Inclusive Education Statement - policy analysis

This study analyses the Inclusive Education Statement – 2005, Education Queensland. (Appendix 1). The Statement was a product of the Queensland State Government response to Federal Legislation. The Federal Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), 1992 and the subsequent Standards for Education 2005, sought to eliminate discrimination against people with disabilities. Under Section 22 of the Act, it became unlawful for an educational authority to discriminate against a person on the grounds of the person’s disability.

Optimizing construction planning schedules by virtual prototyping enabled resource analysis

The inherent uncertainty and complexity of construction work make construction planning a particularly difficult task for project managers due to the need to anticipate and visualize likely future events. Conventional computer-assisted technology can help but is often limited to the constructability issues involved. Virtual prototyping, however, offers an improved method through the visualization of construction activities by computer simulation — enabling a range of ‘what-if’ questions to be asked and their implications on the total project to be investigated. This paper describes the use of virtual prototyping to optimize construction planning schedules by analyzing resource allocation and planning with integrated construction models, resource models, construction planning schedules and site-layout plans. A real-life case study is presented that demonstrates the use of a virtual prototyping enabled resource analysis to reallocate space, logistic on access road and arrange tower cranes to achieve a 6-day floor construction cycle.

Stakeholder impact analysis of infrastructure project management in developing countries : a study of perception of project managers in state-owned engineering firms in Vietnam

Construction projects can involve a diverse range of stakeholders and the success of the project depends very much on fulfilling their needs and expectations. It is important, therefore, to identify and recognize project stakeholders and develop a rigorous stakeholder management process. However, limited research has investigated the impact of stakeholders on construction projects in developing countries. A stakeholder impact analysis (SIA), based on an approach developed by Olander (2007), was adopted to investigate the stakeholders' impact on state-owned civil engineering projects in Vietnam. This involved the analysis of a questionnaire survey of 57 project managers to determine the relative importance of different stakeholders. The results show the client to have the highest level of impact on the projects, followed by project managers and the senior management of state-owned engineering firms. The SIA also provides suggestions to project managers in developing and evaluating the stakeholder management process.

Sunglasses, traffic signals, and color vision deficiencies

Purpose: To determine (a) the effect of different sunglass tint colorations on traffic signal detection and recognition for color normal and color deficient observers, and (b) the adequacy of coloration requirements in current sunglass standards. Methods: Twenty color-normals and 49 color-deficient males performed a tracking task while wearing sunglasses of different colorations (clear, gray, green, yellow-green, yellow-brown, red-brown). At random intervals, simulated traffic light signals were presented against a white background at 5° to the right or left and observers were instructed to identify signal color (red/yellow/green) by pressing a response button as quickly as possible; response times and response errors were recorded. Results: Signal color and sunglass tint had significant effects on response times and error rates (p < 0.05), with significant between-color group differences and interaction effects. Response times for color deficient people were considerably slower than color normals for both red and yellow signals for all sunglass tints, but for green signals they were only noticeably slower with the green and yellow-green lenses. For most of the color deficient groups, there were recognition errors for yellow signals combined with the yellow-green and green tints. In addition, deuteranopes had problems for red signals combined with red-brown and yellow-brown tints, and protanopes had problems for green signals combined with the green tint and for red signals combined with the red-brown tint. Conclusions: Many sunglass tints currently permitted for drivers and riders cause a measurable decrement in the ability of color deficient observers to detect and recognize traffic signals. In general, combinations of signals and sunglasses of similar colors are of particular concern. This is prima facie evidence of a risk in the use of these tints for driving and cautions against the relaxation of coloration limits in sunglasses beyond those represented in the study.

Preliminary spatiotemporal analysis of the association between socio-environmental factors and suicide

Background: The seasonality of suicide has long been recognised. However, little is known about the relative importance of socio-environmental factors in the occurrence of suicide in different geographical areas. This study examined the association of climate, socioeconomic and demographic factors with suicide in Queensland, Australia, using a spatiotemporal approach. Methods: Seasonal data on suicide, demographic variables and socioeconomic indexes for areas in each Local Government Area (LGA) between 1999 and 2003 were acquired from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Climate data were supplied by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. A multivariable generalized estimating equation model was used to examine the impact of socio-environmental factors on suicide. Results: The preliminary data analyses show that far north Queensland had the highest suicide incidence (e.g., Cook and Mornington Shires), while the south-western areas had the lowest incidence (e.g., Barcoo and Bauhinia Shires) in all the seasons. Maximum temperature, unemployment rate, the proportion of Indigenous population and the proportion of population with low individual income were statistically significantly and positively associated with suicide. There were weaker but not significant associations for other variables. Conclusions: Maximum temperature, the proportion of Indigenous population and unemployment rate appeared to be major determinants of suicide at a LGA level in Queensland.

