The application of Bowen’s family system theory (BFST) to the Malay population in Malaysia

The rapid economic development and social changes in Malaysia recently have led to many psychosocial problems in young people, such as drug addiction, child sexual abuse and mental illness. The Malaysian government is beginning to focus more attention on its social welfare and human service needs in order to alleviate these psychosocial problems. Although counselling is accepted and widespread in Malaysia, the practice of family therapy is not as accepted as it is still a widely held belief that family problems need to be kept within the family. However, changes are imminent and thus the theoretical basis of family therapy needs to be culturally relevant. Bowen‟s Family Systems Theory (BFST) is already one of the major theories taught to tertiary counselling students in Malaysian universities. The main tenet of Bowen‟s theory is that the family as a system may be unstable unless each member of the family is well differentiated. High differentiation levels in the family allow a person to both leave the family‟s boundaries in search of uniqueness and to continually return to the family fold in order to establish a more mature sense of belonging. The difficulty, however, is that while Bowen has claimed that his theory is universal nearly all of the research confirming the theory has been conducted in the United States of America. The only known study outside America, however, did show that Bowen‟s theory applied to a Filipino population but, one of the theory‟s propositions that differentiation is intergenerational was not supported in this non-American sample. The American sample that was compared to the Malay sample was taken from Skowron and Friedlander‟s (1998) study. One hundred and twenty-seven faculty staff in an American university completed the Differentiation of Self Inventory (DSI) to measure level of differentiation of self. This thesis therefore, set out to determine whether Bowen‟s theory applied to another non-American sample, the Malaysian community. The research also investigated if the intergenerational effect was present in the Malaysian sample as well as explored the role of socio-economic status on Bowen‟s theory of differentiation and gender effect. Three hundred and seventy-four families completed four measures to examine these research questions: the Differentiation of Self Inventory (DSI), the Family Inventory of Life Event (FILE), the Depression Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS) and the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC). The results of the study showed that differentiation of self is a valid construct for the Malay population. However, all four subscales of the Differentiation of Self Inventory (DSI); emotional reactivity (ER), emotional cut-off (EC), fusion with other (FO) and I position (IP), showed significant differences compared to the American sample from Skowron and Friedlander‟s (1998) study. The Malay sample scored higher in emotional reaction (ER), fusion with other (FO), but lower on emotional cut-off (EC) and I position (IP) than the American sample. The intergenerational effect was found in the Malay population as the parent‟s level of differentiation correlated with their children‟s level of differentiation. It was found that stress as measured by the Family Inventory of Life Event (FILE) and as measured by the Depression Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS) were not correlated with the level of differentiation of self in parents. However, gender had a significant effect in predicting the level of differentiation among parents in Malay population with females scores higher on emotional reactivity (ER) and fusion with other (FO) than males. An additional finding was that resilience can be predicted from the level of differentiation of self in children in the Malay sample. There was also a positive correlation between the level of differentiation of self in parents and resilience in their children. Findings from this study indicate that the concept of differentiation of self is applicable to a Malay sample; however, the implementation of the theory should be applied with cultural sensitivity.

Making space for place-making pedagogies : stretching normative mandated literacy curriculum

In an era of normative standardised literacy curriculum continuing to make space for culturally responsive literacy pedagogy is on ongoing challenge for early childhood educators. Collaborative participatory research and ethnographic studies of teachers who accomplish innovative and inclusive early childhood education in culturally diverse high poverty communities is urgent for the profession. Such pedagogies involve complex understandings of the cultural and political histories, and the dynamic potential, of the places in which school communities are located. By incorporating the study of local histories and biographies and researching neighbourhood changes teachers adapt mandated curriculum to maintain community knowledges and allow for positive identity work at the same time as they meet the authorised systems objectives. When teachers work with children as co-researchers through the study of people's lives in particular places and times, the community and its complex histories become a rich resource for young people's literacy repertoires.

