Towards integrated assessments for urban development

The role of sustainability in urban design is becoming increasingly important as Australia’s cities continue to grow, putting pressure on existing infrastructure such as water, energy and transport. To optimise an urban design many different aspects such as water, energy, transport, costs need to be taken into account integrally. Integrated software applications assessing urban designs on a large variety of aspects are hardly available. With the upcoming next generation of the Internet often referred to as the Semantic Web, data can become more machine-interpretable by developing ontologies that can support the development of integrated software systems. Software systems can use these ontologies to perform an intelligent task such as assessing an urban design on a particular aspect. When ontologies of different applications are aligned, they can share information resulting in interoperability. Inference such as compliancy checks and classifications can support aligning the ontologies. A proof of concept implementation has been made to demonstrate and validate the usefulness of machine interpretable ontologies for urban designs.

An online urban information system initiative for the Shibuya city, Tokyo

The computing tools and technologies with urban information systems are designed to enhance planners’ capability to deal with complex urban environments and to plan for prosperous and liveable communities. This paper examines the role of Online Urban Information Systems or in another words Internet based Geographic Information Systems as spatial decision support systems to aid local planning process. This paper introduces a prototype Internet GIS model that aims to integrate a public oriented interactive decision support system for urban planning process. This model, referred as a ‘Community based Internet GIS’, incorporates advanced information technologies and community involvement in decision making processes on the web environment. This innovative model has been recently applied to a pilot case in Tokyo and this paper concludes with the preliminary results of this project.

The exploration of consumer power in online brand communities : a comparison case study in Australia and China

Aided by the development of information technology, the balance of power in the market place is rapidly shifting from marketers towards consumers and nowhere is this more obvious than in the online environment (Denegri-Knott, Zwick, & Schroeder, 2006; Moynagh & Worsley, 2002; Newcomer, 2000; Samli, 2001). From the inception and continuous development of the Internet, consumers are becoming more empowered. They can choose what they want to click on the Internet, they can shop and transact payments, watch and download video, chat with others, be it friends or even total strangers. Especially in online communities, like-minded consumers share and exchange information, ideas and opinions. One form of online community is the online brand community, which gathers specific brand lovers. As with any social unit, people form different roles in the community and exert different effects on each other. Their interaction online can greatly influence the brand and marketers. A comprehensive understanding of the operation of this special group form is essential to advancing marketing thought and practice (Kozinets, 1999). While online communities have strongly shifted the balance of power from marketers to consumers, the current marketing literature is sparse on power theory (Merlo, Whitwell, & Lukas, 2004). Some studies have been conducted from an economic point of view (Smith, 1987), however their application to marketing has been limited. Denegri-Knott (2006) explored power based on the struggle between consumers and marketers online and identified consumer power formats such as control over the relationship, information, aggregation and participation. Her study has built a foundation for future power studies in the online environment. This research project bridges the limited marketing literature on power theory with the growing recognition of online communities among marketing academics and practitioners. Specifically, this study extends and redefines consumer power by exploring the concept of power in online brand communities, in order to better understand power structure and distribution in this context. This research investigates the applicability of the factors of consumer power identified by Denegri-Knott (2006) to the online brand community. In addition, by acknowledging the model proposed by McAlexander, Schouten, & Koenig (2002), which emphasized that community study should focus on the role of consumers and identifying multiple relationships among the community, this research further explores how member role changes will affect power relationships as well as consumer likings of the brand. As a further extension to the literature, this study also considers cultural differences and their effect on community member roles and power structure. Based on the study of Hofstede (1980), Australia and China were chosen as two distinct samples to represent differences in two cultural dimensions, namely individualism verses collectivism and high power distance verses low power distance. This contribution to the research also helps answer the research gap identified by Muñiz Jr & O'Guinn (2001), who pointed out the lack of cross cultural studies within the online brand community context. This research adopts a case study methodology to investigate the issues identified above. Case study is an appropriate research strategy to answer “how” and “why” questions of a contemporary phenomenon in real-life context (Yin, 2003). The online brand communities of “Haloforum.net” in Australia and “NGA.cn” in China were selected as two cases. In-depth interviews were used as the primary data collection method. As a result of the geographical dispersion and the preference of a certain number of participants, online synchronic interviews via MSN messenger were utilized along with the face-to-face interviews. As a supplementary approach, online observation was carried over two months, covering a two week period prior to the interviews and a six week period following the interviews. Triangulation techniques were used to strengthen the credibility and validity of the research findings (Yin, 2003). The findings of this research study suggest a new definition of power in an online brand community. This research also redefines the consumer power types and broadens the brand community model developed by McAlexander et al. (2002) in an online context by extending the various relationships between brand and members. This presents a more complete picture of how the perceived power relationships are structured in the online brand community. A new member role is discovered in the Australian online brand community in addition to the four member roles identified by Kozinets (1999), in contrast however, all four roles do not exist in the Chinese online brand community. The research proposes a model which links the defined power types and identified member roles. Furthermore, given the results of the cross-cultural comparison between Australia and China showed certain discrepancies, the research suggests that power studies in the online brand community should be country-specific. This research contributes to the body of knowledge on online consumer power, by applying it to the context of an online brand community, as well as considering factors such as cross cultural difference. Importantly, it provides insights for marketing practitioners on how to best leverage consumer power to serve brand objective in online brand communities. This, in turn, should lead to more cost effective and successful communication strategies. Finally, the study proposes future research directions. The research should be extended to communities of different sizes, to different extents of marketer control over the community, to the connection between online and offline activities within the brand community, and (given the cross-cultural findings) to different countries. In addition, a greater amount of research in this area is recommended to determine the generalizability of this study.

