Contemporaneous correlations within individuals in an automated web-based walking program (Walk@Work) over a six week period (three phases) of time

Introduction: Participants may respond to phases of a workplace walking program at different rates. This study evaluated the factors that contribute to the number of steps through phases of the program. The intervention was automated through a web-based program designed to increase workday walking. Methods: The study reviewed independent variable influences throughout phases I–III. A convenience sample of university workers (n=56; 43.6±1.7 years; BMI 27.44±.2.15 kg/m2; 48 female) were recruited at worksites in Australia. These workers were given a pedometer (Yamax SW 200) and access to the website program. For analyses, step counts entered by workers into the website were downloaded and mean workday steps were compared using a seemingly unrelated regression. This model was employed to capture the contemporaneous correlation within individuals in the study across observed time periods. Results: The model predicts that the 36 subjects with complete information took an average 7460 steps in the baseline two week period. After phase I, statistically significance increases in steps (from baseline) were explained by age, working status (full or part time), occupation (academic or professional), and self reported public transport (PT) use (marginally significant). Full time workers walked more than part time workers by about 440 steps, professionals walked about 300 steps more than academics, and PT users walked about 400 steps more than non-PT users. The ability to differentiate steps after two weeks among participants suggests a differential affect of the program after only two weeks. On average participants increased steps from week two to four by about 525 steps, but regular auto users had nearly 750 steps less than non-auto users at week four. The effect of age was diminished in the 4th week of observation and accounted for 34 steps per year of age. In phase III, discriminating between participants became more difficult, with only age effects differentiating their increase over baseline. The marginal effect of age by phase III compared to phase I, increased from 36 to 50, suggesting a 14 step per year increase from the 2nd to 6th week. Discussion: The findings suggest that participants responded to the program at different rates, with uniformity of effect achieved by the 6th week. Participants increased steps, however a tapering off occurred over time. Age played the most consistent role in predicting steps over the program. PT use was associated with increased step counts, while Auto use was associated with decreased step counts.

Stigmergy within web modelling languages : positive feedback mechanisms

Stigmergy is a biological term originally used when discussing insect or swarm behaviour, and describes a model supporting environment-based communication separating artefacts from agents. This phenomenon is demonstrated in the behavior of ants and their food foraging supported by pheromone trails, or similarly termites and their termite nest building process. What is interesting with this mechanism is that highly organized societies are formed without an apparent central management function. We see design features in Web sites that mimic stigmergic mechanisms as part of the User Interface and we have created generalizations of these patterns. Software development and Web site development techniques have evolved significantly over the past 20 years. Recent progress in this area proposes languages to model web applications to facilitate the nuances specific to these developments. These modeling languages provide a suitable framework for building reusable components encapsulating our design patterns of stigmergy. We hypothesize that incorporating stigmergy as a separate feature of a site’s primary function will ultimately lead to enhanced user coordination.

Experimental studies of the shear behaviour and strength of lipped channel beams with web openings

Cold-formed steel members are increasingly used as primary structural elements in the building industries around the world due to the availability of thin and high strength steels and advanced cold-forming technologies. Cold-formed lipped channel beams (LCB) are commonly used as flexural members such as floor joists and bearers. However, their shear capacities are determined based on conservative design rules. Current practice in flooring systems is to include openings in the web element of floor joists or bearers so that building services can be located within them. Shear behaviour of LCBs with web openings is more complicated while their shear strengths are considerably reduced by the presence of web openings. However, limited research has been undertaken on the shear behaviour and strength of LCBs with web openings. Hence a detailed experimental study involving 40 shear tests was undertaken to investigate the shear behaviour and strength of LCBs with web openings. Simply supported test specimens of LCBs with aspect ratios of 1.0 and 1.5 were loaded at midspan until failure. This paper presents the details of this experimental study and the results of their shear capacities and behavioural characteristics. Experimental results showed that the current design rules in cold-formed steel structures design codes are very conservative for the shear design of LCBs with web openings. Improved design equations have been proposed for the shear strength of LCBs with web openings based on the experimental results from this study.