Understanding user experience of mobile video : framework, measurement, and optimization

Since users have become the focus of product/service design in last decade, the term User eXperience (UX) has been frequently used in the field of Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI). Research on UX facilitates a better understanding of the various aspects of the user’s interaction with the product or service. Mobile video, as a new and promising service and research field, has attracted great attention. Due to the significance of UX in the success of mobile video (Jordan, 2002), many researchers have centered on this area, examining users’ expectations, motivations, requirements, and usage context. As a result, many influencing factors have been explored (Buchinger, Kriglstein, Brandt & Hlavacs, 2011; Buchinger, Kriglstein & Hlavacs, 2009). However, a general framework for specific mobile video service is lacking for structuring such a great number of factors. To measure user experience of multimedia services such as mobile video, quality of experience (QoE) has recently become a prominent concept. In contrast to the traditionally used concept quality of service (QoS), QoE not only involves objectively measuring the delivered service but also takes into account user’s needs and desires when using the service, emphasizing the user’s overall acceptability on the service. Many QoE metrics are able to estimate the user perceived quality or acceptability of mobile video, but may be not enough accurate for the overall UX prediction due to the complexity of UX. Only a few frameworks of QoE have addressed more aspects of UX for mobile multimedia applications but need be transformed into practical measures. The challenge of optimizing UX remains adaptations to the resource constrains (e.g., network conditions, mobile device capabilities, and heterogeneous usage contexts) as well as meeting complicated user requirements (e.g., usage purposes and personal preferences). In this chapter, we investigate the existing important UX frameworks, compare their similarities and discuss some important features that fit in the mobile video service. Based on the previous research, we propose a simple UX framework for mobile video application by mapping a variety of influencing factors of UX upon a typical mobile video delivery system. Each component and its factors are explored with comprehensive literature reviews. The proposed framework may benefit in user-centred design of mobile video through taking a complete consideration of UX influences and in improvement of mobile videoservice quality by adjusting the values of certain factors to produce a positive user experience. It may also facilitate relative research in the way of locating important issues to study, clarifying research scopes, and setting up proper study procedures. We then review a great deal of research on UX measurement, including QoE metrics and QoE frameworks of mobile multimedia. Finally, we discuss how to achieve an optimal quality of user experience by focusing on the issues of various aspects of UX of mobile video. In the conclusion, we suggest some open issues for future study.

Patterns-based evaluation of open source BPM systems: The cases of jBPM, OpenWFE, and Enhydra Shark

In keeping with the proliferation of free software development initiatives and the increased interest in the business process management domain, many open source workflow and business process management systems have appeared during the last few years and are now under active development. This upsurge gives rise to two important questions: What are the capabilities of these systems? and How do they compare to each other and to their closed source counterparts? In other words: What is the state-of-the-art in the area?. To gain an insight into these questions, we have conducted an in-depth analysis of three of the major open source workflow management systems – jBPM, OpenWFE, and Enhydra Shark, the results of which are reported here. This analysis is based on the workflow patterns framework and provides a continuation of the series of evaluations performed using the same framework on closed source systems, business process modelling languages, and web-service composition standards. The results from evaluations of the three open source systems are compared with each other and also with the results from evaluations of three representative closed source systems: Staffware, WebSphere MQ, and Oracle BPEL PM. The overall conclusion is that open source systems are targeted more toward developers rather than business analysts. They generally provide less support for the patterns than closed source systems, particularly with respect to the resource perspective, i.e. the various ways in which work is distributed amongst business users and managed through to completion.

A capabilities-based approach to obtaining a deeper understanding of information technology governance effectiveness : evidence from IT steering committees

Given the substantial investment in information technology (IT), and the significant impact IT has on organizational success, organizations consume considerable resources to manage acquisition and use of their IT resources. While various arguments proposed suggest which IT governance arrangements may work best, our understanding of the effectiveness of such initiatives is limited. We examine the relationship between the effectiveness of IT steering committee driven IT governance initiatives and firm's IT management and IT infrastructure related capabilities. We further propose that firm's ITrelated capabilities generated through IT governance initiatives should improve its business processes and firm-level performance. We test these relationships empirically by a field survey. Results suggest that firms' effectiveness of IT steering committee driven IT governance initiatives positively relates to the level of their IT-related capabilities. We also found positive relationships between IT-related capabilities and internal process-level performance. Our results also support that improvement in internal process-level performance positively relates to improvement in customer service and firm-level performance.

