The knowledge: a project by Boxcopy at Post-Museum, Singapore

‘The Knowledge’ was part of the Next Wave/Asialink project 'Invisible Structures: Australian artist collectives in Tokyo, Singapore and Yogyakarta' in January 2011. For this project, Brisbane ARI Boxcopy undertook a two-week residency at Post Musuem in Singapore. In this project, the Boxcopy artists Channon Goodwin, Joseph Breikers, Timothy P Kerr, Daniel McKewen, Raymonde Rajkowski, Tim Woodward, attempted to acquire an intimate knowledge of the city of Singapore by forming a free delivery company, The Boxcopy Publics Carriage Office of Singapore (BPCOS), which provided services around the city by foot, bike and public transport. In addition to committing to memory and documenting the streets and sites of Singapore, the BPCOS team also performed tasks such as delivering goods or messages, travel a particular route or visit a site, as requested by the people of Singapore. The project comprised this process of public interaction as well as an exhibition and website.

The hunt

"Information Thru Play: In 2010, responding to the success of The Threshold, Juxt Interactive again asked No Mimes Media, to partner in creating a transmedia experience to entertain and inform Cisco's Global Sales Force. The Hunt put employees at the center of a thriller where characters sent and responded to their emails, left phone messages, communicated through Facebook and Twitter, even asked them to retrieve items from a dead drop and to send them photographs and information. And while helping fictional characters Isabel and Keith escape an ancient secret organization, the sales force also learned about new Cisco technologies coming to market. Cisco had new demands for the 2010 experience. A geographically and culturally dispersed sales force raises challenges when it comes to introducing dozens of new products and technologies each year. Cisco wanted The Hunt to have global reach, to educate, to build collaboration, and to be fun. This demanded new ways of storytelling and new ways of thinking. The Hunt was quick and intense, unfolding in real time in just two weeks. Many experienced players were poised to participate and expectations were high. Many of the mechanics of the previous year's experience were repeated, and the audience ripped through the opening, discovering video clips and websites in minutes. The surprise was discovering Facebook and Twitter accounts, where characters responded to player postings and comments in real time. The Hunt involved audience members from countries around the world, including China, India, Netherlands, Germany, Norway, Pakistan, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It highlighted new Cisco technologies like Pulse and Mediator, painlessly engaging the audience in what those technologies do and how they work. Players collaborated across silos, creating networks of cross-disciplinary experts. The Hunt pushed the boundaries of storytelling, with events unfolding on Twitter and Facebook, and in the real world where the audience had to use social engineering to find and secure a package with vital information. With thousands of players highly engaged around the world, The Hunt once again proved that transmedia experiences can effectively be used to not only meet the goals of a brand, but entertain their audience as well."

Making smart decisions : key steps towards a typology for emergency communication during natural hazards

Governments, authorities, and organisations dedicate significant resources to encourage communities to prepare for and respond to natural hazards such as cyclones, earthquakes, floods, and bushfires. However, recent events, media attention, and ongoing academic research continue to highlight cases of non-compliance including swift water rescues. Individuals who fail to comply with instructions issued during natural hazards significantly impede the emergency response because they divert resources to compliance-enforcement and risk the lives of emergency service workers who may be required to assist them. An initial investigation of the field suggests several assumptions or practices that influence emergency management policy, communication strategy, and community behaviours during natural hazards: 1) that community members will comply with instructions issued by governments and agencies that represent the most authoritative voice, 2) that communication campaigns are shaped by intuition rather than evidence-based approaches (Wood et al., 2012), and 3) that emergency communication is linear and directional. This extended abstract represents the first stage of a collaborative research project that integrates industry and cross-disciplinary perspectives to provide evidence-based approaches for emergency and risk communication during the response and recovery phases of a natural hazard. Specifically, this abstract focuses on the approach taken and key elements that will form the development of a typology of compliance-gaining messages during the response phase of natural hazards, which will be the focus of the conference presentation.

Aspect-based opinion extraction from customer reviews

Text is the main method of communicating information in the digital age. Messages, blogs, news articles, reviews, and opinionated information abounds on the Internet. People commonly purchase products online and post their opinions about purchased items. This feedback is displayed publicly to assist others with their purchasing decisions, creating the need for a mechanism with which to extract and summarize useful information for enhancing the decision-making process. Our contribution is to improve the accuracy of extraction by combining different techniques from three major areas, named Data Mining, Natural Language Processing techniques and Ontologies. The proposed framework sequentially mines product’s aspects and users’ opinions, groups representative aspects by similarity, and generates an output summary. This paper focuses on the task of extracting product aspects and users’ opinions by extracting all possible aspects and opinions from reviews using natural language, ontology, and frequent “tag” sets. The proposed framework, when compared with an existing baseline model, yielded promising results.

