Australian Learning and Teaching Council, Learning and Teaching Academic Standards Statement for Architecture

The development of the Learning and Teaching Academic Standards Statement for Architecture (the Statement) centred on requirements for the Master of Architecture and proceeded alongside similar developments in the building and construction discipline under the guidance and support of the Australian Deans of Built Environment and Design (ADBED). Through their representation of Australian architecture programs, ADBED have provided high-level leadership for the Learning and Teaching Academic Standards Project in Architecture (LTAS Architecture). The threshold learning outcomes (TLOs), the description of the nature and extent of the discipline, and accompanying notes were developed through wide consultation with the discipline and profession nationally. They have been considered and debated by ADBED on a number of occasions and have, in their fi nal form, been strongly endorsed by the Deans. ADBED formed the core of the Architecture Reference Group (chaired by an ADBED member) that drew together representatives of every peak organisation for the profession and discipline in Australia. The views of the architectural education community and profession have been provided both through individual submissions and the voices of a number of peak bodies. Over two hundred individuals from the practising profession, the academic workforce and the student cohort have worked together to build consensus about the capabilities expected of a graduate of an Australian Master of Architecture degree. It was critical from the outset that the Statement should embrace the wisdom of the greater ‘tribe’, should ensure that graduates of the Australian Master of Architecture were eligible for professional registration and, at the same time, should allow for scope and diversity in the shape of Australian architectural education. A consultation strategy adopted by the Discipline Scholar involved meetings and workshops in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane. Stakeholders from all jurisdictions and most universities participated in the early phases of consultation through a series of workshops that concluded late in October 2010. The Draft Architecture Standards Statement was formed from these early meetings and consultation in respect of that document continued through early 2011. This publication represents the outcomes of work to establish an agreed standards statement for the Master of Architecture. Significant further work remains to ensure the alignment of professional accreditation and recognition procedures with emerging regulatory frameworks cascading from the establishment of the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA). The Australian architecture community hopes that mechanisms can be found to integrate TEQSA’s quality assurance purpose with well-established and understood systems of professional accreditation to ensure the good standing of Australian architectural education into the future. The work to build renewed and integrated quality assurance processes and to foster the interests of this project will continue, for at least the next eighteen months, under the auspices of Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC)-funded Architecture Discipline Network (ADN), led by ADBED and Queensland University of Technology. The Discipline Scholar gratefully acknowledges the generous contributions given by those in stakeholder communities to the formulation of the Statement. Professional and academic colleagues have travelled and gathered to shape the Standards Statement. Debate has been vigorous and spirited and the Statement is rich with the purpose, critical thinking and good judgement of the Australian architectural education community. The commitments made to the processes that have produced this Statement reflect a deep and abiding interest by the constituency in architectural education. This commitment bodes well for the vibrancy and productivity of the emergent Architecture Discipline Network (ADN). Endorsement, in writing, was received from the Australian Institute of Architects National Education Committee (AIA NEC): The National Education Committee (NEC) of the Australian Institute of Architects thank you for your work thus far in developing the Learning and Teaching Academic Standards for Architecture In particular, we acknowledge your close consultation with the NEC on the project along with a comprehensive cross-section of the professional and academic communities in architecture. The TLOs with the nuanced levels of capacities – to identify, develop, explain, demonstrate etc – are described at an appropriate level to be understood as minimum expectations for a Master of Architecture graduate. The Architects Accreditation Council of Australia (AACA) has noted: There is a clear correlation between the current processes for accreditation and what may be the procedures in the future following the current review. The requirement of the outcomes as outlined in the draft paper to demonstrate capability is an appropriate way of expressing the measure of whether the learning outcomes have been achieved. The measure of capability as described in the outcome statements is enhanced with explanatory descriptions in the accompanying notes.

