Science and Technology Studies Commons^™

Translating Evidence-Based Guidelines Into Practice: A Survey Of Practices Of Commissioners And Managers Of The English Stop Smoking Services, Mairtin S. Mcdermott, Heather Thomson, Robert West, Jennifer A. M Kenyon, Andy Mcewen

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

Background: The English National Health Service's (NHS) Stop Smoking Services (SSSs) constitute one of the most highly developed behavioural support programmes in the world. However, there is significant variation in success rates across the approximately 150 services, some of which may be due to variation in practice. This study aimed to assess these differences in practice.

Methods: Two online surveys were administered. All commissioners (people who purchase services for the NHS) and managers (those who run the services) of NHS SSSs in England were invited to participate. Items included details of current practices and services provided, what informed the …

Integrated Seat And Suspension Control For A Quarter Car With Driver Model, Haiping Du, Weihua Li, Nong Zhang

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

In this paper, an integrated vehicle seat and sus pension control strategy for a quarter car with driver model is proposed to improve suspension performance on driver ride comfort. An integrated seat and suspension model that includes a quarter-car suspension, a seat suspension, and a 4-degree-of freedom (DOM) driver body model is presented first. This in1 tegrated model provides a platform to evaluate ride comfort 1performance in terms of driver head acceleration responses under typical road disturbances and to develop an integrated control of seat and car suspensions. Based on the integrated model, an H∞ state feedback controller is designed …

The Work Pattern Of Personal Care Workers In Two Australian Nursing Homes: A Time-Motion Study, Siyu Qian, Ping Yu, Zhen-Yu Zhang, David M. Hailey, Pamela J. Davy, Mark Nelson

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

Background: The aim of the study is to describe the work pattern of personal care workers (PCWs) in nursing homes. This knowledge is important for staff performance appraisal, task allocation and scheduling. It will also support funding allocation based on activities.

Methods: A time-motion study was conducted in 2010 at two Australian nursing homes. The observation at Site 1 was between the hours of 7:00 and 14:00 or 15:00 for 14 days. One PCW was observed on each day. The observation at Site 2 was from 10:00 to 17:00 for 16 days. One PCW working on a morning shift and …

Patients Perceptions Of Web Self-Service Applications In Primary Healthcare, Xin Zhang, Ping Yu, Jun Yan, Hongxiang Hu, Niraj Goureia

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

This paper presents the preliminary findings of a case study of patients' acceptance and usage of web self-service - online appointment system - in a primary health care centre in a regional area in Australia. After two months of implementation, structured interviews were undertaken over three months to ascertain patients' perceptions of the web self-service application. The findings indicates that patients' acceptance of the web self-service application maybe hindered by their relative lower computer ownership or inadequate computer skills and access to the internet, their preference for flexible personal communication for appointment making and inadequate flexibility of the appointment system …

Social Implications Of Technology: The Past, The Present, And The Future, Karl Stephan, Katina Michael, M. G. Michael, Laura Jacob, Emily Anesta

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

The social implications of a wide variety of technologies are the subject matter of the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology (SSIT). This paper reviews the SSIT’s contributions since the Society’s founding in 1982, and surveys the outlook for certain key technologies that may have significant social impacts in the future. Military and security technologies, always of significant interest to SSIT, may become more autonomous with less human intervention, and this may have both good and bad consequences. We examine some current trends such as mobile, wearable, and pervasive computing, and find both dangers and opportunities in these trends. …

Beyond Simple Classifications: Contemporary Information Systems Development Projects As Complex Adaptive Systems, Karlheinz Kautz

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

Contemporary Information Systems Development (ISD) takes place in a dynamic environment and is generally acknowledged as a complex activity. We investigate whether complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory is relevant as a theoretical foundation for understanding ISD, and if so, what kind of conception can be achieved by utilizing the theory? We introduce key CAS concepts and describe an emergent method framework for understanding ISD. Extending existing research, our main contribution is twofold: We first show how CAS and CAS principles are advantageous for comprehending and organizing ISD in general, beyond any particular development approach chosen for the execution of a …

A Sociomaterial Approach To Co-Creating Rfid Value In A Multi-Firm Supply Chain Knowledge Sharing Einvironment: A Longitudinal Case Study, Akemi T. Chatfield, Samuel F. Wamba

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

Orlikowski and Lacono (2001, p. 132) aptly argue that IT artifacts, particularly distributed network technology applications, including RFID, "do not provide the same material and cultural properties in each local time or context of use." A sociomaterial theory suggests the importance of adopting an integrative approach to study the social and material effects when examining IT benefits realization. While much has been written about the high potential of RFID as a new class of strategic enterprise information systems, the early adopters of RFID and researchers still have to answer the question on how to co-create the business value of RFID …

Transactive Memory Systems: Exploring Task, Expertise And People (Tep) Unit Formation In Virtual Teams: Conceptualization And Scale Measurement Development, Mohamed Imran Mohamed Ariff, Simon K. Milton, R Bosua, Rajeev Sharma

