Person-Centred Approaches to Private Housing for People with Disability : Impediments, Difficulties and Opportunities

Objective The main objective of the project was to explore the barriers and obstacles impeding a person-centred approach to planning and private housing for people with disability. Method Methodologically, the project involved explanation building using a multiple case study approach supported by a contextual study. It focussed initially on three organisations and their attempts to integrate innovative and what they regarded as person-centred models of housing into the private housing market for people with disability. It also included a fourth case highlighting the experiences of individuals with disability in accessing suitable and affordable housing. Results Using an ecological framework, the project found that: • Challenges exist within systems (such as the macro cultural, economic, regulatory systems through to local community, family and intra personal systems) as well as with interaction between systems • Reaching across systems is a key role for organisations and individuals but is very challenging with distance from the individual as well as from the policy/funding/service systems being a key aspect of the nature and extent by which they are challenged • In the case of housing for people with disability a ‘disability space’ is assumed and maintained disparately within each system and is separate from the ‘mainstream space’ with the established policy, legal, funding structures making it difficult to move between the two spaces. Conclusions Based on these findings, the project makes recommendations for government, community organisations, the housing industry, people with disability and their families and support networks, as well as for future research. An overarching recommendation is the need to address housing stock availability and suitability by adopting a mainstream approach rather than a disability-first/disability-specific approach.

Fashion Thinking : Creative Approaches to the Design Process, F. Dieffenbacher (2013)

Fashion Thinking: Creative Approaches to the Design Process, F. Dieffenbacher (2013) London: AVA, 224 pp., ISBN: 9782940411719, p/bk, $79.99

Compositional data analysis (CoDA) approaches to distance in information retrieval

Many techniques in information retrieval produce counts from a sample, and it is common to analyse these counts as proportions of the whole - term frequencies are a familiar example. Proportions carry only relative information and are not free to vary independently of one another: for the proportion of one term to increase, one or more others must decrease. These constraints are hallmarks of compositional data. While there has long been discussion in other fields of how such data should be analysed, to our knowledge, Compositional Data Analysis (CoDA) has not been considered in IR. In this work we explore compositional data in IR through the lens of distance measures, and demonstrate that common measures, naïve to compositions, have some undesirable properties which can be avoided with composition-aware measures. As a practical example, these measures are shown to improve clustering. Copyright 2014 ACM.

Class participation as a learning and assessment strategy in law : facilitating students’ engagement, skills development and deep learning

Assessment has widely been described as being ‘at the centre of the student experience’. It would be difficult to conceive of the modern teaching university without it. Assessment is accepted as one of the most important tools that an educator can deploy to influence both what and how students learn. Evidence suggests that how students allocate time and effort to tasks and to developing an understanding of the syllabus is affected by the method of assessment utilised and the weighting it is given. This is particularly significant in law schools where law students may be more preoccupied with achieving high grades in all courses than their counterparts from other disciplines. However, well-designed assessment can be seen as more than this. It can be a vehicle for encouraging students to learn and engage more broadly than with the minimums required to complete the assessment activity. In that sense assessment need not merely ‘drive’ learning, but can instead act as a catalyst for further learning beyond what a student had anticipated. In this article we reconsider the potential roles and benefits in legal education of a form of interactive classroom learning we term assessable class participation (‘ACP’), both as part of a pedagogy grounded in assessment and learning theory, and as a platform for developing broader autonomous approaches to learning amongst students. We also consider some of the barriers students can face in ACP and the ways in which teacher approaches to ACP can positively affect the socio-emotional climates in classrooms and thus reduce those barriers. We argue that the way in which a teacher facilitates ACP is critical to the ability to develop positive emotional and learning outcomes for law students, and for teachers themselves.

Transdisciplinary approaches to urban computing

The research field of urban computing – defined as “the integration of computing, sensing, and actuation technologies into everyday urban settings and lifestyles” – considers the design and use of ubiquitous computing technology in public and shared urban environments. Its impact on cities, buildings, and spaces evokes innumerable kinds of change. Embedded into our everyday lived environments, urban computing technologies have the potential to alter the meaning of physical space, and affect the activities performed in those spaces. This paper starts a multi-themed discussion of various aspects that make up the, at times, messy and certainly transdisciplinary field of urban computing and urban informatics.

Exploring the usefulness of structural-functional approaches to systematically assess the functionality of governance arrangements for natural resource management planning in two Australian case studies

This research developed and applied an evaluative framework to analyse multiple scales of decision-making for environmental management planning. It is the first exploration of the sociological theory of structural-functionalism and its usefulness to support evidence based decision-making in a planning context. The framework was applied to analyse decision-making in Queensland's Cape York Peninsula and Wet Tropics regions.

A tale of two solvers: Eager and lazy approaches to bit-vectors

The standard method for deciding bit-vector constraints is via eager reduction to propositional logic. This is usually done after first applying powerful rewrite techniques. While often efficient in practice, this method does not scale on problems for which top-level rewrites cannot reduce the problem size sufficiently. A lazy solver can target such problems by doing many satisfiability checks, each of which only reasons about a small subset of the problem. In addition, the lazy approach enables a wide range of optimization techniques that are not available to the eager approach. In this paper we describe the architecture and features of our lazy solver (LBV). We provide a comparative analysis of the eager and lazy approaches, and show how they are complementary in terms of the types of problems they can efficiently solve. For this reason, we propose a portfolio approach that runs a lazy and eager solver in parallel. Our empirical evaluation shows that the lazy solver can solve problems none of the eager solvers can and that the portfolio solver outperforms other solvers both in terms of total number of problems solved and the time taken to solve them.

