Evaluation of channel congestion in dedicated short-range communication networks

This thesis presents a novel idea for an adaptive prioritized cross-layer design (APCLD) control algorithm to achieve comprehensive channel congestion control for vehicular safety communication based on DSRC technology. An appropriate evaluation metric and two control parameters have been established. Simulation studies have evaluated the DSRC network performance in different traffic scenario and under different channel conditions. The APCLD algorithm is derived from the results of the simulation analysis.

Evaluation of knowledge management performance: An organic approach

Knowledge management (KM) strategy is the planned or actual coordination of a firm's major goals and learning in time; this coordination continually co-aligns the firm's knowledge-based resources with the environment. Based on the organic perspective of strategy, a KM performance evaluation approach should be able to 1) review the knowledge governance mechanisms and learning routines that underpin the KM strategy, as well as the performance outcomes driven by the strategy, and 2) predict the evolution of performance drivers and outcomes into the future to facilitate strategic planning. This study combined a survey study and a system dynamics (SD) simulation to demonstrate the transformation from a mechanistic to an organic perspective on KM strategy and performance evaluation. The survey study was conducted based on a sample of 143 construction contractors and used structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques to develop a KM performance index for reviewing the key elements that underpin KM strategy. The SD simulation predicted the development of KM strategy configurations and the evolution of KM performance over time. The organic KM performance evaluation approach demonstrated by this study has significant potential to improve the alignment of KM strategy within an increasingly dynamic business environment.

Improved fabrication of melt electrospun tissue engineering scaffolds using direct writing and advanced electric field control

Direct writing melt electrospinning is an additive manufacturing technique capable of the layer-by-layer fabrication of highly ordered 3d tissue engineering scaffolds from micron-diameter fibres. The utility of these scaffolds, however, is limited by the maximum achievable height of controlled fibre deposition, beyond which the structure becomes increasingly disordered. A source of this disorder is charge build-up on the deposited polymer producing unwanted coulombic forces. In this study we introduce a novel melt electrospinning platform with dual voltage power supplies to reduce undesirable charge effects and improve fibre deposition control. We produced and characterised several 90° cross-hatched fibre scaffolds using a range of needle/collector plate voltages. Fibre thickness was found to be sensitive only to overall potential and invariant to specific tip/collector voltage. We also produced ordered scaffolds up to 200 layers thick (fibre spacing 1 mm, diameter 40 μm) and characterised structure in terms of three distinct zones; ordered, semi-ordered and disordered. Our in vitro analysis indicates successful cell attachment and distribution throughout the scaffolds, with little evidence of cell death after seven days. This study demonstrates the importance of electrostatic control for reducing destabilising polymer charge effects and enabling the fabrication of morphologically suitable scaffolds for tissue engineering.

Reframe QUT's evaluation framework : a case study of planning, policy and positioning leading to educational best practice

Every university in Australia has a set of policies that guide the institution in its educational practices, however, the policies are often developed in isolation to each other. Now imagine a space where policies are evidence-based, refined annually, cohesively interrelated, and meet stakeholders’ needs. Is this happenstance or the result of good planning? Culturally, Queensland University of Technology (QUT) is a risk-averse institution that takes pride in its financial solvency and is always keen to know “how are we going?” With a twenty-year history of annual reporting that assures the quality of course performance through multiple lines of evidence, QUT’s Learning and Teaching Unit went one step further and strategically aligned a suite of policies that take into consideration the needs of their stakeholders, collaborate with other areas across the institution and use multiple lines of evidence to inform curriculum decision-making. In QUT’s experience, strategic planning can lead to policy that is designed to meet stakeholders’ needs, not manage them; where decision-making is supported by evidence, not rhetoric; where all feedback is incorporated, not ignored; and where policies are cohesively interrelated, not isolated. While many may call this ‘policy nirvana’, QUT has positioned itself to demonstrate good educational practice through Reframe, its evaluation framework. In this case, best practice was achieved through the application of a theory of change and a design-led logic model that allows for transition to other institutions with different cultural specificity. The evaluation approach follows Seldin’s (2003) notion to offer depth and breadth to the evaluation framework along with Berk’s (2005) concept of multiple lines of evidence. In summary, this paper offers university executives, academics, planning and quality staff an opportunity to understand the critical steps that lead to strategic planning and design of evidence-based educational policy that positions a university for best practice in learning and teaching.

Course evidence matrix : a collaborative evaluation using multiple lines of evidence

Welcome to the Evaluation of course matrix. This matrix is designed for highly qualified discipline experts to evaluate their course, major or unit in a systemic manner. The primary purpose of the Evaluation of course matrix is to provide a tool that a group of academic staff at universities can collaboratively review the assessment within a course, major or unit annually. The annual review will result in you being ready for an external curricula review at any point in time. This tool is designed for use in a workshop format with one, two or more academic staff, and will lead to an action plan for implementation. I hope you find this tool useful in your assessment review.