Measuring the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the classroom

In 2003, the “ICT Curriculum Integration Performance Measurement Instrument” was developed froman extensive review ofthe contemporary international and Australian research pertaining to the definition and measurement of ICT curriculum integration in classrooms (Proctor, Watson, & Finger, 2003). The 45-item instrument that resulted was based on theories and methodologies identified by the literature review. This paper describes psychometric results from a large-scale evaluation of the instrument subsequently conducted, as recommended by Proctor, Watson, and Finger (2003). The resultant 20-item, two-factor instrument, now called “Learning with ICTs: Measuring ICT Use in the Curriculum,” is both statistically and theoretically robust. This paper should be read in association with the original paper published in Computers in the Schools(Proctor, Watson, & Finger, 2003) that described in detail the theoretical framework underpinning the development of the instrument.

Peer to peer English/Chinese cross-language information retrieval

Peer to peer systems have been widely used in the internet. However, most of the peer to peer information systems are still missing some of the important features, for example cross-language IR (Information Retrieval) and collection selection / fusion features. Cross-language IR is the state-of-art research area in IR research community. It has not been used in any real world IR systems yet. Cross-language IR has the ability to issue a query in one language and receive documents in other languages. In typical peer to peer environment, users are from multiple countries. Their collections are definitely in multiple languages. Cross-language IR can help users to find documents more easily. E.g. many Chinese researchers will search research papers in both Chinese and English. With Cross-language IR, they can do one query in Chinese and get documents in two languages. The Out Of Vocabulary (OOV) problem is one of the key research areas in crosslanguage information retrieval. In recent years, web mining was shown to be one of the effective approaches to solving this problem. However, how to extract Multiword Lexical Units (MLUs) from the web content and how to select the correct translations from the extracted candidate MLUs are still two difficult problems in web mining based automated translation approaches. Discovering resource descriptions and merging results obtained from remote search engines are two key issues in distributed information retrieval studies. In uncooperative environments, query-based sampling and normalized-score based merging strategies are well-known approaches to solve such problems. However, such approaches only consider the content of the remote database but do not consider the retrieval performance of the remote search engine. This thesis presents research on building a peer to peer IR system with crosslanguage IR and advance collection profiling technique for fusion features. Particularly, this thesis first presents a new Chinese term measurement and new Chinese MLU extraction process that works well on small corpora. An approach to selection of MLUs in a more accurate manner is also presented. After that, this thesis proposes a collection profiling strategy which can discover not only collection content but also retrieval performance of the remote search engine. Based on collection profiling, a web-based query classification method and two collection fusion approaches are developed and presented in this thesis. Our experiments show that the proposed strategies are effective in merging results in uncooperative peer to peer environments. Here, an uncooperative environment is defined as each peer in the system is autonomous. Peer like to share documents but they do not share collection statistics. This environment is a typical peer to peer IR environment. Finally, all those approaches are grouped together to build up a secure peer to peer multilingual IR system that cooperates through X.509 and email system.