Defining the role of phytoene synthase in carotenoid accumulation of high provitamin A bananas

Vitamin A deficiency (VAD) is a serious problem in developing countries, affecting approximately 127 million children of preschool age and 7.2 million pregnant women each year. However, this deficiency is readily treated and prevented through adequate nutrition. This can potentially be achieved through genetically engineered biofortification of staple food crops to enhance provitamin A (pVA) carotenoid content. Bananas are the fourth most important food crop with an annual production of 100 million tonnes and are widely consumed in areas affected by VAD. However, the fruit pVA content of most widely consumed banana cultivars is low (~ 0.2 to 0.5 ìg/g dry weight). This includes cultivars such as the East African highland banana (EAHB), the staple crop in countries such as Uganda, where annual banana consumption is approximately 250 kg per person. This fact, in addition to the agronomic properties of staple banana cultivars such as vegetative reproduction and continuous cropping, make bananas an ideal target for pVA enhancement through genetic engineering. Interestingly, there are banana varieties known with high fruit pVA content (up to 27.8 ìg/g dry weight), although they are not widely consumed due to factors such as cultural preference and availability. The genes involved in carotenoid accumulation during banana fruit ripening have not been well studied and an understanding of the molecular basis for the differential capacity of bananas to accumulate carotenoids may impact on the effective production of genetically engineered high pVA bananas. The production of phytoene by the enzyme phytoene synthase (PSY) has been shown to be an important rate limiting determinant of pVA accumulation in crop systems such as maize and rice. Manipulation of this gene in rice has been used successfully to produce Golden Rice, which exhibits higher seed endosperm pVA levels than wild type plants. Therefore, it was hypothesised that differences between high and low pVA accumulating bananas could be due either to differences in PSY enzyme activity or factors regulating the expression of the psy gene. Therefore, the aim of this thesis was to investigate the role of PSY in accumulation of pVA in banana fruit of representative high (Asupina) and low (Cavendish) pVA banana cultivars by comparing the nucleic acid and encoded amino acid sequences of the banana psy genes, in vivo enzyme activity of PSY in rice callus and expression of PSY through analysis of promoter activity and mRNA levels. Initially, partial sequences of the psy coding region from five banana cultivars were obtained using reverse transcriptase (RT)-PCR with degenerate primers designed to conserved amino acids in the coding region of available psy sequences from other plants. Based on phylogenetic analysis and comparison to maize psy sequences, it was found that in banana, psy occurs as a gene family of at least three members (psy1, psy2a and psy2b). Subsequent analysis of the complete coding regions of these genes from Asupina and Cavendish suggested that they were all capable of producing functional proteins due to high conservation in the catalytic domain. However, inability to obtain the complete mRNA sequences of Cavendish psy2a, and isolation of two non-functional Cavendish psy2a coding region variants, suggested that psy2a expression may be impaired in Cavendish. Sequence analysis indicated that these Cavendish psy2a coding region variants may have resulted from alternate splicing. Evidence of alternate splicing was also observed in one Asupina psy1 coding region variant, which was predicted to produce a functional PSY1 isoform. The complete mRNA sequence of the psy2b coding regions could not be isolated from either cultivar. Interestingly, psy1 was cloned predominantly from leaf while psy2 was obtained preferentially from fruit, suggesting some level of tissue-specific expression. The Asupina and Cavendish psy1 and psy2a coding regions were subsequently expressed in rice callus and the activity of the enzymes compared in vivo through visual observation and quantitative measurement of carotenoid accumulation. The maize B73 psy1 coding region was included as a positive control. After several weeks on selection, regenerating calli showed a range of colours from white to dark orange representing various levels of carotenoid accumulation. These results confirmed that the banana psy coding regions were all capable of producing functional enzymes. No statistically significant differences in levels of activity were observed between banana PSYs, suggesting that differences in PSY activity were not responsible for differences in the fruit pVA content of Asupina and Cavendish. The psy1 and psy2a promoter sequences were isolated from Asupina and Cavendish gDNA using a PCR-based genome walking strategy. Interestingly, three Cavendish psy2a promoter clones of different sizes, representing possible allelic variants, were identified while only single promoter sequences were obtained for the other Asupina and Cavendish psy genes. Bioinformatic analysis of these sequences identified motifs that were previously characterised in the Arabidopsis psy promoter. Notably, an ATCTA motif associated with basal expression in Arabidopsis was identified in all promoters with the exception of two of the Cavendish psy2a promoter clones (Cpsy2apr2 and Cpsy2apr3). G1 and G2 motifs, linked to light-regulated responses in Arabidopsis, appeared to be differentially distributed between psy1 and psy2a promoters. In the untranscribed regulatory regions, the G1 motifs were found only in psy1 promoters, while the G2 motifs were found only in psy2a. Interestingly, both ATCTA and G2 motifs were identified in the 5’ UTRs of Asupina and Cavendish psy1. Consistent with other monocot promoters, introns were present in the Asupina and Cavendish psy1 5’ UTRs, while none were observed in the psy2a 5’ UTRs. Promoters were cloned into expression constructs, driving the â-glucuronidase (GUS) reporter gene. Transient expression of the Asupina and Cavendish psy1 and psy2a promoters in both Cavendish embryogenic cells and Cavendish fruit demonstrated that all promoters were active, except Cpsy2apr2 and Cpsy2apr3. The functional Cavendish psy2a promoter (Cpsy2apr1) appeared to have activity similar to the Asupina psy2a promoter. The activities of the Asupina and Cavendish psy1 promoters were similar to each other, and comparable to those of the functional psy2a promoters. Semi-quantitative PCR analysis of Asupina and Cavendish psy1 and psy2a transcripts showed that psy2a levels were high in green fruit and decreased during ripening, reinforcing the hypothesis that fruit pVA levels were largely dependent on levels of psy2a expression. Additionally, semi-quantitative PCR using intron-spanning primers indicated that high levels of unprocessed psy2a and psy2b mRNA were present in the ripe fruit of Cavendish but not in Asupina. This raised the possibility that differences in intron processing may influence pVA accumulation in Asupina and Cavendish. In this study the role of PSY in banana pVA accumulation was analysed at a number of different levels. Both mRNA accumulation and promoter activity of psy genes studied were very similar between Asupina and Cavendish. However, in several experiments there was evidence of cryptic or alternate splicing that differed in Cavendish compared to Asupina, although these differences were not conclusively linked to the differences in fruit pVA accumulation between Asupina and Cavendish. Therefore, other carotenoid biosynthetic genes or regulatory mechanisms may be involved in determining pVA levels in these cultivars. This study has contributed to an increased understanding of the role of PSY in the production of pVA carotenoids in banana fruit, corroborating the importance of this enzyme in regulating carotenoid production. Ultimately, this work may serve to inform future research into pVA accumulation in important crop varieties such as the EAHB and the discovery of avenues to improve such crops through genetic modification.

