Higher degree research at Australian Universities : Responding to diversity in engineering and information technology

BACKGROUND There is increasing enrolment of international students in the Engineering and Information Technology disciplines and anecdotal evidence of a need for additional understanding and support for these students and their supervisors due to differences both in academic and social cultures. While there is a growing literature on supervisory styles and guidelines on effective supervision, there is little on discipline-specific, cross-cultural supervision responding to the growing diversity. In this paper, we report findings from a study of Engineering and Information technology Higher Degree Research (HDR)students and supervision in three Australian universities. PURPOSE The aim was to assess perceptions of students and supervisors of factors influencing success that are particular to international or culturally and linguistically diverse (CaLD) HDR students in Engineering and Information technology. DESIGN/METHOD Online survey and qualitative data was collected from international and CaLD HDR students and supervisors at the three universities. Bayesian network analysis, inferential statistics, and qualitative analysis provided the main findings. RESULTS Survey results indicate that both students and supervisors are positive about their experiences, and do not see language or culture as particularly problematic. The survey results also reveal strong consistency between the perceptions of students and supervisors on most factors influencing success. Qualitative analysis of critical supervision incidents has provided rich data that could help improve support services. CONCLUSIONS In contrast with anecdotal evidence, HDR completion data from the three universities reveal that international students, on average, complete in shorter time periods than domestic students. The analysis suggests that success is linked to a complex set of factors involving the student, supervision, the institution and broader community.

Stakeholder pressures and climate change disclosure : Australian evidence

This paper investigates the stakeholder pressures behind corporate accountability and disclosures in relation to climate change. By means of a questionnaire survey, the study focuses on ascertaining the views of a sample of stakeholder groups such as government bodies, institutional investors, environmental NGOs, media accounting professionals, and researchers to examine their perceptions of pressures upon Australian corporations to be accountable in relation to climate change. Prior social and environmental research found that NGOs (Deegan and Blomquist, 2006; Tilt, 1994) and the media (Brown and Deegan, 1996; Islam and Deegan, 2010) were powerful stakeholder groups influencing corporate social and environmental disclosure practices. Our paper finds that along with NGOs and the media, institutional investors and regulators (governments) are equally important and powerful actors for applying pressure for corporate accountability in relation to climate change. Based on the findings of the paper, we would argue that climate change is an issue with no single stakeholder group involved, rather it is a set of stakeholder groups including regulators, institutional investors, the media, and NGOs who demand corporations to be accountable.

Synchronised integrated online e-health profiles

Web-based social networking applications have become increasingly important in recent years. The current applications in the healthcare sphere can support the health management, but to date there is no patient-controlled integrator. This paper proposes a platform called Multiple Profile Manager (MPM) that enables a user to create and manage an integrated profile that can be shared across numerous social network sites. Moreover, it is able to facilitate the collection of personal healthcare data, which makes a contribution to the development of public health informatics. Here we want to illustrate how patients and physicians can be benefited from enabling the platform for online social network sites. The MPM simplifies the management of patients' profiles and allows health professionals to obtain a more complete picture of the patients' background so that they can provide better health care. To do so, we demonstrate a prototype of the platform and describe its protocol specification, which is an XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) [1] extension, for sharing and synchronising profile data (vCard²) between different social networks.

Children and young people using public space : models of rights, optimism and wellbeing

This presentation discusses topics and issues that connect closely with the Conference Themes and themes in the ARACY Report Card. For example, developing models of public space that are safe, welcoming and relevant to children and young people will impact on their overall wellbeing and may help to prevent many of the tensions occurring in Australia and elsewhere around the world. This area is the subject of ongoing international debate, research and policy formation, relevant to concerns in the ARACY Report Card about children and young people’s health and safety, participation, behaviours and risks and peer and family relationships.

Responding to a transformative stressor : climate change and the institutional governance of Australian cities

This paper understands climate change as a transformative stressor that will prompt responses from institutional governance frameworks in Australian cities. A transformative stressor is characterised as a chronic large-scale phenomenon which triggers a process of institutional change whereby institutions seek to reorientate their activities to better manage the social, economic and environmental impacts created by the transformative dynamic. It is posited that institutional change will be required as Australian metropolitan institutional governance frameworks seek to manage climate change effects in urban environments. It is argued that improved operationalisation of adaptation is required as part of a comprehensive urban response to the transformative stresses climate change and its effects are predicted to create in Australian cities. The operationalisation of adaptation refers to adaptation becoming incorporated, codified and implemented as a central principle of metro-regional planning governance. This paper has three key purposes. First, it examines theoretical and conceptual understandings of the role of transformative stressors in compelling institutional change within urban settings. Second, it establishes a conceptual approach that understands climate change as a transformative stressor requiring institutional change within the metropolitan planning frameworks of Australia's cities. Third, it offers early results and conclusions from an empirical investigation into the current prospects for operationalisation of climate adaptation in planning programs within Southeast Queensland (SEQ) via changes to institutional governance. A significant emerging conclusion is that early climate stresses appear not to be leading to episodic institutional change in the metropolitan planning frameworks of SEQ.

