Imaginary Publications

"Documenting research that has not been, and arguably should not be, undertaken since 2004"

18. Report of the Expedition to the Outer Arm, Research Note 3521. The mystery of the Terran 'Office'. Mastharnorvod Tadavas Sornhulva, Doma, 14837.

Keywords: Terra, Architecture, Pandemic
As noted in earlier research notes, civilisation on the planet Terra (their name) was destroyed by a combination of global heating (Note 478), increasingly virulent pandemics (Note 2022), extinction of crucial pollinator species (Note 2035) and a surfeit of advertisers (Note 42). A contemporaneous text called this cluster of events The Jackpot. One of the mysteries of the late stage of their civilisation was the role of the buildings they called offices. These buildings, usually in central locations in their cities, appear to have required those who used them to travel to and from them each day, often in cramped conditions on public transport (see pandemics) or via vehicles that contributed to global heating, and often at considerable personal expense. This behaviour is hard to explain as the technology available to them at the time, while crude, was sufficient to support distributed work. One hypothesis is that the ritual of attending the office served as a social marker of breeding fitness, much like the function of dominance displays in some of our own species. Another is that the ruling elites enjoyed their ability to reinforce dominance hierarchies by compelling such uncomfortable behaviour, although the fact that they also apparently chose to work in these offices is confusing. Given the paucity of surviving records from this period, it may never be possible to solve this mystery.

17. Groenewegen, D. and Treloar, A. (2021). Colonisation of the Title field: the rise to prominence of a punctuation character in scholarly discourse. Int. J. Punctuation Semiotics, V113, No. 1.

Keywords: Punctuation. Citation studies. Bibliometrics.
Abstract:This article describes an investigation into changes in the titles of scholarly articles.
Hypothesis: That the prevalence of the colon character in titles has increased over time.
Methods: Article titles were downloaded from Dimension.ai by Groenewegen for the years 1950 through 2020 at ten year intervals. The selected universities were Stanford (US), Oxford (UK) and Monash (AU). The resulting lists were analysed by Treloar using OpenRefine to count the total number of articles in each decadal snapshot, and those articles containing the colon character. The data used for the graphs is available here as a Google sheet.
Results: The results show a consistent increase in the use of the colon over time. While there are some regional differences between the universities chosen, in all cases there is a trebling of the use of the colon between 1950 and 2020.
Discussion: That the increase began just after the end of the Second World War cannot be a coincidence. Almost certainly, the end of the highly unpopular wartime Punctuation Rationing led to a flourishing of creative title activity as scholars were freed from the constraints to only use commas and full stops. The impact on the public consciousness caused by the extensive use of the colon by noted cinematic auteur George Lucas may have accelerated this trend from the 1970s onwards. Although research has demonstrated that the use of colons has no effect on citation rates, despite (or as a consequence of?) being more attractive to students (see also extensive cited list of previous studies in this area), the trend towards their use has nonetheless increased.
Further work: Two additional lines of enquiry suggest themselves. The first is to see if this is purely a phenomenon of those publishing in English, or at least those based at universities in English-speaking countries. The second is to see if this increase is also visible in book titles and conference papers, and if so whether the trends are different to what is visible in article.
Acknowledgements: The authors wish to thank Digital Science for making their data available.

16. Treloar, A. (2018). Who's in Front: Sexual dimorphism and Gender politics in tandem bicycle riding. Cycling Ethnography, V11, No. 3 (special tandem issue).

Keywords: Cycling. Tandem. Gender Politics. Dominance.
Abstract:Tandem bicycle riding is a form of cycling that is more efficient than conventional cycling (although less so than recumbent cycling). This is because while the weight of the bicycle is less than two times the weight of two single bicycles, the number of "motors" is doubled. The rider in front (responsible for the steering and braking, as well as pedalling) is the Captain. The rider at the rear (responsible for pedalling) is the Stoker. Because of the number of riders involved, tandems are often ridden by couples. An observational study on a recent organised multi-day bicycle ride (Great Vic Bike Ride) counted the number of tandems observed over a 1 hour period. For each tandem, the gender of the couples pedalling was determined. A subset of the data was then extracted for heterosexual couples only (this was because of a desire to analyse the findings using a conventional gender politics framework). For this subset, there were precisely 0 couples where the male was the Stoker - in every case the male was the Captain, and the female the Stoker. A series of semi-structured interviews were undertaken with a random sample of the tandem riders. The explanation most commonly provided was that this was more efficient - males are typically larger and thus male Captains stop more of the wind from hitting the Stoker. And yet even for couples of the same surface area, the male was invariably the Captain. Given this, a more likely explanation is that this is another manifestation of male dominance and "traditional" gender roles; the male is out in front and leading, the female is in a support role.

