Placement Trajectory : mapping the journeys of children and young people in out-of-home care

Significant problems confront our child protection out-of-home care system including: high costs; increasing numbers of children and young people entering and remaining in care longer; high frequency of placement movement; and, negative whole-of-life outcomes for children and young people who have exited care. National policy and research agendas recognise the importance of enhancing the evidence base in out-of-home care to inform the development of policy, programs and practice, and improve longitudinal outcomes of children and young people. The authors discuss the concept of placement trajectory as a framework for research and systems analysis in the out-of-home context. While not without limitations, the concept of placement trajectory is particularly useful in understanding the factors influencing placement movement and stability. Increasing the evidence base in this area can serve to enhance improved outcomes across the lifespan for children and young people in the out-of-home care system.

Opening digital learning to deeper inquiry

This chapter presents an historical narrative on the recent evolution of information and communications technology (ICT) that has been, and is, utilized for purposes of learning. In other words, it presents an account of the development of e-learning supported through the Web and other similar virtual environments. It does not attempt to present a definitive account; as such an exercise is fraught with assumptions, contextual bias, and probable conjecture. The concern here is more with contextualizing the role of inquiry in learning and the evolving digital tools that enable interfaces that promote and support it. In tracking this evolution, both multi-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary research has been pursued. Key historical developments are identified as well as interpretations of the key drivers of e-learning over time and into what might be better described as digital learning. Innovations in the development of digital tools are described as dynamic and emergent, evolving as a consequence of multiple, sometimes hidden drivers of change. But conflating advancements in learning technologies with e-learning seems to be pervasive. As is the push for the “open” agenda – a growing number of initiatives and movements dominated by themes associated with access, intellectual property, public benefit, sharing and technical interoperability. Openness is also explored in this chapter, however, more in terms of what it means when associated with inquiry. By investigating opportunities for the stimulation and support of questioning online – in particular, why-questioning – this chapter is focused on “opening” content – not just for access but for inquiry and deeper learning.

Real-time mobile 3D temperature mapping

The ability to measure surface temperature and represent it on a metrically accurate 3D model has proven applications in many areas such as medical imaging, building energy auditing, and search and rescue. A system is proposed that enables this task to be performed with a handheld sensor, and for the first time with results able to be visualized and analyzed in real-time. A device comprising a thermal-infrared camera and range sensor is calibrated geometrically and used for data capture. The device is localized using a combination of ICP and video-based pose estimation from the thermal-infrared video footage which is shown to reduce the occurrence of failure modes. Furthermore, the problem of misregistration which can introduce severe distortions in assigned surface temperatures is avoided through the use of a risk-averse neighborhood weighting mechanism. Results demonstrate that the system is more stable and accurate than previous approaches, and can be used to accurately model complex objects and environments for practical tasks.

Design and ethics in digital mental health promotion

This chapter presents a case study of Participatory Design as a design framework for developing interactive digital tools for promoting children’s resilience. The author argues for a participatory methodology as an ethical approach that involves children as co-designers in the process from which they are traditionally excluded, namely the creative design process and the process of mental health promotion.

The future of the music industry in an age of digital distribution

This is an invited public lecture. The talk will cover how the music industry has changed due to digital technologies. During the talk I will look at how the changing balance between live music, music licensing and recorded music. I will also discuss online music subscription services and whether they might be a future for music distribution in China and elsewhere in the world. It will also look at how music artists and composers are affected by this change.

Broadcasting digital stories on Australian community television : the Digistories Anthology

Community-based arts and media movements have been intsrumental in building population-wide creative capacity for cultural development, social participation and social transformation in many parts of the world. Digital storytelling is a form of media practice that was pioneered in the United States at the intersection of these movements. It is described here as a ‘co-creative’ media production method. This description aims to differentiate the approaches to collaborative content creation that are used in community cultural development (CCD) and community media movements from those valued in professional and consumer modes of media production. Yet, the products of co-creative practices, such as digital stories, do not circulate widely through existing media networks or through the newer social media networks that Australian CCD and community media movements anticipated by at least twenty years. The complex politics of story ownership are one of a number of factors that often render ‘publication’ a secondary consideration in the making of digital stories. The possibility of ‘downstream’ use and re-use of stories in other networks is not usually considered in initial planning and development processes. As landmark projects such as Capture Wales indicate, even where stories are made for broadcast outcomes, television can be a problematic window for exhibiting digital stories. Scepticism about the brave new world of reality television and user generated content also circulates in digital storytelling networks, especially when it comes to ethical concerns for managing the risks of harm associated with widespread distribution of digital stories to indiscriminate publics. This publication reports on a collaborative action research project that took a closer look at some of the constraints relating to the problems of re-purposing digital stories for television. It focussed on ‘best practice’ for managing the risks of harm to storytellers in the process of re-purposing digital stories for broadcast on community television.

Talking Turkey : digital storytelling goes to Ankara in 2013

In the last fifteen years digital storytelling has come to stand for considerably more than a specific form of collaborative media production. It is also an international network of new media artists, creative practitioners, curators, scholars, and facilitating community media organisations. In May this year the movement will converge on Ankara, Turkey for its Fifth International Conference and Exhibition. The event will draw together key adopters, adapters and innovators in community-based methods of collaborative media production from around the world. Researchers from the Queensland University of Technology will lead a delegation that will include key players in the Australian digital storytelling movement.

