237 resultados para attract physicians


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In response to the need to leverage private finance and the lack of competition in some parts of the Australian public sector infrastructure market, the Australian Federal government has demonstrated its desire to attract new sources of in-bound foreign direct investment (FDI) by multinational contractors. This study aims to update progress towards an investigation into the determinants of multinational contractors’ willingness to bid for Australian public sector major road and bridges. This research deploys Dunning’s eclectic theory for the first time in terms of in-bound FDI by multinational contractors into Australia. Elsewhere, the authors have developed Dunning’s principal hypothesis to suit the context of this research and to address a weakness arising in this hypothesis that is based on a nominal (yes or no) approach to the ownership, location and internalisation factors in Dunning's eclectic framework and which fails to speak to the relative explanatory power of these factors. The authors have completed a first stage test of this development of Dunning's hypothesis based on publically available secondary data, in which it was concluded tentatively that the location factor appears to have the greatest explanatory power. This paper aims to present, for the first time, a further and novel development of the operation of Dunning's eclectic paradigm within the context of multinational contracting, as well as a preview of the design and planned analysis of the next empirical stage in this research concerning case studies. Finally, and beyond the theoretical contributions expected, other expected contributions are mentioned concerning research method and practical implications.

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The increasing popularity of video consumption from mobile devices requires an effective video coding strategy. To overcome diverse communication networks, video services often need to maintain sustainable quality when the available bandwidth is limited. One of the strategy for a visually-optimised video adaptation is by implementing a region-of-interest (ROI) based scalability, whereby important regions can be encoded at a higher quality while maintaining sufficient quality for the rest of the frame. The result is an improved perceived quality at the same bit rate as normal encoding, which is particularly obvious at the range of lower bit rate. However, because of the difficulties of predicting region-of-interest (ROI) accurately, there is a limited research and development of ROI-based video coding for general videos. In this paper, the phase spectrum quaternion of Fourier Transform (PQFT) method is adopted to determine the ROI. To improve the results of ROI detection, the saliency map from the PQFT is augmented with maps created from high level knowledge of factors that are known to attract human attention. Hence, maps that locate faces and emphasise the centre of the screen are used in combination with the saliency map to determine the ROI. The contribution of this paper lies on the automatic ROI detection technique for coding a low bit rate videos which include the ROI prioritisation technique to give different level of encoding qualities for multiple ROIs, and the evaluation of the proposed automatic ROI detection that is shown to have a close performance to human ROI, based on the eye fixation data.

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This paper provides an overview of the challenges faced by remote, rural and regional airports in Australia. The deregulation of airports over the past decades has resulted in local councils owning most of the rural and regional airports across Australia. The paper provides an overview of the international literature on regional airports and research directed at defining the issues faced by regional and rural airports in Australia. A survey of airport managers, regulators and local councils was undertaken across Australia to outline the challenges and stresses that regional airports are facing. Core findings indicate that the operation of rural and regional airports is under stress due to the interrelating factors of infrastructure costs, high cost of maintenance, and security infrastructure upgrades. Small airports often compete with one another to attract airlines and maintain their infrastructure advantage.

