Providing technical support for a university radiological laboratory

Queensland University of Technology has a long standing in providing tertiary education and training in ionising radiation. The radiological laboratory plays an important part in this education and training. As radiological applications are diversified in the fields of health and environment, the laboratory provides support for a number of scenarios in the use of experimental situations in radiation detection and radiation protection. This paper discusses the role that a radiological laboratory technician plays in the functionality of a radiological laboratory.

Paediatric spinal deformity research at the Mater Children's Hospital, Brisbane, Australia.

The Paediatric Spine Research group was formed in 2002 to perform high quality research into the prevention and management of spinal deformity, with an emphasis on scoliosis. The group has successfully built collaborative bridges between the scientific and research expertise at QUT, and the clinical skills and experience of the spinal orthopaedic surgeons at the Mater Children’s Hospital in Brisbane. Clinical and biomechanical research is now possible as a result of the development of detailed databases of patients who have innovative and unique surgical interventions for spinal deformity such as thoracoscopic scoliosis correction, thoracoscopic staple insertion for juvenile idiopathic scoliosis and minimally invasive growing rods. The Mater in Brisbane provides these unique datasets of spinal deformity surgery patients, whose procedures are not being performed anywhere else in the Southern Hemisphere. The most detailed is a database of thoracoscopic scoliosis correction surgery which now contains 180 patients with electronic collections of X-Rays, photographs and patient questionnaires. With ethics approval, a subset of these patients has had CT scans, and a further subset have had MRI scans with and without a compressive load to simulate the erect standing position. This database has to date contributed to 17 international refereed journal papers, a further 7 journal papers either under review or in final preparation, 53 national conference presentations and 35 international conference presentations. Major findings from selected journal publications will be presented. It is anticipated that as the surgical databases grow they will continue to provide invaluable clinical data which will feed into clinically relevant projects driven by both medical and engineering researchers whose findings will benefit spinal deformity patients and scientific knowledge worldwide.

Automatic generation of assertions to detect potential security vulnerabilities in C programs that use union and pointer types

Type unions, pointer variables and function pointers are a long standing source of subtle security bugs in C program code. Their use can lead to hard-to-diagnose crashes or exploitable vulnerabilities that allow an attacker to attain privileged access over classified data. This paper describes an automatable framework for detecting such weaknesses in C programs statically, where possible, and for generating assertions that will detect them dynamically, in other cases. Exclusively based on analysis of the source code, it identifies required assertions using a type inference system supported by a custom made symbol table. In our preliminary findings, our type system was able to infer the correct type of unions in different scopes, without manual code annotations or rewriting. Whenever an evaluation is not possible or is difficult to resolve, appropriate runtime assertions are formed and inserted into the source code. The approach is demonstrated via a prototype C analysis tool.

The provision of patient personal hygiene in the intensive care unit : a descriptive exploratory study of bed-bathing practice

Background/objectives The provision of the patient bed-bath is a fundamental nursing care activity yet few quantitative data and no qualitative data are available on registered nurses’ (RNs) clinical practice in this domain in the intensive care unit (ICU). The aim of this study was to describe ICU RNs current practice with respect to the timing, frequency and duration of the patient bed-bath and the cleansing and emollient agents used. Methods The study utilised a two-phase sequential explanatory mixed method design. Phase one used a questionnaire to survey RNs and phase two employed semi-structured focus group (FG) interviews with RNs. Data was collected over 28 days across four Australian metropolitan ICUs. Ethical approval was granted from the relevant hospital and university human research ethics committees. RNs were asked to complete a questionnaire following each episode of care (i.e. bed-bath) and then to attend one of three FG interviews: RNs with less than 2 years ICU experience; RNs with 2–5 years ICU experience; and RNs with greater than 5 years ICU experience. Results During the 28-day study period the four ICUs had 77.25 beds open. In phase one a total of 539 questionnaires were returned, representing 30.5% of episodes of patient bed-baths (based on 1767 bed occupancy and one bed-bath per patient per day). In 349 bed-bath episodes 54.7% patients were mechanically ventilated. The bed-bath was given between 02.00 and 06.00 h in 161 episodes (30%), took 15–30 min to complete (n = 195, 36.2%) and was completed within the last 8 h in 304 episodes (56.8%). Cleansing agents used were predominantly pH balanced soap or liquid soap and water (n = 379, 71%) in comparison to chlorhexidine impregnated sponges/cloths (n = 86, 16.1%) or other agents such as pre-packaged washcloths (n = 65, 12.2%). In 347 episodes (64.4%) emollients were not applied after the bed-bath. In phase two 12 FGs were conducted (three FGs at each ICU) with a total of 42 RN participants. Thematic analysis of FG transcripts across the three levels of RN ICU experience highlighted a transition of patient hygiene practice philosophy from shades of grey – falling in line for inexperienced clinicians to experienced clinicians concrete beliefs about patient bed-bath needs. Conclusions This study identified variation in process and products used in patient hygiene practices in four ICUs. Further study to improve patient outcomes is required to determine the appropriate timing of patient hygiene activities and cleansing agents used to improve skin integrity.

