of evidence-informed practice in Australian education. It highlights growing system-wide aspirations and support for Australian teachers, school leaders, and jurisdictions to be engaging productively with research and evidence. Our aim here is to step back from these developments and consider them in the context of: (1) the nature and distinctive characteristics of the Australian school system; (2) what is known (and not known) about Australian educators' use of research and evidence; and (3) recent insights into enablers and barriers to research use in Australian schools. We argue that the development of evidence-informed practice in Australia needs to take careful account of the complex history and fatalist nature of the wider school system. This will make it possible to identify and work with the productive places that exist within a system of this kind. It is also important to recognize that research use in schools is a topic that has been investigated surprisingly little in Australia relative to other countries internationally. Current policy aspirations around evidence-informed approaches therefore need to be matched by greater efforts to understand the dynamics of research engagement in Australian schools and school systems.

Early clinical accounts of psychopathy suggest important relationships between alcohol use and psychopathic traits that lead to fantastic and uninviting behavior. In particular, alcohol was thought to facilitate antisocial behavior, including violence, among psychopathic individuals. The purpose of this paper is to report a review of studies that concurrently examine psychopathy and alcohol in relation to violent behavior.

The authors searched electronic databases (PsycInfo, PUBMED) for all published studies between January 1960 and October 2016 that included the combination of alcohol and psychopathy, antisocial personality and violence, aggression.

The evidence converges to indicate that, in college and community samples, self-reported antisocial lifestyle traits interact with alcohol use to predict violence beyond that accounted for by either construct. However, in correctional and clinical samples, there is no evidence that the use of alcohol increases violence for individuals high in clinically measured antisocial lifestyle traits.

This is the first review of the empirical literature on relationships among psychopathy, alcohol, and violence. The authors provide recommendations for future research designed to fill gaps in the literature and lead to a greater understanding of the interplay among these variables.

This paper explores the dynamics and issues associated with system change oriented at developing collaboration with local communities within a university. The effort involves attempts to integrate theory, research, and practice across multiple disciplines, professional training initiatives that bring multiple disciplines into conversations on problems in the lives of children, families, and communities, and outreach to develop significant external community‐university collaboration. All five of the university's professional schools plus the graduate and undergraduate College of Arts and Sciences are involved in this discipline to develop communities of practice and inquiry around resolving complex social problems. The opportunities and hurdles faced in developing the initiative are discussed.

The management accounting aspects of quality are focused on. The traditional approaches of production and marketing are summarised with questions, such as how these can be combined, what relationship is there between price and quality, how can the various departments concerned in the strategic management of quality be drawn together, how one can decide on a quality strategy and what would be a suitable control system, being asked. A solution to these is proffered by looking at the management of quality from a strategic viewpoint, relating the appropriateness of seven pure quality strategies to the product/market life cycle.