Search results

The smart open house provides optimal adaptability using sensing, operating, information, and communications technology, in conjunction with open building in-filled components, to perceive user needs and environmental changes, and thereby meet the needs for sustainability and a healthy living environment. These needs are particularly pressing in view of the aged society that will emerge in Taiwan after 2020. Based on the smart open house hypothesis, this study proposes using agent-based smart skins in a smart open house, where an agent-based smart skin is embedded in a lifetime home (or ageless home) with an open system construction. The agent-based smart skin operating mechanism employs fuzzy logic inference and neuro-fuzzy learning to process environmental information from sensing devices and drive skin elements, achieving adaptive action, meeting residents' lifetime use needs, and offering a user experience-oriented smart care capability.

This study examines the factorial structure of salient user beliefs associated with smart locks. We also examine the predictive value of the identified constructs on the smart lock adoption intention and we evaluate gender differences in the predictive value of the identified constructs.

The study assumes pragmatic epistemological stance and it leverages mixed-methods research design. The research progresses through three stages: belief elicitation, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis within a nomological network. New groups of participants were recruited for each stage of the study.

We find that while potential adopters express a broad range of perceived benefits and concerns associated with smart locks, only the perceived relative advantage of smart locks vis-à-vis conventional locks in providing safety and security is significantly correlated with adoption intention for both genders. We also find that perceived novel benefits are a significant predictor of the smart lock adoption intention for women, but not for men.

Our results indicate that perceived relative advantage can be the singular critical consideration in the adoption of smart home technologies that replace incumbent solutions. The results also demonstrate that gender-specific models can better capture gender effects that influence technology adoption and use.

Smart home technology vendors would need to convince prospective users that new technology is better than the incumbent solutions on the core affordances of the incumbent technology. Men and women differ in the consideration of novel benefits afforded by novel technologies.

This is among the first studies to examine salient beliefs that affect smart home technology adoption. The findings suggest that the traditional models (TAM, UTAUT) do not capture the key salient beliefs that can influence innovative smart home technology adoption. The study also suggests that gendered models are needed to understand technology adoption in contexts where technology adoption intersects with gender roles.

The years 1964–1975 saw an unparalleled expansion of the Commonwealth Government's involvement in Australian education at all levels. At the beginning of that decade the Menzies Liberal‐Country Party Government, which had repeatedly asserted that education was a State not a Commonwealth responsibility, was directly involved only in the university sector. Yet by 1975 Federal involvement had been extended to include not only the creation of a Federal Department of Education and Science but also the assumption of broad responsibility for determining the national priorities and levels of funding in the college, school, technical and further education and pre‐school sectors.

WHEN BAFFLED by their inability to grasp the intricacies of the English educational system, the French are apt to fall back on the dictum that the French are logical (i.e. orderly) and the English are empirical (i.e. propagators of confusion). This is of course only partly true, for the orderly French educational structure is quite apt to produce mutations to meet empirical needs, just as ours is apt to display occasional manifestations of a natural and undoctrinaire orderliness.

The highly organised system of vocational education and training in Germany is often held up to Britain as an example worthy of emulation. In this article, Nadine Dyer, an industrial sociologist working for the Training Services Agency, describes the German System, and the way it fits into German society. She points out what could be regarded as some of the shortcomings of this system of vocational education and training and poses the question whether, in view of the fact that Germany and Britain are experiencing similar manpower problems, we in Britain would gain anything by adopting their system. Finally some further questions are asked about the effects and value of the German system.

This conceptual paper draws together an interdisciplinary approach to robo-advisors (RAs) as an example of an early and successful example of automated, programmed professional services.

Little is known about the forces driving this change in the delivery of professional service. This work explores the drivers of RAs, the degree of disruption incurred by the introduction of RAs, and how, as RAs advance, trust in algorithmic authority aids in legitimating RAs as smart information.

From the firms' perspective, the drivers include rebranding occasioned by the financial crisis (2008), the widening of the client base and the “on-trend” nature of algorithmic authority guided by artificial intelligence (AI) embedded in RAs. This examination of the drivers of RAs indicates that professional service automation is aligned with information society trends and is likely to expand.

