The impact of distributional preferences on (experimental) markets for expert services

Theory predicts that efficiency prevails on credence goods markets if customers are able to verify which quality they receive from an expert seller. In a series of experiments with endogenous prices we observe that verifiability fails to result in efficient provision behaviour and leads to very similar results as a setting without verifiability. Some sellers always provide appropriate treatment even if own money maximization calls for over- or undertreatment. Overall our endogenous-price-results suggests that both inequality aversion and a taste for efficiency play an important role for experts’ provision behaviour. We contrast the implications of those two motivations theoretically and discriminate between them empirically using a fixed-price design. We then classify experimental experts according to their provision behaviour.

Book review : "Community engagement in contemporary legal education : Pro Bono, Clinical legal education and services learning"

The result of a forum on community engagement held in November 2008 at Bond University, Community Engagement in Contemporary Legal Education is a compilation of papers presented at the forum by academics and professionals throughout Australia. Although found initially to be a topic of legal interest, it was not until the reviewer came across the Council of Australian Law Deans (CALD) “Standards for Australian Law Schools” (adopted 17 November 20093) then the full importance and potential of this book was revealed. Clause 2.2.4 of the CALD Standards recognises the importance of “experiential learning opportunities” for law students and cites examples such as clinical programs, internships, practical experience and pro-bono work. Clause 2.3.3 acknowledges the need to develop professional ethics and again cites pro-bono obligations as an example. Clause 9.6.2 encourages interaction of law schools with the profession and the community and again, pro-bono community service is identified as one method of doing so. Yet nowhere in the document are there any uniform standards or binding obligations that law schools must commit to. In the current climate where the importance of practical experience is continually emphasised and student numbers exceed the number of available paid legal positions, there should be more focus on the details of how these commitments should be converted to be included in a law school’s curriculum.

Epidemiology

The aim of this chapter is to provide you with a basic understanding of epidemiology, and to introduce you to some of the epidemiological concepts and methods used by researchers and practitioners working in public health. It is hoped that you will recognise how the principles and practice of epidemiology help to provide information and insights that can be used to achieve better health outcomes for all. Epidemiology is fundamental to preventive medicine and public health policy. Rather than examine health and illness on an individual level, as clinicians do, epidemiologists focus on communities and population health issues. The word epidemiology is derived from the Greek epi (on, upon), demos (the people) and logos (the study of). Epidemiology, then, is the study of that which falls upon the people. Its aims are to describe health-related states or events, and through systematic examination of the available information, attempt to determine their causes. The ultimate goal is to contribute to prevention of disease and disability and to delay mortality. The primary question of epidemiology is: why do certain diseases affect particular population groups? Drawing upon statistics, the social and behavioural sciences, the biological sciences and medicine, epidemiologists collect and interpret information to assist in the prevention of new cases of disease, eradicate existing disease and prolong the lives of people who have disease.

Coordinated research support services at Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) is a large multidisciplinary university located in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. QUT is increasing its research focus and is developing its research support services. It has adopted a model of collaboration between the Library, High Performance Computing and Research Support (HPC) and more broadly with Information Technology Services (ITS). Research support services provided by the Library include the provision of information resources and discovery services, bibliographic management software, assistance with publishing (publishing strategies, identifying high impact journals, dealing with publishers and the peer review process), citation analysis and calculating authors’ H Index. Research data management services are being developed by the Library and HPC working in collaboration. The HPC group within ITS supports research computing infrastructure, research development and engagement activities, researcher consultation, high speed computation and data storage systems , 2D/ 3D (immersive) visualisation tools, parallelisation and optimization of research codes, statistics/ data modeling training and support (both qualitative and quantitative) and support for the university’s central Access Grid collaboration facility. Development and engagement activities include participation in research grants and papers, student supervision and internships and the sponsorship, incubation and adoption of new computing technologies for research. ITS also provides other services that support research including ICT training, research infrastructure (networking, data storage, federated access and authorization, virtualization) and corporate systems for research administration. Seminars and workshops are offered to increase awareness and uptake of new and existing services. A series of online surveys on eResearch practices and skills and a number of focus groups was conducted to better inform the development of research support services. Progress towards the provision of research support is described within the context organizational frameworks; resourcing; infrastructure; integration; collaboration; change management; engagement; awareness and skills; new services; and leadership. Challenges to be addressed include the need to redeploy existing operational resources toward new research support services, supporting a rapidly growing research profile across the university, the growing need for the use and support of IT in research programs, finding capacity to address the diverse research support needs across the disciplines, operationalising new research support services following their implementation in project mode, embedding new specialist staff roles, cross-skilling Liaison Librarians, and ensuring continued collaboration between stakeholders.

