Comparative study : health research on traffic noise pollution vs. Technical research on traffic noise mitigation

Community awareness and the perception on the traffic noise related health impacts have increased significantly over the last decade resulting in a large volume of public inquiries flowing to Road Authorities for planning advice. Traffic noise management in the urban environment is therefore becoming a “social obligation”, essentially due to noise related health concerns. Although various aspects of urban noise pollution and mitigation have been researched independently, an integrated approach by stakeholders has not been attempted. Although the current treatment and mitigation strategies are predominantly handled by the Road Agencies, a concerted effort by all stakeholders is becoming mandatory for effective and tangible outcomes in the future. A research project is underway a RMIT University, Australia, led by the second author to consider the use of “hedonic pricing” for alternative noise amelioration treatments within the road reserve and outside the road reserve. The project aims to foster a full range noise abatement strategy encompassing source, path and noise receiver. The benefit of such a study would be to mitigate the problem where it is most effective and would defuse traditional “authority” boundaries to produce the optimum outcome. The project is conducted in collaboration with the Department of Main Roads Queensland, Australia and funded by the CRC for Construction Innovation. As part of this study, a comprehensive literature search is currently underway to investigate the advancements in community health research, related to environmental noise pollution, and the advancements in technical and engineering research in mitigating the issue. This paper presents the outcomes of this work outlining state of the art, national and international good practices and gap analysis to identify major anomalies and developments.

Advancing e-learning policy and practice : influences on academics’ adoption, integration and development of multimodal e-learning courses

Tertiary education is increasingly a contested space where advances in Information Communications Technologies and their application to technology-mediated e-learning environments have forced university administrators and educators to dislocate themselves from traditional correspondence modes of student engagement. Compounding this paradigmatic shift within the traditional sphere of distance education pedagogy are multiple and conflicting pressures on academics to develop flexible, engaging, cost-effective and sustainable interactive learning resources that incorporate both multimedia and hypermedia. This chapter reports on a study that examined factors that influence educators’ decision to adopt and integrate educational technology and convert traditional print-based distance education materials into interactive multimodal e-learning formats. Although the broader study was conducted in a single Australian university and investigated pedagogical, institutional and individual factors, this chapter restricts its focus to solely the pedagogical motivations and concerns of educators. It is argued that findings from the study have significance at the institutional level, particularly in terms of developing an underlying pedagogical rationale that can permeate the e-learning culture throughout the university, while at the same time, providing a roadmap for educators who are yet to fully engage with the e-learning format.

Designing the Future

While there have been improvements in Australian engineering education since the 1990s, there are still strong concerns that more progress needs to be made, particularly in the areas of developing graduate competencies and in outcomes-based curricula. This paper reports on the findings from a two-day ALTC-funded forum that sought to establish a shared understanding with the 3 stakeholders (students, academics and industry) about how to achieve a design-based engineering curriculum. This paper reports on the findings from the first day’s activities and reveals that there is a shared desire for design and project-based curricula that would encourage the development of the ‘three-dimensional’ graduate: one who has technical, personal and professional and systems-thinking/design-based competence.

Graduate Attribute Mapping With the Extended CDIO Framework

The CDIO (Conceive-Design-Implement-Operate) Initiative has been globally recognised as an enabler for engineering education reform. With the CDIO process, the CDIO Standards and the CDIO Syllabus, many scholarly contributions have been made around cultural change, curriculum reform and learning environments. In the Australasian region, reform is gaining significant momentum within the engineering education community, the profession, and higher education institutions. This paper presents the CDIO Syllabus cast into the Australian context by mapping it to the Engineers Australia Graduate Attributes, the Washington Accord Graduate Attributes and the Queensland University of Technology Graduate Capabilities. Furthermore, in recognition that many secondary schools and technical training institutions offer introductory engineering technology subjects, this paper presents an extended self-rating framework suited for recognising developing levels of proficiency at a preparatory level. A demonstrator mapping tool has been created to demonstrate the application of this extended graduate attribute mapping framework as a precursor to an integrated curriculum information model.

