Digital Commons Network^™

An Examination Of The Sustainability Of Online Communities In Australia: Including The Findings Of Participatory Action Research Undertaken On A Beta 3rd Generation Network Type Regional Community Portal In New South Wales, Andrew Connery

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

This thesis examines the operations and viability of community portals (RCP) generally and within Australia specifically. It records and analyses, through participatory action research undertaken by the candidate, the development of a beta 3rd generation network type community portal (NCP). The particular aspect of interest in this community portal is that it is a commercial venture aimed at achieving long-term economic sustainability. The evolution of portals can be traced back to the origins of the internet. As a group they can be classified into three broad categories: internet, intranet and extranet. In this thesis it is assumed that a community …

Grinding Polycrystalline Diamond Using A Diamond Grinding Wheel, Maryam Agahi

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

Application of ultrahard cutting tool materials is continuously expanding. One example of an ultrahard cutting tool material is polycrystalline diamond (PCD), which is widely used in tool making and machining. However, because of the high wear resistance of PCD it is characterised by low grindability and machinability. So, any mechanism used to machine PCD has to meet specific requirements. Grinding with a diamond grinding wheel is one of the economic ways to machine PCD compacts. This thesis considers the grinding of polycrystalline diamond using a conventional grinding machine and makes machining parameter recommendations to support the optimisation of PCD grinding. …

Development Of 2-Dof Haptic Devices Working With Magnetorheological Fluids, Bin Liu

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

The thesis presents the design and development of a 2-DOF (degree of freedom) magnetorheological (MR) fluid based haptic joystick and studies its applications in virtual reality. MR fluids are controllable fluids that can generate adaptable resistance forces when subjected to a magnetic field. This feature is capable of realizing novel haptic devices. The developed system consists of three main parts: MR joystick, control and display hardware, and software. The MR joystick is constructed of two disc-shaped MR actuators positioned perpendicularly with a gimbal structure, which transfers the movement of the joystick handle into two actuator rotary movements. Therefore, operators can …

Enhancing Mental Health Staff Confidence And Skills In Response To Aggression And Violence: A Longitudinal Study Of Aggression Minimisation Training, Olga Ilkiw-Lavalle

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

Rationale: Aggression minimisation training is essential for mental health staff. No studies to date have investigated the impact of knowledge, prior learning and staff occupations on confidence. Additionally, no studies have followed-up trained staff following actual aggressive and violent incidents to investigate skills used, perceived confidence, fear and satisfaction with the management of incidents. Aim: This research examines: i) the effectiveness of training in aggression minimisation on mental health staff confidence (Study 1) and; ii) the use of learnt skills on staff perceived confidence and fear during actual aggression and violence on inpatient mental health units (Study 2). Method: 103 …

Turning User Into First Level Support In Help Desk: Development Of Web-Based User Self-Help Knowledge Management System, Nelson K. Y. Leung

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

Information technology has changed the way organizations function. This has resulted in reliance of help desks to support users to deal with a wide range of information technology related problems such as hardware, software and telecommunication. The help desk generally has to cover a wide range of information technology products and services. However, due to resources problem, in particular the lack of help desk staff, users often have to wait for a considerably long time before their enquiries and problems are answered and solved. Literature has shown that the majority of incoming enquiries are considered to be simple and routine …

The Importance Of Fine-Scale Environmental Heterogeneity In Determining Levels Of Genotypic Diversity And Local Adaptation, Craig D. H Sherman

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

Fine-scale environmental heterogeneity is predicted to be important in determining variation in genotypic diversity and in selection for important life history traits in natural populations. For example, theory suggests that organisms with complex life histories that involve both sexual and asexual modes of reproduction use sex to produce genotypically diverse and widely dispersed propagules for the colonisation of distant or unstable habitats, but rely on asexual reproduction to restock or maintain populations within their parental habitat. Such organisms should also have great potential for site-specific adaptation as multiple generations may compete within relatively static conditions. Surprisingly, little is still known …

Analytical Solutions For Modeling Soft Soil Consolidation By Vertical Drains, Rohan Walker

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

Vertical drains increase the rate of soil consolidation by providing a short horizontal drainage path for pore water flow, and are used worldwide in many soft soil improvement projects. This thesis develops three new contributions to the solution of consolidation problems: (i) a more realistic representation of the smear zone where soil properties vary gradually with radial distance from the vertical drain; (ii) a nonlinear radial consolidation model incorporating void ratio dependant soil properties and non-Darcian flow; and (iii) a solution to multi-layered consolidation problems with vertical and horizontal drainage using the spectral method. Each model is verified against existing …

Triaxial Behaviour Of Ballast And The Role Of Confining Pressure Under Cyclic Loading, Joanne Lackenby

