DISASTER MANAGEMENT AND COMMUNITY WARNING SYSTEMS: INTER-ORGANISATIONAL COLLABORATION AND ICT INNOVATION.

Emergency Services Agencies (ESA) are required to co-operate and collaborate on a regular basis to provide their communities with warning information about disasters and incidents. Community Warning Systems (CWS) are a vital component of ESA operations as there are many different types of disasters and emergency incidents of varying complexity and uncertainty, which in turn directly influence the type of CWS that should be employed by an ESA for any particular incident. This paper outlines research conducted into CWS in New South Wales (NSW) state government ESA that highlights that a unified approach to the assessment, development, deployment and use of CWS. This approach could be utilised by governments at federal, state and local levels for cross border and jurisdictional management of ESA informational, ICT and process resources. Such an approach would assist government in better targeting expenditure on CWS and using ICT in an innovative manner. This research also highlights that when developing and deploying a CWS, there should be careful consideration of a number of background contextual issues such as: stakeholder involvement, incident complexity; utilisation of multi-ICT delivery platforms for economies of scale; integration of multi-ESA operational, community, communication and ICT requirements for shared direction; and development of an ICT architecture for building learning capabilities and skills of stakeholders

New Star Forming Galaxies at z\approx 7 from WFC3 Imaging

The addition of Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has led to a dramatic increase in our ability to study the z>6 Universe. The increase in the near-infrared (NIR) sensitivity of WFC3 over previous instruments has enabled us to reach apparent magnitudes approaching 29 (AB). This allows us to probe the rest-frame ultraviolet (UV) continuum, redshifted into the NIR at $z>6$. Taking advantage of the large optical depths at this redshift, resulting in the Lyman-alpha break, we use a combination of WFC3 imaging and pre-existing Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) imaging to search for z approx 7 over 4 fields. Our analysis reveals 29 new z approx 7 star forming galaxy candidates in addition to 16 pre-existing candidates already discovered in these fields. The improved statistics from our doubling of the robust sample of z-drop candidates confirms the previously observed evolution of the bright end of the luminosity function.Comment: 15 pages, accepted in MNRA

Information Systems for Disaster Management: The Impact of National Context

Disaster management systems including information systems, differ in each jurisdiction as they are dependent on cultural context, available resources and disaster typology characteristics. As a result, developing knowledge and lessons learned in disaster management, to improve systems and processes is very difficult. By better understanding why systems and processes differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction development of a body of knowledge for disaster systems and process improvement would become more achievable. To graphically highlight and learn from jurisdictional factors, we take a closer look at flood management practices (systems and processes) in China where there is a high incidence of flood disasters and significant death and damage at a far larger scale that that experienced in Australia. In China, flood preparation is based primarily on information systems predictive models to support critical hydraulic engineering decisions while response is mainly reliant on government resource allocation where the military become a key player

The Influence of Industry Culture on an Inter-Organisational Information System Adoption Process

Organisational and national cultures have been extensively studied in information systems. In this paper, we introduce and argue that the concept of industry culture has a strong influence in the adoption of an inter-organisational information system (IOIS). Data was collected from eight organisations in three industries which showed that industry culture rather than organisational culture has a greater influence in the adoption of an IOIS. In all cases, The practice component of the industry culture was examined. In the retail sector of a Fast Moving Consumer Goods industry, organisations prepared to change their culture to achieve shared IOIS adoption benefits such as sharing data across organisations. Industry culture was however shown to be an inhibitor to IOIS adoption in the foodservice industry. In the healthcare industry, customers (hospitals) were prepared to change their practices to adopt an IOIS whilst some suppliers were reluctant to change because they would lose their benefits and power they once held

Digital Innovation: A Comparison of Government CovidApps in Australia and China

COVID-19 developed from the end of 2019 and became a fully-fledged pandemic in the years that followed. There were no effective cures or vaccinations during the outbreak early stage. The Chinese Health Code and Australian COVIDSafe systems were introduced for contact tracing purposes and to stop COVID-19 spread. Chinese residents widely adopted and used the Health Code, and the COVIDSafe app initially had a high volume of downloads but few active users. We gathered data from various secondary sources e.g. government documents, government websites, academic papers etc., to better understand the Health Code and COVIDsafe functions and technical features. We adapted the UTAUT model to analyse and understand performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence and facilitating conditions as determinants of adoption for the comparison of both apps. We seek to highlight potential reasons for different digital adoption outcomes in differing cultural contexts under mandatory and voluntary conditions

Does Agency Size Affect IS Security Compliance for e-Government?

