Search results

Five prominent consultants look into the future, projecting technological advancements that, in some cases, will enhance current library systems, and in many cases will cause them to become obsolete. Major trends include advances in mainframe and microcomputing technology, the development of inexpensive local area networks and telecommunications gateways, and the advent of (mass) optical storage.

This paper aims to introduce a special section based on papers from Australasian Conference for Information Systems 2014.

This paper comments on key contextualisation moments in relevant history.

This paper describes the initiative in Australia to widen Information and Communication Technology ethics awareness.

This is a new attempt to bring Ethics and Information Systems academics closer together.

Presents two case studies offering alternative solutions to the automatic assembly of moulded parts, which require further subassembly activities and inspection. Each illustrates the approach that is resulting in pioneering new concepts and designs, based on sound engineering principles.

Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) represents a new approach to understanding the process of human communication. Developed by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in the early 1970s, it is derived from linguistics, psychology, neurophysiology, kinetics, and cybernetics. NLP is designed to help its users—whether they are therapists, salespersons, or teachers—more quickly gain rapport with their subjects.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the work between statutory sector partners in Staffordshire to establish a transformational rather than transactional health and well being board and its approach to resource allocation.

The paper describes the principles and process of achieving a shared ambition for Staffordshire, and the practical and strategic considerations of taking a broader and more ambitious approach than current guidance recommends.

Supporting individual organisations to achieve their statutory requirements within the context of the shared vision, and using customer insight intelligently to influence the decision‐making process, are critical to success. The challenge of moving resources in times of financial hardship and organisational flux should not be underestimated.

The process of moving resources into prevention and early intervention cannot be done in a “one size fits all” way and has to be considered as part of a differentiated approach. In addition, organisations must be willing to cede influence and resources to support the vision, thus challenging culture and traditional organisational boundaries and structures.

The process described in the paper is designed to improve health and well being for citizens in Staffordshire, tackling inequality in an integrated, targeted and proportionate way.

This is an emerging example of “whole system” integration.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the contribution of cooperative societies to housing finance for the urban low income group in Ogbomoso, Oyo state of Nigeria. This is with a view to determine the effectiveness of the societies' lending as a means of solving the housing problem among the low income group in Nigeria.

Questionnaires were administered to 120 members of eight societies of four cooperative unions selected through a random sampling technique. In total, 15 members who had benefited from the loan were surveyed in each of the societies. Data were analysed with the use of frequency distribution, percentage and measure of cooperators satisfaction index (CSI).

The results showed that 52 per cent of responding members had financed the development of their houses to completion stage, while 28 per cent had their houses still under construction. The index of satisfaction (CSI) on each attribute of “affordability”, “transaction cost” and “collateral” is higher than the aggregate satisfaction on the loan. In addition, the level of satisfaction on a cooperative loan with a CSI of 3.77 is far above average (2.50) and greater than the level of satisfaction on National Housing Fund (CSI of 2.07), which is far below average. It was also discovered that membership of cooperative societies cuts across all occupations and is open to all interested members of the community irrespective of sexual or academic status.

The paper concludes that, with the popularity and effectiveness of cooperative loans in the study area, the government should encourage and integrate the initiative to evolve an efficient and effective national housing policy.

This is one of the few studies on housing development finance conducted through a non‐institutional source, particularly in the Nigerian context.

Biosolids, the residual solids from wastewater treatment operations and once considered a waste product by the industry, are now becoming increasingly recognised as a multifunctional resource with growing opportunities for marketable use. This shift in attitude towards biosolids management is spurred on by increasing volatility in energy, fertilizer and commodity markets as well as moves by the global community towards mitigating global warming and the effects of climate change. This chapter will provide an overview of current global biosolids practices (paired with a number of Australian examples) as well as discuss potential future uses of biosolids. Additionally, present and future risks and opportunities of biosolids use are highlighted, including potential policy implications.

We present here research on the impact of three levels of social structure – large-scale, intermediate, and proximate – on commitment to three types of role-related relationships: family, work, and voluntary associational. This research is carried out using data from a sample survey of Whites, Blacks, and Latinos drawn from a five-county area of southern California. The central problem of this paper is to explicate the social structural sources of commitment to social network relationships. Our interest in this problem arises out of earlier work on Identity Theory.

There have been times in recent years when it has seemed that the US economy, in particular, has defied economic gravity. This was certainly the case in the late nineties of the twentieth century. Many heaved a sigh of relief when the Nasdaq and the Dow responded to the pull of economic gravity and fell to earth in the early part of the twenty first century. The Earth at the time, in 2002, appeared to be indices of around 8,000 for the Dow and 1,250 for the Nasdaq. These measures still indicated huge wealth in terms of saleable bits of paper as well, indicating the underlying huge capacity of the real economy for creating surpluses. Both indices climbed back, though the Nasdaq was a long way from its astronomic former heights before the next (2007) crisis hit. True to the cyclical record of modern capitalism, however, by 2006 the US and the world stock markets were booming again. The nominal value of shares traded worldwide in 2006 by some estimates was nearly $70 trillion (Bogle, 2005). In 2007, another crisis appeared, ushered in supposedly by the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market in the United States; subsequent events took their toll in economic and financial terms not only in the United States but worldwide in most of the major economies. The terms “credit crunch” and “sub-prime” had become so pervasive within a few weeks of the onset of the latest economic crisis that by July 2008, the Concise Oxford Dictionary provided definitions for them. While these terms are now embedded in the language of economics and everyday speech, inevitably the affected economies will recover from the crises and continue to grow. While there is no shortage of reasons posited for the latest crisis and those preceding it, far fewer explanations have been forwarded to tell us why economies survive economic shocks and, despite dire predictions and expressions of gloom, recent crises have not been as disastrous as was once the case, notably as in the Depression years of the 1930s. During the Depression of the Thirties, production fell by a third between 1929 and 1933, unemployment reached 13 million and even by 1938 one person in five were unemployed. No economist has predicted these dire consequences even for the crisis of 2007–2009. In 1999, Paul Krugman published his short book: The Return of Depression Economics in which he not only reminded us of the 1930s Depression but suggested that the then economic crises bore an “eerie resemblance to the Great Depression.”¹ He retreats within a few pages and describes the events as the Great Recession because the global damage has been “well short of Depression levels” (Krugman, 1999). A decade later, Krugman, by then a Nobel laureate for economics in 2008, began his 2009 revised edition of Return of Depression Economics thus: “The world economy is not in depression: it probably won't fall into depression (though I wish I could be completely sure about that)” (Krugman, 2009). By early January 2009, he surprised other economic commentators by using the term “depression” in his New York Times column.