Gender and IT : ongoing challenges for computing and information technology education in Australian secondary education

# 1. Introduction. Exploring the gender and IT problem and possible ways forward /​ Julianne Lynch
# 2. The imagined curriculum: who studies Computing and Information Technology subjects at the senior secondary level? /​ Margaret Vickers and My Trinh Ha
# 3. A question of attention: challenges for researching the under representation of girls in Computing and Information Technology subjects /​ Leonie Rowan
# 4. The nature and purpose of Computing and Information Technology subjects in the senior secondary school curriculum in New South Wales /​ Toni Downes
# 5. The social construction of Computing and Information Technology subject subculture /​ Catherine Harris
# 6. Boy nerds, girl nerds: constituting and negotiating Computing and Information Technology and peer groups as gendered subjects in schooling /​ Kerry Robinson and Cristyn Davies
# 7. CIT teachers' cultures in a globalising world /​ Carol Reid and Jose van der Akker
# 8. Perceptions of changing pedagogies in Computing and Information Technology /​ Susanne Gannon

Girls and computing-still a way to go

Years after the introduction of computing in Australian schools, computer classrooms are still heavily dominated by male students studying subjects which have little appeal to female students, explains the author. This article looks at why girls are less likely to choose computing as a subject to study or to consider computing for a future career.

Mobile location based services

Mobility has become a key factor around the world, as the use of ubiquitous devices, including laptops, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and mobile phones, are increasingly becoming part of daily life (Steinfield, 2004). Adding mobility to computing power, and with advanced personalization of technologies, new business applications are emerging in the area of mobile communications (Jagoe, 2003). The fastest growing segment among these applications is location-based services. This article offers a brief overview of services and their supporting technologies, and provides an outlook for their future.

An evolutionary computing approach to minimize dynamic hedging error

The objective of our present paper is to derive a computationally efficient genetic pattern learning algorithm to evolutionarily derive the optimal rebalancing weights (i.e. dynamic hedge ratios) to engineer a structured financial product out of a multiasset, best-of option. The stochastic target function is formulated as an expected squared cost of hedging (tracking) error which is assumed to be partly dependent on the governing Markovian process underlying the individual asset returns and partly on
randomness i.e. pure white noise. A simple haploid genetic algorithm is advanced as an alternative numerical scheme, which is deemed to be
computationally more efficient than numerically deriving an explicit solution to the formulated optimization model. An extension to our proposed scheme is suggested by means of adapting the Genetic Algorithm parameters based on fuzzy logic controllers.

Toward pervasive computing in restaurant

In this paper, an example of pervasive computing in restaurant, a wireless web-based ordering system is presented. By using mobile devices such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) and WebPad, customers can get many benefits when making orders in restaurants. With this system, customers get faster and better services, restaurant staff cooperate more efficiently with less working mistakes, and enterprise owners thus receive more business profits. This system has multi-tiered web-based system architecture with good integration and scalability features, and is client device operating system fully independent. Details of design and implementation of this system are presented.