Business Innovation and Disruption in Publishing

This is the first volume in a book series examining how organizations in the creative industries respond to disruptive change and how they themselves generate business innovations. The aspiration of this book series is to understand some of the common forces behind the disruptions occurring in so many creative industries today and identifying the most promising strategies and responses by organizations to create new value propositions, business models and business practices that can enable these industry participants to cope with and eventually thrive as their industries and sectors are transformed. The chapters included in the volume examine the processes of disruption and transformation due to the technology of the Internet, social forces driven by social media, the development of new portable digital devices with greater capabilities and smaller size, the decreasing costs of new information, and the creation of new business models and forms of intellectual property ownership rights for a digitized industry. The context for this volume is the publishing industries, understood as the industries for the publishing of fiction and non-fiction books, academic literature, consumer as well as trade magazines, and daily newspapers. This volume includes chapters by an internationally diverse array of media scholars whose chapters provide insights into these phenomena in Eastern Europe, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Portugal, Russia, and the United States, using different methodological frameworks including, but not limited to, surveys, in-depth interviews and multiple-case studies. One gap that this book series seeks to fill is that between the study of business innovation and disruption by innovation scholars largely based in business school settings and similar studies by scholarly experts from non-business school disciplines, including the broader social sciences (e.g. sociology, political science, economic geography) and creative industry based professional school disciplines (e.g. architecture, communications, design, film making, journalism, media studies, performing arts, photography and television). Future volumes of this book series will examine disruption and business innovation in the film, video and photography sectors (volume two), the music sector (volume three) and interactive entertainment (volume four), with subsequent volumes focusing on the most relevant developments in creative industry business innovation and disruption that emerge.

Modelling as a vehicle for philosophical inquiry in the mathematics curriculum

Philosophical inquiry in the teaching and learning of mathematics has received continued, albeit limited, attention over many years (e.g., Daniel, 2000; English, 1994; Lafortune, Daniel, Fallascio, & Schleider, 2000; Kennedy, 2012a). The rich contributions these communities can offer school mathematics, however, have not received the deserved recognition, especially from the mathematics education community. This is a perplexing situation given the close relationship between the two disciplines and their shared values for empowering students to solve a range of challenging problems, often unanticipated, and often requiring broadened reasoning. In this article, I first present my understanding of philosophical inquiry as it pertains to the mathematics classroom, taking into consideration the significant work that has been undertaken on socio-political contexts in mathematics education (e.g., Skovsmose & Greer, 2012). I then consider one approach to advancing philosophical inquiry in the mathematics classroom, namely, through modelling activities that require interpretation, questioning, and multiple approaches to solution. The design of these problem activities, set within life-based contexts, provides an ideal vehicle for stimulating philosophical inquiry.

An Artificial Neutral Network (ANN) model for predicting biodiesel kinetic viscosity as a function of temperature and chemical compositions

An Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is a computational modeling tool which has found extensive acceptance in many disciplines for modeling complex real world problems. An ANN can model problems through learning by example, rather than by fully understanding the detailed characteristics and physics of the system. In the present study, the accuracy and predictive power of an ANN was evaluated in predicting kinetic viscosity of biodiesels over a wide range of temperatures typically encountered in diesel engine operation. In this model, temperature and chemical composition of biodiesel were used as input variables. In order to obtain the necessary data for model development, the chemical composition and temperature dependent fuel properties of ten different types of biodiesels were measured experimentally using laboratory standard testing equipments following internationally recognized testing procedures. The Neural Networks Toolbox of MatLab R2012a software was used to train, validate and simulate the ANN model on a personal computer. The network architecture was optimised following a trial and error method to obtain the best prediction of the kinematic viscosity. The predictive performance of the model was determined by calculating the absolute fraction of variance (R2), root mean squared (RMS) and maximum average error percentage (MAEP) between predicted and experimental results. This study found that ANN is highly accurate in predicting the viscosity of biodiesel and demonstrates the ability of the ANN model to find a meaningful relationship between biodiesel chemical composition and fuel properties at different temperature levels. Therefore the model developed in this study can be a useful tool in accurately predict biodiesel fuel properties instead of undertaking costly and time consuming experimental tests.

Engaging paramedic students in research: A case report

The use of volunteer undergraduate students to support simulated training for peers is common in Paramedic Science. However, there are limited examples of engaging paramedic student-volunteers in research as compared to that reported in cognate disciplines such as Medicine and Nursing. This case report shares our experience with engaging a penultimate year paramedic student in evaluation research. This information we hope will start the dialogue on the epistemology and pedagogies for effective engagement of undergraduate paramedic students as future researchers.