Conservation communication camp : come with ideas, leave with a plan

IUCN´s core work involves generating knowledge and tools to influence policy and practice for nature conservation. Whilst it appears that we are collectively making progress in some areas, we acknowledge the need to improve our communication processes and practices to ´move to action´ in this regard. We need to extend the influence of the science and the knowledge beyond the documents to achieve effective impact and action. The training course will focus on the process of getting the conservation messages out to a wider audience. This interactive and participatory training course will develop the skills and knowledge needed to communicate effective conservation messages for a range of IUCN internal and external audiences. The course will cover: • what is communication for conservation? • the communication planning process (developing your communication objectives) • identifying and understanding your target audiences • developing your conservation message • choosing your communication media and • evaluating the effectiveness of your communication strategies. A unique feature of the training course will be the use of Web 2.0 tools in innovative conservation communications e.g. use of social media in concept branding and social marketing. In the spirit of the Forum´s objective of ´Sharing know how´, each participant will bring a current conservation issue to the training course and will leave with their own communication plan. Potentially, the training course adopts a cross-thematic approach as the issues addressed could be drawn from any of the IUCN´s program themes. Primarily though, the training course´s best fit is with the ´Valuing and Conserving Biodiversity´ theme since it will provide concrete and pragmatic solutions to enhancing the implementation of conservation measures through participatory planning and capacity building.

Long distance calling? Spatial preference patterns in enterprise microblogging in the retail industry

We examine enterprise social network usage data obtained from a community of store managers in a leading Australian retail organization, over a period of fifteen months. Our interest in examining this data is in spatial preferences by the network users, that is, to ascertain who is communicating with whom and where. We offer several contrasting theoretical perspectives for spatial preference patterns and examine these against data collected from over 12,000 messages exchanged between 530 managers in 897 stores. Our findings show that interactions can generally be characterized by individual preferences for local communication but also that two different user communities exist – locals and globals. We develop empirical profiles for these social network user communities and outline implications for theories on spatial influences on communication behaviours on enterprise social networks.

Audio signalling as a backup communication channel for multi-robot systems

This paper presents a low-bandwidth multi-robot communication system designed to serve as a backup communication channel in the event a robot suffers a network device fault. While much research has been performed in the area of distributing network communication across multiple robots within a system, individual robots are still susceptible to hardware failure. In the past, such robots would simply be removed from service, and their tasks re-allocated to other members. However, there are times when a faulty robot might be crucial to a mission, or be able to contribute in a less communication intensive area. By allowing robots to encode and decode messages into unique sequences of DTMF symbols, called words, our system is able to facilitate continued low-bandwidth communication between robots without access to network communication. Our results have shown that the system is capable of permitting robots to negotiate task initiation and termination, and is flexible enough to permit a pair of robots to perform a simple turn taking task.

Making decisions about antibiotic use in the Australian primary healthcare sector

Introduction Australia is contributing to the global problem of antimicrobial resistance with one of the highest rates of antibiotic use amongst OECD countries. Data from the Australian primary healthcare sector suggests unnecessary antibiotics were prescribed for conditions that will resolve without it. If left unchecked, this will result in more resistant micro-organisms, against which antibiotics will be useless. There is a lack of understanding about what is influencing decisions to use antibiotics – what factors influences general practitioners (GPs) to prescribe antibiotics, consumers to seek antibiotics, and pharmacists to fill old antibiotic prescriptions? It is also not clear how these individuals trade-off between the possible benefits that antibiotics may provide in the immediate/short term, against the longer term societal risk of antimicrobial resistance. Method This project will investigate (a) what factors drive decisions to use antibiotics for GPs, pharmacists and consumers, and (b) how these individuals discount the future. Factors will be gleaned from published literature and from a qualitative phase using semi-structured interviews, to inform the development of Discrete Choice Experiments (DCEs). Three DCEs will be constructed – one for each group of interest – to allow investigation of which factors are more important in influencing (a) GPs to prescribe antibiotics, (b) consumers to seek antibiotics, and (c) pharmacists to fill legally valid but old or repeat prescriptions of antibiotics. Regression analysis will be conducted to understand the relative importance of these factors. A Time Trade Off exercise will be developed to investigate how these individuals discount the future, and whether GPs and pharmacists display the same extent of discounting the future, as consumers. Expected Results Findings from the DCEs will provide an insight into which factors are more important in driving decision making in antibiotic use for GPs, pharmacists and consumers. Findings from the Time Trade Off exercise will show what individuals are willing to trade for preserving the miracle of antibiotics. Conclusion The emergence of antibiotic resistance is inevitable. This research will expand on what is currently known about influencing desired behaviour change in antibiotic use, in the fight against antibiotic resistance. Real World Implications Research findings will contribute to existing national programs to bring about a reduction in inappropriate use of antibiotic in Australia. Specifically, influencing (1) how key messages and public health campaigns are crafted to increase health literacy, and (2) clinical education and empowerment of GPs and pharmacists to play a more responsive role as stewards of antibiotic use in the community.