Delegation framework for federated systems

It is not uncommon for enterprises today to be faced with the demand to integrate and incor- porate many different and possibly heterogeneous systems which are generally independently designed and developed, to allow seamless access. In effect, the integration of these systems results in one large whole system that must be able, at the same time, to maintain the local autonomy and to continue working as an independent entity. This problem has introduced a new distributed architecture called federated systems. The most challenging issue in federated systems is to find answers for the question of how to efficiently cooperate while preserving their autonomous characteristic, especially the security autonomy. This thesis intends to address this issue. The thesis reviews the evolution of the concept of federated systems and discusses the organisational characteristics as well as remaining security issues with the existing approaches. The thesis examines how delegation can be used as means to achieve better security, especially authorisation while maintaining autonomy for the participating member of the federation. A delegation taxonomy is proposed as one of the main contributions. The major contribution of this thesis is to study and design a mechanism to support dele- gation within and between multiple security domains with constraint management capability. A novel delegation framework is proposed including two modules: Delegation Constraint Man- agement module and Policy Management module. The first module is designed to effectively create, track and manage delegation constraints, especially for delegation processes which require re-delegation (indirect delegation). The first module employs two algorithms to trace the root authority of a delegation constraint chain and to prevent the potential conflict when creating a delegation constraint chain if necessary. The first module is designed for conflict prevention not conflict resolution. The second module is designed to support the first module via the policy comparison capability. The major function of this module is to provide the delegation framework the capability to compare policies and constraints (written under the format of a policy). The module is an extension of Lin et al.'s work on policy filtering and policy analysis. Throughout the thesis, some case studies are used as examples to illustrate the discussed concepts. These two modules are designed to capture one of the most important aspects of the delegation process: the relationships between the delegation transactions and the involved constraints, which are not very well addressed by the existing approaches. This contribution is significant because the relationships provide information to keep track and en- force the involved delegation constraints and, therefore, play a vital role in maintaining and enforcing security for transactions across multiple security domains.

