Evaluation of implementation of a healthy food and drink supply strategy throughout the whole school environment in Queensland state schools, Australia

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES: This paper reports on the evaluation of the Smart Choices healthy food and drink supply strategy for Queensland schools (Smart Choices) implementation across the whole school environment in state government primary and secondary schools in Queensland, Australia. SUBJECTS/METHODS: Three concurrent surveys using different methods for each group of stakeholders that targeted all 1275 school Principals, all 1258 Parent and Citizens’ Associations (P&Cs) and a random sample of 526 tuckshop convenors throughout Queensland. Nine hundred and seventy-three Principals, 598 P&Cs and 513 tuckshop convenors participated with response rates of 78%, 48% and 98%, respectively. RESULTS: Nearly all Principals (97%), P&Cs (99%) and tuckshop convenors (97%) reported that their school tuckshop had implemented Smart Choices. The majority of Principals and P&Cs reported implementation, respectively, in: school breakfast programs (98 and 92%); vending machine stock (94 and 83%); vending machine advertising (85 and 84%); school events (87 and 88%); school sporting events (81 and 80%); sponsorship and advertising (93 and 84%); fundraising events (80 and 84%); and sporting clubs (73 and 75%). Implementation in curriculum activities, classroom rewards and class parties was reported, respectively, by 97%, 86% and 75% of Principals. Respondents also reported very high levels of understanding of Smart Choices and engagement of the school community. CONCLUSIONS: The results demonstrated that food supply interventions to promote nutrition across all domains of the school environment can be implemented successfully.

What information-related activities do people with ESKD use?

Background Information practice is an emerging area of research that seeks to reveal how people learn to connect with the complex multimodal information landscapes that informs their ability to make decisions. Previous research has identified that people with end stage kidney disease (ESKD) tend to adopt a ‘received’ or ‘engaged’ view of information but little is known about the activities of information practice. Objectives This research project sought to identify the: i) information-related activities; and ii) how information is used. Methods Using a constructivist qualitative methodology, ten people with ESKD living in a large metropolitan city were purposively selected and interviewed. Data was subject to thematic analysis by researchers from nursing and information science. Saturation of themes was achieved. Results Participants were between 38 and 72 years, had been receiving kidney replacement therapy from 2 weeks to 31 years. Eight participants reported having access to the internet but none participated in chat rooms. The activities were conceptualized into themes as listening, seeking, searching, sharing and observing. These activities enabled people to create, reflect on and evaluate the information needed to inform their decision-making Conclusion/Application to Clinical Practice The information practice research approach will enable a better understanding of the underlying relationship between information, knowledge and experience to be better understood. For renal nurses who are involved in patient education being able to recognise the way people use information will assist in individualizing educational sessions and tailoring teaching strategies to make it more meaningful.

A general model for MAC generation using direct injection

This paper presents a model for generating a MAC tag by injecting the input message directly into the internal state of a nonlinear filter generator. This model generalises a similar model for unkeyed hash functions proposed by Nakano et al. We develop a matrix representation for the accumulation phase of our model and use it to analyse the security of the model against man-in-the-middle forgery attacks based on collisions in the final register contents. The results of this analysis show that some conclusions of Nakano et al regarding the security of their model are incorrect. We also use our results to comment on several recent MAC proposals which can be considered as instances of our model and specify choices of options within the model which should prevent the type of forgery discussed here. In particular, suitable initialisation of the register and active use of a secure nonlinear filter will prevent an attacker from finding a collision in the final register contents which could result in a forged MAC.

