Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

How Games Work: Exploring The Instructional Design Of Diablo Iii, Carly Finseth

Carly Finseth

This paper describes a portion of a three-part case study designed to research the instructional patterns that occur within role-playing games (RPGs). It presents a set of nine heuristics for learning in RPGs and analyzes how and where those heuristics occur within the game Diablo III. The findings from the study include an overview of a cyclical learning pattern that occurs with RPGs, as well as theoretical and practical implication for both industry and academic contexts.

Siting ‘Scientific Spaces’ In The Us: The Push And Pull Of Regional Development Strategies And National Innovation Policies, Jennifer Clark

Jennifer Clark

Faster Out Of The Station: Asia Surges Ahead On Rail, Philip Laird

Dr Philip Laird

It is interesting to see the progressmade by Asian countries since 2001 in developing high-speed rail (HSR),while Australia is missing out.

Managing The Public To Manage Data: Citizen Science And Astronomy, Peter Darch

Peter Darch

Citizen Cyberscience Projects (CCPs) that recruit members of the public as volunteers to process and produce large datasets promise a great deal of benefits to scientists and science. However, if this promise is to be realised, and citizen science-produced datasets are to be widely-used by scientists, it is essential that these datasets win the trust of the scientific community. This task of securing credibility involves, in part, applying standard scientific procedures to clean-up datasets formed by volunteer contributions. However, the management of volunteers’ behaviour in terms of how they contribute also plays a significant role in improving both the quality …

Opening Up A Dark Habitat And Opening Up Data: The Co-Emergence Of Scientific Collaboration, Infrastructure For Data-Sharing, And Data-Sharing Practices, Peter Darch

Peter Darch

Allied to the movement promoting Open Access publishing is the Open Data movement, which aims to facilitate and encourage the open sharing of research data amongst scientists across multiple disciplines and institutions. Studies of scientists’ data practices link barriers to data-sharing with lack of appropriate infrastructure, cultural issues regarding norms and reward structures, and lack of trust amongst researchers. However, there have been fewer studies of actual instances of successful data-sharing. Furthermore, little attention has been paid to the implications of successful data-sharing for the structures of collaborative scientific work.

This paper will present findings from a longitudinal ethnographic case …

A Probabilistic Predictive Model For Residential Mobility In Australia, Mohammad-Reza Namazi-Rad, Nagesh Shukla, Albert Munoz, Payam Mokhtarian, Jun Ma

Payam Mokhtarian

Household relocation modelling is an integral part of the planning process as residential movements influence the demand for community facilities and services. Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA) created the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) program to collect reliable longitudinal data on family and household dynamics. Socio-demographic information (such as general health situation and well-being, lifestyle changes, residential mobility, income and welfare dynamics, and labour market dynamics) is collected from the sampled individuals and households. The data shows that approximately 17% of Australian households and 13% of couple families in the HILDA sample …

Managing The Public To Manage Data: Citizen Science And Astronomy, Peter Darch

Peter Darch

Citizen Cyberscience Projects (CCPs) that recruit members of the public as volunteers to process and produce large datasets promise a great deal of benefits to scientists and science. However, if this promise is to be realised, and citizen science-produced datasets are to be widely-used by scientists, it is essential that these datasets win the trust of the scientific community. This task of securing credibility involves, in part, applying standard scientific procedures to clean-up datasets formed by volunteer contributions. However, the management of volunteers’ behaviour in terms of how they contribute also plays a significant role in improving both the quality …

Cognitive Processes In Object-Oriented Requirements Engineering Practice: Analogical Reasoning And Mental Modelling, Linda Dawson

Associate Professor Linda Dawson

This chapter presents a background in cognitive processes such as problem-solving and analogical reasoning for considering modelling from an object-oriented perspective within the domain of requirements engineering. This chapter then describes a research project and the findings from a set of four cases which examine professional practice from perspective of cognitive modelling for object-oriented requirements engineering. In these studies, it was found that the analysts routinely built models in their minds and refined them before committing them to paper or communicating these models to others. The studies also showed that object-oriented analysts depend on analogical reasoning where they use past …

Doing It Tough: Factors Impacting On Local E-Government Mmaturity, Peter Shackleton, Linda Dawson

Associate Professor Linda Dawson

As growing numbers of citizens seek to use the Internet to do business, governments across the world have moved into the area of electronic service delivery. For the last decade significant advancements have been made in the area of e-Government. Today, e-Government is often assumed to be wellestablished. However, ongoing support is often missing, particularly at the local government level. The multi-level nature of government often means that citizens are frustrated when accessing services that span many levels of bureaucracy. This paper describes an empirical study which explores the factors influencing local egovernment maturity and identifies the barriers, enablers, priorities …

Action Research In Emerging Technologies In Health Information Systems: Creating A Mobile Information Environment In A Hospital Ward, Linda Dawson, Julie Fisher, Stephen Weeding, Liza Heslop, Andrew Howard

Associate Professor Linda Dawson

Wireless networks, mobile devices and associated applications are key emerging technologies ideal for nomadic workers such as clinicians in hospital ward settings. These mobile information environments can potentially enhance clinicians' use of patient management and clinical systems by providing decision support and clinical information at the bedside or point of care. Such technologies need to be critically assessed in a hospital environment for their wider potential and application for delivery of information at the point of care. This paper describes the use of action research methods in a project which analysed an existing clinical Information Communication Technology (ICT) environment in …

Rqf Publication Quality Measures: Methodological Issues, John Lamp, Simon Milton, Linda Dawson, Julie Fisher

Associate Professor Linda Dawson

The Research Quality Framework uses Thomson-ISI citation benchmarks as its main set of objective measures of research quality. The Thomson-ISI measures rely on identifying a core set of journals in which the major publications for a discipline are to be found. The core for a discipline is determined by applying a nontransparent process that is partly based on Bradford's Law (1934). Yet Bradford was not seeking measures about quality of publications or journals. How valid then is it to base measures of publication quality on Bradford's Law? We explore this by returning to Bradford's Law and subsequent related research asking …

Worlds Without End: The Many Lives Of The Multiverse, Mary-Jane Rubenstein

Mary-Jane Rubenstein

Worlds without End explores the recent proliferation of "multiverse" cosmologies, which imagine our universe as just one of a vast, even infinite, number of others. While this idea has been the stuff of philosophy, religion, and literature for millennia, it is now under consideration as a scientific hypothesis, with wildly different models emerging from the fields of cosmology, quantum mechanics, and string theory. Beginning with the Atomistic and Stoic philosophies of ancient Greece, this book assembles a genealogy of the multiverse, seeking to map contemporary models in relation to their forerunners, and to ask why the proposition has become such …