Helping undergraduate students across disciplines and cultures actively engage and collaborate as equal members of a community of scholars : peer review within an e-learning environment

At the international level, the higher education sector is currently being subjected to increased calls for public accountability and the current move by the OECD to rank universities based on the quality of their teaching and learning outcomes. At the national level, Australian universities and their teaching staff face numerous challenges including financial restrictions, increasing student numbers and the reality of an increasingly diverse student population. The Australian higher education response to these competing policy and accreditation demands focuses on precise explicit systems and procedures which are inflexible and conservative and which ignore the fact that assessment is the single biggest influence on how students approach their learning. By seriously neglecting the quality of student learning outcomes, assessment tasks are often failing to engage students or reflect the tasks students will face in the world of practice. Innovative assessment design, which includes new paradigms of student engagement and learning and pedagogically based technologies have the capacity to provide some measure of relief from these internal and external tensions by significantly enhancing the learning experience for an increasingly time-poor population of students. That is, the assessment process has the ability to deliver program objectives and active learning through a knowledge transfer process which increases student participation and engagement. This social constructivist view highlights the importance of peer review in assisting students to participate and collaborate as equal members of a community of scholars with both their peers and academic staff members. As a result of increasing the student’s desire to learn, peer review leads to more confident, independent and reflective learners who also become more skilled at making independent judgements of their own and others' work. Within this context, in Case Study One of this project, a summative, peer-assessed, weekly, assessment task was introduced in the first “serious” accounting subject offered as part of an undergraduate degree. The positive outcomes achieved included: student failure rates declined 15%; tutorial participation increased fourfold; tutorial engagement increased six-fold; and there was a 100% student-based approval rating for the retention of the assessment task. However, in stark contrast to the positive student response, staff issues related to the loss of research time associated with the administration of the peer-review process threatened its survival. This paper contributes to the core conference topics of new trends and experiences in undergraduate assessment education and in terms of innovative, on-line, learning and teaching practices, by elaborating the Case Study Two “solution” generated to this dilemma. At the heart of the resolution is an e-Learning, peer-review process conducted in conjunction with the University of Melbourne which seeks to both create a virtual sense of belonging and to efficiently and effectively meet academic learning objectives with minimum staff involvement. In outlining the significant level of success achieved, student-based qualitative and quantitative data will be highlighted along with staff views in a comparative analysis of the advantages and disadvantages to both students and staff of the staff-led, peer review process versus its on-line counterpart.

Next generation low-cost motion capture systems can provide comparable spatial accuracy to high-end systems

The objective quantification of three-dimensional kinematics during different functional and occupational tasks is now more in demand than ever. The introduction of new generation of low-cost passive motion capture systems from a number of manufacturers has made this technology accessible for teaching, clinical practice and in small/medium industry. Despite the attractive nature of these systems, their accuracy remains unproved in independent tests. We assessed static linear accuracy, dynamic linear accuracy and compared gait kinematics from a Vicon MX20 system to a Natural Point OptiTrack system. In all experiments data were sampled simultaneously. We identified both systems perform excellently in linear accuracy tests with absolute errors not exceeding 1%. In gait data there was again strong agreement between the two systems in sagittal and coronal plane kinematics. Transverse plane kinematics differed by up to 3 at the knee and hip, which we attributed to the impact of soft tissue artifact accelerations on the data. We suggest that low-cost systems are comparably accurate to their high-end competitors and offer a platform with accuracy acceptable in research for laboratories with a limited budget.

