Overview of methods used in cross-cultural comparisons of menopausal symptoms and their determinants : Guidelines for Strengthening the Reporting of Menopause and Aging (STROMA) studies

This paper reviews the methods used in cross-cultural studies of menopausal symptoms with the goal of formulating recommendations to facilitate comparisons of menopausal symptoms across cultures. It provides an overview of existing approaches and serves to introduce four separate reviews of vasomotor, psychological, somatic, and sexual symptoms at midlife. Building on an earlier review of cross-cultural studies of menopause covering time periods until 2004, these reviews are based on searches of Medline, PsycINFO, CINAHL and Google Scholar for English-language articles published from 2004 to 2010 using the terms “cross cultural comparison” and “menopause.” Two major criteria were used: a study had to include more than one culture, country, or ethnic group and to have asked about actual menopausal symptom experience. We found considerable variation across studies in age ranges, symptom lists, reference period for symptom recall, variables included in multivariate analyses, and the measurement of factors (e.g., menopausal status and hormonal factors, demographic, anthropometric, mental/physical health, and lifestyle measures) that influence vasomotor, psychological, somatic and sexual symptoms. Based on these reviews, we make recommendations for future research regarding age range, symptom lists, reference/recall periods, and measurement of menopausal status. Recommendations specific to the cross-cultural study of vasomotor, psychological, somatic, and sexual symptoms are found in the four reviews that follow this introduction.

Methods used in cross-cultural comparisons of somatic symptoms and their determinants

This paper is the third in a series of reviews of cross-cultural studies of symptoms at midlife. The goal of this review is to examine methods used previously in cross-cultural studies of menopause and women's health at midlife to (1) identify challenges in the measurement of somatic symptoms across cultures and (2) recommend questions and tools that can be used in future research. This review also aims to examine the determinants of somatic symptoms. The review concludes that methods used for assessing somatic symptoms differ across studies. Somatic symptoms, particularly, aches, pain, and fatigue have a high prevalence. Statistically significant differences were seen in the prevalence of somatic symptoms across cultures. Based on the number of studies that demonstrated cross-cultural differences in symptom prevalence, we recommend that the following symptoms be included in future studies of symptoms at midlife: headaches, aches/pain, palpitations, dizziness, fatigue, breathing difficulties, numbness or tingling, and gastrointestinal difficulties. We also recommend that objective measures of physical function be administered when possible to supplement subjective self-evaluation.

Comparing cost uplift in infrastructure delivery methods : a case based approach

In 2009 the Australian Federal and State governments are expected to have spent some AU$30 billion procuring infrastructure projects. For governments with finite resources but many competing projects, formal capital rationing is achieved through use of Business Cases. These Business cases articulate the merits of investing in particular projects along with the estimated costs and risks of each project. Despite the sheer size and impact of infrastructure projects, there is very little research in Australia, or internationally, on the performance of these projects against Business Case assumptions when the decision to invest is made. If such assumptions (particularly cost assumptions) are not met, then there is serious potential for the misallocation of Australia’s finite financial resources. This research addresses this important gap in the literature by using combined quantitative and qualitative research methods, to examine the actual performance of 14 major Australian government infrastructure projects. The research findings are controversial as they challenge widely held perceptions of the effectiveness of certain infrastructure delivery practices. Despite this controversy, the research has had a significant impact on the field and has been described as ‘outstanding’ and ‘definitive’ (Alliancing Association of Australasia), "one of the first of its kind" (Infrastructure Partnerships of Australia) and "making a critical difference to infrastructure procurement" (Victorian Department of Treasury). The implications for practice of the research have been profound and included the withdrawal by Government of various infrastructure procurement guidelines, the formulation of new infrastructure policies by several state governments and the preparation of new infrastructure guidelines that substantially reflect the research findings. Building on the practical research, a more rigorous academic investigation focussed on the comparative cost uplift of various project delivery strategies was submitted to Australia’s premier academic management conference, the Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management (ANZAM) Annual Conference. This paper has been accepted for the 2010 ANZAM National Conference following a process of double blind peer review with reviewers rating the paper’s overall contribution as "Excellent" and "Good".

A Study of XML models for data mining : representations, methods, and issues

With the increasing number of XML documents in varied domains, it has become essential to identify ways of finding interesting information from these documents. Data mining techniques were used to derive this interesting information. Mining on XML documents is impacted by its model due to the semi-structured nature of these documents. Hence, in this chapter we present an overview of the various models of XML documents, how these models were used for mining and some of the issues and challenges in these models. In addition, this chapter also provides some insights into the future models of XML documents for effectively capturing the two important features namely structure and content of XML documents for mining.

