Online we are all able bodied : Online psychological sense of community and social support found through membership of disability-specific websites promotes well-being for people living with a physical disability

People with a physical disability are a population who for a number of reasons may be vulnerable to social isolation. Research into Internet-based support sites has found that social support and an online sense of community can be developed through computer mediated communication channels. This study aims to gain an understanding of the benefits that membership of disability-specific online communities may have for people with a physical disability. An online survey was administered to a sample of users of such sites (N = 160). Results indicated that users did receive moral support and personal advice through participating in such online communities. Further, results indicated that online social support and feeling a sense of community online were positively associated with participants' well-being in the areas of personal relations and personal growth.

Demonstration of closed-­loop airborne sense-­and-­avoid using machine vision

This paper describes a vision-based airborne collision avoidance system developed by the Australian Research Centre for Aerospace Automation (ARCAA) under its Dynamic Sense-and-Act (DSA) program. We outline the system architecture and the flight testing undertaken to validate the system performance under realistic collision course scenarios. The proposed system could be implemented in either manned or unmanned aircraft, and represents a step forward in the development of a “sense-and-avoid” capability equivalent to human “see-and-avoid”.

Personal processes interface mock up

Situated on Youtube, and shown in various locations. In this video we show a 3D mock up of a personal house purchasing process. A path traversal metaphor is used to give a sense of progression along the process stages. The intention is to be able to use console devices like an Xbox to consume business processes. This is so businesses can expose their internal processes to consumers using sophisticated user interfaces. The demonstrator was developed using Microsoft XNA, with assistance from the Suncorp Bank and the Smart Services CRC. More information at: www.bpmve.org

Establishing design thinking : accident, program frameworks and personal practices

Distribution through electronic media provides an avenue for promotion, recognition and an outlet of display for graphic designers. The emergence of available media technologies have enabled graphic designers to extend these boundaries of their practice. In this context the designer is constantly striving for aesthetic success and is strongly influenced by the fashion and trends of contemporary design work. The designer is always in a state of inquiry, finding pathways of discovery that lead to innovation and originality that are highly valued criteria for self-evaluation. This research is based on an analysis of the designer perspective and the processes used within an active graphic design practice specializing entirely within a digital collage domain. Contemporary design methodologies were critically examined, compared and refined to reflect the self-practice of the researcher. The refined methodology may assist designers in maintaining systematic work practices, as well as promote the importance of exploration and experimentation processes. Research findings indicate some differences in the identified methodologies and the design practice of the researcher in the sense that many contemporary designers are not confined to a client-base but are self-generating design images influenced by contemporary practitioners. As well as confirming some aspects of more conventional design processes, the researcher found that accidental discoveries and the designer’s interaction with technology plays a significant part in the design process.

Let the journey begin : cultivating student identity and a sense of belonging through a formal academic welcome

Queensland University of Technology [QUT] Caboolture campus is a satellite campus co-located with Brisbane North Institute of TAFE. Building a sense of belonging on-campus continues to be challenging, with anecdotal evidence suggesting that QUT Caboolture students feel like second-class students, isolated from the prestige and excitement of the city campuses. A student identity and fostering a sense of belonging are fundamental to on-campus engagement and have been linked to retention (Field & Morgan-Klein, 2010). A formal welcome ceremony, including an academic procession in full regalia, was a new inclusion for QUT Caboolture’s 2013 Orientation Day. The ritual was intended to be a temporal mark for students to recognise their personal transition and emerging identity as a university student. Cultural capital is one ingredient in a complex mix of interactions and relationships to build a sense of identity. (Ecclestone, Biesta & Hughes, 2010). Fostering a sense of belonging and a connection to the campus and its staff was also anticipated. Students responded positively to the event, reporting feelings of excitement, inspiration and being welcomed into the university culture. The ceremony marked the beginning of the students’ journey together as QUT Caboolture students.

