Enhancing an Incremental Clustering Algorithm for Web Page Collections

With the size and state of the Internet today, a good quality approach to organizing this mass of information is of great importance. Clustering web pages into groups of similar documents is one approach, but relies heavily on good feature extraction and document representation as well as a good clustering approach and algorithm. Due to the changing nature of the Internet, resulting in a dynamic dataset, an incremental approach is preferred. In this work we propose an enhanced incremental clustering approach to develop a better clustering algorithm that can help to better organize the information available on the Internet in an incremental fashion. Experiments show that the enhanced algorithm outperforms the original histogram based algorithm by up to 7.5%.

It's time to be more serious about activating youngsters : lessons for childhood obesity

The epidemic of obesity is impacting an increasing proportion of children, adolescents and adults with a common feature being low levels of physical activity (PA). Despite having more knowledge than ever before about the benefits of PA for health and the growth and development of youngsters, we are only paying lip-service to the development of motor skills in children. Fun, enjoyment and basic skills are the essential underpinnings of meaningful participation in PA. A concurrent problem is the reported increase in sitting time with the most common sedentary behaviors being TV viewing and other screen-based games. Limitations of time have contributed to a displacement of active behaviors with inactive pursuits, which has contributed to reductions in activity energy expenditure. To redress the energy imbalance in overweight and obese children, we urgently need out-of-the-box multisectoral solutions. There is little to be gained from a shame and blame mentality where individuals, their parents, teachers and other groups are singled out as causes of the problem. Such an approach does little more than shift attention from the main game of prevention and management of the condition, which requires a concerted, whole-of-government approach (in each country). The failure to support and encourage all young people to participate in regular PA will increase the chance that our children will live shorter and less healthy lives than their parents. In short, we need novel environmental approaches to foster a systematic increase in PA. This paper provides examples of opportunities and challenges for PA strategies to prevent obesity with a particular emphasis on the school and home settings.

A story worth telling : putting oral history and digital collections online in cultural institutions

Digital platforms in cultural institutions offer exciting opportunities for oral history and digital storytelling that can augment and enrich traditional collections. The way in which cultural institutions allow access to the public is changing dramatically, prompting substantial expansions of their oral history and digital story holdings. In Queensland, Australia, public libraries and museums are becoming innovative hubs of a wide assortment of collections that represent a cross-section of community groups and organisations through the integration of oral history and digital storytelling. The State Library of Queensland (SLQ) features digital stories online to encourage users to explore what the institution has in the catalogue through their website. Now SLQ also offers oral history interviews online, to introduce users to oral history and other components of their collections,- such as photographs and documents to current, as well as new users. This includes the various departments, Indigenous centres and regional libraries affiliated with SLQ statewide, who are often unable to access the materials held within, or even full information about, the collections available within the institution. There has been a growing demand for resources and services that help to satisfy community enthusiasm and promote engagement. Demand increases as public access to affordable digital media technologies increases, and as community or marginalised groups become interested in do it yourself (DIY) history; and SLQ encourages this. This paper draws on the oral history and digital story-based research undertaken by the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) for the State Library of Queensland including: the Apology Collection: The Prime Minister’s apology to Australia’s Indigenous Stolen Generation; Five Senses: regional Queensland artists; Gay history of Brisbane; and The Queensland Business Leaders Hall of Fame.

Managing process model collections with AProMoRe

As organizations reach higher levels of Business Process Management maturity, they tend to collect numerous business process models. Such models may be linked with each other or mutually overlap, supersede one another and evolve over time. Moreover, they may be represented at different abstraction levels depending on the target audience and modeling purpose, and may be available in multiple languages (e.g. due to company mergers). Thus, it is common that organizations struggle with keeping track of their process models. This demonstration introduces AProMoRe (Advanced Process Model Repository) which aims to facilitate the management of (large) process model collections.

QUT Digital Repository: Integrating the University’s IR with other digital collections

