EUELC project : a multi-centre, multipurpose study to investigate early stage NSCLC, and to establish a biobank for ongoing collaboration

The European Early Lung Cancer (EUELC) project aims to determine if specific genetic alterations occurring in lung carcinogenesis are detectable in the respiratory epithelium. In order to pursue this objective, nonsmall cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients with a very high risk of developing progressive lung cancer were recruited from 12 centres in eight European countries: France, Germany, southern Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the UK. In addition, NSCLC patients were followed up every 6 months for 36 months. A European Bronchial Tissue Bank was set up at the University of Liverpool (Liverpool, UK) to optimise the use of biological specimens. The molecular - pathological investigations were subdivided into specific work packages that were delivered by EUELC Partners. The work packages encompassed mutational analysis, genetic instability, methylation profiling, expression profiling utilising immunohistochemistry and chip-based technologies, as well as in-depth analysis of FHIT and RARβ genes, the telomerase catalytic subunit hTERT and genotyping of susceptibility genes in specific pathways. The EUELC project engendered a tremendous collaborative effort, and it enabled the EUELC Partners to establish protocols for assessing molecular biomarkers in early lung cancer with the view to using such biomarkers for early diagnosis and as intermediate end-points in future chemopreventive programmes. Copyright©ERS Journals Ltd 2009.

Orchids : My Intersex Adventure

Orchids: My Intersex Adventure is a multi-award winning autobiographical documentary film. The film follows documentary filmmaker, Phoebe Hart, as she comes clean on her journey of self-discovery to embrace her future and reconcile the past shame and family secrecy surrounding her intersex condition. Despite her mother’s outright refusal to be in the film, Phoebe decides she must push on with her quest to resolve her life story and connect with other intersex people on camera. With the help of her sister Bonnie and support from her partner James, she hits the open road and reflects on her youth. Phoebe’s happy and carefree childhood came to an abrupt end at puberty when she was told she would never menstruate nor have children. But the reasons why were never discussed and the topic was taboo. At the age of 17, Phoebe’s mother felt she was old enough to understand the true nature of her body and the family secret was finally revealed. Phoebe then faced an orchidectomy, invasive surgery to remove her undescended testes, the emotional scars of which are still raw today. Phoebe’s road trip around Australia exposes her to the stories of other intersex people and holds a mirror to her own experience. She learns valuable lessons in resilience and healing but also sees the pervasive impact her condition has on all her relationships. At home, Phoebe and James want to start a family but dealing with infertility and the stress of the adoption process puts pressure on their marriage. Phoebe also starts to understand the difficult decisions her parents faced and is excited but apprehensive when they eventually agree to be interviewed. Will talking openly with her mother give Phoebe the answers she has been looking for? The film was produced and directed by Phoebe Hart and commissioned by the Australian Broadcasting Commission. The film premiered at the Brisbane International Film Festival in 2010 where it was voted the number one film of the festival by audiences. Orchids was broadcast on ABC1 in Australia in 2012, appeared in more than 50 film festivals internationally and has since been broadcast nationally in Switzerland, Sweden, Israel, Spain, France, Russia, Poland, Germany and the USA.

Blind steganalysis : a countermeasure for binary image steganography

In this paper, we propose a new blind steganalytic method to detect the presence of secret messages embedded in black and white images using the steganographic techniques. We start by extracting several sets of matrix, such as run length matrix, gap length matrix and pixel difference. We also apply characteristic function on these matrices to enhance their discriminative capabilities. Then we calculate the statistics which include mean, variance, kurtosis and skewness to form our feature sets. The presented empirical works demonstrate our proposed method can effectively detect three different types of steganography. This proves the universality of our proposed method as a blind steganalysis. In addition, the experimental results show our proposed method is capable of detecting small amount of the embedded message.

