Vertical infrastructure inspection using a quadcopter and shared autonomy control

This paper presents a shared autonomy control scheme for a quadcopter that is suited for inspection of vertical infrastructure — tall man-made structures such as streetlights, electricity poles or the exterior surfaces of buildings. Current approaches to inspection of such structures is slow, expensive, and potentially hazardous. Low-cost aerial platforms with an ability to hover now have sufficient payload and endurance for this kind of task, but require significant human skill to fly. We develop a control architecture that enables synergy between the ground-based operator and the aerial inspection robot. An unskilled operator is assisted by onboard sensing and partial autonomy to safely fly the robot in close proximity to the structure. The operator uses their domain knowledge and problem solving skills to guide the robot in difficult to reach locations to inspect and assess the condition of the infrastructure. The operator commands the robot in a local task coordinate frame with limited degrees of freedom (DOF). For instance: up/down, left/right, toward/away with respect to the infrastructure. We therefore avoid problems of global mapping and navigation while providing an intuitive interface to the operator. We describe algorithms for pole detection, robot velocity estimation with respect to the pole, and position estimation in 3D space as well as the control algorithms and overall system architecture. We present initial results of shared autonomy of a quadrotor with respect to a vertical pole and robot performance is evaluated by comparing with motion capture data.

Private health insurance status and utilisation of dental services in Australia

This article focuses on the relationship between private insurance status and dental service utilisation in Australia using data between 1995 and 2001. This article employs joint maximum likelihood to estimate models of time since last dental visit treating private ancillary health insurance (PAHI) as endogenous. The sensitivity of results to the choice between two different but related types of instrumental variables is examined. We find robust evidence in both 1995 and 2001 that individuals with a PAHI policy make significantly more frequent dental consultations relative to those without such coverage. A comparison of the 1995 and 2001 results, however, suggests that there has been an increasing role of PAHI in terms of the frequency of dental consultations over time. This seems intuitive given the trends in the price of unsubsidised private dental consultations. In terms of policy, our results suggest that while government measures to increase private health insurance coverage in Australia has been successful to a significant degree, it may have come at some cost in terms of socio-economic inequality as the privately insured are provided much better access to care and financial protection.

Problems and awareness of support services among University students

Although Australian universities have allocated significant resources toward the development of student support services, administrators have little systematic information about the problems undergraduate university students experience or students' knowledge about available support services. The author surveyed 441 students in an urban, nonresidential university to examine the prevalence of difficulties associated with learning, sexual harassment, discrimination, emotional distress, health problems, course and career concerns, financial difficulties, and difficulties with lecturers; he also assessed students' knowledge of support services in each of these areas. Course concerns were the most common problem, followed by emotional distress, worry about career choices, financial difficulties, and problems with lecturers. More than half of the students were unaware of the support services available to them to address a range of concerns from sexual harassment and discrimination to emotional distress. Approximately 20% of the students reported having used university counseling or career services. Implications for targeting specific areas for outreach programs are discussed.

China's foreign economic cooperation development : exporting Chinese construction services

Since the movement for economic reform started in China 20 years ago, the nation's GDP had grown on average from seven to nine per cent a year, making China's construction industry one of the largest in the world. This paper presents an overview of China's foreign economic cooperation development (FECD) in the context of exporting three major construction services namely; contracting, labour and design. The paper outlines the export market profile of Chinese contractors and discusses their current position in the international market. It then addresses challenges; they are facing in view of meeting the ambitious strategic targets set out by the Government for the FECD, which cover the export of construction services. Finally, the paper sheds some light on key exporting strategies currently adopted by Chinese contractors.

Collaborating to develop research data management services and collections

The Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Library, like many other academic and research institution libraries in Australia, has been collaborating with a range of academic and service provider partners to develop a range of research data management services and collections. Three main strategies are being employed and an overview of process, infrastructure, usage and benefits is provided of each of these service aspects. The development of processes and infrastructure to facilitate the strategic identification and management of QUT developed datasets has been a major focus. A number of Australian National Data Service (ANDS) sponsored projects - including Seeding the Commons; Metadata Hub / Store; Data Capture and Gold Standard Record Exemplars have / will provide QUT with a data registry system, linkages to storage, processes for identifying and describing datasets, and a degree of academic awareness. QUT supports open access and has established a culture for making its research outputs available via the QUT ePrints institutional repository. Incorporating open access research datasets into the library collections is an equally important aspect of facilitating the adoption of data-centric eresearch methods. Some datasets are available commercially, and the library has collaborated with QUT researchers, in the QUT Business School especially strongly, to identify and procure a rapidly growing range of financial datasets to support research. The library undertakes licensing and uses the Library Resource Allocation to pay for the subscriptions. It is a new area of collection development for with much to be learned. The final strategy discussed is the library acting as “data broker”. QUT Library has been working with researchers to identify these datasets and undertake the licensing, payment and access as a centrally supported service on behalf of researchers.

