An insight into the adoption of accountable-eHealth systems: n empirical research model based on the Australian context

This paper provides a first look at the acceptance of Accountable-eHealth (AeH) systems–a new genre of eHealth systems designed to manage information privacy concerns that hinder the proliferation of eHealth. The underlying concept of AeH systems is appropriate use of information through after-the-fact accountability for intentional misuse of information by healthcare professionals. An online questionnaire survey was utilised for data collection from three educational institutions in Queensland, Australia. A total of 23 hypotheses relating to 9 constructs were tested using a structural equation modelling technique. The moderation effects on the hypotheses were also tested based on six moderation factors to understand their role on the designed research model. A total of 334 valid responses were received. The cohort consisted of medical, nursing and other health related students studying at various levels in both undergraduate and postgraduate courses. Hypothesis testing provided sufficient data to accept 7 hypotheses. The empirical research model developed was capable of predicting 47.3% of healthcare professionals’ perceived intention to use AeH systems. All six moderation factors showed significant influence on the research model. A validation of this model with a wider survey cohort is recommended as a future study.

Information preferences for the evaluation of coastal development impacts on ecosystem services: A multi-criteria assessment in the Australian context

Ecosystem based management requires the integration of various types of assessment indicators. Understanding stakeholders' information preferences is important, in selecting those indicators that best support management and policy. Both the preferences of decision-makers and the general public may matter, in democratic participatory management institutions. This paper presents a multi-criteria analysis aimed at quantifying the relative importance to these groups of economic, ecological and socio-economic indicators usually considered when managing ecosystem services in a coastal development context. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is applied within two nationwide surveys in Australia, and preferences of both the general public and decision-makers for these indicators are elicited and compared. Results show that, on average across both groups, the priority in assessing a generic coastal development project is for the ecological assessment of its impacts on marine biodiversity. Ecological assessment indicators are globally preferred to both economic and socio-economic indicators regardless of the nature of the impacts studied. These results are observed for a significantly larger proportion of decision-maker than general public respondents, questioning the extent to which the general public's preferences are well reflected in decision-making processes.

Feature selection and the concept of immediate neighborhood in the context of clustering techniques

The concept of feature selection in a nonparametric unsupervised learning environment is practically undeveloped because no true measure for the effectiveness of a feature exists in such an environment. The lack of a feature selection phase preceding the clustering process seriously affects the reliability of such learning. New concepts such as significant features, level of significance of features, and immediate neighborhood are introduced which result in meeting implicitly the need for feature slection in the context of clustering techniques.

The context of enterprise education: Insights into current practices

This paper presents the results of an investigation into contextual differences in the development and delivery of enterprise education in higher education globally. Using information gathered from an online survey distributed to enterprise educators, distinct differences in the provision of enterprise education are identified, as are differences of opinion among enterprise educators. The findings demonstrate that although enterprise education is highly diversified in terms of presentation, content and style, there are clear commonalities with regard to expected student outcomes. The respondents reported low levels of business start-up activity among students during enterprise education and/or within one year of graduation. Over 75% of the educators surveyed had personal start-up experience, and there was limited reliance on academic literature, with a preference for referencing broader stakeholder perspectives. With regard to the practical implications of this research, the international metric of enterprise education appears to be a broad set of enterprising skills that equip and enable students to recognize and exploit opportunities in order to navigate future unknowns. The commonly employed metric of business start-up appears less valid in light of this investigation.

Understanding the heterogeneity of entrepreneurship education: going beyond Gartner

This paper seeks to draw attention to the importance of appreciating and using ever-present diversity to achieve increased legitimacy for entrepreneurship education. As such, it aims to draw the reader into a reflective process of discovery as to why entrepreneurship education is important and how such importance can be prolonged. Design/methodology/approach - The paper revisits Gartner's 1985 conceptual framework for understanding the complexity of entrepreneurship. The paper proposes an alternative framework based on the logic of Gartner's framework to advance the understanding of entrepreneurship education. The authors discuss the dimensions of the proposed framework and explain the nature of the dialogic relations contained within. Findings - It is argued that the proposed conceptual framework provides a new way to understand ever-present heterogeneity related to the development and delivery of entrepreneurship education. Practical implications - The paper extends an invitation to the reader to audit their own involvement and proximity to entrepreneurship education. It argues that increased awareness of the value that heterogeneity plays in student learning outcomes and programme branding is directly related to the presence of heterogeneity across the dimensions of the conceptual framework. Originality/value - The paper introduces a simple yet powerlu1 means of understanding what factors contribute to the success or otherwise of developing and delivering entrepreneurship education. The simplicity of the approach suggested provides all entrepreneurship educators with the means to audit all facets of their programme.

