Procuring Sydney’s Olympic Stadium : a world class event?

This paper describes and analyses the procurement processes employed in delivering the Sydney Olympic Stadium – arguably the most significant stadia project in the region today. This current high profile project is discussed in terms of a case study into the procurement processes used. Interviews, personal site visits and questionnaires were used to obtain information on the procurement processes used and comments on their application to the project. The alternative procurement process used on this project—Design and Construction within a Build, Own, Operate and Transfer (BOOT) project—is likely to impact on the construction industry as a whole. Already other projects and sectors are following this lead. Based on a series of on-site interviews and questionnaires, a series of benefits and drawbacks to this procurement strategy are provided.The Olympic Stadium project has also been further analysed during construction through a Degree of Interaction framework to determine anticipated project success. This analysis investigates project interaction and user satisfaction to provide a comparable rating. A series of questionnaires were used to collect data to calculate the Degree of Interaction and User Satisfaction ratings.

Using text-spotting to query the world

The world we live in is well labeled for the benefit of humans but to date robots have made little use of this resource. In this paper we describe a system that allows robots to read and interpret visible text and use it to understand the content of the scene. We use a generative probabilistic model that explains spotted text in terms of arbitrary search terms. This allows the robot to understand the underlying function of the scene it is looking at, such as whether it is a bank or a restaurant. We describe the text spotting engine at the heart of our system that is able to detect and parse wild text in images, and the generative model, and present results from images obtained with a robot in a busy city setting.

Industry school partnerships : real world learning through the Gateway Schools Projects

In the last decade, a gradual but significant shift in education has taken place. Schools have transformed from hermetically sealed, impermeable bureaucracies to dynamic and flexible organisations characterised by openness to local communities and connectedness to global issues and cultures. They are also more responsive to the aspirations of students and parents. A central feature of what Christian Maroy (2009) has described as the post bureaucratic era of education has been the relationships formed between schools and other organisations through formalised partnerships. Partnerships have been a significant feature of schooling in Queensland since the 1980s when schools developed Vocational Education Programs (VET) providing alternative pathways from schooling to post school training or employment. However, partnerships that have emerged in recent times have been more structured in their organisation and more targeted in terms of the outcomes they aim to achieve. Examples here have included Queensland’s District Youth Achievement plans that linked schools, business, industry bodies, training organisations and community groups to improve transition outcomes, particularly for young people at risk in their transitions from school to post-school life.

Service-learning within higher education : rhizomatic interconnections between university and the real world

This paper discusses Service-learning within an Australian higher education context as pedagogy to teach about inclusive education. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) model of the rhizome, this study conceptualises pre-service teachers’ learning experiences as multiple, hydra and continuous. Data from reflection logs of pre-service teachers highlight how the learning experience allowed them to gain insights in knowledge as socially just, ethical and inclusive. The paper concludes by arguing the need to consider Service-learning as integral to university education for pre-service teachers.

Facilitating learning in a real time strategy computer game

The aim of this project was to implement a just-in-time hints help system into a real time strategy (RTS) computer game that would deliver information to the user at the time that it would be of the most benefit. The goal of this help system is to improve the user’s learning in terms of their rate of learning, retention and avoidance of stagnation. The first stage of this project was implementing a computer game to incorporate four different types of skill that the user must acquire, namely motor, perceptual, declarative knowledge and strategic. Subsequently, the just-in-time hints help system was incorporated into the game to assess the user’s knowledge and deliver hints accordingly. The final stage of the project was to test the effectiveness of this help system by conducting two phases of testing. The goal of this testing was to demonstrate an increase in the user’s assessment of the helpfulness of the system from phase one to phase two. The results of this testing showed that there was no significant difference in the user’s responses in the two phases. However, when the results were analysed with respect to several categories of hints that were identified, it became apparent that patterns in the data were beginning to emerge. The conclusions of the project were that further testing with a larger sample size would be required to provide more reliable results and that factors such as the user’s skill level and different types of goals should be taken into account.

Teaching new dogs old tricks. How the move to 24/7 interactive, integrated multimedia, multi-platform news and feature delivery is not really changing the skills employers demand of graduates

The journalism revolution is upon us. In a world where we are constantly being told that everyone can be a publisher and challenges are emerging from bloggers, Twitterers and podcasters, journalism educators are inevitably reassessing what skills we now need to teach to keep our graduates ahead of the game. QUT this year tackled that question head-on as a curriculum review and program restructure resulted in a greater emphasis on online journalism. The author spent a week in the online newsrooms of each of two of the major players – ABC online news and thecouriermail.com to watch, listen and interview some of the key players. This, in addition to interviews with industry leaders from Fairfax and news.com, lead to the conclusion that while there are some new skills involved in new media much of what the industry is demanding is in fact good old fashioned journalism. Themes of good spelling, grammar, accuracy and writing skills and a nose for news recurred when industry players were asked what it was that they would like to see in new graduates. While speed was cited as one of the big attributes needed in online journalism, the conclusion of many of the players was that the skills of a good down-table sub or a journalist working for wire service were not unlike those most used in online newsrooms.