An innovative learning model for teaching architectural technology using building information modelling : a Queensland University of Technology perspective

In architecture courses, instilling a wider understanding of the industry specific representations practiced in the Building Industry is normally done under the auspices of Technology and Science subjects. Traditionally, building industry professionals communicated their design intentions using industry specific representations. Originally these mainly two dimensional representations such as plans, sections, elevations, schedules, etc. were produced manually, using a drawing board. Currently, this manual process has been digitised in the form of Computer Aided Design and Drafting (CADD) or ubiquitously simply CAD. While CAD has significant productivity and accuracy advantages over the earlier manual method, it still only produces industry specific representations of the design intent. Essentially, CAD is a digital version of the drawing board. The tool used for the production of these representations in industry is still mainly CAD. This is also the approach taken in most traditional university courses and mirrors the reality of the situation in the building industry. A successor to CAD, in the form of Building Information Modelling (BIM), is presently evolving in the Construction Industry. CAD is mostly a technical tool that conforms to existing industry practices. BIM on the other hand is revolutionary both as a technical tool and as an industry practice. Rather than producing representations of design intent, BIM produces an exact Virtual Prototype of any building that in an ideal situation is centrally stored and freely exchanged between the project team. Essentially, BIM builds any building twice: once in the virtual world, where any faults are resolved, and finally, in the real world. There is, however, no established model for learning through the use of this technology in Architecture courses. Queensland University of Technology (QUT), a tertiary institution that maintains close links with industry, recognises the importance of equipping their graduates with skills that are relevant to industry. BIM skills are currently in increasing demand throughout the construction industry through the evolution of construction industry practices. As such, during the second half of 2008, QUT 4th year architectural students were formally introduced for the first time to BIM, as both a technology and as an industry practice. This paper will outline the teaching team’s experiences and methodologies in offering a BIM unit (Architectural Technology and Science IV) at QUT for the first time and provide a description of the learning model. The paper will present the results of a survey on the learners’ perspectives of both BIM and their learning experiences as they learn about and through this technology.