Ontology-based image annotation

With regard to the long-standing problem of the semantic gap between low-level image features and high-level human knowledge, the image retrieval community has recently shifted its emphasis from low-level features analysis to high-level image semantics extrac- tion. User studies reveal that users tend to seek information using high-level semantics. Therefore, image semantics extraction is of great importance to content-based image retrieval because it allows the users to freely express what images they want. Semantic content annotation is the basis for semantic content retrieval. The aim of image anno- tation is to automatically obtain keywords that can be used to represent the content of images. The major research challenges in image semantic annotation are: what is the basic unit of semantic representation? how can the semantic unit be linked to high-level image knowledge? how can the contextual information be stored and utilized for image annotation? In this thesis, the Semantic Web technology (i.e. ontology) is introduced to the image semantic annotation problem. Semantic Web, the next generation web, aims at mak- ing the content of whatever type of media not only understandable to humans but also to machines. Due to the large amounts of multimedia data prevalent on the Web, re- searchers and industries are beginning to pay more attention to the Multimedia Semantic Web. The Semantic Web technology provides a new opportunity for multimedia-based applications, but the research in this area is still in its infancy. Whether ontology can be used to improve image annotation and how to best use ontology in semantic repre- sentation and extraction is still a worth-while investigation. This thesis deals with the problem of image semantic annotation using ontology and machine learning techniques in four phases as below. 1) Salient object extraction. A salient object servers as the basic unit in image semantic extraction as it captures the common visual property of the objects. Image segmen- tation is often used as the �rst step for detecting salient objects, but most segmenta- tion algorithms often fail to generate meaningful regions due to over-segmentation and under-segmentation. We develop a new salient object detection algorithm by combining multiple homogeneity criteria in a region merging framework. 2) Ontology construction. Since real-world objects tend to exist in a context within their environment, contextual information has been increasingly used for improving object recognition. In the ontology construction phase, visual-contextual ontologies are built from a large set of fully segmented and annotated images. The ontologies are composed of several types of concepts (i.e. mid-level and high-level concepts), and domain contextual knowledge. The visual-contextual ontologies stand as a user-friendly interface between low-level features and high-level concepts. 3) Image objects annotation. In this phase, each object is labelled with a mid-level concept in ontologies. First, a set of candidate labels are obtained by training Support Vectors Machines with features extracted from salient objects. After that, contextual knowledge contained in ontologies is used to obtain the �nal labels by removing the ambiguity concepts. 4) Scene semantic annotation. The scene semantic extraction phase is to get the scene type by using both mid-level concepts and domain contextual knowledge in ontologies. Domain contextual knowledge is used to create scene con�guration that describes which objects co-exist with which scene type more frequently. The scene con�guration is represented in a probabilistic graph model, and probabilistic inference is employed to calculate the scene type given an annotated image. To evaluate the proposed methods, a series of experiments have been conducted in a large set of fully annotated outdoor scene images. These include a subset of the Corel database, a subset of the LabelMe dataset, the evaluation dataset of localized semantics in images, the spatial context evaluation dataset, and the segmented and annotated IAPR TC-12 benchmark.

