AITPM national newsletter October 2008 president's report

It’s a pleasure for me to be penning my first President’s Message for the AITPM Newsletter. I am eagerly looking forward to serving the Institute and members over the coming couple of years. First though, I’d like to congratulate Andrew Hulse for steering the good ship AITPM over the past two years, bringing so many initiatives to the fore, including the Certified Transport Planner (CTP), stronger ties with other organisations and agencies such as IPENZ and Austroads, mutually beneficial sponsorship arrangements, and sharing his enthusiasm towards the Thunderbirds. Personally and largely thanks to my kids’ domination of the TV I’m a bit keener on the other great British sixties sci-fi classic, Doctor Who. Maybe we can generate a “favourite Doctor” dialogue in the Newsletter.

Procuring Sydney’s Olympic Stadium : a world class event?

This paper describes and analyses the procurement processes employed in delivering the Sydney Olympic Stadium – arguably the most significant stadia project in the region today. This current high profile project is discussed in terms of a case study into the procurement processes used. Interviews, personal site visits and questionnaires were used to obtain information on the procurement processes used and comments on their application to the project. The alternative procurement process used on this project—Design and Construction within a Build, Own, Operate and Transfer (BOOT) project—is likely to impact on the construction industry as a whole. Already other projects and sectors are following this lead. Based on a series of on-site interviews and questionnaires, a series of benefits and drawbacks to this procurement strategy are provided.The Olympic Stadium project has also been further analysed during construction through a Degree of Interaction framework to determine anticipated project success. This analysis investigates project interaction and user satisfaction to provide a comparable rating. A series of questionnaires were used to collect data to calculate the Degree of Interaction and User Satisfaction ratings.

GameFlow : a model for evaluating player enjoyment in games

Although player enjoyment is central to computer games, there is currently no accepted model of player enjoyment in games. There are many heuristics in the literature, based on elements such as the game interface, mechanics, gameplay, and narrative. However, there is a need to integrate these heuristics into a validated model that can be used to design, evaluate, and understand enjoyment in games. We have drawn together the various heuristics into a concise model of enjoyment in games that is structured by flow. Flow, a widely accepted model of enjoyment, includes eight elements that, we found, encompass the various heuristics from the literature. Our new model, GameFlow, consists of eight elements -- concentration, challenge, skills, control, clear goals, feedback, immersion, and social interaction. Each element includes a set of criteria for achieving enjoyment in games. An initial investigation and validation of the GameFlow model was carried out by conducting expert reviews of two real-time strategy games, one high-rating and one low-rating, using the GameFlow criteria. The result was a deeper understanding of enjoyment in real-time strategy games and the identification of the strengths and weaknesses of the GameFlow model as an evaluation tool. The GameFlow criteria were able to successfully distinguish between the high-rated and low-rated games and identify why one succeeded and the other failed. We concluded that the GameFlow model can be used in its current form to review games; further work will provide tools for designing and evaluating enjoyment in games.

Does institutional location protect from political influence? the case of a minimum labour standards enforcement agency in Australia

Among the many factors that influence enforcement agencies, this article examines the role of the institutional location (and independence) of agencies, and an incumbent government's ideology. It is argued that institutional location affects the level of political influence on the agency's operations, while government ideology affects its willingness to resource enforcement agencies and approve regulatory activities. Evidence from the agency regulating minimum labour standards in the Australian federal industrial relations jurisdiction (currently the Fair Work Ombudsman) highlights two divergences from the regulatory enforcement literature generally. First, notions of independence from political interference offered by institutional location are more illusory than real and, second, political need motivates political action to a greater extent than political ideology.

The impact of online reviews on hotel booking intentions and trust

A growing reliance on the Internet as an information source when making choices about tourism products raises the need for more research into electronic word of mouth. Within a hotel context, this study explores the role of four key factors that influence perceptions of trust and consumer choice. An experimental design is used to investigate four independent variables: the target of the review (core or interpersonal); overall valence of a set of reviews (positive or negative); framing of reviews (what comes first: negative or positive information); and whether or not a consumer generated numerical rating is provided together with the written text. Consumers seem to be more influenced by early negative information, especially when the overall set of reviews is negative. However, positively framed information together with numerical rating details increases both booking intentions and consumer trust. The results suggest that consumers tend to rely on easy-to-process information, when evaluating a hotel based upon reviews. Higher levels of trust are also evident when a positively framed set of reviews focused on interpersonal service.

