Chameleons in the city: An institutional analysis of sales agents in Sydney’s new apartment market

Multi-unit dwelling (MUD) development is complex and involves multiple relationships, introducing market risks. Following the Global Financial Crisis, a ‘boom-bust’ MUD market cycle eventuated in Sydney against a contrasting political and economic backdrop. The 2017-19 supply peak was crucially enabled through off-the-plan sales by ‘project marketers’ (PMs). Many new entrants into the project marketing industry sharpened competition. Established ways of working were disrupted by technological innovation. REAs needed to adapt to retain market share. An understanding of PM roles and practices in facilitating this ownership exchange is under-represented in existing research. This thesis presents an institutional theory-based conceptual model to investigate the embeddedness of PM actions and relations within institutional ‘structures’. The key question is how PMs evolve over a market cycle to influence market outcomes as key ‘institutions’, or ‘urban managers’? A mixed-methods approach utilises interviews with 36 industry professionals involved in MUD sales practices in the peak (2017-19) and downturn (2020-21). Secondary data charts the sales industry structure and capabilities empowering PMs during the supply peak. These discussions uncover the consequences of sales practices on the spatial distribution of new supply and MUD ownership profile. PMs were found to adjust to changing institutional ‘rules’. Their ‘beliefs’ on the dominant MUD buyer profile shifted over a market cycle. In the boom, financial and government institutions supported voluminous sales to foreign buyers and investors. Little effort was needed to reach sales ‘goals’, high pre-sale rates and prices. Official imposition of constraints dissipated demand in the bust, but fiscal stimuli supported sales to owner-occupiers. As building defects came to the fore, PMs’ ‘information provider’ ‘role’ became more prominent to allay buyer concerns. Sales ‘practices’ were modified to suit the temporal context. While voluminous sales were secured using channel agents on high commissions in the boom, more sophisticated marketing tools were deemed essential to prop up sales in the bust

A semantic framework for unified cloud service search, recommendation, retrieval and management

Cloud computing (CC) is a revolutionary paradigm of consuming Information and Communication Technology (ICT) services. However, while trying to find the optimal services, many users often feel confused due to the inadequacy of service information description. Although some efforts are made in the semantic modelling, retrieval and recommendation of cloud services, existing practices would only work effectively for certain restricted scenarios to deal for example with basic and non-interactive service specifications. In the meantime, various service management tasks are usually performed individually for diverse cloud resources for distinct service providers. This results into significant decreased effectiveness and efficiency for task implementation. Fundamentally, it is due to the lack of a generic service management interface which enables a unified service access and manipulation regardless of the providers or resource types.To address the above issues, the thesis proposes a semantic-driven framework, which integrates two main novel specification approaches, known as agility-oriented and fuzziness-embedded cloud service semantic specifications, and cloud service access and manipulation request operation specifications. These consequently enable comprehensive service specification by capturing the in-depth cloud concept details and their interactions, even across multiple service categories and abstraction levels. Utilising the specifications as CC knowledge foundation, a unified service recommendation and management platform is implemented. Based on considerable experiment data collected on real-world cloud services, the approaches demonstrate distinguished effectiveness in service search, retrieval and recommendation tasks whilst the platform shows outstanding performance for a wide range of service access, management and interaction tasks. Furthermore, the framework includes two sets of innovative specification processing algorithms specifically designed to serve advanced CC tasks: while the fuzzy rating and ontology evolution algorithms establish a manner of collaborative cloud service specification, the service orchestration reasoning algorithms reveal a promising means of dynamic service compositions

Online courses for healthcare professionals: is there a role for social learning?

Background: All UK postgraduate medical trainees receive supervision from trained supervisors. Training has traditionally been delivered via face to face courses, but with increasing time pressures and complex shift patterns, access to these is difficult. To meet this challenge, we developed a two-week massive open online course (MOOC) for faculty development of clinical supervisors. Summary of Work: The MOOC was developed by a group of experienced medical educators and delivered via the FutureLearn (FL) platform which promotes social learning through interaction. This facilitates building of communities of practice, learner interaction and collaboration. We explored learner perceptions of the course, in particular the value of social learning in the context of busy healthcare professionals. We analysed responses to pre- and post-course surveys for each run of the MOOC in 2015, FL course statistics, and learner discussion board comments. Summary of Results: Over 2015, 7,225 learners registered for the course, though 6% left the course without starting. Of the 3,055 learners who began the course, 35% (1073/3055) were social learners who interacted with other participants. Around 31% (960/3055) learners participated fully in the course; this is significantly higher than the FL average of 22%. Survey responses suggest that 68% learners worked full-time, with over 75% accessing the course at home or while commuting, using laptops, smart phones and tablet devices. Discussion: Learners found the course very accessible due to the bite-sized videos, animations, etc which were manageable at the end of a busy working day. Inter-professional discussions and social learning made the learning environment more engaging. Discussion were rated as high quality as they facilitated sharing of narratives and personal reflections, as well as relevant resources. Conclusion: Social learning added value to the course by promoting sharing of resources and improved interaction between learners within the online environment. Take Home Messages: 1) MOOCs can provide faculty development efficiently with a few caveats. 2) Social learning added a new dimension to the online environment

On Strong-Feasibilities of Equivalence-Completions

The notion of completion has been proposed by Francez et al. to transform a non-equivalence-robust fairness notion to an equivalence-robust one while maintaining several properties of the source. However, a completion may not preserve strong-feasibility---a necessary and sufficient condition for a completion to be implementable. In this paper, we study the system requirement for a completion to be strongly-feasible, and determine the strongest implementable completion for every given fairness notion. Moreover, for most systems we obtain a fairness notion, which we refer to as SG + , such that SG + is the strongest fairness notion that is both implementable and equivalence-robust. Finally, we show that, if equivalence-robustness is dropped, then in general it is impossible to define a fairness notion that is implementable and stronger than all other implementable fairness notions. This implies plenty of leeway in the design of fairness notions suitable for various applications. 1 I..