Extending services delivery with lightweight composition

The tertiary sector is an important employer and its growth is well above average. The Texo project’s aim is to support this development by making services tradable. The composition of new or value-added services is a cornerstone of the proposed architecture. It is, however, intended to cater for build-time. Yet, at run-time unforseen exceptions may occur and user’s requirements may change. Varying circumstances require immediate sensemaking of the situation’s context and call for prompt extensions of existing services. Lightweight composition technology provided by the RoofTop project enables domain experts to create simple widget-like applications, also termed enterprise mashups, without extensive methodological skills. In this way RoofTop can assist and extend the idea of service delivery through the Texo platform and is a further step towards a next generation internet of services.

Health and community services for trafficked women : an exploratory study of policy and practice

The trafficking of women has attracted considerable international and national policy attention, particularly since the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (2000), of which the Australian Government has been a signatory since 2005. The provision of health and community services for trafficked women is a central feature of this Protocol, but in Australia service provision is made difficult by how trafficked women are understood and treated in policy and legal terms. This study aimed to explore the provision of health and community services for trafficked women in the Greater Sydney region through a series of interviews with government and non-government organisations. The findings reveal that services have been inaccessible as a result of sparse, uncoordinated, and poorly funded provision. The major obstacle to adequate and appropriate service provision has been a national policy approach focusing on 'border protection' and criminalisation rather than on trafficked women and their human rights. We conclude that further policy development needs to focus on the practical implications of how such rights can be translated into the delivery of health and community services that trafficked women can access and be supported by more effectively.

AR Services Video

Video presented as part of the USECA 2011 workshop at WISE 2011. Real-time sales assistant service is a problematic component of remote delivery of sales support for customers. Solutions involving web pages, telephony and video support prove problematic when seeking to remotely guide customers in their sales processes, especially with transactions revolving around physically complex artefacts. This process involves a number of services that are often complex in nature, ranging from physical compatibility and configuration factors, to availability and credit services. We propose the application of a combination of virtual worlds and augmented reality to create synthetic environments suitable for remote sales of physical artefacts, right in the home of the purchaser. A high level description of the service structure involved is shown, along with a use case involving the sale of electronic goods and services within an example augmented reality application. We expect this work to have application in many sales domains involving physical objects needing to be sold over the Internet.

Aliens, borders and social citizens : Health and community services for trafficked women

Australian policy makers recognise women who are trafficked to Australia (and these are largely for the purposes of sexual exploitation) primarily as victims of crime. The main public mechanism by which the "problem" of trafficked people in Australia is managed is the criminal law. At the same time, however, as a signatory to the UN Protocol on Trafficking and the Declaration of Human Rights, the Australian Government also recognises the rights of women trafficked to Australia to access health and community services in the wake of the health damage and trauma they often incur as a consequence of their experience. Current evidence suggests that trafficked women in Australia face considerable barriers in being able to avail themselves of such a right and of the services that accompany it. This paper explores the tensions posed by Australian policy and service approaches to trafficked women in light of the concept of social citizenship and the ways in which it is mediated in the Australian context by national border protection policy.

College, shared house, or home? The impact of living situation on university students’ drinking

University students are recognised as a heavy drinking group who are at risk of both short and long term harms from their alcohol consumption. This paper explores the social dynamics of drinking and the key differences between three core groups of university students – those who live at home, those living in college and those who live independently. We draw on a large scale survey of Australian university students on alcohol consumption and harm minimisation and extensive qualitative individual and focus group interviews with university students in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. Our data suggests that living at home supports safer drinking in comparison to the less regulated college context or living independently in shared households.

Identifying the triggers for management services in business transformation management

Business transformations are complex organisational change endeavours that result in a business performing current work differently, or performing different work. Information Technology (IT) is a key enabler of such initiatives, but comes with its challenges, as revamping the IT infrastructure in large-scale organisations implies high complexity, high risk, and often high failure rates. We view business transformations as a collection of management services that are demanded and enacted at a program level, defined as abstract resources that provide the managerial capabilities necessary for business transformations. In this research-in-progress, we explore what triggers the need for management services in response to the challenges in business transformation management. We analyse data from two exploratory case studies using the critical incident technique as our qualitative analysis method. Early findings indicate that management service triggers reside on either the strategic level, which may be internally or externally driven, or at the program management level, which may be situational, influential or reactional. We detail implications for our on-going research.

The effects of portal website attitude and e-services on branding of e-stores

Purpose –Increasingly the company websites, along with the intermediary websites such as portal sites have become an integral component of the firms brand strategy. This study emphasises the importance of website service elements within portal sites and the impact on e-retailer brand attitudes and brand identity in an ever more competitive digital market-space. Design/methodology/approach– The research employs structural equation modeling technique to capture the relationship among website attitude, e-service quality, brand attitude and brand identity. Findings–The results from the study indicate consumer attitude perceptions toward portal website and e-service elements combine to increase brand attitude and also brand identity for e-retailers. Originality/value –Although there has been a plethora of studies evaluating corporate websites and branding interactions there is limited comprehension of the impact of intermediary portal sites. Moreover, the literature is limited in validating the link between e-services with brand attitude and brand identity within a portal website context. This study develops a framework that highlights the important influence of e-services within portal websites and the impact on the firm’s brand.

