Acceptance of prostitution and its social determinants in Canada

The nature of collective perception of prostitution is understudied in Canada. Except some rudimentary reports on the percentages of the key legal options, multivariate analysis has never been used to analyze the details of public opinion on prostitution. The current study explores the trend of public attitude toward prostitution acceptability in Canada over a 25-year span and examines the social determinants of the acceptability of prostitution, using structural equation modeling (SEM), which allows researchers to elaborate both direct and indirect effects (through mediating variables) on the outcome variable. Results show that the public has become more acceptant of prostitution over time. In addition, the less religious, less authoritarian, and more educated are more acceptant of prostitution than the more religious, more authoritarian, and less well educated. The effects of religiosity and authoritarianism mediate out the direct effects of age, gender, gender equality, marriage, marriage as an outdated institution, Quebec, race, and tolerance. The findings may serve as a reference point for the law reform regarding the regulation of prostitution in Canada.

LMS acceptance: The instructor role

Learning management systems (LMS) have become the norm in recent years in higher education to further engage students and lecturers. The e-learning tools within LMS provide knowledge sharing and community building opportunities that can support both critical thinking and higher order learning skills through conversation and collaboration. However, the mere existence of tools does not guarantee users’ adoption and acceptance. Several effective arrangements are required to engage users. This paper focuses on different aspects of lecturers’ attitude that impact user engagement with LMS tools reporting on findings from 74 interviews with students and lecturers from different disciplines within a major Australian university. Results indicate that lecturers’ teaching style and habits, active participation in online activities as well as designing appropriate tasks and assessment procedure are important determinants of lecturers’ attitude in engaging students with LMS tools.

Novel vaccine acceptance in emerging infectious diseases: a case study of Hendra virus vaccine uptake in Australia

Background: The development of a horse vaccine against Hendra virus has been hailed as a good example of a One Health approach to the control of human disease. Although there is little doubt that this is true, it is clear from the underwhelming uptake of the vaccine by horse owners to date (approximately 10%) that realisation of a One Health approach requires more than just a scientific solution. As emerging infectious diseases may often be linked to the development and implementation of novel vaccines this presentation will discuss factors influencing their uptake; using Hendra virus in Australia as a case study. Methods: This presentation will draw on data collected from the Horse owners and Hendra virus: A Longitudinal cohort study To Evaluate Risk (HHALTER) study. The HHALTER study is a mixed methods research study comprising a two-year survey-based longitudinal cohort study and qualitative interview study with horse owners in Australia. The HHALTER study has investigated and tracked changes in a broad range of issues around early uptake of vaccination, horse owner uptake of other recommended disease risk mitigation strategies, and attitudes to government policy and disease response. Interviews provide further insights into attitudes towards risk and decision-making in relation to vaccine uptake. A combination of quantitative and qualitative data analysis will be reported. Results: Data collected from more than 1100 horse owners shortly after vaccine introduction indicated that vaccine uptake and intention to vaccinate was associated with a number of risk perception factors and financial cost factors. In addition, concerns about side effects and veterinarians refusing to treat unvaccinated horses were linked to uptake. Across the study period vaccine uptake in the study cohort increased to more than 50%, however, concerns around side effects, equine performance and breeding impacts, delays to full vaccine approvals, and attempts to mandate vaccination by horse associations and event organisers have all impacted acceptance. Conclusion: Despite being provided with a safe and effective vaccine for Hendra virus that can protect horses and break the transmission cycle of the virus to humans, Australian horse owners have been reluctant to commit to it. General issues pertinent to novel vaccines, combined with challenges in the implementation of the vaccine have led to issues of mistrust and misconception with some horse owners. Moreover, factors such as cost, booster dose schedules, complexities around perceived risk, and ulterior motives attributed to veterinarians have only served to polarise attitudes to vaccine acceptance.

