Aligning school reform and teacher education reform in the middle years : an Australian case study

This paper discusses the development of a new Bachelor of Education (Middle Years of Schooling) at The University of Queensland, Australia. The middle years of schooling have increasingly been the focus of education reform initiatives in Australia, but this has not been accompanied by significant increases in the number of teacher education institutions offering specialised middle schooling-level teacher preparation programmes. Considering the rapidly changing social and economic context and the emergent state of middle schooling in Australia, the programme represented a conceptual and practical opportunity and challenge for The University of Queensland team. Working collaboratively, the team sought to design a teacher education preservice programme that was both responsive and generative: that is, responsive to local school contexts and to current education research and reform at national and international levels; and generative of cutting-edge theories and practices associated with middle schooling, teachers' work, and teacher education. This paper focuses on one component of the Middle Years of Schooling Teacher Education programme at The University of Queensland; namely, the practicum. We first present the underlying principles of the practicum programme and then examine "dilemmas" that emerged early in the practicum. These issues and tensions were associated with the ideals of "middle years" philosophy and the pragmatics of school reform associated with that approach. Within this context, we explore what it means to be both responsive and generative, and describe how we as teacher educators negotiated the extremes these terms implied.

Investigation into Travel of Transit Oriented Development Residents’ of Kelvin Grove Urban Village

Travel surveys were conducted for collecting data related to residents’ travel at Kelvin Grove Urban Village (KGUV). Currently, KGUV has residents living in the affordable apartments, apartments, townhouses and student accommodation. As a part of data collection process, travel surveys were undertaken for residents living in apartments, affordable apartments and student accommodation. This document contains the questionnaire form used to collect the demographic and travel data related to residents at KGUV. A mail back survey technique was used to collect data for residents living in affordable apartment and apartments, and an intercept surveys was conducted for residents living in student accommodation.

Explaining International new venture internationalisation: an innovation adoption model

The increasing prevalence of International New Ventures (INVs) during the past twenty years has been highlighted by numerous studies (Knight and Cavusgil, 1996, Moen, 2002). International New Ventures are firms, typically small to medium enterprises, that internationalise within six years of inception (Oviatt and McDougall, 1997). To date there has been no general consensus within the literature on a theoretical framework of internationalisation to explain the internationalisation process of INVs (Madsen and Servais, 1997). However, some researchers have suggested that the innovation diffusion model may provide a suitable theoretical framework (Chetty & Hamilton, 1996, Fan & Phan, 2007).The proposed model was based on the existing and well-established innovation diffusion theories drawn from consumer behaviour and internationalisation literature to explain the internationalisation process of INVs (Lim, Sharkey, and Kim, 1991, Reid, 1981, Robertson, 1971, Rogers, 1962, Wickramasekera and Oczkowski, 2006). The results of this analysis indicated that the synthesied model of export adoption was effective in explaining the internationalisation process of INVs within the Queensland Food and Beverage Industry. Significantly the results of the analysis also indicated that features of the original I-models developed in the consumer behaviour literature, that had limited examination within the internationalisation literature were confirmed. This includes the ability of firms, or specifically decision-makers, to skip stages based om previous experience.

Designing participation in agile ridesharing with mobile social software

Growing participation is a key challenge for the viability of sustainability initiatives, many of which require enactment at a local community level in order to be effective. This paper undertakes a review of technology assisted carpooling in order to understand the challenge of designing participation and consider how mobile social software and interface design can be brought to bear. It was found that while persuasive technology and social networking approaches have roles to play, critical factors in the design of carpooling are convenience, ease of use and fit with contingent circumstances, all of which require a use-centred approach to designing a technological system and building participation. Moreover, the reach of technology platform-based global approaches may be limited if they do not cater to local needs. An approach that focuses on iteratively designing technology to support and grow mobile social ridesharing networks in particular locales is proposed. The paper contributes an understanding of HCI approaches in the context of other designing participation approaches.

