Leaving home for the party on the roof : Brisbane music and musicians

It lies 27°S of the Equator, wrapped uneasily around a wide, muddy river. Three years ago, Brisbane was identified by Billboard Magazine as one of six “hot spots” of independent music in the world. A place to watch. Someone turned a torch on this town, had a quick look, moved on. But this town has always had music in it. Some of it made by me. So, I’m taking my connection with this town, the music and the people, and working it into a contextual historical analysis of the creative lives of Brisbane musicians, and by extension, of Brisbane’s music and Brisbane itself. Talking about what music means to us, how it figures in our lives, and considering the notion, among other factors, of ‘place’ in both our creative practice and creative output. This paper offers an analysis of a particular auto/ethnographic method. How lives are organized and intensified by sounds made and heard in particular social and geographic settings. How music can be the thread which, when pulled, unravels stories, reveals certain truths about musicians and their relationships to one another, to family, to place and to their work.

Design horizons : provoking thoughts

The future of industrial design is not set in stone. The future whether we think of it as next year or 50 years from now, is in fact forged by the actions that we make today. Thus, as we dome to a close on the first decade of the 21st Century it is an opportune time to reflect, take stock, and assess the landscape of the industrial design profession. The inaugural Design Horizons forum, titled Provoking Thought, was held on Friday the 6th July 2010 at The Edge, State Library of Queensland. It was conceptualised by Cara Wrigley and Rafael Gomez to provide a space for industrial designers to motivate, challenge and encourage healthy debate on the future of industrial design in the spirit of respect and integrity. The vision was for all involved to walk away inspired, engaged and most of all provoked by the ideas, questions and propositions presented on the day.

Barriers to information technology governance adoption : a preliminary empirical investigation

The adoption of IT Governance (ITG) continues to be an important topic for research. Many researchers have focused their attention on how these practices are currently being implemented in the many diverse areas and industries. Literature shows that a majority of these studies have only been based on industries and organizations in developed countries. There exist very few researches that look specifically within the context of a developing country. Furthermore, there seems to be a lack of research on identifying the barriers or inhibitors to IT Governance adoption within the context of an emerging yet still developing Asian country. This research sets out to justify, substantiate and improve on a priori model developed to study the barriers to the adoption of ITG practice using qualitative data obtained through a series of semi-structured interviews conducted on organizations in Malaysia.

CAT Detect (Computer Activity Timeline Detection) : a tool for detecting inconsistency in computer activity timelines

The construction of timelines of computer activity is a part of many digital investigations. These timelines of events are composed of traces of historical activity drawn from system logs and potentially from evidence of events found in the computer file system. A potential problem with the use of such information is that some of it may be inconsistent and contradictory thus compromising its value. This work introduces a software tool (CAT Detect) for the detection of inconsistency within timelines of computer activity. We examine the impact of deliberate tampering through experiments conducted with our prototype software tool. Based on the results of these experiments, we discuss techniques which can be employed to deal with such temporal inconsistencies.

Retrofitting commercial office buildings for sustainability : tenants’ expectations and experiences

Introduction Buildings, which account for approximately half of all annual energy and greenhouse gas emissions, are an important target area for any strategy addressing climate change. Whilst new commercial buildings increasingly address sustainability considerations, incorporating green technology in the refurbishment process of older buildings is technically, financially and socially challenging. This research explores the expectations and experiences of commercial office building tenants, whose building was under-going green refurbishment. Methodology Semi-structured in-depth interviews with seven residents and neighbours of a large case-study building under-going green refurbishment in Melbourne, Australia. Built in 1979, the 7,008m² ‘B’ grade building consists of 11 upper levels of office accommodation, ground floor retail, and a basement area leased as a licensed restaurant. After refurbishment, which included the installation of chilled water pumps, solar water heating, waterless urinals, insulation, disabled toilets, and automatic dimming lights, it was expected that the environmental performance of the building would move from a non-existent zero ABGR (Australian Building Greenhouse Rating) star rating to 3.5 stars, with a 40% reduction in water consumption and 20% reduction in energy consumption. Interviews were transcribed, with responses analysed using a thematic approach, identifying categories, themes and patterns. Results Commercial property tenants are on a journey to sustainability - they are interested and willing to engage in discussions about sustainability initiatives, but the process, costs and benefits need to be clear. Critically, whilst sustainability was an essential and non-negotiable criterion in building selection for government and larger corporate tenants, sustainability was not yet a core business value for smaller organisations – whilst they could see it as an emerging issue, they wanted detailed cost-benefit analyses, pay-back calculations of proposed technologies and, ideally, wished they could trial the technology first-hand in some way. Although extremely interested in learning more, most participants reported relatively minimal knowledge of specific sustainability features, designs or products. In discussions about different sustainable technologies (e.g., waterless urinals, green-rated carpets), participants frequently commented that they knew little about the technology, had not heard of it or were not sure exactly how it worked. Whilst participants viewed sustainable commercial buildings as the future, they had varied expectations about the fate of existing older buildings – most felt that they would have to be retrofitted at some point to meet market expectations and predicted the emergence of a ‘non-sustainability discount’ for residing in a building without sustainable features. Discussion This research offers a beginning point for understanding the difficulty of integrating green technology in older commercial buildings. Tenants currently have limited understandings of technology and potential building performance outcomes, which ultimately could impede the implementation of sustainable initiatives in older buildings. Whilst the commercial property market is interested in learning about sustainability in the built environment, the findings highlight the importance of developing a strong business case, communication and transition plan for implementing sustainability retrofits in existing commercial buildings.

