A review of rationale for allocating costs and payments in producing and supplying public sector information PART A of 2 Parts – Chapters 1, 2 and 3) 13 March 2011 version

This work reviews the rationale and processes for raising revenue and allocating funds to perform information intensive activities that are pertinent to the work of democratic government. ‘Government of the people, by the people, for the people’ expresses an idea that democratic government has no higher authority than the people who agree to be bound by its rules. Democracy depends on continually learning how to develop understandings and agreements that can sustain voting majorities on which democratic law making and collective action depends. The objective expressed in constitutional terms is to deliver ‘peace, order and good government’. Meeting this objective requires a collective intellectual authority that can understand what is possible; and a collective moral authority to understand what ought to happen in practice. Facts of life determine that a society needs to retain its collective competence despite a continual turnover of its membership as people die but life goes on. Retaining this ‘collective competence’ in matters of self-government depends on each new generation: • acquiring a collective knowledge of how to produce goods and services needed to sustain a society and its capacity for self-government; • Learning how to defend society diplomatically and militarily in relation to external forces to prevent overthrow of its self-governing capacity; and • Learning how to defend society against divisive internal forces to preserve the authority of representative legislatures, allow peaceful dispute resolution and maintain social cohesion.

Review of regulatory framework for environmental information

If Australian scientists are to fully and actively participate in international scientific collaborations utilising online technologies, policies and laws must support the data access and reuse objectives of these projects. To date Australia lacks a comprehensive policy and regulatory framework for environmental information and data generally. Instead there exists a series of unconnected Acts that adopt historically-based, sector-specific approaches to the collection, use and reuse of environmental information. This paper sets out the findings of an analysis of a representative sample of Australian statutes relating to environmental management and protection to determine the extent to which they meet best practice criteria for access to and reuse of environmental information established in international initiatives. It identifies issues that need to be addressed in the legislation governing environmental information to ensure that Australian scientists are able to fully engage in international research collaborations.

Users verses IT: Understanding prejudice in information systems development project teams

This paper investigated the phenomenon of prejudice among ISD project members. We presented a theoretical discussion followed by one qualitative and one quantitative study. In the qualitative study, we interviewed different members of the project teams to understand the different types of prejudice possessed by team members. Results of this interview study led to the development of prejudice scales for IT members and users, which was used in the quantitative study. We surveyed 128 ISD teams and found that prejudice was related task and relationship conflict, satisfaction and willingness to work together in the future. Furthermore, prejudice exerts stronger influences on users than IT members in terms of increasing task and relationship conflicts and decreasing goal commitment.

Automatically detecting pain in video through facial action units

In a clinical setting, pain is reported either through patient self-report or via an observer. Such measures are problematic as they are: 1) subjective, and 2) give no specific timing information. Coding pain as a series of facial action units (AUs) can avoid these issues as it can be used to gain an objective measure of pain on a frame-by-frame basis. Using video data from patients with shoulder injuries, in this paper, we describe an active appearance model (AAM)-based system that can automatically detect the frames in video in which a patient is in pain. This pain data set highlights the many challenges associated with spontaneous emotion detection, particularly that of expression and head movement due to the patient's reaction to pain. In this paper, we show that the AAM can deal with these movements and can achieve significant improvements in both the AU and pain detection performance compared to the current-state-of-the-art approaches which utilize similarity-normalized appearance features only.

Frequency decomposition techniques for increased discriminative 3D facial information capture

Eigen-based techniques and other monolithic approaches to face recognition have long been a cornerstone in the face recognition community due to the high dimensionality of face images. Eigen-face techniques provide minimal reconstruction error and limit high-frequency content while linear discriminant-based techniques (fisher-faces) allow the construction of subspaces which preserve discriminatory information. This paper presents a frequency decomposition approach for improved face recognition performance utilising three well-known techniques: Wavelets; Gabor / Log-Gabor; and the Discrete Cosine Transform. Experimentation illustrates that frequency domain partitioning prior to dimensionality reduction increases the information available for classification and greatly increases face recognition performance for both eigen-face and fisher-face approaches.