Sense-making across space and time : implications for the organization and findability of information

This paper presents the results from a study of information behaviors, with specific focus on information organisation-related behaviours conducted as part of a larger daily diary study with 34 participants. The findings indicate that organization of information in everyday life is a problematic area due to various factors. The self-evident one is the inter-subjectivity between the person who may have organized the information and the person looking for that same information (Berlin et. al., 1993). Increasingly though, we are not just looking for information within collections that have been designed by someone else, but within our own personal collections of information, which frequently include books, electronic files, photos, records, documents, desktops, web bookmarks, and portable devices. The passage of time between when we categorized or classified the information, and the time when we look for the same information, poses several problems of intra-subjectivity, or the difference between our own past and present perceptions of the same information. Information searching, and hence the retrieval of information from one's own collection of information in everyday life involved a spatial and temporal coordination with one's own past selves in a sort of cognitive and affective time travel, just as organizing information is a form of anticipatory coordination with one's future information needs. This has implications for finding information and also on personal information management.

Planning to Learn : Creating and Using a Personal Planner with Young People on the Autism Spectrum

Late intervention often means that young people on the autism spectrum appear to act on impulse, seem disorganized, or fail to learn from past experiences. In this practical, effective resource, the authors share tried and tested techniques for creating and using a personal planner to help individuals on the autism spectrum to develop independence. "Planning to Learn" is split into three parts. The first part guides adults in helping young people to make sense of the world and to develop and practise coping strategies for any given situation. The authors also explain how simple visual and verbal cues can help people to cope successfully in stressful situations. The second part provides worksheets for the young person to complete to learn how to use plans in different situations, for example staying calm when waiting for a doctor, or coping with a change in the school timetable. Each individual makes a unique planner with procedures to refer to, such as responding to pressure, calming down, being organised, and being around people. The third part includes useful cards, schedules and plans for photocopying and including in the planner. This illustrated photocopiable workbook is packed with guidance, support and helpful notes for those new to, or experienced in, working with children and young people with ASD. It can be used within educational and community settings or at home.

Wrestling with schools, schooling and educational research (Personal Reflections on the European Union-supported Educational Research 1995-2003: Briefing Papers for Policy Makers)

I must admit that I approached the European Union-supported educational research 1995-2003: Briefing papers for policy makers with a sense of trepidation. As a researcher who defines himself as socially critical, I wondered about the dynamics of a policy document that was published by the bureaucracy that has, in some form, a vested interest in the structure and operation of education in its various guises. In turning my attention to this review, I decided to focus my attention on the third guiding question that argues education and training "are strongly interconnected with concerns that include citizenship and democratic participation, inequalities and social justice, cultural diversity and quality of life" (Millei, 2005). The Briefing Papers include recommendations on democracy and citizenship, social exclusion and equality, gender and dealing with mental illness in schools...

Word Sense Discovery and Disambiguation

The work is based on the assumption that words with similar syntactic usage have similar meaning, which was proposed by Zellig S. Harris (1954,1968). We study his assumption from two aspects: Firstly, different meanings (word senses) of a word should manifest themselves in different usages (contexts), and secondly, similar usages (contexts) should lead to similar meanings (word senses). If we start with the different meanings of a word, we should be able to find distinct contexts for the meanings in text corpora. We separate the meanings by grouping and labeling contexts in an unsupervised or weakly supervised manner (Publication 1, 2 and 3). We are confronted with the question of how best to represent contexts in order to induce effective classifiers of contexts, because differences in context are the only means we have to separate word senses. If we start with words in similar contexts, we should be able to discover similarities in meaning. We can do this monolingually or multilingually. In the monolingual material, we find synonyms and other related words in an unsupervised way (Publication 4). In the multilingual material, we ?nd translations by supervised learning of transliterations (Publication 5). In both the monolingual and multilingual case, we first discover words with similar contexts, i.e., synonym or translation lists. In the monolingual case we also aim at finding structure in the lists by discovering groups of similar words, e.g., synonym sets. In this introduction to the publications of the thesis, we consider the larger background issues of how meaning arises, how it is quantized into word senses, and how it is modeled. We also consider how to define, collect and represent contexts. We discuss how to evaluate the trained context classi?ers and discovered word sense classifications, and ?nally we present the word sense discovery and disambiguation methods of the publications. This work supports Harris' hypothesis by implementing three new methods modeled on his hypothesis. The methods have practical consequences for creating thesauruses and translation dictionaries, e.g., for information retrieval and machine translation purposes. Keywords: Word senses, Context, Evaluation, Word sense disambiguation, Word sense discovery.

