The role of the research system in 'Learning Economies'

This paper provides a framework for analysing the role of Australia’s research system in promoting national economic development. The paper is in two parts. Part One focuses on knowledge diffusion and technological development and emphasises the systemic nature of innovation processes within the emerging context of ‘learning economies’. The key understandings relevant to a nation’s research system are drawn out from contemporary developments in the international literature on ‘learning economies’. Some of the implications for Australia are discussed. The aim is to provide readers with some indications of what to look for in considering options for the future of Australia’s research system. More detailed information on relevant aspects of Australia’s industrial and trade structure, the extent of the R&D effort in industry and on issues such as management capability can be obtained from (Marceau et al 1997). In the second part, broad elements of the Australian research system are reviewed in the light of findings from the literature. The central role of universities in the innovation and research systems is described. Actions that can be taken by both universities and governments are suggested, particularly regarding the need to build and maintain efficient information flows at local, national and international levels. The paper briefly points to the nature of a research system capable of contributing effectively to the wealth of the nation and indicates some possible directions for enabling Australia to meet the demands of, and profit from, a knowledge-based economy.

Inclusive universal design practice and activism : a case study

This paper reports on a unique approach to inclusive practice that responds to several critical issues highlighted in the first Universal Design (UD) Conference in Yokohama as well as in more recent literature on universal design. The approach, as explained in the paper, involves a not-for-profit community organization, university researchers, and a design action group comprising practitioners from across the design disciplines, together with other specialist consultants, developing a voluntary capacity an independent housing model for people with disabilities and their families or caretakers. With a focus on relationships and "a system that places human beings at the centre in all respects", this paper presents the approach and the ermerging theoretical framework which addresses three issues that afacan and Erbug (2009) propose hinder the integration of universal design with design practice, namely: theory-practice inconsistency involving the lack of flow-on of universal design awareness into design practice; a way of thinking that exhibits very little empathy with and understanding of the requirements of diverse users; and poorly implemented and coordinated collaboration and communication involving designers and other professionals (pp. 731 - 732).

Assurance of learning : the role of work integrated learning and industry partners

In the partnering with students and industry it is important for universities to recognize and value the nature of knowledge and learning that emanates from work integrated learning experiences is different to formal university based learning. Learning is not a by-product of work rather learning is fundamental to engaging in work practice. Work integrated learning experiences provide unique opportunities for students to integrate theory and practice through the solving of real world problems. This paper reports findings to date of a project that sought to identify key issues and practices faced by academics, industry partners and students engaged in the provision and experience of work integrated learning within an undergraduate creative industries program at a major metropolitan university. In this paper, those findings are focused on some of the particular qualities and issues related to the assessment of learning at and through the work integrated experience. The findings suggest that the assessment strategies needed to better value the knowledges and practices of the Creative Industries. The paper also makes recommendations about how industry partners might best contribute to the assessment of students’ developing capabilities and to continuous reflection on courses and the assurance of learning agenda.

iRAP Malaysia training course : decade of action for road safety

The International Road Assessment Program (iRAP) is a not-for-profit organisation that works in partnership with governments and non-government organisations in all parts of the world to make roads safe. The iRAP Malaysia pilot study on 3700km of road identified the potential to prevent 31,800 deaths and serious injuries over the next 20 years from proven engineering improvements. To help ensure the iRAP data and results are available to planners and engineers, iRAP, together with staff from the Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety – Queensland (CARRS-Q) and the Malaysian Institute of Road Safety Research (MIROS), developed a five-day iRAP training course that covers the background, theory and practical application of iRAP protocols, with a special focus on Malaysian case studies. Funding was provided by a competitive grant from the Australia-Malaysia Institute.

Enhancing professional ethics : service-learning in teacher education

The ethical conduct of professionals has been the focus of increasing scrutiny over the past several decades as members of the public, the media, professional bodies, and legislative authorities have struggled to define ethical behaviour in times of governmental change, increasing internationalisation, globalised communications, threats of terrorism, and the challenges of developments in science and medicine (e.g., Demmke & Bossaert, 2004). National governments and transnational bodies have responded to these concerns about ethics and corruption through measures such as the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2004), Transparency International’s annual corruption index (2010) and Queensland’s Public Sector Ethics Act 1994 (Queensland Parliament 1994). Similarly, academic interest in ethics and its application across a range of domains(e.g., business, health care, social welfare, criminal justice, law, journalism, defence, environment, and media) has also increased. To illustrate, in 1993, a non-partisan, non-profit national umbrella organisation, the Australian Association for Professional and Applied Ethics, was formed following a conference concerned with the teaching of ethics (http://www.arts.unsw.edu.au./aapae/about_aapae/about_aapae.htm), while a recent review of the Excellence in Research for Australian rankings of national and international academic journals revealed that 16 journals related to ethics had received the top ratings of A* or A (Australian Research Council, 2009). In this chapter we examine professional ethics and argue, with specific reference to the context of pre-service teacher education, that Service-learning is one way of enhancing emerging professionals’ understanding of ethics.