Designing relational pedagogies with jam2jamXO

This paper examines the affordances of the philosophy and practice of open source and the application of it in developing music education software. In particular I will examine the parallels inherent in the ‘openness’ of pragmatist philosophy in education (Dewey 1916, 1989) such as group or collaborative learning, discovery learning (Bruner 1966) and learning through creative activity with computers (Papert 1980, 1994). Primarily I am interested in ‘relational pedagogies’ (Ruthmann and Dillon In Press) which is in a real sense about the ethics of the transaction between student and teacher in an ecology where technology plays a more significant role. In these contexts relational pedagogies refers to how the music teacher manages their relationships with students and evaluates the affordances of open source technology in that process. It is concerned directly with how the relationship between student and teacher is affected by the technological tools, as is the capacity for music making and learning. In particular technologies that have agency present the opportunity for a partnership between user and technology that enhances the capacity for expressive music making, productive social interaction and learning. In this instance technologies with agency are defined as ones that enhance the capacity to be expressive and perform tasks with virtuosity and complexity where the technology translates simple commands and gestures into complex outcomes. The technology enacts a partnership with the user that becomes both a cognitive and performative amplifier. Specifically we have used this term to describe interactions with generative technologies that use procedural invention as a creative technique to produce music and visual media.

Editorial: Federal developments

On 24 February 2011 the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee released the broad architecture for a carbon pricing scheme, which is scheduled to commence on 1 July 2012. The proposed mechanism has been agreed by the members of the Multi-Party Climate Change Committee representing the Government and the Australian Greens. Independents Mr Windsor and Mr Oakeshott agreed to the release of the proposal to enable consideration of it, but have not commented on its contents.

eBILITY : from tool use to partnerships

In this article we identify how computational automation achieved through programming has enabled a new class of music technologies with generative music capabilities. These generative systems can have a degree of music making autonomy that impacts on our relationships with them; we suggest that this coincides with a shift in the music-equipment relationship from tool use to a partnership. This partnership relationship can occur when we use technologies that display qualities of agency. It raises questions about the kinds of skills and knowledge that are necessary to interact musically in such a partnership. These are qualities of musicianship we call eBility. In this paper we seek to define what eBility might consist of and how consideration of it might effect music education practice. The 'e' in eBility refers not only to the electronic nature of computing systems but also to the ethical, enabling, experiential and educational dimensions of the creative relationship with technologies with agency. We hope to initiate a discussion around differentiating what we term representational technologies from those with agency and begin to uncover the implications of these ideas for music educators in schools and communities. We hope also to elucidate the emergent theory and practice that has enabled the development of strategies for optimising this kind of eBility where the tool becomes partner. The identification of musical technologies with agency adds to the authors’ list of metaphors for technology use in music education that previously included tool, medium and instrument. We illustrate these ideas with examples and with data from our work with the jam2jam interactive music system. In this discussion we will outline our experiences with jam2jam as an example of a technology with agency and describe the aspects of eBility that interaction with it promotes.

Information technology and business value in a global economy : do information technology investments pay off in a developing economy?

Understanding the business value of IT has mostly been studied in developed countries, but because most investment in developing countries is derived from external sources, the influence of that investment on business value is likely to be different. We test this notion using a two-layer model. We examine the impact of IT investments on firm processes, and the relationship of these processes to firm performance in a developing country. Our findings suggest that investment in different areas of IT positively relates to improvements in intermediate business processes and these intermediate business processes positively relate to the overall financial performance of firms in a developing country.

