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Smart infrastructure is positioned as central to the liveability and viability of rural and regional towns in Australia. The Australian Government's Smart Cities Plan and Regional Connectivity Program includes Smart Investment in regional areas and the New South Wales Government has prioritised connectivity and telecommunications infrastructural development through the Regional Digital Connectivity program. And yet regional and rural communities are typically excluded from the evidence base for smart technologies and services. Local Aboriginal Land Councils are also important stakeholders in managing the digital processes associated with information and infrastructure moving across different Countries. This paper draws on data from the 'It just works!': Regional and rural consumer understandings of smart technologies in North West New South Wales project, including over 130 survey responses and interviews with shire councillors, land councillors, and consumers on smart development and Internet infrastructure in the region. In the areas surveyed, smart regional policy is variously emerging, non‐existent, or assembled from existing policy domains and regulation involving the Internet, telecommunications, regional development, First Nations, and local government. We argue that regional and rural understandings of growth and development are experienced through the infrastructuring processes of Internet quality, availability, and speed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of Building Information Modelling (BIM) has revolutionized the infrastructure construction industry by introducing real-time and collaborative information management tools to be used throughout the lifecycle of projects. The importance of BIM in this industry has been emphasized in previous research. However, strategies for the implementation of this system is still less explored, which requires more elaboration and validation. The purpose of this paper is to investigate such strategies considering all necessary dimensions of the BIM system in infrastructure construction projects. The findings are based on theoretical discussion and semi-structured interviews in a case study project in New South Wales, Australia. The results revealed that BIM integrates various elements of infrastructure construction, which include but are not limited to risk, time, cost, energy, safety, and sustainability. It was found that implementation strategies should focus on improving the contribution of the BIM system to infrastructure construction in terms of improved (1) integrity and automation, (2) collaboration, and (3) optimization. Identification of seven technical and managerial implementations strategies is the core contribution of this research. These strategies provide practitioners with insight into technical and managerial measures to be taken for the successful implementation of the BIM system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Providing a more effective Weighed DTW for traffic flow data analysis. • Systematically analysing and labelling a large real traffic dataset from the City of Melbourne. • GWDTW outperforms Euclidean and DTW using k-medoid for clustering traffic flow data. This paper presents a novel similarity measure to identify interesting traffic patterns on a large traffic flow time series data for the central suburbs of Melbourne city in Australia. This new measure is a weighted Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) method based on Gaussian probability function, named GWDTW, that reflects the relative importance of peak hours. We have shown its superior performance over two benchmark similarity measures, the Euclidean distance and conventional DTW measure, on the intersection clustering task using k -medoids clustering algorithm, with respect to both internal and external evaluation measures. With intensive evaluation, the results show that GWDTW is a very effective similarity measure for modelling traffic behaviours, which can provide policy makers with more valuable information for infrastructure design, and smart city development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to function effectively in today `s information society requires a high degree of literacy and a complexity of skills which is leaving some people behind. Yet in Australia one in five adults do not possess sufficient literacy skills to participate in everyday life. This causes problems for living, working and for survival. The resources, networks and advocacy potential of public libraries make them natural allies of the literacy movement The Australian Library and Information Association in its `Statement on libraries and literacy not only endorses the role of public libraries in supporting literacy but sees it as a core function. It is now an opportune time to re examine that role and develop strategies for its future. The United Nation `s Decade of literacy (2003-2012) presents a golden opportunity for public libraries to reassert their traditional role of supporting literacy as part of the life long learning agenda. Edited version of a paper presented at the Alia 2004 biennial conference Gold Coast Queensland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the implications of the launch of the new national broadband system which is considered the greatest infrastructural development in the Australian history on changing the social forms of the relations of Australians with one another and their corporeal being in the longer term. The author said that the full implications of cyber culture for human existence remain outside the reach of public understanding. According to the author, the chip and digital technology have become key conditions for vastly extended modes of social interchange.

This article examines the system of journalistic accountability in Australia, evaluating its capacity to promote 'the highest ethical and professional standards' seen as fundamental to achieving the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) vision for an inclusive information society. First, it outlines the approach to media and journalistic accountability adopted in Australia. It then analyses a representative sample of journalism codes of ethics and codes of practice, classifying them according to their approaches to self-regulation, the key characteristics of the codes and the approaches to dispute resolution adopted. The findings of this analysis are then compared with best practice in self-regulation criteria distilled from the Taskforce on Industry Self-Regulation to identify potential problems with the current scheme of journalistic self-regulation. These criteria are then critiqued, identifying a range of problems in relation to the scheme's capacity to promote information society objectives as articulated by the WSIS in relation to the role of traditional and new media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]