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The purpose of this paper is to provide a basis from which to start an informed and rational dialogue in Australia about voluntary euthanasia (VE) and assisted suicide (AS). It does this by seeking to chart the broad landscape of issues that can be raised as relevant to how this conduct should be regulated by the law. It is not our purpose to persuade. Rather, we have attempted to address the issues as neutrally as possible and to canvass both sides of the argument in an even-handed manner. We hope that this exercise places the reader in a position to consider the question posed by this paper: How should Australia regulate voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide? In line with the approach taken in the paper, this question does not take sides in the debate. It simply asks how VE and AS should be regulated, acknowledging that both prohibition and legalisation of such conduct involve regulation. We begin by considering the wider legal framework that governs end of life decision-making. Decisions to withhold or withdraw life-sustaining treatment that result in a person’s death can be lawful. This could be because, for example, a competent adult refuses such treatment. Alternatively, stopping or not providing treatment can be lawful when it is no longer in a person’s best interests to receive it. The law also recognises that appropriate palliative care should not attract criminal responsibility. By contrast, VE and AS are unlawful in Australia and could lead to prosecution for crimes such as murder, manslaughter or aiding and abetting suicide. But this is not to say that such conduct does not occur in practice. Indeed, there is a body of evidence that VE and AS occur in Australia, despite them being unlawful. There have been repeated efforts to change the law in this country, mainly by the minor political parties. However, apart from a brief period when VE and AS was lawful in the Northern Territory, these attempts to reform the law have been unsuccessful. The position is different in a small but increasing number of jurisdictions overseas where such conduct is lawful. The most well known is the Netherlands but there are also statutory regimes that regulate VE and/or AS in Belgium and Luxembourg in Europe, and Oregon and Washington in the United States. A feature of these legislative models is that they incorporate review or oversight processes that enable the collection of data about how the law is being used. As a result, there is a significant body of evidence that is available for consideration to assess the operation of the law in these jurisdictions and some of this is considered briefly here. Assisting a suicide, if done for selfless motives, is also legal in Switzerland, and this has resulted in what has been referred to as ‘euthanasia tourism’. This model is also considered. The paper also identifies the major arguments in favour of, and against, legalisation of VE and AS. Arguments often advanced in favour of law reform include respect for autonomy, that public opinion favours reform, and that the current law is incoherent and discriminatory. Key arguments against legalising VE and AS point to the sanctity of life, concerns about the adequacy and effectiveness of safeguards, and a ‘slippery slope’ that will allow euthanasia to occur for minors or for adults where it is not voluntary. We have also attempted to step beyond these well trodden and often rehearsed cases ‘for and against’. To this end, we have identified some ethical values that might span both sides of the debate and perhaps be the subject of wider consensus. We then outline a framework for considering the issue of how Australia should regulate VE and AS. We begin by asking whether such conduct should be criminal acts (as they presently are). If VE and AS should continue to attract criminal responsibility, the next step is to enquire whether the law should punish such conduct more or less than is presently the case, or whether the law should stay the same. If a change is favoured as to how the criminal law punishes VE and AS, options considered include sentencing reform, creating context-specific offences or developing prosecutorial guidelines for how the criminal justice system deals with these issues. If VE and AS should not be criminal acts, then questions arise as to how and when they should be permitted and regulated. Possible elements of any reform model include: ensuring decision-making is competent and voluntary; ascertaining a person’s eligibility to utilise the regime, for example, whether it depends on him or her having a terminal illness or experiencing pain and suffering; and setting out processes for how any decision must be made and evidenced. Options to bring about decriminalisation include challenging the validity of laws that make VE and AS unlawful, recognising a defence to criminal prosecution, or creating a statutory framework to regulate the practice. We conclude the paper where we started: with a call for rational and informed consideration of a difficult and sensitive issue. How should Australia regulate voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide?

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BACKGROUND The engineering profession in Australia has failed to attract young women for the last decade or so despite all the effort that have gone into promoting engineering as a preferred career choice for girls. It is a missed opportunity for the profession to flourish as a heterogeneous team. Many traditional initiatives and programs have failed to make much impact or at best incremental improvement into attracting and retaining more women in the profession. The reasons why girls and young women in most parts of the world show little interest in engineering haven't changed, despite all the efforts to address them, the issue proposed here in this paper is with the perceptions of engineering in the community and the confidence to pursue it. This gender imbalance is detrimental for the engineering profession, and hence an action-based intervention strategy was devised by the Women in Engineering Qld Chapter of Engineers Australia in 2012 to change the perceptions of school girls by redesigning the engagement strategy and key messages. As a result, the “Power of Engineering Inc” (PoE) was established as a not-for-profit organisation, and is a collaborative effort between government, schools, universities, and industry. This paper examines a case study in changing the perceptions of year 9 and 10 school girls towards an engineering career. PURPOSE To evaluate and determine the effectiveness of an intervention in changing the perceptions of year 9 and 10 school girls about engineering career options, but specifically, “What were their perceptions of engineering before today and have those perceptions changed?” DESIGN/METHOD The inaugural Power of Engineering (PoE) event was held on International Women’s Day, Thursday 8 March 2012 and was attended by 131 high school female students (year 9 and 10) and their teachers. The key message of the day was “engineering gives you the power to change the world”. A questionnaire was conducted with the participating high school female students, collecting both quantitative and qualitative data. The survey instrument has not been validated. RESULTS The key to the success of the event was as a result of collaboration between all participants involved and the connection created between government, schools, universities and industry. Of the returned surveys (109 of 131), 91% of girls would now consider a career in engineering and 57% who had not considered engineering before the day would now consider a career in engineering. Data collected found significant numbers of negative and varying perceptions about engineering careers prior to the intervention. CONCLUSIONS The evidence in this research suggests that the intervention assisted in changing the perceptions of year 9 and 10 female school students towards engineering as a career option. Whether this intervention translates into actual career selection and study enrolment is to be determined. In saying this, the evidence suggests that there is a critical and urgent need for earlier interventions prior to students selecting their subjects for year 11 and 12. This intervention could also play its part in increasing the overall pool of students engaged in STEM education.

