The emergent roles of a designer in the development of an e learning service

This paper presents reflections from a service design case study and uses it to investigate the emerging roles of a designer. Skills, methodologies and values are drawn through the case study and used to communicate how this contributes to the continuing expansion of the profession today. Seven roles are discussed in this paper: designer as a facilitator, communicator, capability builder, strategist, researcher, entrepreneur and co-creator. The analysis of the activities of the designer in this particular case study has indicated a presence of all of these roles in various degrees. This brings up three key questions for discussion: 1. How can the design profession communicate the value of this role shift to external audiences? 2. How will design education address the requirements of these emerging roles? and more relevant to this workshop, 3. How will businesses utilise these additional skills of a designer

The influence of atmosphere on the performance of pure-phase WZ and ZB InAs nanowire transistors

We compare the characteristics of phase-pure MOCVD grown ZB and WZ InAs nanowire transistors in several atmospheres: air, dry pure N$_2$ and O$_2$, and N$_2$ bubbled through liquid H$_2$O and alcohols to identify whether phase-related structural/surface differences affect their response. Both WZ and ZB give poor gate characteristics in dry state. Adsorption of polar species reduces off-current by 2-3 orders of magnitude, increases on-off ratio and significantly reduces sub-threshold slope. The key difference is the greater sensitivity of WZ to low adsorbate level. We attribute this to facet structure and its influence on the separation between conduction electrons and surface adsorption sites. We highlight the important role adsorbed species play in nanowire device characterisation. WZ is commonly thought superior to ZB in InAs nanowire transistors. We show this is an artefact of the moderate humidity found in ambient laboratory conditions: WZ and ZB perform equally poorly in the dry gas limit yet equally well in the wet gas limit. We also highlight the vital role density-lowering disorder has in improving gate characteristics, be it stacking faults in mixed-phase WZ or surface adsorbates in pure-phase nanowires.Comment: Accepted for publication in Nanotechnolog

Parental Education and Child Health: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Taiwan

This paper exploits a natural experiment to estimate the causal impact of parental education on child health in Taiwan. In 1968, the Taiwanese government extended compulsory education from six to nine years. From that year through 1973, the government opened 254 new junior high schools, an 80 percent increase, at a differential rate among regions. We form treatment and control groups of women or men who were age 12 or under on the one hand and between the ages of 13 and 20 or 25 on the other hand in 1968. Within each region, we exploit variations across cohorts in new junior high school openings to construct an instrument for schooling. We employ this instrument to estimate the causal effects of mother's or father's schooling on the incidence of low birthweight and mortality of infants born to women in the treatment and control groups or the wives of men in these groups in the period from 1978 through 1999. Parents' schooling, especially mother's schooling, does indeed cause favorable infant health outcomes. The increase in schooling associated with the reform saved almost 1 infant life in 1,000 live births, resulting in a decline in infant mortality of approximately 11 percent.

A Textual Processing Model of Risk Communication: Lessons from Typhoon Haiyan

As the world’s urban poor increase in numbers, they become acutely vulnerable to hazards from extreme weather events. On 8 November 2013, Typhoon Haiyan struck the province of Leyte, Philippines, with casualties numbering in the thousands, largely because of the ensuing storm surge that swept the coastal communities. This study investigates the role and dynamics of risk communication in these events, specifically examining the organizational processing of text within a complex institutional milieu. The authors show how the risk communication process failed to convey meaningful information about the predicted storm surge, transmitting and retransmitting the same routine text instead of communicating authentic messages in earnest. The key insight is that, rather than focus solely on the verbatim transmission of a scripted text, risk communication needs to employ various modes of translation and feedback signals across organizational and institutional boundaries. Adaptation will require overcoming organizational rigidities in order to craft proportionate responses to extreme weather events that may lie outside personal and institutional memory. Future work should build upon the textual processing approach to risk communication, expanding it into a comprehensive relational model of environmental cognition

Negotiating the occupational landscape : the career trajectories of ex-teachers and ex-engineers in Singapore

