Accomplishing results through teachers and students partnership

Current Australian tertiary education intake is formed by students with diverse experiences, skills, ethnicity, language proficiency and economic background. Accordingly, it is a challenge for design education to achieve intended learning outcomes while confronted with constraints of retension. Industrial Design Studio 4 (IDS4) is a third year unit led by Lecturer Mauricio Novoa at University of Western Sydney (UWS). The unit undertook an overhaul in 2005 in preparation for its current international phase. Students were given the choice to democratically participate in the reshaping of the unit. A design agency/studio and production environment structure was set in place to give students a real feel of professional life. Expectations for the subject were raised although accommodating to course objectives and intended students' learning outcomes. Unit outline was changed to cover previous year content in 4 weeks with a structure concentrated in developing research, conceptualisation and pitch proposal to client by week 5. The remaining weeks were focussed in developing industrial design solutions at similar level as in professional life. Students were given the role of clients, suppliers, markers and judges of each other with the creation of a healthy competition, ownership and critical judgement. Students rose to the challenge and showed high levels of professionalism and satisfaction with the subject. Many went through a change of heart about just wanting to pass to measure their success based on their learning outcomes. The success of the unit was best represented by students who either were offered jobs and/or commercialization of their designs. They evaluated themselves and some even decided to fail the unit and come back the following year. They believe they did not meet their own expectations and judged passing as unfair to the rest of the class. Such outcome had not happened before in the School of Engineering and Industrial Design

Preparing future designers for new market economies

In a freer global market economy, design, product development and production are no longer framed by geographical boundaries. Increasingly, the creative process requires more specialized solutions coordinated by the work of multi and interdisciplinary project teams that no longer exercise their professions or trade in close by locations. In addition, there is a raising trend towards shifting and segmenting projects between suppliers, teams, production and their components according to price, labour cost and speed of delivery. A number of areas and principles (i.e. business relationships, project management, quality control, even loyalty to a product and between employers and employees) need re-interpretation as more and more work is mediated by technology. Both in education and professional practice, design workers and students need to understand and constantly update their expertise to take advantage of new opportunities across different professions, trades, cultures, languages and nations. International Design Studio 4 (IDS4) is a third year unit project led by Lecturer Mauricio Novoa from University of Western Sydney (UWS) and currently developed as a joint effort with Metropolitan University of Technology, Chile (UTEM). It intends to prepare our future designers on the new collaborative and distributed design and manufacturing circumstances they will encounter once they start their professional life

Public transport design research initiative

This paper introduces the first in a developing series of projects run as part of the Public Transport Design Research Initiative developed by Monash University's Faculty of Art & Design and the Institute of transport Studies. Using Melbourne as a case study third year Industrial Design students were asked to investigate the future of public transport, and present pertinent, practicable, and realisable design proposals tackling some of the key issues and problems relating to this area. The project focused upon Melbourne's 2030 plan, and in particular the proposal to increase public transport usage to 20% by the year 2020. The paper discusses four case studies of student proposals that highlight not only the diversity of design solutions that resulted in three State Awards, but also the unique approaches to undertaking the studio project. The success of the project was not only in the varied and innovative outcomes, but moreover in the development of the student designers themselves, and how they dealt with conflicting requirements, wrestled with complex design problems, and developed their capacity to design and manage a project of this nature. The different approaches and tools used to tackle the project are briefly discussed

Additional file 1 of Electronic health record closed-loop referral (“eReferral”) to a state tobacco quitline: a retrospective case study of primary care implementation challenges and adaptations

Additional file 1: Table S1. Standards for Reporting Qualitative Research (SRQR). Table S2. Modifications and adaptations to eReferral strategies before, during, and after eReferral implementation in two healthcare systems (HS)

The Greenhouse Gas Climate Change Initiative (GHG-CCI): comparison and quality assessment of near-surface-sensitive satellite-derived CO2 and CH4 global data sets

