An IT Bachelor degree using modern technologies to illustrate core concepts and principles and building generic skills

Information Technology (IT) changes very quickly and influences business, industry and the public in an enormous manner. Outsourcing of IT jobs to cheaper overseas labor and globalization of IT companies become a common practice. Graduates of IT university courses must be well prepared to address the needs and expectations of business, industry and every day life. Many factors in an Information Technology curriculum influence graduates’ professional preparation and image. The most important of them is to reflect technology change, the current state of knowledge of computing, business and industry demands and students’ expectations. The aim of our project was to develop a new Bachelor of IT curriculum that satisfies these requirements. In this report we concentrate our attention on two critical aspects of IT curriculum content, the modern technologies to be used to illustrate basic concepts and principles of computing, and the generic skills that each graduate is expected to acquire to get a job in Australia.

The core of the global warming problem: energy

From the thermodynamic point of view, the global warming problem is an ''energy balance'' problem. The heat (energy) accumulation in the earth and its atmosphere is the cause of the global warming. This accumulation is mainly due to the imbalance of (solar) energy reaching and the energy leaving the earth, caused by ''greenhouse effect'' in which the CO₂ and other greenhouse gases play a critical role; so that balance of the energy entering and leaving the earth should be the key to solve the problem. Currently in the battle of tackling the global warming, we mainly focus on the development of CO₂-related measures, i.e., emission reduction, CO₂ sequestration, and CO₂ recycle technologies. It is right in technical aspect, because they are attempting thinner the CO₂ ''blanket'' around the earth. However, ''Energy'' that is the core of the problem has been overlooked, at least in management/policy aspect. This paper is proposing an ''Energy Credit'' i.e., the energy measure concept as an alternative to the ''CO₂ credit'' that is currently in place in the proposed emission trading scheme. The proposed energy credit concept has the advantages such as covering broad activities related to the global warming and not just direct emissions. Three examples are given in the paper to demonstrate the concept of the energy measure and its advantages over the CO₂ credit concept.

Performance of ventilated hollow core concrete panel systems in Australia

Performance of advanced fabric energy storage systems has not been reported for Australian conditions. The influence pf slab thickness and air flow rate on the annual thermal load, and maximum heating and cooling demands for a typical office module using a ventilated hollow core concrete slab system has been investigated by simulation. Performance results for Melbourne are presented and comments made on other locations.

Core affect and subjective wellbeing: a rebuttal to Moum and Land

This paper is a rebuttal to the reviews of Moum and Land. Publication has been facilitated by Journal policy (see Instructions to authors ‘Procedure when the authors and reviewers disagree’ on the Journal website) which details the procedure to be followed in the case of disputed manuscripts. Our reply is in two parts. The first concerns issues of theory and the second issues of methodology. Each point of critique raised by the reviewers has been answered and shown either to be false or irrelevant. We contend that our original conclusion still stands. Subjective wellbeing is dominated by Core Affect.

Core competencies in information management education

Core competencies have long been discussed and developed in the literature of library science education and information systems education. However, for information management, a blending of these two disciplines, there has been much less discussion of core competencies. The purpose of this paper is to consolidate the sparse literature on information management educational competencies and to suggest a set of core competencies and educational outcomes that might be applied to curricula in both developed and developing countries.

Instructor's resource guide to accompany 'Management : core concepts & skills'

Prepared by Andrew Creed (Deakin University), this useful resource includes an introductory statement or question tp stimulate thought about topic, chapter learning objectives, chapter outline, chapter summary and teaching notes (including enhancements such as inserted activities for use in lectures/class). Responses for text questions including critical thinking, review, analysis and case study questions and additional class exercises.

Longitudinal study of Consumer Price Index (CPI) trends in core and non-core foods in Australia

Objective: This study examined trends in the price of healthy and less-healthy foods from 1989 to 2007 using the Australian Consumer Price Index (CPI).

Methods: CPI food expenditure classes were classified as 'core' or 'non-core'. Trends in the CPI were analysed to examine the rise in prices of core compared with non-core foods.

Results: On average, the CPI for core foods has risen at a slightly higher, though not statistically significant, rate than non-core foods. Furthermore, selected groupings reveal interesting patterns. 'Bread' has risen in price significantly more than 'cakes and biscuits', and 'milk' has risen in price significantly more than 'soft drinks, waters and juices'.

Conclusions and implications: This investigation of food price trends reveals notable differences between core and non-core foods. This should be investigated further to determine the extent to which this contributes to the higher prevalence of diet-related diseases in low socio-economic groups.

Multi-core security defense system (MSDS)

Today's security program developers are not only facing an uphill battle of developing and implementing. But now have to take into consideration, the emergence of next generation of multi-core system, and its effect on security application design. In our previous work, we developed a framework called bodyguard. The objective of this framework was to help security software developers, shift from their use of serialized paradigm, to a multi-core paradigm. Working within this paradigm, we developed a security bodyguard system called Farmer. This abstract framework placed particular applications into categories, like security or multi-media, which were ran on separate core processors within the multi-core system. With further analysis of the bodyguard paradigm, we found that this paradigm was suitable to be used in other computer science areas, such as spam filtering and multi-media. In this paper, we update our research work within the bodyguard paradigm, and showed a marked improvement of 110% speedup performance with an average cost of 1.5 ms.

Multi-core Defense System (MSDS) for protecting computer infrastructure against DDoS attacks

Distributed Denial of Service attacks is one of the most challenging areas to deal with in Security. Not only do security managers have to deal with flood and vulnerability attacks. They also have to consider whether they are from legitimate or malicious attackers. In our previous work we developed a framework called bodyguard, which is to help security software developers from the current serialized paradigm, to a multi-core paradigm. In this paper, we update our research work by moving our bodyguard paradigm, into our new Ubiquitous Multi-Core Framework. From this shift, we show a marked improvement from our previous result of 20% to 110% speedup performance with an average cost of 1.5 ms. We also conducted a second series of experiments, which we trained up Neural Network, and tested it against actual DDoS attack traffic. From these experiments, we were able to achieve an average of 93.36%, of this attack traffic.