Fractal dimension of dried foods : a correlation between microstructure and porosity

The quality of dried food is affected by a number of factors including quality of raw material, initial microstructure, and drying conditions. The structure of the food materials goes through deformations due to the simultaneous effect of heat and mass transfer during the drying process. Shrinkage and changes in porosity, microstructure and appearance are some of the most remarkable features that directly influence overall product quality. Porosity and microstructure are the important material properties in relation to the quality attributes of dried foods. Fractal dimension (FD) is a quantitative approach of measuring surface, pore characteristics, and microstructural changes [1]. However, in the field of fractal analysis, there is a lack of research in developing relationship between porosity, shrinkage and microstructure of different solid food materials in different drying process and conditions [2-4]. Establishing a correlation between microstructure and porosity through fractal dimension during convective drying is the main objective of this work.

New media [Fourth Edition]

This is the fourth edition of New Media: An Introduction, with the previous editions being published by Oxford University Press in 2002, 2005 and 2008. As the first edition of the book published in the 2010s, every chapter has been comprehensively revised, and there are new chapters on: • Online News and the Future of Journalism (Chapter 7) • New Media and the Transformation of Higher Education (Chapter 10) • Online Activism and Networked Politics (Chapter 12). It has retained popular features of the third edition, including the twenty key concepts in new media (Chapter 2) and illustrative case studies to assist with teaching new media. The case studies in the book cover: the global internet; Wikipedia; transmedia storytelling; Media Studies 2.0; the games industry and exploitation; video games and violence; WikiLeaks; the innovator’s dilemma; massive open online courses (MOOCs); Creative Commons; the Barack Obama Presidential campaigns; and the Arab Spring. Several major changes in the media environment since the publication of the third edition stand out. Of particular importance has been the rise of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, which draw out even more strongly the features of the internet as networked and participatory media, with a range of implications across the economy, society and culture. In addition, the political implications of new media have become more apparent with a range of social media-based political campaigns, from Barack Obama’s successful Presidential election campaigns to the Occupy movements and the Arab Spring. At the same time, the subsequent developments of politics in these and other cases has drawn attention to the limitations of thinking about the politics or the public sphere in technologically determinist ways. When the first edition of New Media was published in 2002, the concept of new media was seen as being largely about the internet as it was accessed from personal computers. The subsequent decade has seen a proliferation of platforms and devices: we now access media in all forms from our phones and other mobile platforms, therefore we seen television and the internet increasingly converging, and we see a growing uncoupling of digital media content and delivery platforms. While this has a range of implications for media law and policy, from convergent media policy to copyright reform, governments and policy-makers are struggling to adapt to such seismic shifts from mass communications media to convergent social media. The internet is no longer primarily a Western-based medium. Two-thirds of the world’s internet users are now outside of Europe and North America; three-quarters of internet users use languages other than English; and three-quarters of the world’s mobile cellular phone subscriptions are in developing nations. It is also apparent that conducting discussions about how to develop new media technologies and discussions about their cultural and creative content can no longer be separated. Discussions of broadband strategies and the knowledge economy need to be increasingly joined with those concerning the creative industries and the creative economy.

Critical reflections on the use of participatory methodologies to build evaluation capacities in international development organisations

There has been a greater focus on strengthening evaluation capacity building (ECB) within development organisations in recent years. This can be attributed in part to the growing appreciation of the value of participatory and collaborative forms of evaluation. Evaluation is increasingly seen as an ongoing learning process and an important means of strengthening capacity and improving organisational performance (Horton et al., 2003:7). While there are many benefits of using participatory methodologies in ECB projects, our experiences and a review of the literature in this area highlight the many challenges, issues and contradictions that can affect the success of such ECB efforts. We discuss these issues, drawing on our learnings from the ongoing participatory action research (PAR) project 'Assessing Communication for Social Change’ (AC4SC). This four year project, which began in 2007, is a collaboration between communication and development academics and evaluation specialists from two Australian universities and communication for development practitioners and monitoring and evaluation (M&E) staff in the NGO Equal Access Nepal (EAN). The aim is to develop, implement, and evaluate a participatory methodology for assessing the social change impacts of community radio programs produced by EAN. It builds on previous projects that used ethnographic action research (EAR) methodology (Tacchi et al., 2007).

