Designing the information architecture of governmental one-stop portals : on the application and analysis of card sorting

The latest paradigm shift in government, termed Transformational Government, puts the citizen in the centre of attention. Including citizens in the design of online one-stop portals can help governmental organisations to become more customer focussed. This study describes the initial efforts of an Australian state government to develop an information architecture to structure the content of their future one-stop portal. Hereby, card sorting exercises have been conducted and analysed, utilising contemporary approaches found in academic and non-scientific literature. This paper describes the findings of the card sorting exercises in this particular case and discusses the suitability of the applied approaches in general. These are distinguished into non-statistical, statistical, and hybrid approaches. Thus, on the one hand, this paper contributes to academia by describing the application of different card sorting approaches and discussing their strengths and weaknesses. On the other hand, this paper contributes to practice by explaining the approach that has been taken by the authors’ research partner in order to develop a customer-focussed governmental one-stop portal. Thus, they provide decision support for practitioners with regard to different analysis methods that can be used to complement recent approaches in Transformational Government.

Feedback consistencies and inconsistencies : eight mentors’ observations on one preservice teacher’s lesson

Mentors play a key role in developing preservice teachers for their chosen careers and providing feedback appears as a significant relational interaction between the mentor and mentee that assists in guiding the mentee’s practices. Yet, what are mentors’ perspectives on providing feedback to their mentees? In this case study, eight mentors viewed a professional video recorded science lesson facilitated by a final-year preservice teacher during practicum for the purposes of providing oral feedback in a simulated mentor-mentee discussion. Findings showed that mentors’ feedback was variable in both their positive feedback and constructive criticisms and, in one case, the feedback was contrasting in nature. Implications are discussed, including preservice teachers receiving feedback from more than one mentor and universities researching the design of valid and reliable tools to guide mentors’ oral feedback.

Characterising one-to-one conservatoire teaching : Some implications of a quantitative analysis

Despite the significant recent growth in research relating to instrumental, vocal and composition tuition in higher education, little is known about the diversity of approaches that characterise one-to-one teaching in the Conservatoire, and what counts as optimal practice for educating 21st-century musicians. Through analysis of video-recorded one-to-one lessons that draws on a ‘bottom up’ methodology for characterising pedagogical practices (Taylor, 2012; Taylor et al, 2012), this paper provides empirical evidence about the nature of one-to-one pedagogy in one Australian institution. The research aims (1) to enable a better understanding of current one-to-one conservatoire teaching; and (2) to build and improve upon existing teaching practice using authentic insights gained through systematic investigation. The authors hope the research will lead to a better understanding of the diversity and efficacy of the pedagogical practice within the specific context in which the study was conducted, and beyond, to Conservatoire pedagogy generally.

A retrospective cohort investigation of active range of motion within one week of open reduction and internal fixation of distal radius fractures

Distal radius fractures stabilized by open reduction internal fixation (ORIF) have become increasingly common. There is currently no consensus on the optimal time to commence range of motion (ROM) exercises post-ORIF. A retrospective cohort review was conducted over a five-year period to compare wrist and forearm range of motion outcomes and number of therapy sessions between patients who commenced active ROM exercises within the first seven days and from day eight onward following ORIF of distal radius fractures. One hundred and twenty-one patient cases were identified. Clinical data, active ROM at initial and discharge therapy assessments, fracture type, surgical approaches, and number of therapy sessions attended were recorded. One hundred and seven (88.4%) cases had complete datasets. The early active ROM group (n = 37) commenced ROM a mean (SD) of 4.27 (1.8) days post-ORIF. The comparator group (n = 70) commenced ROM exercises 24.3 (13.6) days post-ORIF. No significant differences were identified between groups in ROM at initial or discharge assessments, or therapy sessions attended. The results from this study indicate that patients who commenced active ROM exercises an average of 24 days after surgery achieved comparable ROM outcomes with similar number of therapy sessions to those who commenced ROM exercises within the first week.