Within-session variability modelling for factor analysis speaker verification

This work presents an extended Joint Factor Analysis model including explicit modelling of unwanted within-session variability. The goals of the proposed extended JFA model are to improve verification performance with short utterances by compensating for the effects of limited or imbalanced phonetic coverage, and to produce a flexible JFA model that is effective over a wide range of utterance lengths without adjusting model parameters such as retraining session subspaces. Experimental results on the 2006 NIST SRE corpus demonstrate the flexibility of the proposed model by providing competitive results over a wide range of utterance lengths without retraining and also yielding modest improvements in a number of conditions over current state-of-the-art.

Safeguarding Rural Australia : Introduction, Framework and Background to Secondary Data Analysis

This report provides an introduction to our analyses of secondary data with respect to violent acts and incidents relating to males living in rural settings in Australia. It clarifies important aspects of our overall approach primarily by concentrating on three elements that required early scoping and resolution. Firstly, a wide and inclusive view of violence which encompasses measures of violent acts and incidents and also data identifying risk taking behaviour and the consequences of violence is outlined and justified. Secondly, the classification used to make comparisons between the city and the bush together with associated caveats is outlined. The third element discussed is in relation to national injury data. Additional commentary resulting from exploration, examination and analyses of secondary data is published online in five subsequent reports in this series.

Inducing shades of meaning by matrix methods : a first step towards thematic analysis of opinion

This article explores two matrix methods to induce the ``shades of meaning" (SoM) of a word. A matrix representation of a word is computed from a corpus of traces based on the given word. Non-negative Matrix Factorisation (NMF) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) compute a set of vectors corresponding to a potential shade of meaning. The two methods were evaluated based on loss of conditional entropy with respect to two sets of manually tagged data. One set reflects concepts generally appearing in text, and the second set comprises words used for investigations into word sense disambiguation. Results show that for NMF consistently outperforms SVD for inducing both SoM of general concepts as well as word senses. The problem of inducing the shades of meaning of a word is more subtle than that of word sense induction and hence relevant to thematic analysis of opinion where nuances of opinion can arise.

Empirical evaluation of a service analysis and design methodology

Service-orientation has gained widespread acceptance and is increasingly being employed as a paradigm for structuring both business and IT architectures. An earlier study of extant service analysis and design methodologies discovered a need for holistic approaches that equally account for both business and software services, which motivated the design of a new, consolidated service analysis and design methodology. A challenge in design-oriented research is to evaluate the utility of the newly created artefacts (here: the methodology), as they are often intended to become part of complex socio-technical systems. Therefore, after presenting a brief overview of the consolidated methodology, the paper discusses possible approaches for the “evaluate” phase of this design-science research process and presents the results of an empirical evaluation conducted in an Action Research study at one of Australia’s largest financial services providers.

Contradictions : Genre, causal layered analysis and analysis of institutional change

In what follows, I put forward an argument for an analytical method for social science that operates at the level of genre. I argue that generic convergence, generic hybridity, and generic instability provide us with a powerful perspectives on changes in political, cultural, and economic relationships, most specifically at the level of institutions. Such a perspective can help us identify the transitional elements, relationships, and trajectories that define the place of our current system in history, thereby grounding our understanding of possible futures.1 In historically contextualising our present with this method, my concern is to indicate possibilities for the future. Systemic contradictions indicate possibility spaces within which systemic change must and will emerge. We live in a system currently dominated by many fully-expressed contradictions, and so in the presence of many possible futures. The contradictions of the current age are expressed most overtly in the public genres of power politics. Contemporary public policy—indeed politics in general-is an excellent focus for any investigation of possible futures, precisely because of its future-oriented function. It is overtly hortatory; it is designed ‘to get people to do things’ (Muntigl in press: 147). There is no point in trying to get people to do things in the past. Consequently, policy discourse is inherently oriented towards creating some future state of affairs (Graham in press), along with concomitant ways of being, knowing, representing, and acting (Fairclough 2000).

