Cross-cultural web user interface design for Indigenous internet users

This project investigated 1) Australian web designers’ cultural perceptions towards Australian Indigenous users and 2) Australian Indigenous cultural features in terms of user interface design. In doing so, it reviews the literature of cross-cultural user interface design by focusing on feasible models and arguments to articulate and integrate Australian Indigenous Internet users’ cultural needs of web user interface. The online survey results collected from 101 Indigenous users and 126 Web designers showed a distinctive difference between them on the integration of Indigenous users' cultural in Web sites. The interview data collected from 14 Indigenous users and 14 web designers suggested practical approaches to the design implications of Indigenous culture.

The Implications of Activity Based Funding for Emergency Departments : A Comprehensive Literature Review

Executive Summary Emergency Departments (EDs) locally, nationally and internationally are becoming increasingly busy. Within this context, it can be challenging to deliver a health service that is safe, of high quality and cost-effective. Whilst various models are described within the literature that aim to measure ED ‘work’ or ‘activity’, they are often not linked to a measure of costs to provide such activity. It is important for hospital and ED managers to understand and apply this link so that optimal staffing and financial resourcing can be justifiably sought. This research is timely given that Australia has moved towards a national Activity Based Funding (ABF) model for ED activity. ABF is believed to increase transparency of care and fairness (i.e. equal work receives equal pay). ABF involves a person-, performance- or activity-based payment system, and thus a move away from historical “block payment” models that do not incentivise efficiency and quality. The aim of the Statewide Workforce and Activity-Based Funding Modelling Project in Queensland Emergency Departments (SWAMPED) is to identify and describe best practice Emergency Department (ED) workforce models within the current context of ED funding that operates under an ABF model. The study is comprised of five distinct phases. This monograph (Phase 1) comprises a systematic review of the literature that was completed in June 2013. The remaining phases include a detailed survey of Queensland hospital EDs’ resource levels, activity and operational models of care, development of new resource models, development of a user-friendly modelling interface for ED mangers, and production of a final report that identifies policy implications. The anticipated deliverable outcome of this research is the development of an ABF based Emergency Workforce Modelling Tool that will enable ED managers to profile both their workforce and operational models of care. Additionally, the tool will assist with the ability to more accurately inform adequate staffing numbers required in the future, inform planning of expected expenditures and be used for standardisation and benchmarking across similar EDs. Summary of the Findings Within the remit of this review of the literature, the main findings include: 1. EDs are becoming busier and more congested Rising demand, barriers to ED throughput and transitions of care all contribute to ED congestion. In addition requests by organisational managers and the community require continued broadening of the scope of services required of the ED and further increases in demand. As the population live longer with more lifestyle diseases their propensity to require ED care continues to grow. 2. Various models of care within EDs exist Models often vary to account for site specific characteritics to suit staffing profile, ED geographical location (e.g. metropolitan or rural site), and patient demographic profile (e.g. paediatrics, older persons, ethnicity). Existing and new models implemented within EDs often depend on the target outcome requiring change. Generally this is focussed on addressing issues at the input, throughput or output areas of the ED. Even with models targeting similar demographic or illness, the structure and process elements underpinning the model can vary, which can impact on outcomes and variance to the patient and carer experience between and within EDs. Major models of care to manage throughput inefficiencies include: A. Workforce Models of Care focus on the appropriate level of staffing for a given workload to provide prompt, timely and clinically effective patient care within an emergency care setting. The studies reviewed suggest that the early involvement of senior medical decision maker and/or specialised nursing roles such as Emergency Nurse Practitioners and Clinical Initiatives Nurse, primary contact or extended scope Allied Health Practitioners can facilitate patient flow and improve key indicators such as length of stay and reducing the number of those who did not wait to be seen amongst others. B. Operational Models of Care within EDs focus on mechanisms for streaming (e.g. fast-tracking) or otherwise grouping patient care based on acuity and complexity to assist with minimising any throughput inefficiencies. While studies support the positive impact of these models in general, it appears that they are most effective when they are adequately resourced. 3. Various methods of measuring ED activity exist Measuring ED activity requires careful consideration of models of care and staffing profile. Measuring activity requires the ability to account for factors including: patient census, acuity, LOS, intensity of intervention, department skill-mix plus an adjustment for non-patient care time. 4. Gaps in the literature Continued ED growth calls for new and innovative care delivery models that are safe, clinically effective and cost effective. New roles and stand-alone service delivery models are often evaluated in isolation without considering the global and economic impact on staffing profiles. Whilst various models of accounting for and measuring health care activity exist, costing studies and cost effectiveness studies are lacking for EDs making accurate and reliable assessments of care models difficult. There is a necessity to further understand, refine and account for measures of ED complexity that define a workload upon which resources and appropriate staffing determinations can be made into the future. There is also a need for continued monitoring and comprehensive evaluation of newly implemented workforce modelling tools. This research acknowledges those gaps and aims to: • Undertake a comprehensive and integrated whole of department workforce profiling exercise relative to resources in the context of ABF. • Inform workforce requirements based on traditional quantitative markers (e.g. volume and acuity) combined with qualitative elements of ED models of care; • Develop a comprehensive and validated workforce calculation tool that can be used to better inform or at least guide workforce requirements in a more transparent manner.