Handbook of service description

With the growth in number and sophistication of services widely available, there is a new urgency for comprehensive service descriptions that take into account both technical and business aspects. The last years have seen a number of efforts for best-of-breed service description focusing on specific aspects of services. The Handbook of Service Description provides the most advanced state of the art insights into these. The main parts of the book provide the most detailed documentation of the Unified Service Description Language (USDL) to date. USDL has been developed across several research institutes and publicly funded projects across Europe and Australia, currently extending to the Americas as part of a standardization push through W3C. The scope of services extends across IT and business, i.e., the socio-technical sense of services scaled to business networks. In this respect, purely human, purely automated and mixed human/automated services were considered, that have a boundary of cognizance that is available through the tasks of service provisioning, discovery, access and delivery. Taken together, the Handbook of Service Description provides a comprehensive reference suitable for a wide-reaching audience including researchers, practitioners, managers, and students who aspire to learn about or to create a deeper scientific foundation for service description and its methodological aspects.

Document clustering evaluation : Divergence from a random baseline

Divergence from a random baseline is a technique for the evaluation of document clustering. It ensures cluster quality measures are performing work that prevents ineffective clusterings from giving high scores to clusterings that provide no useful result. These concepts are defined and analysed using intrinsic and extrinsic approaches to the evaluation of document cluster quality. This includes the classical clusters to categories approach and a novel approach that uses ad hoc information retrieval. The divergence from a random baseline approach is able to differentiate ineffective clusterings encountered in the INEX XML Mining track. It also appears to perform a normalisation similar to the Normalised Mutual Information (NMI) measure but it can be applied to any measure of cluster quality. When it is applied to the intrinsic measure of distortion as measured by RMSE, subtraction from a random baseline provides a clear optimum that is not apparent otherwise. This approach can be applied to any clustering evaluation. This paper describes its use in the context of document clustering evaluation.

Pairwise similarity of TopSig document signatures

This paper analyses the pairwise distances of signatures produced by the TopSig retrieval model on two document collections. The distribution of the distances are compared to purely random signatures. It explains why TopSig is only competitive with state of the art retrieval models at early precision. Only the local neighbourhood of the signatures is interpretable. We suggest this is a common property of vector space models.

A cost-outcome description of the septic work-up for bacterial infection in neonates in a tertiary care hospital

Analysis of the septic work-up of 194 neonates at Women's College Hospital, Toronto, showed that the only antepartum condition predicting neonatal sepsis was the mother being on antibiotics. The only postnatal condition predicting sepsis was a maternal postpartum white blood cell count over 11,000. The average cost for tests for a septic work-up in these 194 mother-neonate pairs was $71.48 (Canadian dollars), and the average cost of tests to find a septic case was $1,066.77.

Semantic labelling for document feature patterns using ontological subjects

Finding and labelling semantic features patterns of documents in a large, spatial corpus is a challenging problem. Text documents have characteristics that make semantic labelling difficult; the rapidly increasing volume of online documents makes a bottleneck in finding meaningful textual patterns. Aiming to deal with these issues, we propose an unsupervised documnent labelling approach based on semantic content and feature patterns. A world ontology with extensive topic coverage is exploited to supply controlled, structured subjects for labelling. An algorithm is also introduced to reduce dimensionality based on the study of ontological structure. The proposed approach was promisingly evaluated by compared with typical machine learning methods including SVMs, Rocchio, and kNN.

Injuries leading to hospitalisation in the first year of life : analysis by trimester of age using coded data and textual description