15. Batton, J. and Treloar, A. (2017). A Place to Stand. Investigatory NeuroKinetics, V1, No. 1.

Keywords: Group Fitness. BodyPump. Location Awareness. PsychoLocation.
Abstract: The 2014 Nobel Prize for medicine was awarded for the discovery of "cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain". Since the original discovery, this positioning system has been investigated in a number of different settings, but using a restricted set of model organisms. This article describes an investigation of the role of this neuronal positioning grid in the contest of group fitness classes for human primates. The author attended a number of group fitness classes and observed the ways in which attendees positioned themselves around the available space (either according to a process of explicit/implicit negotiation, or according to specific locations marked on the floor). In order to remove variation by exercise type (which may correlate with other aspects of personality - further research is needed here) all the classes attended were of the same type. This was an internationally franchised program involving lifting weights to music, where the choreography and music are changed every three months, but where the experience of taking a class is largely invariant by country. Classes were attended in Australia, the USA, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, France, Switzerland, Germany, Portugal and Belgium over a 10 year time period. The behaviour of class attendees consistently demonstrated the following characteristics:

• Each regular attendee had a preferred location. This applied regardless of the packing density for the venue. An extreme observed example was 20 attendees spread out throughout a group fitness studio with space for 100 participants.
• Preferred locations could and often did change over time. This appeared to be based on a combination of indicators: familiarity with the exercise program as a whole, familiarity with a particular instructor, frequency of attending a particular exercise space, and level of self-assessed wellness. A reduced score on any of these indicators would correlate with a position further away from the stage (in a perpendicular direction) and/or further away from the instructor (in a lateral direction).
• Participants took care to preserve a minimal amount of personal space within the venue. This was particularly marked in crowded venues, but if there was lots of space and people did not spread out to fill it, this produced visible discomfort. NOTE: A similar behaviour pattern (on a smaller scale, and in a different context) can be observed in crowded lifts.

The study design, assumed a uniform population, but as an observational study it was impossible to guarantee this. Subsequent factor analysis suggested a strong correlation (p < 0.05) between interoversion and a fixed location preference. Note that this location was not always (as some might have surmised) at the back of the room. In the corner. Facing away from the instructor. Rather, the preference was for consistency of location and thus of exercise partners. Extraversion was associated with a more relaxed approach to location (and thus presumably the consequential opportunity to interact with other people. The study has also only been carried out in the contest of a specific kind of program. Further investigation is needed to determine if this behaviour generalises to other forms of group fitness (aerobic, high intensity interval training, dance exercise). Pending Human Ethics clearance, a number of further experiments also suggest themself (changes to room layout, shrinking room size through use of movable walls, last-minute instructor changes, deliberate infringement of personal space). The implications for gym space design are also tantalising.

14. Imaginary title pending actual imagination

Imaginary abstract pending the same thing

13. Holewa, H. and Treloar, A. (2015). Napkin as a Service: a proposed new collaboration tool. Int. J. Materials Innovation, V. 21, No. 3.