Quantum one-time programs

A one-time program is a hypothetical device by which a user may evaluate a circuit on exactly one input of his choice, before the device self-destructs. One-time programs cannot be achieved by software alone, as any software can be copied and re-run. However, it is known that every circuit can be compiled into a one-time program using a very basic hypothetical hardware device called a one-time memory. At first glance it may seem that quantum information, which cannot be copied, might also allow for one-time programs. But it is not hard to see that this intuition is false: one-time programs for classical or quantum circuits based solely on quantum information do not exist, even with computational assumptions. This observation raises the question, "what assumptions are required to achieve one-time programs for quantum circuits?" Our main result is that any quantum circuit can be compiled into a one-time program assuming only the same basic one-time memory devices used for classical circuits. Moreover, these quantum one-time programs achieve statistical universal composability (UC-security) against any malicious user. Our construction employs methods for computation on authenticated quantum data, and we present a new quantum authentication scheme called the trap scheme for this purpose. As a corollary, we establish UC-security of a recent protocol for delegated quantum computation.

Developmental lessons from the Capricornia Arts Mob : ‘learning to speak with one voice’

The Capricornia Arts Mob also known as CAM is a collective of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander visual artists, sculptors, photographers, carvers and writers based in the Rockhampton Region. Its members are eclectic and include an 18 year old through to Elders. CAM has already had a major exhibition in Rockhampton and is submitting work to a range of arts festivals, events and exhibitions. While their achievements are steadily growing and they have been meeting for 18 months, they have been reluctant to incorporate or implement a formalised structure. In learning how to work together there have been tensions and struggles, there has also been the exhilaration of working collaboratively as artists from diverse Indigenous cultures who utilise different mediums. This has resulted in an incredible vibrancy in creative praxis. Members will share some of CAM’s learnings of the developmental process to date and thoughts and dreams about the future.

Korean ubiquitous-eco-city : a smart-sustainable urban form or a branding hoax?

The buzzwords of zero-carbon, low-carbon, carbon-neutral, smart-eco and ubiquitous-eco have become common brands for the sustainable eco-cities of the 21st century. This paper focuses on one of these city types ‘ubiquitous-eco-city’ (u-eco-city). The principal premise of a u-eco-city is to provide a high quality of life and place to residents, workers and visitors with low-to-no negative impacts on the natural environment by using state-of-the-art technologies in the planning, development and management stages. The paper aims to put this premise into a test and address whether u-eco-city is a dazzling smart and sustainable urban form that constitutes an ideal 21st century city model or just a branding hoax. This paper explores recent developments and trends in the ubiquitous technologies, infrastructures, services and management systems, and their utilisation and implications for the development of u-eco-cities. The paper places Korean u-eco-city initiatives under microscope, and critically discusses their prospects in forming a smart and sustainable urban form and become an ideal city model.

Quality assessment of service bundles for governmental one-stop portals : a literature review

Service bundles, in the context of e-government, are used to group services together that relate to a certain citizen need. These bundles can then be presented on a governmental one-stop portal to structure the available service offerings according to citizen expectations. In order to ensure that citizens utilise the one-stop portal and comprised service bundles for future transactions, the quality of these service bundles needs to be managed and maximised accordingly. Consequently, models and tools that focus on assessing service bundle quality play an important role, when it comes to increasing or retaining usage behaviour of citizens. This study focuses on providing a rigorous and structured literature review of e-government outlets with regards to their coverage of service bundle quality and e-service quality themes. The study contributes to academia and practice by providing a framework that allows structuring and classifying existing studies relevant for the assessment of quality for government portals. Furthermore, this study provides insights into the status quo of quality models that can be used by governments to assess the quality of their service bundles. Directions for future research and limitations of the present study are provided as well.