Interactive axial shortening of columns and walls in high rise buildings

Concrete is commonly used as a primary construction material for tall building construction. Load bearing components such as columns and walls in concrete buildings are subjected to instantaneous and long term axial shortening caused by the time dependent effects of "shrinkage", "creep" and "elastic" deformations. Reinforcing steel content, variable concrete modulus, volume to surface area ratio of the elements and environmental conditions govern axial shortening. The impact of differential axial shortening among columns and core shear walls escalate with increasing building height. Differential axial shortening of gravity loaded elements in geometrically complex and irregular buildings result in permanent distortion and deflection of the structural frame which have a significant impact on building envelopes, building services, secondary systems and the life time serviceability and performance of a building. Existing numerical methods commonly used in design to quantify axial shortening are mainly based on elastic analytical techniques and therefore unable to capture the complexity of non-linear time dependent effect. Ambient measurements of axial shortening using vibrating wire, external mechanical strain, and electronic strain gauges are methods that are available to verify pre-estimated values from the design stage. Installing these gauges permanently embedded in or on the surface of concrete components for continuous measurements during and after construction with adequate protection is uneconomical, inconvenient and unreliable. Therefore such methods are rarely if ever used in actual practice of building construction. This research project has developed a rigorous numerical procedure that encompasses linear and non-linear time dependent phenomena for prediction of axial shortening of reinforced concrete structural components at design stage. This procedure takes into consideration (i) construction sequence, (ii) time varying values of Young's Modulus of reinforced concrete and (iii) creep and shrinkage models that account for variability resulting from environmental effects. The capabilities of the procedure are illustrated through examples. In order to update previous predictions of axial shortening during the construction and service stages of the building, this research has also developed a vibration based procedure using ambient measurements. This procedure takes into consideration the changes in vibration characteristic of structure during and after construction. The application of this procedure is illustrated through numerical examples which also highlight the features. The vibration based procedure can also be used as a tool to assess structural health/performance of key structural components in the building during construction and service life.

Safety enhancement of operator protection systems on self-propelled mining equipment

In the long term, with development of skill, knowledge, exposure and confidence within the engineering profession, rigorous analysis techniques have the potential to become a reliable and far more comprehensive method for design and verification of the structural adequacy of OPS, write Nimal J Perera, David P Thambiratnam and Brian Clark. This paper explores the potential to enhance operator safety of self-propelled mechanical plant subjected to roll over and impact of falling objects using the non-linear and dynamic response simulation capabilities of analytical processes to supplement quasi-static testing methods prescribed in International and Australian Codes of Practice for bolt on Operator Protection Systems (OPS) that are post fitted. The paper is based on research work carried out by the authors at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) over a period of three years by instrumentation of prototype tests, scale model tests in the laboratory and rigorous analysis using validated Finite Element (FE) Models. The FE codes used were ABAQUS for implicit analysis and LSDYNA for explicit analysis. The rigorous analysis and dynamic simulation technique described in the paper can be used to investigate the structural response due to accident scenarios such as multiple roll over, impact of multiple objects and combinations of such events and thereby enhance the safety and performance of Roll Over and Falling Object Protection Systems (ROPS and FOPS). The analytical techniques are based on sound engineering principles and well established practice for investigation of dynamic impact on all self propelled vehicles. They are used for many other similar applications where experimental techniques are not feasible.

Towards participatory action design research : adapting action research and design science research methods for urban informatics

This paper proposes a new research method, Participatory Action Design Research (PADR), for studies in the Urban Informatics domain. PADR supports Urban Informatics research in developing new technological means (e.g. using mobile and ubiquitous computing) to resolve contemporary issues or support everyday life in urban environments. The paper discusses the nature, aims and inherent methodological needs of Urban Informatics research, and proposes PADR as a method to address these needs. Situated in a socio-technical context, Urban Informatics requires a close dialogue between social and design-oriented fields of research as well as their methods. PADR combines Action Research and Design Science Research, both of which are used in Information Systems, another field with a strong socio-technical emphasis, and further adapts them to the cross-disciplinary needs and research context of Urban Informatics.