Keywords: Service Oriented Architectures, Napkins, Collaboration.
Abstract: The role of the paper napkin in supporting collaboration and innovation is rarely recognised (although see the case of Yakov Rekhter and the three-napkins protocol for one counter-example). Tragically, napkins received no mention in the recent launch of the Australian Government Innovation Agenda, despite their proven value as innovation-enhancers. A recent interaction between the two co-authors identified a number of deficiencies in this frequently used impromptu collaboration technology. Suitable napkins may not always be available. Even if they are, getting pens to write legibly without tearing the napkins may be a challenge. The surface area of the napkin is constrained in size. The napkin is not easily shareable without separate data capture and upload steps. And critically, napkins are not always sourced from sustainable fibres. The authors propose instead a new online collaboration tool called Napkin as a Service. This avoids the issues identified with the current default collaboration technology as follows: access to ubiquitous internet and mobile devices is often greater than access to napkins (test: how many of you have a napkin in front of you now?); online napkin-annotation tools will only tear the online napkin if the pressure-sensitivity option is enabled (off by default); virtual napkins (or Napkins in the Cloud if you prefer) require no trees to be felled, and can be infinitely large; and sharing via a range of social media is easily built-in. In addition, the additional metrics available through NaaS enable a number of analyses of how engaging and exciting a concept is to the participants. Available metrics might include real time analysis of the number of collaborators; the frequency of changes in authorship (we need to develop a Napkin-Passing Protocol); the fever of sketching as measured in marks/second; the time between finger/ nail indent on the table to using a writing instrument on a napkin (just in time napkin provisioning). The current prototype is being tested in a range of work settings, and the next iteration will attempt to address the highest priority user request: how to enhance the existing NaaS protocols to include safe garbage disposal after a sausage sizzle; that is how to move from Open Sauce Napkins to Closed Sauce Napkins.

12. Campbell, G. and Treloar, A. (2014). R You Grokked? An Augmentation of Maslow's Needs Hierarchy for Geeks. J. Augmentation Studies, V3, N1, pp. 41-59.

Keywords: Maslow, Engelbart, Augmentation, Geek, Human Capability, Layered Architecture.
Abstract: Abraham Maslow is best known in popular culture for his postulated hierarchy of needs. This is conventionally represented as a pyramid with Physiological needs at the base, followed upward by Safety, Love/Belonging, Self-Esteem, and finally Self-Actualisation. A number of people have tried to adapt this hierarchy for geeks, for whom safety, love, and self-hyphenates of all sorts, not excepting selves simpliciter, are notoriously problematic and taxonomy-resistent. To date, however, these efforts do little more than graft a small number of discrete technology elements (wifi, battery, and the sadly outdated joystick) onto the existing model. What is needed is a complete rethinking of the needs hierarchy for geeks in the post-Winsock age. A partial attempt at this has been undertaken by Crampton, Weinberger and Ohayon, but this model simply does not go far enough. After careful analysis of possible theoretical approaches, it became clear that Engelbart's theory of human augmentation offered the most powerful descriptive framework. As early as 1962, Engelbart proposed a conceptual framework for augmenting human intellectual effectiveness that anticipated many of the hardware and software developments that are now commonplace. This conceptual framework characterises the ways in which human capabilities can be augmented as consisting of Artifacts, Language, Methodology and Training (often abbreviated H-LAM/T - Human using Language, Artifacts, and Methodology in which they are Trained). Building on his approach, we propose to conceptualise the combination of human and technology as an inter-dependent system: humans create technology and this augments their ability to work with information (and thus create further technology). Given this analysis, it becomes clear that any rework of Maslow's hierarchy needs to accommodate both technical and human capabilities. Accordingly, we propose the model visualised below, focussed not on a narrow, pre-Web view of “needs” but on the model’s representation of varying capacities to augment human intellectual capability. 
This model parallels the relevant computer and human elements, and could be seen as an expansion of the Physiological layer in the classical Maslovian approach. In terms of the H-LAM/T conceptual framework, the lefthand boxes represent the Artifacts, with computer applications increasingly incorporating default Methodologies for achieving particular activities. Language has a pivotal role as the substrate for intellectual activity, and Training is required both to optimise the human elements on the right and maximise the augmentation potential of the computer elements on the left. At the summit of the triangle, we propose a “capstone foundation directional element” called “R,” standing for recursion, in which action becomes reified, thus initiating a subsequent, larger pyramid-formation. Geeks will grok “R.” Grokking has been shown to be a reliable proxy for self-actualization among geeks. Thus “R” links our new hierarchy to the more traditional set of “needs” outlined by Maslow.