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This paper examines the history of the IRGEE Journal in terms of its sustainable future. The development of geographical and environmental education is evaluated, as reflected from the articles published in the Journal “International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education” (IRGEE). A content analysis of all papers and forum sections which have appeared in the journal since Volume 1 Number 1 was published in 1992 has been conducted, examining the content of as many as 526 articles. The method was a content analysis, and revealed themes which have experienced an increasing or declining interest over the 18 years of publication of IRGEE (1992-2009), while other themes have remained current during this period. The main findings of this analysis are: a) the total number of articles has increased more than threefold, b) articles related to geographical education (sensu stricto) outweighed those related to environmental education, c) the themes “syllabi, textbooks, curricula” and “values, attitudes” attract the attention of researchers with increasing strength and d) emerging subjects, such as GIS and sustainability have appeared dynamically in the last years.

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Certain statistic and scientometric features of articles published in the journal “International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education” are examined in this paper, for the period 1992-2009, by applying nonparametric statistics and Shannon’s entropy (diversity) formula. The main findings of this analysis are: a) after 2004 the research priorities of researchers in geographical and environmental education seem to have changed, b) “teacher education” has been the most recurrent theme throughout these 18 years, followed by “values & attitudes” and “inquiry & problem solving” c) the themes “GIS” and “Sustainability” were the most “stable” throughout the 18 years, meaning that they maintained their ranks as publication priorities more than other themes, d) citations of IRGEE increase annually, e) the average thematic diversity of articles published during the period 1992-2009 is 82.7% of the maximum thematic diversity (very high), meaning that the Journal has the capacity to attract a wide readership for the 10 themes it has successfully covered throughout the 18 years of its publication.

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This paper discusses the findings of a research study that used semi-structured interviews to explore the views of primary school principals on inclusive education in New South Wales, Australia. Content analysis of the transcript data indicates that principals’ attitudes towards inclusive education and their success in engineering inclusive practices within their school are significantly affected by their own conception of what “inclusion” means, as well as the characteristics of the school community, and the attitudes and capacity of staff. In what follows, we present two parallel conversations that arose from the interview data to illustrate the main conceptual divisions existing between our participants’ conceptions of inclusion. First, we discuss the act of “being inclusive” which was perceived mainly as an issue of culture and pedagogy. Second, we consider the mechanics of “including,” which reflected a more instrumentalist position based on perceptions of individual student deficit, the level of support they may require and the amount of funding they can attract.

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There is global competition for engineering talent with some industries struggling to attract quality candidates. The ‘brands’ of industries and organisations are important elements in attracting talent in a competitive environment. Using brand equity and signalling theory, this paper reports a quantitative study examining factors that attract graduating engineers and technicians to engineering careers in a weak brand profile industry. The survey measures graduating engineers’ preferences for career benefits and their perceptions of the rail industry, which has identified a significant skilled labour shortfall. Knowledge of young engineers’ preferences for certain benefits and segmenting preferences can inform branding and communications strategies. The findings have implications for all industries and organisations, especially those with a weaker brand profile and issues with attracting talent.

