Artefact ecologies : supporting embodied meeting practices with distance access

Frameworks such as activity theory, distributed cognition and structuration theory, amongst others, have shown that detailed study of contextual settings where users work (or live) can help the design of interactive systems. However, these frameworks do not adequately focus on accounting for the materiality (and embodiment) of the contextual settings. Within the IST-EU funded AMIDA project (Augmented Multiparty Interaction with Distance Access) we are looking into supporting meeting practices with distance access. Meetings are inherently embodied in everyday work life and that material artefacts associated with meeting practices play a critical role in their formation. Our eventual goal is to develop a deeper understanding of the dynamic and embodied nature of meeting practices and designing technologies to support these. In this paper we introduce the notion of "artefact ecologies" as a conceptual base for understanding embodied meeting practices with distance access. Artefact ecologies refer to a system consisting of different digital and physical artefacts, people, their work practices and values and lays emphasis on the role artefacts play in embodiment, work coordination and supporting remote awareness. In the end we layout our plans for designing technologies for supporting embodied meeting practices within the AMIDA project.

The construction of social identity in newly recruited nuclear engineering staff : a longitudinal study

This study examines the process by which newly recruited nuclear engineering and technical staff came to understand, define, think, feel and behave within a distinct group that has a direct contribution to the organization's overall emphasis on a culture of reliability and system safety. In the field of organizational behavior the interactive model of social identity formation has been recently proposed to explain the process by which the internalization of shared norms and values occurs, an element critical in identity formation. Using this rich model of organizational behavior we analyzed multiple sources of data from nine new hires over a period of three years. This was done from the time they were employed to investigate the construction of social identity by new entrants entering into a complex organizational setting reflected in the context of a nuclear facility. Informed by our data analyses, we found support for the interactive model of social identity development and report the unexpected finding that a newly appointed member's age and level of experience appears to influence the manner in which they adapt, and assimilate into their surroundings. This study represents an important contribution to the safety and reliability literature as it provides a rich insight into the way newly recruited employees enact the process by which their identities are formed and hence act, particularly under conditions of duress or significant organizational disruption in complex organizational settings.

Entrepreneurship education in non-business schools : best practice for Australian contexts of knowledge and innovation communities (Final Report)

In the current era of global economic instability, business and industry have already identified a widening gap between graduate skills and employability. An important element of this is the lack of entrepreneurial skills in graduates. This Teaching Fellowship investigated two sides of a story about entrepreneurial skills and their teaching. Senior players in the innovation commercialisation industry, a high profile entrepreneurial sector, were surveyed to gauge their needs and experiences of graduates they employ. International contexts of entrepreneurship education were investigated to explore how their teaching programs impart the skills of entrepreneurship. Such knowledge is an essential for the design of education programs that can deliver the entrepreneurial skills deemed important by industry for future sustainability. Two programs of entrepreneurship education are being implemented at QUT that draw on the best practice exemplars investigated during this Fellowship. The QUT Innovation Space (QIS) focuses on capturing the innovation and creativity of students, staff and others. The QIS is a physical and virtual meeting and networking space; a connected community enhancing the engagement of participants. The Q_Hatchery is still embryonic; but it is intended to be an innovation community that brings together nascent entrepreneurial businesses to collaborate, train and support each other. There is a niche between concept product and business incubator where an experiential learning environment for otherwise isolated ‘garage-at-home’ businesses could improve success rates. The QIS and the Q_Hatchery serve as living research laboratories to trial the concepts emerging from the skills survey. The survey of skills requirements of the innovation commercialisation industry has produced a large and high quality data set still being explored. Work experience as an employability factor has already emerged as an industry requirement that provides employee maturity. Exploratory factor analysis of the skills topics surveyed has led to a process-based conceptual model for teaching and learning higher-order entrepreneurial skills. Two foundational skills domains (Knowledge, Awareness) are proposed as prerequisites which allow individuals with a suite of early stage entrepreneurial and behavioural skills (Pre-leadership) to further leverage their careers into a leadership role in industry with development of skills around higher order elements of entrepreneurship, management in new business ventures and progressing winning technologies to market. The next stage of the analysis is to test the proposed model through structured equation modelling. Another factor that emerged quickly from the survey analysis broadens the generic concept of team skills currently voiced in Australian policy documents discussing the employability agenda. While there was recognition of the role of sharing, creating and using knowledge in a team-based interdisciplinary context, the adoption and adaptation of behaviours and attitudes of other team members of different disciplinary backgrounds (interprofessionalism) featured as an issue. Most undergraduates are taught and undertake teamwork in silos and, thus, seldom experience a true real-world interdisciplinary environment. Enhancing the entrepreneurial capacity of Australian industry is essential for the economic health of the country and can only be achieved by addressing the lack of entrepreneurial skills in graduates from the higher education system. This Fellowship has attempted to address this deficiency by identifying the skills requirements and providing frameworks for their teaching.