Improved shear design rules for lipped channel beams with web openings

Cold-formed steel Lipped Channel Beams (LCB) with web openings are commonly used as floor joists and bearers in building structures. The shear behaviour of these beams is more complicated and their shear capacities are considerably reduced by the presence of web openings. However, limited research has been undertaken on the shear behaviour and strength of LCBs with web openings. Hence a detailed numerical study was undertaken to investigate the shear behaviour and strength of LCBs with web openings. Finite element models of simply supported LCBs under a mid-span load with aspect ratios of 1.0 and 1.5 were developed and validated by comparing their results with test results. They were then used in a detailed parametric study to investigate the effects of various influential parameters. Experimental and numerical results showed that the current design rules in cold-formed steel structures design codes are very conservative. Improved design equations were therefore proposed for the shear strength of LCBs with web openings based on both experimental and numerical results. This paper presents the details of finite element modelling of LCBs with web openings, validation of finite element models, and the development of improved shear design rules. The proposed shear design rules in this paper can be considered for inclusion in the future versions of cold-formed steel design codes.

Modelling users' contextual querying behaviour for web image searching

The rapid growth of visual information on Web has led to immense interest in multimedia information retrieval (MIR). While advancement in MIR systems has achieved some success in specific domains, particularly the content-based approaches, general Web users still struggle to find the images they want. Despite the success in content-based object recognition or concept extraction, the major problem in current Web image searching remains in the querying process. Since most online users only express their needs in semantic terms or objects, systems that utilize visual features (e.g., color or texture) to search images create a semantic gap which hinders general users from fully expressing their needs. In addition, query-by-example (QBE) retrieval imposes extra obstacles for exploratory search because users may not always have the representative image at hand or in mind when starting a search (i.e. the page zero problem). As a result, the majority of current online image search engines (e.g., Google, Yahoo, and Flickr) still primarily use textual queries to search. The problem with query-based retrieval systems is that they only capture users’ information need in terms of formal queries;; the implicit and abstract parts of users’ information needs are inevitably overlooked. Hence, users often struggle to formulate queries that best represent their needs, and some compromises have to be made. Studies of Web search logs suggest that multimedia searches are more difficult than textual Web searches, and Web image searching is the most difficult compared to video or audio searches. Hence, online users need to put in more effort when searching multimedia contents, especially for image searches. Most interactions in Web image searching occur during query reformulation. While log analysis provides intriguing views on how the majority of users search, their search needs or motivations are ultimately neglected. User studies on image searching have attempted to understand users’ search contexts in terms of users’ background (e.g., knowledge, profession, motivation for search and task types) and the search outcomes (e.g., use of retrieved images, search performance). However, these studies typically focused on particular domains with a selective group of professional users. General users’ Web image searching contexts and behaviors are little understood although they represent the majority of online image searching activities nowadays. We argue that only by understanding Web image users’ contexts can the current Web search engines further improve their usefulness and provide more efficient searches. In order to understand users’ search contexts, a user study was conducted based on university students’ Web image searching in News, Travel, and commercial Product domains. The three search domains were deliberately chosen to reflect image users’ interests in people, time, event, location, and objects. We investigated participants’ Web image searching behavior, with the focus on query reformulation and search strategies. Participants’ search contexts such as their search background, motivation for search, and search outcomes were gathered by questionnaires. The searching activity was recorded with participants’ think aloud data for analyzing significant search patterns. The relationships between participants’ search contexts and corresponding search strategies were discovered by Grounded Theory approach. Our key findings include the following aspects: - Effects of users' interactive intents on query reformulation patterns and search strategies - Effects of task domain on task specificity and task difficulty, as well as on some specific searching behaviors - Effects of searching experience on result expansion strategies A contextual image searching model was constructed based on these findings. The model helped us understand Web image searching from user perspective, and introduced a context-aware searching paradigm for current retrieval systems. A query recommendation tool was also developed to demonstrate how users’ query reformulation contexts can potentially contribute to more efficient searching.

