Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Very High Data Rate Mb-Ofdm Uwb Systems With Transmit Diversity Techniques, Ngoc Phuc Le, Le Chung Tran, Farzad Safaei

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

In this paper, the application of space time block codes in a very high data rate multiband-OFDM ultra-wideband (VHDR MB-OFDM UWB) system, where the Modified Dual Carrier Modulation (MDCM) scheme and Low Density Parity Check codes are deployed, is investigated. First, we present a new table-based mapping approach and derive soft-demapping expressions for the MDCM scheme. We then propose a space-time-frequency coded VHDR MB-OFDM UWB system by incorporating space time block codes into the conventional VHDR MB-OFDM UWB system. Numerical simulations of the system supporting a data rate of 1Gbps over the IEEE 802.15.3a channel models are implemented. The simulation …

Reducing Unwarranted Variation In Healthcare Service Delivery Systems: Key Issues, Research Challenges And Potential Solutions, Nagesh Shukla, Senevi Kiridena, Nishikant Mishra

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

There is a growing need worldwide to increase the quality and productivity of healthcare services delivery. To this end, analysing and reducing unwarranted variations in healthcare has attracted much attention in recent times. However, current modelling and simulation approaches to reduce unwarranted variations suffer from numerous limitations. Consequently, service improvement efforts have often failed to deliver expected results. This paper discusses the key issues associated with reducing unwarranted variations in hospital service delivery systems, and proposes a research framework that aims at overcoming these issues. In doing so, it highlights the need for: accurately and efficiently modelling complex service delivery …

A New Way Of Identifying Biomarkers In Biomedical Basic-Research Studies, Alexander Yassouridis, Tonia Ludwig, Axel Steiger, Friedrich Leisch

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

A simple, nonparametric and distribution free method was developed for quick identification of the most meaningful biomarkers among a number of candidates in complex biological phenomena, especially in relatively small samples. This method is independent of rigid model forms or other link functions. It may be applied both to metric and non-metric data as well as to independent or matched parallel samples. With this method identification of the most relevant biomarkers is not based on inferential methods; therefore, its application does not require corrections of the level of significance, even in cases of thousands of variables. Hence, the introduced method …

Informing Destination Recommender Systems Design And Evaluation Through Quantitative Research, Ulrike Gretzel, Yeong-Hyeon Hwang, Daniel Fesenmaier

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Purpose - Destination recommender systems need to become truly human-centric in their design and functionality. This requires a profound understanding of human interactions with technology as well as human behavior related to information search and decision-making in the context of travel and tourism. This paper seeks to review relevant theories that can support the development and evaluation of destination recommender systems and to discuss how quantitative research can inform such theory building and testing. Design/methodology/approach - Based on a review of information search and decision-making literatures, a framework for the development of destination recommender systems is proposed and the implications …

Tell Me Who You Think You Are And I Tell You How You Travel : Exploring The Viability Of Market Segmentation By Means Of Travelers' Stated Personality: Insights From A Mature Market (Switzerland), Christian Laesser, Anita Zehrer

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

People travel to different destinations for different reasons. In this study, we investigate the viability of market segmentation by personal traits (based on and exemplified by Jungian's MBTI variables) of travelers from Switzerland, by performing a data-driven a posteriori segmentation by means of k-means clustering. To identify the segmentation power of personal traits, this analysis is complemented with a multiple discriminant analysis as well as a number of contingency tests to identify differences between the segments. We identified four clearly definable segments, which differ in terms of the psychographic traits of the segment members but also in terms of some …

Attracting Volunteers In Highly Multicultural Societies: A Marketing Challenge, Melanie J. Randle, Sara Dolnicar

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Volunteer managers face a typical marketing problem: how to identify the right consumers (in this case, volunteers), attract them, and keep them loyal. In multicultural societies this challenge is amplified because of the different groups originating from countries that can vary significantly in terms of the extent of volunteering and reasons for being involved. The consequence of this heterogeneity is limited success of generic marketing campaigns. Using the theory of planned behavior, we investigate differences between Australian residents from different cultural backgrounds in their volunteering behavior. Groups differed in attitude, social norm, and perceived behavioral control, suggesting the need for …

New Performance Measurement And Management Control Systems, Ted Watts, Carol J. Mcnair-Connolly

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Purpose - Focusing on how performance management systems support control, this article seeks to provide two "next-generation" performance scorecards - the Performance Wheel, suitable for most organizations and the Small Business Performance Pyramid, which acknowledges the unique requirements of small business. This development considers the historical development, increasing variety and often the poorly integrated status of performance measurement systems - one of business management's most important tools.