The GHG-CCI project is one of several projects of the European Space Agency\u27s (ESA) Climate Change Initiative (CCI). The goal of the CCI is to generate and deliver data sets of various satellite-derived Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) in line with GCOS (Global Climate Observing System) requirements. The ECV Greenhouse Gases (ECV GHG) is the global distribution of important climate relevant gases - atmospheric CO2 and CH4 - with a quality sufficient to obtain information on regional CO2 and CH4 sources and sinks. Two satellite instruments deliver the main input data for GHG-CCI: SCIAMACHY/ENVISAT and TANSO-FTS/GOSAT. The first order priority goal of GHG-CCI is the further development of retrieval algorithms for near-surface-sensitive column-averaged dry air mole fractions of CO2 and CH4, denoted XCO2 and XCH4, to meet the demanding user requirements. GHG-CCI focuses on four core data products: XCO2 from SCIAMACHY and TANSO and XCH4 from the same two sensors. For each of the four core data products at least two candidate retrieval algorithms have been independently further developed and the corresponding data products have been quality-assessed and inter-compared. This activity is referred to as Round Robin (RR) activity within the CCI. The main goal of the RR was to identify for each of the four core products which algorithms should be used to generate the Climate Research Data Package (CRDP). The CRDP will essentially be the first version of the ECV GHG. This manuscript gives an overview of the GHG-CCI RR and related activities. This comprises the establishment of the user requirements, the improvement of the candidate retrieval algorithms and comparisons with ground-based observations and models. The manuscript summarizes the final RR algorithm selection decision and its justification. Comparison with ground-based Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON) data indicates that the breakthrough single measurement precision requirement has been met for SCIAMACHY and TANSO XCO2 (\u3c 3 ppm) and TANSO XCH4 (\u3c 17 ppb). The achieved relative accuracy for XCH4 is 3-15 ppb for SCIAMACHY and 2-8 ppb for TANSO depending on algorithm and time period. Meeting the 0.5 ppm systematic error requirement for XCO2 remains a challenge: approximately 1 ppm has been achieved at the validation sites but also larger differences have been found in regions remote from TCCON. More research is needed to identify the causes for the observed differences. In this context GHG-CCI suggests taking advantage of the ensemble of existing data products, for example, via the EnseMble Median Algorithm (EMMA)

Current systematic carbon cycle observations and needs for implementing a policy-relevant carbon observing system

A globally integrated carbon observation and analysis system is needed to improve the fundamental understanding of the global carbon cycle, to improve our ability to project future changes, and to verify the effectiveness of policies aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase carbon sequestration. Building an integrated carbon observation system requires transformational advances from the existing sparse, exploratory framework towards a dense, robust, and sustained system in all components: anthropogenic emissions, the atmosphere, the ocean, and the terrestrial biosphere. The paper is addressed to scientists, policymakers, and funding agencies who need to have a global picture of the current state of the (diverse) carbon observations. We identify the current state of carbon observations, and the needs and notional requirements for a global integrated carbon observation system that can be built in the next decade. A key conclusion is the substantial expansion of the ground-based observation networks required to reach the high spatial resolution for CO2 and CH4 fluxes, and for carbon stocks for addressing policy-relevant objectives, and attributing flux changes to underlying processes in each region. In order to establish flux and stock diagnostics over areas such as the southern oceans, tropical forests, and the Arctic, in situ observations will have to be complemented with remote-sensing measurements. Remote sensing offers the advantage of dense spatial coverage and frequent revisit. A key challenge is to bring remote-sensing measurements to a level of long-term consistency and accuracy so that they can be efficiently combined in models to reduce uncertainties, in synergy with ground-based data. Bringing tight observational constraints on fossil fuel and land use change emissions will be the biggest challenge for deployment of a policy-relevant integrated carbon observation system. This will require in situ and remotely sensed data at much higher resolution and density than currently achieved for natural fluxes, although over a small land area (cities, industrial sites, power plants), as well as the inclusion of fossil fuel CO2 proxy measurements such as radiocarbon in CO2 and carbon-fuel combustion tracers. Additionally, a policy-relevant carbon monitoring system should also provide mechanisms for reconciling regional top-down (atmosphere-based) and bottom-up (surface-based) flux estimates across the range of spatial and temporal scales relevant to mitigation policies. In addition, uncertainties for each observation data-stream should be assessed. The success of the system will rely on long-term commitments to monitoring, on improved international collaboration to fill gaps in the current observations, on sustained efforts to improve access to the different data streams and make databases interoperable, and on the calibration of each component of the system to agreed-upon international scales.ISSN:1810-6277ISSN:1810-628