A psychosocial approach to understanding young Australians' mobile phone behaviour

This thesis by publication contributes to our knowledge of psychological factors underlying a modern day phenomenon, young people’s mobile phone behaviour. Specifically, the thesis reports a PhD program of research which adopted a social psychological approach to explore mobile phone behaviour among young Australians aged between 15 and 24 years. A particular focus of the research program was to explore both the cognitive and behavioural aspects of young people’s mobile phone behaviour which for the purposes of this thesis is defined as mobile phone involvement. The research program comprised three separate stages which were developmental in nature, in that, the findings of each stage of the research program informed the next. The overarching goal of the program of research was to improve our understanding of the psychosocial factors influencing young people’s mobile phone behaviour. To achieve this overall goal, there were a number of aims to the research program which reflect the developmental nature of this thesis. Given the limited research into the mobile phone behaviour in Australia, the first two aims of the research program were to explore patterns of mobile phone behaviour among Australian youth and explore the social psychological factors relating to their mobile phone behaviour. Following this exploration, the research program sought to develop a measure which captures the cognitive and behavioural aspects of mobile phone behaviour. Finally, the research program aimed to examine and differentiate the psychosocial predictors of young people’s frequency of mobile phone use and their level of involvement with their mobile phone. Both qualitative and quantitative methodologies were used throughout the program of research. Five papers prepared during the three stages of the research program form the bulk of this thesis. The first stage of the research program was a qualitative investigation of young people’s mobile phone behaviour. Thirty-two young Australians participated in a series of focus groups in which they discussed their mobile phone behaviour. Thematic data analysis explored patterns of mobile phone behaviour among young people, developed an understanding of psychological factors influencing their use of mobile phones, and identified that symptoms of addiction were emerging in young people’s mobile phone behaviour. Two papers (Papers 1 and 2) emanated from this first stage of the research program. Paper 1 explored patterns of mobile phone behaviour and revealed that mobile phones were perceived as being highly beneficial to young people’s lives, with the ability to remain in constant contact with others being particularly valued. The paper also identified that symptoms of behavioural addiction including withdrawal, cognitive and behavioural salience, and loss of control, emerged in participants’ descriptions of their mobile phone behaviour. Paper 2 explored how young people’s need to belong and their social identity (two constructs previously unexplored in the context of mobile phone behaviour) related to their mobile phone behaviour. It was revealed that young people use their mobile phones to facilitate social attachments. Additionally, friends and peers influenced young people’s mobile phone behaviour; for example, their choice of mobile phone carrier and their most frequent type of mobile phone use. These papers laid the foundation for the further investigation of addictive patterns of behaviour and the role of social psychological factors on young people’s mobile behaviour throughout the research program. Stage 2 of the research program focussed on developing a new parsimonious measure of mobile phone behaviour, the Mobile Phone Involvement Questionnaire (MPIQ), which captured the cognitive and behavioural aspects of mobile phone use. Additionally, the stage included a preliminary exploration of factors influencing young people’s mobile phone behaviour. Participants (N = 946) completed a questionnaire which included a pool of items assessing symptoms of behavioural addiction, the uses and gratifications relating to mobile phone use, and self-identity and validation from others in the context of mobile phone behaviour. Two papers (Papers 3 & 4) emanated from the second stage of the research program. Paper 3 provided an important link between the qualitative and quantitative components of the research program. Qualitative data from Stage 1 indicated the reasons young people use their mobile phones and identified addictive characteristics present in young people’s mobile phone behaviour. Results of the quantitative study conducted in Stage 2 of the research program revealed the uses and gratifications relating to young people’s mobile phone behaviour and the effect of these gratifications on young people’s frequency of mobile phone use and three indicators of addiction, withdrawal, salience, and loss of control. Three major uses and gratifications: self (such as feeling good or as a fashion item), social (such as contacting friends), and security (such as use in an emergency) were found to underlie much of young people’s mobile phone behaviour. Self and social gratifications predicted young people’s frequency of mobile phone use and the three indicators of addiction but security gratifications did not. These results provided an important foundation for the inclusion of more specific psychosocial predictors in the later stages of the research program. Paper 4 reported the development of the mobile phone involvement questionnaire and a preliminary exploration of the effect of self-identity and validation from others on young people’s mobile phone behaviour. The MPIQ assessed a unitary construct and was a reliable measure amongst this cohort. Results found that self-identity influenced the frequency of young people’s use whereas self-identity and validation from others influenced their level of mobile phone involvement. These findings provided an important indication that, in addition to self factors, other people have a strong influence on young people’s involvement with their mobile phone and that mobile phone involvement is conceptually different to frequency of mobile phone use. Stage 3 of the research program empirically examined the psychosocial predictors of young people’s mobile behaviour and one paper, Paper 5, emanated from this stage. Young people (N = 292) from throughout Australia completed an online survey assessing the role of self-identity, ingroup norm, the need to belong, and self-esteem on their frequency of mobile phone use and their mobile phone involvement. Self-identity was the only psychosocial predictor of young people’s frequency of mobile phone use. In contrast, self-identity, ingroup norm, and need to belong all influenced young people’s level of involvement with their mobile phone. Additionally, the effect of self-esteem on young people’s mobile phone involvement was mediated by their need to belong. These results indicate that young people who perceive their mobile phone to be an integral part of their self-identity, who perceive that mobile phone is common amongst friends and peers, and who have a strong need for attachment to others, in some cases driven by a desire to enhance their self-esteem, are most likely to become highly involved with their mobile phones. Overall, this PhD program of research has provided an important contribution to our understanding of young Australians’ mobile phone behaviour. Results of the program have broadened our knowledge of factors influencing mobile phone behaviour beyond the approaches used in previous research. The use of various social psychological theories combined with a behavioural addiction framework provided a novel examination of young people’s mobile behaviour. In particular, the development of a new measure of mobile phone behaviour in the research program facilitated the differentiation of the psychosocial factors influencing frequency of young people’s mobile phone behaviour and their level of involvement with their mobile phone. Results of the research program indicate the important role that mobile phone behaviour plays in young people’s social development and also signals the characteristics of those people who may become highly involved with their mobile phone. Future research could build on this thesis by exploring whether mobile phones are affecting traditional social psychological processes and whether the results in this research program are generalisable to other cohorts and other communication technologies.

