Reducing car-use for leisure: can organised walking groups switch from car travel to bus and train walks?

This paper deals with the significant leisure travel sector, focusing on the attitudes of organised walking groups towards public transport use. A series of interviews with walking group leaders explored the design of organised walks, and factors affecting journeys to and from start points. The themes presented suggest an overlying group culture involving mainly circular walks, reached by car. The research indicates an underlying engrained dependency on cars to reach walks and a degree of opposition to using public transport, which generally contradicts widely–held attitudes towards protecting the environment. Future research should focus more in depth on the long-term removal of psychological barriers to using public transport for leisure, and persuasive measures aimed at groups

The dynamism of strategic learning: Complexity theory in strategic L2 development

Learners of foreign languages (L2s) apply strategies to support learning processes and L2 development. They select strategies according to their individual needs and preferences and adjust their strategic actions to suit situational circumstances and contextual conditions. A holistic investigation of strategic L2 learning processes requires the integration of numerous interconnected, flexibly-interacting influences, which are at constant interplay with each other and whose development is difficult to predict. Validated as effective in other fields of applied linguistics, complex dynamic systems theory (CDST) can also provide an appropriate frame for researching strategic L2 learning. Based on state-of-the-art methodological guidance for complexity research, this article presents the re-analysis of empirical data from a previous study through a complexity lens. It further examines the suitability of CDST in strategy research, explores its practical value, and demonstrates that a complexity perspective can generate new, profound information about strategic learning

Researching Across Two Cultures: Shifting Positionality

Embodied and creative research methods provoke honesty, emotion, and vulnerability in participants, which add to the richness of the stories they tell and are willing to share. The positionality of the researcher is less of “interviewer” and more “co-producer” or participant in a dialogue. Visual and creative approaches invite participants to share in ways in which they are not able or willing through words alone. The data and outputs they produce, with film, art, or objects, can in turn affect those who see it more than written text and need to be analysed and disseminated along with more traditional transcripts, articles, and presentations. In the context of investigating sensitive issues such as those around embodied identity, these methods, which use embodied methods to explore embodied research questions, may feel the most appropriate. These approaches lie along the boundary of therapy and research, asking much of researchers who are unlikely to have received therapeutic training or ongoing support. Due to this deficit, the researched may find that their experience is not held or contained in a way that the content would demand. Similarly, the data themselves lie on the boundary of art and research, in that they can be seen as more than a tool to facilitate reflection, but as artifacts in their own right. What are the implications in this scenario? Where should we position ourselves and our work along these boundaries? Who holds the space for the researcher and the researched if both are made vulnerable

The changing role of the software engineer

In this paper we will discuss the changing role of a software engineer. We will examine this from four major standpoints, the software development life cycle, the influence of open source software, testing and deployment and the emergence of new technologies. We will first analyze what the role of a software engineer was in the past. We will examine limitations associated with software development life cycle models, and software failures that catalyzed increased importance for quality assurance. We then outline the current role of a software engineer. We discuss the impact of agile software development and automation on the software development cycle, the influence of open source software and how new technologies such as Function-as-a-Service and machine learning may impacted the role. Based on our research, we analyze why the software engineer role has changed and postulate prospective changes to the role of software engineer, and in particular how new responsibilities may affect the day to day work of future software engineers. We ultimately find that the role of a “software engineer” is nowadays widely varied and very broad, and it only generally indicates the type of work that the software engineer may undertake

Implementation, mechanisms of impact and key contextual factors involved in outcomes of the Modification of Diet, Exercise and Lifestyle (MODEL) randomised controlled trial in Australian adults: Protocol for a mixed-method process evaluation

Introduction The Modification of Diet, Exercise and Lifestyle (MODEL) study aims to examine the impact of providing visualisation and pictorial representation of advanced structural vascular disease (abdominal aortic calcification), on ‘healthful’ improvements to diet and lifestyle. This paper reports the protocol for the process evaluation for the MODEL study. Methods and analysis The overall aim of the process evaluation is to understand the processes that took place during participation in the MODEL study trial and which elements were effective or ineffective for influencing ‘healthful’ behavioural change, and possible ways of improvement to inform wider implementation strategies. A mixed-method approach will be employed with the use of structured questionnaires and semistructured in-depth interviews. All 200 participants enrolled in the trial will undertake the quantitative component of the study and maximum variation sampling will be used to select a subsample for the qualitative component. The sample size for the qualitative component will be determined based on analytical saturation. Interviews will be digitally recorded and transcribed verbatim. Qualitative data will be analysed thematically and reported according to the Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research (COREQ) guidelines. Ethics and dissemination The MODEL study process evaluation has received approval from Edith Cowan University Human Research Ethics Committee (Project Number: 20513 HODGSON). Written informed consent will be obtained from all participants before they are included in the study. The study results will be shared with the individuals and institutions associated with this study as well as academic audiences through peer-reviewed publication and probable presentation at conferences

Professional boundaries: research report

In 2008 the General Social Care Council (GSCC) published Raising standards: Social work conduct in England 2003-2008. This constituted the GSCC’s first report covering the work undertaken to uphold standards and protect people who use social care services. The GSCC’s analysis revealed that a considerable proportion of conduct cases, some 40%, involved allegations of 'inappropriate relations'. In the light of this finding, and the release by the Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence (CHRE) of sexual boundaries guidance for healthcare workers at the beginning of this year (Halter et al, 2009), the GSCC committed itself to exploring the possibility of producing professional boundaries guidance for social workers. To begin this exploration, the GSCC commissioned a study in early 2009.This is the report of that study. There were two main purposes. First, to establish what professional boundaries1 guidance currently exists for social workers, or for sections of the workforce that includes social workers in the United Kingdom, and the content of any such guidance. Secondly, to identify and discuss a number of other examples of professional boundaries guidance to act as points of reference for the GSCC’s project. The aim was to identify and discuss examples relevant to the GSCC’s project

