Socio-demographic and work setting correlates of poor mental health in a population sample of working Victorians: application in evidence-based intervention priority setting

Interventions to promote mental health in the workplace are rapidly gaining acceptability as a means to prevent, screen, treat and effectively manage the growing disease burden of depression and anxiety among working people. The objective of this study was to identify socio-demographic and work setting correlates of poor mental health to consider alongside other evidence in priority setting for workplace mental health promotion (MHP). Multiple logistic regression was used to model the probability of poor mental health (SF-12) in relation to socio-demographic (gender, age, education, marital status and occupational skill level) and employment factors (workplace size and type, industrial sector, employment arrangement and working hours) in a population-based cross-sectional survey of 1051 working Victorians. As a result, poor mental health was (21% prevalence overall) higher in working females than in males and decreased with increasing age. Only one employment factor was significant in demographically adjusted multivariate analyses, showing an increase in the odds of poor mental health with increasing working hours. It is concluded that based on the prevalence of poor mental health, Victorian work settings with high proportions of younger workers, and younger working women in particular, should be prioritized for workplace MHP. Thus, together with other research demonstrating particularly poor psychosocial working conditions for young working women, sectors with an over-representation of this group (e.g. service sector) could be prioritized for workplace MHP alongside young and blue-collar males (also a priority due to low mental healthcare service use).

Can smartphone users turn off tracking service settings?

Tracking services play a fundamental role in the smartphone ecosystem. While their primary purpose is to provide a smartphone user with the ability to regulate the extent of sharing private information with external parties, these services can also be misused by advertisers in order to boost revenues. In this paper, we investigate tracking services on the Android and iOS smartphone platforms. We present a simple and effective way to monitor traffic generated by tracking services to and from the smartphone and external servers. To evaluate our work, we dynamically execute a set of Android and iOS applications, collected from their respective official markets. Our empirical results indicate that even if the user disables or limits tracking services on the smartphone, applications can by-pass those settings and, consequently, leak private information to external parties. On the other hand, when testing the location 'on' setting, we notice that generally location is not tracked.

A fundamental partnership: the experiences of practising teachers as lecturers in a pre-service teacher education program

This paper reports an evaluation of an innovative university-school partnership in which teacher practitioners work as university lecturers in a regional Australian pre-service teacher education programme. The philosophy of this programme encompasses authentic partnerships between universities, schools and other industry employers. The study was motivated by an interest in understanding the experiences and outcomes for the teacher practitioners and in documenting their experiences. Staff members who are currently on contract as university lecturers as well as teachers who have completed secondments and returned to school settings are surveyed. This paper focuses on suggestions to improve the partnership and discusses future directions for the partnership.

A fundamental partnership : the experiences of practising teachers as lecturers in a pre-service teacher education program

This paper reports an evaluation of an innovative university-school partnership in which teacher practitioners work as university lecturers in a regional Australian pre-service teacher education programme. The philosophy of this programme encompasses authentic partnerships between universities, schools and other industry employers. The study was motivated by an interest inunderstanding the experiences and outcomes for the teacher practitioners and in documenting their experiences. Staff members who are currently on contract as university lecturers as well as teachers who have completed secondments and returned to school settings are surveyed. This paper focuses on suggestions to improve the partnership and discusses future directions for the partnership.

The "theory-practice gap": Turning theory into practice in a pre-service teacher education program

his thesis investigates the theory-practice gap using the exemplar of teacher education. The research is situated in a pre-service teacher education program that explicitly seeks to bridge the theory-practice gap so that it produces “learning managers” who can negotiate the contemporary knowledge society in ways different to those of their predecessors. The empirical work reported in this thesis describes and interprets the experiences of preservice and beginning teachers in turning theory into practice. In order to accomplish this outcome, the thesis draws on Mead’s theory of emergence and symbolic interactionism to provide a theoretical perspective for meaning-making in social situations. Data for the study were collected through interviews and focus groups involving a sample of first-year graduate teachers of an Australian pre-service teacher education program. The main finding of this thesis is that the theory-practice gap in pre-service teacher education under present institutional arrangements is an inevitable phenomenon arising as individuals undergo the process of emergence from pre-service to graduate and then beginning teachers. The study shows that despite the efforts of the program developers, environmental, social and cultural conditions in teacher education processes and structures and in schools inhibit the trainee and novitiate teacher from exercising agency to effect change in traditional classroom practices. Thus, the gap between theory and practice is co-produced and sustained in the model that characterises contemporary preservice teacher education in the perspectives of lecturers, teachers and administrators.