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

Traditional railway foundations or substructures, consisting of one or two granular layers overlying a subgrade or natural formation, have become increasingly overloaded in recent years due to the utilisation of faster and heavier trains. During this period, there has been little, if any, re-engineering of the substructure in Australia, resulting in maintenance cycles becoming more frequent and increasingly expensive. Finding economical and practical techniques for enhancing the stability and safety of the substructure, thereby ensuring a capacity for supporting further increases in load, is vital in securing the long-term viability of the railway industry. The load bearing ballast is located …

Healthcare Providers Communication Mechanisms Using A Case Management Model Of Care: Implications For Information Systems Development, Implementation And Evaluation, Jennifer Lynette Hardy

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

This thesis addresses a fundamental problem within health care, namely communication. Major outcomes of the research include the importance of understanding the relationship between information exchange and communication and how this can impact and influence cooperation and collaboration between and among healthcare providers. The thesis has contributed to an increase in the knowledge of the integration and convergence of different theories related to; communication behaviours and patterns, information exchange, organisational change, and social systems. The application of this knowledge is to better understand the interaction among and between healthcare providers. Ultimately the end point is to bring about change that …

A Model For Improving Wastewater Treatment Plant Performance From 'Command & Control' To Managing In Compliance With Esd Principles, Debashis Raha

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

Water is the basis of all life, human well-being and economic development. It links together all aspects of life on this planet- human and environmental health, food supply, energy and industry. Wastewater is one of the most important sources of surface and ground water pollution due to the chemical and biological pollutants that it contains and is the world’s greatest killer. Some 1.8 million child deaths each year as a result of diarrhoea, the loss of 443 million school days each year from water-related illness and close to 2.8 billion people in developing countries suffering at any given time from …

Interpersonal Concomitants Of Generalised Anxiety Disorder, Dragica Denise Milicevic

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

Objective: Current treatment models of Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD) emphasise maladaptive worry cognitions in the aetiology and maintenance of the disorder. However, although worry cognitions are often relational in content, interpersonal and developmental concomitants of the disorder have been neglected incontemporary research. New models of treatment are urgently needed as current evidence suggests that over half of those treated with the current best practice therapies gain only limited help and remain symptomatic. This study adopts an interpersonal attachment perspective to studying GAD to examine the purported links between adult cognitive, interpersonal and emotional functioning and the related perceptions of early …

The Role Of Volunteer Counsellors In The Prevention Of Psychological Trauma: The Development Of The 'Orienting Approach' To Trauma Counselling, Andrew B. Phipps

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

Early interventions for trauma aim to reduce the likelihood of distress and impairment following exposure to a traumatic event. However, a growing body of research suggests that some popular early interventions have the potential to increase the risk of psychological sequelae. This risk maybe increased when such interventions are delivered by practitioners with limited skill and training. This thesis discusses the development and training of the 'Orienting Approach' to Trauma Counselling (Phipps and Byme, 2003). This early intervention was designed for use by volunteer counsellors. It is argued that the approach is a 'no-harm' intervention that can reduce the potential …

Towards A More Flexible Inter-Organizational Workflow Design: The Application Of Local Criteria Principle, Geng Liang

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

Process oriented technique such as workflow management system is attracting increasing attentions in the e-commerce environment, especially from an inter-organizational workflow perspective. A soundness concept, which identifies if a workflow can terminate properly, is an important factor that needs to be considered when designing a workflow. In an interorganizational workflow environment, the soundness issues become more complicated considering the size of the overall workflow and the privacy of the workflow within individual organization. One of the major approaches to tackle this problem is to use local criteria principle. This principle allows the soundness of the entire inter-organizational workflow to be …

Creation And Distribution Of Real-Time Content, Cong Duc Nguyen

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

The rapid increases in network bandwidth and processing power have led to tremendous growth in Internet applications and changed the nature of delivering content. From earlier web application, which is only about retrieval of pre-computed static content, current content delivery architectures provide dynamic content and enable personalization of content. Recent interactive entertainment applications, such as multiplayer online games, require content to be created and distributed in real-time. In addition, the rapid increase in processor speed has led to various proposals to put real-time computation within or at the edge of the network that allow application specific processing on packet flow …

Improving The Performance Of Fbg Sensing System, Xingyuan Xu

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

The Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) is a periodic perturbation of the refractive index inside the fiber formed by exposure of the fiber core to an intense optical interference pattern. The most important property of FBG is that it will reflect the incident light with particularly predetermined wavelengths, while passing all the other wavelengths of light at the same time. As the wavelength of the reflected light varies with the strain, temperature and other environmental factors, detection of the wavelength will yield information about these quantities. Recently, FBG has attracted much research and development effort due to their potential enormous potential …