Rural and remote road safety study : final report

• Introduction: Concern and action for rural road safety is relatively new in Australia in comparison to the field of traffic safety as a whole. In 2003, a program of research was begun by the Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety - Queensland (CARRS-Q) and the Rural Health Research Unit (RHRU) at James Cook University to investigate factors contributing to serious rural road crashes in the North Queensland region. This project was funded by the Premier’s Department, Main Roads Department, Queensland Transport, QFleet, Queensland Rail, Queensland Ambulance Service, Department of Natural Resources and Queensland Police Service. Additional funding was provided by NRMA Insurance for a PhD scholarship. In-kind support was provided through the four hospitals used for data collection, namely Cairns Base Hospital, The Townsville Hospital, Mount Isa Hospital and Atherton Hospital.----- The primary aim of the project was to: Identify human factors related to the occurrence of serious traffic incidents in rural and remote areas of Australia, and to the trauma suffered by persons as a result of these incidents, using a sample drawn from a rural and remote area in North Queensland.----- The data and analyses presented in this report are the core findings from two broad studies: a general examination of fatalities and casualties from rural and remote crashes for the period 1 March 2004 until 30 June 2007, and a further linked case-comparison study of hospitalised patients compared with a sample of non-crash-involved drivers.----- • Method: The study was undertaken in rural North Queensland, as defined by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) statistical divisions of North Queensland, Far North Queensland and North-West Queensland. Urban areas surrounding Townsville, Thuringowa and Cairns were not included. The study methodology was centred on serious crashes, as defined by a resulting hospitalisation for 24 hours or more and/or a fatality. Crashes meeting this criteria within the North Queensland region between 1 March 2004 and 30 June 2007 were identified through hospital records and interviewed where possible. Additional data was sourced from coroner’s reports, the Queensland Transport road crash database, the Queensland Ambulance Service and the study hospitals in the region.----- This report is divided into chapters corresponding to analyses conducted on the collected crash and casualty data.----- Chapter 3 presents an overview of all crashes and casualties identified during the study period. Details are presented in regard to the demographics and road user types of casualties; the locations, times, types, and circumstances of crashes; along with the contributing circumstances of crashes.----- Chapter 4 presents the results of summary statistics for all casualties for which an interview was able to be conducted. Statistics are presented separately for drivers and riders, passengers, pedestrians and cyclists. Details are also presented separately for drivers and riders crashing in off-road and on-road settings. Results from questionnaire data are presented in relation to demographics; the experience of the crash in narrative form; vehicle characteristics and maintenance; trip characteristics (e.g. purpose and length of journey; periods of fatigue and monotony; distractions from driving task); driving history; alcohol and drug use; medical history; driving attitudes, intentions and behaviour; attitudes to enforcement; and experience of road safety advertising.----- Chapter 5 compares the above-listed questionnaire results between on-road crash-involved casualties and interviews conducted in the region with non-crash-involved persons. Direct comparisons as well as age and sex adjusted comparisons are presented.----- Chapter 6 presents information on those casualties who were admitted to one of the study hospitals during the study period. Brief information is given regarding the demographic characteristics of these casualties. Emergency services’ data is used to highlight the characteristics of patient retrieval and transport to and between hospitals. The major injuries resulting from the crashes are presented for each region of the body and analysed by vehicle type, occupant type, seatbelt status, helmet status, alcohol involvement and nature of crash. Estimates are provided of the costs associated with in-hospital treatment and retrieval.----- Chapter 7 describes the characteristics of the fatal casualties and the nature and circumstances of the crashes. Demographics, road user types, licence status, crash type and contributing factors for crashes are presented. Coronial data is provided in regard to contributing circumstances (including alcohol, drugs and medical conditions), cause of death, resulting injuries, and restraint and helmet use.----- Chapter 8 presents the results of a comparison between casualties’ crash descriptions and police-attributed crash circumstances. The relative frequency of contributing circumstances are compared both broadly within the categories of behavioural, environmental, vehicle related, medical and other groupings and specifically for circumstances within these groups.----- Chapter 9 reports on the associated research projects which have been undertaken on specific topics related to rural road safety.----- Finally, Chapter 10 reports on the conclusions and recommendations made from the program of research.---- • Major Recommendations : From the findings of these analyses, a number of major recommendations were made: + Male drivers and riders - Male drivers and riders should continue to be the focus of interventions, given their very high representation among rural and remote road crash fatalities and serious injuries.----- - The group of males aged between 30 and 50 years comprised the largest number of casualties and must also be targeted for change if there is to be a meaningful improvement in rural and remote road safety.----- + Motorcyclists - Single vehicle motorcycle crashes constitute over 80% of serious, on-road rural motorcycle crashes and need particular attention in development of policy and infrastructure.----- - The motorcycle safety consultation process currently being undertaken by Queensland Transport (via the "Motorbike Safety in Queensland - Consultation Paper") is strongly endorsed. As part of this process, particular attention needs to be given to initiatives designed to reduce rural and single vehicle motorcycle crashes.----- - The safety of off-road riders is a serious problem that falls outside the direct responsibility of either Transport or Health departments. Responsibility for this issue needs to be attributed to develop appropriate policy, regulations and countermeasures.----- + Road safety for Indigenous people - Continued resourcing and expansion of The Queensland Aboriginal Peoples and Torres Strait Islander Peoples Driver Licensing Program to meet the needs of remote and Indigenous communities with significantly lower licence ownership levels.----- - Increased attention needs to focus on the contribution of geographic disadvantage (remoteness) factors to remote and Indigenous road trauma.----- + Road environment - Speed is the ‘final common pathway’ in determining the severity of rural and remote crashes and rural speed limits should be reduced to 90km/hr for sealed off-highway roads and 80km/hr for all unsealed roads as recommended in the Austroads review and in line with the current Tasmanian government trial.----- - The Department of Main Roads should monitor rural crash clusters and where appropriate work with local authorities to conduct relevant audits and take mitigating action. - The international experts at the workshop reviewed the data and identified the need to focus particular attention on road design management for dangerous curves. They also indicated the need to maximise the use of audio-tactile linemarking (audible lines) and rumble strips to alert drivers to dangerous conditions and behaviours.----- + Trauma costs - In accordance with Queensland Health priorities, recognition should be given to the substantial financial costs associated with acute management of trauma resulting from serious rural and remote crashes.----- - Efforts should be made to develop a comprehensive, regionally specific costing formula for road trauma that incorporates the pre-hospital, hospital and post-hospital phases of care. This would inform health resource allocation and facilitate the evaluation of interventions.----- - The commitment of funds to the development of preventive strategies to reduce rural and remote crashes should take into account the potential cost savings associated with trauma.----- - A dedicated study of the rehabilitation needs and associated personal and healthcare costs arising from rural and remote road crashes should be undertaken.----- + Emergency services - While the study has demonstrated considerable efficiency in the response and retrieval systems of rural and remote North Queensland, relevant Intelligent Transport Systems technologies (such as vehicle alarm systems) to improve crash notification should be both developed and evaluated.----- + Enforcement - Alcohol and speed enforcement programs should target the period between 2 and 6pm because of the high numbers of crashes in the afternoon period throughout the rural region.----- + Drink driving - Courtesy buses should be advocated and schemes such as the Skipper project promoted as local drink driving countermeasures in line with the very high levels of community support for these measures identified in the hospital study.------ - Programs should be developed to target the high levels of alcohol consumption identified in rural and remote areas and related involvement in crashes.----- - Referrals to drink driving rehabilitation programs should be mandated for recidivist offenders.----- + Data requirements - Rural and remote road crashes should receive the same quality of attention as urban crashes. As such, it is strongly recommended that increased resources be committed to enable dedicated Forensic Crash Units to investigate rural and remote fatal and serious injury crashes.----- - Transport department records of rural and remote crashes should record the crash location using the national ARIA area classifications used by health departments as a means to better identifying rural crashes.----- - Rural and remote crashes tend to be unnoticed except in relatively infrequent rural reviews. They should receive the same level of attention and this could be achieved if fatalities and fatal crashes were coded by the ARIA classification system and included in regular crash reporting.----- - Health, Transport and Police agencies should collect a common, minimal set of data relating to road crashes and injuries, including presentations to small rural and remote health facilities.----- + Media and community education programmes - Interventions seeking to highlight the human contribution to crashes should be prioritised. Driver distraction, alcohol and inappropriate speed for the road conditions are key examples of such behaviours.----- - Promotion of basic safety behaviours such as the use of seatbelts and helmets should be given a renewed focus.----- - Knowledge, attitude and behavioural factors that have been identified for the hospital Brief Intervention Trial should be considered in developing safety campaigns for rural and remote people. For example challenging the myth of the dangerous ‘other’ or ‘non-local’ driver.----- - Special educational initiatives on the issues involved in rural and remote driving should be undertaken. For example the material used by Main Roads, the Australian Defence Force and local initiatives.

