Augmenting mobile computing with video game elements to support, motivate and engage young people in educational, real-world events

Video games have shown great potential as tools that both engage and motivate players to achieve tasks and build communities in fantasy worlds. We propose that the application of game elements to real world activities can aid in delivering contextual information in interesting ways and help young people to engage in everyday events. Our research will explore how we can unite utility and fun to enhance information delivery, encourage participation, build communities and engage users with utilitarian events situated in the real world. This research aims to identify key game elements that work effectively to engage young digital natives, and provide guidelines to influence the design of interactions and interfaces for event applications in the future. This research will primarily contribute to areas of user experience and pervasive gaming.

Orientation passport : using gamification to engage university students

Adding game elements to an application to motivate use and enhance the user experience is a growing trend known as gamification. This study explores the use of game achievements when applied to a mobile application designed to help new students at university. This paper describes the foundations of a design framework used to integrate game elements to Orientation Passport, a personalised orientation event application for smart phones. Orientation Passport utilises game achievements to present orientation information in an engaging way and to encourage use of the application. The system is explained in terms of the design framework, and the findings of a pilot study involving 26 new students are presented. This study contributes the foundations of a design framework for general gamified achievement design. It also suggests that added game elements can be enjoyable but can potentially encourage undesirable use by some, and aren't as enjoyable if not enforced properly by the technology. Consideration is also needed when enforcing stricter game rules as usability can be affected.

Abduction : the writing of a historical novel

This is a practice-led project consisting of a historical novel Abduction and related exegesis. The novel is a third person intimate narrative set in the mid-nineteenth century and is based on actual events and persons caught up in, or furthering, the mass dispossession of small farmers in Scotland known as the ‘Clearances’. The narrative focuses on the situation in the Outer Hebrides and northern Scotland. It is based on documented facts leading up to a controversial trial in 1850 that arose because a twenty year old woman of the period (the central protagonist, Jess Mackenzie) eloped with a young farmer to escape her parent’s pressure to marry a rival suitor, himself a powerful lawyer and ‘factor’ at the centre of many of the Clearances. The young woman’s independent ideas were ahead of her time, and the decisions she made under great pressure were crucial in some dramatic events that unfolded in Scotland and later in the colony of Victoria, to which she and her new husband emigrated soon after the trial. The exegesis is composed of two unequal parts. It briefly considers the development of the literary historical fiction genre in the nineteenth century with Walter Scott in particular, a genre found useful in representing women’s issues of the Victorian era by Victorian and contemporary authors. The exegesis also briefly considers the appropriateness of the fiction genre (as opposed to creative nonfiction) in creating the lived experience in a fact-based work. The major part of the exegesis is a detailed, reflective analysis of the problem-solving process involved in writing the novel, structured by reference to Kate Grenville’s Searching for the Secret River – a work of metawriting that explains her creative process in researching and writing historical fiction based on fact.

Exploring the opportunities and challenges of using mobile sensing for gamification and achievements

Gamified services delivered on smart phones, such as Foursquare, are able to utilise the sensors on the phone to capture user contexts as a means of triggering game elements. This paper identifies and discusses opportunities and challenges that exist when using mobile sensors as input for game elements. We present initial findings from a field study of a gamified mobile application made to support the university orientation event for new students using game achievements. The study showed that overall the use of context was well received by participants when compared to game elements that required no context to complete. It was also found that using context could help validate that an activity was completed however there were still technical challenges when using sensors that led to exploits in the game elements, or cheating.

Exploring Indigenous social attitudes and priorities in Australia

Given significant government attention to, and expenditure on, Indigenous equity in Australia, this article addresses a core problem: the lack of a sound understanding of Indigenous social attitudes and priorities. An account of cultural theory raises the likelihood of difference in outlook between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, including those making and implementing policy. Yet, years of scholarly research and official statistical collections have overlooked potentially critical aspects of Indigineity. Suggestions of difference emerge from reference to the 2007 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes (AuSSA). If the attitudes recorded a small sample in this instrument manifest in the Indigenous population at large, policy priorities and directions should be reviewed and possibly revised. Despite inherent methodological difficulties, the article calls for targeted social attitude research among Australia's Indigenous peoples so that future policy can be better oriented and calibrated. The national benefits would outweigh the costs via better directed policy making.

