Developing teamwork assessment : satisfying solutions for the real world

While the need for teamwork skills consistently appears in job advertisements across all sectors, the development of these skills for many university students (and some academic staff) remains one of the most painful and often complained about experiences. This presentation introduces the final phase of a project that has investigated and analysed the design of teamwork assessment across all discipline areas in order to provide a university-wide protocol for this important graduate capability. The protocol concentrates best practice guidelines and resources across a range of approaches to team assessment and includes an online diagnostic tool for evaluating the quality of assessment design. Guide-lines are provided for all aspects of the design process such as the development of real-world relevance; choosing the ideal team structure; planning for intervention and conflict resolution; and selecting appropriate marking options. While still allowing academic staff to exercise creativity in assessment design; the guidelines increase the possibility of students’ experiencing a consistent and explicit approach to teamwork throughout their course. If implementation of the protocol is successful, the project team predicts that the resulting consistency and explicitness in approaches to teamwork will lead to more coherent skill development across units, more realistic expectations for students and staff and better communication between all those participating in the process.

Three Carrier Ambiguity Resolutions : Generalised problems, models and solutions

In this paper, the problems of three carrier phase ambiguity resolution (TCAR) and position estimation (PE) are generalized as real time GNSS data processing problems for a continuously observing network on large scale. In order to describe these problems, a general linear equation system is presented to uniform various geometry-free, geometry-based and geometry-constrained TCAR models, along with state transition questions between observation times. With this general formulation, generalized TCAR solutions are given to cover different real time GNSS data processing scenarios, and various simplified integer solutions, such as geometry-free rounding and geometry-based LAMBDA solutions with single and multiple-epoch measurements. In fact, various ambiguity resolution (AR) solutions differ in the floating ambiguity estimation and integer ambiguity search processes, but their theoretical equivalence remains under the same observational systems models and statistical assumptions. TCAR performance benefits as outlined from the data analyses in some recent literatures are reviewed, showing profound implications for the future GNSS development from both technology and application perspectives.

Australian nursing informatics competency project

A study of Australian nurses on their use of information technology in the workplace was undertaken by the Australian Nursing Federation (ANF) in 2007. This study of over 4000 nurses highlighted that nurses recognise benefits to adopting more information technology in the workplace although there are significant barriers to their use. It also identified gross deficits in the capacity of the nursing workforce to engage in the digital processing of information. Following the release of the study last year, the ANF commenced work on a number of key recommendations from the report in order to overcome identified barriers and provide opportunities for nurses to better utilise information technology and information management systems. One of these recommendations was to seek research funding to develop national information technology and information management competency standards for nurses. This project has now received Federal Government funding to undertake this development. This project is being developed in collaboration with the ANF and the Queensland University of Technology. This paper will discuss the methodology, development and publication of the Australian Nursing Informatics Competency Standards Project which is currently underway and due for completion in May 2009. The Australian Nursing Informatics Competencies will be presented at the conference.

Modelling sustainable and optimal solutions for building services integration in early architectural design : confronting the software and professional interoperability deficit

Decisions made in the earliest stage of architectural design have the greatest impact on the construction, lifecycle cost and environmental footprint of buildings. Yet the building services, one of the largest contributors to cost, complexity, and environmental impact, are rarely considered as an influence on the design at this crucial stage. In order for efficient and environmentally sensitive built environment outcomes to be achieved, a closer collaboration between architects and services engineers is required at the outset of projects. However, in practice, there are a variety of obstacles impeding this transition towards an integrated design approach. This paper firstly presents a critical review of the existing barriers to multidisciplinary design. It then examines current examples of best practice in the building industry to highlight the collaborative strategies being employed and their benefits to the design process. Finally, it discusses a case study project to identify directions for further research.

Business process extensibility

Vendors provide reference process models as consolidated, off-the-shelf solutions to capture best practices in a given industry domain. Customers can then adapt these models to suit their specific requirements. Traditional process flexibility approaches facilitate this operation, but do not fully address it as they do not sufficiently take controlled change guided by vendors’ reference models into account. This tension between the customer’s freedom of adapting reference models, and the ability to incorporate with relatively low effort vendor-initiated reference model changes, thus needs to be carefully balanced. This paper introduces process extensibility as a new paradigm for customising reference processes and managing their evolution over time. Process extensibility mandates a clear recognition of the different responsibilities and interests of reference model vendors and consumers, and is concerned with keeping the effort of customer-side reference model adaptations low while allowing sufficient room for model change.

Accurate series solutions for gravity-driven Stokes waves

In the past, high order series expansion techniques have been used to study the nonlinear equations that govern the form of periodic Stokes waves moving steadily on the surface of an inviscid fluid. In the present study, two such series solutions are recomputed using exact arithmetic, eliminating any loss of accuracy due to accumulation of round-off error, allowing a much greater number of terms to be found with confidence. It is shown that higher order behaviour of series generated by the solution casts doubt over arguments that rely on estimating the series’ radius of convergence. Further, the exact nature of the series is used to shed light on the unusual nature of convergence of higher order Pade approximants near the highest wave. Finally, it is concluded that, provided exact values are used in the series, these Pade approximants prove very effective in successfully predicting three turning points in both the dispersion relation and the total energy.