New pleasures and old dangers: reinventing male sex work

Understandings of male sex workers (MSWs) shift with technological, conceptual, and social changes. Research has historically constructed MSWs as psychologically unstable, desperate, or destitute victims and their clients as socially deviant perverts. These perceptions, however, are no longer supported by contemporary research and changing societal perceptions of the sex industry, challenging how we understand and describe “escorts.” The changing understandings of sexuality and the increasing power of the Internet are both important forces behind recent changes in the structure and organization of MSWs. The growth in the visibility and reach of escorts has created opportunities to form an occupational account of MSWs that better accounts for the dynamic and diverse nature of the MSW experience in the early 21st century. Recent changes in the structure and organization of male sex work have provided visibility to the increasingly diverse geographical distribution of MSW, the commodification of race and racialized desire, new populations of heterosexual men and women as clients, and the successful dissemination of safer sexual messages to MSWs through online channels. This article provides a broad overview of the literature on MSWs, concentrating its focus on studies that have emerged over the past 20 years and identifying areas for future research.

Keeping it natural: Does persuasive magazine content have an effect on young women's intentions for birth?

Information in the popular media tends to be biased toward promoting the benefits of medicalized birth for low-risk pregnancies. We aimed to assess the effect of communicating the benefits of non-medicalized birth in magazine articles on women’s birth intentions and to identify the mechanisms by which social communication messages affected women’s intentions for birth. A convenience sample of 180 nulliparous Australian women aged 18–35 years were randomly exposed to a magazine article endorsing non-medicalized birth (using either celebrity or non-celebrity endorsement) or organic eating (control) throughout June–July 2011. Magazine articles that endorsed non-medicalized birth targeted perceived risk of birth, expectations for labor and birth, and attitudes toward birth. These variables and intention for birth were assessed by self-report before and after exposure. Exposure to a magazine article that endorsed non-medicalized birth significantly reduced women’s intentions for a medicalized birth, regardless of whether the endorsement was by celebrities or non-celebrities. Changes in perceived risk of birth mediated the effect of magazine article exposure on women’s intentions for a medicalized birth. Persuasive communication that endorses non-medicalized birth could be delivered at the population level and may reduce women’s intentions for a medicalized birth.

Best practice in peer-led curriculum content : informing an interactive program to improve passenger safety among high school seniors

Despite ongoing improvements in behaviour change strategies, licensing models and road law enforcement measures young drivers remain significantly over-represented in fatal and non-fatal road related crashes. This paper focuses on the safety of those approaching driving age and identifies both high priority road safety messages and relevant peer-led strategies to guide the development school programs. It summarises the review in a program logic model built around the messages and identified curriculum elements, as they may be best operationalised within the licensing and school contexts in Victoria. This paper summarises a review of common deliberate risk-taking and non-deliberate unsafe driving behaviours among novice drivers, highlighting risks associated with speeding, driving while fatigued, driving while impaired and carrying passengers. Common beliefs of young people that predict risky driving were reviewed, particularly with consideration of those beliefs that can be operationalised in a behaviour change school program. Key components of adolescent risk behaviour change programs were also reviewed, which identified a number of strategies for incorporation in a school based behaviour change program, including: a well-structured theoretical design and delivery, thoughtfully considered peer-selected processes, adequate training and supervision of peer facilitators, a process for monitoring and sustainability, and interactive delivery and participant discussions. The research base is then summarised in a program logic model with further discussion about the quality of the current state of knowledge of evaluation of behaviour change programs and the need for considerable development in program evaluation.