Understanding Shared Services : an exploration of the IS literature

In a competitive environment, companies continuously innovate to offer superior services at lower costs. ‘Shared services’ have been extensively adopted in practice as one means for improving organisational performance. Shared services is considered most appropriate for support functions, and is widely adopted in Human Resource Management, Finance and Accounting; more recently being employed across the Information Systems function. IS applications and infrastructure are an important enabler and driver of shared services in all functional areas. As computer based corporate information systems have become de facto and the internet pervasive and increasingly the backbone of administrative systems, the technical impediments to sharing have come down dramatically. As this trend continues, CIOs and IT professionals will need a deeper understanding of the shared services phenomenon and its implications. The advent of shared services has consequential implications for the IS academic discipline. Yet, archival analysis of IS the academic literature reveals that shared services, though mentioned in more than 100 articles, has received little in depth attention. This paper is the first attempt to investigate and report on the current status of shared services in the IS literature. The paper presents detailed review of literature from main IS journals and conferences, findings evidencing a lack of focus and definitions and objectives lacking conceptual rigour. The paper concludes with a tentative operational definition, a list of perceived main objectives of shared services, and an agenda for related future research.

Curriculum development of joint degrees courses with international institutions

With globalisation and severe budget constraints in the education sector in Australia and around the world it has become necessary for higher education institutions to be more outward looking and seek funding from non traditional sources to supplement the financial shortfalls. One way to overcome this problem is to work cooperatively with other institutions to share facilities and courses, at the same time generating valuable income to maintain the operation of the university. This paper describes the development of joint curricula in built environment and engineering courses in QUT. It outlines the stages of development starting from seeking international partners, developing memorandum of understanding, making visit to partner institution to inspect the facilities, curriculum development to meet the academic requirements of the institutions and professional bodies and finally the implementation process.

Teaching crabs to walk straight : is there a place for ethics education in Malaysian accountancy courses?

Recent releases from the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) highlight the importance of ethics education. Academic institutions employ varying methods of teaching ethics and place varying levels of emphasis on ethics teaching during a business/accounting degree. This paper attempts to evaluate whether teaching ethics to final year accountancy students is beneficial. At the commencement of a semester 85 final year accounting students were given five ethical scenarios on which to make an ethical decision. During the semester they were subject to two different methods of teaching ethics, a traditional lecture/tutorial process and a group assignment. ----- After a significant gap, students were re-presented with the ethical scenarios and asked what action they now considered appropriate. In all five instances students offered a more ethical response the second time. When asked to evaluate the methodologies the students considered both training methods to have a positive effect on their ethical thinking. The results suggest it is beneficial to include ethics teaching in accountancy courses, if the profession’s goal of ethical practitioners is to be achieved.

Technical note : modelling a complex micro-multileaf collimator using the standard BEAMnrc distribution

Purpose: The component modules in the standard BEAMnrc distribution may appear to be insufficient to model micro-multileaf collimators that have tri-faceted leaf ends and complex leaf profiles. This note indicates, however, that accurate Monte Carlo simulations of radiotherapy beams defined by a complex collimation device can be completed using BEAMnrc's standard VARMLC component module.---------- Methods: That this simple collimator model can produce spatially and dosimetrically accurate micro-collimated fields is illustrated using comparisons with ion chamber and film measurements of the dose deposited by square and irregular fields incident on planar, homogeneous water phantoms.---------- Results: Monte Carlo dose calculations for on- and off-axis fields are shown to produce good agreement with experimental values, even upon close examination of the penumbrae.--------- Conclusions: The use of a VARMLC model of the micro-multileaf collimator, along with a commissioned model of the associated linear accelerator, is therefore recommended as an alternative to the development or use of in-house or third-party component modules for simulating stereotactic radiotherapy and radiosurgery treatments. Simulation parameters for the VARMLC model are provided which should allow other researchers to adapt and use this model to study clinical stereotactic radiotherapy treatments.

Use of advanced technology videotapes in the delivery of structural engineering courses

A teaching and learning development project is currently under way at Queensland University of Technology to develop advanced technology videotapes for use with the delivery of structural engineering courses. These tapes consist of integrated computer and laboratory simulations of important concepts, and behaviour of structures and their components for a number of structural engineering subjects. They will be used as part of the regular lectures and thus will not only improve the quality of lectures and learning environment, but also will be able to replace the ever-dwindling laboratory teaching in these subjects. The use of these videotapes, developed using advanced computer graphics, data visualization and video technologies, will enrich the learning process of the current diverse engineering student body. This paper presents the details of this new method, the methodology used, the results and evaluation in relation to one of the structural engineering subjects, steel structures.