Topological SLAM using neighbourhood information of places

Perceptual aliasing makes topological navigation a difficult task. In this paper we present a general approach for topological SLAM~(simultaneous localisation and mapping) which does not require motion or odometry information but only a sequence of noisy measurements from visited places. We propose a particle filtering technique for topological SLAM which relies on a method for disambiguating places which appear indistinguishable using neighbourhood information extracted from the sequence of observations. The algorithm aims to induce a small topological map which is consistent with the observations and simultaneously estimate the location of the robot. The proposed approach is evaluated using a data set of sonar measurements from an indoor environment which contains several similar places. It is demonstrated that our approach is capable of dealing with severe ambiguities and, and that it infers a small map in terms of vertices which is consistent with the sequence of observations.

An instrument for assessing primary students’ knowledge of information graphics in mathematics

Information graphics have become increasingly important in representing, organising and analysing information in a technological age. In classroom contexts, information graphics are typically associated with graphs, maps and number lines. However, all students need to become competent with the broad range of graphics that they will encounter in mathematical situations. This paper provides a rationale for creating a test to measure students’ knowledge of graphics. This instrument can be used in mass testing and individual (in-depth) situations. Our analysis of the utility of this instrument informs policy and practice. The results provide an appreciation of the relative difficulty of different information graphics; and provide the capacity to benchmark information about students’ knowledge of graphics. The implications for practice include the need to support the development of students’ knowledge of graphics, the existence of gender differences, the role of cross-curriculum applications in learning about graphics, and the need to explicate the links among graphics.

