Understanding speeding in school zones in Malaysia and Australia using an extended Theory of Planned Behaviour : the potential role of mindfulness

Speeding in school zones is a problem in both Malaysia and Australia. While there are differences between the countries in terms of school zone treatments and more generally, these differences do not explain why people choose to speed in school zones. Because speeding is usually an intentional behaviour, the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) has been used to understand speeding and develop interventions, however it has limitations which can be addressed by extending the model to incorporate other constructs. One promising construct is mindfulness, which can improve the explanatory value of the TPB by taking into account unintentional speeding attributable to a lack of focus on important elements of the driving environment. We explain what mindfulness is (and is not), how it can assist in providing a better understanding of speeding in school zones, and how it can contribute to the development of interventions. We then outline a program of research which has been commenced, investigating the contribution of mindfulness to an understanding of speed choice in school zones in two different settings (Australia and Malaysia) using the TPB.

Injuries across adolescence : an investigation using the Extended Adolescent Injury Checklist (E-AIC)

Injury is the leading cause of death among adolescents, and in many countries, accounts for more deaths than all other causes combined. Rates of death due to injury also increase dramatically across adolescence. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reported that, in 2005, there were 954 deaths of young Australians due to injury, which is a rate of 26 deaths per 100,000 young people. Of these deaths, 4% were adolescents aged 12-14, 17% were aged 15-17, and 80% were aged 18-24 years. Issues addressed: Injuries are the leading cause of death among adolescents. The current research examined a measure of adolescent injury in terms of whether it encompasses the diverse injury experiences of Australian adolescents, including high-risk and normative adolescents, and thus determine its utility as a tool for health promotion research. Grade 9 students from two Brisbane high schools (n=202, aged 13-14 years) and adolescents recruited from the Emergency Department waiting rooms of four Brisbane hospitals (n=98, aged 16-18 years) completed the Extended Adolescent Injury Checklist (E-AIC). The most common cause of injury among adolescents was a sports activity, followed by fights for all participants except schoolbased males, who experienced more bicycle injuries. Alcohol use was most frequently reported in association with interpersonal violence injuries. A broad variety of injuries, occurring in context of multiple risk as well as normative behaviours, were reported by adolescents in both school and ED settings, and were captured by the E-AIC. Findings suggest that the E-AIC is a useful measure that captures the injury experiences of adolescents in different contexts. The high occurrence of injuries that do not result in formal medical treatment also indicates scope for interventions to be based around lessons in first aid, while also incorporating injury prevention components.

Scaling acoustic data analysis through collaboration and automation

Monitoring and assessing environmental health is becoming increasingly important as human activity and climate change place greater pressure on global biodiversity. Acoustic sensors provide the ability to collect data passively, objectively and continuously across large areas for extended periods of time. While these factors make acoustic sensors attractive as autonomous data collectors, there are significant issues associated with large-scale data manipulation and analysis. We present our current research into techniques for analysing large volumes of acoustic data effectively and efficiently. We provide an overview of a novel online acoustic environmental workbench and discuss a number of approaches to scaling analysis of acoustic data; collaboration, manual, automatic and human-in-the loop analysis.

History-aware, real-time risk detection in business processes (Extended Version)

This paper proposes a novel approach for identifying risks in executable business processes and detecting them at run time. The approach considers risks in all phases of the business process management lifecycle, and is realized via a distributed, sensor-based architecture. At design-time, sensors are defined to specify risk conditions which when fulfilled, are a likely indicator of faults to occur. Both historical and current execution data can be used to compose such conditions. At run-time, each sensor independently notifies a sensor manager when a risk is detected. In turn, the sensor manager interacts with the monitoring component of a process automation suite to prompt the results to the user who may take remedial actions. The proposed architecture has been implemented in the YAWL system and its performance has been evaluated in practice.

Comparison of koala LPCoLN and human strains of Chlamydia pneumoniae highlights extended genetic diversity in the species

Background Chlamydia pneumoniae is a widespread pathogen causing upper and lower respiratory tract infections in addition to a range of other diseases in humans and animals. Previous whole genome analyses have focused on four essentially clonal (> 99% identity) C. pneumoniae human genomes (AR39, CWL029, J138 and TW183), providing relatively little insight into strain diversity and evolution of this species. Results We performed individual gene-by-gene comparisons of the recently sequenced C. pneumoniae koala genome and four C. pneumoniae human genomes to identify species-specific genes, and more importantly, to gain an insight into the genetic diversity and evolution of the species. We selected genes dispersed throughout the chromosome, representing genes that were specific to C. pneumoniae, genes with a demonstrated role in chlamydial biology and/or pathogenicity (n = 49), genes encoding nucleotide salvage or amino acid biosynthesis proteins (n = 6), and extrachromosomal elements (9 plasmid and 2 bacteriophage genes). Conclusions We have identified strain-specific differences and targets for detection of C. pneumoniae isolates from both human and animal origin. Such characterisation is necessary for an improved understanding of disease transmission and intervention.

Reduction rules for reset/inhibitor nets

Reset/inhibitor nets are Petri nets extended with reset arcs and inhibitor arcs. These extensions can be used to model cancellation and blocking. A reset arc allows a transition to remove all tokens from a certain place when the transition fires. An inhibitor arc can stop a transition from being enabled if the place contains one or more tokens. While reset/inhibitor nets increase the expressive power of Petri nets, they also result in increased complexity of analysis techniques. One way of speeding up Petri net analysis is to apply reduction rules. Unfortunately, many of the rules defined for classical Petri nets do not hold in the presence of reset and/or inhibitor arcs. Moreover, new rules can be added. This is the first paper systematically presenting a comprehensive set of reduction rules for reset/inhibitor nets. These rules are liveness and boundedness preserving and are able to dramatically reduce models and their state spaces. It can be observed that most of the modeling languages used in practice have features related to cancellation and blocking. Therefore, this work is highly relevant for all kinds of application areas where analysis is currently intractable.