Identifying good re-engagement practice : case studies from Brisbane North and West Youth Connections action research

This report summarises the action research undertaken by the Brisbane North and West Youth Connections Consortium during 2010 and facilitated by staff from QUT. The Consortium consists of a lead agency which undertakes both program coordination and direct service delivery (Brisbane Youth Service) and four other agencies across the region who undertake direct service delivery. Funds for Youth Connections are provided by the Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. This report describes and analyses the participatory action research (PAR) undertaken in 2011, including eight case studies exploring questions seen as important to the re-engagement of young people in education and training.

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.

SimTrust : a new method of trust network generation

Trust can be used for neighbor formation to generate automated recommendations. User assigned explicit rating data can be used for this purpose. However, the explicit rating data is not always available. In this paper we present a new method of generating trust network based on user’s interest similarity. To identify the interest similarity, we use user’s personalized tag information. This trust network can be used to find the neighbors to make automated recommendation. Our experiment result shows that the precision of the proposed method outperforms the traditional collaborative filtering approach.

Managing Trust in Online Social Networks

In recent years, there is a dramatic growth in number and popularity of online social networks. There are many networks available with more than 100 million registered users such as Facebook, MySpace, QZone, Windows Live Spaces etc. People may connect, discover and share by using these online social networks. The exponential growth of online communities in the area of social networks attracts the attention of the researchers about the importance of managing trust in online environment. Users of the online social networks may share their experiences and opinions within the networks about an item which may be a product or service. The user faces the problem of evaluating trust in a service or service provider before making a choice. Recommendations may be received through a chain of friends network, so the problem for the user is to be able to evaluate various types of trust opinions and recommendations. This opinion or recommendation has a great influence to choose to use or enjoy the item by the other user of the community. Collaborative filtering system is the most popular method in recommender system. The task in collaborative filtering is to predict the utility of items to a particular user based on a database of user rates from a sample or population of other users. Because of the different taste of different people, they rate differently according to their subjective taste. If two people rate a set of items similarly, they share similar tastes. In the recommender system, this information is used to recommend items that one participant likes, to other persons in the same cluster. But the collaborative filtering system performs poor when there is insufficient previous common rating available between users; commonly known as cost start problem. To overcome the cold start problem and with the dramatic growth of online social networks, trust based approach to recommendation has emerged. This approach assumes a trust network among users and makes recommendations based on the ratings of the users that are directly or indirectly trusted by the target user.

Development and validation of a pregnancy symptoms inventory

BACKGROUND. Physical symptoms are common in pregnancy and are predominantly associated with normal physiological changes. These symptoms have a social and economic cost, leading to absenteeism from work and additional medical interventions. There is currently no simple method for identifying common pregnancy related problems in the antenatal period. A validated tool, for use by pregnancy care providers would be useful. AIM: The aim of the project was to develop and validate a Pregnancy Symptoms Inventory for use by healthcare professionals (HCPs). METHODS: A list of symptoms was generated via expert consultation with midwives and obstetrician gynaecologists. Focus groups were conducted with pregnant women in their first, second or third trimester. The inventory was then tested for face validity and piloted for readability and comprehension. For test-re-test reliability, it was administered to the same women 2 to 3 days apart. Finally, outpatient midwives trialled the inventory for 1 month and rated its usefulness on a 10cm visual analogue scale (VAS). The number of referrals to other health care professionals was recorded during this month. RESULTS: Expert consultation and focus group discussions led to the generation of a 41-item inventory. Following face validity and readability testing, several items were modified. Individual item test re-test reliability was between .51 to 1 with the majority (34 items) scoring .0.70. During the testing phase, 211 surveys were collected in the 1 month trial. Tiredness (45.5%), poor sleep (27.5%) back pain (19.5%) and nausea (12.6%) were experienced often. Among the women surveyed, 16.2% claimed to sometimes or often be incontinent. Referrals to the incontinence nurse increased > 8 fold during the study period. The median rating by midwives of the ‘usefulness’ of the inventory was 8.4 (range 0.9 to 10). CONCLUSIONS: The Pregnancy Symptoms Inventory (PSI) was well accepted by women in the 1 month trial and may be a useful tool for pregnancy care providers and aids clinicians in early detection and subsequent treatment of symptoms. It shows promise for use in the research community for assessing the impact of lifestyle intervention in pregnancy.

