AITPM Email Newsletter Volume 0910, October 2009 : Presidents Message

President’s Message Hello fellow AITPM members, Well I can’t believe it’s already October! My office is already organising its end of year function and looking to plan for 2010. Our whole School is moving to a different building next year, with the lovely L block eventually making way for a new shiny one. Those of you who have entered the Brisbane CBD from the south side, across the Captain Cook Bridge, would know L block as the big 9 storey brick and concrete Lego block ode to 1970’s functional architecture, which greets you on the right hand side. Onto traffic matters: an issue that has been tossing around in my mind of late is that of speed. I know I am growing older and may be prematurely becoming a “grumpy old man”, but everyone around me locally seems to be accelerating off from the stop line much faster than I was taught to for economical driving, both here and in the United States (yes they made my wife and me resit our written and practical driving tests when we lived there). People here in Australia also seem to be driving right on top of the posted speed limit, on whichever part of the Road Hierarchy, whether urban or rural. I was also taught on both sides of the planet that the posted speed limit is a maximum legal speed, not the recommended driving speed. This message did seem to sink in to the American drivers around me when we lived in Oregon - where people did appear to drive more cautiously. Further, posted speed limits in Oregon were, and I presume still are, set more conservative by about 5mph or 10km/h than Australian limits, for any given part of the Road Hierarchy. Another excellent speed limit treatment used in Oregon was in school zones, where reduced speed limits applied “when children are present” rather than during prescribed hours on school days. This would be especially useful here in Australia, where a lot of extra-curricular activities take place around schools outside of the prescribed speed limit hours. Before and after hours school care is on the increase (with parents dropping and collecting children near dawn and dusk in the winter), and many childcentred land uses are located adjacent to schools, such as Scouts/Guides halls, swimming pools and parks. Consequentially, I believe there needs to be some consideration towards more public campaigning about economical driving and the real purpose of the speed limit = or perhaps even a rethink of the speed limit concept, if people really are driving on top of it and it’s not just me becoming grumpier (our industrial psychology friends at the research centres may be able to assist us here). The Queensland organising committee is now in full swing organising the 2010 AITPM National Conference, What’s New?, so please keep a lookout for related content. Best regards to all, Jon Bunker PS A Cartoonists view of traffic engineers I thought you might enjoy this. http://xkcd.com/277/

The strategic and operational dimensions of staff training and professional development for information professionals : what neXus2 has revealed

The paper seeks to continue the debate about the need for professionals in the library and information services (LIS) sector to continually engage in career-long learning to sustain and develop their knowledge and skills in a dynamic industry. Aims: The neXus2 workforce study has been funded by the ALIA and the consortium of National and State Libraries Australasia (NSLA). It builds on earlier research work (the neXus census) that looked at the demographic, educational and career perspectives of individual library and information professions, to critically examine institutional policies and practices associated with the LIS workforce. The research aims to develop a clearer understanding of the issues impacting on workforce sustainability, workforce capability and workforce optimisation. Methods: The research methodology involved an extensive online survey conducted in March 2008 which collected data on organisational and general staffing; recruitment and retention; staff development and continuing professional education; and succession planning. Encouragement to participate was provided by key industry groups, including academic, public, health, law and government library and information agencies, with the result that around 150 institutions completed the questionnaire. Results: The paper will specifically discuss the research findings relating to training and professional development, to measure the scope and distribution of training activities across the workforce, to consider the interrelationship between the strategic and operational dimensions of staff development in individual institutions and to analyse the common and distinctive factors evident in the different sectors of the profession. Conclusion: The neXus2 project has successfully engaged LIS institutions in the collection of complex industry data that is relevant to the future education and workforce strategies for all areas of the profession. Cross-sector forums such as Information Online 2009 offer the opportunity for stimulating professional dialogue on the key issues.

Contrasting views and experiences of health professionals on the management of comorbid substance misuse and mental disorders

Objectives: To determine opinions and experiences of health professionals concerning the management of people with comorbid substance misuse and mental health disorders. Method: We conducted a survey of staff from mental health services and alcohol and drug services across Queensland. Survey items on problems and potential solutions had been generated by focus groups. Results: We analysed responses from 112 staff of alcohol and drug services and 380 mental health staff, representing a return of 79% and 42% respectively of the distributed surveys. One or more issues presented a substantial clinical management problem for 98% of respondents. Needs for increased facilities or services for dual disorder clients figured prominently. These included accommodation or respite care, work and rehabilitation programs, and support groups and resource materials for families. Needs for adolescent dual diagnosis services and after-hours alcohol and drug consultations were also reported. Each of these issues raised substantial problems for over 70% of staff. Another set of problems involved coordination of client care across mental health and alcohol and drug services, including disputes over duty of care. Difficulties with intersectoral liaison were more pronounced for alcohol and drug staff than for mental health. A majority of survey respondents identified 13 solutions as practical. These included routine screening for dual diagnosis at intake, and a range of proposals for closer intersectoral communication such as exchanging client information, developing shared treatment plans, conducting joint case conferences and offering consultation facilities. Conclusions: A wide range of problems for the management of comorbid disorders were identified. While solution of some problems will require resource allocation, many may be addressed by closer liaison between existing services.

