New students, new learning, new environments in higher education : literacies in the digital age

Information literacy is developing new meanings and importance in the online age of teaching and learning in higher education. Information literacy, as a highly prized graduate attribute, is related to the development of lifelong learning capacities. Its strong re-emergence in the form of digital literacy in the context of major online developments at Deakin University is considered through four cases. In each case the reader is asked to consider how the teaching staff members have conceived critical discipline-based information and digital literacies, how these conceptions are related to desired learning outcomes, the types of digital and online environments designed to support the development of these literacies, and how each one contributes to the development of lifelong learning capacities. Information and digital literacy is enlivened through being situated in broader understandings of new generations of learners, new forms of learning and new e-supported learning environments. Educational design, evaluation, research and technology implications of these new types of digital and online-based teaching and learning environments are finally examined.

An innovative analyser for email classification based on grey list analysis

In this paper we propose a new technique of email classification based on grey list (GL) analysis of user emails. This technique is based on the analysis of output emails of an integrated model which uses multiple classifiers of statistical learning algorithms. The GL is a list of classifier/(s) output which is/are not considered as true positive (TP) and true negative (TN) but in the middle of them. Many works have been done to filter spam from legitimate emails using classification algorithm and substantial performance has been achieved with some amount of false positive (FP) tradeoffs. In the case of spam detection the FP problem is unacceptable, sometimes. The proposed technique will provide a list of output emails, called "grey list (GL)", to the analyser for making decisions about the status of these emails. It has been shown that the performance of our proposed technique for email classification is much better compare to existing systems, in order to reducing FP problems and accuracy.

Broadband : benefits and problems

The striving of nations to build a broadband-based information society is paralleled by individuals striving to improve their personal lot and by organisations seeking a competitive advantage—all supposedly to be achieved via broadband. However, the social and economic impact of broadband may be surrounded in controversies. This paper argues that these controversies need to be identified and addressed if public policy decisions about broadband are to be made with confidence. While literature on broadband abounds, it is rarely directed at the impact of broadband on social and personal issues. Rather, that literature typically focuses on broadband's economic aspects, but with poor benefit identification and measure difficulties, the findings tend to be steeped in rhetoric. Largely, what we are left with is literature on the impact of narrowband Internet. While research on the Internet abounds, its findings are typically indeterminate and often disputed. The paper works with literature on broadband and extrapolates from the literature on narrowband with its disputed impacts to identify possible impacts of broadband. In so doing it identifies a core set of controversies regarding broadband at the national, individual and organisational levels. It then calls for diversity of analysis of possible broadband outcomes. Only with such analysis will it be possible to place the likely broadband future in the context of broader national, individual and organisational aspirations.

Image featuring for retrieval of multimedia documents

The utilization of massive multimedia documents collections, such as multimedia documents in the global Internet, needs search engines which can rank using both text and image evidence. Massive size and (dynamic) nature of collection can make manual indexing prohibitively expensive in such situations. Traditional search engines utilize only text components of multimedia documents. But there are information needs, which require the utilization of image evidence. In this paper, we investigate image-feature for large and heterogeneous collections. Both the nature and complexities of information needs are key elements for an effective retrieval. Retrieval needs that depend on perceptual similarities (as found in art galleries, building architecture) require the utilization of visual cues. In such situations, the retrieval of multimedia document based on image ranking can provide higher effectiveness. Experimental results show that effectiveness of ranking based on image feature can be higher where perceptual similarities are key elements for retrieval than the retrieval effectiveness of algorithms based on text ranking algorithms

Impact of image organizations on multimedia document retrieval

In this paper we compare ranking effectiveness of heterogeneous multimedia document retrieval when different image organizations are used for formulating queries. The quality of image queries depends on the organization of images used to make queries which in turn significantly impacts retrieval precision. CBIR (content based information retrieval) needs an effective and efficient organization of images including user interface which must be part of the configuration parameters of image retrieval research.

A scalable and extensible segment-event-object-based sports video retrieval system

Sport video data is growing rapidly as a result of the maturing digital technologies that support digital video capture, faster data processing, and large storage. However, (1) semi-automatic content extraction and annotation, (2) scalable indexing model, and (3) effective retrieval and browsing, still pose the most challenging problems for maximizing the usage of large video databases. This article will present the findings from a comprehensive work that proposes a scalable and extensible sports video retrieval system with two major contributions in the area of sports video indexing and retrieval. The first contribution is a new sports video indexing model that utilizes semi-schema-based indexing scheme on top of an Object-Relationship approach. This indexing model is scalable and extensible as it enables gradual index construction which is supported by ongoing development of future content extraction algorithms. The second contribution is a set of novel queries which are based on XQuery to generate dynamic and user-oriented summaries and event structures. The proposed sports video retrieval system has been fully implemented and populated with soccer, tennis, swimming, and diving video. The system has been evaluated against 20 users to demonstrate and confirm its feasibility and benefits. The experimental sports genres were specifically selected to represent the four main categories of sports domain: period-, set-point-, time (race)-, and performance-based sports. Thus, the proposed system should be generic and robust for all types of sports.

