Description of the Argo GDAC File Checks: Data Format and Consistency Checks

Every Argo data file submitted by a DAC for distribution on the GDAC has its format and data consistency checked by the Argo FileChecker. Two types of checks are applied: 1. Format checks. Ensures the file formats match the Argo standards precisely. 2. Data consistency checks. Additional data consistency checks are performed on a file after it passes the format checks. These checks do not duplicate any of the quality control checks performed elsewhere. These checks can be thought of as “sanity checks” to ensure that the data are consistent with each other. The data consistency checks enforce data standards and ensure that certain data values are reasonable and/or consistent with other information in the files. Examples of the “data standard” checks are the “mandatory parameters” defined for meta-data files and the technical parameter names in technical data files. Files with format or consistency errors are rejected by the GDAC and are not distributed. Less serious problems will generate warnings and the file will still be distributed on the GDAC. Reference Tables and Data Standards: Many of the consistency checks involve comparing the data to the published reference tables and data standards. These tables are documented in the User’s Manual. (The FileChecker implements “text versions” of these tables.)

The internal consistency and construct validity of the partners in health scale : validation of a patient rated chronic condition self-management measure

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to test the internal consistency and construct validity of the revised 12-item self-rated Partners in Health (PIH) scale used to assess patients' chronic condition self-management knowledge and behaviours. METHODS: Baseline PIH data were collected for a total of 294 patients with a range of co-morbid chronic conditions including diabetes, cardiovascular disease and arthritis. Scale data for the initial sample of 176 patients were analysed for internal consistency and construct validity using Reliability Analysis and Factor Analysis. Construct validity was tested in a separate sample of 118 patients using confirmatory factor analysis and a structural equation model. RESULTS: Good internal consistency was indicated with a Cronbach's alpha coefficient of 0.82 in the initial sample. Factor analysis for this sample revealed four key factors (knowledge, coping, management of condition and adherence to treatment) across the twelve items of the scale. These four key factors were then confirmed by applying the exploratory structural equation model to the separate sample. CONCLUSION: The PIH scale exhibits construct validity and internal consistency. It therefore is both a generic self-rated clinical tool for assessing self-management in a range of chronic conditions as well as an outcome measure to compare populations and change in patient self-management knowledge and behaviour over time. The four domains of self-management provide a valid measure of patient competency in relation to the self-management of their chronic condition(s).

MaramaAIC: tool support for consistency management and validation of requirements

Requirements captured by requirements engineers (REs) are commonly inconsistent with their client’s intended requirements and are often error prone. There is limited tool support providing end-to-end support between the REs and their client for the validation and improvement of these requirements. We have developed an automated tool called MaramaAIC (Automated Inconsistency Checker) to address these problems. MaramaAIC provides automated requirements traceability and visual support to identify and highlight inconsistency, incorrectness and incompleteness in captured requirements. MaramaAIC provides an end-to-end rapid prototyping approach together with a patterns library that helps to capture requirements and check the consistency of requirements that have been expressed in textual natural language requirements and then extracted to semi-formal abstract interactions, essential use cases (EUCs) and user interface prototype models. It helps engineers to validate the correctness and completeness of the EUCs modelled requirements by comparing them to “best-practice” templates and generates an abstract prototype in the form of essential user interface prototype models and concrete User Interface views in the form of HTML. We describe its design and implementation together with results of evaluating our tool’s efficacy and performance, and user perception of the tool’s usability and its strengths and weaknesses via a substantial usability study. We also present a qualitative study on the effectiveness of the tool’s end-to-end rapid prototyping approach in improving dialogue between the RE and the client as well as improving the quality of the requirements.