Mining specific features for acquiring user information needs

Term-based approaches can extract many features in text documents, but most include noise. Many popular text-mining strategies have been adapted to reduce noisy information from extracted features; however, text-mining techniques suffer from low frequency. The key issue is how to discover relevance features in text documents to fulfil user information needs. To address this issue, we propose a new method to extract specific features from user relevance feedback. The proposed approach includes two stages. The first stage extracts topics (or patterns) from text documents to focus on interesting topics. In the second stage, topics are deployed to lower level terms to address the low-frequency problem and find specific terms. The specific terms are determined based on their appearances in relevance feedback and their distribution in topics or high-level patterns. We test our proposed method with extensive experiments in the Reuters Corpus Volume 1 dataset and TREC topics. Results show that our proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models.

Statutory right of user - its impact in practice?

Scenario 1 A buys a two storey commercial building built along the only street frontage to the property. Vehicles cannot reach the rear of the property as the building extends across the entire width of the land. A bought the building with full knowledge that vehicular access to the rest of the property had been compromised by a desire to obtain maximum street frontage for the building which was occupied by a commercial tenant. On street parking is scarce in the surrounding area. A (to the knowledge of the adjoining owner B) constructs a carpark at the rear of the building. The employees of A’s tenant have been using the carpark obtaining access via a driveway on B’s land. To formalise this arrangement, A seeks a right of way for vehicles to travel down B’s driveway to access the carpark...

HPAKE : Password authentication secure against cross-site user impersonation

We propose a new kind of asymmetric mutual authentication from passwords with stronger privacy against malicious servers, lest they be tempted to engage in “cross-site user impersonation” to each other. It enables a person to authenticate (with) arbitrarily many independent servers, over adversarial channels, using a memorable and reusable single short password. Beside the usual PAKE security guarantees, our framework goes to lengths to secure the password against brute-force cracking from privileged server information.

Constructing the Architext : Georges Perec's life a user's manual

Mitchell critiques Georges Perec's Life a User's Manual, which articulates compellingly the confluence of literature and architecture studies that emerged in the late twentieth century. He argues the Perec's novel diverges from this tradition, for, rather than being a search for origins and true expression, Life a User's Manual denies the very possibility of originality. He adds that Perec's architext is de-constructive and ironic.

Is intent-aware expected reciprocal rank sufficient to evaluate diversity?

