International students using online information resources to learn

This qualitative study views international students as information-using learners, through an information literacy lens. Focusing on the experiences of 25 international students at two Australian universities, the study investigates how international students use online information resources to learn, and identifies associated information literacy learning needs. An expanded critical incident approach provided the methodological framework for the study. Building on critical incident technique, this approach integrated a variety of concepts and research strategies. The investigation centred on real-life critical incidents experienced by the international students whilst using online resources for assignment purposes. Data collection involved semi-structured interviews and an observed online resource-using task. Inductive data analysis and interpretation enabled the creation of a multifaceted word picture of international students using online resources and a set of critical findings about their information literacy learning needs. The study’s key findings reveal: • the complexity of the international students’ experience of using online information resources to learn, which involves an interplay of their interactions with online resources, their affective and reflective responses to using them, and the cultural and linguistic dimensions of their information use. • the array of strengths as well as challenges that the international students experience in their information use and learning. • an apparent information literacy imbalance between the international students’ more developed information skills and less developed critical and strategic approaches to using information • the need for enhanced information literacy education that responds to international students’ identified information literacy needs. Responding to the findings, the study proposes an inclusive informed learning approach to support reflective information use and inclusive information literacy learning in culturally diverse higher education environments.

The self-Googling phenomenon : investigating the performance of personalized information resources

This paper investigates self–Googling through the monitoring of search engine activities of users and adds to the few quantitative studies on this topic already in existence. We explore this phenomenon by answering the following questions: To what extent is the self–Googling visible in the usage of search engines; is any significant difference measurable between queries related to self–Googling and generic search queries; to what extent do self–Googling search requests match the selected personalised Web pages? To address these questions we explore the theory of narcissism in order to help define self–Googling and present the results from a 14–month online experiment using Google search engine usage data.

Rough set-based reasoning and pattern mining for information filtering

An information filtering (IF) system monitors an incoming document stream to find the documents that match the information needs specified by the user profiles. To learn to use the user profiles effectively is one of the most challenging tasks when developing an IF system. With the document selection criteria better defined based on the users’ needs, filtering large streams of information can be more efficient and effective. To learn the user profiles, term-based approaches have been widely used in the IF community because of their simplicity and directness. Term-based approaches are relatively well established. However, these approaches have problems when dealing with polysemy and synonymy, which often lead to an information overload problem. Recently, pattern-based approaches (or Pattern Taxonomy Models (PTM) [160]) have been proposed for IF by the data mining community. These approaches are better at capturing sematic information and have shown encouraging results for improving the effectiveness of the IF system. On the other hand, pattern discovery from large data streams is not computationally efficient. Also, these approaches had to deal with low frequency pattern issues. The measures used by the data mining technique (for example, “support” and “confidences”) to learn the profile have turned out to be not suitable for filtering. They can lead to a mismatch problem. This thesis uses the rough set-based reasoning (term-based) and pattern mining approach as a unified framework for information filtering to overcome the aforementioned problems. This system consists of two stages - topic filtering and pattern mining stages. The topic filtering stage is intended to minimize information overloading by filtering out the most likely irrelevant information based on the user profiles. A novel user-profiles learning method and a theoretical model of the threshold setting have been developed by using rough set decision theory. The second stage (pattern mining) aims at solving the problem of the information mismatch. This stage is precision-oriented. A new document-ranking function has been derived by exploiting the patterns in the pattern taxonomy. The most likely relevant documents were assigned higher scores by the ranking function. Because there is a relatively small amount of documents left after the first stage, the computational cost is markedly reduced; at the same time, pattern discoveries yield more accurate results. The overall performance of the system was improved significantly. The new two-stage information filtering model has been evaluated by extensive experiments. Tests were based on the well-known IR bench-marking processes, using the latest version of the Reuters dataset, namely, the Reuters Corpus Volume 1 (RCV1). The performance of the new two-stage model was compared with both the term-based and data mining-based IF models. The results demonstrate that the proposed information filtering system outperforms significantly the other IF systems, such as the traditional Rocchio IF model, the state-of-the-art term-based models, including the BM25, Support Vector Machines (SVM), and Pattern Taxonomy Model (PTM).