Analysis of Sampling Data

A Similar Exposure Group (SEG) can be created through the evaluation of workers performing the same or similar task, hazards they are exposed to, frequency and duration of their exposures, engineering controls available during their operations, personal protective equipment used, and exposure data. For this report, the samples of one facility that has collected nearly 40,000 various types of samples will be evaluated to determine if the creation of a SEG can be supported. The data will be reviewed for consistency with collection methods and laboratory detection limits. A subset of the samples may be selected based on the review. Data will also be statistically evaluated in order to determine whether the data is sufficient to terminate the sampling. IHDataAnalyst V1.27 will be used to assess the data. This program uses Bayesian Analysis to assist in making determinations. The 95 percent confidence interval will be calculated and evaluated in making decisions. This evaluation will be used to determine if a SEG can be created for any of the workers and determine the need for future sample collection. The data and evaluation presented in this report have been selected and evaluated specifically for the purposes of this project.

Examination of Inequalities in Hungary by Microsimulation in Consistency with Macro Data

Effective decision making uses various databases including both micro and macro level datasets. In many cases it is a big challenge to ensure the consistency of the two levels. Different types of problems can occur and several methods can be used to solve them. The paper concentrates on the input alignment of the households’ income for microsimulation, which means refers to improving the elements of a micro data survey (EU-SILC) by using macro data from administrative sources. We use a combined micro-macro model called ECONS-TAX for this improvement. We also produced model projections until 2015 which is important because the official EU-SILC micro database will only be available in Hungary in the summer of 2017. The paper presents our estimations about the dynamics of income elements and the changes in income inequalities. Results show that the aligned data provides a different level of income inequality, but does not affect the direction of change from year to year. However, when we analyzed policy change, the use of aligned data caused larger differences both in income levels and in their dynamics.

Into the Spotlight: Bringing Transparency, Consistency, and Efficiency to the Division of Appeals and Hearings

Currently, the Division of Appeals and Hearings of the South Carolina Department of Health and Human Services has no specific presence on the agency's website to provide information or to allow for the electronic submission of appeals. This project's focus was developing an online presence for the Division on SCDHHS' website. The page will make the Division's procedures publicly available to beneficiaries, providers, and agency program staff who attend hearings. Additionally, parties will have a secure online portal through which they can file appeals and upload supporting documentation, reducing the need to send appeals via first class mail. The online appeal portal will further the agency' s goal of reducing paper.

Detecting outliers and asserting consistency in agriculture ground truth information by using temporal VI data from modis.

Collecting ground truth data is an important step to be accomplished before performing a supervised classification. However, its quality depends on human, financial and time ressources. It is then important to apply a validation process to assess the reliability of the acquired data. In this study, agricultural infomation was collected in the Brazilian Amazonian State of Mato Grosso in order to map crop expansion based on MODIS EVI temporal profiles. The field work was carried out through interviews for the years 2005-2006 and 2006-2007. This work presents a methodology to validate the training data quality and determine the optimal sample to be used according to the classifier employed. The technique is based on the detection of outlier pixels for each class and is carried out by computing Mahalanobis distances for each pixel. The higher the distance, the further the pixel is from the class centre. Preliminary observations through variation coefficent validate the efficiency of the technique to detect outliers. Then, various subsamples are defined by applying different thresholds to exclude outlier pixels from the classification process. The classification results prove the robustness of the Maximum Likelihood and Spectral Angle Mapper classifiers. Indeed, those classifiers were insensitive to outlier exclusion. On the contrary, the decision tree classifier showed better results when deleting 7.5% of pixels in the training data. The technique managed to detect outliers for all classes. In this study, few outliers were present in the training data, so that the classification quality was not deeply affected by the outliers.

Consumer appraisals of mobile marketing communications

This paper reports on a study that investigates the emotions elicited from appraising SMS-based mobile marketing (m-marketing) communications under three marketing conditions: product consistency, incentives and permission giving. Results from the experimental design show that appraising m-marketing communications elicits both single emotions and mixed emotions; that is, a mixture of positive and negative emotions in the same response. Additionally, the results show that the influence of specific marketing conditions may increase or reduce the intensity of the emotions elicited. This study contributes to marketing practice by examining consumer appraisals of m-marketing communications under different combinations of marketing conditions. The results provide insights into which emotions are likely to be elicited as a result, and how a specific marketing condition might influence their levels of intensity. The study contributes to marketing theory also through combining appraisal theory with Richins (1997) consumption emotion set.