Teaching the economic way of thinking : a new approach to teaching introductory economics in a business degree

In teaching introductory economics there has been a tendency to put a lot of emphasis on imparting abstract models and technical skills to students (Stilwell, 2005; Voss, Blais, Greens, & Ahwesh, 1986). This model building approach has the merit of preparing the grounding for students 10 pursue further studies in economics. However, in a business degree with only a small proportion of students majoring in economics, such an approach tend to alienate the majority of students transiting from high school in to university. Surveys in Europe and Australia found that students complained about the lack of relevance of economics courses to the real world and the over-reliance of abstract mathematical modelling (Kirman, 2001; Lewis and Norris, 1997; Siegfried & Round, 2000). BSB112 Economics 1 is one of the eight faculty core units in the Faculty of Business at QUT, with over 1000 students in each semester. In semester I 2008, a new approach to teaching this unit was designed aiming to achieve three inter-related objectives: (1) to provide business students with a first insight into economic thinking and language, (2) to integrate economic analysis with current Australian social, environmental and political issues, and (3) to cater for students with a wide range of academic needs. Strategies used to achieve these objectives included writing up a new text which departs from traditional economics textbooks in important ways, integrating students' cultures in teaching and learning activities, and devising a new assessment format to encourage development of research skills and applications rather than reproduction of factual knowledge. This paper will document the strategies used in this teaching innovation, present quantitative and qualitative evidence to evaluate this new approach and suggest ways of further improvement.

Technical report : acoustic analysis of the natural environment

This technical report is concerned with one aspect of environmental monitoring—the detection and analysis of acoustic events in sound recordings of the environment. Sound recordings offer ecologists the potential advantages of cheaper and increased sampling. An acoustic event detection algorithm is introduced that outputs a compact rectangular marquee description of each event. It can disentangle superimposed events, which are a common occurrence during morning and evening choruses. Next, three uses to which acoustic event detection can be put are illustrated. These tasks have been selected because they illustrate quite different modes of analysis: (1) the detection of diffuse events caused by wind and rain, which are a frequent contaminant of recordings of the terrestrial environment; (2) the detection of bird calls using the spatial distribution of their component events; and (3) the preparation of acoustic maps for whole ecosystem analysis. This last task utilises the temporal distribution of events over a daily, monthly or yearly cycle.

Standardization and omics science : technical and social dimensions are inseparable and demand symmetrical study

Standardization is critical to scientists and regulators to ensure the quality and interoperability of research processes, as well as the safety and efficacy of the attendant research products. This is perhaps most evident in the case of “omics science,” which is enabled by a host of diverse high-throughput technologies such as genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics. But standards are of interest to (and shaped by) others far beyond the immediate realm of individual scientists, laboratories, scientific consortia, or governments that develop, apply, and regulate them. Indeed, scientific standards have consequences for the social, ethical, and legal environment in which innovative technologies are regulated, and thereby command the attention of policy makers and citizens. This article argues that standardization of omics science is both technical and social. A critical synthesis of the social science literature indicates that: (1) standardization requires a degree of flexibility to be practical at the level of scientific practice in disparate sites; (2) the manner in which standards are created, and by whom, will impact their perceived legitimacy and therefore their potential to be used; and (3) the process of standardization itself is important to establishing the legitimacy of an area of scientific research.

Use of advanced technology videotapes in the delivery of structual engineering courses

A teaching and learning development project is currently under way at Queensland University of Technology to develop advanced technology videotapes for use with the delivery of structural engineering courses. These tapes consist of integrated computer and laboratory simulations of important concepts, and behaviour of structures and their components for a number of structural engineering subjects. They will be used as part of the regular lectures and thus will not only improve the quality of lectures and learning environment, but also will be able to replace the ever-dwindling laboratory teaching in these subjects. The use of these videotapes, developed using advanced computer graphics, data visualization and video technologies, will enrich the learning process of the current diverse engineering student body. This paper presents the details of this new method, the methodology used, the results and evaluation in relation to one of the structural engineering subjects, steel structures.