A literature review on research methodologies of gross pollutant traps

This paper presents a comprehensive review of scientific and grey literature on gross pollutant traps (GPTs). GPTs are designed with internal screens to capture gross pollutants—organic matter and anthropogenic litter. Their application involves professional societies, research organisations, local city councils, government agencies and the stormwater industry—often in partnership. In view of this, the 113 references include unpublished manuscripts from these bodies along with scientific peer-reviewed conference papers and journal articles. The literature reviewed was organised into a matrix of six main devices and nine research areas (testing methodologies) which include: design appraisal study, field monitoring/testing, experimental flow fields, gross pollutant capture/retention characteristics, residence time calculations, hydraulic head loss, screen blockages, flow visualisations and computational fluid dynamics (CFD). When the fifty-four item matrix was analysed, twenty-eight research gaps were found in the tabulated literature. It was also found that the number of research gaps increased if only the scientific literature was considered. It is hoped, that in addition to informing the research community at QUT, this literature review will also be of use to other researchers in this field.

Gender differences and store characteristics : a study of Australian supermarket consumers

It is argued, there is a paucity of research with regard to male and female consumer behaviour in the context of supermarket shopping in Australia. The purpose of this paper is to identify the differences between male and female shoppers rating the importance of store characteristics within an Australian Supermarket retail environment. A survey gathered data from two hundred and eighty male and female grocery shoppers, across four major Brisbane supermarkets. A simple-random-sample, collection methodology was employed to collect data. Significant statistical differences between male and female grocery shoppers were evident on all ten store characteristics constructs. Significant gender differences featured on twenty-eight of thirty scale items tested. Female grocery shoppers considered supermarket store characteristics more important than male shoppers. This study has implications for sociology, gender studies and consumer behaviour disciplines. It also has commercial implications for food retail management and consumer marketing activities that can positively influence consumer participation levels, increased store revenues and profitability.

Crown copyright

Copyright protects much of the creative, cultural, educational, scientific and informational material generated by federal, State/Territory and local governments and their constituent departments and agencies. Governments at all levels develop, manage and distribute a vast array of materials in the form of documents, reports, websites, datasets and databases on CD or DVD and files that can be downloaded from a website. Under the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth), with few exceptions government copyright is treated the same as copyright owned by non-government parties insofar as the range of protected materials and the exclusive proprietary rights attaching to them are concerned. However, the rationale for recognizing copyright in public sector materials and vesting ownership of copyright in governments is fundamentally different to the main rationales underpinning copyright generally. The central justification for recognizing Crown copyright is to ensure that government documents and materials created for public administrative purposes are disseminated in an accurate and reliable form. Consequently, the exclusive rights held by governments as copyright owners must be exercised in a manner consistent with the rationale for conferring copyright ownership on them. Since Crown copyright exists primarily to ensure that documents and materials produced for use in the conduct of government are circulated in an accurate and reliable form, governments should exercise their exclusive rights to ensure that their copyright materials are made available for access and reuse, in accordance with any laws and policies relating to access to public sector materials. While copyright law vests copyright owners with extensive bundles of exclusive rights which can be exercised to prevent others making use of the copyright material, in the case of Crown copyright materials these rights should rarely be asserted by government to deviate from the general rule that Crown copyright materials will be available for “full and free reproduction” by the community at large.

