User-generated content and the future of public broadcasting : a case study of the special broadcasting service

This thesis presents a case study of the Special Broadcasting Service documenting the broadcasting challenges posed by user-generated content initiatives and the work-place approach to strategies for participation. Using the action research method, the project findings reveal that limitations to resources and funding determined the scope for innovation and that the practice of executive editorial control over content was considered fundamental to fulfilling the responsibilities of the public service mandate. Media workers were overwhelmingly positive about the enhanced productive capabilities of the audience and willing to facilitate moderated interactions, however the effectiveness of these initiatives differed according to the level of skills required. This thesis demonstrates how participatory initiatives can enhance aspects of the public service remit relating to cultural diversity, the servicing of niche interests, and broader social representation, and help reinvigorate the relevance of public service broadcasting in the digitalised media sphere.

Supply chain collaboration : capabilities for continuous innovation

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to investigate how collaborative relationships enhance continuous innovation in the supply chain using case studies. Design/methodology/approach – The data were collected from semi-structured interviews with 23 managers in ten case studies. The main intention was to comprehend how these firms engaged in collaborative relationships and their importance for successful innovation. The study adopted a qualitative approach to investigating these factors. Findings – The findings demonstrate how differing relationships can impact on the operation of firms and their capacities to innovate. The ability to work together with partners has enabled firms to integrate and link operations for increased effectiveness as well as embark on both radical and incremental innovation. Research limitations/implications – The research into the initiatives and strategies for collaboration was essentially exploratory. A qualitative approach using case studies acknowledged that the responses from managers were difficult to quantify or gauge the extent of these factors. Practical implications – The findings have shown various methods where firms integrated with customers and suppliers in the supply chain. This was evident in the views of managers across all the firms examined, supporting the importance of collaboration and efficient allocation of resources throughout the supply chain. They were able to set procedures in their dealings with partners, sharing knowledge and processes, and subsequently joint-planning and investing with them for better operations, systems and processes in the supply chain. Originality/value – The case studies serve as examples for managers in logistics organisation who are contemplating strategies and issues on collaborative relationships. The study provides important lessons on how such relationships can impact on the operation of firms and their capability to innovate. Keywords Supply chain management, Innovation, Relationship marketing

Design of automatic vision-based inspection system for solder joint segmentation

Purpose: Computer vision has been widely used in the inspection of electronic components. This paper proposes a computer vision system for the automatic detection, localisation, and segmentation of solder joints on Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) under different illumination conditions. Design/methodology/approach: An illumination normalization approach is applied to an image, which can effectively and efficiently eliminate the effect of uneven illumination while keeping the properties of the processed image the same as in the corresponding image under normal lighting conditions. Consequently special lighting and instrumental setup can be reduced in order to detect solder joints. These normalised images are insensitive to illumination variations and are used for the subsequent solder joint detection stages. In the segmentation approach, the PCB image is transformed from an RGB color space to a YIQ color space for the effective detection of solder joints from the background. Findings: The segmentation results show that the proposed approach improves the performance significantly for images under varying illumination conditions. Research limitations/implications: This paper proposes a front-end system for the automatic detection, localisation, and segmentation of solder joint defects. Further research is required to complete the full system including the classification of solder joint defects. Practical implications: The methodology presented in this paper can be an effective method to reduce cost and improve quality in production of PCBs in the manufacturing industry. Originality/value: This research proposes the automatic location, identification and segmentation of solder joints under different illumination conditions.

Australasian horror special issue editorial : putting Australian and New Zealand horror movies on the map of cinema studies

This Australasian horror special issue is an important step forward in putting Australian and New Zealand horror movies on the map of film and cinema studies as a subject worthy of intellectual debate. The journal issue is the first devoted solely to the academic discussion of Australasian horror movies. While an Australian horror movie tradition has produced numerous titles since the 1970s achieving commercial success and cult popularity worldwide, the horror genre is largely missing from Australian film history. While there have been occasional essays on standout titles such as Wolf Creek (Mclean, 2005), an increasing number of articles on ‘Ozploitation’ movies, and irregular discussion about Australian Gothic, overall the nature of Australian horror as a genre remains poorly understood. In terms of New Zealand, debate has tended to revolve around ‘Kiwi Gothic’ and of course Peter Jackon’s early splatter films, rather than Kiwi horror as a specific filmmaking tradition.