Analysing reflective text for learning analytics : an approach using anomaly recontextualisation

Reflective writing is an important learning task to help foster reflective practice, but even when assessed it is rarely analysed or critically reviewed due to its subjective and affective nature. We propose a process for capturing subjective and affective analytics based on the identification and recontextualisation of anomalous features within reflective text. We evaluate 2 human supervised trials of the process, and so demonstrate the potential for an automated Anomaly Recontextualisation process for Learning Analytics.

Automated counting of the Northern Pacific Sea Star in the Derwent using shape recognition

A novel shape recognition algorithm was developed to autonomously classify the Northern Pacific Sea Star (Asterias amurenis) from benthic images that were collected by the Starbug AUV during 6km of transects in the Derwent estuary. Despite the effects of scattering, attenuation, soft focus and motion blur within the underwater images, an optimal joint classification rate of 77.5% and misclassification rate of 13.5% was achieved. The performance of algorithm was largely attributed to its ability to recognise locally deformed sea star shapes that were created during the segmentation of the distorted images.

Automated sensory data alignment for environmental and epidermal change monitoring

In this paper we present research adapting a state of the art condition-invariant robotic place recognition algorithm to the role of automated inter- and intra-image alignment of sensor observations of environmental and skin change over time. The approach involves inverting the typical criteria placed upon navigation algorithms in robotics; we exploit rather than attempt to fix the limited camera viewpoint invariance of such algorithms, showing that approximate viewpoint repetition is realistic in a wide range of environments and medical applications. We demonstrate the algorithms automatically aligning challenging visual data from a range of real-world applications: ecological monitoring of environmental change, aerial observation of natural disasters including flooding, tsunamis and bushfires and tracking wound recovery and sun damage over time and present a prototype active guidance system for enforcing viewpoint repetition. We hope to provide an interesting case study for how traditional research criteria in robotics can be inverted to provide useful outcomes in applied situations.

Examination of the properties of IMRT and VMAT beams and evaluation against pre-treatment quality assurance results

This study aimed to provide a detailed evaluation and comparison of a range of modulated beam evaluation metrics, in terms of their correlation with QA testing results and their variation between treatment sites, for a large number of treatments. Ten metrics including the modulation index (MI), fluence map complexity (FMC), modulation complexity score (MCS), mean aperture displacement (MAD) and small aperture score (SAS) were evaluated for 546 beams from 122 IMRT and VMAT treatment plans targeting the anus, rectum, endometrium, brain, head and neck and prostate. The calculated sets of metrics were evaluated in terms of their relationships to each other and their correlation with the results of electronic portal imaging based quality assurance (QA) evaluations of the treatment beams. Evaluation of the MI, MAD and SAS suggested that beams used in treatments of the anus, rectum, head and neck were more complex than the prostate and brain treatment beams. Seven of the ten beam complexity metrics were found to be strongly correlated with the results from QA testing of the IMRT beams (p < 0.00008). For example, Values of SAS (with MLC apertures narrower than 10 mm defined as “small”) less than 0.2 also identified QA passing IMRT beams with 100% specificity. However, few of the metrics are correlated with the results from QA testing of the VMAT beams, whether they were evaluated as whole 360◦ arcs or as 60◦ sub-arcs. Select evaluation of beam complexity metrics (at least MI, MCS and SAS) is therefore recommended, as an intermediate step in the IMRT QA chain. Such evaluation may also be useful as a means of periodically reviewing VMAT planning or optimiser performance.

Writing Ourselves : pastpresentfuture

If resilience is a hallmark of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s survival beyond centuries of colonisation and oppression, brandishing the pen – or any its modern equivalents– can be understood as key resilience and survival strategy. Writing ourselves into contemporary and future existence is a complex act of cultural translation; it involves a speaking to others through a technology from a foreign culture. Subsequently, Indigenous writing is born into complexity.

Melt electrospinning writing

This thesis has developed an innovative additive manufacturing technology platform, which combines melt electrospinning with direct writing, allowing the fabrication of a new class of highly-ordered ultrafine fibrous materials. Bioresorbable polymer fibres were printed using a variety of designs, with filament resolutions not demonstrated by established melt-extrusion based direct writing processes, to form novel medical devices. This platform was applied to tissue engineering scaffold design, where structures were prepared in a variety of shapes and forms, characterised and then seeded with cells to investigate their biocompatibility, cell-seeding and proliferation behaviour as well as the ability to guide cell growth and differentiation.

