Organisational challenges in understanding and implementing effective buiness continuity management strategies in a complex and critical organisation : an airport case study

With the increasing complexity of modern day threats and the growing sophistication of interlinked and interdependent operating environments, Business Continuity Management (BCM) has emerged as a new discipline, offering a strategic approach to safeguarding organisational functions. Of significant interest is the application of BCM frameworks and strategies within critical infrastructure, and in particular the aviation industry. Given the increased focus on security and safety for critical infrastructures, research into the adoption of BCM principles within an airport environment provides valuable management outcomes and research into a previously neglected area of inquisition. This research has used a single case study methodology to identify possible impediments to BCM adoption and implementation by the Brisbane Airport Corporation (BAC). It has identified a number of misalignments between the required breadth of focus for a BCM program, identified differing views on specific roles and responsibilities required during a major disruptive event and illustrated the complexities of the Brisbane Airport which impede the understanding and implementation of effective Business Continuity Management Strategies.

Comparison of U.S., Canadian, and Australian participants' performance on the Algase Wandering Scale-Version 2 (AWS-V2)

Background Wandering represents a major problem in the management of patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). In this study we examined the utility of the Algase Wandering Scale (AWS), a newly developed psychometric instrument that asks caregivers to assess the likelihood of wandering behavior. Methods The AWS was administered to the caregivers of 40 AD patients and total and subscale scores were examined in relation to measures of mental and functional status, depressive symptoms and medication usage. Results AWS scores were comparable, though slightly lower, than those normative values previously published. Higher scores were associated with more severe dementia. The Negative Outcome subscale showed a significant increase in reported falls or injuries in association with anti-depressant use. Conclusions These data provide some construct validation for the AWS as a potentially useful scale to assess wandering behaviors in AD.

Re-envisioning sovereignty : the end of Westphalia?

Fables of sovereignty / Wayne Hudson Sovereignty discourse and practice : past and future / Joseph Camilleri Guises of sovereignty / Gerry Simpson Westphalian and Islamic concepts of sovereignty in the Middle East / Amin Saikal Wither sovereignty in Southeast Asia today? / See Seng Tan Ambivalent sovereignty : China and re-imagining the Westphalian ideal / Yongjin Zhang Confronting terrorism : dilemmas of principle and practice regarding sovereignty / Brian L. Job Sovereignty in the 21st century : security, immigration, and refugees / Howard Adelman State sovereignty and international refugee protection / Robyn Lui Do no harm : towards a Hippocratic standard for international civilisation / Neil Arya Sovereignty and the global politics of the environment : beyond Westphalia? / Lorraine Elliott Westphalian sovereignty in the shadow of international justice? a fresh coat of paint for a tainted concept / Jackson Nyamuya Maogoto Development assistance and the hollow sovereignty of the weak / Roland Rich Corruption and transparency in governance and development : reinventing sovereignty for promoting good governance / C. Raj Kumar Re-envisioning economic sovereignty : developing countries and the International Monetary Fund / Ross P. Buckley Trust, legitimacy, and the sharing of sovereignty / William Maley Sovereignty as indirect rule / Barry Hindess Indigenous sovereignty / Paul Keal Civil society in a post-statist circumstance / Jan Aart Scholte.

Privacy and trust management for electronic health records

Establishing a nationwide Electronic Health Record system has become a primary objective for many countries around the world, including Australia, in order to improve the quality of healthcare while at the same time decreasing its cost. Doing so will require federating the large number of patient data repositories currently in use throughout the country. However, implementation of EHR systems is being hindered by several obstacles, among them concerns about data privacy and trustworthiness. Current IT solutions fail to satisfy patients’ privacy desires and do not provide a trustworthiness measure for medical data. This thesis starts with the observation that existing EHR system proposals suer from six serious shortcomings that aect patients’ privacy and safety, and medical practitioners’ trust in EHR data: accuracy and privacy concerns over linking patients’ existing medical records; the inability of patients to have control over who accesses their private data; the inability to protect against inferences about patients’ sensitive data; the lack of a mechanism for evaluating the trustworthiness of medical data; and the failure of current healthcare workflow processes to capture and enforce patient’s privacy desires. Following an action research method, this thesis addresses the above shortcomings by firstly proposing an architecture for linking electronic medical records in an accurate and private way where patients are given control over what information can be revealed about them. This is accomplished by extending the structure and protocols introduced in federated identity management to link a patient’s EHR to his existing medical records by using pseudonym identifiers. Secondly, a privacy-aware access control model is developed to satisfy patients’ privacy requirements. The model is developed by integrating three standard access control models in a way that gives patients access control over their private data and ensures that legitimate uses of EHRs are not hindered. Thirdly, a probabilistic approach for detecting and restricting inference channels resulting from publicly-available medical data is developed to guard against indirect accesses to a patient’s private data. This approach is based upon a Bayesian network and the causal probabilistic relations that exist between medical data fields. The resulting definitions and algorithms show how an inference channel can be detected and restricted to satisfy patients’ expressed privacy goals. Fourthly, a medical data trustworthiness assessment model is developed to evaluate the quality of medical data by assessing the trustworthiness of its sources (e.g. a healthcare provider or medical practitioner). In this model, Beta and Dirichlet reputation systems are used to collect reputation scores about medical data sources and these are used to compute the trustworthiness of medical data via subjective logic. Finally, an extension is made to healthcare workflow management processes to capture and enforce patients’ privacy policies. This is accomplished by developing a conceptual model that introduces new workflow notions to make the workflow management system aware of a patient’s privacy requirements. These extensions are then implemented in the YAWL workflow management system.

Does physical protection of soil organic matter attenuate temperature sensitivity?

Global climate change may induce accelerated soil organic matter (SOM) decomposition through increased soil temperature, and thus impact the C balance in soils. We hypothesized that compartmentalization of substrates and decomposers in the soil matrix would decrease SOM sensitivity to temperature. We tested our hypothesis with three short-term laboratory incubations with differing physical protection treatments conducted at different temperatures. Overall, CO2 efflux increased with temperature, but responses among physical protection treatments were not consistently different. Similar respiration quotient (Q(10)) values across physical protection treatments did not support our original hypothesis that the largest Q(10) values would be observed in the treatment with the least physical protection. Compartmentalization of substrates and decomposers is known to reduce the decomposability of otherwise labile material, but the hypothesized attenuation of temperature sensitivity was not detected, and thus the sensitivity is probably driven by the thermodynamics of biochemical reactions as expressed by Arrhenius-type equations.

Focus-score weighted super-resolution for uncooperative iris recognition at a distance and on the move

Uncooperative iris identification systems at a distance and on the move often suffer from poor resolution and poor focus of the captured iris images. The lack of pixel resolution and well-focused images significantly degrades the iris recognition performance. This paper proposes a new approach to incorporate the focus score into a reconstruction-based super-resolution process to generate a high resolution iris image from a low resolution and focus inconsistent video sequence of an eye. A reconstruction-based technique, which can incorporate middle and high frequency components from multiple low resolution frames into one desired super-resolved frame without introducing false high frequency components, is used. A new focus assessment approach is proposed for uncooperative iris at a distance and on the move to improve performance for variations in lighting, size and occlusion. A novel fusion scheme is then proposed to incorporate the proposed focus score into the super-resolution process. The experiments conducted on the The Multiple Biometric Grand Challenge portal database shows that our proposed approach achieves an EER of 2.1%, outperforming the existing state-of-the-art averaging signal-level fusion approach by 19.2% and the robust mean super-resolution approach by 8.7%.