Most Popular Books by Tom ROBERTS

In Tom Roberts' award-winning debut historical novel, Lost Scrolls of Archimedes, you will encounter improbable-though not impossible-history. Along the way, there will be danger, adventure, pain, and love. And a few philosophical discussions of the dangers of new technology. Marcus, a young Roman scholar, and Hippolytus, his mentor, steal two long-lost scrolls of Archimedes from the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus. Legends say the encrypted documents contain the knowledge of immense powers. When Hippolytus flees Alexandria to avoid Roman agents seeking him, Marcus is left to safeguard the scrolls. He waits, but after four years, he decides to try to crack the complex coding obscuring Archimedes masterwork. Marcus seeks help from his best friend, Kleon, and from the alluring Electra, cousin of Cleopatra and an expert linguist. The ambitious Kleon, seeking wealth and status, betrays Marcus to the agents of Roman strongman, Octavian. On a trading voyage for his father, Marcus is attacked and thrown into captivity as a galley slave. Marcus and Kleon thus begin a dangerous game of cat and mouse as each rush to extract the knowledge of the scrolls. Assassination, kidnapping, a midnight raid, and a long chase across the Tunisian desert bring Marcus to the climactic encounter with enemies-and friends-on the day of the epoch-making Battle of Actium, the funeral pyre of the Republic and the crucible of the Roman Empire.

The glittering story of April Ashley, model and trans pioneer, and the divorce case which gripped 1960s Britain and defined transgender rights for a generation. As Britain emerged from post-war austerity in the 1960s, no one embodied its newfound spirit of hedonism and glamour like April Ashley. A fashion model and socialite who rose from poverty in Liverpool to the heights of London society via Le Carrousel nightclub in Paris, she was also one of the first Britons to undergo gender-affirming surgery. Ashley was appointed MBE for services to transgender equality in 2012, but her journey towards acceptance was hard-won and bitterly contested. In 1961, a friend sold her story to a tabloid and she was told that she would never work in the UK again. Her brief marriage to Arthur Corbett, the son of a baron, set off a high-profile divorce battle, resulting in a landmark 1970 decision denying transgender women legal status as women -- and denying Ashley her husband's inheritance. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, award-winning biographers Jacqueline Kent and Tom Roberts tell the full story of April Ashley's extraordinary life at the vanguard of the sexual revolution and the movement for trans equality.

I find that high home-buying costs for a typical household, relative to a cumulative city-level average, help to predict downward pressure on future real house price growth at a 1-year horizon for Canadian cities over the 1980q1 to 2016q2 sample period. This insight is relevant for broader household vulnerabilities because of their interdependence with housing market conditions -- this interdependence is illustrated, for instance, by how a decline in house prices Granger-causes an increase in mortgage arrears. Based on ease of interpretability, relevant historical context, and in- and out-of-sample performance, local housing cost (i.e. affordability) measures may have some advantages for the monitoring of household sector vulnerabilities, versus other common measures such as debt-to-income.

Traditional TAM research primarily focuses on utilitarian systems where extrinsic motivations chiefly explain and predict acceptance. We propose a theoretical model, ISAM, which explains the role of intrinsic motivations in building the user attention that leads to hedonic system acceptance. ISAM combines several theories with TAM to explain how interactivity acts as a stimulus in hedonic contexts -- fostering curiosity, enjoyment, and the full immersion of cognitive resources. Two experiments involving over 700 participants validated ISAM as a useful model for explaining and predicting hedonic system acceptance. Immersion and PE are shown to be the primary predictors of behavioral intention to use hedonic systems. Unlike traditional utilitarian adoption research, PEOU does not directly impact BIU, and extrinsic motivations are virtually non-existent. The implications of this study extend beyond hedonic contexts, as users of utilitarian systems continue to demand more hedonic features and enjoyment is often more important than PEOU.

Insiders may act to sustain and improve organizational information security, yet our knowledge of what motivates them to do so remains limited. For example, most extant research use portions of protection motivation theory (PMT) and have relied on isolated behaviors thus limiting the generalizability of findings to single artifacts rather than the global set of protective security behaviors. We thus investigate the motivations surrounding this larger behavioral set by assessing maladaptive rewards, response costs, and fear alongside traditional PMT components. We extend PMT by showing that: (1) security education, training, and awareness (SETA) efforts help form appraisals; (2) PMT's applicability to organizational rather than personal contexts depends on insiders' organizational commitment levels; and (3) response costs provide the link between PMT's appraisals. Contributions include detailing how organizational commitment is the mechanism through which organizational security threats become personally relevant to insiders and how SETA efforts influence many PMT-based components.

Letters written from Roberts to Frederick McCubbin, mainly on the subject of art. Several of the letters are illustrated with his sketches. Photocopied letters are bound.

64 letters to A.H. Fullwood, 1902-30, including 10 letters from Kineton Parkes who managed Fullwood's affairs in London in the 1920s. Other correspondents include Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, Julian Ashton and Hardy Wilson. The collection also includes copies of some letters written to Geoffrey Fullwood after the death of his father in 1930. Bound volume containing a long illustrated letter entitled "Sketching tour through New England, N.S. Wales". Although undated, this letter would have been produced in the late 1880s in connection with Fullwood's work on the 'Picturesque Atlas of Australasia'

Project groups are becoming a mainstay in today's work environment. This trend, coupled with globalization, has virtualized many teams, and has made communication among group members vital to project success. This study evaluates the impact of varying group size and social presence on small-group communication. It compares key communication factors for three different treatments: face-to-face (FtF) without computer-mediated communication (CMC) support, FtF with CMC support, and virtual with CMC support. This study also evaluates these impacts on two different small group sizes (3 and 6). The results indicate that smaller groups establish and maintain higher levels of communication quality. In addition, the results indicate that FtF with CMC support groups had higher levels of communication quality than virtual with CMC support groups; however, we did not find a significant difference between traditional FtF groups and virtual groups with CMC support. Another major finding is that CMC minimized the impact of increased group size. It appears that the process losses a larger FtF group might ordinarily experience can be reduced through the use of CMC. These results should help project managers plan for and deal with the difficulty of communication between project group members in virtual environments.

Usability flaws found in the later stages of the development process can be extremely costly to resolve. Accordingly, usability evaluation (UE) is an important, albeit expensive, part of software development. We report on how the inexpensive usability evaluation method of heuristic evaluation (HE) can benefit from collaborative software, implicit coordination, and principles from collaboration engineering. In our study, 439 novice participants were trained in HE methods and then performed HE. Our results show that traditional nominal HE groups can experience implicit coordination from the collaborative software features of group memory and group awareness. One of the key results is that collaborative software (CSW) groups had fewer duplicates than traditional nominal groups, which differences were magnified in going from groups of three to groups of six members. Furthermore, because of less coordination, traditional nominal groups had a lot more work to perform in the overall process of HE. We attribute the reduction in duplication for CSW-supported groups to the implicit coordination available to CSW-supported groups who could see violations typed by other group members but could not directly discuss the violations. These findings not only show the power of implicit coordination in groups, but should dramatically change how HE is conducted. These results may also extend to other evaluation tasks, such as software inspection and usability assessment tasks.

Opinion article on the Australian Ex-Prisoner of War Memorial at Lake Wendouree.