Can skin cancer prevention and early detection be improved via mobile phone text messaging? a randomised, attention-control trial.

Objective. To test the impact of a theory-based, SMS (text message)-delivered behavioural intervention (Healthy Text) targeting sun protection or skin self-examination behaviours compared to attention-control. Method. Overall, 546 participants aged 18–42 years were randomised using a computer-generated number list to the skin self-examination (N = 176), sun protection (N = 187), or attention-control (N = 183) text messages group. Each group received 21 text messages about their assigned topic over 12 months (12 weekly messages for three months, then monthly messages for the next nine months). Data was collected via telephone survey at baseline, three-, and 12-months across Queensland from January 2012 to August 2013. Results. One year after baseline, the sun protection (mean change 0.12; P = 0.030) and skin self-examination groups (mean change 0.12; P = 0.035) had significantly greater improvement in their sun protection habits (SPH) index compared to the attention-control group (reference mean change 0.02). The increase in the proportion of participants who reported any skin self-examination from baseline to 12 months was significantly greater in the skin self-examination intervention group (103/163; 63%; P < 0.001) than the sun protection (83/173; 48%), or attention-control (65/165; 36%) groups. There was no significant effect of the intervention for participants who self-reported whole-body skin self-examination, sun tanning behaviour, or sunburn behaviours. Conclusion. The Healthy Text intervention was effective in inducing significant improvements in sun protection and any type of skin self-examination behaviours.

Accelerating taxonomic discovery through automated character extraction

This paper discusses the following key messages. Taxonomy is (and taxonomists are) more important than ever in times of global change. Taxonomic endeavour is not occurring fast enough: in 250 years since the creation of the Linnean Systema Naturae, only about 20% of Earth's species have been named. We need fundamental changes to the taxonomic process and paradigm to increase taxonomic productivity by orders of magnitude. Currently, taxonomic productivity is limited principally by the rate at which we capture and manage morphological information to enable species discovery. Many recent (and welcomed) initiatives in managing and delivering biodiversity information and accelerating the taxonomic process do not address this bottleneck. Development of computational image analysis and feature extraction methods is a crucial missing capacity needed to enable taxonomists to overcome the taxonomic impediment in a meaningful time frame. Copyright © 2009 Magnolia Press.

Cryptic marketing : strategic targeting of subculture markets

This research aims to understand what factors influence consumers' behaviour to subculture marketing and how companies can strategically overcome potential brand alienation. Findings validate cryptic marketing as a strategy for organizations to communicate effectively with their chosen market through the use of cryptic cues, symbols and messages while circumventing negative responses from non-target audiences. The thesis contributes to extending current understanding of marketing communication through the use of covert strategies, employing covert tactics on the non-target, wider market instead of the target, subculture market.

Predicting Australian adults' sun-safe behaviour : examining the role of personal and social norms

Objectives To address the scarcity of comprehensive, theory-based research in the Australian context, this study, using a theory of planned behaviour (TPB) framework, investigated the role of personal and social norms to identify the key predictors of adult Australians' sun-safe intentions and behaviour. Design The study used a prospective design with two waves of data collection, 1 week apart. Methods Participants were 816 adults (48.2% men) aged between 18 and 88 years recruited from urban, regional, and rural areas of Australia. At baseline, participants completed a questionnaire assessing the standard TPB predictors (attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioural control [PBC]), past behaviour, behavioural intention, and additional measures of group norm for the referent groups of friends and family, image norm, personal norm, personal choice/responsibility, and Australian identity. Seventy-one per cent of the participants (n = 577) reported on their sun-safe behaviour in the subsequent week. Results Via path modelling, past behaviour, attitude, group norm (friends), personal norm, and personal choice/responsibility emerged as independent predictors of intentions which, in turn, predicted sun-safe behaviour prospectively. Past behaviour, but not PBC, had direct effects on sun-safe behaviour. The model explained 61.6% and 43.9% of the variance in intention and behaviour, respectively. Conclusions This study provides support for the use of a comprehensive theoretical decision-making model to explain Australian adults' sun-safe intentions and behaviours and identifies viable targets for health-promoting messages in this high-risk context.