11.   Collins, S. and Treloar, A. (2013). The role of banter/craic in facilitating international technology-mediated communication. Banteractions (formerly Transactions of the International Institute of Banter Studies), V25 N4, pp. 11-16.

Keywords: Computer-Mediated Communication, International Collaboration, Applied Banter.
Abstract: It is widely recognised that the channel provided by all forms of computer-mediated communication is impoverished  relative to face to face communication, which provides content, tone of voice and body language. Email/text messaging only conveys content (although the use of emoticons and more recently emoji is an attempt to compensate for this). Audio-conferencing adds tone of voice to content, and video-conferencing layers on some body-language cues  (although the restricted video bandwidth for most commercially available solutions, coupled with comms lag militates against this being as effective as it could be). Accordingly, the CMC literature is (or should be) replete with case-studies where communication is sub-optimal. As a result, most knowledge workers who engage in international collaborations work by the heuristic that in order to work effectively together it is necessary to first bond F2F, preferably in an informal setting such as a bar, coupled with ethanol-inducedreduction of inhibition mechanisms and concomitant social approval for otherwise inappropriate levels of personal-sharing. It is because of this wide-spread perception that it is important to report on counter-examples. The case-study detailed in this article involved a group that came together to organise an international conference. The group had not worked together previously as a unit, although some of them had some interaction/collaboration history. The characteristics of the group would normally lead to an expectation of significant challenges in remote collaboration: the communications channel was audio (using Skype, which introduces intermittent degradation of quality due to jitter, packet loss, compression, etc); the group was multi-cultural (Australian, Irish, German, Greek); the timezones for participants were up to 11 hours apart (providing an alertness mismatch). The group ended up meeting remotely for a total of 26 times. The first 8 times were prior to a majority of the group meeting F2F for the kind of bonding sessions outlined above. Despite this, the group clicked (see Treloar, A. (2014) "Perceptions of phalangeal percussion - measuring clickedness", in press) on the first audio meeting and immediately began to work effectively together. The result of the collaboration was a highly-successful international event that attracted over 500 participants. An analysis of the reason for this result, which runs against the consensus in the research literature, points to the pivotal role of banter/ craic in reducing barriers and facilitating effective communication. There is, of course, debate within the banter research community about whether banter in fact equals craic. It seems most likely that these two seminal concepts should be modelled as overlapping circles (a classic Venn diagram):  there is banter that could not be characterised as craic, and the concept of craic is found to be relatively ill-defined and may in fact include all of Irish social interaction. Nonetheless, in this case the intersection between banter and craic was, with these test subjects, found to be a framework which provided a suitable environment and stimulus for a successful international collaborative platform. Clearly the next step will be further collaboration with at least some of the same subjects to see if this experience was an outlier.

10. Treloar, A. (2012). International Meetings and the Asymmetry of Perceived Travel Pain. J. Aust. Discrimination Studies, V7, N10, pp. 1234-1244.

Keywords: Cultural Studies,  International Collaboration, Perception Studies.
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.

9. Treloar, A. (2011). Confusion, Collision, Culture and Convergence: an analysis of the negotiation of passing behaviour in London. J. Pedestrian Studies (not to be confused with the Pedestrian Journal of Studies), V1, N1 (Inaugural Invitational Issue), pp. 10-19.

Keywords: Cultural Studies,  Traffic Management, Urban Design, NeuroLinguistics
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 P3^L, and passing on the right as P3^R. 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=P3^R(R, F, O), but in Australia, P3=P3^L(R, F, O). Given that in the UK P3=P3^L(R), one would also expect P3=P3^L(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 P3^L 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.

8. Groenewegen, D., and Treloar, A. (2010). Adaptive Meeting Protocols and the Neglected Issue of Banter. Banteractions (formerly Transactions of the International Institute of Banter Studies), V22 N4 (Bumper Holiday Banter Issue), pp. 238-263.