Self-defence against terrorism in the post 9/11 world

In 1986 the then United States Secretary of State George Shultz asserted that: It is absurd to argue that international law prohibits us from capturing terrorists in international waters or airspace; from attacking them on the soil of other nations, even for the purpose of rescuing hostages; or from using force against states that support, train and harbor terrorists or guerrillas. At that time the United States’ claim of a right to use military force in self-defence against terrorism2 received little support from other states.3 The predominant view then was that terrorist attacks committed by private or non-state actors were a form of criminal activity to be combated through domestic and international criminal justice mechanisms. The notion that such terrorist acts should be treated as ‘armed attacks’ triggering a victim state’s right of self-defence was not accepted by the majority of states. To suggest, as Shultz had done, that a state not directly responsible for terrorist acts could have its territorial integrity violated by military action targeting terrorists located within that state, was a controversial proposition in 1986. However, some fifteen years later, when the United States and a coalition of allies launched a military campaign in Afghanistan following the 11 September 2001 (hereafter ‘9/11’) terrorist attacks, there was virtually unanimous international support for the use of force.

Swell : a feature-length screenplay set in the world of Australian surfing, and an accompanying exegesis on three-act structure

Despite many arguments to the contrary, the three-act story structure, as propounded and refined by Hollywood continues to dominate the blockbuster and independent film markets. Recent successes in post-modern cinema could indicate new directions and opportunities for low-budget national cinemas.

Legal ethics in a post-Westphalian world : building the international rule of law and otehr tasks

The emergence of strong sovereign states after the Treaty of Westphalia turned two of the most cosmopolitan professions (law and arms) into two of the least cosmopolitan. Sovereign states determined the content of the law within their borders – including which, if any, ecclesiastical law was to be applied; what form of economic regulation was adopted; and what, if any, international law applied. Similarly, states sought to ensure that all military force was at their disposal in national armies. The erosion of sovereignty in a post-Westphalian world may significantly reverse these processes. The erosion of sovereignty is likely to have profound consequences for the legal profession and the ethics of how, and for what ends, it is practised. Lawyers have played a major role in the civilization of sovereign states through the articulation and institutionalisation of key governance values – starting with the rule of law. An increasingly global profession must take on similar tasks. The same could be said of the military. This essay will review the concept of an international rule of law and its relationship to domestic conceptions and outline the task of building the international rule of law and the role that lawyers can and should play in it.

48 Hour Game Making Challenge - In Progress [Four Episodes]

Statement: Jams, Jelly Beans and the Fruits of Passion Let us search, instead, for an epistemology of practice implicit in the artistic, intuitive processes which some practitioners do bring to situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and value conflict. (Schön 1983, p40) Game On was born out of the idea of creative community; finding, networking, supporting and inspiring the people behind the face of an industry, those in the mist of the machine and those intending to join. We understood this moment to be a pivotal opportunity to nurture a new emerging form of game making, in an era of change, where the old industry models were proving to be unsustainable. As soon as we started putting people into a room under pressure, to make something in 48hrs, a whole pile of evolutionary creative responses emerged. People refashioned their craft in a moment of intense creativity that demanded different ways of working, an adaptive approach to the craft of making games – small – fast – indie. An event like the 48hrs forces participants’ attention on the process as much as the outcome. As one game industry professional taking part in a challenge for the first time observed: there are three paths in the genesis from idea to finished work: the path that focuses on mechanics; the path that focuses on team structure and roles and the path that focuses on the idea, the spirit – and the more successful teams need to put the spirit of the work first and foremost. The spirit drives the adaptation, it becomes improvisation. As Schön says: “Improvisation consists on varying, combining and recombining a set of figures within the schema which bounds and gives coherence to the performance.” (1983, p55). This improvisational approach is all about those making the games: the people and the principles of their creative process. This documentation evidences the intensity of their passion, determination and the shit that they are prepared to put themselves through to achieve their goal – to win a cup full of jellybeans and make a working game in 48hrs. 48hr is a project where, on all levels, analogue meets digital. This concept was further explored through the documentation process. This set of four videos were created by Cameron Owen on the fly during the challenge using both the iphone video camera and editing software in order to be available with immediacy and allow the event audience to share the experience - and perhaps to give some insights into the creative process exposed by the 48 hour challenge. ____________________________ Schön, D. A. 1983, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, Basic Books, New York

Biomashups: the new world of exploratory bioinformatics?

Bioinformatics is dominated by online databases and sophisticated web-accessible tools. As such, it is ideally placed to benefit from the rapid, purpose specific combination of services achievable via web mashups. The recent introduction of a number of sophisticated frameworks has greatly simplified the mashup creation process, making them accessible to scientists with limited programming expertise. In this paper we investigate the feasibility of mashups as a new approach to bioinformatic experimentation, focusing on an exploratory niche between interactive web usage and robust workflows, and attempting to identify the range of computations for which mashups may be employed. While we treat each of the major frameworks, we illustrate the ideas with a series of examples developed under the Popfly framework

World Ethic Forum Conference Proceedings

World Ethics Forum conference proceedings : the joint conference of The International Institute for Public Ethics (IIPE) and The World Bank : leadership, ethics and integrity in public life : 9-11 April 2006, Keble College, University of Oxford UK /

Hybrid-Game Strategies for multi-objective design optimization in engineering

A number of Game Strategies (GS) have been developed in past decades. They have been used in the fields of economics, engineering, computer science and biology due to their efficiency in solving design optimization problems. In addition, research in multi-objective (MO) and multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) has focused on developing robust and efficient optimization methods to produce a set of high quality solutions with low computational cost. In this paper, two optimization techniques are considered; the first optimization method uses multi-fidelity hierarchical Pareto optimality. The second optimization method uses the combination of two Game Strategies; Nash-equilibrium and Pareto optimality. The paper shows how Game Strategies can be hybridised and coupled to Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEA) to accelerate convergence speed and to produce a set of high quality solutions. Numerical results obtained from both optimization methods are compared in terms of computational expense and model quality. The benefits of using Hybrid-Game Strategies are clearly demonstrated