The design and development of music eScape: A new iPhone mood management music App

The physical, emotional, educational and social developmental challenges of adolescence can be associated with high levels of emotional vulnerability. Thus, the development of effective emotion-regulation strategies is crucial during this time period. Young people commonly use music to identify, express and regulate their emotions. Modern mobile technology provides an engaging, easily accessible means of assisting young people through music. A systematic contextual review identified 20 iPhone applications addressing emotions through music and two independent raters, using the Mobile App Rating Scale (MARS), evaluated the quality of the apps. Their characteristics, key features and overall quality will be presented. Three participatory design workshops (N=13, 6 males, 7 females; age 15-25) were conducted to explore young people’s use of music to enhance wellbeing. Young people were also asked to trial existing mood and music apps and to conceptualise their ultimate mood targeting music application. A thematic analysis of the participatory design workshops content identified the following music affect-regulation strategies: relationship building, modifying cognitions, modifying emotions, and immersing in emotions. The application of the key learnings from the mobile app review and participatory design workshops and the design and development of the music eScape app were presented and implications for future research was discussed.

How should future building structure and emergency response cope with bushfire attack?

Bushfires are regular occurrences in the Australian landscape which can, under adverse weather conditions, give rise to losses of life, property, infrastructure, environmental and cultural values. Where property loss is involved, historical surveys of house losses have focussed on ember, radiant heat and flame contact as key bushfire attack mechanisms. Although often noted, little work has been done to quantify the impact of fire generated or fire enhanced wind and pyro-convective events on house loss and to improve construction practice within Australia. It is well known that strong winds are always associated with bushfire events. It is less well known, although increasingly shown through anecdotal evidence, that bushfires are not a passive companion of wind, but indeed they interact with winds and can together cause significant damages to exposed buildings and ecological structures. Previous studies have revealed the effects of wind, fire and structure interactions with the result of increased pressure coefficient distributions on the windward side of a building downstream of a fire front. This paper presents a further analysis of the result in relations to the relevant standards and fire weather conditions. A review of wind code and bushfire code was conducted. Based on the result of the current study, the authors believe it is necessary to consider wind as an attack mechanism in bushfire events. The results of the study will also have implications on bushfire emergency management, design of emergency shelters, perception of danger, emergency evacuation and on risk assessment.

Virtual resistance based active damping solution for constant power instability in AC microgrids

With ever-increasing share of power electronic loads constant power instability is becoming a significant issue in microgrids, especially when they operate in the islanding mode. Transient conditions like resistive load-shedding or sudden increase of constant power loads (CPL) might destabilize the whole system. Modeling and stability analysis of AC microgrids with CPLs have already been discussed in literature. However, no effective solutions are provided to stabilize this kind of system. Therefore, this paper proposes a virtual resistance based active damping method to eliminate constant power instability in AC microgrids. Advantages and limitations of the proposed method are also discussed in detail. Simulation results are presented to validate the proposed active damping solution.

Sexual abuse prevention education

Child sexual abuse is a serious problem that has received increased attention in recent years. From an ecological perspective, in which social problems are viewed in the context of characteristics of individuals, families, and broader societal systems (Prilleltensky, Peirson, & Nelson, 2001), preventing child sexual abuse involves strengthening capacity to intervene at individual, family/relationship, school, and community levels. School-based education programs have been developed in efforts to prevent child sexual abuse before it happens and to provide children who may already be experiencing it with help seeking information. Use of these programs must be based on evidence rather than ideology. Evaluations of these programs have demonstrated that sexual abuse prevention education can provide children with improved knowledge and skills for responding to and reporting potential sexual abuse. However, this learning does not seem to be maintained over time which means further attention should be given to repeated learning, opportunities for concept reinforcement and integration with other topics. School-based programs typically present information to children by presenting a series of core concepts and messages which are delivered using engaging pedagogical strategies such as multi-media technologies, animations, theatre and songs, puppets, picture books, and games. This chapter will outline the key characteristics of effective child sexual abuse prevention programs, and will provide directions for future research and practice.