Middle-out approaches to reform of university teaching and learning: Champions striding between the top-down and bottom-up approaches

In recent years, Australian universities have been driven by a diversity of external forces, including funding cuts, massification of higher education, and changing student demographics, to reform their relationship with students and improve teaching and learning, particularly for those studying off-campus or part-time. Many universities have responded to these forces either through formal strategic plans developed top-down by executive staff or through organic developments arising from staff in a bottom-up approach. By contrast, much of Murdoch University's response has been led by a small number of staff who have middle management responsibilities and who have championed the reform of key university functions, largely in spite of current policy or accepted practice. This paper argues that the "middle-out" strategy has both a basis in change management theory and practice, and a number of strengths, including low risk, low cost, and high sustainability. Three linked examples of middle-out change management in teaching and learning at Murdoch University are described and the outcomes analyzed to demonstrate the benefits and pitfalls of this approach

SenseCam image localisation using hierarchical SURF trees

The SenseCam is a wearable camera that automatically takes photos of the wearer's activities, generating thousands of images per day. Automatically organising these images for efficient search and retrieval is a challenging task, but can be simplified by providing semantic information with each photo, such as the wearer's location during capture time. We propose a method for automatically determining the wearer's location using an annotated image database, described using SURF interest point descriptors. We show that SURF out-performs SIFT in matching SenseCam images and that matching can be done efficiently using hierarchical trees of SURF descriptors. Additionally, by re-ranking the top images using bi-directional SURF matches, location matching performance is improved further

Twilight Intensity Variation of the Infrared Hydroxyl Airglow

The vibration rotation bands of the hydroxyl radical are the strongest features in the night airglow and are exceeded in intensity in the dayglow only by the infrared atmospheric bands of oxygen. The variation of intensity during evening twilight is discussed. Using a ground-based Fourier Transform Spectrometer (FTS), hydroxyl intensity measurements as early as 3 deg solar depression were made. Models of the twilight behavior show that this should be sufficient to provide measurement of the main portion of the twilight intensity change. The instrument was equipped with a liquid nitrogen-cooled germanium detector whose high sensitivity combined with the efficiency of the FTS technique permits spectra of the region 1.1 to 1.6 microns at high signal-to-noise to be obtained in two minutes. The use of a polarizer at the entrance aperture of the instrument reduces the intensity of scattered sunlight by a factor of at least ten for zenith observations

Working Paper 12: Restoring Forest Roads

Restoring unused and abandoned forest roads is an important step in the rehabilitation of natural ecosystem processes. The USDA Forest Service estimates that there are over 435,000 miles of road within the national forest system, 52,000 miles of which are unclassified and not maintained for vehicle use. Temporary forest roads can facilitate ecosystem restoration by providing access for equipment and by serving as firebreaks. But they also have the potential to cause an array of ecological problems. Many agency land management plans call for closing and rehabilitating unneeded roads. This publication presents an overview of the ecological problems forest roads can cause and a guide to traditional and novel methods that can be used in their restoration

Working Paper 13: Treating Slash after Restoration Thinning

Restoration thinning of ponderosa pine forests often results in large quantities of slash that can be challenging to remove. As is true of most aspects of forest restoration, there is no one-size-fits-all approach for dealing with slash. In fact, there are several options commonly used in southwestern forests, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. It is important for land managers to understand the long-term implications of slash removal methods on ecosystem processes. This paper presents standard methods for disposing of slash, as well as the ecological and logistical tradeoffs associated with each method

Working Paper 16: Snags and Forest Restoration

Standing dead trees, also known as snags, are an important component of a thriving forest ecosystem. They are an essential part of the nutrient cycling process and provide crucial wildlife habitat for many species of animals. Although some may consider snags unsightly, they are a natural part of the decomposition process and may be one of the most important legacies of a forest (Tinker and Knight 2004). This publication presents an overview of snags and their relationship to ecosystem health and wildlife habitat, guidelines for maintaining snags in restoration areas, and additional information about how snags affect the level of fire hazard

Working Paper 15: Effects of Forest Thinning Treatments on Fire Behavior

One of the goals of restoration in southwestern ponderosa pine ecosystems is to reduce the risk of unnaturally severe wildfires. Many factors influence fire behavior including drought, topography, insect infestation, and weather but fuels are the only factor that people can realistically manage. This publication summarizes what is known about restoration treatment effects on fire behavior in ponderosa pine forests, and suggests treatment options that can alter future fire behavior

Working Paper 10: The Stand Treatment Impacts on Forest Health (STIFH) Model

This Working Paper is one of a series that describes the planning and implementation of restoration treatments in southwestern ponderosa pine forests. In this paper the treatment type is based on the Stand Treatment Impacts on Forest Health (STIFH) restoration treatments multi-aged group selection. It represents the best scientifically-based knowledge currently available about treatment types and effects. But this Working Paper is not a prescription. Restoration decisions need to be made with close attention to local conditions there is no one size fits all approach, and specific prescriptions must be determined according to project objectives. Use this publication as an aid in making informed decisions about how to restore more natural conditions, and greater health, to the southwestern ponderosa pine forests

Exploring Deep Space: Learning Personalized Ranking in a Semantic Space

Recommender systems leverage both content and user interactions to generate recommendations that fit users' preferences. The recent surge of interest in deep learning presents new opportunities for exploiting these two sources of information. To recommend items we propose to first learn a user-independent high-dimensional semantic space in which items are positioned according to their substitutability, and then learn a user-specific transformation function to transform this space into a ranking according to the user's past preferences. An advantage of the proposed architecture is that it can be used to effectively recommend items using either content that describes the items or user-item ratings. We show that this approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art recommender systems on the MovieLens 1M dataset.Comment: 6 pages, RecSys 2016 RSDL worksho