Combining the parts to make the whole : integrated child and family services in Queensland

Over the past decade, the promotion of 'integrated child and family services' has emerged as a strong and consistent theme within Australian early childhood policy. Fuelling this trend is the belief that integrated service provision is more responsive to holistic family needs, offering better support to parents and thereby promoting better outcomes for young children. Adding further strength is the prevention and early intervention literature, and suggested social and economic benefits of 'effective' early years services and supports. States and territories are introducing new integrated child and family service models and Reflections is continuing to profile these. In this edition, we look at directions and new service models in Queensland, in particular, the new Early Years Centre service model.

Promoting child protection : early childhood education and care services playing their part

Over recent years, there has been a shift in government social policy in Australia toward interest and investment in family support, prevention and early intervention. Central to this new approach to supporting families and promoting better outcomes for children is the development of a continuum of services able to respond to different and changing family needs. This continuum or integrated service system seeks to better connect key human services, such as health, child care, education and family support. This paper explores the role of early childhood education and care (ECEC) services in promoting child protection and strengthening the safety and wellbeing of children.

Sourcing business and software services

With the advancement of Service-Oriented Architecture in the technical and business domain, the management & engineering of services requires a thorough and systematic understanding of the service lifecycle for both business and software services. However, while service-oriented approaches acknowledge the importance of the service ecosystem, service lifecycle models are typically internally focused, paying limited attention to processes related to offering services to or using services from other actors. In this paper, we address this need by discussing the relations between a comprehensive service lifecycle approach for service management & engineering and the sourcing & purchasing of services. In particular we pay attention to the similarities and differences between sourcing business and software services, the alignment between service management & engineering and sourcing & purchasing, the role of sourcing in the transformation of an organization towards a service-oriented paradigm, the role of architectural approaches to sourcing in this transformation, and the sourcing of specific services at different levels of granularity.

Detection and prevention of distributed denial of services attacks by collaborative effort of software agents, first prototype implementation

Distributed Denial of Services DDoS, attacks has become one of the biggest threats for resources over Internet. Purpose of these attacks is to make servers deny from providing services to legitimate users. These attacks are also used for occupying media bandwidth. Currently intrusion detection systems can just detect the attacks but cannot prevent / track the location of intruders. Some schemes also prevent the attacks by simply discarding attack packets, which saves victim from attack, but still network bandwidth is wasted. In our opinion, DDoS requires a distributed solution to save wastage of resources. The paper, presents a system that helps us not only in detecting such attacks but also helps in tracing and blocking (to save the bandwidth as well) the multiple intruders using Intelligent Software Agents. The system gives dynamic response and can be integrated with the existing network defense systems without disturbing existing Internet model. We have implemented an agent based networking monitoring system in this regard.

What health services within rural communities tell us about Aboriginal people and Aboriginal health

There is a growing body of literature within social and cultural geography that explores notions of place, space, culture, race and identity. When health services in rural communities are explored using these notions, it can lead to multiple ways of understanding the cultural meanings inscribed within health services and how they can be embedded with an array of politics. For example, health services can often reflect the symbolic place that each individual holds within that rural community. Through the use of a rural health service case study, this paper will demonstrate how the physical sites and appearances of health services can act as social texts that convey messages of belonging and welcome, or exclusion and domination. They can also produce and reproduce power and control relations. In this way, they can influence the ways that Aboriginal people engage in health service environments – either as places where Aboriginal people feel welcome, comfortable, secure and culturally safe and happy to use the health service, or as places where they utilise the service provided with a great deal of effort, angst and energy. It is important to understand how these complex notions play out in rural communities if the health and wellbeing of Aboriginal people is going to be addressed.

Partitioning composite web services for decentralized execution using a genetic algorithm

Composite web services comprise several component web services. When a composite web service is executed centrally, a single web service engine is responsible for coordinating the execution of the components, which may create a bottleneck and degrade the overall throughput of the composite service when there are a large number of service requests. Potentially this problem can be handled by decentralizing execution of the composite web service, but this raises the issue of how to partition a composite service into groups of component services such that each group can be orchestrated by its own execution engine while ensuring acceptable overall throughput of the composite service. Here we present a novel penalty-based genetic algorithm to solve the composite web service partitioning problem. Empirical results show that our new algorithm outperforms existing heuristic-based solutions.