Prostitution Ideology and Trafficking Policy: The Impact of Political Approaches to Domestic Sex Work on Human Trafficking Policy in Australia and the United States

Debates over the legitimacy and legality of prostitution have characterised human trafficking discourse for the last two decades. This article identifies the extent to which competing perspectives concerning the legitimacy of prostitution have influenced anti-trafficking policy in Australia and the United States, and argues that each nation-state’s approach to domestic sex work has influenced trafficking legislation. The legal status of prostitution in each country, and feminist influences on prostitution law reform, have had a significant impact on the nature of the legislation adopted.

Is Merit on the Agenda? Approaches to Recruitment and Promotion in Australian Organisations

Employment on the basis of merit is the foundation of Australia’s equal opportunity legislation, beginning with the Affirmative Action (Equal Opportunity for Women) Act 1986, and continuing through the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Act 1999 to the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012, all of which require organisations with more than 100 employees to produce an organisational program promoting employment equity for women (WGEA 2014a; Strachan, Burgess & Henderson 2007). The issue of merit was seen as critically important to the objectives of the original 1986 Act and the Affirmative Action Agency produced two monographs in 1988 written by Clare Burton: Redefining Merit (Burton 1988a) and Gender Bias in Job Evaluation (Burton 1988b) which provided practical advice. Added to this, in 1987 the Australian Government Publishing Service published Women’s Worth: Pay Equity and Job Evaluation in Australia (Burton, Hag & Thompson 1987). The equity programs set up under the 1986 legislation aimed to ‘eliminate discriminatory employment practices and to promote equal employment opportunities for women’ and this was ‘usually understood to mean that the merit principle forms the basis of appointment to positions and for promotion’ (Burton 1988a, p. 1).

Approaches to curriculum development in Vietnamese higher education: A case study

This research used a case study approach to examine curriculum understandings and the processes of curriculum development at a Vietnamese university. The study proposes a participatory model for curriculum development contextualized for Vietnamese higher education. The study found that the curriculum is understood in diverse and sometimes conflicting ways by students, academics and administrative staff, and is developed in a hierarchical manner. Hence, the participatory model incorporates recommendations for effective practices of curriculum development at different levels within Vietnamese universities.

Investigating the effectiveness of an ecological approach to learning design in a first year mathematics for engineering unit

This paper reports on the results of a project aimed at creating a research-informed, pedagogically reliable, technology-enhanced learning and teaching environment that would foster engagement with learning. A first-year mathematics for engineering unit offered at a large, metropolitan Australian university provides the context for this research. As part of the project, the unit was redesigned using a framework that employed flexible, modular, connected e-learning and teaching experiences. The researchers, interested in an ecological perspective on educational processes, grounded the redesign principles in probabilistic learning design (Kirschner et al., 2004). The effectiveness of the redesigned environment was assessed through the lens of the notion of affordance (Gibson, 1977,1979, Greeno, 1994, Good, 2007). A qualitative analysis of the questionnaire distributed to students at the end of the teaching period provided insight into factors impacting on the successful creation of an environment that encourages complex, multidimensional and multilayered interactions conducive to learning.

Resampling-based approaches to study variation in morphological modularity

Modularity has been suggested to be connected to evolvability because a higher degree of independence among parts allows them to evolve as separate units. Recently, the Escoufier RV coefficient has been proposed as a measure of the degree of integration between modules in multivariate morphometric datasets. However, it has been shown, using randomly simulated datasets, that the value of the RV coefficient depends on sample size. Also, so far there is no statistical test for the difference in the RV coefficient between a priori defined groups of observations. Here, we (1), using a rarefaction analysis, show that the value of the RV coefficient depends on sample size also in real geometric morphometric datasets; (2) propose a permutation procedure to test for the difference in the RV coefficient between a priori defined groups of observations; (3) show, through simulations, that such a permutation procedure has an appropriate Type I error; (4) suggest that a rarefaction procedure could be used to obtain sample-size-corrected values of the RV coefficient; and (5) propose a nearest-neighbor procedure that could be used when studying the variation of modularity in geographic space. The approaches outlined here, readily extendable to non-morphometric datasets, allow study of the variation in the degree of integration between a priori defined modules. A Java application – that will allow performance of the proposed test using a software with graphical user interface – has also been developed and is available at the Morphometrics at Stony Brook Web page (http://life.bio.sunysb.edu/morph/).

The use of hand-held mobile devices as aids to learning within flexible learning spaces in tertiary Information Technology classes

Mobile devices are very popular among tertiary student populations. This study looks at student use of hand-held mobile devices within the context of a first year programming unit. This research sought for ways in which an educational app on these devices could be successfully integrated into such a class's learning.

Introduction to "Learning Chinese as a Heritage Language : An Australia Perspective"

The book grapples with the complex entanglement of identity construction, language choice, cultural heritage, and social orders. Specifically, the book investigates how Chinese Australians negotiate their Chineseness and capitalise on resources through learning Chinese as a heritage language in Australia and beyond. Though the book is concerned with Chinese Australians, knowledge built and lessons learned can provide insight into other multicultural settings where people of Chinese descent are becoming increasingly prominent in representing the cultural and linguistic diversity of the society, and more recently, in contributing to the economic dynamics of the society. In addition, the focus on the potholes and distractions as well as the benefits and gains of heritage language learning is not restricted to Chinese diaspora, but relevant to ethnic minority individuals and communities elsewhere.