Enhancing security and continuity management at international airports

Operators of busy contemporary airports have to balance tensions between the timely flow of passengers, flight operations, the conduct of commercial business activities and the effective application of security processes. In addition to specific onsite issues airport operators liaise with a range of organisations which set and enforce aviation-related policies and regulations as well as border security agencies responsible for customs, quarantine and immigration, in addition to first response security services. The challenging demands of coordinating and planning in such complex socio-technical contexts place considerable pressure on airport management to facilitate coordination of what are often conflicting goals and expectations among groups that have standing in respect to safe and secure air travel. What are, as yet, significantly unexplored issues in large airports are options for the optimal coordination of efforts from the range of public and private sector participants active in airport security and crisis management. A further aspect of this issue is how airport management systems operate when there is a transition from business-as-usual into an emergency/crisis situation and then, on recovery, back to ‘normal’ functioning. Business Continuity Planning (BCP), incorporating sub-plans for emergency response, continuation of output and recovery of degraded operating capacity, would fit such a context. The implementation of BCP practices in such a significant high security setting offers considerable potential benefit yet entails considerable challenges. This paper presents early results of a 4 year nationally funded industry-based research project examining the merger of Business Continuity Planning and Transport Security Planning as a means of generating capability for improved security and reliability and, ultimately, enhanced resilience in major airports. The project is part of a larger research program on the Design of Secure Airports that includes most of the gazetted ‘first response’ international airports in Australia, key Aviation industry groups and all aviation-related border and security regulators as collaborative partners. The paper examines a number of initial themes in the research, including: ? Approaches to integrating Business Continuity & Aviation Security Planning within airport operations; ? Assessment of gaps in management protocols and operational capacities for identifying and responding to crises within and across critical aviation infrastructure; ? Identification of convergent and divergent approaches to crisis management used across Austral-Asia and their alignment to planned and possible infrastructure evolution.

Postural balance under normal and altered sensory conditions in normal-weight and overweight children

Background Little or no research has been done in the overweight child on the relative contribution of multisensory information to maintain postural stability. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate postural balance control under normal and experimentally altered sensory conditions in normal-weight versus overweight children. Methods Sixty children were stratified into a younger (7–9 yr) and an older age group (10–12 yr). Participants were also classified as normal-weight (n = 22) or overweight (n = 38), according to the international BMI cut-off points for children. Postural stability was assessed during quiet bilateral stance in four sensory conditions (eyes open or closed, normal or reduced plantar sensation), using a Kistler force plate to quantify COP dynamics. Coefficients of variation were calculated as well to describe intra-individual variability. Findings Removal of vision resulted in systematically higher amounts of postural sway, but no significant BMI group differences were demonstrated across sensory conditions. However, under normal conditions lower plantar cutaneous sensation was associated with higher COP velocities and maximal excursion of the COP in the medial-lateral direction for the overweight group. Regardless of condition, higher variability was shown in the overweight children within the 7–9 yr old subgroup for postural sway velocity, and more specifically medial–lateral velocity. Interpretation In spite of these subtle differences, results did not establish any clear underlying sensory organization impairments that may affect standing balance performance in overweight children compared to normal-weight peers. Consequently, it is believed that other factors account for overweight children's functional balance deficiencies.

Summary report : the high road or the low road? Alternatives for Australia's future

This document is a summary of the findings of the inaugural study commissioned by the Australian Business Foundation Limited. It was conducted by Professor Jane Marceau, Pro-Vice Chancellor (Research) at the University of Western Sydney Macarthur, Dr Karen Manley, Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Western Sydney Macarthur and Mr Derek Sicklen, Managing Director of Australian Economic Analysis Pty Limited. The full report is available from the Australian Business Foundation. The Australian Business Foundation Limited is a recently formed independent economic and industry policy think-tank. It has been established and sponsored by Australian Business Limited, a pre-eminent and long-standing industry association and business services network. The report is in three parts. The first reviews the key findings of contemporary international economic and innovation-oriented analyses of the characteristics of high growth economies. The second assesses the shape, structure and dynamics of Australian industry as these compare with the characteristics for successful economic development suggested in the literature. Finally, the report indicates the nature of urgently required policy directions.

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.

Sustaining the next generation of teacher-researchers to work for social justice

This chapter explores a research project involving teachers working with some of the most disadvantaged young people in South Australia, children growing up in poverty, in families struggling with homelessness and ill-health, in the outer southern suburbs. Additionally, there were particular children were struggling with intellectual, emotional and social difficulties which were extreme enough for them not be included in a mainstream class. The research project made two crucial interrelated moves to support teachers to tackle this tough work. First, the project had an explicit social justice agenda. We were not simply researching literacy outcomes, but literacy pedagogies for the students teachers were most worried about. And we wanted to understand how the material conditions of students’ everyday lifeworlds impacted on the working conditions of teachers’ schoolworlds. We sought to open up a discursive space where teachers could talk about poverty, violence, racism and classism in ways that would take them beyond despair and into new imaginings and positive action. Second, the project was designed to start from the urgent questions of early career teachers and to draw on the accumulated practice wisdom of their chosen mentors. Hence we designed not only a teacher-researcher community, but cross-generational networks. Our aim was to build the capacities of both generations to address long-standing educational problems in new ways that drew overtly on their different and complementary resources.