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

Transactive Memory Systems (TMS) are important cognitive constructs to share knowledge and control and coordinate interdependent tasks in teams. The construction of Transactive Memory Systems involves a number of key phases that lead up to the actual formation of a team’s TMS. In particular, the development of Task-Expertise-People (TEP) units, form an essential part of the development of a team’s Transactive Memory System. At this stage very little is known of how Task- Expertise-People units are formed in virtual teams. This paper addresses this problem by following an inductive, quantitative method to develop a measurement scale for TEP formation in …

A Methodology For Bridge Condition Evaluation, Maria Rashidi, Peter Gibson

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

Due to the substantial role of bridges in transportation networks and in accordance with the limited funding for bridge management, remediation strategies have to be prioritised. A conservative bridge assessment will result in unnecessary actions, such as costly bridge strengthening or repairs. On the other hand, any bridge maintenance negligence and delayed actions may lead to heavy future costs or degraded assets. The accuracy of decisions developed by any manager or bridge engineer relies on the accuracy of the bridge condition assessment which emanates from visual inspection. Many bridge rating systems are based on a very subjective procedure and are …

Order-4 Quasi-Orthogonal Cooperative Communication In Stfc Mb-Ofdm Uwb, Zixuan Lin, Le Chung Tran, Farzad Safaei, Tadeusz A. Wysocki

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

Recently, cooperative communication and Space-Time-Frequency-Codes (STFCs) have been introduced into the Multiband OFDM Ultra-Wideband (MB-OFDM UWB) to improve the reliability, data rate and system capacity. This paper proposes a cooperative communication scheme for a four source node MB-OFDM UWB system using Quasi-Orthogonal STFCs, which is referred to as order-4 Quasi-Orthogonal Cooperative Communication Scheme (4-QOCCS). Simulation results show that the proposed 4-QOCCS provides significantly better error performance over the conventional MB-OFDM UWB and our order-2 Orthogonal Cooperative Communication Scheme (2-OCCS) using the Alamouti STFCs, and even better than the order-4 Orthogonal Cooperative Communication Scheme (4-OCCS), which we have been recently proposed, …

An Opportunistic Scheduler For Dense Wlans, Kwan-Wu Chin

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

The demand for bandwidth by multimedia applications remains unabated. This is particular critical given the growing number of devices with WiFi capability, and the ubiquity of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). These trends have spurred researchers to develop low-cost and backward compatible solutions to increase the capacity of WLANs. One approach is to deploy additional Access Points (APs), and strategies to manage channel, user, and transmit power. As a result, stations are likely to be near one or more APs, and therefore are more likely to experience high data rates. In this paper, we take advantage of this fact to …

Providing And Financing Aged Care In Australia, Henry Ergas, Francesco Paolucci

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

This article focuses on the provision and financing of aged care in Australia. Demand for aged care will increase substantially as a result of population aging, with the number of Australians aged 85 and over projected to increase from 400,000 in 2010 to over 1.8 million in 2051. Meeting this demand will greatly strain the current system, and makes it important to exploit opportunities for increased efficiency. A move to greater beneficiary co-payments is also likely, though its extent may depend on whether aged care insurance and other forms of pre-payment can develop.

Feature Selection With Redundancy-Constrained Class Separability, Luping Zhou, Lei Wang, Chunhua Shen

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

Scatter-matrix-based class separability is a simple and efficient feature selection criterion in the literature. However, the conventional trace-based formulation does not take feature redundancy into account and is prone to selecting a set of discriminative but mutually redundant features. In this brief, we first theoretically prove that in the context of this trace-based criterion the existence of sufficiently correlated features can always prevent selecting the optimal feature set. Then, on top of this criterion, we propose the redundancy-constrained feature selection (RCFS). To ensure the algorithm's efficiency and scalability,we study the characteristic of the constraints with which the resulted constrained 0-1 …

Gmp‐Based Channel Estimation For Single‐Carrier Transmissions Over Doubly Selective Channels, Qinghua Guo, Defeng (David) Huang

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

We present a graph-based channel estimation approach for SC-IFDE (single-carrier transmissions with iterative frequency domain equalization) without CP (cyclic prefix) over doubly selective channels using the recently developed Gaussian message passing (GMP) technique. A direct application of the GMP updating rules in the FFG (Forney-style factor graph) of the SC-IFDE system model incurs high complexity. Approximate updating rules are therefore developed to overcome this problem. The proposed GMP-based channel estimation approach has similar complexity as the low-complexity Kalman-filtering based frequency domain channel estimation approach in the literature, but significantly outperforms the latter due to its enhanced capability in capturing the …

A Kernel-Induced Space Selection Approach To Model Selection Of Klda, Lei Wang, Kap Luk Chan, Ping Xue, Luping Zhou

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

Model selection in kernel linear discriminant analysis (KLDA) refers to the selection of appropriate parameters of a kernel function and the regularizer. By following the principle of maximum information preservation, this paper formulates the model selection problem as a problem of selecting an optimal kernel-induced space in which different classes are maximally separated from each other. A scatter-matrix-based criterion is developed to measure the "goodness" of a kernel-induced space, and the kernel parameters are tuned by maximizing this criterion. This criterion is computationally efficient and is differentiable with respect to the kernel parameters. Compared with the leave-one-out (LOO) or -fold …