Employees' adoption of enterprise web 2.0 : the role of technological attributes

Although the adoption of Enterprise Web 2.0 within organisations is beneficial, it could meet with employees’ resistance and the adoption process can be lengthy. The successful implementation of Enterprise Web 2.0 is based on employee involvement and adoption of such social technology. This paper is part of a larger research project that explored the adoption of Web 2.0 by individuals within enterprises. Using a qualitative study, the findings show that there are number of adoption influences including technological, individual and contextual issues. This paper presents Web 2.0 technological attributes that influence its adoption. The found attributes are: friendliness, reliability, mobility, technical compatibility, discoverability, transparency and Web 2.0 type.

E-learning 2.0 experiences within higher education : theorising students' and teachers' experiences in Web 2.0 learning

This study explores and evaluates students’ and teachers’ experiences when using a range of Web 2.0 tools in Higher Education teaching and learning. It contributes to our understanding of how Web 2.0 learning communities are constructed, experienced and the nature of the participation therein. This research extends our knowledge and understanding of the Web 2.0 phenomena, and provides a framework that can assist with improving future Web 2.0 implementation.

Discovering interesting information with advances in web technology

The Web is a steadily evolving resource comprising much more than mere HTML pages. With its ever-growing data sources in a variety of formats, it provides great potential for knowledge discovery. In this article, we shed light on some interesting phenomena of the Web: the deep Web, which surfaces database records as Web pages; the Semantic Web, which de�nes meaningful data exchange formats; XML, which has established itself as a lingua franca for Web data exchange; and domain-speci�c markup languages, which are designed based on XML syntax with the goal of preserving semantics in targeted domains. We detail these four developments in Web technology, and explain how they can be used for data mining. Our goal is to show that all these areas can be as useful for knowledge discovery as the HTML-based part of the Web.

Retrieval of health advice on the web: AEHRC at ShARe/CLEF eHealth Evaluation Lab Task 3

This paper details the participation of the Australian e- Health Research Centre (AEHRC) in the ShARe/CLEF 2013 eHealth Evaluation Lab { Task 3. This task aims to evaluate the use of information retrieval (IR) systems to aid consumers (e.g. patients and their relatives) in seeking health advice on the Web. Our submissions to the ShARe/CLEF challenge are based on language models generated from the web corpus provided by the organisers. Our baseline system is a standard Dirichlet smoothed language model. We enhance the baseline by identifying and correcting spelling mistakes in queries, as well as expanding acronyms using AEHRC's Medtex medical text analysis platform. We then consider the readability and the authoritativeness of web pages to further enhance the quality of the document ranking. Measures of readability are integrated in the language models used for retrieval via prior probabilities. Prior probabilities are also used to encode authoritativeness information derived from a list of top-100 consumer health websites. Empirical results show that correcting spelling mistakes and expanding acronyms found in queries signi cantly improves the e ectiveness of the language model baseline. Readability priors seem to increase retrieval e ectiveness for graded relevance at early ranks (nDCG@5, but not precision), but no improvements are found at later ranks and when considering binary relevance. The authoritativeness prior does not appear to provide retrieval gains over the baseline: this is likely to be because of the small overlap between websites in the corpus and those in the top-100 consumer-health websites we acquired.

The adoption of Web 2.0 within enterprises : employees' perspectives

This project explores employees’ adoption of Web 2.0 within organisations. It shows that the adoption of Web 2.0 is a challenging and dynamic process that changes over time. The adoption is, also, influenced by a number of interrelated issues including: People Traits, Social Influence, Trust, Technological Attributes, Relevance of Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Maturity, Organisational Support, and Organisational Practice.

Surrogacy : competing interests or a tangled web?