QoS-oriented sesource allocation and scheduling of multiple composite web services in a hybrid cloud using a random-key genetic algorithm

In cloud computing resource allocation and scheduling of multiple composite web services is an important challenge. This is especially so in a hybrid cloud where there may be some free resources available from private clouds but some fee-paying resources from public clouds. Meeting this challenge involves two classical computational problems. One is assigning resources to each of the tasks in the composite web service. The other is scheduling the allocated resources when each resource may be used by more than one task and may be needed at different points of time. In addition, we must consider Quality-of-Service issues, such as execution time and running costs. Existing approaches to resource allocation and scheduling in public clouds and grid computing are not applicable to this new problem. This paper presents a random-key genetic algorithm that solves new resource allocation and scheduling problem. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of the algorithm.

Evolution of vocational rehabilitation competencies in Australia

Over the past decade, there has been growth in the delivery of vocational rehabilitation services globally, as countries seek to control disability-related expenditure, yet there has been minimal research outside the United States on competencies required to work in this area. This study reports on research conducted in Australia to determine current job function and knowledge areas in terms of their importance and frequency of use in the provision of vocational rehabilitation. A survey comprising items from the Rehabilitation Skills Inventory-Amended and International Survey of Disability Management was completed by 149 rehabilitation counselors and items submitted to factor analysis. T-tests and analyses of variance were used to determine differences between scores of importance and frequency and differences in scores based on work setting and professional training. Six factors were identified as important and frequently used: (i) vocational counseling, (ii) professional practice, (iii) personal counseling, (iv) rehabilitation case management, (v) workplace disability case management, and (vi) workplace intervention and program management. Vocational counseling, professional practice and personal counseling were significantly more important and performed more frequently by respondents in vocational rehabilitation settings than those in compensation settings. These same three factors were rated significantly higher in importance and frequency by those with rehabilitation counselor training when compared with those with other training. In conclusion, although ‘traditional’ knowledge and skill areas such as vocational counseling, professional practice, and personal counseling were identified as central to vocational rehabilitation practice in Australian rehabilitation agencies, mean ratings suggest a growing emphasis on knowledge and skills associated with disability management practice.