Budget-aware role based access control

The suitability of Role Based Access Control (RBAC) is being challenged in dynamic environments like healthcare. In an RBAC system, a user's legitimate access may be denied if their need has not been anticipated by the security administrator at the time of policy specification. Alternatively, even when the policy is correctly specified an authorised user may accidentally or intentionally misuse the granted permission. The heart of the challenge is the intrinsic unpredictability of users' operational needs as well as their incentives to misuse permissions. In this paper we propose a novel Budget-aware Role Based Access Control (B-RBAC) model that extends RBAC with the explicit notion of budget and cost, where users are assigned a limited budget through which they pay for the cost of permissions they need. We propose a model where the value of resources are explicitly defined and an RBAC policy is used as a reference point to discriminate the price of access permissions, as opposed to representing hard and fast rules for making access decisions. This approach has several desirable properties. It enables users to acquire unassigned permissions if they deem them necessary. However, users misuse capability is always bounded by their allocated budget and is further adjustable through the discrimination of permission prices. Finally, it provides a uniform mechanism for the detection and prevention of misuses.

Teaching creatively, teaching for creativity : QUT’s Creative Industries Faculty Showcase Panel

In this panel, we showcase approaches to teaching for creativity in disciplines of the Media, Entertainment and Creative Arts School and the School of Design within the Creative Industries Faculty (CIF) at QUT. The Faculty is enormously diverse, with 4,000 students enrolled across a total of 20 disciplines. Creativity is a unifying concept in CIF, both as a graduate attribute, and as a key pedagogic principle. We take as our point of departure the assertion that it is not sufficient to assume that students of tertiary courses in creative disciplines are ‘naturally’ creative. Rather, teachers in higher education must embrace their roles as facilitators of development and learning for the creative workforce, including working to build creative capacity (Howkins, 2009). In so doing, we move away from Renaissance notions of creativity as an individual genius, a disposition or attribute which cannot be learned, towards a 21st century conceptualisation of creativity as highly collaborative, rhizomatic, and able to be developed through educational experiences (see, for instance, Robinson, 2006; Craft; 2001; McWilliam & Dawson, 2008). It has always been important for practitioners of the arts and design to be creative. Under the national innovation agenda (Bradley et al, 2008) and creative industries policy (e.g., Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2008; Office for the Arts, 2011), creativity has been identified as a key determinant of economic growth, and thus developing students’ creativity has now become core higher education business across all fields. Even within the arts and design, professionals are challenged to be creative in new ways, for new purposes, in different contexts, and using new digital tools and platforms. Teachers in creative disciplines may have much to offer to the rest of the higher education sector, in terms of designing and modelling innovative and best practice pedagogies for the development of student creative capability. Information and Communication Technologies such as mobile learning, game-based learning, collaborative online learning tools and immersive learning environments offer new avenues for creative learning, although analogue approaches may also have much to offer, and should not be discarded out of hand. Each panelist will present a case study of their own approach to teaching for creativity, and will address the following questions with respect to their case: 1. What conceptual view of creativity does the case reflect? 2. What pedagogical approaches are used, and why were these chosen? What are the roles of innovative learning approaches, including ICTs, if any? 3. How is creativity measured or assessed? How do students demonstrate creativity? We seek to identify commonalities and contrasts between and among the pedagogic case studies, and to answer the question: what can we learn about teaching creatively and teaching for creativity from CIF best practice?

Slide attacks on the Sfinks stream cipher

Sfinks is a shift register based stream cipher designed for hardware implementation and submitted to the eSTREAM project. In this paper, we analyse the initialisation process of Sfinks. We demonstrate a slid property of the loaded state of the Sfinks cipher, where multiple key-IV pairs may produce phase shifted keystream sequences. The state update functions of both the initialisation process and keystream generation and also the pattern of the padding affect generation of the slid pairs.

State convergence in bit-based stream ciphers

Well-designed initialisation and keystream generation processes for stream ciphers should ensure that each key-IV pair generates a distinct keystream. In this paper, we analyse some ciphers where this does not happen due to state convergence occurring either during initialisation, keystream generation or both. We show how state convergence occurs in each case and identify two mechanisms which can cause state convergence.

