Abstract: Part of the self-image of Australia has, at least since its settlement/invasion by the British, been a profound sense of distance.Indeed, Geoffrey Blainey coined the phrase "the tyranny of distance" to describe its influence on the national psyche. In the modern age, this tyranny is manifesting itself in a new sphere, that of international meetings. Planning of a number of different events involving international and local (Australian) participants has revealed to the author that distance is perceived in very different terms depending on the frame of reference. There is a wealth of evidence that a flight of 24 hours by a European (used in this article to mean someone from Western Europe, including the UK) to Australia is perceived by the traveller as significantly further (and thus more arduous) than the reverse flight by an Australian. Further work is required to determine the exact multiplier (which may itself vary by location or culture), but two sets of data points are illustrative. In one instance, travel by an Australian attendee from the East coast of Australia (c. 15 hours) to a meeting on the West coast of the United States was self-reported to be roughly equivalent in Perceived Travel Pain (PTP) to a flight by an American attendee from the East cost (c. 6 hours), yielding a PTP multiplier of 2.5. In another instance, travel by a group of Australian attendees to a meeting held in Prato in Italy (c. 24 hours) was self-reported to be roughly equivalent in PTP to travel by a mixed group of European attendees where the furthest distance travelled was c. 5 hours) for a PTP multiplier of 5. Note that in neither case was the PTP multiplier remotely close to 1. Additional research is needed to investigate whether the multiplier simply increases as a function of the longest travel time involved, or whether other cultural factors play a role. One possible approach would involve a series of international events along a line between the UK and Australia, gradually shifting the events Eastward until an PTP equivalence point is reached. A more sophisticated design would involve finding a similar balance point between five nodes: East Coast of the US, West Coast of the US, UK, Central Europe and Australia. Part of the challenge for the next phase of this research is determining the lowest cost experimental design needed to establish a sufficiently general PTP formula for an arbitrary set of participants. It is, of course, possible that this may be not be computable within a finite time.
Abstract: As is widely recognised, the world is divided into countries where vehicular traffic passes on the left-hand side of the road and those where it passes on the right-hand side (as a parenthetical note, the way that the word "right" is used here for what is self-evidently the wrong side of the road is a semantic reversal of the same form but opposite polarity as the meanings assigned to the word "sinister" - See Treloar (2011), "Lefthandedness and Systematic Oppression", in press). Many countries have taken the legalised passing preference and adopted it via community consensus in other motion contexts such as walking, escalators. Let us introduce some formal notation and refer to this as Passing Preference Partiality (or P3). Passing on the left is denoted as P3L, and passing on the right as P3R. In any given country, let us denote the default as P3, and the alternative as P3'. P3 can change depending on the settings, where the most significant are road (R), footpath (F) and other modalities such as escalator or travelator (O). Using this notation, in the US and Europe P3=P3R(R, F, O), but in Australia, P3=P3L(R, F, O). Given that in the UK P3=P3L(R), one would also expect P3=P3L(F, O). However research in a number of cities has indicated that this is not the case. In London, the percentage of P3' (F, O) appears around 50% for all pairwise encounters. In Birmingham and Manchester this drops to 35%, and in Edinburgh even lower to 25%. In other words, the pattern in the (F, O) settings moves back towards the (R) setting as one moves further away from London. The current working hypothesis is that visitors to the UK in general and London in particular from P3L countries are reverting to their default patterns of behaviour in settings where P3 is not constrained by legislation (such as F and O). As a result, there is an increase of poorly negotiated pairwise encounters, and what has been described in the literature as the Dance of Indecision (DoI). Instances have been observed of up to six repeats of unconsciously synchronised moves of both participants to left then right as they approach, with a resulting eventual collision. The final resolution of the underlying mechanism behind this behaviour will need to wait on the development of mobile Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI) devices, thus allowing real-time monitoring of brain activation in different passing settings. Further research is also needed into the relative influence of the factors that contribute to the higher incidences of P3'(F, O) in the UK. These factors might include proportion of the population with P3', distance of the city from Europe, availability of subliminal influences such as foreign-language programming, influence of jetlag in impairing cognitive processes in new arrivals).The London Olympics in 2012, combining changes in transportation arrangements for locals and an influx of visitors from non-P3 L countries, presents fertile ground for further research.