A comparison of two commercially available motion capture systems for gait analysis : high end vs low-cost

In 1999 Richards compared the accuracy of commercially available motion capture systems commonly used in biomechanics. Richards identified that in static tests the optical motion capture systems generally produced RMS errors of less than 1.0 mm. During dynamic tests, the RMS error increased to up to 4.2 mm in some systems. In the last 12 years motion capture systems have continued to evolve and now include high-resolution CCD or CMOS image sensors, wireless communication, and high full frame sampling frequencies. In addition to hardware advances, there have also been a number of advances in software, which includes improved calibration and tracking algorithms, real time data streaming, and the introduction of the c3d standard. These advances have allowed the system manufactures to maintain a high retail price in the name of advancement. In areas such as gait analysis and ergonomics many of the advanced features such as high resolution image sensors and high sampling frequencies are not required due to the nature of the task often investigated. Recently Natural Point introduced low cost cameras, which on face value appear to be suitable as at very least a high quality teaching tool in biomechanics and possibly even a research tool when coupled with the correct calibration and tracking software. The aim of the study was therefore to compare both the linear accuracy and quality of angular kinematics from a typical high end motion capture system and a low cost system during a simple task.

Measuring National Accessibility to Cardiac Services using Geographic Information Systems

The Cardiac Access-Remoteness Index of Australia (Cardiac ARIA) used geographic information systems (GIS) to model population level, road network accessibility to cardiac services before and after a cardiac event for all (20,387) population localities in Australia., The index ranged from 1A (access to all cardiac services within 1 h driving time) to 8E (limited or no access). The methodology derived an objective geographic measure of accessibility to required cardiac services across Australia. Approximately 71% of the 2006 Australian population had very good access to acute hospital services and services after hospital discharge. This GIS model could be applied to other regions or health conditions where spatially enabled data were available.

Trust-based automated recommendation making

Recommender systems are one of the recent inventions to deal with ever growing information overload in relation to the selection of goods and services in a global economy. Collaborative Filtering (CF) is one of the most popular techniques in recommender systems. The CF recommends items to a target user based on the preferences of a set of similar users known as the neighbours, generated from a database made up of the preferences of past users. With sufficient background information of item ratings, its performance is promising enough but research shows that it performs very poorly in a cold start situation where there is not enough previous rating data. As an alternative to ratings, trust between the users could be used to choose the neighbour for recommendation making. Better recommendations can be achieved using an inferred trust network which mimics the real world "friend of a friend" recommendations. To extend the boundaries of the neighbour, an effective trust inference technique is required. This thesis proposes a trust interference technique called Directed Series Parallel Graph (DSPG) which performs better than other popular trust inference algorithms such as TidalTrust and MoleTrust. Another problem is that reliable explicit trust data is not always available. In real life, people trust "word of mouth" recommendations made by people with similar interests. This is often assumed in the recommender system. By conducting a survey, we can confirm that interest similarity has a positive relationship with trust and this can be used to generate a trust network for recommendation. In this research, we also propose a new method called SimTrust for developing trust networks based on user's interest similarity in the absence of explicit trust data. To identify the interest similarity, we use user's personalised tagging information. However, we are interested in what resources the user chooses to tag, rather than the text of the tag applied. The commonalities of the resources being tagged by the users can be used to form the neighbours used in the automated recommender system. Our experimental results show that our proposed tag-similarity based method outperforms the traditional collaborative filtering approach which usually uses rating data.