Investigation of MEMS inertial sensors and aircraft dynamic models in global positioning system integrity monitoring for approaches with vertical guidance

An Approach with Vertical Guidance (APV) is an instrument approach procedure which provides horizontal and vertical guidance to a pilot on approach to landing in reduced visibility conditions. APV approaches can greatly reduce the safety risk to general aviation by improving the pilot’s situational awareness. In particular the incidence of Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT) which has occurred in a number of fatal air crashes in general aviation over the past decade in Australia, can be reduced. APV approaches can also improve general aviation operations. If implemented at Australian airports, APV approach procedures are expected to bring a cost saving of millions of dollars to the economy due to fewer missed approaches, diversions and an increased safety benefit. The provision of accurate horizontal and vertical guidance is achievable using the Global Positioning System (GPS). Because aviation is a safety of life application, an aviation-certified GPS receiver must have integrity monitoring or augmentation to ensure that its navigation solution can be trusted. However, the difficulty with the current GPS satellite constellation alone meeting APV integrity requirements, the susceptibility of GPS to jamming or interference and the potential shortcomings of proposed augmentation solutions for Australia such as the Ground-based Regional Augmentation System (GRAS) justifies the investigation of Aircraft Based Augmentation Systems (ABAS) as an alternative integrity solution for general aviation. ABAS augments GPS with other sensors at the aircraft to help it meet the integrity requirements. Typical ABAS designs assume high quality inertial sensors to provide an accurate reference trajectory for Kalman filters. Unfortunately high-quality inertial sensors are too expensive for general aviation. In contrast to these approaches the purpose of this research is to investigate fusing GPS with lower-cost Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (MEMS) Inertial Measurement Units (IMU) and a mathematical model of aircraft dynamics, referred to as an Aircraft Dynamic Model (ADM) in this thesis. Using a model of aircraft dynamics in navigation systems has been studied before in the available literature and shown to be useful particularly for aiding inertial coasting or attitude determination. In contrast to these applications, this thesis investigates its use in ABAS. This thesis presents an ABAS architecture concept which makes use of a MEMS IMU and ADM, named the General Aviation GPS Integrity System (GAGIS) for convenience. GAGIS includes a GPS, MEMS IMU, ADM, a bank of Extended Kalman Filters (EKF) and uses the Normalized Solution Separation (NSS) method for fault detection. The GPS, IMU and ADM information is fused together in a tightly-coupled configuration, with frequent GPS updates applied to correct the IMU and ADM. The use of both IMU and ADM allows for a number of different possible configurations. Three are investigated in this thesis; a GPS-IMU EKF, a GPS-ADM EKF and a GPS-IMU-ADM EKF. The integrity monitoring performance of the GPS-IMU EKF, GPS-ADM EKF and GPS-IMU-ADM EKF architectures are compared against each other and against a stand-alone GPS architecture in a series of computer simulation tests of an APV approach. Typical GPS, IMU, ADM and environmental errors are simulated. The simulation results show the GPS integrity monitoring performance achievable by augmenting GPS with an ADM and low-cost IMU for a general aviation aircraft on an APV approach. A contribution to research is made in determining whether a low-cost IMU or ADM can provide improved integrity monitoring performance over stand-alone GPS. It is found that a reduction of approximately 50% in protection levels is possible using the GPS-IMU EKF or GPS-ADM EKF as well as faster detection of a slowly growing ramp fault on a GPS pseudorange measurement. A second contribution is made in determining how augmenting GPS with an ADM compares to using a low-cost IMU. By comparing the results for the GPS-ADM EKF against the GPS-IMU EKF it is found that protection levels for the GPS-ADM EKF were only approximately 2% higher. This indicates that the GPS-ADM EKF may potentially replace the GPS-IMU EKF for integrity monitoring should the IMU ever fail. In this way the ADM may contribute to the navigation system robustness and redundancy. To investigate this further, a third contribution is made in determining whether or not the ADM can function as an IMU replacement to improve navigation system redundancy by investigating the case of three IMU accelerometers failing. It is found that the failed IMU measurements may be supplemented by the ADM and adequate integrity monitoring performance achieved. Besides treating the IMU and ADM separately as in the GPS-IMU EKF and GPS-ADM EKF, a fourth contribution is made in investigating the possibility of fusing the IMU and ADM information together to achieve greater performance than either alone. This is investigated using the GPS-IMU-ADM EKF. It is found that the GPS-IMU-ADM EKF can achieve protection levels approximately 3% lower in the horizontal and 6% lower in the vertical than a GPS-IMU EKF. However this small improvement may not justify the complexity of fusing the IMU with an ADM in practical systems. Affordable ABAS in general aviation may enhance existing GPS-only fault detection solutions or help overcome any outages in augmentation systems such as the Ground-based Regional Augmentation System (GRAS). Countries such as Australia which currently do not have an augmentation solution for general aviation could especially benefit from the economic savings and safety benefits of satellite navigation-based APV approaches.