A stakeholder process evaluation of a social marketing walking intervention targeting children

One quarter of Australian children are overweight or obese (ABS, 2010), putting them at increased risk of physical and psychological health problems (Reilly et al., 2003). Overweight and obesity in childhood tends to persist into adulthood and is associated with premature death and morbidity (Reilly & Kelly, 2011). Increases in Australian children’s weight have coincided with declines in active transportation, such as walking, to school (Salmon et al., 2005). To address this problem, the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation (VicHealth), which is an independent statutory authority which advises government and contributes to promoting good health in Victoria (VicHealth, 2014), developed the Walk to School program. Walk to School aims to encourage primary school children in Victoria to walk to and from school more often. Walking to school is a low cost and effective means of reducing excess weight (Rosenberg et al., 2006) that can be easily integrated into daily routine (Brophy et al., 2011). The purpose of this paper is to present the results of the stakeholder process evaluation of Walk to School 2013, which forms part of a broader outcome evaluation that is currently in field. Although there is an emphasis on outcome evaluation of programs, process evaluation can be equally important in determining program success (Saunders et al., 2005). Further, process evaluation to assess program delivery and utilization is explicitly recommended by two social marketing frameworks (see Lefebvre et al., 1988; Walsh et al., 1993).

Illuminative evaluation as a method applied to Australian Government policy borrowing and implementation in higher education

Any government deciding to invoke widespread change in its higher education sector through implementation of new policies impacts on every institution and all staff and students, often in both the time taken up and the heightened emotions caused. The central phenomenon that this study addresses is the process and consequences of policy changes in higher education in Australia. The aim of this article is to record the research design through the perspective (evaluation research), theoretical framework (program evaluation) and methods (content analysis, descriptive statistical analysis and bibliometric analysis) applied to the investigation of the 2003 federal government higher education reform package. This approach allows both the intended and unintended consequences arising from the policy implementation of three national initiatives focused on learning and teaching in higher education in Australia to surface. As a result, this program evaluation, also known in some disciplines as policy implementation analysis, will demonstrate the applicability of illuminative evaluation as a methodology and reinforce how program evaluation will assist and advise future government reform and policy implementation, and will serve as a legacy for future evaluative research.Any government deciding to invoke widespread change in its higher education sector through implementation of new policies impacts on every institution and all staff and students, often in both the time taken up and the heightened emotions caused. The central phenomenon that this study addresses is the process and consequences of policy changes in higher education in Australia. The aim of this article is to record the research design through the perspective (evaluation research), theoretical framework (program evaluation) and methods (content analysis, descriptive statistical analysis and bibliometric analysis) applied to the investigation of the 2003 federal government higher education reform package. This approach allows both the intended and unintended consequences arising from the policy implementation of three national initiatives focused on learning and teaching in higher education in Australia to surface. As a result, this program evaluation, also known in some disciplines as policy implementation analysis, will demonstrate the applicability of illuminative evaluation as a methodology and reinforce how program evaluation will assist and advise future government reform and policy implementation, and will serve as a legacy for future evaluative research.

Rules and mechanics

So far in this book, we have seen a large number of methods for generating content for existing games. So, if you have a game already, you could now generate many things for it: maps, levels, terrain, vegetation, weapons, dungeons, racing tracks. But what if you don’t already have a game, and want to generate the game itself? What would you generate, and how? At the heart of any game are its rules. This chapter will discuss representations for game rules of different kinds, along with methods to generate them, and evaluation functions and constraints that help us judge complete games rather than just isolated content artefacts. Our main focus here will be on methods for generating interesting, fun, and/or balanced game rules. However, an important perspective that will permeate the chapter is that game rule encodings and evaluation functions can encode game design expertise and style, and thus help us understand game design. By formalising aspects of the game rules, we define a space of possible rules more precisely than could be done through writing about rules in qualitative terms; and by choosing which aspects of the rules to formalise, we define what aspects of the game are interesting to explore and introduce variation in. In this way, each game generator can be thought of an executable micro-theory of game design, though often a simplified, and sometimes even a caricatured one

A model-framed evaluation of elephant effects on tree and fire dynamics in African savannas

There is a concern that high densities of elephants in southern Africa could lead to the overall reduction of other forms of biodiversity. We present a grid-based model of elephant-savanna dynamics, which differs from previous elephant-vegetation models by accounting for woody plant demographics, tree-grass interactions, stochastic environmental variables (fire and rainfall), and spatial contagion of fire and tree recruitment. The model projects changes in height structure and spatial pattern of trees over periods of centuries. The vegetation component of the model produces long-term tree-grass coexistence, and the emergent fire frequencies match those reported for southern African savannas. Including elephants in the savanna model had the expected effect of reducing woody plant cover, mainly via increased adult tree mortality, although at an elephant density of 1.0 elephant/km2, woody plants still persisted for over a century. We tested three different scenarios in addition to our default assumptions. (1) Reducing mortality of adult trees after elephant use, mimicking a more browsing-tolerant tree species, mitigated the detrimental effect of elephants on the woody population. (2) Coupling germination success (increased seedling recruitment) to elephant browsing further increased tree persistence, and (3) a faster growing woody component allowed some woody plant persistence for at least a century at a density of 3 elephants/km2. Quantitative models of the kind presented here provide a valuable tool for exploring the consequences of management decisions involving the manipulation of elephant population densities. © 2005 by the Ecological Society of America.