Keywords: Rapport, CSCW, Meetings, Banter Theory
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:

where d = duration, w = bandwidth of the communications channel at any given time t,  if is the number of meeting attendees who are interaction-focussed and tf is the number of meeting attendees who are task-focussed (all of these parameters need to measured at time t as the number of the attendees and the channel used may change over the course of the meeting). One way of applying the banterwidth principle is for meeting attendees to identify and adopt appropriate banter behaviours in different settings (see table below).

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

Further research is needed with a wider range of channels and participants to see if this formula generalises. The authors are fortunate to have a workplace environment, if not necessarily willing experimental subjects, which acts as an ideal testbed for this further research.

7. Treloar, A. (2009). The paradox of size: observations on alpha male information technology preferences. Special "Boys Toys" Joint Issue of J. Gender Studies/J. Technology Adoption, Spring/Summer.

Keywords: Psychology, Technology Adoption, Gender Studies
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.

6. Treloar, A., and Treloar, D. (2008). An analysis of the relationship between actual age and perceived walking speed. First Festschrift for Eadweard Muybridge, Vol. 2, Supplement C, Annex IV, pp. 1035-1044.

Keywords: Movement studies, Psychology, Physiology, Perception
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.

5. Hood, R., Tell, W. and Treloar, A. (2007). The Name's the Thing: some considerations when selecting a field of human endeavour as a consistent theme for acronyms of technical projects. J. Appl. Toxophilism, April 1 special issue.

Keywords: Archery, symbolism, applied linguistics, whimsy
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 forE@rend1l 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).

4. Treloar, A. (2006). Suitcase size selection as a correlate with gender dimorphism. Trans. Appl. Container Studies, Special Luggage Issue, Vol 203, Spring.

Keywords: Gender Studies, Design Theory

Abstract: An observational research study identified opposite-gendered pairs of subjects together with their luggage in an international travel setting. In all of the cases observed, the size of the suitcases was different. In most of the cases (3 out of 4, significant at p < 0.001) the male member of the pair was associated with the larger suitcase and the female member of the pair with the smaller suitcase. This is despite anecdotal evidence from the domestic clothes storage sector that a greater amount of space is typically required for storage of female clothes (based on number of items rather than volume of each item). Because of the small sample size, and the observational nature of the data collection, further research is needed in a variety of settings. Dimensions that might be significant include setting (national versus international),  mode (air, train, boat), class (economy, premium economy, business, first). This suggests a 24 cell matrix that needs to be incorporated into the phase two research design.

3. Treloar, A. (2005). Solar-Silico-Saline Therapy: Fad or Fantasy? Int. J. Wellness, Vol 100, No 2.

Keywords: Commerce, Management, Tourism and Services/Tourism/Tourism Behaviour

Abstract: This paper describes a single-subject experiment involving a 180-degree work-life balance repolarisation, coupled with a zero-tolerance approach to the use of any form of information technology. The research project builds on earlier research reported in Treloar (2003). The subject initially experienced feelings of loss of purpose, coupled with an ongoing desire to see if any new emails had arrived in the last minute, and what the latest slashdot posting was about. After repeated courses of integrated solar-silico-saline therapy these symptoms diminished markedly. A side-effect, the desirability of which should perhaps be viewed as highly context and task-specific, was a reduced sense of the passage of time, or even of the importance of such passage. On return to work, it is believed that the subject will experience greater motivation, increased clarity of thought, and a better perspective on how to proactively manage an increasingly complex task portfolio. In addition, it is hoped that the subject will be more fun to work with. Due to the limited sample size, and the restricted experiment duration, more research will be required as a matter of urgency to validate these findings.

2. Treloar, D. (2004). Technology tough love - how I got my husband to go computer cold turkey. J. App. Spousal Mgt, Vol 32, Spring.

Keywords: Recaltricance, Self-Justification, Reflection, Action
Abstract: [yet to be supplied by author]

1. Treloar, A. (2003). Sun, sand and surf - an innovative new treatment regime delivers real relaxed results. Int. J. Wellness, Vol 99, No 1.

Keywords: Commerce, Management, Tourism and Services/Tourism/Tourism Behaviour

Abstract: [not completed due to fieldwork-induced damage (sand/salt water rendering laptop inoperable)]