Sense of Community in Web Environment

The study of social phenomena in the World Wide Web has been rather fragmentary, andthere is no coherent, reseach-based theory about sense of community in Web environment. Sense of community means part of one's self-concept that has to do with perceiving oneself belonging to, and feeling affinity to a certain social grouping. The present study aimed to find evidence for sense of community in Web environment, and specifically find out what the most critical psychological factors of sense of community would be. Based on known characteristics of real life communities and sense of community, and few occational studies of Web-communities, it was hypothesized that the following factors would be the most critical ones and that they could be grouped as prerequisites, facilitators and consequences of sense of community: awareness and social presence (prerequisites), criteria for membership and borders, common purpose, social interaction and reciprocity, norms and conformity, common history (facilitators), trust and accountability (consequences). In addition to critical factors, the present study aimed to find out if this kind of grouping would be valid. Furthermore, the effect of Web-community members' background variables to sense of community was of interest. In order to answer the questions, an online-questionnaire was created and tested. It included propositions that reflect factors that precede, facilitate and follow the sense of community in Web environment. A factor analysis was calculated to find out the critical factors and analyses of variance were calculated to see if the grouping to prerequisites, facilitators and consequences was right and how the background variables would affect the sense of community in Web environment. The results indicated that the psychological structure of sense of community in Web environment could not be presented with critical variables grouped as prerequisites, facilitators and consequences. Most factors did facilitate the sense of community, but based on this data it could not be argued that some of the factors chronologically precedesense of community and some follow it. Instead, the factor analysis revealed that the most critical factors in sense of community in Web environment are 1) reciprocal involvement, 2) basic trust for others, 3) similarity and common purpose of members, and 4) shared history of members. The most influencing background variables were the member's own participation activity (indicated with reading and writing messages) and the phase in membership lifecycle (from visitor to leader). The more the member participated and the further in membership life cycle he was, the more he felt sense of community. There are many descreptions of sense of community, but the present study was one of the first to actually measure the phenomenon in Web environment, and that gained well documented, valid results based on large data, proving that sense of community in Web environment is possible, and clarifying its psychological structure, thus enhancing the understanding of sense of community in Web environment. Keywords: sense of community, Web-community, psychology of the Internet

A cloud-based intelligent computing system for contextual exploration on personal sleep-tracking data using association rule mining

With the development of wearable and mobile computing technology, more and more people start using sleep-tracking tools to collect personal sleep data on a daily basis aiming at understanding and improving their sleep. While sleep quality is influenced by many factors in a person’s lifestyle context, such as exercise, diet and steps walked, existing tools simply visualize sleep data per se on a dashboard rather than analyse those data in combination with contextual factors. Hence many people find it difficult to make sense of their sleep data. In this paper, we present a cloud-based intelligent computing system named SleepExplorer that incorporates sleep domain knowledge and association rule mining for automated analysis on personal sleep data in light of contextual factors. Experiments show that the same contextual factors can play a distinct role in sleep of different people, and SleepExplorer could help users discover factors that are most relevant to their personal sleep.

The Relational Self, the Social Bond and the Dynamics of Personal Relationships : A Sociological Analysis