Security compliance has now become a major information systems management problem thanks to government regulations. Organizations are now developing methodologies and tools to assess compliance of Information Systems (IS) security. The research outlined in this paper is part of a longitudinal action research study which aims to help inform and improve security within Whole of Government (WoG). This paper examines the different effects of organisational size on IS security compliance within government organisations and how the adoption of security controls differed across small, medium and large government agencies. This paper identifies differences across government agencies rather than assuming that IS security compliance within e-government would be the same for different sized agencies. The approach utilised within this study may be extended to assess compliance with regulations in small, medium and large, multi-unit organizations in other sectors as well as government

Os fatores espaciais e materiais da produção e os mercados globais

Many authors have attempted to incorporate the local into the global.However, understanding the expansion and intensification of the social and material relations of capitalism that have created and sustain the dynamic growth of the world-system from the local to the global requires analysis of material processes of natural and social production in space as differentiated by topography, hydrology, climate, and absolute distance between places. In this article, I consider some of the spatio-material configurations that have structured local effects on global formations within a single region, the Amazon Basin. The Amazon is but one of the specific environments that have supplied raw materials to changing global markets, but close consideration of how its material and spatial attributes shaped the global economy provides insights into the ways other local systems affect the world-system.Muitos autores tentaram incorporar o local ao global. Todavia, compreender a expansão e a intensificação das relações sociais e materiais do capitalismo que criaram e sustentam o crescimento dinâmico do sistema-mundo do local ao global requer a análise de processos materiais da produção natural e social no espaço como diferenciado pela topografia, pela hidrologia, pelo clima, e pela distância absoluta entre lugares. Neste artigo, eu considero algumas das configurações que estruturaram os efeitos locais em formações globais dentro de uma única região, a bacia espacial e material da Amazônia. Deste modo, a Amazônia é mais um dos ambientes específicos que forneceram matérias-primas para dinamizar os mercados globais, mas é preciso considerar como seus atributos materiais e espaciais deram forma a economia global fornecendo introspecções nas maneiras que outros sistemas locais afetam o sistema-mundo

Joint Ventures em ambientes frágeis : O caso do alumínio na Amazônia

By examining the recent changes in the aluminum world trade structure this article emphasizes the Japanese strategies to secure the access to this metal, the effects of such strategies on the Brazilian Amazon region, and their consequences for the world aluminum industry. It examines how the specific environmental and physical characteristics of the aluminum and of the sites its exploitation influence its profitability and turns competitive its exportation. It discusses also that competition between core consumers has resulted in the weakening in the position of the peripheral exporters of raw materials.Ao examinar as mudanças no mercado mundial de alumínio, este artigo analisa as estratégias japoneses para assegurar o acesso a este metal, os efeitos de sua exploração na Amazônia brasileira e suas conseqüências para as indústrias de alumínio no mundo.Examina como as características físicas e ambientais do alumínio e dos lugares de ocorrência deste minério tornam sua extração lucrativa e sua exportação competitiva. Discute ainda que a competição entre consumidores centrais tem tido como resultado o enfraquecimento da posição dos países periféricos exportadores de matérias-primas

Human Ecology and Public Policy: Overcoming the Hegemony of Economics

The thinking of those with the power to formulate and implement public policy is now almost totally dominated by the so-called science of economics. While efforts have been made to supplement or modify economics to make it less brutal or less environmentally blind, here it is suggested that economics is so fundamentally flawed and that it so completely dominates the culture of late modern capitalism (or postmodernity) that a new master human science is required to displace it and provide an alternative coordinating framework for research and for defining reality. This could then provide an alternative basis for formulating public policy. It is argued that if human ecology is to fill this role, it will must be developed on consistently anti-reductionist foundations, and that such a social science would totally reorient public policy from a domain for power elites to a domain for genuinely democratic societies to define and control their destinies