The central focus of this thesis is how professionals in Singapore negotiate\ud occupational mobility in their career life-course. The research seeks to understand the\ud factors that underpin and guide individual aspiration and motivations when making\ud occupational moves within career trajectories. Occupational mobility is fast\ud becoming the norm among the international skilled labour force, creating a need to\ud understand how such flexibility can be used advantageously, at the national level, for\ud workforce management. The approach taken in this study conceptualises the career\ud landscape as a field, and analyses mobility at the political, social and individual\ud levels. It examines the power that is enacted by government on its citizens and the\ud reflexive meaning making of individuals participating in occupational mobility. The\ud empirical work consists of interviews with ex-teachers and ex-engineers in Singapore.\ud The thesis presents an analysis of their narratives and identifies generic skills\ud acquired in pre-employment training and in employment as a key to understanding\ud how professional individuals are negotiating occupational fields.\ud Amongst the achievements of the research is the understanding of what happens\ud when individuals move from one occupation to the next. The research attempts to\ud humanise the 'human resource' and present, through individual narratives, the\ud individual's perspective on the changing nature of work, the need to participate in\ud boundaryless work contexts and their involvement in occupational mobility. The\ud thesis further illustrates the complexities that surround mobile behaviours of workers\ud within an Asian context, and presents ways of understanding the needs of such\ud professional workers so that they can negotiate the contemporary advanced economy\ud landscape more effectively. The resulting conceptual framework attempts to explain\ud how mobile Asian professional workers negotiate occupational mobility within a\ud context that is influenced by conservative Confucian ideologies that place nation\ud before self, and community before family. The research further emphasises the role\ud that state-initiated lifelong learning structures play in creating the mobile worker and\ud explores how generic skills facilitate occupational movements. It discusses the\ud importance of contextualised skill acquisition and practice for subsequent\ud recontextualisation in a new occupation and also aligns current career discourses to\ud the perceptions that these individuals have of their occupations. Finally, the role that lifelong learning is perceived to play when considering the need for career\ud adaptability competences, the space for recontextualisation of skills and the\ud ideologies that influence individual occupational mobility are presented. By looking\ud at those who have participated in it themselves, this research explores how\ud individuals engage in occupational mobility and explains how control can be\ud maintained over people's personal aspirations in the grand occupational mobility\ud scheme

Music symbol recognition

This paper focuses on optical music recognition (OMR) system that recognizes the musical symbols on a digitized music sheet and converts them into symbolic music representation. Two main stages are distinguished ? pre-processing and symbol analysis. In the pre-processing stage, staves are detected and removed; while in the symbol analysis stage, each musical symbol is recognized and analyzed. The musical semantics are then determined and converted into symbolic music representation stored in text form

Video shot boundary detection: seven years of TRECVid activity

Shot boundary detection (SBD) is the process of automatically detecting the boundaries between shots in video. It is a problem which has attracted much attention since video became available in digital form as it is an essential pre-processing step to almost all video analysis, indexing, summarisation, search, and other content-based operations. Automatic SBD was one of the tracks of activity within the annual TRECVid benchmarking exercise, each year from 2001 to 2007 inclusive. Over those seven years we have seen 57 different research groups from across the world work to determine the best approaches to SBD while using a common dataset and common scoring metrics. In this paper we present an overview of the TRECVid shot boundary detection task, a high-level overview of the most significant of the approaches taken, and a comparison of performances, focussing on one year (2005) as an example

Evolution of InAs branches in InAs/GaAs nanowire heterostructures

Branched nanowireheterostructures of InAs∕GaAs were observed during Au-assisted growth of InAs on GaAsnanowires. The evolution of these branches has been determined through detailed electron microscopy characterization with the following sequence: (1) in the initial stage of InAsgrowth, the Au droplet is observed to slide down the side of the GaAsnanowire, (2) the downward movement of Aunanoparticle later terminates when the nanoparticle encounters InAsgrowing radially on the GaAsnanowire sidewalls, and (3) with further supply of In and As vapor reactants, the Aunanoparticles assist the formation of InAs branches with a well-defined orientation relationship with GaAs∕InAs core/shell stems. We anticipate that these observations advance the understanding of the kink formation in axial nanowireheterostructures.The Australian Research Council is acknowledged for the financial support of this project. One of the authors M.P. acknowledges the support of an International Postgraduate Research Scholarship