Examining RAs as an indicator of the future introduction of programmed professional services suggests that success increases when the algorithmic authority in the programmed serves are minimally disruptive, trustworthy and expand the client base while keeping the knowledge domain of the profession under control of the industry.

Treating RAs as an early instance of successfully embedding knowledge in AI and algorithmically based platforms adds to the early stages of theory and practice in the monetization and automation of professional knowledge-based services.

The importance of vocational guidance, and its problems, are not discussed very much, and the general attitude towards it is one of complacency. The Crowther Report, for instance, which purports to deal with the destinies of 15 to 18 year olds, dedicates only half a dozen scattered and rather woolly paragraphs to this question. Yet “the conditions of modern life, fluctuations in economic life, evolution of techniques, complexity and diversity of vocational training, severity of competition in all sectors of human activity, present families more and more with problems of guidance which it is impossible for them to solve by themselves.”

The traditional and official attitude towards technical training in this country is that it is the duty of industry to train its own skilled workers with the help from technical colleges that industry may ask for in certain directions. This means that a large number of apprentices, especially in small firms, receive no systematic training to speak of, whilst those who serve apprenticeships with progressive firms offering sound schemes of industrial training often have no time for more than a pitiably small amount of continued general education. In France, however, there have grown up a large number of Centres d'Apprentissage, or ‘apprenticeship centres’, under the aegis of the Ministry of National Education, where about 200,000 boys and girls now receive a sound technical training accompanied by continued general education. Usually, the course lasts for three years, and the weekly programme of forty hours consists of about twenty hours' technical training and twenty hours' general education. Revenue from the apprenticeship tax which all French employers have to pay is devoted to these centres, and large undertakings are authorised to run their own centres subject to inspection by the Ministry.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Harry Messel, Harold Wyndham, L.C. Robson and Robert Menzies were instrumental in bringing about substantial change in science curriculum and infrastructure reform in NSW schools.

The paper relies on substantial archival research including materials never before examined or used by historians of education history. The paper is divided into sections, the first uses teacher surveys and identifies problems with science teaching in 1958, a key year in education history and each section after that looks at the contribution of Wyndham, Messel, Robson and Menzies in driving a new direction for science education.

The research found that Wyndham, Messel, Robson and Menzies each contributed a new dimension to the reform of science education in Australia. Their individual contributions were substantial, inter-related and interlocking but quite different. The paper argues that it is not adequate to look at science education reform purely as a means to introduce State Aid, rather science education reform was advocated as a means to ensure students had a scientific literacy going forward into a technologically driven future.

The research strikes a path through a vast primary source record to outline how individuals and science teachers more generally believed in science education reform as a mechanism to ensure students were better placed to enter a post-Sputnik world. As a result, known arguments around State Aid are only part of the story and not the main focus of the research. The aim is to supplement that knowledge by looking more at a broader picture for science reform for its own sake.

This paper takes an original approach to the history of curriculum change by providing a broader context for the State Aid debate, that is, by focussing on individual contributions to science education reform for its own sake and because science education was deemed necessary for student literacy in the future. At the same time it uses archival material never before accessed or used to tease out this history. The teachers’ surveys provide a unique insight into conditions for science teachers in the late 1950s. This material has not been accessed before and it provides a context upon which to superimpose the impact of the contributions of Wyndham, Messel, Robson and Menzies.

The authors conducted a study at a history museum with the objective of examining changes in the knowledge of students aged 12 to 14 concerning the use of primary sources.

Students utilized self-led guides while exploring two museum spaces presenting different historical events. These guides encouraged students to scrutinize the exhibits, become acquainted with the methods employed in their research, and develop an awareness of the information derived from them. Students' responses to pre- and postquestionnaires were compared and analyzed using mixed methods.

The results revealed that students became familiar with various types of primary sources, recognized that only specific sources endure through time and gained an understanding of the research methods employed to study them. Additionally, most students comprehended that the same sources could lead to diverse historical accounts and the potential reasons for such variations.

Recommendations for practice are discussed.

This study contributed to the limited knowledge regarding learning during a single, self-led tour in a history museum. The findings illuminate the potential for learning and advancing historical thinking concepts even within such museum-visit contexts.