Early childhood education for sustainability : why it matters, what it is, and how whole centre action research and systems thinking can help

The global financial crisis, global pandemics, global warming and peak oil are indicative of a world facing major environmental, social and economic problems. At the same time, world population continues to rise and global inequalities deepen. Children are the most vulnerable to the impacts of unsustainable living with specific harms arising because of their physical and cognitive vulnerabilities. Nevertheless, children do not have to be victims in the face of these challenges. Education, including early childhood education, has an important role to in building resilience and capabilities in children that equip them as active and informed citizens now and in the future and who are capable of contributing to healthy and sustainable ways of living. Drawing on educational change literature, action research, education for sustainability, health promotion and systems theory, this paper outlines three strategies that can help reorient early childhood education towards sustainability. One strategy is the adoption of whole centre approaches to sustainability and education for sustainability. This means working across the whole of a centre’s operations – curriculum and pedagogy, physical and social environments, its partnerships and community connections. The second strategy – applied in conjunction with the first – is the use of action research to investigate the early childhood setting and to create the desired changes. The third strategy is the adoption of systems thinking as a way of leveraging support and momentum for change so that education for sustainability goes beyond the initiatives of individual teachers and centres, and becomes a systems-wide imperative.

Training and development for transitional employment in mature-aged manual workers

The purpose of the current article was to explore perceptions of transitional employment and training and development amongst blue collar workers employed in technical, trade, operations or physical and labour-intensive occupations within the local government system.

The researcher’s perspective on procuring public works projects

Purpose: As part of a comprehensive research study looking at implementing PPPs, interviews with experienced researchers were conducted to realize their views on private sector involvement in public works projects. Design / methodology / approach: Amongst these interviews, five were launched with academics from Hong Kong and Australia, and two were conducted with Legislative Councillors of the Hong Kong Special Administration Region (HKSAR) government. Findings: The interview findings show that both Hong Kong and Australian interviewees had previously conducted some kind of research in the field of PPP. The interviewees highlighted that “Different risk profiles” and “Private sector more innovative / efficient” were the main differences between projects that were procured by PPP and traditionally. Other differences include risk transfer. In a PPP arrangement the public sector passes on a substantial amount of the project risks to the private sector, whereas in a traditional case the public sector would take the largest responsibility in bearing these risks. Another common feature of the private sector is that they tend to be more efficient and innovative when compared to the public sector hence their expertise is often reflected in PPP projects. The interviewees agreed that the key performance indicators for PPP projects were unique depending on the individual project. The critical success factors mentioned by both groups of interviewees included “Transparent process”, “Project dependent” and “Market need”. Due to the fact that PPP projects tend to be large scaled costly projects, adequate transparency in the process is necessary in order to demonstrate that a fair selection and tendering process is conducted. A market need for the project is also important to ensure that the project will be financially secure and that the private sector can make a reasonable profit to cover their project expenditure. Originality / value: The findings from this study have enabled a comparative analysis between the views of researchers in two completely different jurisdictions. With the growing popularity to implement PPP projects, it is believed that the results presented in this paper would be of interest to the industry at large.