Information and communication technology for E-regions

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are essential components of the knowledge economy, and have an immense complementary role in innovation, education, knowledge creation, and relations with government, civil society, and business within city regions. The ability to create, distribute, and exploit knowledge has become a major source of competitive advantage, wealth creation, and improvements in the new regional policies. Growing impact of ICTs on the economy and society, rapid application of recent scientific advances in new products and processes, shifting to more knowledge-intensive industry and services, and rising skill requirements have become crucial concepts for urban and regional competitiveness. Therefore, harnessing ICTs for knowledge-based urban development (KBUD) has a significant impact on urban and regional growth (Yigitcanlar, 2005). In this sense, e-region is a novel concept utilizing ICTs for regional development. Since the Helsinki European Council announced Turkey as a candidate for European Union (EU) membership in 1999, the candidacy has accelerated the speed of regional policy enhancements and adoption of the European regional policy standards. These enhancements and adoption include the generation of a new regional spatial division, NUTS-II statistical regions; a new legislation on the establishment of regional development agencies (RDAs); and new orientations in the field of high education, science, and technology within the framework of the EU’s Lisbon Strategy and the Bologna Process. The European standards posed an ambitious new agenda in the development and application of contemporary regional policy in Turkey (Bilen, 2005). In this sense, novel regional policies in Turkey necessarily endeavor to include information society objectives through efficient use of new technologies such as ICTs. Such a development seeks to be based on tangible assets of the region (Friedmann, 2006) as well as the best practices deriving from grounding initiatives on urban and local levels. These assets provide the foundation of an e-region that harnesses regional development in an information society context. With successful implementations, the Marmara region’s local governments in Turkey are setting the benchmark for the country in the implementation of spatial information systems and e-governance, and moving toward an e-region. Therefore, this article aims to shed light on organizational and regional realities of recent practices of ICT applications and their supply instruments based on evidence from selected local government organizations in the Marmara region. This article also exemplifies challenges and opportunities of the region in moving toward an e-region and provides a concise review of different ICT applications and strategies in a broader urban and regional context. The article is organized in three parts. The following section scrutinizes the e-region framework and the role of ICTs in regional development. Then, Marmara’s opportunities and challenges in moving toward an e-region are discussed in the context of ICT applications and their supply instruments based on public-sector projects, policies, and initiatives. Subsequently, the last section discusses conclusions and prospective research.

Benchmarking local E-Government

Increasingly, almost everything we do in our daily lives is being influenced by information and communications technologies (ICTs) including the Internet. The task of governance is no exception with an increasing number of national, state, and local governments utilizing ICTs to support government operations, engage citizens, and provide government services. As with other things, the process of governance is now being prefixed with an “e”. E-governance can range from simple Web sites that convey basic information to complex sites that transform the customary ways of delivering all sorts of government services. In this respect local e-government is the form of e-governance that specifically focuses on the online delivery of suitable local services by local authorities. In practice local e-government reflects four dimensions, each one dealing with the functions of government itself. The four are: (a) e-services, the electronic delivery of government information, programs, and services often over the Internet; (b) e-management, the use of information technology to improve the management of government. This might range from streamlining business processes to improving the flow of information within government departments; (c) e-democracy the use of electronic communication vehicles, such as e-mail and the Internet, to increase citizen participation in the public decision-making process; (d) e-commerce, the exchange of money for goods and services over the Internet which might include citizens paying taxes and utility bills, renewing vehicle registrations, and paying for recreation programs, or government buying office supplies and auctioning surplus equipment (Cook, LaVigne, Pagano, Dawes, & Pardo, 2002). Commensurate with the rapid increase in the process of developing e-governance tools, there has been an increased interest in benchmarking the process of local e-governance. This benchmarking, which includes the processes involved in e-governance as well as the extent of e-governance adoption or take-up is important as it allows for improved processes and enables government agencies to move towards world best practice. It is within this context that this article discusses benchmarking local e-government. It brings together a number of discussions regarding the significance of benchmarking, best practices and actions for local e-government, and key elements of a successful local e-government project.