Can knowledge management save regional development?

Australia needs to create innovative regions to sustain economic prosperity and regional development. In order to do this, regions will need to systematically address their knowledge needs and identify tools that are appropriate in maximising their effectiveness. Many initiatives have focused on information and communication technology (ICT) to enable knowledge exchange and stimulate knowledge generation, but active knowledge management (KM) strategies are required if ICTs are to be used effectively. These strategies must respond to the regional economic and social environments which incorporate small and medium enterprises (SMEs). This paper outlines the importance of KM for supporting regional cluster development and the key ways in which communities of practice (CoPs), a KM technique, have been used to add value in similar contexts. How CoPs and their online counterpart, virtual communities of practice (VCoPs), can be used and developed in regional areas of Australia is considered along with a program for further research.<br /

How do Australian small and medium enterprises communicate their corporate social responsibility activities online?

Much of the existing research on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) focuses on large firms, with comparatively little on Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). The SME research focuses on barriers and drivers to CSR and neglects how SMEs communicate their CSR activities. This paper addresses this gap by reporting on a content analysis of 443 Australian SME websites which identifies how they are using this channel to communicate their CSR activities.<br /

Draft Genome Sequences of Antibiotic-Resistant Commensal Escherichia coli

Antimicrobial resistance is a significant public health issue. We report here the draft genome sequences of three drug-resistant strains of commensal Escherichia coli isolated from a single healthy college student. Each strain has a distinct genome, but two of the three contain an identical large plasmid with multiple resistance genes

Weather data dissemination to aircraft

Documentation exists that shows weather to be responsible for approximately 40 percent of all general aviation accidents with fatalities. Weather data products available on the ground are becoming more sophisticated and greater in number. Although many of these data are critical to aircraft safety, they currently must be transmitted verbally to the aircraft. This process is labor intensive and provides a low rate of information transfer. Consequently, the pilot is often forced to make life-critical decisions based on incomplete and outdated information. Automated transmission of weather data from the ground to the aircraft can provide the aircrew with accurate data in near-real time. The current National Airspace System Plan calls for such an uplink capability to be provided by the Mode S Beacon System data link. Although this system has a very advanced data link capability, it will not be capable of providing adequate weather data to all airspace users in its planned configuration. This paper delineates some of the important weather data uplink system requirements, and describes a system which is capable of meeting these requirements. The proposed system utilizes a run-length coding technique for image data compression and a hybrid phase and amplitude modulation technique for the transmission of both voice and weather data on existing aeronautical Very High Frequency (VHF) voice communication channels

Unravelling mucosal immunity to poliovirus

Comment - No abstrac

Hannah Crafts and The Bondwoman\u27s Narrative: rhetoric, religion, textual influences, and contemporary literary trends and tactics

The 2002 discovery by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of a manuscript titled The Bondwoman\u27s Narrative, written by a woman identifying herself as Hannah Crafts, presents a unique opportunity to examine the unpolished writing of an African American woman who had been a slave. The Bondwoman\u27s Narrative, incorporating both novelistic and seemingly autobiographical elements to present Craft\u27s rhetorical appeals against the injustices of slavery, has many similarities with more canonical works of antebellum African American literature, including Harriet Jacobs\u27s Incidents, Frederick Douglass\u27s Narrative, and Harriet Wilson\u27s Our Nig. Among the most significant of these similarities are those involving the prefaces of the respective works as meta-text, in which the authors directly address the audience outside of their narratives\u27 frames of reference, and those involving the attitudes of the authors and their protagonists toward Christianity and the attempts of the authors and their black characters to retain faith while rejecting the perversions of religion for which the institution of slavery was responsible. To date, critical attention paid to The Bondwoman\u27s Narrative has been largely concerned with proving Crafts to have been white or black in a perhaps oversimplified static racial binary that Crafts actually critiques within her text. Nevertheless, the preponderance of the evidence within the text of The Bondwoman\u27s Narrative suggests that Crafts is best identified as black. This evidence includes the aforementioned similarities with her African American contemporaries, her treatment of black characters within the text, and her adherence to common black religious beliefs and attitudes of the day. Other critical attention has focused on Craft\u27s literary influences, most notably Bleak House by Charles Dickens. Some critics believe Craft\u27s use of Dickensian material to be tantamount to plagiarism, while others feel that it is inappropriate to apply 21st century definitions of plagiarism to Crafts due to her intents and writing context. The concept of intellectual property itself plays an intriguing role in this debate, both because of the antebellum pro-slavery notion that human beings could be property and because of disagreement by literary theorists such as Hirsch and Barthes on the relation of an author to his or her text

A preliminary meta-analysis of SME ebusiness journal publications: current trends and future research opportunities moving beyond adoption factor studies

Previous meta-analyses of SME-eBusiness journal research focuses on analysing adoption factors, pre-2000 articles and a small number of journals. This paper departs from this research by analysing 100 articles published between 2003 and 2006 in 41 journals on the basis of the research approaches employed, countries and eBusiness technologies studied, and research objectives focused upon. The paper presents preliminary insights into current major research trends based on this analysis, such as the predominant focus on adoption factor by many studies. It also identifies future research opportunities, and proposes a research agenda which aims to progress SME-eBusiness research beyond adoption factor studies by outlining research objectives to help SMEs overcome barriers and exploit drivers.<br /