AFM study of forces between silicon oil and hydrophobic - hydrophylic surfaces in aqueous solutions

An investigation has been made of the interactions between silicone oil and various solid substrates immersed in aqueous solutions. Measurements were made using an atomic force microscope (AFM) using the colloid-probe method. The silicone oil drop is simulated by coating a small silica sphere with the oil, and measuring the force as this coated sphere is brought close to contact with a flat solid surface. It is found that the silicone oil surface is negatively charged, which causes a double-layer repulsion between the oil drop and another negatively charged surface such as mica. With hydrophilic solids, this repulsion is strong enough to prevent attachment of the drop to the solid. However, with hydrophobic surfaces there is an additional attractive force which overcomes the double-layer repulsion, and the silicone oil drop attaches to the solid. A "ramp" force appears in some, but not all, of the data sets. There is circumstantial evidence that this force results from compression of the silicone oil film coated on the glass sphere.

Urban Informatics in Creative Industries

Presentation of research projects

Use of hydrotalcites for the removal of toxic anions from aqueous solutions

The removal of toxic anions has been achieved using hydrotalcite via two methods: (1) coprecipitation and (2) thermal activation. Hydrotalcite formed via the coprecipitation method, using solutions containing arsenate and vanadate up to pH 10, are able to remove more than 95% of the toxic anions (0.2 M) from solution. The removal of toxic anions in solutions with a pH of >10 reduces the removal uptake percentage to 75%. Raman spectroscopy observed multiple A1 stretching modes of V−O and As−O at 930 and 810 cm−1, assigned to vanadate and arsenate, respectively. Analysis of the intensity and position of the A1 stretching modes helped to identify the vanadate and arsenate specie intercalated into the hydrotalcite structure. It has been determined that 3:1 hydrotalcite structure predominantly intercalate anions into the interlayer region, while the 2:1 and 4:1 hydrotalcite structures shows a large portion of anions being removed from solution by adsorption processes. Treatment of carbonate solutions (0.2 M) containing arsenate and vanadate (0.2 M) three times with thermally activated hydrotalcite has been shown to remove 76% and 81% of the toxic anions, respectively. Thermally activated hydrotalcite with a Mg:Al ratio of 2:1, 3:1, and 4:1 have all been shown to remove 95% of arsenate and vanadate (25 ppm). At increased concentrations of arsenate and vanadate, the removal uptake percentage decreased significantly, except for the 4:1 thermally activated hydrotalcite. Thermally activated Bayer hydrotalcite has also been shown to be highly effective in the removal of arsenate and vanadate. The thermal activation of the solid residue component (red mud) removes 30% of anions from solution (100 ppm of both anions), while seawater-neutralized red mud removes 70%. The formation of hydrotalcite during the seawater neutralization process removes anions via two mechanisms, rather than one observed for thermally activated red mud.

Analytical and numerical solutions for the time and space-symmetric fractional diffusion equation

We consider a time and space-symmetric fractional diffusion equation (TSS-FDE) under homogeneous Dirichlet conditions and homogeneous Neumann conditions. The TSS-FDE is obtained from the standard diffusion equation by replacing the first-order time derivative by a Caputo fractional derivative, and the second order space derivative by a symmetric fractional derivative. First, a method of separating variables expresses the analytical solution of the TSS-FDE in terms of the Mittag--Leffler function. Second, we propose two numerical methods to approximate the Caputo time fractional derivative: the finite difference method; and the Laplace transform method. The symmetric space fractional derivative is approximated using the matrix transform method. Finally, numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the numerical methods and to confirm the theoretical claims.

Analytical and numerical solutions for the time and space-symmetric fractional diffusion equation

We consider a time and space-symmetric fractional diffusion equation (TSS-FDE) under homogeneous Dirichlet conditions and homogeneous Neumann conditions. The TSS-FDE is obtained from the standard diffusion equation by replacing the first-order time derivative by the Caputo fractional derivative and the second order space derivative by the symmetric fractional derivative. Firstly, a method of separating variables is used to express the analytical solution of the tss-fde in terms of the Mittag–Leffler function. Secondly, we propose two numerical methods to approximate the Caputo time fractional derivative, namely, the finite difference method and the Laplace transform method. The symmetric space fractional derivative is approximated using the matrix transform method. Finally, numerical results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the numerical methods and to confirm the theoretical claims.

Identifying child sexual abuse within school contexts : policy problems and solutions, and a landmark case

As a strategy to identify child sexual abuse, most Australian States and Territories have enacted legislation requiring teachers to report suspected cases. Some Australian State and non-State educational authorities have also created policy-based obligations to report suspected child sexual abuse. Significantly, these can be wider than non-existent or limited legislative duties, and therefore are a crucial element of the effort to identify sexual abuse. Yet, no research has explored the existence and nature of these policy-based duties. The first purpose of this paper is to report the results of a three-State study into policy-based reporting duties in State and non-State schools in Australia. In an extraordinary coincidence, while conducting the study, a case of failure to comply with reporting policy occurred with tragic consequences. This led to a rare example in Australia (and one of only a few worldwide) of a professional being prosecuted for failure to comply with a legislative duty. It also led to disciplinary proceedings against school staff. The second purpose of this paper is to describe this case and connect it with findings from our policy analysis.