Four Aces : Bringing Communication Perspectives to Corporate Social Responsibility

The purpose of this chapter is to address the question of how communication studies can prove its value in relation to corporate social responsibility (CSR). As many disciplines seek to understand CSR, the role of communication has been relatively underexplored despite its prevalence in demonstrating and shaping social responsibility positions and practice. Literature review. The literature review points to what we consider as four aces. Communication studies alert us to (1) how meaning is constructed through communication, something that has implications for the management of organizations as publics hold different views of CSR and expect different things from them; (2) how a dialogue between an organization and its publics should unfold; (3) how practices of transparency can assist organizations to come across as trustworthy actors; and, importantly, (4) how a complexity view is fruitful to grasp the CSR communication process. These four key themes could be instructive for practitioners who want to argue for and demonstrate the usefulness of strategic communication for the management of CSR and bridge meso and macro levels of analysis.

Criminal Laws : Materials and Commentary on Criminal Law and Process in NSW [Fifth Edition]

"The success of Criminal Laws lies both in its distinctive features and in its appeal to a range of readerships. As one review put it, it is simultaneously a "textbook, casebook, handbook and reference work". As such it is ideal for criminal law and criminal justice courses as a teaching text, combining as it does primary sources with extensive critical commentary and a contextual perspective. It is likewise indispensable to practitioners for its detailed coverage of substantive law and its extensive references and inter-disciplinary approach make it a first point of call for researchers from all disciplines. This fifth edition strengthens these distinctive features. All chapters have been systematically updated to incorporate the plethora of legislative, case law, statistical and research material which has emerged since the previous edition. The critical, thematic, contextual and interdisciplinary perspectives have been continued."--Publisher's website. Table of Contents: 1. Some themes -- 2. Criminalisation -- 3. The criminal process -- 4. Components of criminal offences -- 5. Homicide: murder and involuntary manslaughter -- 6. Defences -- 7. Assault and sexual assault -- 8. Public order offences -- 9. Drugs offences -- 10. Dishonest acquisition -- 11. Extending criminal liability: complicity, conspiracy and association -- 12. Sentencing and penality.

OSCE online : making assessment of clinical competencies transparent, accountable & authentic

Creating an authentic assessment which at once assesses competencies, scene management, communication and overall patient care is challenging in the competitive tertiary education market. Increasing student numbers and the cost of evaluating scenario based competencies serve to ensure the need for consistent objectivity and need for timely feedback to students on their performance. Objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) is currently the most flexible approach to competency based formative and summative assessment and widely used within paramedic degree programs. Students are understandably compelled to perform well and can be frustrated by not receiving timely and appropriate feedback. Increasingly a number of products aimed at providing a more efficient and paperless approach have begun to enter the market. These products, it is suggested are aimed at medicine programs and not at allied health professions and limited to one operating system and therefore ignore issues surrounding equity and accessibility. OSCE Online aims to address this gap in the market and is tailored to these disciplines. The application will provide a service that can be both tailored and standardised from a pre-written bank, depending upon requirement to fit around the needs of clinical competency assessment. Delivering authentic assessments to address student milestones in their training to become paramedics is the cornerstone of OSCE Online. By not being restricted to a specific device it will address issues of functionality, adaptability, accessibility, authenticity and importantly: transparency and accountability by producing contemporaneous data allowing issues to be easily identified and rectified.

A prospective cohort study examining the preferred learning styles of acute care registered nurses

Objectives This paper reports on the preferred learning styles of Registered Nurses practicing in acute care environments and relationships between gender, age, post-graduate experience and the identified preferred learning styles. Methods A prospective cohort study design was used. Participants completed a demographic questionnaire and the Felder-Silverman Index of Learning Styles (ILS) questionnaire to determine preferred learning styles. Results Most of the Registered Nurse participants were balanced across the Active-Reflective (n = 77, 54%), and Sequential-Global (n = 96, 68%) scales. Across the other scales, sensing (n = 97, 68%) and visual (n = 76, 53%) were the most common preferred learning style. There were only a small proportion who had a preferred learning style of reflective (n = 21, 15%), intuitive (n = 5, 4%), verbal (n = 11, 8%) or global learning (n = 15, 11%). Results indicated that gender, age and years since undergraduate education were not related to the identified preferred learning styles. Conclusions The identification of Registered Nurses’ learning style provides information that nurse educators and others can use to make informed choices about modification, development and strengthening of professional hospital-based educational programs. The use of the Index of Learning Styles questionnaire and its ability to identify ‘balanced’ learning style preferences may potentially yield additional preferred learning style information for other health-related disciplines.

Toward a more holistic analysis of international news flows

The study of international news flows has been a dominant topic of international communication research during the past 50 years. This paper critically reviews past approaches to the analysis of news flows and identifies the main strands of research in this field. In line with some previous critiques of the field, we argue that past research has for too long been influenced by dichotomous debates that failed to take account of the complexities of international news decisions. A new direction is needed in order for news flow research to provide better answers to the recurring questions. This new direction is not a break from past approaches but rather an integration of all different approaches, which would provide researchers with a more holistic framework for analyzing international news flows. This new approach calls for a combination of political, economic, geographic, historical, social and cultural factors, including perspectives from other disciplines, such as anthropology and linguistics.