Word Segmentation for Chinese Wikipedia Using N-Gram Mutual Information

In this paper, we propose an unsupervised segmentation approach, named "n-gram mutual information", or NGMI, which is used to segment Chinese documents into n-character words or phrases, using language statistics drawn from the Chinese Wikipedia corpus. The approach alleviates the tremendous effort that is required in preparing and maintaining the manually segmented Chinese text for training purposes, and manually maintaining ever expanding lexicons. Previously, mutual information was used to achieve automated segmentation into 2-character words. The NGMI approach extends the approach to handle longer n-character words. Experiments with heterogeneous documents from the Chinese Wikipedia collection show good results.

Celebrating difference/censoring difference? : Marie Chouinard’s bODY rEMIX

This paper examines performances that defy established representations of disease, deformity and bodily difference. Historically, the ‘deformed’ body has been cast – onstage and in sideshows – as flawed, an object of pity, or an example of the human capacity to overcome. Such representations define the boundaries of the ‘normal’ body by displaying its Other. They bracket the ‘abnormal’ body off as an example of deviance from the ‘norm’, thus, paradoxically, decreasing the social and symbolic visibility (and agency) of disabled people. Yet, in contemporary theory and culture, these representations are reappropriated – by disabled artists, certainly, but also as what Carrie Sandahl has called a ‘master trope’ for representing a range of bodily differences. In this paper, I investigate this phenomenon. I analyse French Canadian choreographer Marie Chouinard’s bODY rEMIX/gOLDBERG vARIATIONS, in which 10 able-bodied dancers are reborn as bizarre biotechnical mutants via the use of crutches, walkers, ballet shoes and barres as prosthetic pseudo-organs. These bodies defy boundaries, defy expectations, develop new modes of expression, and celebrate bodily difference. The self-inflicted pain dancers experience during training is cast as a ‘disablement’ that is ultimately ‘enabling’. I ask what effect encountering able bodies celebrating ‘dis’ or ‘diff’ ability has on audiences. Do we see the emergence of a once-repressed Other, no longer silenced, censored or negated? Or does using ‘disability’ to express the dancers’ difference and self-determination usurp a ‘trope’ by which disabled people themselves might speak back to the dominant culture, creating further censorship?

Emergency department triage revisited

Triage is a process that is critical to the effective management of modern emergency departments. Triage systems aim, not only to ensure clinical justice for the patient, but also to provide an effective tool for departmental organisation, monitoring and evaluation. Over the last 20 years, triage systems have been standardised in a number of countries and efforts made to ensure consistency of application. However, the ongoing crowding of emergency departments resulting from access block and increased demand has led to calls for a review of systems of triage. In addition, international variance in triage systems limits the capacity for benchmarking. The aim of this paper is to provide a critical review of the literature pertaining to emergency department triage in order to inform the direction for future research. While education, guidelines and algorithms have been shown to reduce triage variation, there remains significant inconsistency in triage assessment arising from the diversity of factors determining the urgency of any individual patient. It is timely to accept this diversity, what is agreed, and what may be agreeable. It is time to develop and test an International Triage Scale (ITS) which is supported by an international collaborative approach towards a triage research agenda. This agenda would seek to further develop application and moderating tools and to utilise the scales for international benchmarking and research programmes.

A 5 year review of information requests to QISU

The Queensland Injury Surveillance Unit (QISU) has been collecting and analysing injury data in Queensland since 1988. QISU data is collected from participating emergency departments (EDs) in urban, rural and remote areas of Queensland. Using this data, QISU produces several injury bulletins per year on selected topics, providing a picture of Queensland injury, and setting this in the context of relevant local, national and international research and policy. These bulletins are used by numerous government and non-government groups to inform injury prevention and practice throughout the state. QISU bulletins are also used by local and state media to inform the general public of injury risk and prevention strategies. In addition to producing the bulletins, QISU regularly responds to requests for information from a variety of sources. These requests often require additional analysis of QISU data to tailor the response to the needs of the end user. This edition of the bulletin reviews 5 years of information requests to QISU.

