Occupy Oakland and #oo : uses of Twitter within the Occupy movement

Social media have become crucial tools for political activists and protest movements, providing another channel for promoting messages and garnering support. Twitter, in particular, has been identified as a noteworthy medium for protests in countries including Iran and Egypt to receive global attention. The Occupy movement, originating with protests in, and the physical occupation of, Wall Street, and inspiring similar demonstrations in other U.S. cities and around the world, has been intrinsically linked with social media through location-specific hashtags: #ows for Occupy Wall Street, #occupysf for San Francisco, and so on. While the individual protests have a specific geographical focus-highlighted by the physical occupation of parks, buildings, and other urban areas-Twitter provides a means for these different movements to be linked and promoted through tweets containing multiple hashtags. It also serves as a channel for tactical communications during actions and as a space in which movement debates take place. This paper examines Twitter's use within the Occupy Oakland movement. We use a mixture of ethnographic research through interviews with activists and participant observation of the movements' activities, and a dataset of public tweets containing the #oo hashtag from early 2012. This research methodology allows us to develop a more accurate and nuanced understanding of how movement activists use Twitter by cross-checking trends in the online data with observations and activists' own reported use of Twitter. We also study the connections between a geographically focused movement such as Occupy Oakland and related, but physically distant, protests taking place concurrently in other cities. This study forms part of a wider research project, Mapping Movements, exploring the politics of place, investigating how social movements are composed and sustained, and the uses of online communication within these movements.

Understanding the abnormal brain activity in epilepsy as a potential predictor of the onset of an epileptic seizure

The Brain Research Institute (BRI) uses various types of indirect measurements, including EEG and fMRI, to understand and assess brain activity and function. As well as the recovery of generic information about brain function, research also focuses on the utilisation of such data and understanding to study the initiation, dynamics, spread and suppression of epileptic seizures. To assist with the future focussing of this aspect of their research, the BRI asked the MISG 2010 participants to examine how the available EEG and fMRI data and current knowledge about epilepsy should be analysed and interpreted to yield an enhanced understanding about brain activity occurring before, at commencement of, during, and after a seizure. Though the deliberations of the study group were wide ranging in terms of the related matters considered and discussed, considerable progress was made with the following three aspects. (1) The science behind brain activity investigations depends crucially on the quality of the analysis and interpretation of, as well as the recovery of information from, EEG and fMRI measurements. A number of specific methodologies were discussed and formalised, including independent component analysis, principal component analysis, profile monitoring and change point analysis (hidden Markov modelling, time series analysis, discontinuity identification). (2) Even though EEG measurements accurately and very sensitively record the onset of an epileptic event or seizure, they are, from the perspective of understanding the internal initiation and localisation, of limited utility. They only record neuronal activity in the cortical (surface layer) neurons of the brain, which is a direct reflection of the type of electrical activity they have been designed to record. Because fMRI records, through the monitoring of blood flow activity, the location of localised brain activity within the brain, the possibility of combining fMRI measurements with EEG, as a joint inversion activity, was discussed and examined in detail. (3) A major goal for the BRI is to improve understanding about ``when'' (at what time) an epileptic seizure actually commenced before it is identified on an eeg recording, ``where'' the source of this initiation is located in the brain, and ``what'' is the initiator. Because of the general agreement in the literature that, in one way or another, epileptic events and seizures represent abnormal synchronisations of localised and/or global brain activity the modelling of synchronisations was examined in some detail. References C. M. Michel, G. Thut, S. Morand, A. Khateb, A. J. Pegna, R. Grave de Peralta, S. Gonzalez, M. Seeck and T. Landis, Electric source imaging of human brain functions, Brain Res. 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Tactics of antifeminist backlash against the U. S. battered women's movement

Opposition to men’s violence against women who are their intimate partners has become politically popular in the United States. The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) has enjoyed broad-based support for over 15 years. VAWA has been refined and expanded with each reauthorization. Resistance to the battered women’s movement is often overlooked in this political context. However, woman abuse and state responses to it are mired in cultural tensions about crime, law, gender, economics, scholarship, and the family. Based on interviews with 35 advocates in the United States, this paper outlines key tactics of antifeminist backlash against the battered women’s movement.