Design/methodology/approach - The paper considers the issues of various performance measurement models - the Performance Pyramid, the Results and Determinants mode, the Balanced Scorecard - through the integration of perspectives, metrics and terminology. …

Measuring And Recognizing The Value Of Purchased Goodwill: A Note On Market Value Measurement Method, Indra Abeysekera

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Through a review of literature and with conceptual underpinnings, this paper demonstrates that relying on the market value measurement method to ascertain value of purchased goodwill does not contribute to more accurate value of the financial worth of the firm.It argues that the use of market value for the measurement of purchased goodwill for recognition in financial statements is a mere artifact and a response to the contemporary paradigm rather than a measure of the accurate financial worth of purchased goodwill. It demonstrates the need to seek a measurement method that does not impose a transaction as a necessary precondition …

A Comparative Case Study Of The Internationalization Strategies Of Malaysian, Singaporean And Taiwanese Firms, Ah Ba Sim

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Comparative empirical research on the internationalization strategies of Asian multinational enterprises (MNEs) from countries at different levels of development is lacking. This paper examines and analyzes the internationalization characteristics and strategies of MNEs from three Asian countries at two different levels of development. Primary data from matched sample firms from Malaysia (a fast developing economy) and Singapore and Taiwan (representing newly industrialized economies) in the textile and electronics industries are used for this study. The findings indicate some differences among the Malaysian, Singaporean and Taiwanese MNEs. These differences and their implications are examined. The empirical findings, particularly the contextual aspects …

The Preponderant Causes Of The Usa Banking Crisis 2007-08, Eduardo Pol

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Scientific research on the banking crisis 2007-08 has answered many important questions according to generally accepted methodological standards. However, there remains at least one outstanding question that has not been answered with methodological accuracy: What caused the severe USA banking crisis 2007-08? To address this question the paper uses a counterfactual definition of 'cause,' distinguishes between separable and non-separable causes, and employs a well-posed methodology for the causation analysis of singular events. In addition, first causes and preponderant causes are distinguished. The main result of this paper is that the preponderant causes of the banking crisis 2007-08 were securitization and …

An Activity-Theory Analysis Of Corporate Wikis, Helen M. Hasan, Charmaine C. Pfaff

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Purpose: Wiki technologies, which are popular in social settings, are beginning to contribute to more flexible and participatory approaches to the exploitation of knowledge in corporate settings. Through the lens of activity theory, this paper aims to investigate contentious challenges to organizational activities that may be associated with the introduction of corporate wikis, in particular the potential democratization of knowledge work. Design/methodology/approach: From a study of several cases of corporate wiki adoption, this paper presents and interprets two representative cases sampled to provide more generalized results. Qualitative data were collected through semi-structured interviews and observation. The analysis followed a systematic …

Why Do Some Business Relationships Persist Despite Dissatisfaction? A Social Exchange Review, Venkata K. Yanamandram, Lesley White

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

This paper reviews the relevant theories and marketing literature to develop a theoretical foundation for understanding the process and outcome of struggling business-to-business (B2B) customer relationships. Specifically, the paper provides a social exchange perspective of the factors that influence the likelihood of dissatisfied customers remaining in a present relationship by serving as deterrents to discontinuing the relationship. In doing so, the paper identifies the common features of, noteworthy differences among, and gaps in these theories. The paper also connects determinant factors to an outcome variable in order to explain what drives a customer in managing an unsatisfying business relationship, and …

Public Sector Commercial Orientation And The Social Contract: A Study Of Performance Management In A Non-Competitive Environment, Ali Rkein, Brian H. Andrew

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Purpose - The aim of this paper is to study the workings of commercial orientation, with a focus on performance management, in an environment that is characterised by limited competition between the public and the private sectors and a high level of government social responsibility. Design/methodology/approach - An interpretive case study approach is adopted for this study. It draws on primary data from interviews with key personnel in public sector organisations, and on secondary data from government publications such as annual reports and budget papers. Findings - This study shows that the market-based performance management system has failed to achieve …

On Darkened Days And Sleepless Nights, Rowan Cahill

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

The author's thoughts on the role of radical historians, and the roles of protest and dissent in history. He argues that it is the "act of resistance that is crucial, not necessarily its success or otherwise". The example of the resistance to Nazism by Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) is invoked.