Personalized recommender system based on item taxonomy and folksonomy

Item folksonomy or tag information is popularly available on the web now. However, since tags are arbitrary words given by users, they contain a lot of noise such as tag synonyms, semantic ambiguities and personal tags. Such noise brings difficulties to improve the accuracy of item recommendations. In this paper, we propose to combine item taxonomy and folksonomy to reduce the noise of tags and make personalized item recommendations. The experiments conducted on the dataset collected from Amazon.com demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approaches. The results suggested that the recommendation accuracy can be further improved if we consider the viewpoints and the vocabularies of both experts and users.

The concealed difficulties of aligning CRE decisions to corporate goals

Realisation of the importance of real estate asset strategic decision making has inspired a burgeoning corporate real estate management (CREM) literature. Much of this criticises the poor alignment between strategic business direction and the ‘enabling’ physical environment. This is based on the understanding that corporate real estate assets represent the physical resource base that supports business, and can either complement or impede that business. In the hope of resolving this problem, CRE authors advocate a deeper integration of strategic and corporate real estate decisions. However this recommendation appears to be based on a relatively simplistic theoretical approach to organization where decision-making tends to be viewed as a rationally managed event rather than a complex process. Defining decision making as an isolated event has led to an uncritical acceptance of two basic assumptions: ubiquitous, conflict-free rationality and profit maximisation. These assumptions have encouraged prescriptive solutions that clearly lack the sophistication necessary to come to grips with the complexity of the built and organizational environment. Alternatively, approaching CREM decision making from a more sophisticated perspective, such as that of the “Carnegie School”, leads to conceptualise it as a ‘process’, creating room for bounded rationality, multiple goals, intra-organizational conflict, environmental matching, uncertainty avoidance and problem searching. It is reasonable to expect that such an approach will result in a better understanding of the organizational context, which will facilitate the creation of organizational objectives, assist with the formation of strategies, and ultimately will aid decision.

The politics of charity

For the first time since 1601, a number of leading common law nations have almost simultaneously chosen to revise and place on the statute books the law relating to charity. The Politics of Charity examines the reasons for this and for the varying legislative outcomes. ----- ----- ----- This book examines the legal framework and political significance of charity, as developed within England & Wales, contrasts this with the experiences of other common law nations and explores the resulting implications for government/sector relationships in those countries. It suggests that charity law lies at the heart of the relationship between government and the non profit sector, that there is an unmistakeable political agenda driving charity law reform and that the differential in legislative outcomes reflects important differences in the policies pursued by the governments concerned.----- ----- ----- Looking at fundamentally different approaches of government towards the sector in the UK, Ireland, the US, New Zealand, Canada, Singapore and Australia, O’Halloran argues the results will have implications for the present workings of parliamentary democracy.----- ----- ----- The Politics of Charity will be a valuable resource for academics, regulators and legal practitioners as well as advanced and postgraduate students in law, politics and public policy.

Using computers in the music classroom

Computers are now being widely used in the making of music and the extent of computer use in the music that we hear is farlarger than most people realise. This paper will discuss how computer technology is used in music, with particular reference to music education.

Power through influence : the evolution of arts management in Australia

The purpose of this paper is to frame effective models of arts management for Australia in the nineties and beyond based on an analysis of historical practices. The evolutionary process of government subvention of the arts through non-profit arts organisations provides a clear statement of the role of power and influence. In particular the ascendancy of arts organisations and their management constitute a background against which to study other non-profit corporations.