Experimental creative practices

From the earliest human creative expressions there has been a relationship between art, technology and science. In Western history this relationship is often seen as drawing from the advances in both art and science that occurred during the Renaissance, and as captured in the polymath figure of da Vinci. The 20th century development of computer technology, and the more recent emergence of creative practice-led research as a recognised methodology, has lead to a renewed appreciation of the relationship between art, science and technology. This chapter focuses on transdisciplinary practices that bring together arts, science and technology in imaginative ways. Showing how such combinations have led to changes in both practice and forms of creative expression for artists and their partners across disciplines. The aim of this chapter is to sketch an outline of the types of transdisiplinary creative research projects that currently signify best practice in the field, which is done in reference to key literature and exemplars drawn from the Australian context.

Editorial : Turf

Thirteen years ago, Kenichi Ohmae proclaimed that the world had become “borderless,” and the nation-state nothing more than a “bit actor” in a globalised economy. Around the same time, “interdisciplinarity” appeared as the prime strategy for breaking down the rigid stratifications of traditional disciplines, promising an equivalently borderless academe. However, despite the rhetoric of globalisation and interdisciplinarity, territorial boundaries—both physical and conceptual—remain in evidence and under contention...

Ethnographic notes on visualization practices in tissue engineering

Visual information is central to several of the scientific disciplines. This paper studies how scientists working in a multidisciplinary field produce scientific evidence through building and manipulating scientific visualizations. Using ethnographic methods, we studied visualization practices of eight scientists working in the domain of tissue engineering research. Tissue engineering is an upcoming field of research that deals with replacing or regenerating human cells, tissues, or organs to restore or establish normal function. We spent 3 months in the field, where we recorded laboratory sessions of these scientists and used semi-structured interviews to get an insight into their visualization practices. From our results, we elicit two themes characterizing their visualization practices: multiplicity and physicality. In this article, we provide several examples of scientists’ visualization practices to describe these two themes and show that multimodality of such practices plays an important role in scientific visualization.

Social media analytics: an interdisciplinary approach and its implications for information systems

Social Media Analytics is an emerging interdisciplinary research field that aims on combining, extending, and adapting methods for analysis of social media data. On the one hand it can support IS and other research disciplines to answer their research questions and on the other hand it helps to provide architectural designs as well as solution frameworks for new social media-based applications and information systems. The authors suggest that IS should contribute to this field and help to develop and process an interdisciplinary research agenda.

A threshold concepts focus to curriculum design: supporting student learning through application of variation theory

This project develops and evaluates a model of curriculum design that aims to assist student learning of foundational disciplinary ‘Threshold Concepts’. The project uses phenomenographic action research, cross-institutional peer collaboration and the Variation Theory of Learning to develop and trial the model. Two contrasting disciplines (Physics and Law) and four institutions (two research-intensive and two universities of technology) were involved in the project, to ensure broad applicability of the model across different disciplines and contexts. The Threshold Concepts that were selected for curriculum design attention were measurement uncertainty in Physics and legal reasoning in Law. Threshold Concepts are key disciplinary concepts that are inherently troublesome, transformative and integrative in nature. Once understood, such concepts transform students’ views of the discipline because they enable students to coherently integrate what were previously seen as unrelated aspects of the subject, providing new ways of thinking about it (Meyer & Land 2003, 2005, 2006; Land et al. 2008). However, the integrative and transformative nature of such threshold concepts make them inherently difficult for students to learn, with resulting misunderstandings of concepts being prevalent...

Learning and teaching epidemiology with audience response technology

Background The learning and teaching of epidemiology is core to many public health programs. Many students find the content of epidemiology, and specifically risk of bias assessment, challenging to learn. Howbeit, learning is enhanced when knowledge is able to be acquired from an active-learning, hands-on experience. Methods The innovative use of wireless audience response technology “clickers” was incorporated into the lectures of the university’s post-graduate epidemiology units and the tailored epidemiological modules delivered for professional disciplines (e.g. optometry). Clickers were used to apply several pedagogical approaches of active learning including peer-instruction and real-world simulation. Students were also assessed for their gain in knowledge within the lecture (pre-post) and their perceptions of how the use of clickers helped them learn. The routine university-wide end of semester Insight Survey provided further information of the student’s satisfaction with the approach. Results The technology was useful in identifying deficits of knowledge of key concepts either before or after instruction. Where key concepts were re-tested post-lecture, as expected, knowledge increased significantly and provided immediate feed-back to students. Across the lecture series, typically 85% of students identified the technology helped them learn, increased their opportunity to interact with the lecturer, and recommend their use for future classes. The Insight Survey report identified 93% of respondents identified the unit in which clickers were consistently used provided good learning opportunities. Numerous student comments supported the teaching method. Conclusions Epidemiological subject matter lends itself to incorporation of audience response technology. The use of the technology to facilitate interactive voting provides an instant response and participation of everyone to enhance the classroom experience. The pedagogical approach increases students’ knowledge and increases their satisfaction with the unit.