Non-linkage of insulin receptor locus with essential hypertension in an affected pedigree

A recent cross-sectional study has demonstrated a significant association of the R1 RsaI restriction fragment length polymorphism of the insulin receptor gene (INSR) with human essential hypertension. In the present study, an alternative approach, involving linkage analysis, was carried out using 8 hypertensive families with 5 or more affected members. Five of the families were found to be informative and in one of these pedigrees a conclusion of non-linkage of INSR and hypertension could be made on the basis of an obligate recombinant in one generation which yielded a Lod score of - ∞ at a recombination fraction (θ) of zero. In another family, the largest studied, a positive Lod score was obtained at θ = 0, but this was below the level required for a conclusion of linkage. Lod score at θ = 0 for a marker at the insulin locus in this family was negative. The present study has thus demonstrated one pedigree in which hypertension is not linked to the insulin receptor locus.

One night’s CPAP withdrawal in otherwise compliant OSA patients: marked driving impairment but good awareness of increased sleepiness

Purpose Obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) patients effectively treated by and compliant with continuous positive air pressure (CPAP) occasionally miss a night’s treatment. The purpose of this study was to use a real car interactive driving simulator to assess the effects of such an occurrence on the next day’s driving, including the extent to which these drivers are aware of increased sleepiness. Methods Eleven long-term compliant CPAP-treated 50–75-year-old male OSA participants completed a 2-h afternoon, simulated, realistic monotonous drive in an instrumented car, twice, following one night: (1) normal sleep with CPAP and (2) nil CPAP. Drifting out of road lane (‘incidents’), subjective sleepiness every 200 s and continuous electroencephalogram (EEG) activities indicative of sleepiness and compensatory effort were monitored. Results Withdrawal of CPAP markedly increased sleep disturbance and led to significantly more incidents, a shorter ‘safe’ driving duration, increased alpha and theta EEG power and greater subjective sleepiness. However, increased EEG beta activity indicated that more compensatory effort was being applied. Importantly, under both conditions, there was a highly significant correlation between subjective and EEG measures of sleepiness, to the extent that participants were well aware of the effects of nil CPAP. Conclusions Patients should be aware that compliance with treatment every night is crucial for safe driving.

A fuzzy TOPSIS based multi criteria performance measurement model for lean supply chain

Increasing global competition, rapid technological changes, advances in manufacturing and information technology and discerning customers are forcing supply chains to adopt improvement practices that enable them to deliver high quality products at a lower cost and in a shorter period of time. A lean initiative is one of the most effective approaches toward achieving this goal. In the lean improvement process, it is critical to measure current and desired performance level in order to clearly evaluate the lean implementation efforts. Many attempts have tried to measure supply chain performance incorporating both quantitative and qualitative measures but failed to provide an effective method of measuring improvements in performances for dynamic lean supply chain situations. Therefore, the necessity of appropriate measurement of lean supply chain performance has become imperative. There are many lean tools available for supply chains; however, effectiveness of a lean tool depends on the type of the product and supply chain. One tool may be highly effective for a supply chain involved in high volume products but may not be effective for low volume products. There is currently no systematic methodology available for selecting appropriate lean strategies based on the type of supply chain and market strategy This thesis develops an effective method to measure the performance of supply chain consisting of both quantitative and qualitative metrics and investigates the effects of product types and lean tool selection on the supply chain performance Supply chain performance matrices and the effects of various lean tools over performance metrics mentioned in the SCOR framework have been investigated. A lean supply chain model based on the SCOR metric framework is then developed where non- lean and lean as well as quantitative and qualitative metrics are incorporated in appropriate metrics. The values of appropriate metrics are converted into triangular fuzzy numbers using similarity rules and heuristic methods. Data have been collected from an apparel manufacturing company for multiple supply chain products and then a fuzzy based method is applied to measure the performance improvements in supply chains. Using the fuzzy TOPSIS method, which chooses an optimum alternative to maximise similarities with positive ideal solutions and to minimise similarities with negative ideal solutions, the performances of lean and non- lean supply chain situations for three different apparel products have been evaluated. To address the research questions related to effective performance evaluation method and the effects of lean tools over different types of supply chains; a conceptual framework and two hypotheses are investigated. Empirical results show that implementation of lean tools have significant effects over performance improvements in terms of time, quality and flexibility. Fuzzy TOPSIS based method developed is able to integrate multiple supply chain matrices onto a single performance measure while lean supply chain model incorporates qualitative and quantitative metrics. It can therefore effectively measure the improvements for supply chain after implementing lean tools. It is demonstrated that product types involved in the supply chain and ability to select right lean tools have significant effect on lean supply chain performance. Future study can conduct multiple case studies in different contexts.