Supporting children's language and literacy skills : the effectiveness of shared book reading intervention strategies with parents

Parents are encouraged to read with their children from an early age because shared book reading helps children to develop their language and early literacy skills. A pragmatic Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT) research design was adopted to investigate the influence of two forms of a shared reading intervention (Dialogic Reading and Dialogic Reading with the addition of Print Referencing) on children’s language and literacy skills. Dialogic reading is a validated shared reading intervention that has been shown to improve children’s oral language skills prior to formal schooling (Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998). Print referencing is another form of shared reading intervention that has the potential to have effects on children’s print knowledge as they begin school (Justice & Ezell, 2002). However, training parents to use print referencing strategies at home has not been researched extensively although research findings indicate its effectiveness when used by teachers in the early years of school. Eighty parents of Preparatory year children from three Catholic schools in low income areas in the outer suburbs of a metropolitan city were trained to deliver specific shared reading strategies in an eight-week home intervention. Parents read eight books to their children across the period of the intervention. Each book was requested to be read at least three times a week. There were 42 boys and 38 girls ranging in age from 4.92 years to 6.25 years (M=5.53, SD=0.33) in the sample. The families were randomly assigned to three groups: Dialogic Reading (DR); Dialogic Reading with the addition of Print Referencing (DR + PR); and a Control group. Six measures were used to assess children’s language skills at pre and post, and follow-up (three months after the intervention). These measures assessed oral language (receptive and expressive vocabulary), phonological awareness skills (rhyme, word completion), alphabet knowledge, and concepts about print. Results of the intervention showed that there were significant differences from pre to post between the two intervention groups and the control group on three measures: expressive vocabulary, rhyme, and concepts about print. The shared reading strategies delivered by parents of the dialogic reading, and dialogic reading with the addition of print referencing, showed promising results to develop children’s oral language skills in terms of expressive vocabulary and rhyme, as well as understanding of the concepts about print. At follow-up, when the children entered Year 1, the two intervention groups (DR and DR + PR) group had significantly maintained their knowledge of concepts about prints when compared with the control group. Overall, the findings from this intervention study did not show that dialogic reading with the addition of print referencing had stronger effects on children’s early literacy skills than dialogic reading alone. The research also explored if pre-existing family factors impacted on the outcomes of the intervention from pre to post. The relationships between maternal education and home reading practices prior to intervention and child outcomes at post were considered. However, there were no significant effects of maternal education and home literacy activities on child outcomes at post. Additionally, there were no significant effects for the level of compliance of parents with the intervention program in terms of regular weekly reading to children during the intervention period on child outcomes at post. These non-significant findings are attributed to the lack of variability in the recruited sample. Parents participating in the intervention had high levels of education, although they were recruited from schools in low socio-economic areas; parents were already highly engaged in home literacy activities at recruitment; and the parents were highly compliant in reading regularly to their child during the intervention. Findings of the current study did show that training in shared reading strategies enhanced children’s early language and literacy skills. Both dialogic reading and dialogic reading with the addition of print referencing improved children’s expressive vocabulary, rhyme, and concepts about print at post intervention. Further research is needed to identify how, and if, print referencing strategies used by parents at home can be effective over and above the use of dialogic reading strategies. In this research, limitations of sample size and the nature of the intervention to use print referencing strategies at home may have restricted the opportunities for this research study to find more effects on children’s emergent literacy skills or for the effectiveness of combining dialogic reading with print referencing strategies. However, these results did indicate that there was value in teaching parents to implement shared reading strategies at home in order to improve early literacy skills as children begin formal schooling.

Reorganizing a technical services division using collaborative evidence based information practice at Auraria Library

The article focuses on the evidence-based information practice (EBIP) applied at the Auraria Library in Denver, Colorado during the reorganization of its technical services division. Collaboration processes were established for the technical services division through the reorganization and redefinition of workflows. There are several factors that form part of the redefinition of roles including personal interests, department needs, and library needs. A collaborative EBIP environment was created in the division by addressing issues of workplace hierarchies, by the distribution of problem solving, and by the encouragement of reflective dialogue.

Distributing leadership and cultivating dialogue with collaborative EBIP

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the efficacy of collaborative evidence based information practice (EBIP) as an organizational effectiveness model. Shared leadership, appreciative inquiry and knowledge creation theoretical frameworks provide the foundation for change toward the implementation of a collaborative EBIP workplace model. Collaborative EBIP reiterates the importance of gathering the best available evidence, but it differs by shifting decision-making authority from "library or employer centric" to "user or employee centric". University of Colorado Denver Auraria Library Technical Services department created a collaborative EBIP environment by flattening workplace hierarchies, distributing problem solving and encouraging reflective dialogue. By doing so, participants are empowered to identify problems, create solutions, and become valued and respected leaders and followers. In an environment where library budgets are in jeopardy, recruitment opportunities are limited and the workplace is in constant flux, the Auraria Library case study offers an approach that maximizes the capability of the current workforce and promotes agile responsiveness to industry and organizational challenges. Collaborative EBIP is an organizational model demonstrating a process focusing first on the individual and moving to the collective to develop a responsive and high performing business unit, and in turn, organization.