Notes towards the scientific study of public communication on Twitter

Twitter is now well-established as an important platform for real-time public communication. Twitter research continues to lag behind these developments, with many studies remaining focused on individual case studies and utilizing home-grown, idiosyncratic, non-repeatable, and non-verifiable research methodologies. While the development of a full-blown “science of Twitter” may remain illusory, it is nonetheless necessary to move beyond such individual scholarship and toward the development of more comprehensive, transferable, and rigorous tools and methods for the study of Twitter on a large scale and in close to real time.

"Food For Thought" Selected Design Installation DIA Homegrown 2011 Life In the Slow Lane Exhibition: Little Stanley Street, South Bank, Brisbane

'Homegrown is an initiative of the Design Institute of Australia–Queensland Branch to promote the collaboration and cultivation of local design talent in Queensland and strengthen the connection between design, plate, planet, people and culture.' Homegrown 2011 Exhibition Catalogue Excerpt

The silence and the silencing of the nurse's voice : a reading of patient progress notes

Content analysis of text offers a method for exploring experiences which usually remain unquestioned and unexamined. In this paper the authors analyse a set of patient progress notes by re-framing them as a narrative account of a significant event in the experience of a patient, her family and attending health care workers. Examination of these notes provides insights into aspects of clinical practice which are usually dealt with at a taken-for-granted level. An interpretation of previously unexamined therapeutic practices within the social and political context of institutional health care is offered.

Grameen Bank's social performance disclosure : responding to a negative assessment by Wall Street Journal in late 2001

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to establish a linkage between negative global media news towards Grameen Bank (GB), the largest microfinance organisation in the developing world, and the extent and type of annual report social performance disclosures by GB, over the nine-year period 1997-2005. Design/methodology/approach – Content analysis instruments are utilised to analyse GB annual report social disclosure. Findings – The study finds that GB's community poverty alleviation disclosures account for the highest proportion of total social disclosures in the period 1997-2005. The results of this study are particularly significant in relation to poverty alleviation – the issue attracting severe criticism from the Wall Street Journal (WSJ?) late in 2001. The community poverty alleviation disclosures by GB are significantly greater over the four years following the negative news in the WSJ than in the four years before. The results suggest that GB responds to a negative media story or legitimacy threatening news via annual report social disclosures in an attempt to re-establish its legitimacy. Originality/value – This paper contributes to the literature because in the past there has been no research published linking global media attention to the social disclosure practices of major organisations in developing countries

An extensible framework for analysing resource behaviour using event logs

Business processes depend on human resources and managers must regularly evaluate the performance of their employees based on a number of measures, some of which are subjective in nature. As modern organisations use information systems to automate their business processes and record information about processes’ executions in event logs, it now becomes possible to get objective information about resource behaviours by analysing data recorded in event logs. We present an extensible framework for extracting knowledge from event logs about the behaviour of a human resource and for analysing the dynamics of this behaviour over time. The framework is fully automated and implements a predefined set of behavioural indicators for human resources. It also provides a means for organisations to define their own behavioural indicators, using the conventional Structured Query Language, and a means to analyse the dynamics of these indicators. The framework's applicability is demonstrated using an event log from a German bank.

Ethnographic notes on visualization practices in tissue engineering

Visual information is central to several of the scientific disciplines. This paper studies how scientists working in a multidisciplinary field produce scientific evidence through building and manipulating scientific visualizations. Using ethnographic methods, we studied visualization practices of eight scientists working in the domain of tissue engineering research. Tissue engineering is an upcoming field of research that deals with replacing or regenerating human cells, tissues, or organs to restore or establish normal function. We spent 3 months in the field, where we recorded laboratory sessions of these scientists and used semi-structured interviews to get an insight into their visualization practices. From our results, we elicit two themes characterizing their visualization practices: multiplicity and physicality. In this article, we provide several examples of scientists’ visualization practices to describe these two themes and show that multimodality of such practices plays an important role in scientific visualization.

