Creating successful cultural Brokers : the pros and cons of a community of practice approach in arts management education

Arts managers play a critical role in creating a strong, sustainable arts and cultural sector. They operate as brokers, creating programs, and, more critically, coordinating the relationships between artists, audiences, communities, governments and sponsors required to make these programs a success. Based on study of model developed for a subject in the Master of Creative Industries (Creative Production & Arts Management) at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), this paper examines the pros and cons of a “community of practice” approach in training arts management students to act as cultural brokers. It provides data on the effectiveness of a range of activities – including Position Papers, Case Studies, Masterclasses, and offline and online conversations – that can be used facilitate the peer-to-peer engagement by which students work together to build their cultural brokering skills in a community of practice. The data demonstrates that, whilst students appreciate this approach, educators must provide enough access to voices of authority – that is, to arts professionals – to establish a well-functioning community of practice, and ensure that more expert students do not become frustrated when they are unwittingly and unwillingly thrust into this role by less expert classmates. This is especially important in arts management, where classes are always diverse, due to the fact that most dedicated programs in Australia, as in the US, UK and Europe, are taught via small-scale programs at graduate level which accept applicants from a wide variety of arts and non-arts backgrounds.

Formal complaints of workplace sexual harassment lodged with Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commissions - 1 July 2009 - 31 December 2009

This report presents an analysis of quantitative data collected from the Australian Human Rights Commission, the Anti-Discrimination Commission of Queensland, the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission, the Anti-Discrimination Board of New South Wales, the Equal Opportunity Commission of South Australia, the Australian Capital Territory Human Rights Commission, the Equal Opportunity Commission Western Australia, the Northern Territory Anti-Discrimination Commission, and the Office of the Anti-Discrimination Commissioner (Tasmania) (hereafter referred to as the Commissions). The data comprise formal complaints lodged under the various federal, state and territory anti-discrimination laws in the period 1 July 2009 to 31 December 2009 where a complainant had alleged sexual harassment in the area of employment.

A framework for cost-aware process management : generation of accurate and timely management accounting cost reports

Organisations are constantly seeking efficiency improvements for their business processes in terms of time and cost. Management accounting enables reporting of detailed cost of operations for decision making purpose, although significant effort is required to gather accurate operational data. Business process management is concerned with systematically documenting, managing, automating, and optimising processes. Process mining gives valuable insight into processes through analysis of events recorded by an IT system in the form of an event log with the focus on efficient utilisation of time and resources, although its primary focus is not on cost implications. In this paper, we propose a framework to support management accounting decisions on cost control by automatically incorporating cost data with historical data from event logs for monitoring, predicting and reporting process-related costs. We also illustrate how accurate, relevant and timely management accounting style cost reports can be produced on demand by extending open-source process mining framework ProM.

Book Review : Bellanta, Melissa (2012) Larrikins : A History. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press.

This book has been painstakingly researched by a scholar whose intellectual competencies span several disciplines: history, sociology, criminology, culture, drama and film studies. It is theoretically sophisticated and yet not dense as it reads like a novel with an abundance of interesting complex characters.

Exploiting SNOMED CT concepts and relationships for clinical information retrieval : Australian e-Health Research Centre and Queensland University of Technology at the TREC 2012 Medical Track

The Australian e-Health Research Centre and Queensland University of Technology recently participated in the TREC 2012 Medical Records Track. This paper reports on our methods, results and experience using an approach that exploits the concept and inter-concept relationships defined in the SNOMED CT medical ontology. Our concept-based approach is intended to overcome specific challenges in searching medical records, namely vocabulary mismatch and granularity mismatch. Queries and documents are transformed from their term-based originals into medical concepts as defined by the SNOMED CT ontology, this is done to tackle vocabulary mismatch. In addition, we make use of the SNOMED CT parent-child `is-a' relationships between concepts to weight documents that contained concept subsumed by the query concepts; this is done to tackle the problem of granularity mismatch. Finally, we experiment with other SNOMED CT relationships besides the is-a relationship to weight concepts related to query concepts. Results show our concept-based approach performed significantly above the median in all four performance metrics. Further improvements are achieved by the incorporation of weighting subsumed concepts, overall leading to improvement above the median of 28% infAP, 10% infNDCG, 12% R-prec and 7% Prec@10. The incorporation of other relations besides is-a demonstrated mixed results, more research is required to determined which SNOMED CT relationships are best employed when weighting related concepts.