A Decentralized Session Management Framework for Heterogeneous Ad-Hoc and Fixed Networks

Wireless technologies are continuously evolving. Second generation cellular networks have gained worldwide acceptance. Wireless LANs are commonly deployed in corporations or university campuses, and their diffusion in public hotspots is growing. Third generation cellular systems are yet to affirm everywhere; still, there is an impressive amount of research ongoing for deploying beyond 3G systems. These new wireless technologies combine the characteristics of WLAN based and cellular networks to provide increased bandwidth. The common direction where all the efforts in wireless technologies are headed is towards an IP-based communication. Telephony services have been the killer application for cellular systems; their evolution to packet-switched networks is a natural path. Effective IP telephony signaling protocols, such as the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and the H 323 protocol are needed to establish IP-based telephony sessions. However, IP telephony is just one service example of IP-based communication. IP-based multimedia sessions are expected to become popular and offer a wider range of communication capabilities than pure telephony. In order to conjoin the advances of the future wireless technologies with the potential of IP-based multimedia communication, the next step would be to obtain ubiquitous communication capabilities. According to this vision, people must be able to communicate also when no support from an infrastructured network is available, needed or desired. In order to achieve ubiquitous communication, end devices must integrate all the capabilities necessary for IP-based distributed and decentralized communication. Such capabilities are currently missing. For example, it is not possible to utilize native IP telephony signaling protocols in a totally decentralized way. This dissertation presents a solution for deploying the SIP protocol in a decentralized fashion without support of infrastructure servers. The proposed solution is mainly designed to fit the needs of decentralized mobile environments, and can be applied to small scale ad-hoc networks or also bigger networks with hundreds of nodes. A framework allowing discovery of SIP users in ad-hoc networks and the establishment of SIP sessions among them, in a fully distributed and secure way, is described and evaluated. Security support allows ad-hoc users to authenticate the sender of a message, and to verify the integrity of a received message. The distributed session management framework has been extended in order to achieve interoperability with the Internet, and the native Internet applications. With limited extensions to the SIP protocol, we have designed and experimentally validated a SIP gateway allowing SIP signaling between ad-hoc networks with private addressing space and native SIP applications in the Internet. The design is completed by an application level relay that permits instant messaging sessions to be established in heterogeneous environments. The resulting framework constitutes a flexible and effective approach for the pervasive deployment of real time applications.

Gap acceptance behavior of mobile phone distracted drivers at roundabouts

While mobile phones have become ubiquitous in modern society, the use of mobile phones while driving is increasing at an alarming rate despite the associated crash risks. A significant safety concern is that driving while distracted by a mobile phone is more prevalent among young drivers, a less experienced driving cohort with elevated crash risk. The objective of this study was to examine the gap acceptance behavior of distracted young drivers at roundabouts. The CARRS-Q Advanced Driving Simulator was used to test participants on a simulated gap acceptance scenario at roundabouts. Conflicting traffic from the right approach of a four-legged roundabout were programmed to have a series of vehicles having the gaps between them proportionately increased from two to six seconds. Thirty-two licensed young drivers drove the simulator under three phone conditions: baseline (no phone conversation), hands-free and handheld phone conversations. Results show that distracted drivers started responding to the gap acceptance scenario at a distance closer to the roundabout and approached the roundabout at slower speeds. They also decelerated at faster rates to reduce their speeds prior to gap acceptance compared to non-distracted drivers. Although accepted gap sizes were not significantly different across phone conditions, differences in the safety margins at various gap sizes—measured by Post Encroachment Time (PET) between the driven vehicle and the conflicting vehicle—were statistically significant across phone conditions. PETs for distracted drivers were smaller across different gap sizes, suggesting a lower safety margin taken by distracted drivers compared to non-distracted drivers. The results aid in understanding how cognitive distraction resulting from mobile phone conversations while driving influences driving behavior during gap acceptance at roundabouts.

A Combinatorial Construct for Keyless Message Dispersal (Work in Progress)

We propose a keyless and lightweight message transformation scheme based on the combinatorial design theory for the confidentiality of a message transmitted in multiple parts through a network with multiple independent paths, or for data stored in multiple parts by a set of independent storage services such as the cloud providers. Our combinatorial scheme disperses a message into v output parts so that (k-1) or less parts do not reveal any information about any message part, and the message can only be recovered by the party who possesses all v output parts. Combinatorial scheme generates an xor transformation structure to disperse the message into v output parts. Inversion is done by applying the same xor transformation structure on output parts. The structure is generated using generalized quadrangles from design theory which represents symmetric point and line incidence relations in a projective plane. We randomize our solution by adding a random salt value and dispersing it together with the message. We show that a passive adversary with capability of accessing (k-1) communication links or storage services has no advantage so that the scheme is indistinguishable under adaptive chosen ciphertext attack (IND-CCA2).

