Harnessing Sources of Innovation, Useful Knowledge and Leadership within a Complex Public Sector Agency Network: A Reflective Practice Perspective

This Innovation Portfolio Project focuses on the development and implementation of a single workplace innovation, namely the "Portal2Progress" (P2P) to the context of the Western Australian Department of Fire and Emergency Services (DFES). The P2P endeavour sought to harness emergent grassroots innovation ideas within the complexity of the contemporary public sector environment of the DFES, which I lead. The P2P is the Innovation Project that underpins my Professional Doctorate study, which is essentially insider research on the introduction and embedding of P2P as a workplace innovation. Within my role, I was actively involved in the research process and in the innovation project delivery. The organisational goal of this Innovation Portfolio Project was that DFES would benefit practically and culturally from the adoption of the P2P. The P2P mechanism of the cultivation of innovative ideas, percolating within DFES, was intended to make a real difference to the business of the agency; and culturally, by the adoption of those ideas leading to the organisation's embracing of innovation and learning. The social aim was to add public value to DFES operations through the delivery of improved service to the community and by making a contribution to the field of public sector management. This Innovation Portfolio Project provides a vehicle for the sharing of knowledge, derived from this endeavour. It also provides a reference, available for the benefit of others that might seek to embed an innovation strategy across their organisation. My personal aim from this research was that of self-improvement as a thinker, as a leader and as a scholar. The Innovation Portfolio Project of this workplace research project, articulates the results of my study from a practical, organisational, academic and personal perspective. It also presents my reflections on the contextual conditions I see as more broadly necessary for the successful implementation of change in public service organisations and more specifically, the leadership, organisational structure and power relationships that I believe made change possible in the DFES. Through my reflection on the findings of this study and its significance, I have explored its potential within DFES, the challenges into future and how these might be managed. I also briefly consider the wider impacts for the wider public sector of P2P and what might be achieved by broader adoption into a public sector organisation

Tscale: A new multidimensional scaling procedure based on tversky's contrast model

Tversky's contrast model of proximity was initially formulated to account for the observed violations of the metric axioms often found in empirical proximity data. This set-theoretic approach models the similarity/dissimilarity between any two stimuli as a linear (or ratio) combination of measures of the common and distinctive features of the two stimuli. This paper proposes a new spatial multidimensional scaling (MDS) procedure called TSCALE based on Tversky's linear contrast model for the analysis of generally asymmetric three-way, two-mode proximity data. We first review the basic structure of Tversky's conceptual contrast model. A brief discussion of alternative MDS procedures to accommodate asymmetric proximity data is also provided. The technical details of the TSCALE procedure are given, as well as the program options that allow for the estimation of a number of different model specifications. The nonlinear estimation framework is discussed, as are the results of a modest Monte Carlo analysis. Two consumer psychology applications are provided: one involving perceptions of fast-food restaurants and the other regarding perceptions of various competitive brands of cola soft-drinks. Finally, other applications and directions for future research are mentioned.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45750/1/11336_2005_Article_BF02294658.pd

Motivation and Engagement of Boys: Evidence-based Teaching Practices: A Report Submitted to the Australian Government Department of Education, Science and Training (Appendices)

The first appendix in this report is the complete version of the literature review from the research project "Motivation and Engagement of Boys: Evidence-based Teaching Practices." This project was carried out by the University of Western Sydney on behalf of the Australian Government Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) between December 2004 and June 2005. The project is a quality teacher initiative under the Australian Government Quality Teaching Programme (AGQTP) designed to strengthen the skills and understanding of the teaching profession. The review of literature into the motivation and engagement of boys has three specific focal points. The first concentrates on definitions and issues surrounding motivation and engagement. The second identifies the key issues and factors in boys' academic and social outcomes and links these back to motivation and engagement. The third focuses on research about school and classroom strategies that have been shown to be effective in improving the academic and social outcomes of boys. The second appendix in this report is the complete version of the case study reports from the research project, "Motivation and Engagement of Boys: Evidence-based Teaching Practices." The 15 case studies in this research show schools that have taken up the significant challenge of working towards improving social and academic outcomes for their boys. These case studies reveal a variety of policies, interventions and strategies, reflecting the different educational decisions that each school has made as a result of identifying its particular contextual needs. It also highlights the different stages that each school has reached on a significant educational journey

Motivation and Engagement of Boys: Evidence-based Teaching Practices: A Report Submitted to the Australian Government Department of Education, Science and Training (Main Report)