Suitability of procuring large public works by PPP in Hong Kong

Purpose : The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (referred to as Hong Kong from here onwards) is an international leading commercial hub particularly in Asia. In order to keep up its reputation a number of large public works projects have been considered. Public Private Partnership (PPP) has increasingly been suggested for these projects, but the suitability of using this procurement method in Hong Kong is yet to be studied empirically. The findings presented in this paper will specifically consider whether PPPs should be used to procure public works projects in Hong Kong by studying the attractive and negative factors for adopting PPP. Design/methodology/approach : As part of this study a questionnaire survey was conducted with industrial practitioners. The respondents were requested to rank the importance of fifteen attractive factors and thirteen negative factors for adopting PPP. Findings : The results found that in general the top attractive factors ranked by respondents from Hong Kong were efficiency related, these included (1) ‘Provide an integrated solution (for public infrastructure / services)’; (2) ‘Facilitate creative and innovative approaches’; and (3) ‘Solve the problem of public sector budget restraint’. It was found that Australian respondents also shared similar findings to those in Hong Kong, but the United Kingdom respondents showed a higher priority to those economic driven attractive factors. Also, the ranking of the attractive and negative factors for adopting PPP showed that on average the attractive factors were scored higher than the negative factors. Originality/value : The results of this research have enabled a comparison of the attractive and negative factors for adopting PPP between three administrative systems. These findings have confirmed that PPP is a suitable means to procure large public projects which are believed to be useful and interesting to PPP researchers and practitioners.

Contribution of cross-functional teams to the improvement in operational performance

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of cross-functional teams in the alignment between system effectiveness and operational effectiveness after the implementation of enterprise information systems (EIS). In addition, it aims to explore the contribution of cross-functional teams to improvement in operational performance. ---------- Design/methodology/approach: The research uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, in a two-stage methodological approach, to investigate the influence of cross-functional teams on the alignment between system effectiveness and operational effectiveness and the impact of the stated alignment on the improvement in operational performance. ---------- Findings: Initial findings suggest that factors stemming from system effectiveness and the performance objectives stemming from operational effectiveness are important and significantly well correlated factors that promote the alignment between the effectiveness of technological implementation and the effectiveness of operations. In addition, confirmatory factor analysis has been used to find the structural relationships and provide explanations for the stated alignment and the contribution of cross-functional teams to the improvement in operational performance. ---------- Research limitations/implications: The principal limitation of this study is its small sample size. ---------- Practical implications: Cross-functional teams have been used by many organisations as a way of involving expertise from different functional areas in the implementation of innovative technologies. An appropriate use of the dimensions that emerged from this research, in the context of cross-functional teams, will assist organisations to properly utilise cross-functional teams with the aim of improving operational performance. ---------- Originality/value: The paper presents a new approach to measure the effectiveness of EIS implementation by adding new dimensions to measure it.

