Stomp : an interactive platform for people with intellectual disabilities

For people with intellectual disabilities there are significant barriers to inclusion in socially cooperative endeavours. This paper investigates the effectiveness of Stomp, a tangible user interface (TUI) designed to provide new participatory experiences for people with intellectual disability. Results from an observational study reveal the extent to which the Stomp system supports social and physical interaction. The tangible, spatial and embodied qualities of Stomp result in an experience that does not rely on the acquisition of specific competencies before interaction and engagement can occur.

Engaging parents in STEM: Coteaching and cogenerative dialoguing in a Queensland high school

Diminished student interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) is recognised by educators, researchers and public policy makers as a concerning global trend. Inviting stakeholders like scientists and industry specialists to discuss their work is one means schools use to facilitate student engagement in the sciences. However, these visits generally comprise one-off sessions with minimal relevance to students’ particular and ongoing learning needs. This case study investigated coteaching and cogenerative dialoguing with parents in teaching a Year-8 multidisciplinary unit with science and technology foci. Two parents cotaught alongside the resident teacher and researcher over eight months. This paper concentrates on one parent, a medical scientist by profession. Data sources included video and audio recordings of cogenerative dialogues and classroom interactions, student work samples and journal entries. Data were interrogated using the sociological constructs of fields and capitals and the dialectic of structure|agency. The findings reveal how (a) the parent’s science and technology knowledge was tailored to the students’ needs initially and continually and (b) student-generated data indicated enhanced engagement in science and technology. The research speaks to schools and governments about enhancing STEM education by furthering collaborative relationships with relevant stakeholders.

Developing and enhancing independent learning skills : using video tutorials as a means of helping students help themselves

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of short video tutorials in a post-graduate accounting subject, as a means of helping students develop and enhance independent learning skills. Design/methodology/approach – In total, five short (approximately five to 10 minutes) video tutorials were introduced in an effort to shift the reliance for learning from the lecturer to the student. Data on students’ usage of online video tutorials, and comments by students in university questionnaires were collated over three semesters from 2008 to 2009. Interviews with students were then conducted in late 2009 to more comprehensively evaluate the use and perceived benefits of video tutorials. Findings – Findings reveal preliminary but positive outcomes in terms of both more efficient and effective teaching and learning. Research limitations/implications – The shift towards more independent learning through the use of video tutorials has positive implications for educators, employers, and professional accounting bodies; each of whom has identified the need for this skill in accounting graduates. Practical implications – The use of video tutorials has the potential for more rewarding teaching and more effective learning. Originality/value – This study is one of the first to examine the use and benefits of video tutorials as a means of developing independent learning skills in accountancy students – addressing a key concern within the profession.

Arc voltage behavior in GMAW-P under different drop transfer modes

Purpose: Experimental measurements have been made to investigate meaning of the change in voltage for the pulse gas metal arc welding (GMAW-P) process operating under different drop transfer modes. Design/methodology/approach: Welding experiments with different values of pulsing parameter and simultaneous recording of high speed camera pictures and welding signals (such as current and voltage) were used to identify different drop transfer modes in GMAW-P. The investigation is based on the synchronization of welding signals and high speed camera to study the behaviour of voltage signal under different drop transfer modes. Findings: The results reveal that the welding arc is significantly affected by the molten droplet detachment. In fact, results indicate that sudden increase and drop in voltage just before and after the drop detachment can be used to characterize the voltage behaviour of different drop transfer mode in GMAW-P. Research limitations/implications: The results show that voltage signal carry rich information about different drop transfer occurring in GMAW-P. Hence it’s possible to detect different drop transfer modes. Future work should concentrate on development of filters for detection of different drop transfer modes. Originality/value: Determination of drop transfer mode with GMAW-P is crucial for the appropriate selection of pulse welding parameters. As change in drop transfer mode results in poor weld quality in GMAW-P, so in order to estimate the working parameters and ensure stable GMAW-P understanding the voltage behaviour of different drop transfer modes in GMAW-P will be useful. However, in case of GMAW-P hardly any attempt is made to analyse the behaviour of voltage signal for different drop transfer modes. This paper analyses the voltage signal behaviour of different drop transfer modes for GMAW-P.