Accounting for student/educator diversity: resurrecting coaction theory

This chapter challenges current approaches to defining the context and process of entrepreneurship education. In modeling our classrooms as a microcosm of the world our current and future students will enter, this chapter brings to life (and celebrates) the everpresent diversity found within. The chapter attempts to make an important (and unique) contribution to the field of enterprise education by illustrating how we can determine the success of (1) our efforts as educators, (2) our students, and (3) our various teaching methods. The chapter is based on two specific premises, the most fundamental being the assertion that the performance of student, educator and institution can only be accounted for by accepting the nature of the dialogic relationship between the student and educator and between the educator and institution. A second premise is that at any moment in time, the educator can be assessed as being either efficient or inefficient, due to the presence of observable heterogeneity in the learning environment that produces differential learning outcomes. This chapter claims that understanding and appreciating the nature of heterogeneity in our classrooms provides an avenue for improvement in all facets of learning and teaching. To explain this claim, Haskell’s (1949) theory of coaction is resurrected to provide a lens through which all manner of interaction occurring within all forms of educational contexts can be explained. Haskell (1949) asserted that coaction theory had three salient features.

Bayesian analysis of community dynamics

Elucidating the mechanisms responsible for the patterns of species abundance, diversity, and distribution within and across ecological systems is a fundamental research focus in ecology. Species abundance patterns are shaped in a convoluted way by interplays between inter-/intra-specific interactions, environmental forcing, demographic stochasticity, and dispersal. Comprehensive models and suitable inferential and computational tools for teasing out these different factors are quite limited, even though such tools are critically needed to guide the implementation of management and conservation strategies, the efficacy of which rests on a realistic evaluation of the underlying mechanisms. This is even more so in the prevailing context of concerns over climate change progress and its potential impacts on ecosystems. This thesis utilized the flexible hierarchical Bayesian modelling framework in combination with the computer intensive methods known as Markov chain Monte Carlo, to develop methodologies for identifying and evaluating the factors that control the structure and dynamics of ecological communities. These methodologies were used to analyze data from a range of taxa: macro-moths (Lepidoptera), fish, crustaceans, birds, and rodents. Environmental stochasticity emerged as the most important driver of community dynamics, followed by density dependent regulation; the influence of inter-specific interactions on community-level variances was broadly minor. This thesis contributes to the understanding of the mechanisms underlying the structure and dynamics of ecological communities, by showing directly that environmental fluctuations rather than inter-specific competition dominate the dynamics of several systems. This finding emphasizes the need to better understand how species are affected by the environment and acknowledge species differences in their responses to environmental heterogeneity, if we are to effectively model and predict their dynamics (e.g. for management and conservation purposes). The thesis also proposes a model-based approach to integrating the niche and neutral perspectives on community structure and dynamics, making it possible for the relative importance of each category of factors to be evaluated in light of field data.

Middleware for Mobile Sensing Applications in Urban Environments

Sensor networks represent an attractive tool to observe the physical world. Networks of tiny sensors can be used to detect a fire in a forest, to monitor the level of pollution in a river, or to check on the structural integrity of a bridge. Application-specific deployments of static-sensor networks have been widely investigated. Commonly, these networks involve a centralized data-collection point and no sharing of data outside the organization that owns it. Although this approach can accommodate many application scenarios, it significantly deviates from the pervasive computing vision of ubiquitous sensing where user applications seamlessly access anytime, anywhere data produced by sensors embedded in the surroundings. With the ubiquity and ever-increasing capabilities of mobile devices, urban environments can help give substance to the ubiquitous sensing vision through Urbanets, spontaneously created urban networks. Urbanets consist of mobile multi-sensor devices, such as smart phones and vehicular systems, public sensor networks deployed by municipalities, and individual sensors incorporated in buildings, roads, or daily artifacts. My thesis is that "multi-sensor mobile devices can be successfully programmed to become the underpinning elements of an open, infrastructure-less, distributed sensing platform that can bring sensor data out of their traditional close-loop networks into everyday urban applications". Urbanets can support a variety of services ranging from emergency and surveillance to tourist guidance and entertainment. For instance, cars can be used to provide traffic information services to alert drivers to upcoming traffic jams, and phones to provide shopping recommender services to inform users of special offers at the mall. Urbanets cannot be programmed using traditional distributed computing models, which assume underlying networks with functionally homogeneous nodes, stable configurations, and known delays. Conversely, Urbanets have functionally heterogeneous nodes, volatile configurations, and unknown delays. Instead, solutions developed for sensor networks and mobile ad hoc networks can be leveraged to provide novel architectures that address Urbanet-specific requirements, while providing useful abstractions that hide the network complexity from the programmer. This dissertation presents two middleware architectures that can support mobile sensing applications in Urbanets. Contory offers a declarative programming model that views Urbanets as a distributed sensor database and exposes an SQL-like interface to developers. Context-aware Migratory Services provides a client-server paradigm, where services are capable of migrating to different nodes in the network in order to maintain a continuous and semantically correct interaction with clients. Compared to previous approaches to supporting mobile sensing urban applications, our architectures are entirely distributed and do not assume constant availability of Internet connectivity. In addition, they allow on-demand collection of sensor data with the accuracy and at the frequency required by every application. These architectures have been implemented in Java and tested on smart phones. They have proved successful in supporting several prototype applications and experimental results obtained in ad hoc networks of phones have demonstrated their feasibility with reasonable performance in terms of latency, memory, and energy consumption.