Objective: To describe unintentional injuries to children aged less than one year, using coded and textual information, in three-month age bands to reflect their development over the year. Methods: Data from the Queensland Injury Surveillance Unit was used. The Unit collects demographic, clinical and circumstantial details about injured persons presenting to selected emergency departments across the State. Only injuries coded as unintentional in children admitted to hospital were included for this analysis. Results: After editing, 1,082 children remained for analysis, 24 with transport-related injuries. Falls were the most common injury, but becoming proportionately less over the year, whereas burns and scalds and foreign body injuries increased. The proportion of injuries due to contact with persons or objects varied little, but poisonings were relatively more common in the first and fourth three-month periods. Descriptions indicated that family members were somehow causally involved in 16% of injuries. Our findings are in qualitative agreement with comparable previous studies. Conclusion: The pattern of injuries varies over the first year of life and is clearly linked to the child's increasing mobility. Implications: Injury patterns in the first year of life should be reported over shorter intervals. Preventive measures for young children need to be designed with their rapidly changing developmental stage in mind, using a variety of strategies, one of which could be opportunistic developmentally specific education of parents. Injuries in young children are of abiding concern given their immediate health and emotional effects, and potential for long-term adverse sequelae. In Australia, in the financial year 2006/07, 2,869 children less than 12 months of age were admitted to hospital for an unintentional injury, a rate of 10.6 per 1,000, representing a considerable economic and social burden. Given that many of these injuries are preventable, this is particularly concerning. Most epidemiologic studies analyse data in five-year age bands, so children less than five years of age are examined as a group. This study includes only those children younger than one year of age to identify injury detail lost in analyses of the larger group, as we hypothesised that the injury pattern varied with the developmental stage of the child. The authors of several North American studies have commented that in dealing with injuries in pre-school children, broad age groupings are inadequate to do justice to the rapid developmental changes in infancy and early childhood, and have in consequence analysed injuries in shorter intervals. To our knowledge, no similar analysis of Australian infant injuries has been published to date. This paper describes injury in children less than 12 months of age using data from the Queensland Injury Surveillance Unit (QISU).

Integrated configuration of enterprise systems for interoperability : towards process model and business document specification alignment

Enterprise Systems (ES) can be understood as the de facto standard for holistic operational and managerial support within an organization. Most commonly ES are offered as commercial off-the-shelf packages, requiring customization in the user organization. This process is a complex and resource-intensive task, which often prevents small and midsize enterprises (SME) from undertaking configuration projects. Especially in the SME market independent software vendors provide pre-configured ES for a small customer base. The problem of ES configuration is shifted from the customer to the vendor, but remains critical. We argue that the yet unexplored link between process configuration and business document configuration must be closer examined as both types of configuration are closely tied to one another.

A description of the Mei2-like protein family; structure, phylogenetic distribution and biological context

The Schizosaccharomyces pombe Mei2 gene encodes an RNA recognition motif (RRM) protein that stimulates meiosis upon binding a specific non-coding RNA and subsequent accumulation in a “mei2-dot” in the nucleus. We present here the first systematic characterization of the family of proteins with characteristic Mei2-like amino acid sequences. Mei2-like proteins are an ancient eukaryotic protein family with three identifiable RRMs. The C-terminal RRM (RRM3) is unique to Mei2-like proteins and is the most highly conserved of the three RRMs. RRM3 also contains conserved sequence elements at its C-terminus not found in other RRM domains. Single copy Mei2-like genes are present in some fungi, in alveolates such as Paramecium and in the early branching eukaryote Entamoeba histolytica, while plants contain small families of Mei2-like genes. While the C-terminal RRM is highly conserved between plants and fungi, indicating conservation of molecular mechanisms, plant Mei2-like genes have changed biological context to regulate various aspects of developmental pattern formation.

Exploring the challenges to industrialized residential building in China

Industrialised building (IB) is considered by many to have an important role to play in China's residential construction industry due to its potential for improved quality, productivity, efficiency, safety and sustainability. It is surprising, therefore, that although a large number of construction programmes have been completed in the country in recent years, very few have been built in this manner. Quite why this situation exists is unknown. The well-known problems with IB, such as the constraints placed on designer freedom, may be the cause. It is equally possible that, as is typical with developing countries such as China, cost or government issues dominate. On the other hand, in comparison with other countries, the construction industry in China has been widely criticised for its lack of modernity. Either way, there is an urgent need to assess and understand the hindrances to the adoption of IB in residential construction in order to identify what corrective measures, if any, need to be taken. Towards this end, we first identify a set of critical factors (CFs) for assessing the hindrances to IB adoption in China. This involves the analysis of research data collected by a questionnaire survey of experienced housing developers and professionals working in China's construction industry sector. Fuzzy set theory is used in the selection of the CFs. These CFs comprise, in rank order: higher initial cost; lack of skilled labour in IB; manufacturing capability and involvement issues and product quality problems; lack of supply chain; lack of codes and standards; and lack of government incentives, directives and promotion. The establishment of the CFs provides a basis for local construction sectors to better equip themselves for future implementation of IB. The findings also indicate a current need for formulating improved policies and strategies to encourage the further development of IB in China at present.

