Author: John Kao
Examines the world's innovation hotspots: Singapore, Denmark and Finland, and then presents a plan for a national innovation strategy which would harness the United States talent and resources, and change the way innovation occurs.
Tuesday, 8 December 2009
Statistics for dummies [book]
Author: Deborah Rumsey
"For everyone who wants to sort through and evaluate the incredible amount of statistical information that comes to them on a daily basis ... This book arms you with the ability to decipher and make important decisions about statistical results ... [Contains] practical and intuitive explanations of statistical concepts, ideas, techniques, formulas, and calculations. Clear and concise step-by-step procedures that intuitively explain how to work through statistics problems." - from publisher.
The art of digital branding [book]
Author: Ian Cocoran
Covers the pivotal role the colour schemes and menu formats play in the perception of an online brand, and how to encourage and retain traffic flow through competitions, vouchers, and giveaways, moderated forums, or subscription-based membership.
Friday, 4 December 2009
Boomtown 2050 : scenarios for a rapidly growing city [book]
Author: Richard Weller
"Perth, a city of 1.5 million relatively complacent people, is changing at a phenomenal rate. Latest predictions are that the city will grow from 1.5 million people to 4.2 million by 2056. To meet this increase the entire city and its infrastructure needs to double in the next 4 decades. This will have huge consequences for the culture and ecology of the city: Perth's long term survival is at stake. The book is designed to help the community visualize the results of planning decisions and get everyone involved in the debate about how the city should grow. This is an important and timely book for Perth, but it also presents a model piece of research that could be emulated in any city experiencing rapid change." - from publisher.
Author: Ross Garland
“Project governance is the decision-making framework that guides the development of a project within which the critical project decisions are made. Effective project governance is recognized as a key feature of successful projects, while ineffective decision making leads to project delay and failure. ...This] is a practical and comprehensive new title that guides readers through the logical steps required for the establishment of a project governance framework for an individual project or across an entire organization.” - cover.
Tuesday, 1 December 2009
Public sector intranets [book]
Author: Anna Shaw
"A unique guide to the particular challenges faced by those who develop, implement and manage intranet sites for public sector organisations. Based on the real-life experiences of the contributors, the report offers practical advice on topics such as securing buy-in and raising awareness at all levels of the organisation, improving accessibility and usability, use of web 2.0 tools and ensuring relevance with a thorough and effective user-consultation process." - executive summary.
The Economics of climate change mitigation : policies and options for global action beyond 2012 [online]
Author: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
"Addresses key climate policy issues including: an ideal set of climate policy tools; the size of the economic and environmental costs of incomplete country or sector coverage of climate change mitigation policies; how to concretely develop a global carbon market; the case for, and what can we reasonably expect from, R&D and technology support policies; and the incentives for major emitting countries to join a climate change mitigation agreement." - abstract.
Thursday, 26 November 2009
The Changing Nature of Global Innovation and Competitiveness (journal article)
By Scott Andes
from Information Technology and Innovation Foundation Policy Issue
"In this article for Future’s Magazine ITIF research analyst Scott Andes discusses the findings of the Atlantic Century and how globalization is redefining competition and the importance of innovation."
An integrated model for business process measurement (journal article)
By Vincent C. Yen
from Business Process Management Journal Vol 15 Iss 6 2009, pp. 865 - 875
"Research in the evaluation of business processes (BPs) seems to have missed those of BP modeling techniques. Past studies on evaluations have focused in most cases on a single objective or goal of a BP using quantitative performance measures or qualitative surveys. In this paper, an approach that combines all relevant single purpose measures (relevant to the goals of the BP) into one overall measure is proposed. The overall measure will reflect all stakeholders' perspective and preference ratings on the attributes/criterion of the BP in question. The conceptual model is supported by the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) methodology."
Tuesday, 24 November 2009
The Blue Revolution (journal article)
by Colin Chartres
from Australasian Science, December 2009
"Water scarcity is going to be one of the critical limitations on agricultural production and our ability to feed the growing world population. However, the overall productivity of water use can be increased to help cope with increasing food demand."
Harvest Fare (article)
by Fran Molloy
from Fast Thinking, November 16 2009
Fran Molloy looks at the little picture on energy - harvesting micro amounts - that could change the world:
"Since humans recognised that wind and water and the sun were generating energy, we have been trying to harvest it, through such things as windmills and waterwheels - but these were never sufficient to satisfy the needs of a greedy, growing, industrial world. But the information revolution has introduced miniaturisation, and from solar-powered calculators to motion-powered wristwatches, we have been capturing tiny amounts of energy for our gadgets for decades. Now, it seems that our scavenging ways may allow us to squeeze every last drop of the highend energy we produce by powering sensor networks to control its use."
Author: Douglas Brown
"Outlines the principles of one of the more difficult branches of law. It aims to digest the many judicial decisions into a form that reveals the essential elements and also seeks to summarise and abbreviate the critical statutory provisions in each jurisdiction." - from publisher.
Author: Ken Hickson
"An illustrated, alphabetical digest with an encyclopaedic approach to carbon and climate change. ... Opinions and facts are gathered together alongside global personalities and advocates for action. Insights into the latest research and innovations to produce energy that is carbon-free and climate-friendly." - publisher's website.