Theories and ideas you just have to know about - Introduction

Theories provide us with a frame of reference or model of how something works. Theoreticians who focus on the human state try to make a best-fit model. They try to imagine a typical case and generate a set of frameworks that might assist us to predict behaviour or some outcome, or simply explain how things work. They aim to understand how elements of interest might impact upon each other, and give rise to or predict behavioural, emotional, moral, physical, cognitive or social change for individuals and groups. Theories help give us insight. However, theories do not provide the templates for growth and change. They are simply someone’s informed and researched view regarding what might happen as people grow and interact with the physical and social world.

Social effects on coworker reliance and individual contributions to intercultural teams

Which social perceptions and structures shape coworker reliance and contributions to team products? When people form an intercultural team, they launch a set of working relationships that may be affected by social perceptions and social structures. Social perceptions include beliefs about interpersonal similarity and also expectations of behavior based on professional and national memberships. Social structures include dyadic relationships and the patterns they form. In this study, graduate students from three cohorts were consistently more likely to rely on others with whom they had a professional relationship, while structural equivalence in the professional network had no effect. In only one of the cohorts, people were more likely to rely on others who were professionally similar to themselves. Expectations regarding professional or national groups had no effect on willingness to rely on members of those groups, but expectations regarding teammates' nations positively influenced individual contributions. Willingness to rely on one's teammates did not significantly influence individual contributions to the team. Number of professional ties to teammates increased individual contributions, and number of external ties decreased contributions. Finally, people whose professional networks included a mixture of brokerage and closure (higher ego network variance) made greater contributions to their teams.

The right person, in the right job, with the right skills, at the right time. A workforce-planning model that goes beyond metrics

Purpose – The paper aims to describe a workforce-planning model developed in-house in an Australian university library that is based on rigorous environmental scanning of an institution, the profession and the sector. Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses a case study that describes the stages of the planning process undertaken to develop the Library’s Workforce Plan and the documentation produced. Findings – While it has been found that the process has had successful and productive outcomes, workforce planning is an ongoing process. To remain effective, the workforce plan needs to be reviewed annually in the context of the library’s overall planning program. This is imperative if the plan is to remain current and to be regarded as a living document that will continue to guide library practice. Research limitations/implications – Although a single case study, the work has been contextualized within the wider research into workforce planning. Practical implications – The paper provides a model that can easily be deployed within a library without external or specialist consultant skills, and due to its scalability can be applied at department or wider level. Originality/value – The paper identifies the trends impacting on, and the emerging opportunities for, university libraries and provides a model for workforce planning that recognizes the context and culture of the organization as key drivers in determining workforce planning. Keywords - Australia, University libraries, Academic libraries, Change management, Manpower planning Paper type - Case study

Serious playground : using Second Life to engage high school students in urban planning

Virtual world platforms such as Second Life have been successfully used in educational contexts to motivate and engage learners. This article reports on an exploratory workshop involving a group of high school students using Second Life for an urban planning project. Young people are traditionally an under-represented demographic when it comes to participating in urban planning and decision making processes. The research team developed activities that combined technology with a constructivist approach to learning. Real world experiences and purposes ensured that the workshop enabled students to see the relevance of their learning. Our design also ensured that play remained an important part of the learning. By conceiving of the workshop as a ‘serious playground’ we investigated the ludic potential of learning in a virtual world.