An integrated observation network for the Gippsland Lakes, Victoria, Australia : balancing the needs of science and management

The Gippsland Lakes region in eastern Victoria is a partially flushed coastal lake system within a diverse catchment of rural and urban communities. Pressure from lakeside developments, re-occurring blue-green algal blooms, declining fisheries, sedimentation and infilling of the ocean entrance, has borne several decades of focussed studies and routine monitoring programs, along with a variety of engineering and management solutions. A recent review recommended that these disparate studies should be enhanced to formulate a coordinated monitoring network that could improve both spatial and temporal coverage, develop a capacity to trigger responsive investigations and was able to serve the needs of system management. Through a series of partnerships an integrated network was developed that comprises event and baseline monitoring of catchment loads, local meteorological forcing and an array of water quality sampling sites within the lakes system. A majority of these sites are incorporated with real-time telemetry that provides up to the minute information to stakeholders via a web-based information management system and vital operational status to technical system management.

Working with farmers for better agriculture in Timor Leste

Agricultural production in Tirnor Leste is of vital importance, both for the majority of the population who rely primarily on agricultural production for their livelihoods, but also in the broader development agenda of this new nation. The post independence lack of public agricultural extension and the destruction of much the resource base led to the current situation whereby the NGO sector is the primary provider of advice, extension and access to resources for agricultural production. The very recent move to invest once more in public agricultural extension services provides a timely point to assess the role, approach, issues and opportunities faced by NGOs. This research is based on discussions with a number of NGO personnel, both local, national and international and raises a number of questions regarding how the wide variety of organisations engage with communities, their objectives, inputs, coverage, and impacts. The discussion is framed by an analysis of the changing practices in agricultural extension and the associated role of NGOs, and questions how best the agricultural sector rnight move forward in providing appropriate support to the farmers of Timor Leste..

Visions, illusions and facts : a reflection on the partnerships between academic libraries and vendors in the new information landscape

Is the industry in chaos? How do we to meet the future information needs of the international scholarly community?

The one certainty is that forecasting is never easy. Libraries, vendors and publishers are all working in a rapidly changing environment. It is a fair prediction that there will be fewer participants and less competition in the marketplace. The potential for libraries to be locked into one vendor for access to electronic journals is real. Whether this access will be in perpetuity, no one can give an absolute guarantee. Intellectual property rights, commercial viability and communication standards are all of concern.

We've seen the vision, what's happening now? The Australian academic and research library market has an international reputation for being informed, frank and through necessity, pragmatic. When planning information access and delivery for the next two to five years we are told libraries need a reasonable indication of what is real. Vendors, more than ever, are contributing to a shared understanding amongst libraries, publishers and vendors of the priorities and concerns of different sectors of the industry.

Users' information requirements and narrative reporting : the case of Iranian companies

This paper investigates whether the narrative section of Iranian companies' annual reports satisfies the information requirements of financial analysts employed by institutional investors. Taking a group of stakeholders (i.e. financial analysts) as the sample, a questionnaire survey was conducted to identify their top three information needs from the narrative sections of company annual reports in each of three information categories: Present, Analytical and Prospective. Following this survey, a checklist was prepared to analyse whether Iranian companies are disclosing this information required by financial analysts. Overall, the results partially support stakeholder theory as there is a general lack of information flow on the part of Iranian listed companies in meeting their stakeholders' information needs.