Interactions among different dimensions of a responsive public space: case study in Iran (journal article)
by Maryam Charkhchian and Seyyed Abdolhadi Daneshpour
from Review of Urban and Regional Development Studies, Vol 21 No 1 2009
"A place is generally identified by its varying physical, activity, social and meaning (connotative) characteristics. In this paper, the "Model of Responsive Public Space" is defined by these four aspects and each of them has its own special indicators as shown in previous studies on this subject. To examine this model and evaluate the interactions between these dimensions, experimental studies were carried out in two stages. In the first stage, open-ended structured interviews were carried out with 70 participants to adjust the model with personal opinions about public spaces in Qazvin city, Iran. In the second stage a questionnaire was used to explore the effect of the four dimensions on each other. 598 users of a selected public space participated in this study. The results were analyzed by SPSS software applying a Pearson correlation test and Excel software. These results indicate that not only in theory but also in practice, public spaces have four distinct aspects that must be taken into consideration when creating a responsive public space. The most significance correlation is that between the meaning and the social dimension of public spaces."
Spatially varying effects of re-zoning on housing price (journal article)
by Seong-Hoon Cho, Seung Gyu Kim and Dayton M. Lambert
from Review of Urban and Regional Development Studies, Vol 21 No 1 2009
"A hedonic price equation is estimated at the parcel level to capture the spatially-varying effects of rezoning on housing prices using a geographically weighted regression - spatial autoregressive error model (GWR-SEM). The empirical results highlight a number of points. Firstly, the positive amenities from rezoning to office use act as a buffer and transition the zones between single family housing to commercial zones near downtown areas may be applicable to approving the same kind of rezoning in other areas. Secondly, when approving rezoning from agriculture to residential or commercial use, it may be necessary to anticipate the positive amenities from rezoning in less well-off neighborhoods and the negative amenities from rezoning in well-off neighborhoods. Thirdly, the positive amenities from well-designed open space preservation districts may encourage county planners to consider similar types of projects in the future."
Thursday, 19 November 2009
Reassessing Outsourcing in Ict-Enabled Public Management (journal article)
By Tino Schuppan
from Public Management Review Vol 11 Issue 6 Nov 2009 , pp 811 - 831
"Using Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in public administration goes beyond online services, as it also enables new kinds of work sharing and information exchange between different agencies. These can be used to establish new forms of public service delivery, such as the separation of service delivery between front and back offices, which enable better access for citizens. This new kind of ICT enabled work sharing will be used as a basis to analyse whether outsourcing can be reassessed. First, existing approaches to such decisions will be explored against the backdrop of public service delivery processes which have been penetrated by ICT. Next, a framework will be derived which will be used to understand better the potential of different ICT functions to affect outsourcing decisions. Finally, ICT's effect upon outsourcing will be illustrated using examples from the United Kingdom. The UK findings demonstrate that new strategic issues are emerging which are not addressed in existing public management literature about outsourcing and which therefore require further exploration and examination."
Wednesday, 18 November 2009
Transport, Housing and Urban Form: The Life Cycle Energy Consumption and Emissions of City Centre Apartments Compared with Suburban Dwellings (journal article)
by Alan Perkins et al.
from Urban Policy and Research, Vol 27 No 4 December 2009, pp.377-396
"Buildings in cities and the activities carried out therein use a significant proportion of a nation's energy consumption and produce substantial quantities of greenhouse gases in the process. Residential buildings are a large contributor, partially as a result of the transport and housing activities of households. In this study, life cycle analysis is used to calculate the total transport and housing energy and emissions from a sample of 41 households in apartment buildings in the city centre of Adelaide, Australia and compare them with suburban households. The purpose of this is to determine whether the urban density option of higher rise dwellings offers a lower environmental impact than conventional housing. The analysis includes delivered energy and greenhouse gas emissions generated by motorised travel and activities within the dwellings, and the energy and emissions embodied in household motor vehicles and the apartment buildings. The total delivered energy consumption of apartment households was found to be lower than suburban households due mainly to higher car usage, particularly in the outer suburbs. However, the analysis of total greenhouse gas emissions provided a somewhat different comparison especially when they were considered on a per capita basis. The total per capita emissions for apartment households varied considerably but, on average, exceeded those of both the inner and outer suburban households. This resulted from lower occupancy rates and higher emissions arising from higher dwelling operational and embodied energy consumption. Overall, it cannot be assumed that centralised, higher density living will deliver per capita emission reductions for residents, once the combined per capita life cycle emissions from housing and transport have been accounted for. A more vigorous educational, promotional and regulatory approach is required to achieve greater operational and embodied energy efficiency in apartment buildings to fully realise the emissions-reducing potential of such buildings in centralised locations. "
Urban Form and Housing Density, Australian Cities and European Models: Copenhagen and Stockholm Reconsidered (journal article)
by Greg Bamford
from Urban Policy and Research, Vol 27 No 4 December 2009, pp. 337-356
"Stockholm and Copenhagen have been widely regarded in English-speaking countries as exemplifying aspects of the compact city—from well planned, mixed use, higher density, transit-oriented development to sociable urban spaces. So how is it that the development of these two cities has also been located in the garden city tradition? This article tackles this question in the context of the implications European cities are often thought to have for low-density Australian cities. Comparisons of the urban form of Stockholm and Brisbane and of higher density housing in Copenhagen and Brisbane emphasise that the 'Scandinavian model' is as much about the role of open space in shaping urban form and in housing design as our current preoccupation with density"
Strategic change: program management (journal article)
by Cecily Macdougall
from Queensland Mining and Energy Bulletin, Spring 2009
"Some of the key learning points gained from our most recent engagements include the lack of understanding of programs and program management, and the recognition that strategic change
programs cannot be run from a line management position. Strategic change can be done successfully, if managed as a strategic program and not part of business as usual activities. Successful change creates value and inspires members to achieve the visions. Unmanaged and unmeasured change increases rework, increases costs and the investment rarely delivers the required outcomes. This article attempts to share some of our experiences with you to illustrate these points."
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