Guanxi as complex adaptive system : definition, description and underlying principles

Guanxi has become a common term in the wider business community and has attracted an increasing attention of researchers. However, a consistent understanding of the concept continues to be elusive. We critically review the extant guanxi literature to identify the major inconsistencies in the way guanxi is currently conceptualized and develop a conceptualization of guanxi which views guanxi as a complex adaptive system formed by the strategic establishing, evolving, utilizing, and maintaining of personal relationships based upon social norms of trust and reciprocal obligation unique to the Chinese culture. This study contributes to research of guanxi and to the field of Chinese management in several ways. First, we identify four levels of inconsistency surrounding the conceptualization of guanxi in the literature, thus clarifying the current common sources of confusion. Second, this study deconstructs the level and core values of guanxi to provide a more transparent picture, enabling researchers to develop more robust measures of guanxi. Finally, we made progress towards a more comprehensive understanding of guanxi by introducing the complex adaptive system perspective into the guanxi research.

Distinguishing between mean-field, moment dynamics and stochastic descriptions of birth-death-movement processes

Mathematical descriptions of birth–death–movement processes are often calibrated to measurements from cell biology experiments to quantify tissue growth rates. Here we describe and analyze a discrete model of a birth–death-movement process applied to a typical two–dimensional cell biology experiment. We present three different descriptions of the system: (i) a standard mean–field description which neglects correlation effects and clustering; (ii) a moment dynamics description which approximately incorporates correlation and clustering effects, and; (iii) averaged data from repeated discrete simulations which directly incorporates correlation and clustering effects. Comparing these three descriptions indicates that the mean–field and moment dynamics approaches are valid only for certain parameter regimes, and that both these descriptions fail to make accurate predictions of the system for sufficiently fast birth and death rates where the effects of spatial correlations and clustering are sufficiently strong. Without any method to distinguish between the parameter regimes where these three descriptions are valid, it is possible that either the mean–field or moment dynamics model could be calibrated to experimental data under inappropriate conditions, leading to errors in parameter estimation. In this work we demonstrate that a simple measurement of agent clustering and correlation, based on coordination number data, provides an indirect measure of agent correlation and clustering effects, and can therefore be used to make a distinction between the validity of the different descriptions of the birth–death–movement process.

On parallel hybrid-electric propulsion system for unmanned aerial vehicles

This paper presents a review of existing and current developments and the analysis of Hybrid-Electric Propulsion Systems (HEPS) for small fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Efficient energy utilisation on an UAV is essential to its functioning, often to achieve the operational goals of range, endurance and other specific mission requirements. Due to the limitations of the space available and the mass budget on the UAV, it is often a delicate balance between the onboard energy available (i.e. fuel) and achieving the operational goals. One technology with potential in this area is with the use of HEPS. In this paper, information on the state-of-art technology in this field of research is provided. A description and simulation of a parallel HEPS for a small fixed-wing UAV by incorporating an Ideal Operating Line (IOL) control strategy is described. Simulation models of the components in a HEPS were designed in the MATLAB Simulink environment. An IOL analysis of an UAV piston engine was used to determine the most efficient points of operation for this engine. The results show that an UAV equipped with this HEPS configuration is capable of achieving a fuel saving of 6.5%, compared to the engine-only configuration.

Software as a service (SaaS) for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) : the role of intermediaries

Software as a Service (SaaS) is anticipated to provide significant benefits to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) due to ease of access to high-end applications, 7*24 availability, utility pricing, etc. However, underlying SaaS is the assumption that SMEs will directly interact with the SaaS vendor and use a self-service model. In practice, we see the rise of SaaS intermediaries who support SMEs with using SaaS. This paper reports on an empirical study of the role of intermediaries in terms of how they support SMEs in sourcing and leveraging SaaS for their business. The knowledge contributions of this paper are: (1) the identification and description of the role of SaaS intermediaries and (2) the specification of different roles of SaaS intermediaries, in particular a more basic role with technology orientation and operational alignment perspective and (3) a more added value role with customer orientation and strategic alignment perspective.