Geek goddesses go to school : A study of female pre-service teachers in information technology courses

Various reasons have been proffered for female under-representation in tertiary information technology (IT) courses and the IT industry with most relating to cultural moirés. The 2006 Geek Goddess calendar was designed to alter IT’s “geeky image” and the term is used here to represent young women enrolled in pre-service IT teaching courses. Their special mix of IT and teaching draws on conflicting stereotypes and represents a micro-climate which is typically lost in studies of IT occupations because of the aggregation of all IT roles. This paper will report on a small-scale investigation of female students (N=25) at a university in Queensland (Australia) studying to become teachers of secondary IT subjects. They are entering the IT industry, gendered as a “male” occupation, through the safe space of teaching a discipline allied to feminine qualities of nurturing. They are “geek goddesses” who – perhaps to balance the masculine and feminine of these occupations - have decided to go to school rather than into corporations or government.

Building Information Modelling for FM at Sydney Opera House

“SOH see significant benefit in digitising its drawings and operation and maintenance manuals. Since SOH do not currently have digital models of the Opera House structure or other components, there is an opportunity for this national case study to promote the application of Digital Facility Modelling using standardized Building Information Models (BIM)”. The digital modelling element of this project examined the potential of building information models for Facility Management focusing on the following areas: • The re-usability of building information for FM purposes • BIM as an Integrated information model for facility management • Extendibility of the BIM to cope with business specific requirements • Commercial facility management software using standardised building information models • The ability to add (organisation specific) intelligence to the model • A roadmap for SOH to adopt BIM for FM The project has established that BIM – building information modelling - is an appropriate and potentially beneficial technology for the storage of integrated building, maintenance and management data for SOH. Based on the attributes of a BIM, several advantages can be envisioned: consistency in the data, intelligence in the model, multiple representations, source of information for intelligent programs and intelligent queries. The IFC – open building exchange standard – specification provides comprehensive support for asset and facility management functions, and offers new management, collaboration and procurement relationships based on sharing of intelligent building data. The major advantages of using an open standard are: information can be read and manipulated by any compliant software, reduced user “lock in” to proprietary solutions, third party software can be the “best of breed” to suit the process and scope at hand, standardised BIM solutions consider the wider implications of information exchange outside the scope of any particular vendor, information can be archived as ASCII files for archival purposes, and data quality can be enhanced as the now single source of users’ information has improved accuracy, correctness, currency, completeness and relevance. SOH current building standards have been successfully drafted for a BIM environment and are confidently expected to be fully developed when BIM is adopted operationally by SOH. There have been remarkably few technical difficulties in converting the House’s existing conventions and standards to the new model based environment. This demonstrates that the IFC model represents world practice for building data representation and management (see Sydney Opera House – FM Exemplar Project Report Number 2005-001-C-3, Open Specification for BIM: Sydney Opera House Case Study). Availability of FM applications based on BIM is in its infancy but focussed systems are already in operation internationally and show excellent prospects for implementation systems at SOH. In addition to the generic benefits of standardised BIM described above, the following FM specific advantages can be expected from this new integrated facilities management environment: faster and more effective processes, controlled whole life costs and environmental data, better customer service, common operational picture for current and strategic planning, visual decision-making and a total ownership cost model. Tests with partial BIM data – provided by several of SOH’s current consultants – show that the creation of a SOH complete model is realistic, but subject to resolution of compliance and detailed functional support by participating software applications. The showcase has demonstrated successfully that IFC based exchange is possible with several common BIM based applications through the creation of a new partial model of the building. Data exchanged has been geometrically accurate (the SOH building structure represents some of the most complex building elements) and supports rich information describing the types of objects, with their properties and relationships.

Information literacy and learning

This book explores the relationship between information literacy and learning. It reports on the findings of research into the experience of students studying music and tax law in higher edcuation; investigating in depth the way in which they approach the twin activities of information use and discipline learning. The key findings of this study include: • A description of the nature of the experienced relationship between information literacy and learning in music composition and tax law as 1) Applying, 2) Discovering and 3) Expressing (music) or Understanding (tax law); • the theoretical GeST windows model and alignment of the model with the empirical study; • the presentation of curriculum implications in music and tax law, and • an exploration of the nature of information as-it-is-experienced. The findings may be used by teachers, students, librarians, academic skills advisors,academic developers and policy makers in higher education.