Using information criteria to select the correct variance–covariance structure for longitudinal data in ecology

1. Ecological data sets often use clustered measurements or use repeated sampling in a longitudinal design. Choosing the correct covariance structure is an important step in the analysis of such data, as the covariance describes the degree of similarity among the repeated observations. 2. Three methods for choosing the covariance are: the Akaike information criterion (AIC), the quasi-information criterion (QIC), and the deviance information criterion (DIC). We compared the methods using a simulation study and using a data set that explored effects of forest fragmentation on avian species richness over 15 years. 3. The overall success was 80.6% for the AIC, 29.4% for the QIC and 81.6% for the DIC. For the forest fragmentation study the AIC and DIC selected the unstructured covariance, whereas the QIC selected the simpler autoregressive covariance. Graphical diagnostics suggested that the unstructured covariance was probably correct. 4. We recommend using DIC for selecting the correct covariance structure.

Conceptions of school based youth health nursing : a phenomenographic study

The School Based Youth Health Nurse Program was established in 1999 by the Queensland Government to fund school nurse positions in Queensland state high schools. Schools were required to apply for a School Based Youth Health Nurse during a five-phase recruitment process, managed by the health districts, and rolled out over four years. The only mandatory selection criterion for the position of School Based Youth Health Nurse was registration as a General Nurse and most School Based Youth Health Nurses are allocated to two state high schools. Currently, there are approximately 115 Full Time Equivalent School Based Youth Health Nurse positions across all Queensland state high schools. The literature review revealed an abundance of information about school nursing. Most of the literature came from the United Kingdom and the United States, who have a different model of school nursing to school based youth health nursing. However, there is literature to suggest school nursing is gradually moving from a disease-focused approach to a social view of health. The noticeable number of articles about, for example, drug and alcohol, mental health, and contemporary sexual health issues, is evidence of this change. Additionally, there is a significant the volume of literature about partnerships and collaboration, much of which is about health education, team teaching and how school nurses and schools do health business together. The surfacing of this literature is a good indication that school nursing is aligning with the broader national health priority areas. More particularly, the literature exposed a small but relevant and current body of research, predominantly from Queensland, about school based youth health nursing. However, there remain significant gaps in the knowledge about school based youth health nursing. In particular, there is a deficit about how School Based Youth Heath Nurses understand the experience of school based youth health nursing. This research aimed to reveal the meaning of the experience of school based youth health nursing. The research question was How do School Based Youth Health Nurses’ understand the experience of school based youth health nursing? This enquiry was instigated because the researcher, who had a positive experience of school based youth health nursing, considered it important to validate other School Based Youth Health Nurses’ experiences. Consequently, a comprehensive use of qualitative research was considered the most appropriate manner to explore this research question. Within this qualitative paradigm, the research framework consists of the epistemology of social constructionism, the theoretical perspective of interpretivism and the approach of phenomenography. After ethical approval was gained, purposeful and snowball sampling was used to recruit a sample of 16 participants. In-depth interviews, which were voluntary, confidential and anonymous, were mostly conducted in public venues and lasted from 40-75 minutes. The researcher also kept a researchers journal as another form of data collection. Data analysis was guided by Dahlgren and Fallsbergs’ (1991, p. 152) seven phases of data analysis which includes familiarization, condensation, comparison, grouping, articulating, labelling and contrasting. The most important finding in this research is the outcome space, which represents the entirety of the experience of school based youth health nursing. The outcome space consists of two components: inside the school environment and outside the school environment. Metaphorically and considered as whole-in-themselves, these two components are not discreet but intertwined with each other. The outcome space consists of eight categories. Each category of description is comprised of several sub-categories of description but as a whole, is a conception of school based youth health nursing. The eight conceptions of school based youth health nursing are: 1. The conception of school based youth health nursing as out there all by yourself. 2. The conception of school based youth health nursing as no real backup. 3. The conception of school based youth health nursing as confronted by many barriers. 4. The conception of school based youth health nursing as hectic and full-on. 5. The conception of school based youth health nursing as working together. 6. The conception of school based youth health nursing as belonging to school. 7. The conception of school based youth health nursing as treated the same as others. 8. The conception of school based youth health nursing as the reason it’s all worthwhile. These eight conceptions of school based youth health nursing are logically related and form a staged hierarchical relationship because they are not equally dependent on each other. The conceptions of school based youth health nursing are grouped according to negative, negative and positive and positive conceptions of school based youth health nursing. The conceptions of school based youth health nursing build on each other, from the bottom upwards, to reach the authorized, or the most desired, conception of school based youth health nursing. This research adds to the knowledge about school nursing in general but especially about school based youth health nursing specifically. Furthermore, this research has operational and strategic implications, highlighted in the negative conceptions of school based youth health nursing, for the School Based Youth Health Nurse Program. The researcher suggests the School Based Youth Health Nurse Program, as a priority, address the operational issues The researcher recommends a range of actions to tackle issues and problems associated with accommodation and information, consultations and referral pathways, confidentiality, health promotion and education, professional development, line management and School Based Youth Health Nurse Program support and school management and community. Strategically, the researcher proposes a variety of actions to address strategic issues, such as the School Based Youth Health Nurse Program vision, model and policy and practice framework, recruitment and retention rates and evaluation. Additionally, the researcher believes the findings of this research have the capacity to spawn a myriad of future research projects. The researcher has identified the most important areas for future research as confidentiality, information, qualifications and health outcomes.