The 'Citizens' And 'Citizenship' Debates: 'Vernacular Citizenship' And Contemporary Australian Politics And Society, Simon Maher

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

'Citizens' and 'citizenship' have become 'buzz words' in contemporary times. Within Australian academia the subjects have attracted an unprecedented level of interest. Typically the focus is on 'formal' definitions and 'official' forms of citizenship found within Government legislation. This focus is problematic because it is possible that it overlooks the existence of 'informal' and 'unofficial' understandings of citizenship. This thesis challenges the approaches that concentrate on 'official' versions of citizenship. It argues that an 'informal' understanding of citizenship has developed in the minds of the Australian community. This citizenship consists of a range of 'popular' and 'informal' ideas that comprise …

Refugees In The 2001 Australian Federal Election: An Analysis Using The Backfire Model, Andrew Herd

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

The issue of asylum seekers was central to the 2001 Australian federal election campaign. Of several incidents involving asylum seekers during the campaign, two have become essential to the election narrative: the so-called children overboard and SIEV X incidents. Although both incidents involved asylum seekers, they were also quite different. During children overboard, the Government was very quick to inform the public of what occurred, although this was later proven wrong, whereas the Government did not wish to publicise the deaths of 353 asylum seekers onboard SIEV X. Most Australians are now well aware of the truth behind children overboard, …

The Dynamics Of Financial Reporting Practice In An Indonesian Insurance Company: A Reflection Of Javanese Views Of An Ethical Social Relationship, Anis Chariri

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

This study is an ethnographic case study conducted in an Indonesian insurance company. The aim of the study is to understand the dynamics of financial reporting practice in the company. Ontologically, this study is built on a belief that financial reporting practice is a socially constructed reality. It is an institutional and political practice. As a socially constructed reality, such a practice involves an interaction among social actors, and between organisational actors and the institutional and cultural environment in which the company operates. The main research question of this study is why and how the company commits to quality financial …

An Implementation Of Multiplayer Online Game With Distributed Server Architecture, Dingliang Liang

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

The distribution of game servers has received serious attention in recent years. A multi-server structure may distribute the load of the server, as well as improve the fairness of games played over large geographical distances without sacrificing delay. However, while distributing the game authority, the system takes risk of game state inconsistency between servers. Mechanisms are presented to provide synchronization between servers. However, user response to these mechanisms for maintaining server consistency in different game types is largely unknown. This thesis aims to study the user responses to two of the important synchronization techniques, Local Lag and Timewarp, within a …

The Effects Of The Indian Ocean Tsunami On Peace In Sri Lanka And Aceh, Meredith Melecki

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

The 26 December 2004 tsunami was far reaching in its effects but the two areas most devastated by the tidal wave were the Indonesian province of Aceh and the country of Sri Lanka. These areas have much more than the impact of the tsunami disaster in common. They have both also been sites of decades-long violent conflicts that have compounded many of the problems caused by the tsunami. One result of the tsunami was an influx of NGOs into these two areas. NGOs, as promoters of development, have increasingly been associated with activities deemed necessary to the creation of peace. …

The 'Legalisation' Of Education : A Study Of New South Wales Teachers And Their Professional Development Needs In The Area Of Law, David J. Newlyn

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

This study is concerned with the legal knowledge held by teachers of New South Wales Government schools and the need for continued professional development in this area. The study commenced in 1997 and primary research concluded in 2000. The Australian experience seems to be mirroring international experiences, particularly those of the United States of America, which have seen an increase in the legalisation of the field of education. From this increase there emerged a need for a systematic programme of instruction to address the problem of a lack of legal knowledge held by teachers in order to adequately perform their …

Using Assumptions In Service Composition Context, Z. Lu

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

Service composition aims to provide an efficient and accurate model of a service, based on which the global service oriented architecture (SOA) can be realized, allowing value added services to be generated on the fly. Unlike a traditional software module, which runs within a predictable domain, Web Services are autonomous software agents running in a heterogeneous execution environment. Because of distributed responsibilities, ownership and control, it is often not feasible to acquire all information needed for the service composition. These characteristics of autonomy and heterogeneity are fundamental to service oriented computing but make it inherently difficult to avoid service conflicts. …

Distribution, Speciation And Geochemistry Of Selenium In Contaminated Marine Sediments - Port Kembla Harbour, Nsw, Australia, Pattanan Tarin

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

Selenium (Se) is an element of concern in Port Kembla Harbour as it was the only element found in harbour fish tissues in the mid-1990s at concentrations that exceeded the Australia New Zealand Food Authority Maximum Residue Limit. This thesis investigated the distribution, speciation, binding phases and geochemical behaviour of selenium in Port Kembla Harbour sediments, which potentially receive selenium pollution from local metal processing and smelting and coal industries. Sedimentary selenium is a potential selenium source for fish and organisms via benthic food chain transfer. Grab surface sediments from 23 sites around the harbour and a total of 14 …