This report is the outcome of a research project carried out between December 2004 and June 2005 by the University of Western Sydney. The project was commissioned by the Australian Government Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) as a quality teacher initiative under the Australian Government Quality Teacher Programme (AGQTP). The aim of the report was to examine the motivation and engagement of boys, in particular those from Indigenous, low socioeconomic, rural and isolated backgrounds. These boys have historically been over-represented among those students who are under-achieving academically and/or experiencing social difficulties. The objective of this project is to inform teachers’ professional learning, knowledge and practice, and school curriculum development in relation to the education of boys in the early and middle years of schooling. In particular, the project sets out to identify and describe evidence-based teaching practices that have proved effective in improving the motivation, engagement and academic and social outcomes of boys, particularly those boys at risk of disengaging from school-based learning activities

The JCMT Gould Belt Survey: First results from SCUBA-2 observations of the Cepheus Flare region

We present observations of the Cepheus Flare obtained as part of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) Gould Belt Legacy Survey (GBLS) with the SCUBA-2 instrument. We produce a catalogue of sources found by SCUBA-2, and separate these into starless cores and protostars. We determine masses and densities for each of our sources, using source temperatures determined by the Herschel Gould Belt Survey. We compare the properties of starless cores in four different molecular clouds: L1147/58, L1172/74, L1251 and L1228. We find that the core mass functions for each region typically show shallower-than-Salpeter behaviour. We find that L1147/58 and L1228 have a high ratio of starless cores to Class II protostars, while L1251 and L1174 have a low ratio, consistent with the latter regions being more active sites of current star formation, while the former are forming stars less actively. We determine that if modelled as thermally supported Bonnor–Ebert spheres, most of our cores have stable configurations accessible to them. We estimate the external pressures on our cores using archival 13CO velocity dispersion measurements and find that our cores are typically pressure confined, rather than gravitationally bound. We perform a virial analysis on our cores, and find that they typically cannot be supported against collapse by internal thermal energy alone, due primarily to the measured external pressures. This suggests that the dominant mode of internal support in starless cores in the Cepheus Flare is either non-thermal motions or internal magnetic fields.ISSN:0035-8711ISSN:1365-2966ISSN:1365-871

The ceramic ecology of florida: compositional baselines for pottery provenance studies

The success of pottery provenance studies is fundamentally dependent upon spatially patterned variation in the composition of exploited clay resources. Uniformity in clay composition within a region and recognizable differences between regions of interest are essential requirements for determining provenance, but these parameters are difficult to satisfy in study areas such as the coastal plain of the southeastern USA in which chemical and mineralogical variation tend toward continuous gradients. In an attempt to improve the reliability and validity of pottery provenance studies in the area, this research investigates compositional variation in raw clay samples from across Florida and southern Georgia through NAA (n=130) and petrographic analysis (n=99). The results indicate that fourteen distinct compositional regions can be differentiated, ranging from 50 km to 400 km in length. These regions dictate the direction and minimum distance a pottery vessel must have been transported in order to be recognized as nonlocal through compositional analysis. The validity of the proposed compositional regions is supported by previous case studies focused on assemblages from three of the regions. In each case, vessels were transported from other compositional regions more than 100 km away

The JCMT Gould Belt Survey : a first look at IC 5146

We present 450 and 850 μm submillimeter continuum observations of the IC 5146 star-forming region taken as part of the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope Gould Belt Survey. We investigate the location of bright submillimeter (clumped) emission with the larger-scale molecular cloud through comparison with extinction maps, and find that these denser structures correlate with higher cloud column density. Ninety-six individual submillimeter clumps are identified using FellWalker, and their physical properties are examined. These clumps are found to be relatively massive, ranging from 0.5 M⊙ to 116 M⊙ with a mean mass of 8 M⊙ and a median mass of 3.7 M⊙ . A stability analysis for the clumps suggests that the majority are (thermally) Jeans stable, with M/Mj < 1. We further compare the locations of known protostars with the observed submillimeter emission, finding that younger protostars, i.e., Class 0 and I sources, are strongly correlated with submillimeter peaks and that the clumps with protostars are among the most Jeans unstable. Finally, we contrast the evolutionary conditions in the two major star-forming regions within IC 5146: the young cluster associated with the Cocoon Nebula and the more distributed star formation associated with the Northern Streamer filaments. The Cocoon Nebula appears to have converted a higher fraction of its mass into dense clumps and protostars, the clumps are more likely to be Jeans unstable, and a larger fraction of these remaining clumps contain embedded protostars. The Northern Streamer, however, has a larger number of clumps in total and a larger fraction of the known protostars are still embedded within these clumps