CD73 and CD29 concurrently mediate the mechanically induced decrease of migratory capacity of mesenchymal stromal cells

The assumption that mesenchymal stromal cell (MSC)-based therapies are capable of augmenting physiological regeneration processes has fostered intensive basic and clinical research activities. However, to achieve sustained therapeutic success in vivo, not only the biological, but also the mechanical microenvironment of MSCs during these regeneration processes needs to be taken into account. This is especially important for e.g., bone fracture repair, since MSCs present at the fracture site undergo significant biomechanical stimulation. This study has therefore investigated cellular characteristics and the functional behaviour of MSCs in response to mechanical loading. Our results demonstrated a reduced expression of MSC surface markers CD73 (ecto-5’-nucleotidase) and CD29 (integrin β1) after loading. On the functional level, loading led to a reduced migration of MSCs. Both effects persisted for a week after the removal of the loading stimulus. Specifi c inhibition of CD73/CD29 demonstrated their substrate dependent involvement in MSC migration after loading. These results were supported by scanning electron microscopy images and phalloidin staining of actin fi laments displaying less cell spreading, lamellipodia formation and actin accumulations. Moreover, focal adhesion kinase and Src-family kinases were identified as candidate downstream targets of CD73/CD29 that might contribute to the mechanically induced decrease in MSC migration. These results suggest that MSC migration is controlled by CD73 CD29, which in turn are regulated by mechanical stimulation of cells. We therefore speculate that MSCs migrate into the fracture site, become mechanically entrapped, and thereby accumulate to fulfil their regenerative functions.

Learning and teaching from the edge to centre stage : Critical factors in embedding sustainable university-wide engagement in external awards and grants funding initiatives.

Teaching awards, grants and fellowships are strategies used to recognise outstanding contributions to learning and teaching, encourage innovation, and to shift learning and teaching from the edge to centre stage. Examples range from school, faculty and institutional award and grant schemes to national schemes such as those offered by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC), the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in the United States, and the Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning in higher education in the United Kingdom. The Queensland University of Technology (QUT) has experienced outstanding success in all areas of the ALTC funding since the inception of the Carrick Institute for Learning and Teaching in 2004. This paper reports on a study of the critical factors that have enabled sustainable and resilient institutional engagement with ALTC programs. As a lens for examining the QUT environment and practices, the study draws upon the five conditions of the framework for effective dissemination of innovation developed by Southwell, Gannaway, Orrell, Chalmers and Abraham (2005, 2010): 1. Effective, multi-level leadership and management 2. Climate of readiness for change 3. Availability of resources 4. Comprehensive systems in institutions and funding bodies 5. Funding design The discussion on the critical factors and practical and strategic lessons learnt for successful university-wide engagement offer insights for university leaders and staff who are responsible for learning and teaching award, grant and associated internal and external funding schemes.

Optimal strategies and minimax lower bounds for online convex games

A number of learning problems can be cast as an Online Convex Game: on each round, a learner makes a prediction x from a convex set, the environment plays a loss function f, and the learner’s long-term goal is to minimize regret. Algorithms have been proposed by Zinkevich, when f is assumed to be convex, and Hazan et al., when f is assumed to be strongly convex, that have provably low regret. We consider these two settings and analyze such games from a minimax perspective, proving minimax strategies and lower bounds in each case. These results prove that the existing algorithms are essentially optimal.

Shifting : one-inclusion mistake bounds and sample compression

We present new expected risk bounds for binary and multiclass prediction, and resolve several recent conjectures on sample compressibility due to Kuzmin and Warmuth. By exploiting the combinatorial structure of concept class F, Haussler et al. achieved a VC(F)/n bound for the natural one-inclusion prediction strategy. The key step in their proof is a d=VC(F) bound on the graph density of a subgraph of the hypercube—one-inclusion graph. The first main result of this report is a density bound of n∙choose(n-1,≤d-1)/choose(n,≤d) < d, which positively resolves a conjecture of Kuzmin and Warmuth relating to their unlabeled Peeling compression scheme and also leads to an improved one-inclusion mistake bound. The proof uses a new form of VC-invariant shifting and a group-theoretic symmetrization. Our second main result is an algebraic topological property of maximum classes of VC-dimension d as being d-contractible simplicial complexes, extending the well-known characterization that d=1 maximum classes are trees. We negatively resolve a minimum degree conjecture of Kuzmin and Warmuth—the second part to a conjectured proof of correctness for Peeling—that every class has one-inclusion minimum degree at most its VC-dimension. Our final main result is a k-class analogue of the d/n mistake bound, replacing the VC-dimension by the Pollard pseudo-dimension and the one-inclusion strategy by its natural hypergraph generalization. This result improves on known PAC-based expected risk bounds by a factor of O(log n) and is shown to be optimal up to a O(log k) factor. The combinatorial technique of shifting takes a central role in understanding the one-inclusion (hyper)graph and is a running theme throughout