Speaker identification using higher order spectral phase features and their effectiveness vis-a-vis Mel-Cepstral features

The effectiveness of higher-order spectral (HOS) phase features in speaker recognition is investigated by comparison with Mel Cepstral features on the same speech data. HOS phase features retain phase information from the Fourier spectrum unlikeMel–frequency Cepstral coefficients (MFCC). Gaussian mixture models are constructed from Mel– Cepstral features and HOS features, respectively, for the same data from various speakers in the Switchboard telephone Speech Corpus. Feature clusters, model parameters and classification performance are analyzed. HOS phase features on their own provide a correct identification rate of about 97% on the chosen subset of the corpus. This is the same level of accuracy as provided by MFCCs. Cluster plots and model parameters are compared to show that HOS phase features can provide complementary information to better discriminate between speakers.

An application of fractal image-set coding in facial recognition

Faces are complex patterns that often differ in only subtle ways. Face recognition algorithms have difficulty in coping with differences in lighting, cameras, pose, expression, etc. We propose a novel approach for facial recognition based on a new feature extraction method called fractal image-set encoding. This feature extraction method is a specialized fractal image coding technique that makes fractal codes more suitable for object and face recognition. A fractal code of a gray-scale image can be divided in two parts – geometrical parameters and luminance parameters. We show that fractal codes for an image are not unique and that we can change the set of fractal parameters without significant change in the quality of the reconstructed image. Fractal image-set coding keeps geometrical parameters the same for all images in the database. Differences between images are captured in the non-geometrical or luminance parameters – which are faster to compute. Results on a subset of the XM2VTS database are presented.

Misunderstanding or Misdirection?: Whistleblower Protection in Queensland

In his report into corruption in Queensland, Fitzgerald listed whistleblower protection as a necessary part of a strong governance regime. "What is required is an accessible, independent body to which disclosures can be made, confidentially (at least in the first instance) and in any event free from fear of reprisals." It was one of the reforms studied by the Electoral and Administrative Review Committee, the report of which resulted in the Whistleblowers Protection Act 1994 (WPA). The need for whistleblower protection was supported by all sides of Parliament. The Premier, Wayne Goss, in his Second Reading Speech on the Public Sector Ethics Bill , said that that Act and the WPA would form a package with the former outlining required behaviour and the WPA encouraging staff to report wrongdoing. The WPA was subsequently passed and has remained virtually unamended for over a decade. Such consistency is either an indication of skilled drafting and effectiveness or the fact that the Act has been neglected. It is the hypothesis of this paper that the latter is the case. This hypothesis will be tested by examining the sincerity and diligence with which the Act has been treated during, and following, its passage.

Error, Bias, and Long-Branch Attraction in Data for Two Chloroplast Photosystem Genes in Seed Plants

Sequences of two chloroplast photosystem genes, psaA and psbB, together comprising about 3,500 bp, were obtained for all five major groups of extant seed plants and several outgroups among other vascular plants. Strongly supported, but significantly conflicting, phylogenetic signals were obtained in parsimony analyses from partitions of the data into first and second codon positions versus third positions. In the former, both genes agreed on a monophyletic gymnosperms, with Gnetales closely related to certain conifers. In the latter, Gnetales are inferred to be the sister group of all other seed plants, with gymnosperms paraphyletic. None of the data supported the modern ‘‘anthophyte hypothesis,’’ which places Gnetales as the sister group of flowering plants. A series of simulation studies were undertaken to examine the error rate for parsimony inference. Three kinds of errors were examined: random error, systematic bias (both properties of finite data sets), and statistical inconsistency owing to long-branch attraction (an asymptotic property). Parsimony reconstructions were extremely biased for third-position data for psbB. Regardless of the true underlying tree, a tree in which Gnetales are sister to all other seed plants was likely to be reconstructed for these data. None of the combinations of genes or partitions permits the anthophyte tree to be reconstructed with high probability. Simulations of progressively larger data sets indicate the existence of long-branch attraction (statistical inconsistency) for third-position psbB data if either the anthophyte tree or the gymnosperm tree is correct. This is also true for the anthophyte tree using either psaA third positions or psbB first and second positions. A factor contributing to bias and inconsistency is extremely short branches at the base of the seed plant radiation, coupled with extremely high rates in Gnetales and nonseed plant outgroups. M. J. Sanderson,* M. F. Wojciechowski,*† J.-M. Hu,* T. Sher Khan,* and S. G. Brady