Collaborative filtering recommender systems using tag information

Recommender Systems is one of the effective tools to deal with information overload issue. Similar with the explicit rating and other implicit rating behaviours such as purchase behaviour, click streams, and browsing history etc., the tagging information implies user’s important personal interests and preferences information, which can be used to recommend personalized items to users. This paper is to explore how to utilize tagging information to do personalized recommendations. Based on the distinctive three dimensional relationships among users, tags and items, a new user profiling and similarity measure method is proposed. The experiments suggest that the proposed approach is better than the traditional collaborative filtering recommender systems using only rating data.

Concise representations for association rules in multi-level datasets

Association rule mining has made many advances in the area of knowledge discovery. However, the quality of the discovered association rules is a big concern and has drawn more and more attention recently. One problem with the quality of the discovered association rules is the huge size of the extracted rule set. Often for a dataset, a huge number of rules can be extracted, but many of them can be redundant to other rules and thus useless in practice. Mining non-redundant rules is a promising approach to solve this problem. In this paper, we firstly propose a definition for redundancy; then we propose a concise representation called Reliable basis for representing non-redundant association rules for both exact rules and approximate rules. An important contribution of this paper is that we propose to use the certainty factor as the criteria to measure the strength of the discovered association rules. With the criteria, we can determine the boundary between redundancy and non-redundancy to ensure eliminating as many redundant rules as possible without reducing the inference capacity of and the belief to the remaining extracted non-redundant rules. We prove that the redundancy elimination based on the proposed Reliable basis does not reduce the belief to the extracted rules. We also prove that all association rules can be deduced from the Reliable basis. Therefore the Reliable basis is a lossless representation of association rules. Experimental results show that the proposed Reliable basis can significantly reduce the number of extracted rules.

Enabling Open Access to Public Sector Information With Creative Commons Licences : The Australian Experience

This chapter considers how open content licences of copyright-protected materials – specifically, Creative Commons (CC) licences - can be used by governments as a simple and effective mechanism to enable reuse of their PSI, particularly where materials are made available in digital form online or distributed on disk.

Assessing information systems success models : empirical comparison (Research in Progress)

Information System (IS) success may be the most arguable and important dependent variable in the IS field. The purpose of the present study is to address IS success by empirically assess and compare DeLone and McLean’s (1992) and Gable’s et al. (2008) models of IS success in Australian Universities context. The two models have some commonalities and several important distinctions. Both models integrate and interrelate multiple dimensions of IS success. Hence, it would be useful to compare the models to see which is superior; as it is not clear how IS researchers should respond to this controversy.

Information interventions for orienting patients and their carers to cancer care facilities (Protocol)

To assess the effects of information interventions which orient patients and their carers/family to a cancer care facility and the services available in the facility.