In this paper we define two models of users that require diversity in search results; these models are theoretically grounded in the notion of intrinsic and extrinsic diversity. We then examine Intent-Aware Expected Reciprocal Rank (ERR-IA), one of the official measures used to assess diversity in TREC 2011-12, with respect to the proposed user models. By analyzing ranking preferences as expressed by the user models and those estimated by ERR-IA, we investigate whether ERR-IA assesses document rankings according to the requirements of the diversity retrieval task expressed by the two models. Empirical results demonstrate that ERR-IA neglects query-intents coverage by attributing excessive importance to redundant relevant documents. ERR-IA behavior is contrary to the user models that require measures to first assess diversity through the coverage of intents, and then assess the redundancy of relevant intents. Furthermore, diversity should be considered separately from document relevance and the documents positions in the ranking.

Rodent Scope: A User-Configurable Digital Wireless Telemetry System for Freely Behaving Animals

This paper describes the design and implementation of a wireless neural telemetry system that enables new experimental paradigms, such as neural recordings during rodent navigation in large outdoor environments. RoSco, short for Rodent Scope, is a small lightweight user-configurable module suitable for digital wireless recording from freely behaving small animals. Due to the digital transmission technology, RoSco has advantages over most other wireless modules of noise immunity and online user-configurable settings. RoSco digitally transmits entire neural waveforms for 14 of 16 channels at 20 kHz with 8-bit encoding which are streamed to the PC as standard USB audio packets. Up to 31 RoSco wireless modules can coexist in the same environment on non-overlapping independent channels. The design has spatial diversity reception via two antennas, which makes wireless communication resilient to fading and obstacles. In comparison with most existing wireless systems, this system has online user-selectable independent gain control of each channel in 8 factors from 500 to 32,000 times, two selectable ground references from a subset of channels, selectable channel grounding to disable noisy electrodes, and selectable bandwidth suitable for action potentials (300 Hz–3 kHz) and low frequency field potentials (4 Hz–3 kHz). Indoor and outdoor recordings taken from freely behaving rodents are shown to be comparable to a commercial wired system in sorting for neural populations. The module has low input referred noise, battery life of 1.5 hours and transmission losses of 0.1% up to a range of 10 m.

Media innovations, user innovations, societal innovations

As the Journal of Media Innovations comes into existence, this article reflects on the first and most obvious question: just what do we mean by “media innovations”? Drawing on the examples of a range of recent innovations in media technologies and practices, initiated by a variety of media audiences, users, professionals, and providers, it explores the interplay between the different drivers of innovation and the effects of such innovation on the complex frameworks of contemporary society and the media ecology which supports it. In doing so, this article makes a number of key observations: first, it notes that media innovation is an innovation in media practices at least as much as in media technologies, and that changes to the practices of media both reflect and promote societal changes as well – media innovations are never just media technology innovations. Second, it shows that the continuing mediatisation of society, and the shift towards a more widespread participation of ordinary users as active content creators and media innovators, make it all the more important to investigate in detail these interlinked, incremental, everyday processes of media and societal change – media innovations are almost always also user innovations. Finally, it suggests that a full understanding of these processes as they unfold across diverse interleaved media spaces and complex societal structures necessarily requires a holistic perspective on media innovations, which considers the contemporary media ecology as a crucial constitutive element of societal structures and seeks to trace the repercussions of innovations across both media and society – media innovations are inextricably interlinked with societal innovations (even if, at times, they may not be considered to be improvements to the status quo).

Does counting still count? Revisiting the security of counting based user authentication protocols against statistical attacks

At NDSS 2012, Yan et al. analyzed the security of several challenge-response type user authentication protocols against passive observers, and proposed a generic counting based statistical attack to recover the secret of some counting based protocols given a number of observed authentication sessions. Roughly speaking, the attack is based on the fact that secret (pass) objects appear in challenges with a different probability from non-secret (decoy) objects when the responses are taken into account. Although they mentioned that a protocol susceptible to this attack should minimize this difference, they did not give details as to how this can be achieved barring a few suggestions. In this paper, we attempt to fill this gap by generalizing the attack with a much more comprehensive theoretical analysis. Our treatment is more quantitative which enables us to describe a method to theoretically estimate a lower bound on the number of sessions a protocol can be safely used against the attack. Our results include 1) two proposed fixes to make counting protocols practically safe against the attack at the cost of usability, 2) the observation that the attack can be used on non-counting based protocols too as long as challenge generation is contrived, 3) and two main design principles for user authentication protocols which can be considered as extensions of the principles from Yan et al. This detailed theoretical treatment can be used as a guideline during the design of counting based protocols to determine their susceptibility to this attack. The Foxtail protocol, one of the protocols analyzed by Yan et al., is used as a representative to illustrate our theoretical and experimental results.