Defining Interaction Design Patterns to Extract Knowledge from Big Data

[EN] The Big Data domain offers valuable opportunities to gain valuable knowledge. The User Interface (UI), the place where the user interacts to extract knowledge from data, must be adapted to address the domain complexities. Designing UIs for Big Data becomes a challenge that involves identifying and designing the user-data interaction implicated in the knowledge extraction. To design such an interaction, one widely used approach is design patterns. Design Patterns describe solutions to common interaction design problems. This paper proposes a set of patterns to design UIs aimed at extracting knowledge from the Big Data systems data conceptual schemas. As a practical example, we apply the patterns to design UI s for the Diagnosis of Genetic Diseases domain since it is a clear case of extracting knowledge from a complex set of genetic data. Our patterns provide valuable design guidelines for Big Data UIs.The authors thank the members of the PROS Center's Genome group for fruitful discussions. In addition, it is also important to highlight that Secretaria Nacional de Educacion, Ciencia y Tecnologia (SENESCYT) and Escuela Politecnica Nacional from Ecuador have supported this work. This project also has the support of Generalitat Valenciana through project IDEO (PROMETEOII/2014/039) and Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through project DataME (ref: TIN2016-80811-P).Iñiguez Jarrín, CE.; Panach Navarrete, JI.; Pastor López, O. (2018). Defining Interaction Design Patterns to Extract Knowledge from Big Data. Springer. 490-504. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91563-0_30S490504Power, D.J.: ‘Big Data’ decision making use cases. In: Delibašić, B., Hernández, J.E., Papathanasiou, J., Dargam, F., Zaraté, P., Ribeiro, R., Liu, S., Linden, I. (eds.) ICDSST 2015. LNBIP, vol. 216, pp. 1–9. Springer, Cham (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18533-0_1Genetic Alliance: Capítulo 2, Diagnóstico de una enfermedad genética (2009). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK132200/Pabinger, S., et al.: A survey of tools for variant analysis of next-generation genome sequencing data. Brief Bioinform. 15(2), 256–278 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1093/bib/bbs086Borchers, J.O.: Pattern approach to interaction design. In: Proceedings of the Conference on Designing Interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, and Techniques, DIS 2000, pp. 369–378 (2000)Tidwell, J.: Designing Interfaces, vol. XXXIII, no. 2. O’Reilly Media, Sebastopol (2012)Van Duyne, D.K., Landay, J.A., Hong, J.I.: The Design of Sites: Patterns, Principles, and Processes for Crafting a Customer-Centered Web Experience. Addison-Wesley, Boston (2003)Schmettow, M.: User interaction design patterns for information retrieval. In: EuroPLoP 2006, pp. 489–512 (2006)IBM big data use cases – What is a big data use case and how to get started - Exploration. http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/bigdata/use-cases.htmlDatamer e-book: Top Five High-Impact Use Cases for Big Data Analytics (2016). https://www.datameer.com/pdf/eBook-Top-Five-High-Impact-UseCases-for-Big-Data-Analytics.pdfBig Data Uses Cases | Pentaho. http://www.pentaho.com/big-data-use-casesHenderson-Sellers, B., Ralyté, J.: Situational method engineering: state-of-the-art review. J. Univers. Comput. Sci. 16(3), 424–478 (2010)Iñiguez-Jarrin, C., García, A., Reyes, J.F., Pastor, O.: GenDomus: interactive and collaboration mechanisms for diagnosing genetic diseases. In: ENASE 2017 - Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering, Porto, Portugal, 28–29 April 2017, pp. 91–102 (2017). https://doi.org/10.5220/0006324000910102Román, J.F.R., López, Ó.P.: Use of GeIS for early diagnosis of alcohol sensitivity. In: Proceedings of the BIOSTEC 2016, pp. 284–289 (2016). https://doi.org/10.5220/0005822902840289Laskowski, N.: Ten big data case studies in a nutshell. http://searchcio.techtarget.com/opinion/Ten-big-data-case-studies-in-a-nutshellMolina, P.J., Meliá, S., Pastor, O.: JUST-UI: a user interface specification model. In: Kolski, C., Vanderdonckt, J. (eds.) Computer-Aided Design of User Interfaces III, pp. 63–74. Springer, Dordrecht (2002). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0421-3_

Chapter 5: Evaluation

The OTiS (Online Teaching in Scotland) programme, run by the now defunct Scotcit programme, ran an International e-Workshop on Developing Online Tutoring Skills which was held between 8–12 May 2000. It was organised by Heriot–Watt University, Edinburgh and The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, UK. Out of this workshop came the seminal Online Tutoring E-Book, a generic primer on e-learning pedagogy and methodology, full of practical implementation guidelines. Although the Scotcit programme ended some years ago, the E-Book has been copied to the SONET site as a series of PDF files, which are now available via the ALT Open Access Repository. The editor, Carol Higgison, is currently working in e-learning at the University of Bradford (see her staff profile) and is the Chair of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT)

British research in accounting and finance (2001–2007): the 2008 research assessment exercise

No abstract available