Customer-engineer relationship management for converged ICT service companies

Thanks to the advent of converged communications services (often referred to as ‘triple play’), the next generation Service Engineer will need radically different skills, processes and tools from today’s counterpart. Why? in order to meet the challenges of installing and maintaining services based on multi-vendor software and hardware components in an IP-based network environment. The converged services environment is likely to be ‘smart’ and support flexible and dynamic interoperability between appliances and computing devices. These radical changes in the working environment will inevitably force managers to rethink the role of Service Engineers in relation to customer relationship management. This paper aims to identify requirements for an information system to support converged communications service engineers with regard to customer-engineer relationship management. Furthermore, an architecture for such a system is proposed and how it meets these requirements is discussed

Adolescent dietary patterns are associated with lifestyle family psycho-social factors

Background/ Objectives: Dietary intake during adolescence contributes to lifelong eating habits and the development of early risk factors for disease in adulthood. Few studies have examined the dietary patterns of adolescents and the social and environmental factors that may affect them during this life stage. The present study describes dietary patterns in a cohort of adolescents and examines their associations with socioeconomic factors, as well as parental and adolescent risk factor behaviours. Design: A semi quantitative FFQ was used to assess study adolescents’ usual dietary intake over the previous year. Information was collected on family functioning and various socio economic and risk factor variables via questionnaire. Adolescents visited the clinic for anthropometric measurements. Setting: The Western Australian Pregnancy Cohort Study (Raine Study), Perth, Western Australia. Subjects: Adolescents (n 1631) aged 14 years from a pregnancy cohort study. Results: Factor analysis identified two distinct dietary patterns that differed predominantly in fat and sugar intakes. The ‘Western’ pattern consisted of high intakes of take away foods, soft drinks, confectionery, French fries, refined grains, full fat dairy products and processed meats. The ‘Healthy’’ pattern included high intakes of whole grains, fruit, vegetables, legumes and fish. ANOVA showed that the ‘Western’ dietary pattern was positively associated with greater television viewing and having a parent that smoked, and was inversely associated with family income. The ‘Healthy’’ pattern was positively associated with female gender, greater maternal education, better family functioning and being in a two parent family, and was inversely associated with television viewing. Conclusions: This study suggests that both lifestyle factors and family psycho social environment are related to eating patterns in Australian adolescents

Early risk factors for adolescent antisocial behaviour: an Australian longitudinal study

Objective: This investigation utilizes data from an Australian longitudinal study to identify early risk factors for adolescent antisocial behaviour. Method: Analyses are based on data from the Mater University Study of Pregnancy, an on-going longitudinal investigation of women’s and children’s health and development involving over 8000 participants. Five types of risk factors (child characteristics, perinatal factors, maternal/familial characteristics, maternal pre- and post-natal substance use and parenting practices) were included in analyses and were based on maternal reports, child assessments and medical records. Adolescent antisocial behaviour was measured when children were 14 years old, using the delinquency subscale of the Child Behaviour Checklist. Results: Based on a series of logistic regression models, significant risk factors for adolescent antisocial behaviour included children’s prior problem behaviour (i.e. aggression and attention/restlessness problems at age 5 years) and marital instability, which doubled or tripled the odds of antisocial behaviour. Perinatal factors, maternal substance use, and parenting practices were relatively poor predictors of antisocial behaviour. Conclusions: Few studies have assessed early predictors of antisocial behaviour in Australia and the current results can be used to inform prevention programs that target risk factors likely to lead to problem outcomes for Australian youth

Dopamine and semantic activation: An investigation of masked direct and indirect priming

To investigate the effects of dopamine on the dynamics of semantic activation, 39 healthy volunteers were randomly assigned to ingest either a placebo (n = 24) or a levodopa (it = 16) capsule. Participants then performed a lexical decision task that implemented a masked priming paradigm. Direct and indirect semantic priming was measured across stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) of 250, 500 and 1200 ms. The results revealed significant direct and indirect semantic priming effects for the placebo group at SOAs of 250 ms and 500 ms, but no significant direct or indirect priming effects at the 1200 ms SOA. In contrast, the levodopa group showed significant direct and indirect semantic priming effects at the 250 ms SOA, while no significant direct or indirect priming effects were evident at the SOAs of 500 ins or 1200 ms. These results suggest that dopamine has a role in modulating both automatic and attentional aspects of semantic activation according to a specific time course. The implications of these results for current theories of dopaminergic modulation of semantic activation are discussed