This study analyses personal relationships linking research to sociological theory on the questions of the social bond and on the self as social. From the viewpoint of disruptive life events and experiences, such as loss, divorce and illness, it aims at understanding how selves are bound to their significant others as those specific people ‘close or otherwise important’ to them. Who form the configurations of significant others? How do different bonds respond in disruptions and how do relational processes unfold? How is the embeddedness of selves manifested in the processes of bonding, on the one hand, and in the relational formation of the self, on the other? The bonds are analyzed from an anti-categorical viewpoint based on personal citations of significance as opposed to given relationship categories, such as ‘family’ or ‘friendship’ – the two kinds of relationships that in fact are most frequently significant. The study draws from analysis of the personal narratives of 37 Finnish women and men (in all 80 interviews) and their entire configurations of those specific people who they cite as ‘close or otherwise important’. The analysis stresses the subjective experiences, while also investigating the actualized relational processes and configurations of all personal relationships with certain relationship histories embedded in micro-level structures. The research is based on four empirical sub-studies of personal relationships and a summary discussing the questions of the self and social bond. Discussion draws from G. H. Mead, C. Cooley, N. Elias, T. Scheff, G. Simmel and the contributors of ‘relational sociology’. Sub-studies analyse bonds to others from the viewpoint of biographical disruption and re-configuration of significant others, estranged family bonds, peer support and the formation of the most intimate relationships into exclusive and inclusive configurations. All analyses examine the dialectics of the social and the personal, asking how different structuring mechanisms and personal experiences and negotiations together contribute to the unfolding of the bonds. The summary elaborates personal relationships as social bonds embedded in wider webs of interdependent people and social settings that are laden with cultural expectations. Regarding the question of the relational self, the study proposes both bonding and individuality as significant. They are seen as interdependent phases of the relationality of the self. Bonding anchors the self to its significant relationships, in which individuality is manifested, for example, in contrasting and differentiating dynamics, but also in active attempts to connect with others. Individuality is not a fixed quality of the self, but a fluid and interdependent phase of the relational self. More specifically, it appears in three formats in the flux of relational processes: as a sense of unique self (via cultivation of subjective experiences), as agency and as (a search for) relative autonomy. The study includes an epilogue addressing the ambivalence between the social expectation of individuality in society and the bonded reality of selves.

Sense of Coherence : Determinants and consequences

ABSTRACT Sense of coherence (SOC) is a core concept within Antonovsky s salutogenic theory and is argued to be a psychological determinant of health. The present social-epidemiological study explores the associations between a wide range of generalized resistance resources of SOC among Finnish- and Swedish-speaking women and men with a view to gaining deeper insight into its developmental circumstances and determinants. Secondly, a five-year follow-up study was conducted in order to assess the stability of SOC in difficult life events. Finally the role and effect of SOC in the intentions to retire early was investigated in a prospective study. The above studies were based on two data sets: the Finnish 'Survey on Living Conditions' (ELO-94) conducted in 1994 by means of personal face-to-face interviews (N=6506), and a prospective postal survey of the 15-year Health and Social Support (HeSSup) study for which the baseline data was collected in 1998 (N=25 898) and the follow-up in 2003. The present study reveals that the level of SOC in adulthood is strongly dependent on close and successful social relationships during both childhood and adulthood, and that there is a strong association with qualitative work features. Not having a partner as well as being unable to use one s skills at work proved to threaten men s SOC in particular, whereas a lack of social support did the same for women. Otherwise, the association with generalized resistance resources turned out to be quite similar in both genders. Swedish-speaking Finns appear to have a slightly stronger SOC due to the better psycho-emotional circumstances in the childhood home and work circumstances in adulthood, in other words higher levels of generalized resistance resources compared to Finnish speakers. These language group differences did not concern any social-life factors included in the present study. The results of the five-year follow-up study suggest that SOC is not stable, and that the level clearly decreases after a negative life event. Even a strong SOC decreased during the follow-up period and, furthermore, was no more stable than a mediocre or weak SOC. There seems to be a clear and independent association with the intentions to retire early among both men and women following full adjustment. Swedish speakers appear to be less inclined to retire early than Finnish speakers. In the light of the present study, it seems that SOC is determined not only by socio-economic factors but also by close and successful social relationships during both childhood and adulthood. This applied to both genders and language groups. Interventions aimed at promoting the health of the disadvantaged should therefore focus on families with children, and extend later also to other than socio-economic spheres of life. SOC theory could also be applied in efforts to inhibit early retirement: management practices aimed at providing employees with a work environment and tasks that are comprehensible, manageable and meaningful could potentially decrease the intentions to retire early.