The use of headings and marginal notes in interpreting Queensland legislation : appearances can be deceptive

This article considers the rules relating to the use of marginal notes and headings in interpreting Queensland legislation, both in its original form and in reprinted legislation. It also examines the application of the principles of construction as to the use of section headings in the interpretation of provisions of the Criminal Code 1899 (Qld). Finally, it suggests that amendments should be made to the Acts Interpretation Act 1954 (Qld) in order to clarify the position as to the status of marginal notes and headings in statutory interpretation.

Genomic resources notes accepted 1 December 2013 - 31 January 2014

This article documents the public availability of (i) transcriptome sequence data, assembled and annotated contigs and unigenes, and BLAST hits from the Queensland fruit fly, Bactrocera tryoni; (ii) 75 single-nucleotide variants (SNVs) from 454 sequencing of reduced representation libraries for Phalangiidae harvestmen, Megabunus armatus, Megabunus vignai, Megabunus lesserti, and Rilaena triangularis; and (iii) expressed sequence tags from 454 sequencing of the lepidopterans Lymantria dispar and Lymantria monacha.

Bank audit fees and asset securitization risks

Using the lens of audit pricing, we provide insights into auditors’ behaviors in relation to the risk of asset securitizations to bank holding companies in a period encompassing the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the introduction of the accounting standards FAS 166 and FAS 167. Using US bank holding company data from 2003 to 2011, we find significant and positive associations between asset securitization risks and audit fees. We find that auditors appear to focus on different aspects of asset securitization risks after the onset of the GFC, and increase their attention to the systemic risks facing bank holding companies in general. After the implementation of FAS 166 and FAS 167, which removed the discretion to treat asset securitizations as sales and required the consolidation of the accounts of special purpose entities, asset securitization risks no longer have a significant effect on audit fees.

One-stop shopping : some notes on the concept and some Australian initiatives

This paper aims to review the notion of the one-stop shop, particularly as it has developed in Australia. It has three main components. The first focuses on a significant initiative taken by the Coombs Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration as a form of action research in the mid-1970s. The second highlights the associated work on access theory by the late Bernard Schaffer and his associates and explains why this work was of fundamental importance for the development of the idea of the one-stop shop. The third deals with subsequent Australian understandings and a pp lications of the idea.

Class notes : 10 principles of good BPM

The question concerning what makes for good BPM is often raised. A recent call from Paul Harmon on the BPTrends Discussion LinkedIN Group for key issues in BPM received 189 answers within two months, with additional answers still appearing. I have teamed up with a number of BPM researchers and practitioners to bring together our joint experience in a BPM workshop at the University in Liechtenstein in 2013, where we developed ten principles of good BPM, later published in Business Process Management Journal (vom Brocke et al., 2014). The paper, which has received considerable attention in academia, was ranked the journal’s most downloaded paper the month it was published. Slides on Slideshare that provide a brief summary of the paper have been accessed more than 3,000 times since they were first put online in March 2014. Given the importance of the topic–what makes for good BPM–and the positive response to the ten principles, I wrote this note with the co-authors of the original BPMJ paper to outline the ten principles and illustrate how to use them in practice. We invite all readers to engage in this discussion via any channel they find appropriate.

Working notes for TopSig at ShARe/CLEF 2013

We used our TopSig open-source indexing and retrieval tool to produce runs for the ShARe/CLEF eHealth 2013 track. TopSig was used to produce runs using the query fields and provided discharge summaries, where appropriate. Although the improvement was not great TopSig was able to gain some benefit from utilising the discharge summaries, although the software needed to be modified to support this. This was part of a larger experiment involving determining the applicability and limits to signature-based approaches.

Perspectives on Australian bankruptcy law through the prism of the World Bank report on the treatment of the insolvency of natural persons

The insolvency of natural persons raises questions not only for a nation’s economy but also for its concern for equity. The World Bank has recently released a Report on the Treatment of the Insolvency of Natural Persons to guide nations in addressing the issues raised by an individual debtor’s insolvency. A brief review of Australia’s personal insolvency laws shows that it addresses many of the issues raised by the Report. However two areas are identified as worthy of further investigation by policy-makers and scholars to better address a concern for equity.