Estimating hidden message length in binary image embedded by using boundary pixels steganography

In this paper, we propose a new steganalytic method to detect the message hidden in a black and white image using the steganographic technique developed by Liang, Wang and Zhang. Our detection method estimates the length of hidden message embedded in a binary image. Although the hidden message embedded is visually imperceptible, it changes some image statistic (such as inter-pixels correlation). Based on this observation, we first derive the 512 patterns histogram from the boundary pixels as the distinguishing statistic, then we compute the histogram difference to determine the changes of the 512 patterns histogram induced by the embedding operation. Finally we propose histogram quotient to estimate the length of the embedded message. Experimental results confirm that the proposed method can effectively and reliably detect the length of the embedded message.

Pore size distribution and accessible pore size distribution in bituminous coals

The porosity and pore size distribution of coals determine many of their properties, from gas release to their behavior on carbonization, and yet most methods of determining pore size distribution can only examine a restricted size range. Even then, only accessible pores can be investigated with these methods. Small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) and ultra small-angle neutron scattering (USANS) are increasingly used to characterize the size distribution of all of the pores non-destructively. Here we have used USANS/SANS to examine 24 well-characterized bituminous and subbituminous coals: three from the eastern US, two from Poland, one from New Zealand and the rest from the Sydney and Bowen Basins in Eastern Australia, and determined the relationships of the scattering intensity corresponding to different pore sizes with other coal properties. The range of pore radii examinable with these techniques is 2.5nm to 7μm. We confirm that there is a wide range of pore sizes in coal. The pore size distribution was found to be strongly affected by both rank and type (expressed as either hydrogen or vitrinite content) in the size range 250nm to 7μm and 5 to 10nm, but weakly in intermediate regions. The results suggest that different mechanisms control coal porosity on different scales. Contrast-matching USANS and SANS were also used to determine the size distribution of the fraction of the pores in these coals that are inaccessible to deuterated methane, CD4, at ambient temperature. In some coals most of the small (~10nm) pores were found to be inaccessible to CD4 on the time scale of the measurement (~30min–16h). This inaccessibility suggests that in these coals a considerable fraction of inherent methane may be trapped for extended periods of time, thus reducing the effectiveness of methane release from (or sorption by) these coals. Although the number of small pores was less in higher rank coals, the fraction of total pores that was inaccessible was not rank dependent. In the Australian coals, at the 10nm to 50nm size scales the pores in inertinites appeared to be completely accessible to CD4, whereas the pores in the vitrinite were about 75% inaccessible. Unlike the results for total porosity that showed no regional effects on relationships between porosity and coal properties, clear regional differences in the relationships between fraction of closed porosity and coal properties were found. The 10 to 50nm-sized pores of inertinites of the US and Polish coals examined appeared less accessible to methane than those of the inertinites of Australian coals. This difference in pore accessibility in inertinites may explain why empirical relationships between fluidity and coking properties developed using Carboniferous coals do not apply to Australian coals.

Generating natural language texts from business process models

Process Modeling is a widely used concept for understanding, documenting and also redesigning the operations of organizations. The validation and usage of process models is however affected by the fact that only business analysts fully understand them in detail. This is in particular a problem because they are typically not domain experts. In this paper, we investigate in how far the concept of verbalization can be adapted from object-role modeling to process models. To this end, we define an approach which automatically transforms BPMN process models into natural language texts and combines different techniques from linguistics and graph decomposition in a flexible and accurate manner. The evaluation of the technique is based on a prototypical implementation and involves a test set of 53 BPMN process models showing that natural language texts can be generated in a reliable fashion.

Visualization : A powerful tool for effective teaching of dynamics

Dynamics is an essential core engineering subject and it is considered as one of the hardest subjects in the engineering discipline. Many students acknowledged that Dynamics is very hard to understand and comprehend the abstract concepts through traditional teaching methods with normal tutorials and assignments. In this study, we conducted an investigation on the application of visualization technique to help students learning the unit with the fundamental theory displayed in the physical space. The research was conducted based on the following five basic steps of Action Learning Cycle including: Identifying problem, Planning action, Implementing, Evaluating, and Reporting. Through our studies, we have concluded that visualization technique can definitely help students in learning and comprehending the abstract theories and concepts of Dynamics.