Attention and memory bias for body image and health related information using an Emotional Stroop task in a non-clinical sample

It has been proposed that body image disturbance is a form of cognitive bias wherein schemas for self-relevant information guide the selective processing of appearancerelated information in the environment. This threatening information receives disproportionately more attention and memory, as measured by an Emotional Stroop and incidental recall task. The aim of this thesis was to expand the literature on cognitive processing biases in non-clinical males and females by incorporating a number of significant methodological refinements. To achieve this aim, three phases of research were conducted. The initial two phases of research provided preliminary data to inform the development of the main study. Phase One was a qualitative exploration of body image concerns amongst males and females recruited through the general community and from a university. Seventeen participants (eight male; nine female) provided information on their body image and what factors they saw as positively and negatively impacting on their self evaluations. The importance of self esteem, mood, health and fitness, and recognition of the social ideal were identified as key themes. These themes were incorporated as psycho-social measures and Stroop word stimuli in subsequent phases of the research. Phase Two involved the selection and testing of stimuli to be used in the Emotional Stroop task. Six experimental categories of words were developed that reflected a broad range of health and body image concerns for males and females. These categories were high and low calorie food words, positive and negative appearance words, negative emotion words, and physical activity words. Phase Three addressed the central aim of the project by examining cognitive biases for body image information in empirically defined sub-groups. A National sample of males (N = 55) and females (N = 144), recruited from the general community and universities, completed an Emotional Stroop task, incidental memory test, and a collection of psycho-social questionnaires. Sub-groups of body image disturbance were sought using a cluster analysis, which identified three sub-groups in males (Normal, Dissatisfied, and Athletic) and four sub-groups in females (Normal, Health Conscious, Dissatisfied, and Symptomatic). No differences were noted between the groups in selective attention, although time taken to colour name the words was associated with some of the psycho-social variables. Memory biases found across the whole sample for negative emotion, low calorie food, and negative appearance words were interpreted as reflecting the current focus on health and stigma against being unattractive. Collectively these results have expanded our understanding of processing biases in the general community by demonstrating that the processing biases are found within non-clinical samples and that not all processing biases are associated with negative functionality

Older patients request more information : a survey of use of written patient education materials in general practice

Objectives: To determine GPs' reported use of written education materials with older patients and older patients' reported receipt of these materials. To determine GPs' and older patients' perceptions of written materials.---------- Method: Using self-report questionnaires, two populations were surveyed; a randomised sample of 50 GPs (29 males and 21 females) practising in Brisbane's southern suburbs and a convenience sample of 188 older community-dwelling people (aged over 64 years).----------- Results: All GPs reported using written materials with patients, although 28% had not given any to the Last 10 patients. This increased to 46% when patients were older. Twenty percent of patients wanted more written information from their GP, while some GPs believed that older patients preferred verbal information and gave out written information only when they perceived patient interest. All GPs reported giving written materials at the time of consultation and over two thirds discussed the content with patients. Just over 50% of patients reported receiving written information from GPs in the Last six months and only hall of these again discussed it directly with their GP. Overall, patients were more positive than GPs about the value of written education materials.---------- Conclusions: Older patients' desire for written information may be better met if they are more assertive in requesting this of GPs and GPs may better serve their patients' needs if they make written information more readily available to them. Better access to materials and more financial incentives to give them out might also increase GPs' use of written materials.

Building information modelling for FM using IFC

Facility managers have to acquire, integrate, edit and update diverse facility information ranging from building elements & fabric data, operational costs, contract types, room allocation, logistics, maintenance, etc. With the advent of standardized Building Information Models (BIM) such as the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) new opportunities are available for Facility Managers to manage their FM data. The usage of IFC supports data interoperability between different software systems including the use of operational data for facility management systems. Besides the re-use of building data, the Building Information Model can be used as an information framework for storing and retrieving FM related data. Currently several BIM driven FM systems are available including IFC compliant ones. These systems have the potential to not only manage primary data more effectively but also to offer practical systems for detailed monitoring, and analysis of facility performance that can underpin innovative and more cost effective management of complex facilities.