Ben Harris, Professor of Psychology and Histrory travels to the Netherlands

Professor Harris traveled to The Netherlands in August. While there he met with faculty members and administrators at Utrecht University to discuss ways to facilitate student and faculty exchanges between that university and UNH. He also participated in the annual meeting of the European Society for the History of Human Science (ESHHS)

Ontology Winnowing: A Case Study on the AKT Reference Ontology

Many ontologies are built for the main purpose of representing a domain, rather than to meet the requirements of a specific application. When applications and services are deployed over an ontology, it is sometimes the case that only few parts of the ontology are queried and used. Identifying which parts of an ontology are being used could useful for realising the necessary fragments of the ontology to run the applications. Such information could be used to winnow an ontology, i.e., simplifying or shrinking the ontology to smaller, more fit for purpose sizes. This paper presents a study on the use of the AKT Reference Ontology by a number of applications and services, and investigate the possibility of using this information to winnow that ontology

The impact and effectiveness of equity focused health impact assessment in health service planning

This ebook looks at the use of equity focused health impact assessment (EFHIA) on health service plans. It examines: What are the direct and indirect impacts of EFHIAs conducted on health sector plans? Does EFHIA improve the consideration of equity in the development and implementation of health sector plans? How does EFHIA improve the consideration of equity in health planning? This ebook describes the use and evolution of health impact assessment (HIA) and EFHIA internationally and in Australia, how it has been used in relation to health service plans, examines its effectiveness and impacts on decision-making and implementation and examines several EFHIAs using case study and interpretive description methodologies. This research shows that EFHIA has the potential to have both direct and indirect impacts on health service planning. These impacts are influenced by a broad range of factors however. The case studies in this ebook show that engagement with the EFHIA process and the extent to which EFHIA is regarded as a broader learning process are important factors that mediate the extent to which EFHIAs influence subsequent activities. This research suggests that it is not possible to adequately describe the full range of impacts of EFHIA on decision-making and implementation without looking at perceptions about EFHIA’s effectiveness, in particular the perceptions of those involved in the EFHIA and those responsible for acting on its recommendations. These perceptions change over time, suggesting that future research on the effectiveness of HIA should look at the mechanisms by which this change occurs. The ebook makes two theoretical contributions in the form of (i) a typology for HIAs and (ii) a conceptual framework for evaluating the impact and effectiveness of HIAs. This conceptual framework is tested for its applicability and refined. The ebook and the accompanying publications were written to fulfil the requirements for a Doctor of Philosophy in Public Health at the University of New South Wales