Abstract: It has been long recognised that the creation and maintenance of rapport is essential to the successful conduct of meetings. Where the meetings are being held in a computer-mediated environment, such as multi-party videoconferencing, this rapport is even more critical. What has not been sufficiently considered in the literature to date is the crucial role of banter, and the effects on banter of the interactions between meeting style preferences and the bandwidth of the communications channel being used. Based on extensive analysis of a series of meetings held both face to face, and via video-conferencing, we have derived a formula that enables us to calculate the “banterwidth (b)” of a meeting as the amount of banter that can (or should) be mediated over a given channel. Put more formally:
| Interaction-focussed attendees | Moderate BanterWidth: Banterers awareness of visual and auditory cues will need to be enhanced | High BanterWidth: Banter can almost proceed as for a face to face meeting |
| Task-focussed attendees | Low BanterWidth: Banter tolerance reduced to nearzero |
Moderate BanterWidth: Banter acceptable but will need to be carefully restrained |
| Low Bandwidth Meeting | High Bandwidth Meeting |
Abstract: One of the male psychosexual stereotypes, but no less true for that, is that larger is better. This is observable across such diverse domains as bodybuilding, 4WD/SUV acquisition, and home cinema installations. Recent research, building on the existing work correlating testosterone levels with stockmarket performance, has demonstrated that this preference for size is also positively correlated both with hormone levels and the status of the individual within his own social groupings (of course, these latter two factors may themselves be positively correlated). This paper reports research showing that the domain of personal technology (and particularly information technology) is an exception to this general rule. In particular, when it comes to things like mobile phones and laptop computers, smaller is generally perceived to be better. Further work is needed to elicit why this should be the case, and also to clarify the underlying mechanism behind the interesting 'boundary technology' of digital cameras where at the same time smaller is better (for small point and shoot) and bigger is better (for large SLVs, and particularly zoom lenses). It is possible that a Freudian analysis couched in terms of 'hiding and concealment' as opposed to 'demonstration and display' may be productive here. It is also the case that significant research funding will be required to purchase the entire matrix of small to large technology options across these different domains.
Abstract: This invited paper for the first time takes an integrative approach to the widely recognised problem of mismatches in perceptions of walking speeds by The Other. In contrast to previous work, this analysis does not simply dismiss the issue as purely perceptual but draws on a rich dataset resulting from nearly a centuries combined observational feedwork. In addition to the walking settings from existing research (the street, shops), one of us (Dr A. Treloar) was able to draw on fieldwork in a university setting, as well as significant overseas and airport data. The other of us (Revd D. Treloar) was able to draw on her extensive experience of walking behaviour across the entire school age range. As is well known, mismatches in walking speeds are particularly vexatious in educational settings. The conclusion from this research is the novel insight that walking speeds display a left-skewed bell curve relationship with age. That is, they are slow early in life (probably affected by age-related locomotion constraints), rise gradually to a peak around 40 years of age, and then decline thereafter (again, affected by age-related locomotion constraints, but of a different kind). This new theory might be mis-perceived as a variant of Dr A. Elk's hypothesis relating to brontosaurus morphology, but is in fact our theory which is ours. As the cause of frustration with walking speed mismatches has been shown to be based on actual slow speeds rather than perceived slow speeds, the only effective interventions would appear to be (i) cognitive behavioural therapy for the sufferers, (ii) a process of age-targeted removal of the cause, or (iii) intensive training in dodging, obstacle prediction and collision avoidance. The next phase of this research will undertake a series of double-blind trials (potentially dangerous in the case of approaches (iii), and possibly (ii) depending on the targeting mechanism) to determine the most effective approach.
Abstract: As is widely recognised, the most critical decision to be made at the start of a technology project is not the choice of technology, but the choice of the project acronym. Many novice e-research technologists rush this crucial step, with potentially long-term negative consequences for branding, credibility and the "giggle" factor. The decision on acronym is particularly important if one anticipates a series of related projects. This article describes some desiderata for deciding on how to consistently theme project acronyms. One must select an area that has significant specialist vocabulary (to provide lots of choice), a preponderance of short terms (few project acronyms can convincingly be longer than about 5±2 characters), and a reasonable mix between vowels and consonants. As a particular case study, the article analyses a related set of e-Research projects undertaken in Australia during the first decade of this century: Australian Research Repositories Online to the World (ARROW), Dataset Acquisition, Accessibility and Annotation eResearch Technologies (DART), Australian eResearCH Enabling enviRonment (ARCHER), and Building Rules for Access Control to Electronic Resources (BRACER).
Abstract: [yet to be supplied by author]
©Andrew Treloar, 2010. W: http://andrew.treloar.net/ E: andrew.treloar@ands.org.au