Slid pairs in the initialisation of the A5/1 stream cipher

A5/1 is a shift register based stream cipher which uses a majority clocking rule to update its registers. It is designed to provide privacy for the GSM system. In this paper, we analyse the initialisation process of A5/1. We demonstrate a sliding property of the A5/1 cipher, where every valid internal state is also a legitimate loaded state and multiple key-IV pairs produce phase shifted keystream sequences. We describe a possible ciphertext only attack based on this property.

Supreme Court Act 1995 (Qld) s 253 - leave to appeal costs orders - appeal against substantive judgment insufficient - must be arguable case that discretion will be overturned on appeal

The recent decision of the Court of Appeal in AGL Sales (Qld) Pty Ltd v Dawson Sales Pty Ltd [2009] QCA 262 provides clear direction on the Court’s expectations of a party seeking leave to appeal a costs order.This decision is likely to impact upon common practice in relation to appeals against costs orders. It sends a clear message to trial judges that they should not give leave as of course when giving a judgment in relation to costs, and that parties seeking leave under s 253 of the Supreme Court Act 1995 (Qld) should make a separate application. The application should be supported by material presenting an arguable case that the trial judge made an error in the exercise of the discretion of the kind described in House v King (1936) 55 CLR 499. A different, and interesting, aspect of this appeal is that it was the first wholly electronic civil appeal. The court-provided technology had been adopted at trial, and the Court of Appeal dispensed with any requirement for hard copy appeal record books.

Riding a mile in their shoes : understanding Australian metropolitan rail passenger perceptions and experiences of crowdedness using mixed-methods research

Metrics such as passengers per square metre have been developed to define optimum or crowded rail passenger density. Whilst such metrics are important to operational procedures, service evaluation and reporting, they fail to fully capture and convey the ways in which passengers experience crowded situations. This paper reports findings from a two year study of rail passenger crowding in five Australian capital cities which involved a novel mixed-methodology including ethnography, focus groups and an online stated preference choice experiment. The resulting data address the following four fundamental research questions: 1) to what extent are Australian rail passengers concerned by crowding, 2) what conditions exacerbate feelings of crowdedness, 3) what conditions mitigate feelings of crowdedness, and 4) how can we usefully understand passengers’ experiences of crowdedness? It concludes with some observations on the significance and implications of these findings for customer service provision. The findings outlined in this paper demonstrate that the experience of crowdedness (including its tolerance) cannot be understood in isolation from other customer services issues such as interior design, quality of environment, safety and public health concerns. It is hypothesised that tolerance of crowding will increase alongside improvements to overall customer service. This was the first comprehensive study of crowding in the Australian rail industry.

Algebraic analysis of Trivium-like ciphers

Trivium is a bit-based stream cipher in the final portfolio of the eSTREAM project. In this paper, we apply the approach of Berbain et al. to Trivium-like ciphers and perform new algebraic analyses on them, namely Trivium and its reduced versions: Trivium-N, Bivium-A and Bivium-B. In doing so, we answer an open question in the literature. We demonstrate a new algebraic attack on Bivium-A. This attack requires less time and memory than previous techniques which use the F4 algorithm to recover Bivium-A's initial state. Though our attacks on Bivium-B, Trivium and Trivium-N are worse than exhaustive keysearch, the systems of equations which are constructed are smaller and less complex compared to previous algebraic analysis. Factors which can affect the complexity of our attack on Trivium-like ciphers are discussed in detail.

A framework for security analysis of key derivation functions

This paper presents a comprehensive formal security framework for key derivation functions (KDF). The major security goal for a KDF is to produce cryptographic keys from a private seed value where the derived cryptographic keys are indistinguishable from random binary strings. We form a framework of five security models for KDFs. This consists of four security models that we propose: Known Public Inputs Attack (KPM, KPS), Adaptive Chosen Context Information Attack (CCM) and Adaptive Chosen Public Inputs Attack(CPM); and another security model, previously defined by Krawczyk [6], which we refer to as Adaptive Chosen Context Information Attack(CCS). These security models are simulated using an indistinguisibility game. In addition we prove the relationships between these five security models and analyse KDFs using the framework (in the random oracle model).