Evaluation of public hospital performance in Khanh Hoa Province : Vietnam in connection with patient and staff satisfaction surveys

This research aimed to develop a framework for performance evaluation of public hospitals in Vietnam that is culturally, socially, and politically appropriate. The research included both qualitative and quantitative methods and identified and validated novel instruments to measure patient satisfaction and job satisfaction of hospital staff and to determine a set of hospital indicators that reflect the quality of hospital performance. New models for understanding the determinants of patient and staff satisfaction were developed along with a new performance indicator framework for hospital performance. These instruments will now be applied to the evaluation of hospital services in Khanh Hoa Province, permitting longer term evaluation of their effectiveness in changing system wide performance and satisfaction.

Attracting and Retaining Staff : The Role of Branding and Industry Image

In increasingly competitive labour markets, attracting and retaining talent has become a prime concern of organisations. Employers need to understand the range of factors that influence career decision making and the role of employer branding in attracting human capital that best fits and contributes to the strategic aims of an organisation. This chapter identifies the changing factors that attract people to certain employment and industries and discusses the importance of aligning employer branding with employee branding to create a strong, genuine and lasting employer brand. Whilst organisations have long used marketing and branding practices to engender loyalty in customers, they are increasingly expanding this activity to differentiate organisations and make them attractive from an employee perspective. This chapter discusses employer branding and industry image as two important components of attraction strategies and describes ways companies can maximise their brand awareness in the employment market to both current and future employees.

The automation of radiotherapy treatment planning assessment

Aim The assessment of treatment plans is an important component in the education of radiation therapists. The establishment of a grade for a plan is currently based on subjective assessment of a range of criteria. The automation of assessment could provide a number of advantages including faster feedback, reduced chance of human error, and simpler aggregation of past results. Method A collection of treatments planned by a cohort of 27 second year radiation therapy students were selected for quantitative evaluation. Treatment sites included the bladder, cervix, larynx, parotid and prostate, although only the larynx plans had been assessed in detail. The plans were designed with the Pinnacle system and exported using the DICOM framework. Assessment criteria included beam arrangement optimisation, volume contouring, target dose coverage and homogeneity, and organ-at-risk sparing. The in-house Treatment and Dose Assessor (TADA) software1 was evaluated for suitability in assisting with the quantitative assessment of these plans. Dose volume data were exported in per-student and per-structure data tables, along with beam complexity metrics, dose volume histograms, and reports on naming conventions. Results The treatment plans were exported and processed using TADA, with the processing of all 27 plans for each treatment site taking less than two minutes. Naming conventions were successfully checked against a reference protocol. Significant variations between student plans were found. Correlation with assessment feedback was established for the larynx plans. Conclusion The data generated could be used to inform the selection of future assessment criteria, monitor student development, and provide useful feedback to the students. The provision of objective, quantitative evaluations of plan quality would be a valuable addition to not only radiotherapy education programmes but also for staff development and potentially credentialing methods. New functionality within TADA developed for this work could be applied clinically to, for example, evaluate protocol compliance.

Psychological capital as moderator of organizational change demands on nursing stress

Healthcare organizations in all OECD countries have continued to undergo change. These changes have been found to have a negative effect on work engagement of nursing staff. While the extent to which nursing staff dealt with these changes has been documented in the literature, little is known of how they utilized their personal resources to deal with the consequences of these changes. This study will address this gap by integrating the Job Demands-Resources theoretical perspective with Positive Psychology, in particular, psychological capital (PsyCap). PsyCap is operationalized as a source of personal resources. Data were collected from 401 nurses from Australia and analyses were undertaken using Partial Least Squares modelling and moderation analysis. Two types of changes on the nursing work were identified. There was an increase in changes to the work environment of nursing. These changes, included increasing administrative workload and the amount of work, resulted in more job demands and job resources. On the other hand, another type of changes relate to reduction to training and management support, which resulted in less job demands. Nurses with more job demands utilized more job resources to address these increasing demands. We found PsyCap to be a crucial source of personal resources that has a moderating effect on the negative effects of job demands and role stress. PsyCap and job resources were both critical in enhancing the work engagement of nurses, as they encountered changes to nursing work. These findings provided empirical support for a positive psychological perspective of understanding nursing engagement.