Teaching Teachers for the Future : an Australian government national project

This paper describes the Teaching Teachers of the Future (TTF) Project – a national project funded ($8.8mil AUD) by the Australian Government. The project was aimed at building the capacity of student teachers to use technology to improve student learning outcomes. It discusses the aims and objectives of the project, its genesis in a changing educational and political landscape, the use of TPACK as a theoretical scaffold, and briefly reports on the operations of the various components and part-ners. Further, it discusses the research opportunities afforded by the project includ-ing a national survey of all PSTs in Australia gauging their TPACK confidence and the use of the Most Significant Change (MSC) methodology. Finally the paper dis-cusses the outcomes of the project and its future.

Handmade clay balls and recycled crush glass as alternative media in water filtration

For many years materials such as quarried sand, anthracite, and granular activated carbon have been the principal media-products traditionally used in water and wastewater filtration plants. Pebble Matrix Filtration (PMF) is a novel non-chemical, sustainable pre-treatment method of protecting Slow Sand Filters (SSF) from high turbidity during heavy monsoon periods. PMF uses sand and pebbles as the filter media and the sustainability of this new technology might depend on availability and supply of pebbles and sand, both finite resources. In many countries there are two principal methods of obtaining pebbles and sand, namely dredging from rivers and beaches, and due to the scarcity of these resources in some countries the cost of pebbles is often 4-5 times higher than that of sand. In search for an alternative medium to pebbles after some preliminary laboratory tests conducted in Colombo-Sri Lanka, Poznan-Poland and Cambridge-UK, a 100-year-old brick factory near Sudbury, Suffolk, has produced hand-made clay pebbles satisfying the PMF quality requirements. As an alternative to sand, crushed recycled glass from a UK supplier was used and the PMF system was operated together with hand-made clay balls in the laboratory for high turbidity removal effectively. The results of laboratory experiments with alternative media are presented in this paper. There are potential opportunities for recycled crushed glass and clay ball manufacturing processes in some countries where they can be used as filter media.

Double-authentication-preventing signatures

Digital signatures are often used by trusted authorities to make unique bindings between a subject and a digital object; for example, certificate authorities certify a public key belongs to a domain name, and time-stamping authorities certify that a certain piece of information existed at a certain time. Traditional digital signature schemes however impose no uniqueness conditions, so a trusted authority could make multiple certifications for the same subject but different objects, be it intentionally, by accident, or following a (legal or illegal) coercion. We propose the notion of a double-authentication-preventing signature, in which a value to be signed is split into two parts: a subject and a message. If a signer ever signs two different messages for the same subject, enough information is revealed to allow anyone to compute valid signatures on behalf of the signer. This double-signature forgeability property discourages signers from misbehaving---a form of self-enforcement---and would give binding authorities like CAs some cryptographic arguments to resist legal coercion. We give a generic construction using a new type of trapdoor functions with extractability properties, which we show can be instantiated using the group of sign-agnostic quadratic residues modulo a Blum integer.

Automatic inference of driving task demand from visual cues of emotion and attention

Sensing the mental, physical and emotional demand of a driving task is of primary importance in road safety research and for effectively designing in-vehicle information systems (IVIS). Particularly, the need of cars capable of sensing and reacting to the emotional state of the driver has been repeatedly advocated in the literature. Algorithms and sensors to identify patterns of human behavior, such as gestures, speech, eye gaze and facial expression, are becoming available by using low cost hardware: This paper presents a new system which uses surrogate measures such as facial expression (emotion) and head pose and movements (intention) to infer task difficulty in a driving situation. 11 drivers were recruited and observed in a simulated driving task that involved several pre-programmed events aimed at eliciting emotive reactions, such as being stuck behind slower vehicles, intersections and roundabouts, and potentially dangerous situations. The resulting system, combining face expressions and head pose classification, is capable of recognizing dangerous events (such as crashes and near misses) and stressful situations (e.g. intersections and way giving) that occur during the simulated drive.