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It is certain that there will be changes in environmental conditions across the globe as a result of climate change. Such changes will require the building of biological, human and infrastructure resilience. In some instances the building of such resilience will be insufficient to deal with extreme changes in environmental conditions and legal frameworks will be required to provide recognition and support for people dislocated because of environmental change. Such dislocation may occur internally within the country of original origin or externally into another State’s territory. International and national legal frameworks do not currently recognise or assist people displaced as a result of environmental factors including displacement occurring as a result of climate change. Legal frameworks developed to deal with this issue will need to consider the legal rights of those people displaced and the legal responsibilities of those countries required to respond to such displacement. The objective of this article is to identify the most suitable international institution to host a program addressing climate displacement. There are a number of areas of international law that are relevant to climate displacement, including refugee law, human rights law and international environmental law. These regimes, however, were not designed to protect people relocating as a result of environmental change. As such, while they indirectly may be of relevance to climate displacement, they currently do nothing to directly address this complex issue. In order to determine the most appropriate institution to address and regulate climate displacement, it is imperative to consider issues of governance. This paper seeks to examine this issue and determine whether it is preferable to place climate displacement programs into existing international legal frameworks or whether it is necessary to regulate this area in an entirely new institution specifically designed to deal with the complex and cross-cutting issues surrounding the topic. Commentators in this area have proposed three different regulatory models for addressing climate displacement. These models include: (a) Expand the definition of refugee under the Refugee Convention to encompass persons displaced by climate change; (b) Implement a new stand alone Climate Displacement Convention; and (c) Implement a Climate Displacement Protocol to the UNFCCC. This article will examine each of these proposed models against a number of criteria to determine the model that is most likely to address the needs and requirements of people displaced by climate change. It will also identify the model that is likely to be most politically acceptable and realistic for those countries likely to attract responsibilities by its implementation. In order to assess whether the rights and needs of the people to be displaced are to be met, theories of procedural, distributive and remedial justice will be used to consider the equity of the proposed schemes. In order to consider the most politically palatable and realistic scheme, reference will be made to previous state practice and compliance with existing obligations in the area. It is suggested that the criteria identified by this article should underpin any future climate displacement instrument.

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Multilevel converters, because of the benefits they attract in generating high quality output voltage, are used in several applications. Various modulation and control techniques are introduced by several researchers to control the output voltage of the multilevel converters like space vector modulation and harmonic elimination (HE) methods. Multilevel converters may have a DC link with equal or unequal DC voltages. In this study a new HE technique based on the HE method is proposed for multilevel converters with unequal DC link voltage. The DC link voltage levels are considered as additional variables for the HE method and the voltage levels are defined based on the HE results. Increasing the number of voltage levels can reduce lower order harmonic content because of the fact that more variables are created. In comparison to previous methods, this new technique has a positive effect on the output voltage quality by reducing its total harmonic distortion, which must take into consideration for some applications such as uninterruptable power supply, motor drive systems and piezoelectric transducer excitation. In order to verify the proposed modulation technique, MATLAB simulations and experimental tests are carried out for a single-phase four-level diode-clamped converter.