Queensland University of Technology’s Institutional Repository, QUT ePrints (http://eprints.qut.edu.au/), was established in 2003. With the help of an institutional mandate (endorsed in 2004) the repository now holds over 11,000 open access publications. The repository’s success is celebrated within the University and acknowledged nationally and internationally. QUT ePrints was built on GNU EPrints open source repository software (currently running v.3.1.3) and was originally configured to accommodate open access versions of the traditional range of research publications (journal articles, conference papers, books, book chapters and working papers). However, in 2009, the repository’s scope, content and systems were broadened and the ‘QUT Digital repository’ is now a service encompassing a range of digital collections, services and systems. For a work to be accepted in to the institutional repository, at least one of the authors/creators must have a current affiliation with QUT. However, the success of QUT ePrints in terms of its capacity to increase the visibility and accessibility of our researchers' scholarly works resulted in requests to accept digital collections of works which were out of scope. To address this need, a number of parallel digital collections have been developed. These collections include, OZcase, a collection of legal research materials and ‘The Sugar Industry Collection’; a digitsed collection of books and articles on sugar cane production and processing. Additionally, the Library has responded to requests from academics for a service to support the publication of new, and existing, peer reviewed open access journals. A project is currently underway to help a group of senior QUT academics publish a new international peer reviewed journal. The QUT Digital Repository website will be a portal for access to a range of resources to support copyright management. It is likely that it will provide an access point for the institution’s data repository. The data repository, provisionally named the ‘QUT Data Commons’, is currently a work-in-progress. The metadata for some QUT datasets will also be harvested by and discoverable via ‘Research Data Australia’, the dataset discovery service managed by the Australian National Data Service (ANDS). QUT Digital repository will integrate a range of technologies and services related to scholarly communication. This paper will discuss the development of the QUT Digital Repository, its strategic functions, the stakeholders involved and lessons learned.

Changing relationships: activating student and staff engagement in a design studio

In the design studio learning environment, traditional student and staff expectations are of close contact teaching and learning. In recent years at QUT students have experienced reduced personal staff attention, and have increasingly felt “anonymous” and correspondingly disengaged, to the detriment of quality learning (Carbone 1998: 8; Biggs 2003). Concurrently, there has been a necessary increase in teaching by sessional staff at QUT with varied levels of experience and assurance. This paper outlines the first iteration of an action research project exploring whether changing the current QUT design studio student and staff relationships may lead to more engaged, dynamic learning environments. “Engagement” is understood as a primarily emotional, rather than operational student concern (Solomonides and Martin 2008; Austerlitz and Aravot 2007). The project inverted the standard QUT design studio teaching structure, and evaluated the new structure and activation of student engagement across four identified markers: attendance, participation, learning and performance (ACER 2009; NSSE 2005; Chapman 2003). Student and staff surveys and focus groups, corporate data, and informal feedback informed these evaluations. Overall, the results support the premise that when students and staff feel part of a reasonably-sized studio class with a dedicated lecturer and self-selected project, the majority are inclined to value these relationships, to feel actively engaged, and to experience some improvement in their learning and teaching performances.

Discovering characteristics of stochastic collections of process models

Process models in organizational collections are typically modeled by the same team and using the same conventions. As such, these models share many characteristic features like size range, type and frequency of errors. In most cases merely small samples of these collections are available due to e.g. the sensitive information they contain. Because of their sizes, these samples may not provide an accurate representation of the characteristics of the originating collection. This paper deals with the problem of constructing collections of process models, in the form of Petri nets, from small samples of a collection for accurate estimations of the characteristics of this collection. Given a small sample of process models drawn from a real-life collection, we mine a set of generation parameters that we use to generate arbitrary-large collections that feature the same characteristics of the original collection. In this way we can estimate the characteristics of the original collection on the generated collections.We extensively evaluate the quality of our technique on various sample datasets drawn from both research and industry.

Frequent activating FGFR2 mutations in endometrial carcinomas parallel germline mutations associated with craniosynostosis and skeletal dysplasia syndromes

Endometrial carcinoma is the most common gynecological malignancy in the United States. Although most women present with early disease confined to the uterus, the majority of persistent or recurrent tumors are refractory to current chemotherapies. We have identified a total of 11 different FGFR2 mutations in 3/10 (30%) of endometrial cell lines and 19/187 (10%) of primary uterine tumors. Mutations were seen primarily in tumors of the endometrioid histologic subtype (18/115 cases investigated, 16%). The majority of the somatic mutations identified were identical to germline activating mutations in FGFR2 and FGFR3 that cause Apert Syndrome, Beare-Stevenson Syndrome, hypochondroplasia, achondroplasia and SADDAN syndrome. The two most common somatic mutations identified were S252W (in eight tumors) and N550K (in five samples). Four novel mutations were identified, three of which are also likely to result in receptor gain-of-function. Extensive functional analyses have already been performed on many of these mutations, demonstrating they result in receptor activation through a variety of mechanisms. The discovery of activating FGFR2 mutations in endometrial carcinoma raises the possibility of employing anti-FGFR molecularly targeted therapies in patients with advanced or recurrent endometrial carcinoma.