Avatar Obama in the age of liquid celebrity

Barak Obama, orator extraordinaire, the embodiment of the American success myth, 'global' prophet of the adoring masses and multi-media auratic figure, is the leading illustration of what is the expanded nexus of celebrity, spectacle and politics in the age of what Zygmund Bauman refers to as liquid modernity or 'the era of disembedding without re-embedding' (2001, p. 89). This is the era in which a traumatic sense of fear, uncertainty and transience defines one's relationship to the nation state, and social (media) centre, as they lose their economic singularity and cultural coherency and cohesiveness in a world system ever inter-connected and driven increasingly, incessantly by supra-corporate concerns and spectacular celebrity-based presentations. In this world of 'togetherness dismantled' (Bauman 2003, p. 119), the disenfranchised individual feels they cannot meet the trans-capital intensive, show reel-like, boundaryless world on solid ground. That adoration, or a liquefied definition of it, is key to this imagined and affective communion between Obama and those who adore him, suggests that there is a terrible wanting and simultaneous waning to those who look for such rootedness and the promise of deliverance in the celebrity political figure. This is a charismatic authority figure who promises this solidity yet streams in and out of material view, unable to fix or properly propagate their communion beyond triumphant spectacularism. Their 'lightness of being' (ibid, p. 123-9) is powerfully seductive and decidedly empty because it echoes the instantaneous (instant) way in which all lives are increasingly led. I will suggest that liquid celebrity is one of the cornerstones of liquid modernity, and Barack Obama is the epitome of this 'runniness'.

A multi-filter enhanced genetic ensemble system for gene selection and sample classification of microarray data

Background: Feature selection techniques are critical to the analysis of high dimensional datasets. This is especially true in gene selection from microarray data which are commonly with extremely high feature-to-sample ratio. In addition to the essential objectives such as to reduce data noise, to reduce data redundancy, to improve sample classification accuracy, and to improve model generalization property, feature selection also helps biologists to focus on the selected genes to further validate their biological hypotheses.
Results: In this paper we describe an improved hybrid system for gene selection. It is based on a recently proposed genetic ensemble (GE) system. To enhance the generalization property of the selected genes or gene subsets and to overcome the overfitting problem of the GE system, we devised a mapping strategy to fuse the goodness information of each gene provided by multiple filtering algorithms. This information is then used for initialization and mutation operation of the genetic ensemble system.
Conclusion: We used four benchmark microarray datasets (including both binary-class and multi-class classification problems) for concept proving and model evaluation. The experimental results indicate that the proposed multi-filter enhanced genetic ensemble (MF-GE) system is able to improve sample classification accuracy, generate more compact gene subset, and converge to the selection results more quickly. The MF-GE system is very flexible as various combinations of multiple filters and classifiers can be incorporated based on the data characteristics and the user preferences.

Using internet technology within the organization : a structurational analysis of intranets

Many organizations are implementing Internet technology, specifically Word Wide Web technology, inside the organization in the form of an “organizational Internet” or irttrunet. Intranet technology can unify dispersed computer based information systems in the organization into one rich “system”. Thus, intranets can have a major impact on organizational processes, for example cross-functional information sharing and collaboration. We focus on the social aspects surrounding intranet implementation. We seek to answer how intranet implementations shape and how they are shaped by ‘social structures employed by organizational agents. We adapt structuration theory into an explanatory device to analyze inhanet implementation and we apply it to four cases. We conclude that, intranets are initially more shaped by, rather than shaping social structures, but that this may change over time. The following learning points are condensed: Firstly, intranets are socially constructed and implementers need to be cautious when seeking to transplanting Web technology into an organizational context. Secondly, intranets typically evolve in sophistication over time. Finally, institutionalization is isolated as the key challenge in intranet implementation.

Mixed methods evaluation research for a mental health screening and referral clinical pathway

Rationale: This study is an exemplar of mixed method evaluation research for development of a clinical pathway.

Aim: To develop and evaluate an evidence-based, feasible mental health screening and referral clinical pathway for Department of Veterans’ Affairs-funded community nursing care of war veterans and war widows in the Australian context.

Methods: Mixed methods were applied to formulate and clinically evaluate an appropriate pathway. The pathway was applied at urban and rural sites for the nursing care of 97 war veteran and war widow clients. Evaluative data were collected from clients, their informal carers, community nurses, and general practitioners. Chart auditing and pre-post measures were undertaken. Collaboration occurred with an interdisciplinary design team.

Results: The final modified six-page pathway includes use of validated screening tools (Kessler Psychological Distress Scale [K10]) and Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test, appropriate referral information, directions for support and health-promoting education, and evidence-based guidelines. Implications for Practice: The clinical pathway is a useful, tested, evidence-based guide for generalist community nurses to identify and suitably respond to common mental healthcare needs of war veterans and war widows. The pathway provides outcomes acceptable to clients and their carers, nurses and doctors.

Conclusions: This study provides an evaluated clinical pathway for generalist community nurses to screen for mental health difficulties, make appropriate referrals as required and to support war veteran and war widow clients. However, the study also shows how research can be used to develop and evaluate
practical, evidence-based clinical pathways.