The effectiveness of literalism-symbolism in business-to-business advertising

A basic element in advertising strategy is the choice of an appeal. In business-to-business (B2B) marketing communication, a long-standing approach relies on literal and factual, benefit-laden messages. Given the highly complex, costly and involved processes of business purchases, such approaches are certainly understandable. This project challenges the traditional B2B approach and asks if an alternative approach—using symbolic messages that operate at a more intrinsic or emotional level—is effective in the B2B arena. As an alternative to literal (factual) messages, there is an emerging body of literature that asserts stronger, more enduring results can be achieved through symbolic messages (imagery or text) in an advertisement. The present study contributes to this stream of research. From a theoretical standpoint, the study explores differences in literal-symbolic message content in B2B advertisements. There has been much discussion—mainly in the consumer literature—on the ability of symbolic messages to motivate a prospect to process advertising information by necessitating more elaborate processing and comprehension. Business buyers are regarded as less receptive to indirect or implicit appeals because their purchase decisions are based on direct evidence of product superiority. It is argued here, that these same buyers may be equally influenced by advertising that stimulates internally-directed motivation, feelings and cognitions about the brand. Thus far, studies on the effect of literalism and symbolism are fragmented, and few focus on the B2B market. While there have been many studies about the effects of symbolism no adequate scale exists to measure the continuum of literalism-symbolism. Therefore, a first task for this study was to develop such a scale. Following scale development, content analysis of 748 B2B print advertisements was undertaken to investigate whether differences in literalism-symbolism led to higher advertising performance. Variations of time and industry were also measured. From a practical perspective, the results challenge the prevailing B2B practice of relying on literal messages. While definitive support was not established for the use of symbolic message content, literal messages also failed to predict advertising performance. If the ‘fact, benefit laden’ assumption within B2B advertising cannot be supported, then other approaches used in the business-to-consumer (B2C) sector, such as symbolic messages may be also appropriate in business markets. Further research will need to test the potential effects of such messages, thereby building a revised foundation that can help drive advances in B2B advertising. Finally, the study offers a contribution to the growing body of knowledge on symbolism in advertising. While the specific focus of the study relates to B2B advertising, the Literalism-Symbolism scale developed here provides a reliable measure to evaluate literal and symbolic message content in all print advertisements. The value of this scale to advance our understanding about message strategy may be significant in future consumer and business advertising research.

Sloshing motion of water in a moonpool

This thesis is concerned with the sloshing motion of water in a moonpool. It is a relatively new problem, that is particularly predominant in moonpools with relatively large dimensions. The problem is further complicated by the additional behaviour of vertical oscillation. It is inevitable that large moonpools will be needed as offshore technology advances, therefore making a problem an important one. The research involves two parts, the theoretical and experimental study. The theoretical study consists of idealising the moonpool to a two dimensional system, represented by two surface piercing parallel barriers at a distance 2a apart. The barriers are forced to undergo roll motion which in turn generates waves. These travelling waves are travelling in opposite directions to each other and have the same amplitude and period, and thus can be expressed in terms of a standing wave. This is mathematically achieved by applying the theory of wavemaking, and therefore the wave amplitude at the side wall can be evaluated at near resonant conditions. The experimental study comprises of comparing the results obtained from the tank and moonpool experiments. The rolling motion creates the sloshing waves in both cases, in addition the vertical oscillation in the moonpool is produced by generating waves at one end of the towing tank. Apart from highlighting influencing parameters, the resonant frequencies obtained from these experiments are then compared with the theoretical values. Experiments in demonstrating the effect of increasing damping with the aid of baffles are also conducted. This is an important aspect which is very necessary if operations in launching and retrieving are to be carried out efficiently and safely.

Independent review of ACT Corrective Services Alexander Maconochie Centre [Interim Report]

Under a Services Agreement dated 16th April 2010 the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) engaged Knowledge Consulting Pty Ltd to conduct an independent review of operations at the Alexander Maconochie Centre (AMC) in the ACT. The Review was commissioned following a motion passed in the ACT Legislative Assembly as follows: “That this Assembly: (1) notes: (a) concerns regarding the operation of the AMC; (b) the unanimous findings of the Standing Committee on Justice and Community Safety report, Inquiry into the delay in the commencement of operations at the Alexander Maconochie Centre; and (c) the Government’s intention to have a review into the operation of the AMC after its first year of operation; and (2) calls on the Government to: (a) commission an independent reviewer to conduct the one year review into the AMC; (b) ensure that the review be open and transparent and public, and include input from community and non-government groups with an interest or involvement in the AMC, including on the terms of reference for the review; (c) ensure the review is completed in a timely manner and be tabled in the Legislative Assembly immediately upon completion; and (d) report upon the progress of the review in August 2010;”