Robot navigation in sensor space

This thesis investigates the problem of robot navigation using only landmark bearings. The proposed system allows a robot to move to a ground target location specified by the sensor values observed at this ground target posi- tion. The control actions are computed based on the difference between the current landmark bearings and the target landmark bearings. No Cartesian coordinates with respect to the ground are computed by the control system. The robot navigates using solely information from the bearing sensor space. Most existing robot navigation systems require a ground frame (2D Cartesian coordinate system) in order to navigate from a ground point A to a ground point B. The commonly used sensors such as laser range scanner, sonar, infrared, and vision do not directly provide the 2D ground coordi- nates of the robot. The existing systems use the sensor measurements to localise the robot with respect to a map, a set of 2D coordinates of the objects of interest. It is more natural to navigate between the points in the sensor space corresponding to A and B without requiring the Cartesian map and the localisation process. Research on animals has revealed how insects are able to exploit very limited computational and memory resources to successfully navigate to a desired destination without computing Cartesian positions. For example, a honeybee balances the left and right optical flows to navigate in a nar- row corridor. Unlike many other ants, Cataglyphis bicolor does not secrete pheromone trails in order to find its way home but instead uses the sun as a compass to keep track of its home direction vector. The home vector can be inaccurate, so the ant also uses landmark recognition. More precisely, it takes snapshots and compass headings of some landmarks. To return home, the ant tries to line up the landmarks exactly as they were before it started wandering. This thesis introduces a navigation method based on reflex actions in sensor space. The sensor vector is made of the bearings of some landmarks, and the reflex action is a gradient descent with respect to the distance in sensor space between the current sensor vector and the target sensor vec- tor. Our theoretical analysis shows that except for some fully characterized pathological cases, any point is reachable from any other point by reflex action in the bearing sensor space provided the environment contains three landmarks and is free of obstacles. The trajectories of a robot using reflex navigation, like other image- based visual control strategies, do not correspond necessarily to the shortest paths on the ground, because the sensor error is minimized, not the moving distance on the ground. However, we show that the use of a sequence of waypoints in sensor space can address this problem. In order to identify relevant waypoints, we train a Self Organising Map (SOM) from a set of observations uniformly distributed with respect to the ground. This SOM provides a sense of location to the robot, and allows a form of path planning in sensor space. The navigation proposed system is analysed theoretically, and evaluated both in simulation and with experiments on a real robot.

Rough set-based reasoning and pattern mining for information filtering

An information filtering (IF) system monitors an incoming document stream to find the documents that match the information needs specified by the user profiles. To learn to use the user profiles effectively is one of the most challenging tasks when developing an IF system. With the document selection criteria better defined based on the users’ needs, filtering large streams of information can be more efficient and effective. To learn the user profiles, term-based approaches have been widely used in the IF community because of their simplicity and directness. Term-based approaches are relatively well established. However, these approaches have problems when dealing with polysemy and synonymy, which often lead to an information overload problem. Recently, pattern-based approaches (or Pattern Taxonomy Models (PTM) [160]) have been proposed for IF by the data mining community. These approaches are better at capturing sematic information and have shown encouraging results for improving the effectiveness of the IF system. On the other hand, pattern discovery from large data streams is not computationally efficient. Also, these approaches had to deal with low frequency pattern issues. The measures used by the data mining technique (for example, “support” and “confidences”) to learn the profile have turned out to be not suitable for filtering. They can lead to a mismatch problem. This thesis uses the rough set-based reasoning (term-based) and pattern mining approach as a unified framework for information filtering to overcome the aforementioned problems. This system consists of two stages - topic filtering and pattern mining stages. The topic filtering stage is intended to minimize information overloading by filtering out the most likely irrelevant information based on the user profiles. A novel user-profiles learning method and a theoretical model of the threshold setting have been developed by using rough set decision theory. The second stage (pattern mining) aims at solving the problem of the information mismatch. This stage is precision-oriented. A new document-ranking function has been derived by exploiting the patterns in the pattern taxonomy. The most likely relevant documents were assigned higher scores by the ranking function. Because there is a relatively small amount of documents left after the first stage, the computational cost is markedly reduced; at the same time, pattern discoveries yield more accurate results. The overall performance of the system was improved significantly. The new two-stage information filtering model has been evaluated by extensive experiments. Tests were based on the well-known IR bench-marking processes, using the latest version of the Reuters dataset, namely, the Reuters Corpus Volume 1 (RCV1). The performance of the new two-stage model was compared with both the term-based and data mining-based IF models. The results demonstrate that the proposed information filtering system outperforms significantly the other IF systems, such as the traditional Rocchio IF model, the state-of-the-art term-based models, including the BM25, Support Vector Machines (SVM), and Pattern Taxonomy Model (PTM).

Fast searching algorithm for candidate satellite-node set in NLMG

The Node-based Local Mesh Generation (NLMG) algorithm, which is free of mesh inconsistency, is one of core algorithms in the Node-based Local Finite Element Method (NLFEM) to achieve the seamless link between mesh generation and stiffness matrix calculation, and the seamless link helps to improve the parallel efficiency of FEM. Furthermore, the key to ensure the efficiency and reliability of NLMG is to determine the candidate satellite-node set of a central node quickly and accurately. This paper develops a Fast Local Search Method based on Uniform Bucket (FLSMUB) and a Fast Local Search Method based on Multilayer Bucket (FLSMMB), and applies them successfully to the decisive problems, i.e. presenting the candidate satellite-node set of any central node in NLMG algorithm. Using FLSMUB or FLSMMB, the NLMG algorithm becomes a practical tool to reduce the parallel computation cost of FEM. Parallel numerical experiments validate that either FLSMUB or FLSMMB is fast, reliable and efficient for their suitable problems and that they are especially effective for computing the large-scale parallel problems.