Achieving socially inclusive practice: analysing power dynamics in a participatory approach to service development

The paper is concerned with what works and why in relation to socially inclusive practice in diverse community services settings. Drawing on the findings from a research study involving a participatory evaluation and service development project in a large community services organisation in Melbourne, Australia, the paper asserts that organisations can become more inclusive by paying attention to the ways in which they perpetuate existing oppression and by intentionally challenging associated limiting power/knowledge formations. The study was situated in rights-based approaches to health and social development and drew on Foucauldian conceptualisations of power that see the point of operation of power as the point of resistance, and therefore containing the possibility for change. The researchers worked in three diverse service contexts: children and families experiencing homelessness, people with disabilities, and older people with a history of homelessness and exclusion. The ongoing analysis of the power relations between and within the different stakeholder groups was important in ensuring that the development of the process did not reinscribe oppression and marginalisation. Within the growing body of work that theorises participatory and inclusive practices, the application of a Foucauldian framework offers new insights for anti-oppressive practice in the context of service development.

An analytical model for optimal spectrum leasing under constraints of quality of service in CRNs

Cognitive radio improves spectrum efficiency and mitigates spectrum scarcity by allowing cognitive users to opportunistically access idle chunks of the spectrum owned by licensed users. In long-term spectrum leasing markets, secondary network operators make a decision about how much spectrum is optimal to fulfill their users' data transmission requirements. We study this optimization problem in multiple channel scenarios. Under the constrains of expected user admission rate and quality of service, we model the secondary network into a dynamic data transportation system. In this system, the spectrum accesses of both primary users and secondary users are in accordance with stochastic processes, respectively. The main metrics of quality of service we are concerned with include user admission rate, average transmission delay and stability of the delay. To quantify the relationship between spectrum provisioning and quality of service, we propose an approximate analytical model. We use the model to estimate the lower and upper bounds of the optimal amount of the spectrum. The distance between the bounds is relatively narrow. In addition, we design a simple algorithm to compute the optimum by using the bounds. We conduct numerical simulations on a slotted multiple channel dynamic spectrum access network model. Simulation results demonstrate the preciseness of the proposed model. Our work sheds light on the design of game and auction based dynamic spectrum sharing mechanisms in cognitive radio networks.

Recover fault services via complex service-to-node mappings in wireless sensor networks

With the motivation of seamlessly extending wireless sensor networks to the external environment, service-oriented architecture comes up as a promising solution. However, as sensor nodes are failure prone, this consequently renders the whole wireless sensor network to seriously faulty. When a particular node is faulty, the service on it should be migrated into those substitute sensor nodes that are in a normal status. Currently, two kinds of approaches exist to identify the substitute sensor nodes: the most common approach is to prepare redundancy nodes, though the involved tasks such as maintaining redundancy nodes, i.e., relocating the new node, lead to an extra burden on the wireless sensor networks. More recently, other approaches without using redundancy nodes are emerging, and they merely select the substitute nodes in a sensor node's perspective i.e., migrating the service of faulty node to it's nearest sensor node, though usually neglecting the requirements of the application level. Even a few work consider the need of the application level, they perform at packets granularity and don't fit well at service granularity. In this paper, we aim to remove these limitations in the wireless sensor network with the service-oriented architecture. Instead of deploying redundancy nodes, the proposed mechanism replaces the faulty sensor node with consideration of the similarity on the application level, as well as on the sensor level. On the application level, we apply the Bloom Filter for its high efficiency and low space costs. While on the sensor level, we design an objective solution via the coefficient of a variation as an evaluation for choosing the substitute on the sensor level. © 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York.

‘I felt like I was watching porn’: the reality of preparing pre-service teachers to teach about sexual pleasure

Overwhelmingly, school-based sexuality education programmes focus on the prevention of infection, pregnancy and abuse, with little if any attention given to positive views of sexuality and rarely the inclusion of sex positive issues such as pleasure, intimacy and desire. This paper explores the experience of teaching about pleasure to pre-service health and physical education teachers as part of compulsory studies in a unit on sexuality education designed to prepare them to teach sexuality education in secondary schools. Drawing on the aims, theoretical framework, content and pedagogical structure of the unit, and data collected from 42, third-year pre-service teachers (PST) in Australia via surveys and student assessment, the paper provides some practical examples of what teaching about pleasure might look like in practice. It argues that with adequate preparation, a framework to celebrate sex and sexuality, a gender lens to examine normative discourses, and the opportunity for reflection, PST can develop the confidence, skill and willingness to include pedagogies of pleasure in their school-based work.