Fuzzy methods for analysis of microarrays and networks

Bioinformatics involves analyses of biological data such as DNA sequences, microarrays and protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks. Its two main objectives are the identification of genes or proteins and the prediction of their functions. Biological data often contain uncertain and imprecise information. Fuzzy theory provides useful tools to deal with this type of information, hence has played an important role in analyses of biological data. In this thesis, we aim to develop some new fuzzy techniques and apply them on DNA microarrays and PPI networks. We will focus on three problems: (1) clustering of microarrays; (2) identification of disease-associated genes in microarrays; and (3) identification of protein complexes in PPI networks. The first part of the thesis aims to detect, by the fuzzy C-means (FCM) method, clustering structures in DNA microarrays corrupted by noise. Because of the presence of noise, some clustering structures found in random data may not have any biological significance. In this part, we propose to combine the FCM with the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) for clustering microarray data. The purpose of EMD is to reduce, preferably to remove, the effect of noise, resulting in what is known as denoised data. We call this method the fuzzy C-means method with empirical mode decomposition (FCM-EMD). We applied this method on yeast and serum microarrays, and the silhouette values are used for assessment of the quality of clustering. The results indicate that the clustering structures of denoised data are more reasonable, implying that genes have tighter association with their clusters. Furthermore we found that the estimation of the fuzzy parameter m, which is a difficult step, can be avoided to some extent by analysing denoised microarray data. The second part aims to identify disease-associated genes from DNA microarray data which are generated under different conditions, e.g., patients and normal people. We developed a type-2 fuzzy membership (FM) function for identification of diseaseassociated genes. This approach is applied to diabetes and lung cancer data, and a comparison with the original FM test was carried out. Among the ten best-ranked genes of diabetes identified by the type-2 FM test, seven genes have been confirmed as diabetes-associated genes according to gene description information in Gene Bank and the published literature. An additional gene is further identified. Among the ten best-ranked genes identified in lung cancer data, seven are confirmed that they are associated with lung cancer or its treatment. The type-2 FM-d values are significantly different, which makes the identifications more convincing than the original FM test. The third part of the thesis aims to identify protein complexes in large interaction networks. Identification of protein complexes is crucial to understand the principles of cellular organisation and to predict protein functions. In this part, we proposed a novel method which combines the fuzzy clustering method and interaction probability to identify the overlapping and non-overlapping community structures in PPI networks, then to detect protein complexes in these sub-networks. Our method is based on both the fuzzy relation model and the graph model. We applied the method on several PPI networks and compared with a popular protein complex identification method, the clique percolation method. For the same data, we detected more protein complexes. We also applied our method on two social networks. The results showed our method works well for detecting sub-networks and give a reasonable understanding of these communities.

Seasonality of suicide in Shandong China, 1991–2009 : associations with gender, age, area and methods of suicide

Backgrounds Whether suicide in China has significant seasonal variations is unclear. The aim of this study is to examine the seasonality of suicide in Shandong China and to assess the associations of suicide seasonality with gender, residence, age and methods of suicide. Methods Three types of tests (Chi-square, Edwards' T and Roger's Log method) were used to detect the seasonality of the suicide data extracted from the official mortality data of Shandong Disease Surveillance Point (DSP) system. Peak/low ratios (PLRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated to indicate the magnitude of seasonality. Results A statistically significant seasonality with a single peak in suicide rates in spring and early summer, and a dip in winter was observed, which remained relatively consistent over years. Regardless of gender, suicide seasonality was more pronounced in rural areas, younger age groups and for non-violent methods, in particular, self-poisoning by pesticide. Conclusions There are statistically significant seasonal variations of completed suicide for both men and women in Shandong, China. Differences exist between residence (urban/rural), age groups and suicide methods. Results appear to support a sociological explanation of suicide seasonality.

Forensic analysis of fibres by vibrational spectroscopy

Fibres are extremely common. They can originate directly from human and animal hair, and also from textiles in the form of clothing, upholstery and carpets. Hair and textile fibres are relatively easily shed and transferred, which means that it is highly likely that fibres will be found at crime scenes. If such fibres are carefully characterised they can be of immense value in the forensic environment. Vibrational spectroscopy is one of the most important methods for the characterisation of natural and synthetic fibres. The vibrational spectrum, whether mid-IR or Raman, can be considered to be a fingerprint of the molecular structure of the fibre and as such has a very high information content.

Selection of project procurement methods in the consumer electronics industry : a Hong Kong study

Under pressure from both the ever increasing level of market competition and the global financial crisis, clients in consumer electronics (CE) industry are keen to understand how to choose the most appropriate procurement method and hence to improve their competitiveness. Four rounds of Delphi questionnaire survey were conducted with 12 experts in order to identify the most appropriate procurement method in the Hong Kong CE industry. Five key selection criteria in the CE industry are highlighted, including product quality, capability, price competition, flexibility and speed. This study also revealed that product quality was found to be the most important criteria for the “First type used commercially” and “Major functional improvements” projects. As for “Minor functional improvements” projects, price competition was the most crucial factor to be considered during the PP selection. These research findings provide owners with useful insights to select the procurement strategies.

How effective is the new child restraint legislation in Queensland? A mixed methods evaluation

Research Interests: Are parents complying with the legislation? Is this the same for urban, regional and rural parents? Indigenous parents? What difficulties do parents experience in complying? Do parents understand why the legislation was put in place? Have there been negative consequences for other organisations or sectors of the community?

Context-aware methods for process modeling

Recent studies have started to explore context-awareness as a driver in the design of adaptable business processes. The emerging challenge of identifying and considering contextual drivers in the environment of a business process are well understood, however, typical methods used in business process modeling do not yet consider this additional contextual information in their process designs. In this chapter, we describe our research towards innovative and advanced process modeling methods that include mechanisms to incorporate relevant contextual drivers and their impacts on business processes in process design models. We report on our ongoing work with an Australian insurance provider and describe the design science we employed to develop these innovative and useful artifacts as part of a context-aware method framework. We discuss the utility of these artifacts in an application in the claims handling process at the case organization.