Report on the AIDS Vaccine 2008 Conference

The "AIDS Vaccine 2008" Conference was held in Cape Town, South Africa (October 13 to 16, 2008) and organized, under the aegis of the Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise, by Dr. Lynn Morris (Chair of the Conference) National Institute of Communicable Diseases; Dr. Koleka Mlisana from CAPRISA, University KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, Dr. Glenda Gray from Perinatal HIV Research Unit, University Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and Dr. Carolyn Williamson from Institute of Infectious Diseses. and Molecular Medicine, UCT, Cape Town (Co-Chairs of the Conference). Since the first AIDS Vaccine conference, organized in Paris in 2000, this was the first time it was held outside of the U.S. and Europe, and involved nearly 1,000 participants. Besides three Plenary Sessions with ten state-of-the-art plenary lectures and one Keynote Lecture given by Dr. A.S. Fauci (Director of NIAID, NIH, USA), the Conference was organized in nine oral sessions, four poster discussion groups covering a wide spectrum of scientific information relating to HIV vaccine research and development. Moreover three Symposia, two Special Sessions, one Roundtable as well as two Debates were held, the latter focusing on current controversial topics. The conference opening was memorable for a number of reasons: among these was the presence of South Africa's new Minister of Health, Barbara Hogan who, in her first speech in a major forum as a senior member of the SA Government, affirmed that HIV causes AIDS, and that the search for a vaccine is of paramount importance to SA and the rest of the world. A scientific summary of the Conference is reported in the present article, divided into four major topics: (1) vaccine concepts and design; (2) T-cell immunology and innate immunity; (3) B-cell immunology, neutralizing antibodies and mucosal immunology; and (4) clinical trials. © 2009 Landes Bioscience.

Transnational higher education programs for facilitating inter-university knowledge transfer : University of Indonesia’s experience

This paper explores the impacts and extent of knowledge transfer (KT) in an undergraduate engineering transnational program with an Australian university partner at the University of Indonesia (UI) using an inter-university KT conceptual framework (Sutrisno, Lisana, & Pillay 2012). For the purpose of this paper, the opportunity for KT in curriculum design is examined. Given the explicit nature of curriculum knowledge, assessing each partner’s curriculum was pivotal in allowing UI to enrich its own curriculum. The KT mechanism of face-to-face contact between Indonesian and Australian academics led to not only transfer of knowledge related to the curriculum of the undergraduate program but also to other cooperation beyond the transnational program in the form of joint research and joint supervision of post-graduate theses. Positive inter-university dynamics, such as trust and willingness to work together between the partners were underpinned by the presence of key actors from both sides at the earlier stages of the partnership. Retrospectively exploring the KT process in the UI’s transnational programs with its Australian partner suggests that there have been both structured and unstructured mechanisms, highlighting the ubiquitous and unbounded nature of KT between universities. While initially successful in facilitating KT, due to rapid succession of persons in charge of the program and the increasing focus on revenue generation, the useful lessons and practices unfortunately are being lost. Although the intention to use the transnational program for KT was always implied, it gradually was overlooked by newer staff members. Based on UI’s experience as the first provider of transnational program in Indonesia and other similar cases in China, seemingly transnational programs driven by short-term immediate financial return are unsuccessful in facilitating KT due to sensitivities to unfavourable economic situation. Those that remain operational and contribute to knowledge exchange between the partners apparently have genuine long-term engagement objective.

Residual Soil Properties of South East Queensland

This project sought to investigate parameters of residual soil materials located in South East Queensland (SEQ), as determined from a large number of historical site investigation records. This was undertaken to quantify material parameter variability and to assess the validity of using commonly adopted correlations to estimate "typical" soil parameters for this region. A dataset of in situ and laboratory derived residual soil parameters was constructed and analysed to identify potential correlations that related either to the entire area considered, or to specific residual soils that were derived from a common parent material. The variability of SEQ soil parameters were generally found to be greater than the results of equivalent studies that analysed transported soil dominant datasets. Noteworthy differences in material properties also became evident when residual soils weathered from different parent materials were considered independently. Large variation between the correlations developed for specific soil types was found, which highligted both heterogeneity of the studied materials and the incompatibility of generic correlations to residual soils present in SEQ. Region and parent material specific correlations that estimate shear strength from in situ penetration tests have been proposed for the various residual soil types considered.

Media and information literacy at Queensland University of Technology and in Australia

Media and Information Literacy is the focus of several teaching and research projects at Queensland University of Technology and there is particular emphasis placed on digital technologies and how they are used for communication, information use and learning in formal contexts such as schools. Research projects are currently taking place in several locations where investigators are collecting data on approaches to the use of digital media tools like cameras and editing systems, tablet computers and video games. This complements QUT’s teacher preparation courses, including preparation to implement UNESCO’s Online Course in Media and Information Literacy and Intercultural Dialogue in 2013. This work takes place in the context of projects occurring at the National level in Australia that continue to promote Media and Information Literacy.