Online Onslaught: Internet-Based Methods For Attacking And Defending Citizens' Organisations, Brian Martin

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

As the online profiles of organisations become more important, so do their vulnerabilities to online attack. A wide range of online methods can be used to attack the credibility of an organisation, deter participation by its members and undermine its operations. A case study from the Australian vaccination debate is used to illustrate the operation and impact of some of these possible methods. The main modes of attack are disrupting discussions, dominating descriptions and ridiculing and intimidating opponents. The main modes of defence are excluding disrupters, providing counter–descriptions, making formal complaints, and ignoring or exposing abuse. New forms of social …

Encourage. Support. Act! Bystander Approaches To Sexual Harassment In The Workplace, Paula Mcdonald, Michael G. Flood

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

Workplace sexual harassment is a persistent and pervasive problem in Australia and elsewhere, demanding new and creative responses. One promising area which may inform prevention and response strategies is bystander approaches. In broad terms, bystander approaches focus on the ways in which individuals who are not the targets of the conduct can intervene in violence, harassment or other anti-social behaviour in order to prevent and reduce harm to others.40 Although bystander approaches have a long history in relation to intervening in emergencies, they have recently been translated to efforts to engage men and boys in the prevention of sexual violence. …

Academic Snobbery: Local Historians Need More Support [4 April], Ian C. Willis

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

Local history is one of the most popular forms of history in Australia. Yet there is a yawning gap between the enthusiastic amateur and the academic historian.

While some academic historians engage with local history, sadly there is an entrenched snobbery from the academy. From the other side, the enthusiastic amateur is too wound up with a parochial approach to local history and often doesn’t see the bigger picture.

If both sides can engage with each other, the result would be a better type of history practise and a greater contribution to the story of Australia.

Separated Fathers And The 'Fathers' Rights' Movement, Michael G. Flood

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

Separated fathers often feel profound grief, distress, and anger at the end of their relationships with their partners and their children. Some participate in 'fathers' rights' groups, a movement which claims to advocate on behalf of men and fathers who are the victims of discrimination and injustice in the Family Court and elsewhere. Yet such groups may do little to help fathers heal or to build or maintain ongoing and positive relationships with their children. Some men do find support in these groups, but they also may be incited into anger, blame, and destructive strategies of litigation. Using a framework …

Power Of The Korean Film Producer: Dictator Park Chung Hee's Forgotten Film Cartel Of The 1960s Golden Decade And Its Legacy, Ae-Gyung Shim, Brian Yecies

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

After censorship was eliminated in 1996, a new breed of writer-directors created a canon of internationally provocative and visually stunning genre-bending hit films, and new and established producers infused unprecedented venture capital into the local industry. Today, a bevy of key producers, including vertically integrated Korean conglomerates, maintain dominance over the film industry while engaging in a variety of relatively near-transparent domestic and international expansion strategies. Backing hits at home as well as collaborating with filmmakers in China and Hollywood have become priorities. In stark contrast to the way in which the film business is conducted today is Korean cinema’s …

Diverging Paths: Occupational Sex Segregation, Australia, And The Oecd, Kirsti Rawstron

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

In the mid-1980s, “Australia held the title for the most sex segregated labour force in the OECD area” (OECD, 1984 in Pocock 1998: 590). Does this still hold true? In this paper, series analysis is employed to explore what has happened to occupational sex segregation in Australia since 1984. I do this by measuring changes in the Index of Association. The level, and change in trend, of occupational sex segregation in Australia is also compared to that of selected other groups of OECD nations between 2000 and 2010, including the Pacific Rim OECD nations and those nations which are included …

Disorderly, Valerie Harwood

Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) - Papers

Over the past thirty years the word disorderly has become increasingly linked to discourses of mental disorder. This change points to the effects that the social and cultural has in the production of ‘scientific’ knowledge of youth. Unlike uses in the mid twentieth century, the word disorderly is now medicalized, conjuring images of aberrant behavior together with psychopathology. Earlier depictions of disorderliness such as James Dean’s famous role as Jim Stark, the drunk and disorderly youth outsider in Rebel Without a Cause (Weisbart & Ray, 1955) were not underwritten with medicalized notions. Such representations linked youth with “out of order” …

Role-Based E-Learning For University Students : A Comparison Of Australian, American, British And Singapore Designs, Sandra Wills

Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) - Papers

Role play in face-to-face contexts has been shown to be a powerful teaching design at all levels of education. The arrival of e-learning makes it possible to engage with different types of role play, for example inter-national and inter-institutional collaborations, role plays blending online and face-to-face interaction, role plays blending synchronous and asynchronous media including recordings of the sessions, and role play within distance learning contexts. It is now possible to conduct elaborate and responsive role play activities where the identity of the participants is not immediately apparent, where they may use avatars or inhabit 3D virtual worlds as part …

The Simulation Triad, Sandra Wills

Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) - Papers

This chapter contributes to the discussion on how best to theorise relationships among learning preferences, simulations, role plays and games as modes for learning. It describes the development of a framework called the Simulation Triad which is used to better define online role play by positioning it in relation to simulation and games as a teaching method. For designers of online simulations, the Simulation Triad, and the complementary Design Space Framework, will illustrate design choices around problems, rules and roles, clarifying that designs for role-based simulation emphasise interaction between roles to resolve a problem rather than focus on rules that …

Becoming An 'Authorised' Postgraduate Research Writer, Bronwyn James

Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) - Papers

No abstract provided.

Book Review - The Right To Higher Education: Beyond Widening Participation, Bronwyn James

Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) - Papers

When we first conceived of the idea of the Critical Discussions about Social Inclusion Forum - the word critical was at the forefront in our minds. We wanted to create an opportunity to critically reflect on the ways in which the most recent social inclusion agenda might be understood and acted upon while being attentive to the ways in which "doing" social inclusion might inadvertently reproduce or manifest other forms of social exclusion. We also wanted to discuss what doing social inclusion might mean for our work as academic language and learning educators, as discipline lecturers, as policy makers and …

Social Inclusion As An Unfinished Verb: A Practice-Based Approach, Lynne Keevers, Pamela Abuodha

Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) - Papers

The Australian Government has embarked on a social inclusion agenda that includes ambitious targets to increase and widen participation in higher education. From the evidence to date their approach to social inclusion in higher education focuses attention on statistical indicators of "proportional representation". Most of the available measures of social inclusion and exclusion have an individualistic focus and tend to characterise social exclusion as a "state" in which people are assumed to be "excluded" from access to higher education. Such a perspective focuses attention on the point of entry but backgrounds how the relational experience of under-represented groups in learning …

Made To Measure: Taming Practices With Results-Based Accountability, Lynne Keevers, L Treleaven, Christopher Sykes, Michael Darcy

Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) - Papers

This paper focuses on what happens when accountability regimes, represented in calculative planning processes, migrate onto situated, sociomaterial practices. Specifically, the article investigates what happens when the practices of results-based accountability (RBA) are translated into the social justice practices of locally-based community organizations. Based on the tenets of contemporary practice theory and a threeyear participatory action research project with community organizations in Australia, the study illustrates that performance measurement and accountability frameworks such as RBA are not technologies that peer and measure innocently and disinterestedly from a distance. Rather, RBA, as a bundle of materialdiscursive practices, is part of the …

Social Learning, Critical Reflection And The Perception Of Facticity In Deliberation On Water Reuse, Gregory R. Hampton

Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) - Papers

Critical reflection involves the uncovering and understanding of the assumptions, which are made in the development of knowledge and the establishment and perception of facts. A capacity to understand the development of facts is proposed as an important outcome of social learning. The public perception of the facticity of expert scientific and technological knowledge is analysed in four sets of workshops conducted with publics who utilised recycled water, were within close proximity to water recycling schemes or lived in an area where planned water recycling schemes were to be implemented. The purpose of these workshops was to develop a social …

"Out Of The Shadows" ..... Strategic Development Of An Institutional Repository, Michael K. Organ

Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) - Papers

This presentation outlines strategic developments at the University of Wollongong during 2012 which impacted upon the profile and functionality of the open access institutional repository Research Online.

Comparison Of Ohs Course Accreditation Procedures In Australia, Sue Reed, Jane Whitelaw

Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) - Papers

As OHS professional bodies have moved or are moving towards professional certification of their members, the need for accredited programs of study has developed. This move has been prompted by the requirement of the certification boards for the applicant to demonstrate that they have the minimum knowledge required to work at a professional level. The AIOH has had a course accreditation procedure for over 20 years as discussed by Whitelaw and Reed (2011) which has been well recognised by the profession, but until 2009 only one course had been accredited. In the last two years the AIOH has revised its …