Characteristic analysis for multisampled digital implementation of fixed-switching-frequency closed-loop modulation of voltage-source inverter

In this paper, a fixed-switching-frequency closed-loop modulation of a voltage-source inverter (VSI), upon the digital implementation of the modulation process, is analyzed and characterized. The sampling frequency of the digital processor is considered as an integer multiple of the modulation switching frequency. An expression for the determination of the modulation design parameter is developed for smooth modulation at a fixed switching frequency. The variation of the sampling frequency, switching frequency, and modulation index has been analyzed for the determination of the switching condition under closed loop. It is shown that the switching condition determined based on the continuous-time analysis of the closed-loop modulation will ensure smooth modulation upon the digital implementation of the modulation process. However, the stability properties need to be tested prior to digital implementation as they get deteriorated at smaller sampling frequencies. The closed-loop modulation index needs to be considered maximum while determining the design parameters for smooth modulation. In particular, a detailed analysis has been carried out by varying the control gain in the sliding-mode control of a two-level VSI. The proposed analysis of the closed-loop modulation of the VSI has been verified for the operation of a distribution static compensator. The theoretical results are validated experimentally on both single- and three-phase systems.

Determination of elastic modulus of thin coating materials using nanoindentation and finite element analysis

A deconvolution method that combines nanoindentation and finite element analysis was developed to determine elastic modulus of thin coating layer in a coating-substrate bilayer system. In this method, the nanoindentation experiments were conducted to obtain the modulus of both the bilayer system and the substrate. The finite element analysis was then applied to deconvolve the elastic modulus of the coating. The results demonstrated that the elastic modulus obtained using the developed method was in good agreement with that reported in literature.

Analysis of authenticated encryption stream ciphers

Authenticated Encryption (AE) is the cryptographic process of providing simultaneous confidentiality and integrity protection to messages. AE is potentially more efficient than applying a two-step process of providing confidentiality for a message by encrypting the message and in a separate pass, providing integrity protection by generating a Message Authentication Code (MAC) tag. This paper presents results on the analysis of three AE stream ciphers submitted to the recently completed eSTREAM competition. We classify the ciphers based on the methods the ciphers use to provide authenticated encryption and discuss possible methods for mounting attacks on these ciphers.