Identity, addressing, authenticity and audit requirements for trust in ERP, analytics and big/open data in a “Cloud” computing environment : a review and proposal

Enterprises, both public and private, have rapidly commenced using the benefits of enterprise resource planning (ERP) combined with business analytics and “open data sets” which are often outside the control of the enterprise to gain further efficiencies, build new service operations and increase business activity. In many cases, these business activities are based around relevant software systems hosted in a “cloud computing” environment. “Garbage in, garbage out”, or “GIGO”, is a term long used to describe problems in unqualified dependency on information systems, dating from the 1960s. However, a more pertinent variation arose sometime later, namely “garbage in, gospel out” signifying that with large scale information systems, such as ERP and usage of open datasets in a cloud environment, the ability to verify the authenticity of those data sets used may be almost impossible, resulting in dependence upon questionable results. Illicit data set “impersonation” becomes a reality. At the same time the ability to audit such results may be an important requirement, particularly in the public sector. This paper discusses the need for enhancement of identity, reliability, authenticity and audit services, including naming and addressing services, in this emerging environment and analyses some current technologies that are offered and which may be appropriate. However, severe limitations to addressing these requirements have been identified and the paper proposes further research work in the area.

Privacy enhancements for hardware-based security modules

The increasing growth in the use of Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) towards identification and authentication of a security endpoint have raised numerous privacy and security concerns. HSMs have the ability to tie a system or an object, along with its users to the physical world. However, this enables tracking of the user and/or an object associated with the HSM. Current systems do not adequately address the privacy needs and as such are susceptible to various attacks. In this work, we analyse various security and privacy concerns that arise when deploying such hardware security modules and propose a system that allow users to create pseudonyms from a trusted master public-secret key pair. The proposed system is based on the intractability of factoring and finding square roots of a quadratic residue modulo a composite number, where the composite number is a product of two large primes. Along with the standard notion of protecting privacy of an user, the proposed system offers colligation between seemingly independent pseudonyms. This new property when combined with HSMs that store the master secret key is extremely beneficial to a user, as it offers a convenient way to generate a large number of pseudonyms using relatively small storage requirements.

Geometric sensitivity of patient-specific finite element models of the spine to variability in user-selected anatomical landmarks

Software to create individualised finite element (FE) models of the osseoligamentous spine using pre-operative computed tomography (CT) data-sets for spinal surgery patients has recently been developed. This study presents a geometric sensitivity analysis of this software to assess the effect of intra-observer variability in user-selected anatomical landmarks. User-selected landmarks on the osseous anatomy were defined from CT data-sets for three scoliosis patients and these landmarks were used to reconstruct patient-specific anatomy of the spine and ribcage using parametric descriptions. The intra-observer errors in landmark co-ordinates for these anatomical landmarks were calculated. FE models of the spine and ribcage were created using the reconstructed anatomy for each patient and these models were analysed for a loadcase simulating clinical flexibility assessment. The intra-observer error in the anatomical measurements was low in comparison to the initial dimensions, with the exception of the angular measurements for disc wedge and zygapophyseal joint (z-joint) orientation and disc height. This variability suggested that CT resolution may influence such angular measurements, particularly for small anatomical features, such as the z-joints, and may also affect disc height. The results of the FE analysis showed low variation in the model predictions for spinal curvature with the mean intra-observer variability substantially less than the accepted error in clinical measurement. These findings demonstrate that intra-observer variability in landmark point selection has minimal effect on the subsequent FE predictions for a clinical loadcase.