Advanced in-vehicle applications to mitigate driver aggression

Aggressive behavior at the steering wheel has been indicated as a contributing factor in a majority of crashes and anger has been compared to alcohol impairment in terms of probability to cause a crash. It has been shown that being in a state of anger or excitement while driving can decrease the drivers’ performances. . This paper reports the evaluation of 6 novel design alternatives of In-Vehicle Information Systems (IVIS) aimed at mitigating driver aggression. Each application presented was designed to tackle the following contributing factors to driver aggression: competitiveness, anonymity, territoriality, stress as well as social and emotional isolation. The 6 applications were simulated using computer vision algorithm to automatically overlay the real traffic conditions with ‘Head-Up Display’ visualizations. Two applications emerged over the others from participant’s evaluation: shared music combined the known calming effect of music with the sense of sympathy and intimacy caused by hearing other drivers’ music. The Shared Snapshot application provided an immediate gratification and was evaluated as a potential prevention of roadside quarrels. The paper presents Theoretical foundation, participant’s evaluations, implications and limitations of the study.

Driver’s over-trust on Advanced Driver Assistance Systems on passively protected railway crossings

Passively protected railway crossings are a major rail safety issue in Australia. Such crossings cannot be upgraded as such crossings are too numerous and the cost involved is prohibitive. Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) have been shown to improve road safety and are widely used. These systems could be a solution to improve safety of passively protected crossings at a lower cost. Such complementary ADAS could result in driver’s over-trust due to the absence of Humane Machine Interface reflecting the quality of the information or the state of the ADAS (failure status). This paper demonstrates that driver’s exposure to crossing exhibiting fail-safe and non-fail safe properties could result in improperly allocating trust between technologies. We conducted a driving simulator study where participants (N=58) were exposed to three types of level crossing warning system on passive and active crossings. The results show that a significant proportion of participants over-trust the ADAS. Such drivers exhibit the same driving performance with the ADAS as when exposed to infrastructure based active crossing protection. They do not take the necessary safety precautions as they have a faster speed approach, reduced number of gaze toward the rail tracks and fail to stop at the crossing.

Setting the research agenda in IHRM

Firstly, on behalf of the secretariat that has coordinated these meetings every two years since 1985, our thanks to the organising committee here at the University of Economics in Cracow, Poland, for hosting this conference. I was asked to offer comment on the research agenda. There are many famous names to refer to. Two Australian colleagues here today are Peter Dowling and Helen De Cieri, longtime stalwarts of the field of IHRM. I acknowledge their contributions over many years, along with Randy Schuler and Denise Welch, and Dennis Briscoe. Other names such as Rosalie Tung, Pawan Bhudwhar, Michael Morley, Paul Sparrow and Wayne Cascio are known to us all. Their books have become classics. One example is the 700 page benchmark 2012 work by Chris Brewster and Wolfgang Mayrhofer, Handbook of Research on Comparative Human Resource Management (Brewster & Mayrhofer, 2012). More recently, in a book published by Cambridge University press in 2014, Mustafa Özbilgin, Dimitria Groutsis and William Harvey offer students a very accessible overview of the basics in IHRM (Ozbilgin, Groutsis, & Harvey, 2014). As for a research agenda, there are excellent literature reviews to which I would refer you, such as those by people who over the years have been frequent participants at this conference (Tarique & Schuler, 2010), (Farndale, Scullion, & Sparrow, 2010), and (Scullion & Collings, 2011).

Improving the railway’s understanding of accident causation through an integrated approach to human factors analysis and technical safety data recording

This paper describes a safety data recording and analysis system that has been developed to capture safety occurrences including precursors using high-definition forward-facing video from train cabs and data from other train-borne systems. The paper describes the data processing model and how events detected through data analysis are related to an underlying socio-technical model of accident causation. The integrated approach to safety data recording and analysis insures systemic factors that condition, influence or potentially contribute to an occurrence are captured both for safety occurrences and precursor events, providing a rich tapestry of antecedent causal factors that can significantly improve learning around accident causation. This can ultimately provide benefit to railways through the development of targeted and more effective countermeasures, better risk models and more effective use and prioritization of safety funds. Level crossing occurrences are a key focus in this paper with data analysis scenarios describing causal factors around near-miss occurrences. The paper concludes with a discussion on how the system can also be applied to other types of railway safety occurrences.