Susceptibility Of 12% Cr Steels To Sensitisation During Welding Of Thick Gauge Plate, Martin Nicholas Van Warmelo

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

In recent years, the subject of sensitisation in unstabilised ferritic/martensitic dual phase 11-14%Cr steels has been investigated in some detail after a number of failures in service due to accelerated corrosion. It was found that sensitisation could occur due to a number of different mechanisms which were dependant on the heat treatment, the number of thermal cycles and the phases present in the material. All the detected modes of sensitisation could be prevented by stabilisation with titanium or niobium and suitable design of the material composition to produce a suitably high ferrite factor. However, these options could not readily be …

Novel Nanostructured Conducting Polymer Systems Based On Sulfonated Polyaniline, Fatemeh Masdarolomoor

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

The fully sulfonated polyaniline, Poly(2-methoxyaniline-5-sulfonic acid) (PMAS), is a watersoluble and electroactive conducting polymer. Its high water solubility makes it a potentially very attractive material for a range of applications. However, to date problems with its synthesis from MAS monomer and the impure nature of the PMAS product have hindered its exploitation. This thesis successfully addresses these problems and then subsequently exploits the pure high molecular weight PMAS obtained as a novel electroactive dopant in composite materials with other conducting polymers. The initial focus of this thesis was the development of a rapid purification technique capable of fractionating in gram …

An Evaluation Of Automated Dietary Assessment: A Case Study Into The Development, Implementation And Evaluation Of Computer-Assisted Survey Technology As An Adjunct To Professional Dietary Consultation, Yasmine Probst

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

Dietary assessment has changed dramatically with time, progressing from face-to-face interviews and hand calculated nutrient intakes to the use of computer technology to automate various parts of the process. The most common application is the use of software packages to calculate nutrient intake data obtained from dietary interviews. The development of technology to automate the interview process will allow for clinicians to spend more time focussing on patient education and counselling. The central hypothesis tested in this thesis was that automated dietary assessment would prove to be a feasible adjunct to the professional consultation in the primary healthcare setting. Development …

Collecting The Self, Leonie Watson

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

This study examines the intertwining of the body and the self and the way this is represented in the visual arts. This research is informed by the bodily interventions of feminist artists and new conceptions of the self as multiple, a "locus" or meeting place of desires, beliefs, language forms and histories. This "self' is extended by technology, which dissolves boundaries of scale, of inside and outside. The paintings ask whether defined gender boundaries can be blurred, whether discrete notions of body and self can be merged, through ambiguities of inside/outside, using folds and concealments to make new kinds of …

Disclosing Childhood Sexual Assault In Close Relationships : The Meanings And Emotions Women Associate With Their Experiences And Their Lives Now, Hilary Anne Maitland

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

This research aimed to explore women’s meanings and emotions associated with

disclosing childhood sexual assault within close relationships and their current life experiences. A personal construct model of the disclosure process was examined, which proposed that disclosing childhood sexual assault will impact on women’s meaning making, their willingness to tell, and their close relationships.

Participants were twenty eight women between 20 and 60 years of age drawn

from those accessing counselling or support groups. Twenty three women completed a questionnaire, provided narratives about their current life experiences and an important

disclosure experience, and the Social Support Questionnaire (Sarason, Levine, Basham …

Impulse Control Systems For Servomechanisms With Nonlinear Friction, Stephen Van Duin

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

At low velocities, friction is highly non linear and difficult to control. In practical mechanisms, friction may also be position dependent and highly variable. This can lead to tracking errors, limit cycles, and a phenomenon referred to as 'stick-slip', when a periodic cycle of alternating motion and rest, limits the mechanism's velocity and position accuracy. Impulse control is a friction compensator that does not require an accurate friction model. It achieves precise motion of a servomechanism by applying small impacts which overcome static friction with a controlled breakaway. The size of the impact and its duration determine how much the …

Defining The Mechanism And Functional Consequences Of Pai-2-Mediated Upa/Upar Endocytosis, David R. Croucher

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

Plasminogen is converted to its active form plasmin by two major serine proteases; the urokinase plasminogen activator (uPA) and tissue plasminogen activator (tPA). De-regulated plasmin formation is associated with tumour growth and progression. Whilst tPA is primarily involved in blot clot dissolution, uPA, along with its cell surface receptor uPAR, are commonly over-expressed at the leading edge of a tumour and by the tumour-associated stroma, contributing to plasmin formation, cell proliferation and migration. Soluble and receptor bound uPA is efficiently inhibited by two members of the serine protease inhibitor (serpin) superfamily; the plasminogen activator inhibitors type 1 (PAI-1) and 2 …