Engineering handbook

2006 handbook for the faculty of Engineerin

The educational politics of curriculum policy in Vocational Education and Training in Australia

This research investigates the effects of the 1987 federal government’s Vocational Education and Training (VET) policy on curriculum development on NSW TAFE by undertaking a critical policy analysis and utilising interview data. Drawing on Foucault’s (1980, 1982) power/knowledge nexus, the study examines the complexities of social and structural relations to power and knowledge and how the state regulates the acquisition of knowledge. Foucault (1972a) saw curriculum as one form of social regulation that connects the citizen to the state. The VET policies embodied power relations by prescribing new practices that regulates the individual in a manner that is interrelated with the multiple demands of the new neoliberal economy and the expanding control of the state. VET became a mechanism for social and macroeconomic reform by being tied to youth employment, skills formation, human capital and Australia’s global economic competitiveness. This study also draws on Popkewitz’s (1987, 1991, 1997) notion that the state exploits curriculum as a converting ordinance. Technical curriculum postulates the forms of knowledge which frame and classify the world, the nature of work and in turn organises and shapes individual identity and citizenship (Olson et al. 2015). Through a case study I demonstrate how the VET policy initiatives introduced mechanisms that privileged certain political and professional actors to dominate knowledge and thereby impose their identity in the construction of educational policy, and how other stakeholders have been disadvantaged by the selection, organisation and control of curriculum intellectual property in TAFE NSW. The dominant educational philosophies in VET aim to inculcate people to adapt to these social forms rather than critically interrogate them. The federal government privatised the writing and ratifying of VET course content by contracting Industry Skills Councils to produce training packages, which specified the learning outcomes and required competencies embedded in the competency-based VET qualifications (Goozee 2001). The VET curriculum was also rationalised by the removal of the cognitive and behavioural attributes of knowledge to permit the awarding of qualifications via the Recognition of Prior Learning (Buchanan et al. 2004). The study concludes that there is no embedded curriculum in VET or TAFE NSW courses. This afforded NSW TAFE, and the for-profit sector, the privilege to determine the volume-of-learning, student/teacher ratios and modes of delivery, which allowed the student-centred citizenship paradigm of VET to be replaced with an economic, human-capital model

Enhancing Privacy Protection:Set Membership, Range Proofs, and the Extended Access Control

Privacy has recently gained an importance beyond the field of cryptography. In that regard, the main goal behind this thesis is to enhance privacy protection. All of the necessary mathematical and cryptographic preliminaries are introduced at the start of this thesis. We then show in Part I how to improve set membership and range proofs, which are cryptographic primitives enabling better privacy protection. Part II shows how to improve the standards for Machine Readable Travel Documents (MRTDs), such as biometric passports. Regarding set membership proofs, we provide an efficient protocol based on the Boneh-Boyen signature scheme. We show that alternative signature schemes can be used and we provide a general protocol description that can be applied for any secure signature scheme. We also show that signature schemes in our design can be replaced by cryptographic accumulators. For range proofs, we provide interactive solutions where the range is divided in a base u and the u-ary digits are handled by one of our set membership proofs. A general construction is also provided for any set membership proof. We additionally explain how to handle arbitrary ranges with either two range proofs or with an improved solution based on sumset representation. These efficient solutions achieve, to date, the lowest asymptotical communication load. Furthermore, this thesis shows that the first efficient non-interactive range proof is insecure. This thesis thus provides the first efficient and secure non-interactive range proof. In the case of MRTDs, two standards exist: one produced by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the other by the European Union, which is called the Extended Access Control (EAC). Although this thesis focuses on the EAC, which is supposed to solve all privacy concerns, it shows that both standards fail to provide complete privacy protection. Lastly, we provide several solutions to improve them

Emerging Communications for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are deployed in a rapidly increasing number of arenas, with uses ranging from healthcare monitoring to industrial and environmental safety, as well as new ubiquitous computing devices that are becoming ever more pervasive in our interconnected society. This book presents a range of exciting developments in software communication technologies including some novel applications, such as in high altitude systems, ground heat exchangers and body sensor networks. Authors from leading institutions on four continents present their latest findings in the spirit of exchanging information and stimulating discussion in the WSN community worldwide