Elliptic curves, group law, and efficient computation

This thesis is about the derivation of the addition law on an arbitrary elliptic curve and efficiently adding points on this elliptic curve using the derived addition law. The outcomes of this research guarantee practical speedups in higher level operations which depend on point additions. In particular, the contributions immediately find applications in cryptology. Mastered by the 19th century mathematicians, the study of the theory of elliptic curves has been active for decades. Elliptic curves over finite fields made their way into public key cryptography in late 1980’s with independent proposals by Miller [Mil86] and Koblitz [Kob87]. Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), following Miller’s and Koblitz’s proposals, employs the group of rational points on an elliptic curve in building discrete logarithm based public key cryptosystems. Starting from late 1990’s, the emergence of the ECC market has boosted the research in computational aspects of elliptic curves. This thesis falls into this same area of research where the main aim is to speed up the additions of rational points on an arbitrary elliptic curve (over a field of large characteristic). The outcomes of this work can be used to speed up applications which are based on elliptic curves, including cryptographic applications in ECC. The aforementioned goals of this thesis are achieved in five main steps. As the first step, this thesis brings together several algebraic tools in order to derive the unique group law of an elliptic curve. This step also includes an investigation of recent computer algebra packages relating to their capabilities. Although the group law is unique, its evaluation can be performed using abundant (in fact infinitely many) formulae. As the second step, this thesis progresses the finding of the best formulae for efficient addition of points. In the third step, the group law is stated explicitly by handling all possible summands. The fourth step presents the algorithms to be used for efficient point additions. In the fifth and final step, optimized software implementations of the proposed algorithms are presented in order to show that theoretical speedups of step four can be practically obtained. In each of the five steps, this thesis focuses on five forms of elliptic curves over finite fields of large characteristic. A list of these forms and their defining equations are given as follows: (a) Short Weierstrass form, y2 = x3 + ax + b, (b) Extended Jacobi quartic form, y2 = dx4 + 2ax2 + 1, (c) Twisted Hessian form, ax3 + y3 + 1 = dxy, (d) Twisted Edwards form, ax2 + y2 = 1 + dx2y2, (e) Twisted Jacobi intersection form, bs2 + c2 = 1, as2 + d2 = 1, These forms are the most promising candidates for efficient computations and thus considered in this work. Nevertheless, the methods employed in this thesis are capable of handling arbitrary elliptic curves. From a high level point of view, the following outcomes are achieved in this thesis. - Related literature results are brought together and further revisited. For most of the cases several missed formulae, algorithms, and efficient point representations are discovered. - Analogies are made among all studied forms. For instance, it is shown that two sets of affine addition formulae are sufficient to cover all possible affine inputs as long as the output is also an affine point in any of these forms. In the literature, many special cases, especially interactions with points at infinity were omitted from discussion. This thesis handles all of the possibilities. - Several new point doubling/addition formulae and algorithms are introduced, which are more efficient than the existing alternatives in the literature. Most notably, the speed of extended Jacobi quartic, twisted Edwards, and Jacobi intersection forms are improved. New unified addition formulae are proposed for short Weierstrass form. New coordinate systems are studied for the first time. - An optimized implementation is developed using a combination of generic x86-64 assembly instructions and the plain C language. The practical advantages of the proposed algorithms are supported by computer experiments. - All formulae, presented in the body of this thesis, are checked for correctness using computer algebra scripts together with details on register allocations.

Efficient clustering approach for intrusion detection in adhoc networks

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are temporary wireless networks useful in emergency rescue services, battlefields operations, mobile conferencing and a variety of other useful applications. Due to dynamic nature and lack of centralized monitoring points, these networks are highly vulnerable to attacks. Intrusion detection systems (IDS) provide audit and monitoring capabilities that offer the local security to a node and help to perceive the specific trust level of other nodes. We take benefit of the clustering concept in MANETs for the effective communication between nodes, where each cluster involves a number of member nodes and is managed by a cluster-head. It can be taken as an advantage in these battery and memory constrained networks for the purpose of intrusion detection, by separating tasks for the head and member nodes, at the same time providing opportunity for launching collaborative detection approach. The clustering schemes are generally used for the routing purposes to enhance the route efficiency. However, the effect of change of a cluster tends to change the route; thus degrades the performance. This paper presents a low overhead clustering algorithm for the benefit of detecting intrusion rather than efficient routing. It also discusses the intrusion detection techniques with the help of this simplified clustering scheme.