Novice riders and the predictors of riding without motorcycle protective clothing

Background While helmet usage is often mandated, few motorcycle and scooter riders make full use of protection for the rest of the body. Little is known about the factors associated with riders’ usage or non-usage of protective clothing. Methods Novice riders were surveyed prior to their provisional licence test in NSW, Australia. Questions related to usage and beliefs about protective clothing, riding experience and exposure, risk taking and demographic details. Multivariable Poisson regression models were used to identify factors associated with two measures of usage, comparing those who sometimes vs rarely/never rode unprotected and who usually wore non-motorcycle pants vs motorcycle pants. Results Ninety-four percent of eligible riders participated and usable data was obtained from 66% (n = 776). Factors significantly associated with riding unprotected were: youth (17–25 years) (RR = 2.00, 95% CI: 1.50–2.65), not seeking protective clothing information (RR = 1.29, 95% CI = 1.07–1.56), non-usage in hot weather (RR = 3.01, 95% CI: 2.38–3.82), awareness of social pressure to wear more protection (RR = 1.48, 95% CI: 1.12–1.95), scepticism about protective benefits (RR = 2.00, 95% CI: 1.22–3.28) and riding a scooter vs any type of motorcycle. A similar cluster of factors including youth (RR = 1.17, 95% CI: 1.04–1.32), social pressure (RR = 1.32, 95% CI: 1.16–1.50), hot weather (RR = 1.30, 95% CI: 1.19–1.41) and scooter vs motorcycles were also associated with wearing non-motorcycle pants. There was no evidence of an association between use of protective clothing and other indicators of risk taking behaviour. Conclusions Factors strongly associated with non-use of protective clothing include not having sought information about protective clothing and not believing in its injury reduction value. Interventions to increase use may therefore need to focus on development of credible information sources about crash risk and the benefits of protective clothing. Further work is required to develop motorcycle protective clothing suitable for hot climates.

Examination of gaze behaviors under in situ and video simulation task constraints reveals differences in information pickup for perception and action

Gaze and movement behaviors of association football goalkeepers were compared under two video simulation conditions (i.e., verbal and joystick movement responses) and three in situ conditions (i.e., verbal, simplified body movement, and interceptive response). The results showed that the goalkeepers spent more time fixating on information from the penalty kick taker’s movements than ball location for all perceptual judgment conditions involving limited movement (i.e., verbal responses, joystick movement, and simplified body movement). In contrast, an equivalent amount of time was spent fixating on the penalty taker’s relative motions and the ball location for the in situ interception condition, which required the goalkeepers to attempt to make penalty saves. The data suggest that gaze and movement behaviors function differently, depending on the experimental task constraints selected for empirical investigations. These findings highlight the need for research on perceptual— motor behaviors to be conducted in representative experimental conditions to allow appropriate generalization of conclusions to performance environments.

Technology strategy and competitive performance in bridge construction

Pragmatic construction professionals, accustomed to intense price competition and focused on the bottom line, have difficulty justifying investments in advanced technology. Researchers and industry professionals need improved tools to analyze how technology affects the performance of the firm. This paper reports the results of research to begin answering the question, “does technology matter?” The researchers developed a set of five dimensions for technology strategy, collected information regarding these dimensions along with four measures of competitive performance in five bridge construction firms, and analyzed the information to identify relationships between technology strategy and competitive performance. Three technology strategy dimensions—competitive positioning, depth of technology strategy, and organizational fit—showed particularly strong correlations with the competitive performance indicators of absolute growth in contract awards and contract award value per technical employee. These findings indicate that technology does matter. The research also provides ways to analyze options for approaching technology and ways to relate technology to competitive performance for use by managers. It also provides a valuable set of research measures for technology strategy.

An integrated approach to cryptographic mitigation of denial-of-service attacks

Gradual authentication is a principle proposed by Meadows as a way to tackle denial-of-service attacks on network protocols by gradually increasing the confidence in clients before the server commits resources. In this paper, we propose an efficient method that allows a defending server to authenticate its clients gradually with the help of some fast-to-verify measures. Our method integrates hash-based client puzzles along with a special class of digital signatures supporting fast verification. Our hash-based client puzzle provides finer granularity of difficulty and is proven secure in the puzzle difficulty model of Chen et al. (2009). We integrate this with the fast-verification digital signature scheme proposed by Bernstein (2000, 2008). These schemes can be up to 20 times faster for client authentication compared to RSA-based schemes. Our experimental results show that, in the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol, fast verification digital signatures can provide a 7% increase in connections per second compared to RSA signatures, and our integration of client puzzles with client authentication imposes no performance penalty on the server since puzzle verification is a part of signature verification.