Managing large collections of business process models - Current techniques and challenges

Nowadays, business process management is an important approach for managing organizations from an operational perspective. As a consequence, it is common to see organizations develop collections of hundreds or even thousands of business process models. Such large collections of process models bring new challenges and provide new opportunities, as the knowledge that they encapsulate requires to be properly managed. Therefore, a variety of techniques for managing large collections of business process models is being developed. The goal of this paper is to provide an overview of the management techniques that currently exist, as well as the open research challenges that they pose.

Alternative primary sources for studying Australian television history : an annotated list of online private collections

It is possible to write many different histories of Australian television, and these different histories draw on different primary sources. The ABC of Drama, for example, draws on the ABC Document Archives (Jacka 1991). Most of the information for Images and Industry: television drama production in Australia is taken from original interviews with television production staff (Moran 1985). Ending the Affair, as well as archival work, draws on ‘over ten years of watching … Australian television current affairs’ (Turner 2005, xiii). Moran’s Guide to Australian TV Series draws exhaustively on extant archives: the ABC Document Archives, material sourced through the ABC Drama department, the Australian Film Commission, the library of the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, and the Australian Film Institute (Moran 1993, xi)...

User participation in the categorisation of the State Library of Queensland digital image collections: characteristics, motivations and experiences

In 2010, the State Library of Queensland (SLQ) donated their out-of-copyright Queensland images to Wikimedia Commons. One direct effect of publishing the collections at Wikimedia Commons is the ability of general audiences to participate and help the library in processing the images in the collection. This paper will discuss a project that explored user participation in the categorisation of the State Library of Queensland digital image collections. The outcomes of this project can be used to gain a better understanding of user participation that lead to improving access to library digital collections. Two techniques for data collection were used: documents analysis and interview. Document analysis was performed on the Wikimedia Commons monthly reports. Meanwhile, interview was used as the main data collection technique in this research. The data collected from document analysis was used to help the researchers to devise appropriate questions for interviews. The interviews were undertaken with participants who were divided into two groups: SLQ staff members and Wikimedians (users who participate in Wikimedia). The two sets of data collected from participants were analysed independently and compared. This method was useful for the researchers to understand the differences between the experiences of categorisation from both the librarians’ and the users’ perspectives. This paper will provide a discussion on the preliminary findings that have emerged from each group participant. This research provides preliminary information about the extent of user participation in the categorisation of SLQ collections in Wikimedia Commons that can be used by SLQ and other interested libraries in describing their digital content by their categorisations to improve user access to the collection in the future.

Nagelschmidtite bioceramics with osteostimulation properties : material chemistry activating osteogenic genes and WNT signalling pathway of human bone marrow stromal cells

Bioactive materials with osteostimulation properties are of great importance to promote osteogenic differentiation of human bone marrow stromal cells (hBMSCs) for potential bone regeneration. We have recently synthesized nagelschmidtite (NAGEL, Ca7Si2P2O16) ceramic powders which showed excellent apatite-mineralization ability. The aim of this study was to investigate the interaction of hBMSCs with NAGEL bioceramic bulks and their ionic extracts, and to explore the osteostimulation properties of NAGEL bioceramics and the possible molecular mechanism. The cell attachment, proliferation, bone-related gene expression (ALP, OPN and OCN) and WNT signalling pathways (WNT3a, FZD6, AXIN2 and CTNNB) of hBMSCs cultured on NAGEL bioceramic disks were systematically studied. We further investigated the biological effects of ionic products from NAGEL powders on cell proliferation and osteogenic differentiation of hBMSCs by culturing cells with NAGEL extracts. Furthermore, the effect of NAGEL bioceramics on the osteogenic differentiation in hBMSCs was also investigated with the addition of cardamonin, a WNT inhibitor. The results showed that NAGEL bioceramic disks supported the attachment and proliferation of hBMSCs, and significantly enhanced the bone-related gene expression and WNT signalling pathway of hBMSCs, compared to conventional beta-tricalcium phosphate (β-TCP) bioceramic disks and blank controls. The ionic products from NAGEL powders also significantly promoted the proliferation, bone and WNT-related gene expression of hBMSCs. It was also identified that NAGEL bioceramics could bypass the action of the WNT inhibitor (10 μM) to stimulate the selected osteogenic genes in hBMSCs. Our results suggest that NAGEL bioceramics possess excellent in vitro osteostimulation properties. The possible mechanism for the osteostimulation may be directly related to the released Si, Ca and P-containing ionic products from NAGEL bioceramics which activate bone-related gene expression and WNT signalling pathway of hBMSCs. The present study suggests that NAGEL bioceramics are a potential bone regeneration material with significant osteostimulation capacity.