The ‘Good Eater’ : modelling maternal perception of food fussiness in Australian toddlers – the NOURISH and SAIDI cohorts

Purpose Food refusal is part of normal toddler development due to an innate ability to self-regulate energy intake and the onset of neophobia. For parents, this ‘fussy’ stage causes great concern, prompting use of coercive feeding practices which ignore a child’s own hunger and satiety cues, promoting overeating and overweight. This analysis defines characteristics of the ‘good eater’ using latent variable structural equation modelling and the relationship with maternal perception of her child as a fussy eater. Methods Mothers in the control group of the NOURISH and South Australian Infants Dietary Intake studies (n=332) completed a self-administered questionnaire - when child was age 12-16 months - describing refusal of familiar and unfamiliar foods and maternal perception as fussy/not fussy. Weight-for-age z-score (WAZ) was derived from weight measured by study staff. Questionnaire items and WAZ were combined in AMOS to represent the latent variable the ‘good eater’. Results/findings Mean age(sd) of children was 13.8(1.3) months, mean WAZ(sd), .58(.86) and 49% were male. The ‘good eater’ was represented by higher WAZ, a child that hardly ever refuses food, hardly ever refuses familiar food, and willing to eat unfamiliar foods (x2/df=2.80, GFI=.98, RMSEA=.07(.03-.12), CFI=.96). The ‘good eater’ was inversely associated with maternal perception of her child as a fussy eater (β=-.64, p<.05). Conclusions Toddlers displaying characteristics of a ‘good eater’ are not perceived as fussy, but these characteristics, especially higher WAZ, may be undesirable in the context of obesity prevention. Clinicians can promote food refusal as normal and even desirable in healthy young children.

Blended learning : meeting the needs of distance education students

This thesis involved research into the barriers and enablers that existed for a cohort of mature-aged education support students engaging with blended learning through distance education. The findings that emerged from this research indicated that a flexible model of blended learning is possible in this context. The findings shed light on the experiences of novice technology users' participation in blended learning. The study highlighted the significance of factors such as isolation, technology, communication, connectivity, prior learning, and the growth of self-efficacy that influenced learner engagement.

National working group meeting on ALK diagnostics in lung cancer

The global landscape of molecular testing is rapidly changing, with the recent publication of the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC)/College of American Pathologists (CAP) guidelines and the ALK Atlas. The IASLC/CAP guidelines recommend that tumors from patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) be tested for ALK rearrangements in addition to epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutations. The spur for this recommendation is the availability of novel therapies that target these rearrangements. This article is based on coverage of a Pfizer-sponsored National Working Group Meeting on ALK Diagnostics in Lung Cancer, held around the 15th World Lung Cancer Conference, in Sydney on October 31, 2013. It is based on the presentations given by the authors at the meeting and the discussion that ensued. The content for this article was discussed and agreed on by the authors.

Resilience of water supply systems in meeting the challenges posed by climate change and population growth

This research project provides a scientifically robust approach for assessing the resilience of water supply systems, which are critical infrastructure, to impacts of climate change and population growth. An approach for the identification of trigger points that allows timely and appropriate management actions to be taken to avoid catastrophic system failure is an important outcome of this project. In the current absence of a formal method to evaluate the resilience of a water supply system, the approach developed in this study was based on the characterisation of resilience of a water supply system to a range of surrogate measures. Accordingly, a set of indicators are proposed to evaluate system behaviour and logistic regression analysis was used to assess system behaviour under predicted rainfall, storage and demand conditions.

Indigenous livelihoods policy reference group: Research priorities identified from the first meeting, 28th April 2010

The CSIRO Indigenous Livelihoods Project sought to work with Indigenous communities, government and non-government stakeholders to bring together western science and Indigenous knowledge in order to understand the potential livelihood benefits of enterprises based on natural resource management. The research focus was to enhance livelihood opportunities for Indigenous communities derived from new enterprises and activities based on natural resource management in regional and remote Australia. Underpinning outcomes were: · Identification of effective policy and institutional arrangements required to establish and maintain sustainable livelihoods; · Improved systems understanding of factors that enhance or inhibit sustainable livelihoods based on natural resource management; · Tools and methods for measuring the livelihood benefits of natural resource management; · Education, training, employment and capacity building for Indigenous communities and researchers.