Project managers and technical change : curriculum development in strategic technology management

Traditional business approaches do not take account of the rapid technological developments underpinning today's world. Further understanding the role of technology and its efficient management to build and maintain a competitive edge in business can allow project managers to more successfully manage organisations, and to adapt to and capitalise on, today’s rapidly changing environment. Strategic Technology Management links engineering, science and management principles to identify, choose, and implement the most effective means of attaining compatibility between internal skills and resources of an organisation and its competitive, economic and social environment. This paper reviews the rationale and the development of a new Strategic Technology Management subject in QUT’s Master of Project Management program. It discusses recent developments in the area of technology management from an international perspective, provides details of the curriculum developed and discusses the experience of completing two years of teaching the new program

Self-Evaluation of Black and White College Students

A major issue in the social psychology of race relations has been the axiom that blacks tend to manifest lower self-esteem than whites.[1] Much of the empirical support for this hypothesis came from studies demonstrating that blacks are stigmatized and subjected to a variety of unpleasant and derogatory experiences.[2] However, these studies are limited in two respects: first, by their use of small, nonrepresentative samples (primarily nursery school and kindergarten children) and second, by their reliance upon inferential (semi-projective) measures of self-esteem.[3

LAND QUALITY, AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTIVITY, AND FOOD SECURITY AT LOCAL, REGIONAL, AND GLOBAL SCALES

Econometric and simulation analyses indicate that land degradation does not threaten agricultural productivity growth and food security at the global level, but problems exist in some areas. Improving market performance could reduce erosion-induced yield losses to 0.1 percent per year and the number of hungry people in less-developed countries by 5 percent over 10 years.land quality, agricultural productivity, food security, Food Security and Poverty, Productivity Analysis,

LINKING LAND QUALITY, AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTIVITY, AND FOOD SECURITY

Land quality and land degradation affect agricultural productivity, but quantifying these relationships has been difficult. Data are limited, and impacts are sensitive to the choices that farmers make. Summarizing new research by economists, soil scientists, and geographers, this report explores the extent to which land quality and land degradation affect agricultural productivity, how farmers' responses to land degradation are influenced by economic, environmental, and institutional factors, and whether land degradation poses a threat to productivity growth and food security. Results suggest that land degradation does not threaten food security at the global scale, but does pose problems in areas where soils are fragile, property rights are insecure, and farmers have limited access to information and markets.Land quality, land degradation, soil erosion, agricultural productivity, food security, Food Security and Poverty, Land Economics/Use, Productivity Analysis,

Tools for monitoring and controlling distributed applications

The Meta system is a UNIX-based toolkit that assists in the construction of reliable reactive systems, such as distributed monitoring and debugging systems, tool integration systems and reliable distributed applications. Meta provides mechanisms for instrumenting a distributed application and the environment in which it executes, and Meta supplies a service that can be used to monitor and control such an instrumented application. The Meta toolkit is built on top of the ISIS toolkit; they can be used together in order to build fault-tolerant and adaptive, distributed applications

Correspondence between sound propagation in discrete and continuous random media with application to forest acoustics

Although sound propagation in a forest is important in several applications, there are currently no rigorous yet computationally tractable prediction methods. Due to the complexity of sound scattering in a forest, it is natural to formulate the problem stochastically. In this paper, it is demonstrated that the equations for the statistical moments of the sound field propagating in a forest have the same form as those for sound propagation in a turbulent atmosphere if the scattering properties of the two media are expressed in terms of the differential scattering and total cross sections. Using the existing theories for sound propagation in a turbulent atmosphere, this analogy enables the derivation of several results for predicting forest acoustics. In particular, the second-moment parabolic equation is formulated for the spatial correlation function of the sound field propagating above an impedance ground in a forest with micrometeorology. Effective numerical techniques for solving this equation have been developed in atmospheric acoustics. In another example, formulas are obtained that describe the effect of a forest on the interference between the direct and ground-reflected waves. The formulated correspondence between wave propagation in discrete and continuous random media can also be used in other fields of physics

Decay of Z into Three Pseudoscalar Bosons

We consider the decay of the $Z$ boson into three pseudoscalar bosons in a general two-Higgs-doublet model. Assuming $m_A$ to be very small, and that of the two physical neutral scalar bosons $h_1$ and $h_2$, $A$ only couples to $Z$ through $h_1$, we find the $Z \to A A A$ branching fraction to be negligible for moderate values of $\tan \beta \equiv v_2/v_1$, if there is no $\lambda_5 (\Phi_1^\dagger \Phi_2)^2 + h.c.$ term in the Higgs potential; otherwise there is no absolute bound but very large quartic couplings (beyond the validity of perturbation theory) are needed for it to be observable.Comment: 8 pages including 1 fi