Wellness in older adults

Understanding perception of wellness in older adults is a question to be understood against the backdrop of concerns about whether global ageing and the ‘bulge’ of ageing baby boomers will increase health care cost beyond what modern economies can deal with. Older adults who age in a healthy way and who take responsibility for their own health offer a positive alternative and change the perception that older adults are a burden on their society’s health system. The concept of successful ageing introduced by Rowe and Kahn (1987; 1997) suggested that older adults age successfully if they avoid disease and disability, maintain high cognitive and physical functioning and remain actively engaged with life. This concept, however, did not reflect older adults’ own perceptions of what constitutes successful ageing or how perceptions of wellness or health-related quality of life influenced the older adult’s understanding of his or her own health and ageing. A research project was designed to examine older adults’ perceptions of wellness in order to gain an understanding of the factors that influence perception of their own wellness. Specifically, the research wanted to explore two aspects: whether belonging to a unique organisation, in this instance a Returned Services Club, influenced perceptions of wellness; and whether there are significant gender differences for the perception of wellness. A mixed method project with two consecutive studies was designed to answer these questions: a quantitative survey of members of a Returned Services Club and of the surrounding community in Queensland, Australia, and a qualitative study conducting focus groups to explore findings of the survey. The results of the survey were used to determine the composition of the focus groups. The participants for the first study, (N=257), community living adults 65 years and older, were chosen from the membership role of a Returned Services Club or recruited by personal approach from the community surrounding the Services Club. Participants completed a survey that consisted of a perception of wellness instrument, a health-related quality of life instrument, and questions on morbidities, modifiable life style factors and demographics. Data analysis found that a number of individual factors influenced perception of wellness and health-related quality of life. Positive influences were independent mobility, exercise and gambling at non-hazardous levels, and negative influences were hearing loss, memory problems, chronic disease and being single. Membership of the Services Club did not contribute to perception of wellness beyond being a member of a social group. While there may have been an expectation that members of an organisation that is traditionally associated with high alcohol use and problematic gambling may have lower perceptions of wellness, this study suggested that the negative influences may have been counteracted by the positive effects of social interaction, thus having neither negative nor positive influences on perception of wellness. There were significant differences in perception of wellness and in health-related quality of life for women and men. The most significant difference was for women aged 85-90 who had significantly lower scores for perception of wellness than men or than any other age group. This result was the impetus for conducting focus groups with adults aged 85-90 years of age. Focus groups were conducted with 24 women and four men aged 85-90 to explore the survey findings for this age group. Results from the focus groups indicated that for older adults perception of wellness was a multidimensional construct of more complexity than indicated by the survey instrument. Elite older women (women over 85 years of age) related their perception of wellness to their ability to do what they wanted to do, and what they wanted to do significantly more than anything else, was to stay connected to family, friends and the community to which they belonged. From the focus group results it appeared that elite older women identified with the three elements of successful ageing – low incidence of disability and disease, high physical and cognitive functioning, and active engagement with life – but not in a flat structure. It appears that for elite older women good physical and mental health function to enable social connectedness. It is the elements of health that impact on the ability to do what they wanted to do that were identified as key factors: independent mobility, hearing and memory - factors that impact on the ability to interact socially. These elements were only identified when they impacted on the person’s ability to do what they wanted to do, for example mobility problems that were managed were not considered a problem. The study also revealed that older women use selection, optimisation and compensation to meet their goal of staying socially connected. The shopping centre was a key factor in this goal and older women used shopping centres to stay connected to the community and for exercise as well as shopping. Personal and public safety and other environmental concerns were viewed in the same context of enabling or disabling social connectedness. This suggested that for elite older women the model of successful ageing was hierarchical rather than flat, with social connectedness at the top, supported by cognitive functioning and good physical and mental health. In conclusion, this research revealed that perception of wellness in older adults is a complex, multidimensional construct. For older adults good health is related to social connectedness and is not a goal in itself. Health professionals and the community at large have a responsibility to take into account the ability of the older adult to stay socially connected to their community and to enable this, if the goal is to keep older adults healthy for as long as possible. Maintaining or improving perception of wellness in older adults will require a broad biopsychosocial approach that utilises findings such as older adults’ use of shopping centres for non-shopping purposes, concerns about personal and environmental safety and supporting older adults to maintain or improve their social connectedness to their communities.

Developing regional precise positioning services using the legacy and future GNSS receivers

This paper presents an overview of technical solutions for regional area precise GNSS positioning services such as in Queensland. The research focuses on the technical and business issues that currently constrain GPS-based local area Real Time Kinematic (RTK) precise positioning services so as to operate in future across larger regional areas, and therefore support services in agriculture, mining, utilities, surveying, construction, and others. The paper first outlines an overall technical framework that has been proposed to transition the current RTK services to future larger scale coverage. The framework enables mixed use of different reference GNSS receiver types, dual- or triple-frequency, single or multiple systems, to provide RTK correction services to users equipped with any type of GNSS receivers. Next, data processing algorithms appropriate for triple-frequency GNSS signals are reviewed and some key performance benefits of using triple carrier signals for reliable RTK positioning over long distances are demonstrated. A server-based RTK software platform is being developed to allow for user positioning computations at server nodes instead of on the user's device. An optimal deployment scheme for reference stations across a larger-scale network has been suggested, given restrictions such as inter-station distances, candidates for reference locations, and operational modes. For instance, inter-station distances between triple-frequency receivers can be extended to 150km, which doubles the distance between dual-frequency receivers in the existing RTK network designs.

Validating denial of service vulnerabilities in web services

The loosely-coupled and dynamic nature of web services architectures has many benefits, but also leads to an increased vulnerability to denial of service attacks. While many papers have surveyed and described these vulnerabilities, they are often theoretical and lack experimental data to validate them, and assume an obsolete state of web services technologies. This paper describes experiments involving several denial of service vulnerabilities in well-known web services platforms, including Java Metro, Apache Axis, and Microsoft .NET. The results both confirm and deny the presence of some of the most well-known vulnerabilities in web services technologies. Specifically, major web services platforms appear to cope well with attacks that target memory exhaustion. However, attacks targeting CPU-time exhaustion are still effective, regardless of the victim’s platform.