High-throughput Phenotyping of Wheat Seminal Root Traits in a Breeding Context

Water availability is a major limiting factor for wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) in rain-fed agricultural systems worldwide. Root architecture has important functional implications for the timing and extent of soil water extraction, yet selection for root traits in wheat breeding programs has been largely limited due to the lack of suitable phenotyping methods. The aim of this research was to develop a low-cost high-throughput phenotyping method to facilitate selection for desirable root traits. We developed a method to assess ‘seminal root angle’ and ‘seminal root number’ in seedlings – two proxy traits associated to root architecture of mature wheat plants (1). The method involves measuring the angle between the first pair of seminal roots and the number of roots of wheat seedlings grown in transparent pots (Figure 1). Images captured at 5 to 10 days after sowing are analyzed to calculate seminal root angle and number. Performing this technique under “speed breeding” conditions (plants grown at a density of 600 plants / m2, under controlled temperature and constant light) allows the selection based on the desired root traits of up to 5 consecutive generations within 12 months. Alternatively, when focusing only on germplasm screening, up to 52 successive phenotypic assays can be conducted within 12 months. This approach has been shown to be highly reproducible, it requires little resource (time, space, and labour) and can be used to rapidly enrich breeding populations with desirable alleles for narrow root angle and a high number of seminal roots to indirectly target the selection of deeper root system with higher branching at depth. Such root characteristics are highly desirable in wheat to cope with the climate model projections, especially in summer rainfall dominant regions including some Australian, Indian, South American and African cropping regions, where winter crops mainly rely on deep stored water.

AndroMedia - Towards a Context-aware Mobile Music Recommender

Portable music players have made it possible to listen to a personal collection of music in almost every situation, and they are often used during some activity to provide a stimulating audio environment. Studies have demonstrated the effects of music on the human body and mind, indicating that selecting music according to situation can, besides making the situation more enjoyable, also make humans perform better. For example, music can boost performance during physical exercises, alleviate stress and positively affect learning. We believe that people intuitively select different types of music for different situations. Based on this hypothesis, we propose a portable music player, AndroMedia, designed to provide personalised music recommendations using the user’s current context and listening habits together with other user’s situational listening patterns. We have developed a prototype that consists of a central server and a PDA client. The client uses Bluetooth sensors to acquire context information and logs user interaction to infer implicit user feedback. The user interface also allows the user to give explicit feedback. Large user interface elements facilitate touch-based usage in busy environments. The prototype provides the necessary framework for using the collected information together with other user’s listening history in a context- enhanced collaborative filtering algorithm to generate context-sensitive recommendations. The current implementation is limited to using traditional collaborative filtering algorithms. We outline the techniques required to create context-aware recommendations and present a survey on mobile context-aware music recommenders found in literature. As opposed to the explored systems, AndroMedia utilises other users’ listening habits when suggesting tunes, and does not require any laborious set up processes.

Feature selection and the concept of immediate neighborhood in the context of clustering techniques

The concept of feature selection in a nonparametric unsupervised learning environment is practically undeveloped because no true measure for the effectiveness of a feature exists in such an environment. The lack of a feature selection phase preceding the clustering process seriously affects the reliability of such learning. New concepts such as significant features, level of significance of features, and immediate neighborhood are introduced which result in meeting implicitly the need for feature slection in the context of clustering techniques.