Designing for engagement towards healthier lifestyles through food image sharing : the case of I8DAT

This paper introduces the underlying design concepts of I8DAT, a food image sharing application that has been developed as part of a three-year research project – Eat, Cook, Grow: Ubiquitous Technology for Sustainable Food Culture in the City (http://www.urbaninformatics .net/projects/food) – exploring urban food practices to engage people in healthier, more environmentally and socially sustainable eating, cooking, and growing food in their everyday lives. The key aim of the project is to produce actionable knowledge, which is then applied to create and test several accessible, user-centred interactive design solutions that motivate user-engagement through playful and social means rather than authoritative information distribution. Through the design and implementation processes we envisage to integrate these design interventions to create a sustainable food network that is both technical and socio-cultural in nature (technosocial). Our primary research locale is Brisbane, Australia, with additional work carried out in three reference cities with divergent geographic, socio-cultural, and technological backgrounds: Seoul, South Korea, for its global leadership in ubiquitous technology, broadband access, and high population density; Lincoln, UK, for the regional and peri-urban dimension it provides, and Portland, Oregon, US, for its international standing as a hub of the sustainable food movement.

An analysis of the nature and effectiveness of corporate governance in smaller listed Australian companies

The objective of this thesis is to investigate the corporate governance attributes of smaller listed Australian firms. This study is motivated by evidence that these firms are associated with more regulatory concerns, the introduction of ASX Corporate Governance Recommendations in 2004, and a paucity of research to guide regulators and stakeholders of smaller firms. While there is an extensive body of literature examining the effectiveness of corporate governance, the literature principally focuses on larger companies, resulting in a deficiency in the understanding of the nature and effectiveness of corporate governance in smaller firms. Based on a review of agency theory literature, a theoretical model is developed that posits that agency costs are mitigated by internal governance mechanisms and transparency. The model includes external governance factors but in many smaller firms these factors are potentially absent, increasing the reliance on the internal governance mechanisms of the firm. Based on the model, the observed greater regulatory intervention in smaller companies may be due to sub-optimal internal governance practices. Accordingly, this study addresses four broad research questions (RQs). First, what is the extent and nature of the ASX Recommendations that have been adopted by smaller firms (RQ1)? Second, what firm characteristics explain differences in the recommendations adopted by smaller listed firms (RQ2), and third, what firm characteristics explain changes in the governance of smaller firms over time (RQ3)? Fourth, how effective are the corporate governance attributes of smaller firms (RQ4)? Six hypotheses are developed to address the RQs. The first two hypotheses explore the extent and nature of corporate governance, while the remaining hypotheses evaluate its effectiveness. A time-series, cross-sectional approach is used to evaluate the effectiveness of governance. Three models, based on individual governance attributes, an index of six items derived from the literature, and an index based on the full list of ASX Recommendations, are developed and tested using a sample of 298 smaller firms with annual observations over a five-year period (2002-2006) before and after the introduction of the ASX Recommendations in 2004. With respect to (RQ1) the results reveal that the overall adoption of the recommendations increased from 66 per cent in 2004 to 74 per cent in 2006. Interestingly, the adoption rate for recommendations regarding the structure of the board and formation of committees is significantly lower than the rates for other categories of recommendations. With respect to (RQ2) the results reveal that variations in rates of adoption are explained by key firm differences including, firm size, profitability, board size, audit quality, and ownership dispersion, while the results for (RQ3) were inconclusive. With respect to (RQ4), the results provide support for the association between better governance and superior accounting-based performance. In particular, the results highlight the importance of the independence of both the board and audit committee chairs, and of greater accounting-based expertise on the audit committee. In contrast, while there is little evidence that a majority independent board is associated with superior outcomes, there is evidence linking board independence with adverse audit opinion outcomes. These results suggest that board and chair independence are substitutes; in the presence of an independent chair a majority independent board may be an unnecessary and costly investment for smaller firms. The findings make several important contributions. First, the findings contribute to the literature by providing evidence on the extent, nature and effectiveness of governance in smaller firms. The findings also contribute to the policy debate regarding future development of Australia’s corporate governance code. The findings regarding board and chair independence, and audit committee characteristics, suggest that policy-makers could consider providing additional guidance for smaller companies. In general, the findings offer support for the “if not, why not?” approach of the ASX, rather than a prescriptive rules-based approach.