A strategy for delayed research method selection : deciding between grounded theory and phenomenology

This paper presents a strategy for delayed research method selection in a qualitative interpretivist research. An exemplary case details how explorative interviews were designed and conducted in accordance with a paradigm prior to deciding whether to adopt grounded theory or phenomenology for data analysis. The focus here is to determine the most appropriate research strategy in this case the methodological framing to conduct research and represent findings, both of which are detailed. Research addressing current management issues requires both a flexible framework and the capability to consider the research problem from various angles, to derive tangible results for academia with immediate application to business demands. Researchers, and in particular novices, often struggle to decide on an appropriate research method suitable to address their research problem. This often applies to interpretative qualitative research where it is not always immediately clear which is the most appropriate method to use, as the research objectives shift and crystallize over time. This paper uses an exemplary case to reveal how the strategy for delayed research method selection contributes to deciding whether to adopt grounded theory or phenomenology in the initial phase of a PhD research project. In this case, semi-structured interviews were used for data generation framed in an interpretivist approach, situated in a business context. Research questions for this study were thoroughly defined and carefully framed in accordance with the research paradigm‟s principles, while at the same time ensuring that the requirements of both potential research methods were met. The grounded theory and phenomenology methods were compared and contrasted to determine their suitability and whether they meet the research objectives based on a pilot study. The strategy proposed in this paper is an alternative to the more „traditional‟ approach, which initially selects the methodological formulation, followed by data generation. In conclusion, the suggested strategy for delayed research method selection intends to help researchers identify and apply the most appropriate method to their research. This strategy is based on explorations of data generation and analysis in order to derive faithful results from the data generated.

On IT governance structures and their effectiveness in collaborative organizational structures

Organizations today engage in various forms of alliances to manage their existing business processes or to diversify into new processes to sustain their competitive positions. Many of today’s alliances use the IT resources as their backbone. The results of these alliances are collaborative organizational structures with little or no ownership stakes between the parties. The emergence of Web 2.0 tools is having a profound effect on the nature and form of these alliance structures. These alliances heavily depend on and make radical use of the IT resources in a collaborative environment. This situation requires a deeper understanding of the governance of these IT resources to ensure the sustainability of the collaborative organizational structures. This study first suggests the types of IT governance structures required for collaborative organizational structures. Semi-structured interviews with senior executives who operate in such alliances reveal that co-created IT governance structures are necessary. Such structures include co-created IT-steering committees, co-created operational committees, and inter-organizational performance management and communication systems. The findings paved the way for the development of a model for understanding approaches to governing IT and evaluating the effectiveness for such governance mechanisms in today’s IT dependent alliances. This study presents a sustainable IT-related capabilities approach to assessing the effectiveness of suggested IT governance structures for collaborative alliances. The findings indicate a favourable association between organizations IT governance efforts and their ability to sustain their capabilities to leverage their IT resources. These IT-related capabilities also relate to measures business value at the process and firm level. This makes it possible to infer that collaborative organizations’ IT governance efforts contribute to business value.

Non-invasive, quantitative analysis of drug mixtures in containers using spatially offset Raman spectroscopy (SORS) and multivariate statistical analysis

In this paper, spatially offset Raman spectroscopy (SORS) is demonstrated for non-invasively investigating the composition of drug mixtures inside an opaque plastic container. The mixtures consisted of three components including a target drug (acetaminophen or phenylephrine hydrochloride) and two diluents (glucose and caffeine). The target drug concentrations ranged from 5% to 100%. After conducting SORS analysis to ascertain the Raman spectra of the concealed mixtures, principal component analysis (PCA) was performed on the SORS spectra to reveal trends within the data. Partial least squares (PLS) regression was used to construct models that predicted the concentration of each target drug, in the presence of the other two diluents. The PLS models were able to predict the concentration of acetaminophen in the validation samples with a root-mean-square error of prediction (RMSEP) of 3.8% and the concentration of phenylephrine hydrochloride with an RMSEP of 4.6%. This work demonstrates the potential of SORS, used in conjunction with multivariate statistical techniques, to perform non-invasive, quantitative analysis on mixtures inside opaque containers. This has applications for pharmaceutical analysis, such as monitoring the degradation of pharmaceutical products on the shelf, in forensic investigations of counterfeit drugs, and for the analysis of illicit drug mixtures which may contain multiple components.