Effectiveness of current treatment approaches for benzodiazepine discontinuation : a meta-analysis.

Aims: To assess the effectiveness of current treatment approaches to assist benzodiazepine discontinuation. Methods: A systematic review of approaches to benzodiazepine discontinuation in general practice and out-patient settings was undertaken. Routine care was compared with three treatment approaches: brief interventions, gradual dose reduction (GDR) and psychological interventions. GDR was compared with GDR plus psychological interventions or substitutive pharmacotherapies. Results: Inclusion criteria were met by 24 studies, and a further eight were identified by future search. GDR [odds ratio (OR) = 5.96, confidence interval (CI) = 2.08–17.11] and brief interventions (OR = 4.37, CI = 2.28–8.40) provided superior cessation rates at post-treatment to routine care. Psychological treatment plus GDR were superior to both routine care (OR = 3.38, CI = 1.86–6.12) and GDR alone (OR = 1.82, CI = 1.25–2.67). However, substitutive pharmacotherapies did not add to the impact of GDR (OR = 1.30, CI = 0.97– 1.73), and abrupt substitution of benzodiazepines by other pharmacotherapy was less effective than GDR alone (OR = 0.30, CI = 0.14–0.64). Few studies on any technique had significantly greater benzodiazepine discontinuation than controls at follow-up. Conclusions: Providing an intervention is more effective than routine care. Psychological interventions may improve discontinuation above GDR alone. While some substitutive pharmacotherapies may have promise, current evidence is insufficient to support their use.

Improved GMM-based speaker verification using SVM-driven impostor dataset selection

The problem of impostor dataset selection for GMM-based speaker verification is addressed through the recently proposed data-driven background dataset refinement technique. The SVM-based refinement technique selects from a candidate impostor dataset those examples that are most frequently selected as support vectors when training a set of SVMs on a development corpus. This study demonstrates the versatility of dataset refinement in the task of selecting suitable impostor datasets for use in GMM-based speaker verification. The use of refined Z- and T-norm datasets provided performance gains of 15% in EER in the NIST 2006 SRE over the use of heuristically selected datasets. The refined datasets were shown to generalise well to the unseen data of the NIST 2008 SRE.

Data-driven impostor selection for T-norm score normalisation and the background dataset in SVM-based speaker verification

A data-driven background dataset refinement technique was recently proposed for SVM based speaker verification. This method selects a refined SVM background dataset from a set of candidate impostor examples after individually ranking examples by their relevance. This paper extends this technique to the refinement of the T-norm dataset for SVM-based speaker verification. The independent refinement of the background and T-norm datasets provides a means of investigating the sensitivity of SVM-based speaker verification performance to the selection of each of these datasets. Using refined datasets provided improvements of 13% in min. DCF and 9% in EER over the full set of impostor examples on the 2006 SRE corpus with the majority of these gains due to refinement of the T-norm dataset. Similar trends were observed for the unseen data of the NIST 2008 SRE.

Scatter difference NAP for SVM speaker recognition

This paper presents Scatter Difference Nuisance Attribute Projection (SD-NAP) as an enhancement to NAP for SVM-based speaker verification. While standard NAP may inadvertently remove desirable speaker variability, SD-NAP explicitly de-emphasises this variability by incorporating a weighted version of the between-class scatter into the NAP optimisation criterion. Experimental evaluation of SD-NAP with a variety of SVM systems on the 2006 and 2008 NIST SRE corpora demonstrate that SD-NAP provides improved verification performance over standard NAP in most cases, particularly at the EER operating point.