Financial planners and philanthropic planning

This article reports findings from a survey of Canadian financial planners. The focus of the study is learning more about the depth and breadth of philanthropic planning that is included in their advising services to their high-net worth clients. The findings indicate that a minority of financial planners (1) regularly broach the topic of philanthropy in their counseling, (2) believe their clients are interested in philanthropy, and (3) feel sufficiently knowledgeable to assist their clients with philanthropic planning. The implications of these findings and recommendations for improvement are discussed.

Using approximate Bayesian computation to estimate transmission rates of nosocomial pathogens

In this paper, we apply a simulation based approach for estimating transmission rates of nosocomial pathogens. In particular, the objective is to infer the transmission rate between colonised health-care practitioners and uncolonised patients (and vice versa) solely from routinely collected incidence data. The method, using approximate Bayesian computation, is substantially less computer intensive and easier to implement than likelihood-based approaches we refer to here. We find through replacing the likelihood with a comparison of an efficient summary statistic between observed and simulated data that little is lost in the precision of estimated transmission rates. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of incorporating uncertainty in previously fixed parameters on the precision of the estimated transmission rates.

History of critical criminology in Australia

Those working in the critical criminology tradition have been centrally concerned with the social construction, variability and contingency of the criminal label. The concern is no less salient to a consideration of critical criminology itself and any history of critical criminology (in Australia or elsewhere) should aim itself to be critical in this sense. The point applies with equal force to both of the terms ‘critical’ and ‘criminology’. The want of a stable theoretical object has meant that criminology itself needs to be seen not as a distinct discipline but as a composite intellectual and governmental hybrid, a field of studies that overlaps and intersects many others (sociology, law, psychology, history, anthropology, social work, media studies and youth studies to name only a few). In consequence, much of the most powerful work on subjects of criminological inquiry is undertaken by scholars who do not necessarily define themselves as criminologists first and foremost, or at all. For reasons that should later become obvious this is even more pronounced in the Australian context. Although we may appear at times to be claiming such work for criminology, our purpose is to recognize its impact on and in critical criminology in Australia.

Synthesizing and databasing fossil calibrations: divergence dating and beyond

Divergence dating studies, which combine temporal data from the fossil record with branch length data from molecular phylogenetic trees, represent a rapidly expanding approach to understanding the history of life. National Evolutionary Synthesis Center hosted the first Fossil Calibrations Working Group (3–6 March, 2011, Durham, NC, USA), bringing together palaeontologists, molecular evolutionists and bioinformatics experts to present perspectives from disciplines that generate, model and use fossil calibration data. Presentations and discussions focused on channels for interdisciplinary collaboration, best practices for justifying, reporting and using fossil calibrations and roadblocks to synthesis of palaeontological and molecular data. Bioinformatics solutions were proposed, with the primary objective being a new database for vetted fossil calibrations with linkages to existing resources, targeted for a 2012 launch.

Non-combinatorial library screening reveals subsite cooperativity and identifies new high-efficiency substrates for kallikrein-related peptidase 14

An array of substrates link the tryptic serine protease, kallikrein-related peptidase 14 (KLK14), to physiological functions including desquamation and activation of signaling molecules associated with inflammation and cancer. Recognition of protease cleavage sequences is driven by complementarity between exposed substrate motifs and the physicochemical signature of an enzyme's active site cleft. However, conventional substrate screening methods have generated conflicting subsite profiles for KLK14. This study utilizes a recently developed screening technique, the sparse matrix library, to identify five novel high-efficiency sequences for KLK14. The optimal sequence, YASR, was cleaved with higher efficiency (k(cat)/K(m)=3.81 ± 0.4 × 10(6) M(-1) s(-1)) than favored substrates from positional scanning and phage display by 2- and 10-fold, respectively. Binding site cooperativity was prominent among preferred sequences, which enabled optimal interaction at all subsites as indicated by predictive modeling of KLK14/substrate complexes. These simulations constitute the first molecular dynamics analysis of KLK14 and offer a structural rationale for the divergent subsite preferences evident between KLK14 and closely related KLKs, KLK4 and KLK5. Collectively, these findings highlight the importance of binding site cooperativity in protease substrate recognition, which has implications for discovery of optimal substrates and engineering highly effective protease inhibitors.