Access control : allocating resources to selfish agents

The ultimate goal of an authorisation system is to allocate each user the level of access they need to complete their job - no more and no less. This proves to be challenging in an organisational setting because on one hand employees need enough access to perform their tasks, while on the other hand more access will bring about an increasing risk of misuse - either intentionally, where an employee uses the access for personal benefit, or unintentionally through carelessness, losing the information or being socially engineered to give access to an adversary. With the goal of developing a more dynamic authorisation model, we have adopted a game theoretic framework to reason about the factors that may affect users’ likelihood to misuse a permission at the time of an access decision. Game theory provides a useful but previously ignored perspective in authorisation theory: the notion of the user as a self-interested player who selects among a range of possible actions depending on their pay-offs.

Physicality in the Information Age : a normative perspective on the patent eligibility of non-physical methods

There has been much conjecture of late as to whether the patentable subject matter standard contains a physicality requirement. The issue came to a head when the Federal Circuit introduced the machine-or-transformation test in In re Bilski and declared it to be the sole test for determining subject matter eligibility. Many commentators criticized the test, arguing that it is inconsistent with Supreme Court precedent and the need for the patent system to respond appropriately to all new and useful innovation in whatever form it arises. Those criticisms were vindicated when, on appeal, the Supreme Court in Bilski v. Kappos dispensed with any suggestion that the patentable subject matter test involves a physicality requirement. In this article, the issue is addressed from a normative perspective: it asks whether the patentable subject matter test should contain a physicality requirement. The conclusion reached is that it should not, because such a limitation is not an appropriate means of encouraging much of the valuable innovation we are likely to witness during the Information Age. It is contended that it is not only traditionally-recognized mechanical, chemical and industrial manufacturing processes that are patent eligible, but that patent eligibility extends to include non-machine implemented and non-physical methods that do not have any connection with a physical device and do not cause a physical transformation of matter. Concerns raised that there is a trend of overreaching commoditization or propertization, where the boundaries of patent law have been expanded too far, are unfounded since the strictures of novelty, nonobviousness and sufficiency of description will exclude undeserving subject matter from patentability. The argument made is that introducing a physicality requirement will have unintended adverse effects in various fields of technology, particularly those emerging technologies that are likely to have a profound social effect in the future.

Embedding information literacy in a first year business undergraduate course

This article reports on a project to embed information literacy skills development in a first-year undergraduate business course at an Australian university. In accordance with prior research suggesting that first-year students are over-confident about their skills, the project used an optional online quiz to allow students to pre-test their information literacy skills. The students' lower than expected results subsequently encouraged greater skill development. However, not all students elected to undertake the first quiz. A final assessable information literacy quiz increased the levels of student engagement, suggesting that skill development activities need to be made assessable. We found that undertaking the information literacy quizzes resulted in a statistically significant improvement in students' information literacy skills from the pre-test to the post-test. This research therefore extends previous research by providing an effective means of delivering information literacy skill development to large cohorts of first-year students.

A hybrid Chinese information retrieval model

A distinctive feature of Chinese test is that a Chinese document is a sequence of Chinese with no space or boundary between Chinese words. This feature makes Chinese information retrieval more difficult since a retrieved document which contains the query term as a sequence of Chinese characters may not be really relevant to the query since the query term (as a sequence Chinese characters) may not be a valid Chinese word in that documents. On the other hand, a document that is actually relevant may not be retrieved because it does not contain the query sequence but contains other relevant words. In this research, we propose a hybrid Chinese information retrieval model by incorporating word-based techniques with the traditional character-based techniques. The aim of this approach is to investigate the influence of Chinese segmentation on the performance of Chinese information retrieval. Two ranking methods are proposed to rank retrieved documents based on the relevancy to the query calculated by combining character-based ranking and word-based ranking. Our experimental results show that Chinese segmentation can improve the performance of Chinese information retrieval, but the improvement is not significant if it incorporates only Chinese segmentation with the traditional character-based approach.

Developing trust networks based on user tagging information for recommendation making

Recommender systems are one of the recent inventions to deal with ever growing information overload. Collaborative filtering seems to be the most popular technique in recommender systems. With sufficient background information of item ratings, its performance is promising enough. But research shows that it performs very poor in a cold start situation where previous rating data is sparse. As an alternative, trust can be used for neighbor formation to generate automated recommendation. User assigned explicit trust rating such as how much they trust each other is used for this purpose. However, reliable explicit trust data is not always available. In this paper we propose a new method of developing trust networks based on user’s interest similarity in the absence of explicit trust data. To identify the interest similarity, we have used user’s personalized tagging information. This trust network can be used to find the neighbors to make automated recommendations. Our experiment result shows that the proposed trust based method outperforms the traditional collaborative filtering approach which uses users rating data. Its performance improves even further when we utilize trust propagation techniques to broaden the range of neighborhood.