Comparing the diffusion of online service recovery in small and large organisations

A key concern organisations face is how to incorporate Internet tools into their marketing communications mix. Where and how should companies invest their human, technological and financial resources? This paper explores a subset of this problem, online complaining and electronic customer service. It applies diffusion of innovation as a theoretical framework to investigate organisational implementation of email technology and explain the outcome of annual customer service surveys in 2001, 2002 and 2003. The results add to the small body of research on electronic service recovery by extending diffusion of innovations to email service recovery and underscoring the importance of adoption phases, particularly for SMEs. Larger companies provide more channels for submitting complaints, which represents an early phase of adoption. There was little difference in how large and small companies respond to online complaints, a later phase of adoption.

Exploring non-cancer pain conditions in a community sample : critiquing a current conceptual model of the acute to chronic pain transition and examining predictors of chronicity

This program of research examines the experience of chronic pain in a community sample. While, it is clear that like patient samples, chronic pain in non-patient samples is also associated with psychological distress and physical disability, the experience of pain across the total spectrum of pain conditions (including acute and episodic pain conditions) and during the early course of chronic pain is less clear. Information about these aspects of the pain experience is important because effective early intervention for chronic pain relies on identification of people who are likely to progress to chronicity post-injury. A conceptual model of the transition from acute to chronic pain was proposed by Gatchel (1991a). In brief, Gatchel’s model describes three stages that individuals who have a serious pain experience move through, each with worsening psychological dysfunction and physical disability. The aims of this program of research were to describe the experience of pain in a community sample in order to obtain pain-specific data on the problem of pain in Queensland, and to explore the usefulness of Gatchel’s Model in a non-clinical sample. Additionally, five risk factors and six protective factors were proposed as possible extensions to Gatchel’s Model. To address these aims, a prospective longitudinal mixed-method research design was used. Quantitative data was collected in Phase 1 via a comprehensive postal questionnaire. Phase 2 consisted of a follow-up questionnaire 3 months post-baseline. Phase 3 consisted of semi-structured interviews with a subset of the original sample 12 months post follow-up, which used qualitative data to provide a further in-depth examination of the experience and process of chronic pain from respondents’ point of view. The results indicate chronic pain is associated with high levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms. However, the levels of disability reported by this Queensland sample were generally lower than those reported by clinical samples and consistent with disability data reported in a New South Wales population-based study. With regard to the second aim of this program of research, while some elements of the pain experience of this sample were consistent with that described by Gatchel’s Model, overall the model was not a good fit with the experience of this non-clinical sample. The findings indicate that passive coping strategies (minimising activity), catastrophising, self efficacy, optimism, social support, active strategies (use of distraction) and the belief that emotions affect pain may be important to consider in understanding the processes that underlie the transition to and continuation of chronic pain.

Reviewing psychologists’ qualifications for career development practice in Australia

Vocational psychology and the practice of career development are important dimensions of the psychology discipline. This paper contains an overview of the Australian career development industry in light of recent trends, particularly the formalisation of professional career development practice. Given the advent of the Professional Standards for Career Development Practitioners, an audit of postgraduate degrees in organisational, developmental and educational, and counselling psychology was conducted to determine their alliance with the competencies of the Standards. The audit revealed significant areas of consistency on generic competencies, however there was a serious lack of training specific to career development. The implications of the audit results are discussed in light of the evolution of the career development industry and the threat to psychologists’ standing in this field.