“That you would post such a thing implies that you are a despicable human being”: spectatorship, social media, & the struggle for meaning in disability performance

Artists with disabilities working in Live Art paradigms often present performances which replay the social attitudes they are subject to in daily life as guerilla theatre in public spaces – including online spaces. In doing so, these artists draw spectators’ attention to the way their responses to disabled people contribute to the social construction of disability. They provide different theatrical, architectural or technological devices to encourage spectators to articulate their response to themselves and others. But – the use of exaggeration, comedy and confrontation in these practices notwithstanding – their blurry boundaries mean some spectators experience confusion as to whether they are responding to real life or a representation of it. This results in conflicted responses which reveal as much about the politics of disability as the performances themselves. In this paper, I examine how these conflicted responses play out in online forums. I discuss diverse examples, from blog comments on Liz Crow’s Resistance on the Plinth on YouTube, to Aaron Williamson and Katherine Araneillo’s Disabled Avant-Garde clips on YouTube, to Ju Gosling’s Letter Writing Project on her website, to segments of UK Channel 4’s mock reality show Cast Offs on YouTube. I demonstrate how online forums become a place not just for recording memories of an original performance (which posters may not have seen), but for a new performance, which goes well beyond re-membering/remediating the original. I identify trends in the way experience, memory and meaningmaking play out in these performative forums – moving from clarification of the original act’s parameters, to claims of disgust, insult or offense, to counter-claims confirming the comic or political efficacy of the act, often linked disclosure of personal memory or experience of disability. I examine the way these encounters at the interstices of live and/or online performance, memory, technology and public/private history negotiate ideas about disability, and what they tell us about the ethics and efficacy of the specific modes of performance and spectatorship these artists with disabilities are invoking.

Secure authentication procedure with mobile device for ubiquitous health environments

Medical industries have brought Information Technology (IT) in their systems for both patients and medical staffs due to the numerous benefits of IT we experience at presently. Moreover, the Mobile healthcare (M-health) system has been developed as the first step of Ubiquitous Health Environment (UHE). With the mobility and multi-functions, M-health system will be able to provide more efficient and various services for both doctors and patients. Due to the invisible feature of mobile signals, hackers have easier access to hospital networks than wired network systems. This may result in several security incidents unless security protocols are well implemented. In this paper, user authentication and authorization procedures will applied as a featured component at each level of M-health systems inthe hospital environment. Accordingly, M-health system in the hospital will meet the optimal requirements as a countermeasure to its vulnerabilities.

Theorizing Police Response to Domestic Violence in Singapore: Police Subculture Revisited

This article focuses on the well documented, yet potentially contested concept of rank-and-file policesubculture to conceptualize policeresponse to situations of domesticviolence in Singapore. It argues that the utility of the concept to explaining police behavior is often undermined by an all-powerful, homogenous, and deterministic conception of it that fails to take into account the value of agency in police decision-making and the range of differentiated policeresponse in situations of domesticviolence. Through reviewing the literature on policeresponse to domesticviolence, this study called for the need to rework the concept of policesubculture by treating it as having a relationship with, and response to, the structural conditions of policing, while retaining a conception of the active role played by street-level officers in instituting a situational practice. Using Pierre Bourdieu's relational concepts of ‘habitus’ and ‘field,’ designating the cultural dispositions of policesubculture and structural conditions of policing respectively, the study attempted to reconceptualize the problem of policing domesticviolence with reference to the Singaporean context.

Whe' yu' from?