A cognitive processing framework for learning analytics

Incorporating a learner’s level of cognitive processing into Learning Analytics presents opportunities for obtaining rich data on the learning process. We propose a framework called COPA that provides a basis for mapping levels of cognitive operation into a learning analytics system. We utilise Bloom’s taxonomy, a theoretically respected conceptualisation of cognitive processing, and apply it in a flexible structure that can be implemented incrementally and with varying degree of complexity within an educational organisation. We outline how the framework is applied, and its key benefits and limitations. Finally, we apply COPA to a University undergraduate unit, and demonstrate its utility in identifying key missing elements in the structure of the course.

Digital beings : an opportunity for Australian visual effects

Ongoing innovation in digital animation and visual effects technologies has provided new opportunities for stories to be visually rendered in ways never before possible. Films featuring animation and visual effects continue to perform well at the box office, proving to be highly profitable projects. The Avengers (Whedon, 2012) holds the current record for opening weekend sales, accruing as much as $207,438,708 USD and $623,357,910 USD gross at time of writing. Life of Pi (Lee, 2012) at time of writing has grossed as much as $608,791,063 USD (Box Office Mojo, 2013). With so much creative potential and a demonstrable ability to generate a large amount of revenue, the animation and visual effects industry – otherwise known as the Post, Digital and Visual Effects (PDV) industry – has become significant to the future growth and stability of the Australian film industry as a whole.

Strategies and challenges for systematically mapping biologically significant molecular pathways regulating carcinoma epithelial-mesenchymal transition

Enormous progress has been made towards understanding the role of specific factors in the process of epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT); however, the complex underlying pathways and the transient nature of the transition continues to present significant challenges. Targeting tumour cell plasticity underpinning EMT is an attractive strategy to combat metastasis. Global gene expression profiling and high-content analyses are among the strategies employed to identify novel EMT regulators. In this review, we highlight several approaches to systematically interrogate key pathways involved in EMT, with particular emphasis on the features of multiparametric, high-content imaging screening strategies that lend themselves to the systematic discovery of highly significant modulators of tumour cell plasticity.

Using digital technologies at home

Internet-connected tablets and smart phones are being used increasingly by young children. Little is known, however, about their social interactions with family members when engaged with these technologies. This article examines video recorded interactions between a father and his two young children, one aged 18 months using an iPhone, and one aged three years accessing an iPad. Drawing on Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, this analysis establishes ways the family members engage and disengage in talk to manage their individual activity with mobile devices and accomplish interaction with each other. Findings are relevant for understanding children’s everyday practices with mobile technologies.

Talk about a YouTube video in preschool : the mutual production of shared understanding for learning with digital technology

Much of what is written about digital technologies in preschool contexts focuses on young children’s acquisition of skills rather than their meaning-making during use of technologies. In this paper, we consider how the viewing of a YouTube video was used by a teacher and children to produce shared understandings about it. Conversation analysis of talk and interaction during the viewing of the video establishes some of the ways that individual accounts of events were produced for others and then endorsed as shared understandings. The analysis establishes how adults and children made use of verbal and embodied actions during interactions to produce shared understandings of the YouTube video, the events it recorded and written commentary about those events

Error modeling and calibration of exteroceptive sensors for accurate mapping applications

Reliable robotic perception and planning are critical to performing autonomous actions in uncertain, unstructured environments. In field robotic systems, automation is achieved by interpreting exteroceptive sensor information to infer something about the world. This is then mapped to provide a consistent spatial context, so that actions can be planned around the predicted future interaction of the robot and the world. The whole system is as reliable as the weakest link in this chain. In this paper, the term mapping is used broadly to describe the transformation of range-based exteroceptive sensor data (such as LIDAR or stereo vision) to a fixed navigation frame, so that it can be used to form an internal representation of the environment. The coordinate transformation from the sensor frame to the navigation frame is analyzed to produce a spatial error model that captures the dominant geometric and temporal sources of mapping error. This allows the mapping accuracy to be calculated at run time. A generic extrinsic calibration method for exteroceptive range-based sensors is then presented to determine the sensor location and orientation. This allows systematic errors in individual sensors to be minimized, and when multiple sensors are used, it minimizes the systematic contradiction between them to enable reliable multisensor data fusion. The mathematical derivations at the core of this model are not particularly novel or complicated, but the rigorous analysis and application to field robotics seems to be largely absent from the literature to date. The techniques in this paper are simple to implement, and they offer a significant improvement to the accuracy, precision, and integrity of mapped information. Consequently, they should be employed whenever maps are formed from range-based exteroceptive sensor data. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The 2013 creative industries statistical analysis for Western Australia

The Department of Culture and the Arts undertook the first mapping of Perth’s creative industries in 2007 in partnership with the City of Perth and the Departments of Industry and Resources and the Premier and Cabinet. The 2013 Creative Industries Statistical Analysis for Western Australia report has updated the mapping with the 2011 Census employment data to provide invaluable information for the State’s creative industries, their peak associations and potential investors. The report maps sector employment numbers and growth between the 2006 and 2011 Census in the areas of music, visual and performing arts, film, TV and radio, advertising and marketing, software and digital content, publishing, and architecture and design, which includes designer fashion.