Are two threats worse than one? The effects of face race and emotional expression on fear conditioning

Facial cues of racial outgroup or anger mediate fear learning that is resistant to extinction. Whether this resistance is potentiated if fear is conditioned to angry, other race faces has not been established. Two groups of Caucasian participants were conditioned with two happy and two angry face conditional stimuli (CSs). During acquisition, one happy and one angry face were paired with an aversive unconditional stimulus whereas the second happy and angry faces were presented alone. CS face race (Caucasian, African American) was varied between groups. During habituation, electrodermal responses were larger to angry faces regardless of race and declined less to other race faces. Extinction was immediate for Caucasian happy faces, delayed for angry faces regardless of race, and slowest for happy racial outgroup faces. Combining the facial cues of other race and anger does not enhance resistance to extinction of fear.

One robot, eight hours, and twenty four thousand people

This paper presents an account of an autonomous mobile robot deployment in a densely crowded public event with thousands of people from different age groups attending. The robot operated for eight hours on an open floor surrounded by tables, chairs and massive touchscreen displays. Due to the large number of people who were in close vicinity of the robot, different safety measures were implemented including the use of no-go zones which prevent the robot from blocking emergency exits or moving too close to the display screens. The paper presents the lessons learnt and experiences obtained from this experiment, and provides a discussion about the state of mobile service robots in such crowded environments.

Weak key-IV pairs in the A5/1 stream cipher

A5/1 is a shift register based stream cipher which provides privacy for the GSM system. In this paper, we analyse the loading of the secret key and IV during the initialisation process of A5/1. We demonstrate the existence of weak key-IV pairs in the A5/1 cipher due to this loading process; these weak key-IV pairs may generate one, two or three registers containing all-zero values, which may lead in turn to weak keystream sequences. In the case where two or three registers contain only zeros, we describe a distinguisher which leads to a complete decryption of the affected messages.

Made by motion, Series one

“Made by Motion” is a collaboration between digital artist Paul Van Opdenbosch and performer and choreographer Elise May; a series of studies on captured motion data used to generating experimental visual forms that reverberate in space and time. The project investigates the invisible forces generated by and influencing the movement of a dancer. Along with how the forces can be captured and applied to generating visual outcomes that surpass simple data visualisation, projecting the intent of the performer’s movements. The source or ‘seed’ comes from using an Xsens MVN - Inertial Motion Capture system to capture spontaneous dance movements, with the visual generation conducted through a customised dynamics simulation. In this first series the visual investigation focused on manipulating the movement date at the instance of capture, capture been the recording of three-dimensional movement as ‘seen’ by the hardware and ‘understood’ through the calibration of software. By repositioning the capture hardware on the body we can effectively change how the same sequence of movements is ‘seen’ by the motion capture system thus generating a different visual result from effetely identical movement. The outcomes from the experiments clearly demonstrates the effectiveness of using motion capture hardware as a creative tool to manipulate the perception of the capture subject, in this case been a sequence of dance movements. The creative work exhibited is a cross-section of the experiments conducted in practice with the first animated work (Movement A - Control) using the motion capture hardware in its default ‘normal’ configuration. Following this is the lower body moved to the upper body (Lb-Ub), right arm moved onto the left arm (Ra-La), right leg moved onto the left leg (Rl-Ll) and finally the left leg moved onto a object that is then held in the left hand (Ll-Pf (Lh)).