Metaheuristics for the mixed shop scheduling problem

In this paper, three metaheuristics are proposed for solving a class of job shop, open shop, and mixed shop scheduling problems. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms by means of a set of Lawrence’s benchmark instances for the job shop problem, a set of randomly generated instances for the open shop problem, and a combined job shop and open shop test data for the mixed shop problem. The computational results show that the proposed algorithms perform extremely well on all these three types of shop scheduling problems. The results also reveal that the mixed shop problem is relatively easier to solve than the job shop problem due to the fact that the scheduling procedure becomes more flexible by the inclusion of more open shop jobs in the mixed shop.

Measuring bitrate and quality trade-off in a fast region-of-interest based video coding

Prevailing video adaptation solutions change the quality of the video uniformly throughout the whole frame in the bitrate adjustment process; while region-of-interest (ROI)-based solutions selectively retains the quality in the areas of the frame where the viewers are more likely to pay more attention to. ROI-based coding can improve perceptual quality and viewer satisfaction while trading off some bandwidth. However, there has been no comprehensive study to measure the bitrate vs. perceptual quality trade-off so far. The paper proposes an ROI detection scheme for videos, which is characterized with low computational complexity and robustness, and measures the bitrate vs. quality trade-off for ROI-based encoding using a state-of-the-art H.264/AVC encoder to justify the viability of this type of encoding method. The results from the subjective quality test reveal that ROI-based encoding achieves a significant perceptual quality improvement over the encoding with uniform quality at the cost of slightly more bits. Based on the bitrate measurements and subjective quality assessments, the bitrate and the perceptual quality estimation models for non-scalable ROI-based video coding (AVC) are developed, which are found to be similar to the models for scalable video coding (SVC).

The molar effect on citizenship and nomad immigration: Reading, readingthe world and self

This presentation explores molarization and overcoding of social machines and relationality within an assemblage consisting of empirical data of immigrant families in Australia. Immigration is key to sustainable development of Western societies like Australia and Canada. Newly arrived immigrants enter a country and are literally taken over by the Ministry of Immigration regarding housing, health, education and accessing job possibilities. If the immigrants do not know the official language(s) of the country, they enroll in language classes for new immigrants. Language classes do more than simply teach language. Language is presented in local contexts (celebrating the national day, what to do to get a job) and in control societies, language classes foreground values of a nation state in order for immigrants to integrate. In the current project, policy documents from Australia reveal that while immigration is the domain of government, the subject/immigrant is nevertheless at the core of policy. While support is provided, it is the subject/immigrant transcendent view that prevails. The onus remains on the immigrant to “succeed”. My perspective lies within transcendental empiricism and deploys Deleuzian ontology, how one might live in order to examine how segmetary lines of power (pouvoir) reflected in policy documents and operationalized in language classes rupture into lines of flight of nomad immigrants. The theoretical framework is Multiple Literacies Theory (MLT); reading is intensive and immanent. The participants are one Korean and one Sudanese family and their children who have recently immigrated to Australia. Observations in classrooms were obtained and followed by interviews based on the observations. Families also borrowed small video cameras and they filmed places, people and things relevant to them in terms of becoming citizen and immigrating to and living in a different country. Interviews followed. Rhizoanalysis informs the process of reading data. Rhizoanalysis is a research event and performed with an assemblage (MLT, data/vignettes, researcher, etc.). It is a way to work with transgressive data. Based on the concept of the rhizome, a bloc of data has no beginning, no ending. A researcher enters in the middle and exists somewhere in the middle, an intermezzo suggesting that the challenges to molar immigration lie in experimenting and creating molecular processes of becoming citizen.

Anticipatory innovation

This article examines the role of innovation in society, arguing that a failure of foresight in the practical design and development of innovations has been a significant causal factor in the crisis of global un-sustainability. It questions flawed assumptions about the nature of ecological and social change processes, and the worldview most commonly associated with modernism. In a diagnose, the dimensions of this failure reveal a "disciplinary dissociation", or the failure of disciplines to integrate in order to facilitate a process of innovation with a forward view. Finally the article proposes an alternative approach to innovation which utilises greater foresight, is inclusive of multiple disciplines, and has a greater sensitivity to social and ecological processes. This process is referred to as "anticipatory innovation."