Oncology service initiatives and research in regional Australia

OBJECTIVE: This paper reflects on the recent growth of cancer research being conducted through some of Australia's rural centres. It encompasses work being done across the fields of clinical, translational and health services research. DESIGN: This is a collaborative piece with contributions from rural health researchers, clinical and cancer services staff from several different regions. CONCLUSION: The past decade has seen an expansion in cancer research in rural and regional Australia driven in part by the recognition that cancer patients in remote areas experience poorer outcomes than their metropolitan counterparts. This work has led to the development of more effective cancer networks and new models of care designed to meet the particular needs of the rural cancer patient. It is hoped that the growth of cancer research in regional centres will, in time, reduce the disparity between rural and urban communities and improve outcomes for cancer patients across both populations.

Energy efficient sleep schedule with service coverage guarantee in wireless sensor networks

Service oriented architecture has been proposed to support collaborations among distributed wireless sensor network (WSN) applications in an open dynamic environment. However, WSNs are resource constraint, and have limited computation abilities, limited communication bandwidth and especially limited energy. Fortunately, sensor nodes in WSNs are usually deployed redundantly, which brings the opportunity to adopt a sleep schedule for balanced energy consumption to extend the network lifetime. Due to miniaturization and energy efficiency, one sensor node can integrate several sense units and support a variety of services. Traditional sleep schedule considers only the constraints from the sensor nodes, can be categorized to a one-layer (i.e., node layer) issue. The service oriented WSNs should resolve the energy optimization issue considering the two-layer constraints, i.e., the sensor nodes layer and service layer. Then, the one-layer energy optimization scheme in previous work is not applicable for service oriented WSNs. Hence, in this paper we propose a sleep schedule with a service coverage guarantee in WSNs. Firstly, by considering the redundancy degree on both the service level and the node level, we can get an accurate redundancy degree of one sensor node. Then, we can adopt fuzzy logic to integrate the redundancy degree, reliability and energy to get a sleep factor. Based on the sleep factor, we furthermore propose the sleep mechanism. The case study and simulation evaluations illustrate the capability of our proposed approach.

Big data sensing and service: a tutorial

As the advance of the Internet of Things (IoT), more M2M sensors and devices are connected to the Internet. These sensors and devices generate sensor-based big data and bring new business opportunities and demands for creating and developing sensor-oriented big data infrastructures, platforms and analytics service applications. Big data sensing is becoming a new concept and next technology trend based on a connected sensor world because of IoT. It brings a strong impact on many sensor-oriented applications, including smart city, disaster control and monitor, healthcare services, and environment protection and climate change study. This paper is written as a tutorial paper by providing the informative concepts and taxonomy on big data sensing and services. The paper not only discusses the motivation, research scope, and features of big data sensing and services, but also exams the required services in big data sensing based on the state-of-the-art research work. Moreover, the paper discusses big data sensing challenges, issues, and needs.

The influence of the tag-along rights in the value of companies: an event study of the effects on the market and service companies

The aim of this work is to check the effect of granting tag-along rights to stockholders by analyzing the behavior of the return of the stock. To do so we carried out event studies for a group of 21 company stocks, divided into service provider companies and others, who granted this right to their stockholders after Law 10,303 was passed in October, 2001. In the test we used two models for estimating abnormal returns: adjusted to the market and adjusted to the risk and market. The results of the tests we carried out based on these models did not capture abnormal returns (surpluses), telling us that the tag-along rights did not affect the pattern of daily returns of the stocks of companies traded on BOVESPA (The Sao Paulo Stock Exchange). We did not expect this result because of the new corporate governance practices adopted by companies in Brazil.

GRAPHICAL REPRESENTATIONS of MESSAGE EXCHANGES INTO WEB SERVICE-BASED APPLICATIONS

Web service-based application is an architectural style, where a collection of Web services communicate to each other to execute processes. With the popularity increase of Web service-based applications and since messages exchanged inside of this applications can be complex, we need tools to simplify the understanding of interrelationship among Web services. This work present a description of a graphical representation of Web service-based applications and the mechanisms inserted among Web service requesters and providers to catch information to represent an application. The major contribution of this paper is to discus and use HTTP and SOAP information to show a graphical representation similar to a UML sequence diagram of Web service-based applications.

A framework for monitoring and runtime recovery of web service-based applications

Service provisioning is a challenging research area for the design and implementation of autonomic service-oriented software systems. It includes automated QoS management for such systems and their applications. Monitoring, Diagnosis and Repair are three key features of QoS management. This work presents a self-healing Web service-based framework that manages QoS degradation at runtime. Our approach is based on proxies. Proxies act on meta-level communications and extend the HTTP envelope of the exchanged messages with QoS-related parameter values. QoS Data are filtered over time and analysed using statistical functions and the Hidden Markov Model. Detected QoS degradations are handled with proxies. We experienced our framework using an orchestrated electronic shop application (FoodShop).