Theological Exegesis in the Canonical Context : Brevard S. Childs' Methodology of Biblical Theology

Modern Christian theology has been at pain with the schism between the Bible and theology, and between biblical studies and systematic theology. Brevard Springs Childs is one of biblical scholars who attempt to dismiss this “iron curtain” separating the two disciplines. The present thesis aims at analyzing Childs’ concept of theological exegesis in the canonical context. In the present study I employ the method of systematic analysis. The thesis consists of seven chapters. Introduction is the first chapter. The second chapter attempts to find out the most important elements which exercise influence on Childs’ methodology of biblical theology by sketching his academic development during his career. The third chapter attempts to deal with the crucial question why and how the concept of the canon is so important for Childs’ methodology of biblical theology. In chapter four I analyze why and how Childs is dissatisfied with historical-critical scholarship and I point out the differences and similarities between his canonical approach and historical criticism. The fifth chapter attempts at discussing Childs’ central concepts of theological exegesis by investigating whether a Christocentric approach is an appropriate way of creating a unified biblical theology. In the sixth chapter I present a critical evaluation and methodological reflection of Childs’ theological exegesis in the canonical context. The final chapter sums up the key points of Childs’ methodology of biblical theology. The basic results of this thesis are as follows: First, the fundamental elements of Childs’ theological thinking are rooted in Reformed theological tradition and in modern theological neo-orthodoxy and in its most prominent theologian, Karl Barth. The American Biblical Theological Movement and the controversy between Protestant liberalism and conservatism in the modern American context cultivate his theological sensitivity and position. Second, Childs attempts to dismiss negative influences of the historical-critical method by establishing canon-based theological exegesis leading into confessional biblical theology. Childs employs terminology such as canonical intentionality, the wholeness of the canon, the canon as the most appropriate context for doing a biblical theology, and the continuity of the two Testaments, in order to put into effect his canonical program. Childs demonstrates forcefully the inadequacies of the historical-critical method in creating biblical theology in biblical hermeneutics, doctrinal theology, and pastoral practice. His canonical approach endeavors to establish and create post-critical Christian biblical theology, and works within the traditional framework of faith seeking understanding. Third, Childs’ biblical theology has a double task: descriptive and constructive, the former connects biblical theology with exegesis, the later with dogmatic theology. He attempts to use a comprehensive model, which combines a thematic investigation of the essential theological contents of the Bible with a systematic analysis of the contents of the Christian faith. Childs also attempts to unite Old Testament theology and New Testament theology into one unified biblical theology. Fourth, some problematic points of Childs’ thinking need to be mentioned. For instance, his emphasis on the final form of the text of the biblical canon is highly controversial, yet Childs firmly believes in it, he even regards it as the corner stone of his biblical theology. The relationship between the canon and the doctrine of biblical inspiration is weak. He does not clearly define whether Scripture is God’s word or whether it only “witnesses” to it. Childs’ concepts of “the word of God” and “divine revelation” remain unclear, and their ontological status is ambiguous. Childs’ theological exegesis in the canonical context is a new attempt in the modern history of Christian theology. It expresses his sincere effort to create a path for doing biblical theology. Certainly, it was just a modest beginning of a long process.

An innovative clustering technique for unsupervized learning in the context of remotely sensed earth resources data analysis

A new clustering technique, based on the concept of immediato neighbourhood, with a novel capability to self-learn the number of clusters expected in the unsupervized environment, has been developed. The method compares favourably with other clustering schemes based on distance measures, both in terms of conceptual innovations and computational economy. Test implementation of the scheme using C-l flight line training sample data in a simulated unsupervized mode has brought out the efficacy of the technique. The technique can easily be implemented as a front end to established pattern classification systems with supervized learning capabilities to derive unified learning systems capable of operating in both supervized and unsupervized environments. This makes the technique an attractive proposition in the context of remotely sensed earth resources data analysis wherein it is essential to have such a unified learning system capability.

An object-centred approach to encourage online participation in the context of behaviour change

Online groups rely on contributions from their members to flourish, but in the context of behaviour change individuals are typically reluctant to participate actively before they have changed successfully. We took inspiration from CSCW research on objects to address this problem by shifting the focus of online participation from the exchange of personal experiences to more incidental interactions mediated by objects that offer support for change. In this article we describe how we designed, deployed and studied a smartphone application that uses different objects, called distractions and tips, to facilitate social interaction amongst people trying to quit smoking. A field study with 18 smokers revealed different forms of interaction: purely instrumental interactions with the objects, subtle engagement with other users through receptive and covert interactions, as well as explicit interaction with other users through disclosure and mutual support. The distraction objects offered a stepping-stone into interaction, whereas the tips encouraged interaction with the people behind the objects. This understanding of interaction through objects complements existing frameworks of online participation and adds to the current discourse on object-centred sociality. Furthermore, it provides an alternative approach to the design of online support groups, which offers the users enhanced control about the information they share with other users. We conclude by discussing how researchers and practitioners can apply the ideas of interaction around objects to other domains where individuals may have a simultaneous desire and reluctance to interact.