"Whe' yu' from?" The question was put to me as I wandered, camera in hand, in the old square of Spanish Town, Jamaica's former capital. The local man, lounging in the shade of one of the colonial Georgian buildings that enclose the square, was mildly curious about what he took to be a typical white tourish photgraphing the sights of the decayed historic town. At that time, my home was in Kingston where i lived with my wife and baby son. I was then working in the Jamaican Government Town Planning Department in a job that took me all over the island. Turning to my questioner, I replied, "Kingston". There was a brief pause, and then the man spoke again: "No Man! Whe' yu' really from?" I still have difficulties when asked this question. Where am I from? What does this question mean? Does it refer to where I was born, where I spent my previous life or where I live now? Does it have a broader meaning, an enquiry about my origins in terms of background and previous experience? The following chapters are my attempt to answer these questions for my own satisfaction and, I hope, for the amusement of others who may be interested in the life of an ordinary English boy whose dream to travel and see the world was realized in ways he could not possibly have imagined. Finding an appropriate title for this book was difficult. Thursday's Child, North and South and War and Peace all came to mind but, unfortunately for me, those titles had been appropriated by other writers. Thursdays's Child is quite a popular book title, presumably because people who were born on that day and, in the words of the nursery rhyme, had 'far to go', are especially likely to have travellers' tales to tell or life stories of the rags-to-riches variety. Born on a Thursday, I have travelled a lot and I suppose that I have gone far in life. Coming from a working class family, I 'got on' by 'getting a good education' and a 'good job'. I decided against adding to the list of Thursday's Children. North and South would have reflected my life in Britain, spent in both the North and South of England, and my later years, divided between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres of the globe, as well as in countries commonly referred to as the 'advanced' North and the 'underdeveloped' South. North and South has already been appropriated by Mrs Gaskell, something that did not deter one popular American writer from using the title for a book of his. My memories of World War Two and the years afterwards made War and Peace a possible candidate, but readers expectnig an epic tale of Tolstoyan proportions may have been disappointed. To my knowledge, no other book has the title "Whe' Yu' From?". I am grateful to the Jamaican man whose question lingered in my memory and provided the title of this memoir, written decades later. This book is a word picture. It is, in a sense, a self-portrait, and like all portraits, it captures something of the character, it attempts to tell the truth, but it is not the whole truth. This is because it is not my intention to write my entire life story; rather I wish to tell about some of the things in my experience of life that have seemed important or interesting to me. Unlike a painted portrait, the picture I have created is intended to suggest the passage of time. While, for most of us in Western society, time is linear and unidirectional, like the flight of an arrov or the trajectory of a bullet, memory rearranges things, calling up images of the past in no particular order, making connections that may link events in various patterns, circular, web-like, superimposed. The stream of consciousness is very unlike that of streams we encounter in the physical world. Connections are made in all directions; thoughts hop back and forth in time and space, from topic to topic. My book is a composition drawn from periods, events and thoughts as I remember them. Like life itself, it is made up of patches, some good, some bad, but in my experience, always fascinating. In recording my memories, I have been as accurate as possible. Little of what I have written is about spectacular sights and strange customs. Much of it focuses on my more modest explorations includng observations of everyday things that have attracted my attention. Reading through the chapters, I am struck by my childhood freedom to roam and engage in 'dangerous' activities like climbing trees and playing beside streams, things that many children today are no longer allowed to enjoy. Also noticeable is the survival of traditions and superstitions from the distant past. Obvious too, is my preoccupation with place names, both official ones that appear on maps and sign boards and those used by locals and children, names rarely seen in print. If there is any uniting theme to be found in what I have written, it must be my education in the fields, woods and streets of my English homeland, in the various other countries in which I have lived and travelled, as well as more formally from books and in classrooms. Much of my book is concerned with people and places. Many of the people I mention are among those who have been, and often have remained, important and close to me. Others I remember from only the briefest of encounters, but they remain in my memory because of some specific incident or circumstance that fixed a lasting image in my mind. Some of my closest friends and relatives, however, appear nowhere in these pages or they receive only the slightest mention. This is not because they played an unimportant roles in my life. It is because this book is not the whole story. Among those whe receive little or no mention are some who are especially close to me, with whom I have shared happy and sad times and who have shown me and my family much kindness, giving support when this was needed. Some I have known since childhood and have popped up at various times in my life, often in different parts of the world. Although years may pass without me seeing them, in an important sense they are always with me. These people know who they are. I hope that they know how much I love and appreciate them. When writing my memoir, I consulted a few of the people mentioned in this book, but in the main, I have relied on my own memory, asided by daiary and notebook entries and old correspondence. In the preparation of this manuscript, I benefited greatly from the expert advice and encouragement of Neil Marr of BeWrite Books. My wife Anne, inspiration for this book, also contributed in the valuable role of critic. She has my undying gratitude.

Regional integration 2.0 : facilitating regional integration and development with collaborative technologies

The current global economic instability and the vulnerability of small nations provide the impetus for greater integration between the countries of the South Pacific region. This exercise is critical for their survival. Past efforts of regional integration in the South Pacific have mostly failed. However, today’s IT collaborative capabilities provide the opportunity to develop a shared IT infrastructure to facilitate integration in the South Pacific. In developing an IT-backed model of regional integration, this study identifies and reports on the antecedents of the current stage for integration in the Pacific. We conducted interviews with twenty five individuals from various sectors and find that while most respondents were optimistic about the potential of IT-backed regional integration, significant challenges exists. The study identifies and discusses these challenges providing policy implications to stakeholders in the regional integration process. The findings will assist in suggesting a model of regional integration 2.0 for the Pacific region.

Hamlet through the looking glass : Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead

The film adaptation of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead"'s constant reallocation of actor and audience roles (or subject and object positions) means that the film’s viewers are as deeply implicated in considering issues of identity, agency and determination as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are. Tellingly, one of The Player’s outbursts reveals the philosophical connections between observing and being observed in ways that are true of the theatre, but which also transcend it: ‘You don’t understand the humiliation of it. To be tricked out of the single assumption that makes our existence bearable; that somebody is watching.’ In this statement is one of the film’s main concerns; that is, the relationship between knowing the self, knowing others, and being known by others.