A decision support system for sustainable urban development : the integrated land use and transportation indexing model

The broad definition of sustainable development at the early stage of its introduction has caused confusion and hesitation among local authorities and planning professionals. The main difficulties are experience in employing loosely-defined principles of sustainable development in setting policies and goals. The question of how this theory/rhetoric-practice gap could be filled will be the theme of this study. One of the widely employed sustainability accounting approaches by governmental organisations, triple bottom line, and applicability of this approach to sustainable urban development policies will be examined. When incorporating triple bottom line considerations with the environmental impact assessment techniques, the framework of GIS-based decision support system that helps decision-makers in selecting policy option according to the economic, environmental and social impacts will be introduced. In order to embrace sustainable urban development policy considerations, the relationship between urban form, travel pattern and socio-economic attributes should be clarified. This clarification associated with other input decision support systems will picture the holistic state of the urban settings in terms of sustainability. In this study, grid-based indexing methodology will be employed to visualise the degree of compatibility of selected scenarios with the designated sustainable urban future. In addition, this tool will provide valuable knowledge about the spatial dimension of the sustainable development. It will also give fine details about the possible impacts of urban development proposals by employing disaggregated spatial data analysis (e.g. land-use, transportation, urban services, population density, pollution, etc.). The visualisation capacity of this tool will help decision makers and other stakeholders compare and select alternative of future urban developments.

Transportation disadvantage determination framework : space-time organisation measure in determining transportation disadvantage

Transportation disadvantage has been recognised to be the key source of social exclusion. Therefore an appropriate process is required to investigate and seek to resolve this problem. Currently, determination of Transportation Disadvantage is postulate based on income, poverty and mobility level. Transportation disadvantage may best regard be based on accessibility perspectives as they represent inability of the individual to access desired activities. This paper attempts to justify a process in determining transportation disadvantage by incorporating accessibility and social transporation conflict as the essence of a framework. The framework embeds space time organisation within the dimension of accessibility to identify a rigorous definition of transportation disadvantage. In developing the framework, the definition, dimension, component and measure of accessibility were scrutinised. The findings suggest the definition and dimension are the significant approach of research to evaluate travel experience of the disadvantaged. Concurrently, location accessibility measures will be incorprated to strenghten the determination of accessibility level. Literature review in social exclusion and mobility-related exclusion identified the dimension and source of transportation disadvantage. It was revealed that the appropriate approach to justify trasnportation disadvantaged is to incorporate space-time organisation within the studied components. The suggested framework is an inter-related process consisting of component of accessibility; individual, networking (transport system) and activities (destination). The integration and correlation among the components shall determine the level of transportation disadvantage. Prior findings are used to retrieve the spatial distribution of transportation disadvantaged and appropriate policies are developed to resolve the problems.

Metabolic syndrome and serum carotenoids : findings of a cross-sectional study in Queensland, Australia

Several components of the metabolic syndrome, particularly diabetes and cardiovascular disease, are known to be oxidative stress-related conditions and there is research to suggest that antioxidant nutrients may play a protective role in these conditions. Carotenoids are compounds derived primarily from plants and several have been shown to be potent antioxidant nutrients. The aim of this study was to examine the associations between metabolic syndrome status and major serum carotenoids in adult Australians. Data on the presence of the metabolic syndrome, based on International Diabetes Federation 2005 criteria, were collected from 1523 adults aged 25 years and over in six randomly selected urban centers in Queensland, Australia, using a cross-sectional study design. Weight, height, BMI, waist circumference, blood pressure, fasting and 2-hour blood glucose and lipids were determined, as well as five serum carotenoids. Mean serum alpha-carotene, beta-carotene and the sum of the five carotenoid concentrations were significantly lower (p<0.05) in persons with the metabolic syndrome (after adjusting for age, sex, education, BMI status, alcohol intake, smoking, physical activity status and vitamin/mineral use) than persons without the syndrome. Alpha, beta and total carotenoids also decreased significantly (p<0.05) with increased number of components of the metabolic syndrome, after adjusting for these confounders. These differences were significant among former smokers and non-smokers, but not in current smokers. Low concentrations of serum alpha-carotene, beta-carotene and the sum of five carotenoids appear to be associated with metabolic syndrome status. Additional research, particularly longitudinal studies, may help to determine if these associations are causally related to the metabolic syndrome, or are a result of the pathologies of the syndrome.