Learning English in an English speaking world : examining opportunities for intercultural understandings and connectedness through representations of identities in English language textbooks

With the recognition that language both reflects and constructs culture and English now widely acknowledged as an international language, the cul-tural content of language teaching materials is now being problematised. Through a quantitative analysis, this chapter focuses on opportunities for intercultural understanding and connectedness through representations of the identities that appear in two leading English language textbooks. The analyses reveal that the textbooks orientate towards British and western identities with representations of people from non-European/non-Western backgrounds being notable for their absence, while others are hidden from view. Indeed there would appear to be a neocolonialist orientation in oper-ation in the textbooks, one that aligns English with the West. The chapter proposes arguments for the consideration of cultural diversity in English language teaching (ELT) textbook design, and promoting intercultural awareness and acknowledging the contexts in which English is now being used. It also offers ways that teachers can critically reflect on existing ELT materials and proposes arguments for including different varieties of Eng-lish in order to ensure a level of intercultural understanding and connect-edness.

Overlapping medical alarms are almost indiscriminable

Objective: We explore how accurately and quickly nurses can identify melodic medical equipment alarms when no mnemonics are used, when alarms may overlap, and when concurrent tasks are performed. Background: The international standard IEC 60601-1-8 (International Electrotechnical Commission, 2005) has proposed simple melodies to distinguish seven alarm sources. Previous studies with nonmedical participants reveal poor learning of melodic alarms and persistent confusions between some of them. The effects of domain expertise, concurrent tasks, and alarm overlaps are unknown. Method: Fourteen intensive care and general medical unit nurses learned the melodic alarms without mnemonics in two sessions on separate days. In the second half of Day 2 the nurses identified single alarms or pairs of alarms played in sequential, partially overlapping, or nearly completely overlapping configurations. For half the experimental blocks nurses performed a concurrent mental arithmetic task. Results: Nurses' learning was poor and was no better than the learning of nonnurses in a previous study. Nurses showed the previously noted confusions between alarms. Overlapping alarms were exceptionally difficult to identify. The concurrent task affected response time but not accuracy. Conclusion: Because of a failure of auditory stream segregation, the melodic alarms cannot be discriminated when they overlap. Directives to sequence the sounding of alarms in medical electrical equipment must be strictly adhered to, or the alarms must redesigned to support better auditory streaming. Application: Actual or potential uses of this research include the implementation of IEC 60601-1-8 alarms in medical electrical equipment.

Communicating with the coroner : how religion, culture, and family concerns may influence autopsy decision making

Based on coronial data gathered in the state of Queensland in 2004, this article reviews how a change in legislation may have impacted autopsy decision making by coroners. More specifically, the authors evaluated whether the requirement that coronial autopsy orders specify the level of invasiveness of an autopsy to be performed by a pathologist was affected by the further requirement that coroners take into consideration a known religion, culture, and/or raised family concern before making such an order. Preliminary data reveal that the cultural status of the deceased did not affect coronial autopsy decision making. However, a known religion with a proscription against autopsy and a raised family concern appeared to be taken into account by coroners when making autopsy decisions and tended to decrease the invasiveness of the autopsy ordered from a full internal examination to either a partial internal examination or an external-only examination of the body. The impact of these findings is briefly discussed.

Unravel and picking at scabs : the underside of grief (a novella and exegesis)

This thesis consists of a 46,000 word polyphonic novella, Unravel, and an exegesis, Picking at Scabs: the Underside of Grief. The works are companion pieces, sitting side-by-side, and together they plumb the complex depths of loss and its resultant disorder, painful longing, and sorrow. The novella, representing 75% of the work and creative practice, is a multilayered work, which scrapes at the potent unspeakability of the presence of absence in the lives of its chief protagonists, Hana and Guy. As the novella progresses, loss is unraveled to reveal the interplay of remembering and forgetting, past and present and the ways in which these knotty fibres are connected with the strands of memory, trauma, silence, and the uncanny. Each of these threads is woven into the novella and as they plait together, loosen and fray, they expose the mystery, lies and secrets at the core of the novella. The exegesis, which comprises 25% of the thesis, picks at loss to uncover and loosen a complex and worn tangle of knots and loops. In this way, the exegesis and creative work are constantly in dialogue and while neither provides all the answers, both stretch the yarn to reveal an enthusiasm of practice.