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Our daily lives become more and more dependent upon smartphones due to their increased capabilities. Smartphones are used in various ways from payment systems to assisting the lives of elderly or disabled people. Security threats for these devices become increasingly dangerous since there is still a lack of proper security tools for protection. Android emerges as an open smartphone platform which allows modification even on operating system level. Therefore, third-party developers have the opportunity to develop kernel-based low-level security tools which is not normal for smartphone platforms. Android quickly gained its popularity among smartphone developers and even beyond since it bases on Java on top of "open" Linux in comparison to former proprietary platforms which have very restrictive SDKs and corresponding APIs. Symbian OS for example, holding the greatest market share among all smartphone OSs, was closing critical APIs to common developers and introduced application certification. This was done since this OS was the main target for smartphone malwares in the past. In fact, more than 290 malwares designed for Symbian OS appeared from July 2004 to July 2008. Android, in turn, promises to be completely open source. Together with the Linux-based smartphone OS OpenMoko, open smartphone platforms may attract malware writers for creating malicious applications endangering the critical smartphone applications and owners� privacy. In this work, we present our current results in analyzing the security of Android smartphones with a focus on its Linux side. Our results are not limited to Android, they are also applicable to Linux-based smartphones such as OpenMoko Neo FreeRunner. Our contribution in this work is three-fold. First, we analyze android framework and the Linux-kernel to check security functionalities. We survey wellaccepted security mechanisms and tools which can increase device security. We provide descriptions on how to adopt these security tools on Android kernel, and provide their overhead analysis in terms of resource usage. As open smartphones are released and may increase their market share similar to Symbian, they may attract attention of malware writers. Therefore, our second contribution focuses on malware detection techniques at the kernel level. We test applicability of existing signature and intrusion detection methods in Android environment. We focus on monitoring events on the kernel; that is, identifying critical kernel, log file, file system and network activity events, and devising efficient mechanisms to monitor them in a resource limited environment. Our third contribution involves initial results of our malware detection mechanism basing on static function call analysis. We identified approximately 105 Executable and Linking Format (ELF) executables installed to the Linux side of Android. We perform a statistical analysis on the function calls used by these applications. The results of the analysis can be compared to newly installed applications for detecting significant differences. Additionally, certain function calls indicate malicious activity. Therefore, we present a simple decision tree for deciding the suspiciousness of the corresponding application. Our results present a first step towards detecting malicious applications on Android-based devices.

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Customer relationship marketing (CRM) initiatives are increasingly being adopted by businesses in the attempt to enhance brand loyalty and stimulate repeat purchases. The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which destination marketing organisations (DMOs) around the world have developed a visitor relationship marketing (VRM) orientation. The proposition underpinning the study is that maintaining meaningful dialogue with previous visitors in some markets would represent a more efficient use of resources than above the line advertising to attract new visitors. Importance-performance analysis was utilised to measure destination marketers’ perceptions of the efficacy of CRM initiatives, and then rate their own organisation’s performance across the same range of initiatives. A key finding was that mean importance was higher than perceived performance for every item. While the small sample limits generalisability, in general there are appears to be a lack of strategic intent by DMOs to invest in VRM.

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Our objective was to measure the prevalence of wife abuse in an urban teaching hospital family practice unit and compare this to the frequency of documentation by family physicians. A modified Conflicts Tactics Scale Questionnaire was administered to all female patients either married or common-law older than 16 years during the study period. The respective patients' charts were reviewed for documentation of wife abuse. Three hundred eighty-three charts were reviewed, and 275 surveys were completed (72% response rate). Physical and mental abuse were reported in 8% and 23%, respectively, of the respondents. Four percent of respondents had considered suicide. One percent of the charts had wife assault documented (p = 0.0001). Wife abuse is reported in at least 8% of our patients. There appear to be significant health risks to these women, including homicide, suicide, and rape. Family physician documentation of wife abuse was poor.

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Self-hypnosis was taught to 87 obstetric patients (HYP) and was not taught to 56 other patients (CNTRL), all delivered by the same family physician, in order to determine whether the use of self-hypnosis by low-risk obstetric patients leads to fewer technologic interventions during their deliveries or greater satisfaction of parturients with their delivery experience or both. The outcomes of the deliveries of these two groups were compared, and the HYP group was compared to 352 low-risk patients delivered by other family physicians at the same hospital (WCH). Questionnaires were mailed postpartum to 156 patients, all delivered by the same family physician, to determine satisfaction with delivery using the Labor and Delivery Satisfaction Index (LADSI). The hypnosis group showed a significant reduction in the number of epidurals (11.4% less than CNTRL and 17.9% less than WCH, p < 0.05) and the use of intravenous lines (18.5% less for both, p < 0.05). The number of episiotomies was significantly less in the HYP group compared to WCH (15.9%, p < 0.05) and 11.5% less when compared to CNTRL. The tear rate was not statistically different. Combined use of the intervention triad (epidural–forceps–episiotomy) was less for HYP than for CNTRL (15.8% less) and WCH (10.2% less, p < 0.05). More deliveries were done in the labor room with HYP than CNTRL (21%, p < 0.05). The second stage was shortened by 10 min (HYP vs CNTRL). Overall satisfaction of HYP and CNTRL patients was similar and generally favorable.