Optimizing construction planning schedules by virtual prototyping enabled resource analysis

The inherent uncertainty and complexity of construction work make construction planning a particularly difficult task for project managers due to the need to anticipate and visualize likely future events. Conventional computer-assisted technology can help but is often limited to the constructability issues involved. Virtual prototyping, however, offers an improved method through the visualization of construction activities by computer simulation — enabling a range of ‘what-if’ questions to be asked and their implications on the total project to be investigated. This paper describes the use of virtual prototyping to optimize construction planning schedules by analyzing resource allocation and planning with integrated construction models, resource models, construction planning schedules and site-layout plans. A real-life case study is presented that demonstrates the use of a virtual prototyping enabled resource analysis to reallocate space, logistic on access road and arrange tower cranes to achieve a 6-day floor construction cycle.

Planning for smart urban ecosystems : information technology applications for capacity building in environmental decision making

Since the industrial revolution, our world has experienced rapid and unplanned industrialization and urbanization. As a result, we have had to cope with serious environmental challenges. In this context, an explanation of how smart urban ecosystems can emerge, gains a crucial importance. Capacity building and community involvement have always been key issues in achieving sustainable development and enhancing urban ecosystems. By considering these, this paper looks at new approaches to increase public awareness of environmental decision making. This paper will discuss the role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), particularly Webbased Geographic Information Systems (Web-based GIS) as spatial decision support systems to aid public participatory environmental decision making. The paper also explores the potential and constraints of these webbased tools for collaborative decision making.

Augmenting competitiveness of cities through tourism planning : the role of collaborative decision support systems

Many cities around the globe are now considering tourism facilities and their remarkable revenues in order to become competitive in the global economy. In many of these cities a great emphasis is given to the cultural tourism as it plays an important role in the establishment of creative and knowledge-base of cities. The literature points out the importance of local community support in cultural tourism. In such context, the use of new approach and technologies in tourism planning in order to increase the community participation and competitiveness of cities’ cultural assets gains a great significance. This paper advocates a new planning approach for tourism planning, particularly for cultural tourism, to increase the competitiveness of cities. As part of this new approach, the paper introduces the joined up planning approach integrated with a collaborative decision support system: ‘the community-oriented decision support system’. This collaborative planning support system is an effective and efficient tool for cultural tourism planning, which provides a platform for local communities’ participation in the development decision process.

Providing innovative planning education experience : teaching regional planning in an international context

Rapidly changing economic, social, and environmental conditions have created a need for urban and regional planning practitioners who are resilient, innovative, and able to cope with the increasingly complex and cosmopolitan nature of major metropolitan areas. This need should be reflected in planning education that allows students to experience a diverse range of approaches to problems and challenges, and that exposes students to the diverse array of perspectives on planning issues. This paper investigates the outcomes of a collaborative regional planning exercise organised jointly by planning academics from both Queensland University of Technology and the International Islamic University of Malaysia, and involving planning students from both universities. The regional planning exercise consisted of a regional appraisal and report topics of the area under investigation, Klang Valley – Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It culminated with the presentation of regional development strategies for the area, with a field trip to Malaysia being the cornerstone of the project. The collaborative exercise involved a series of workshops and seminars organised locally, in which both Australian and Malaysian planning students participated, as well as meetings with local and federal planning officials, and also a forum for Young Planners of Australian and Malaysian Planning Institutes. The experience attempted to bridge the teaching of theoretical concepts of regional planning and development and the regional, more professional knowledge of planning practice, as it relates to specific political, institutional and cultural contexts. A survey of participating students, from both Queensland University of Technology and the International Islamic University of Malaysia, highlights the benefits of such project in terms of leaning experience and exposure to different cultural contexts.

A fuzzy neural network approach for contractor pre-qualification

Nonlinearity, uncertainty and subjectivity are the three predominant characteristics of contractors prequalification which cause the process more of an art than a scientific evaluation. A fuzzy neural network (FNN) model, amalgamating both the fuzzy set and neural network theories, has been developed aiming to improve the objectiveness of contractor prequalification. Through the FNN theory, the fuzzy rules as used by the prequalifiers can be identified and the corresponding membership functions can be transformed. Eighty-five cases with detailed decision criteria and rules for prequalifying Hong Kong civil engineering contractors were collected. These cases were used for training (calibrating) and testing the FNN model. The performance of the FNN model was compared with the original results produced by the prequalifiers and those generated by the general feedforward neural network (GFNN, i.e. a crisp neural network) approach. Contractor’s ranking orders, the model efficiency (R2) and the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) were examined during the testing phase. These results indicate the applicability of the neural network approach for contractor prequalification and the benefits of the FNN model over the GFNN model. The FNN is a practical approach for modelling contractor prequalification.