Investigation to enhance high speed rail accessibility

High Speed Rail (HSR) is rapidly gaining popularity worldwide as a safe and efficient transport option for long-distance travel. Designed to win market shares from air transport, HSR systems optimise their productivity between increasing speeds and station spacing to offer high quality service and gain ridership. Recent studies have investigated the effects that the deployment of HSR infrastructure has on spatial distribution and the economic development of cities and regions. Findings appear mostly positive at higher geographical scales, where HSR links connect major urban centres several hundred kilometres apart and already well positioned within a national or international context. Also, at the urban level, studies have shown regeneration and concentration effects around HSR station areas with positive returns on city’s image and economy. However, doubts persist on the effects of HSR at an intermediate scale, where the accessibility trade off on station spacing limits access to many small and medium agglomerations. Thereby, their ability to participate in the development opportunities facilitated by HSR infrastructure is significantly reduced. The locational advantages deriving from transport improvements appear contrasting especially in regions that tend to have a polycentric structure, where cities may present greater accessibility disparities between those served by HSR and those left behind. This thesis fits in this context where intermediate and regional cities do not directly enjoy the presence of an HSR station while having an existing or planned proximate HSR corridor. With the aim of understanding whether there might be a solution to this apparent incongruity, the research investigates strategies to integrate HSR accessibility at the regional level. While current literature recommends to commit with ancillary investments to the uplift of station areas and the renewal of feeder systems, I hypothesised the interoperability between the HSR and the conventional networks to explore the possibilities offered by mixed traffic and infrastructure sharing. Thus, I developed a methodology to quantify the exchange of benefits deriving from this synergistic interaction. In this way, it was possible to understand which level of service quality offered by alternative transit strategies best facilitates the distribution of accessibility benefits for areas far from actual HSR stations. Therefore, strategies were selected for their type of service capable of regional extensions and urban penetrations, while incorporating a combination of specific advantages (e.g. speed, sub-urbanity, capacity, frequency and automation) in order to emulate HSR quality with increasingly efficient services. The North-eastern Italian macro region was selected as case study to ground the research offering concurrently a peripheral polycentric metropolitan form, the presence of a planned HSR corridor with some portions of HSR infrastructure implementation, and the project to develop a suburban rail service extended regionally. Results show significant distributive potential, in terms of network effects produced in relation with HSR, in increasing proportions for all the strategies considered: a regional metro rail strategy (abbreviated RMR), a regional high speed rail strategy (abbreviated RHSR), a regional light rail transit (abbreviated LRT) strategy, and a non-stopping continuous railway system (abbreviated CRS) strategy. The provision of additional tools to value HSR infrastructure against its accessibility benefits and their regional distribution through alternative strategies beyond the actual HSR stations, would have great implications, both politically and technically, in moving towards new dimensions of HSR evaluation and development.

Infrastructure transitions toward sustainability : a complex adaptive systems perspective

To ensure infrastructure assets are procured and maintained by government on behalf of citizens, appropriate policy and institutional architecture is needed, particularly if a fundamental shift to more sustainable infrastructure is the goal. The shift in recent years from competitive and resource-intensive procurement to more collaborative and sustainable approaches to infrastructure governance is considered a major transition in infrastructure procurement systems. In order to better understand this transition in infrastructure procurement arrangements, the concept of emergence from Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) theory is offered as a key construct. Emergence holds that micro interactions can result in emergent macro order. Applying the concept of emergence to infrastructure procurement, this research examines how interaction of agents in individual projects can result in different industry structural characteristics. The paper concludes that CAS theory, and particularly the concept of ‘emergence’, provides a useful construct to understand infrastructure procurement dynamics and progress towards sustainability.

Considering the importance of a systems approach to integrating ESD with campus operations

Society faces an unprecedented global education challenge to equip professionals with the knowledge and skills to address emerging 21st Century challenges, spanning climate change mitigation through to adaptation measures to deal with issues such as temperature and sea level rise, and diminishing fresh water and fossil fuel reserves. This paper discusses the potential for systemic and synergistic integration of curriculum with campus operations to accelerate curriculum renewal towards ESD, drawing on the authors' experiences within engineering education. The paper begins by a providing a brief overview of the need for timely curriculum renewal towards ESD in tertiary education. The paper then highlights some examples of academic barriers that need to be overcome for integration efforts to be successful, and opportunities for promoting the benefits of such integration. The paper concludes by discussing the rational for planning green campus initiatives within a larger system of curriculum renewal considerations, including awareness raising and developing a common understanding, identifying and mapping graduate attributes, curriculum auditing, content development and strategic renewal, and bridging and outreach.