Three-User Cognitive Channels with Cumulative Message Sharing: An Achievable Rate Region

In this paper, an achievable rate region for the three-user discrete memoryless interference channel with asymmetric transmitter cooperation is derived. The three-user channel facilitates different ways of message sharing between the transmitters. We introduce a manner of noncausal (genie aided) unidirectional message-sharing, which we term cumulative message sharing. We consider receivers with predetermined decoding capabilities, and define a cognitive interference channel. We then derive an achievable rate region for this channel by employing a coding scheme which is a combination of superposition and Gel'fand-Pinsker coding techniques.

Editor's message: the sunk cost fallacy of deep drilling

At the beginning of 2008, I visited a watershed, located in Karkinatam village in the state of Karnataka, South India, where crops are intensively irrigated using groundwater. The water table had been depleted from a depth of 5 to 50 m in a large part of the area. Presently, 42% of a total of 158 water wells in the watershed are dry. Speaking with the farmers, I have been amazed to learn that they were drilling down to 500 m to tap water. This case is, of course, not isolated.

Deep Packet Inspection Using Message Passing Networks

We propose a solution based on message passing bipartite networks, for deep packet inspection, which addresses both speed and memory issues, which are limiting factors in current solutions. We report on a preliminary implementation and propose a parallel architecture.

A Story about a Message that was a Story: Message Form and its Implications to Knowledge Flow

Knowledge Flow, my dear friend! I would like to introduce you to a close relative of yours: Organizational Communication. You might want to take a moment to hear what your newfound kin has to say. As bright as you are dear Flow, you're missing a piece of the puzzle - for one cannot study any aspect of an organization relating to communication without acknowledging the message. Without a message, communication does not exist. Organizational Communication has always appreciated this. Perhaps the time has come for you to join rank and do so too? The main point of this work is to prove that the form of a message considerably affects communication, interpretation - and knowledge flow. As stories are at the heart of this thesis; and entertaining, reader-friendly communication its main argument, the entire manuscript is written in story form and is intentionally breaking academic writing tradition as far as writing style goes. Each chapter reads as a story of sorts and put together they create a grand narrative of my journey as a PhD student, the research I have conducted and the outcomes of this work. Thus if a reader hopes to make any sense of this title, she must read it in the same way one would read a novel, from beginning to end. This is a thesis with three aspirations. First, it sets out to prove that knowledge flow cannot be studied without a message. Second, it moves on to give the reader a once-over of a much used message form: storytelling. After these two goals are tackled the path is clear to research if message form indeed is as essential as claimed. I do so through both a qualitative and a quantitative study. The former acted as both a stepping stone into the research area and as an inspirational pilot, from which the research design for the larger quantitative study was drawn. Together, these two studies answered my research question - and allowed me to fulfill the third, final and foremost aspiration of this study - bridging the gap between two separate fields of knowledge management: knowledge flow and storytelling.

Stability of scheduled message communication over degraded broadcast channels

We develop a multi-class discrete-time processor-sharing queueing model for scheduled message communication over a discrete memoryless degraded broadcast channel. The framework we consider here models both the random message arrivals and the subsequent reliable communication by suitably combining techniques from queueing theory and information theory. Requests for message transmissions are assumed to arrive according to i.i.d. arrival processes. Then, (i) we derive an outer bound to the stability region of message arrival rate vectors achievable by the class of stationary scheduling policies, (ii) we show for any message arrival rate vector that satisfies the outer bound, that there exists a stationary "state-independent" policy that results in a stable system for the corresponding message arrival processes, and (iii) under an asymptotic regime, we show that the stability region of information arrival rate vectors is the information-theoretic capacity region of a degraded broadcast channel.