Overseas commercial surrogacy is a legally challenging but commonly utilised form of assisted reproductive technology. Not only does it raise complex and competing policy issues, but it tests the relevant Family Law legislation which underpins parenting orders. Decisions handed down by the judiciary are inconsistent. Legislation is inadequate. But still the surge in surrogacy continues as surrogacy destinations such as India and Thailand continue to increase in popularity. Part one of this article addresses the competing interests of the illegality of overseas commercial surrogacy arrangements with the welfare of the child born as a result of such arrangements, and the inconsistent approaches taken by the judiciary. Part two concerns the interpretation of Family Law legislation by the courts in an attempt to provide intended couples and their children with certainty and finality, again resulting in inconsistent judicial decisions. Overseas commercial surrogacy is legally problematic, and intended parents need to be aware of its limitations.

Towards modelling web search behaviour : integrating users’ cognitive styles

With the rapid growth of information on the Web, the study of information searching has let to an increased interest. Information behaviour (IB) researchers and information systems (IS) developers are continuously exploring user - Web search interactions to understand and to help users to provide assistance with their information searching. In attempting to develop models of IB, several studies have identified various factors that govern user's information searching and information retrieval (IR), such as age, gender, prior knowledge and task complexity. However, how users' contextual factors, such as cognitive styles, affect Web search interactions has not been clearly explained by the current models of Web Searching and IR. This study explores the influence of users' cognitive styles on their Web search behaviour. The main goal of the study is to enhance Web search models with a better understanding of how these cognitive styles affect Web searching. Modelling Web search behaviour with a greater understanding of user's cognitive styles can help information science researchers and IS designers to bridge the semantic gap between the user and the IS. To achieve the aims of the study, a user study with 50 participants was conducted. The study adopted a mixed method approach incorporating several data collection strategies to gather a range of qualitative and quantitative data. The study utilised pre-search and post-search questionnaires to collect the participants' demographic information and their level of satisfaction about the search interactions. Riding's (1991) Cognitive Style Analysis (CSA) test was used to assess the participants' cognitive styles. Participants completed three predesigned search tasks and the whole user - web search interactions, including thinkaloud, were captured using a monitoring program. Data analysis involved several qualitative and quantitative techniques: the quantitative data gave raise to detailed findings about users' Web searching and cognitive styles, the qualitative data enriched the findings with illustrative examples. The study results provide valuable insights into Web searching behaviour among different cognitive style users. The findings of the study extend our understanding of Web search behaviour and how users search information on the Web. Three key study findings emerged: • Users' Web search behaviour was demonstrated through information searching strategies, Web navigation styles, query reformulation behaviour and information processing approaches while performing Web searches. The manner in which these Web search patterns were demonstrated varied among the users with different cognitive style groups. • Users' cognitive styles influenced their information searching strategies, query reformulation behaviour, Web navigational styles and information processing approaches. Users with particular cognitive styles followed certain Web search patterns. • Fundamental relationships were evident between users' cognitive styles and their Web search behaviours; and these relationships can be illustrated through modelling Web search behaviour. Two models that depict the associations between Web search interactions, user characteristics and users' cognitive styles were developed. These models provide a greater understanding of Web search behaviour from the user perspective, particularly how users' cognitive styles influence their Web search behaviour. The significance of this research is twofold: it will provide insights for information science researchers, information system designers, academics, educators, trainers and librarians who want to better understand how users with different cognitive styles perform information searching on the Web; at the same time, it will provide assistance and support to the users. The major outcomes of this study are 1) a comprehensive analysis of how users search the Web; 2) extensive discussion on the implications of the models developed in this study for future work; and 3) a theoretical framework to bridge high-level search models and cognitive models.

Exploiting Web 2.0 technologies to forge live connectedness in class

The economics of supporting learning has seen institutional encouragement of a wide range of blended learning initiatives in face to face and online teaching and learning. This has become one of the key drivers for the adoption of technology in teaching, in a manner occassionally guilty of putting the cart before the horse. Learning spaces are increasingly equipped with a dizzying array of technological options testifying to institutional and governmental investment and commitment in supporting face to face blended learning (QUT, 2011, C/4.2). Yet innovation within traditional learning and teaching models faces a number of challenges both at an institutional level and at the teaching coal face. Web 2.0 technologies present a vast array of opportunities to harness and capture the attention of students in engaging learning opportunitites. This presentation will explore technologies supportive of active learning pedagogies.