Neck movement and muscle activity characteristics in female office workers with neck pain

Study Design Cross-sectional study. Objective To explore aspects of cervical musculoskeletal function in female office workers with neck pain. Summary of Background Data Evidence of physical characteristics that differentiate computer workers with and without neck pain is sparse. Patients with chronic neck pain demonstrate reduced motion and altered patterns of muscle control in the cervical flexor and upper trapezius (UT) muscles during specific tasks. Understanding cervical musculoskeletal function in office workers will better direct intervention and prevention strategies. Methods Measures included neck range of motion; superficial neck flexor muscle activity during a clinical test, the craniocerivcal flexion test; and a motor task, a unilateral muscle coordination task, to assess the activity of both the anterior and posterior neck muscles. Office workers with and without neck pain were formed into 3 groups based on their scores on the Neck Disability Index. Nonworking women without neck pain formed the control group. Surface electromyographic activity was recorded bilaterally from the sternocleidomastoid, anterior scalene (AS), cervical extensor (CE) and UT muscles. Results Workers with neck pain had reduced rotation range and increased activity of the superficial cervical flexors during the craniocervical flexion test. During the coordination task, workers with pain demonstrated greater activity in the CE muscles bilaterally. On completion of the task, the UT and dominant CE and AS muscles demonstrated an inability to relax in workers with pain. In general, there was a linear relationship between the workers’ self-reported levels of pain and disability and the movement and muscle changes. Conclusion These results are consistent with those found in other cervical musculoskeletal disorders and may represent an altered muscle recruitment strategy to stabilize the head and neck. An exercise program including motor reeducation may assist in the management of neck pain in office workers.

Discerning the timing and cause of historical mortality events in modern Porites from the Great Barrier Reef

The life history strategies of massive Porites corals make them a valuable resource not only as key providers of reef structure, but also as recorders of past environmental change. Yet recent documented evidence of an unprecedented increase in the frequency of mortality in Porites warrants investigation into the history of mortality and associated drivers. To achieve this, both an accurate chronology and an understanding of the life history strategies of Porites are necessary. Sixty-two individual Uranium–Thorium (U–Th) dates from 50 dead massive Porites colonies from the central inshore region of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) revealed the timing of mortality to have occurred predominantly over two main periods from 1989.2 ± 4.1 to 2001.4 ± 4.1, and from 2006.4 ± 1.8 to 2008.4 ± 2.2 A.D., with a small number of colonies dating earlier. Overall, the peak ages of mortality are significantly correlated with maximum sea-surface temperature anomalies. Despite potential sampling bias, the frequency of mortality increased dramatically post-1980. These observations are similar to the results reported for the Southern South China Sea. High resolution measurements of Sr/Ca and Mg/Ca obtained from a well preserved sample that died in 1994.6 ± 2.3 revealed that the time of death occurred at the peak of sea surface temperatures (SST) during the austral summer. In contrast, Sr/Ca and Mg/Ca analysis in two colonies dated to 2006.9 ± 3.0 and 2008.3 ± 2.0, suggest that both died after the austral winter. An increase in Sr/Ca ratios and the presence of low Mg-calcite cements (as determined by SEM and elemental ratio analysis) in one of the colonies was attributed to stressful conditions that may have persisted for some time prior to mortality. For both colonies, however, the timing of mortality coincides with the 4th and 6th largest flood events reported for the Burdekin River in the past 60 years, implying that factors associated with terrestrial runoff may have been responsible for mortality. Our results show that a combination of U–Th and elemental ratio geochemistry can potentially be used to precisely and accurately determine the timing and season of mortality in modern massive Porites corals. For reefs where long-term monitoring data are absent, the ability to reconstruct historical events in coral communities may prove useful to reef managers by providing some baseline knowledge on disturbance history and associated drivers.

"What" versus "how" in nonvisual whole-body movement

Dissociable processes for conscious perception (“what” processing) and guidance of action (“how” processing) have been identified in visual, auditory, and somatosensory systems. The present study was designed to find similar dissociation within whole-body movements in which the presence of vestibular information creates a unique perceptual condition. In two experiments, blindfolded participants walked along a linear path and specified the walked distance by verbally estimating it (“what” measure) and by pulling a length of tape that matched the walked distance (“how” measure). Although these two measures yielded largely comparable responses under a normal walking condition, variability in verbal estimates showed a qualitatively different pattern from that in tape-pulling when sensory input into walking was altered by having participants wear a heavy backpack. This suggests that the “what” versus “how” dissociation exists in whole-body movements as well, supporting a claim that it is a general principle with which perceptual systems are organized.

Monitoring spatiotemporal dynamics of human movement based on MAC address data

This thesis was a step forward in extracting valuable features from human's movement behaviour in terms of space utilisation based on Media-Access-Control data. This research offered a low-cost and less computational complexity approach compared to existing human's movement tracking methods. This research was successfully applied in QUT's Gardens Point campus and can be scaled to bigger environments and societies. Extractable information from human's movement by this approach can add a significant value to studying human's movement behaviour, enhancing future urban and interior design, improving crowd safety and evacuation plans.

Knowledge Based Urban Development

The changing and challenging conditions of the 21st century have been significantly impacting our economy, society and built and natural environments. Today generation of knowledge—mostly in the form of technology and innovation—is seen as a panacea for the adaptation to changes and management of challenges (Yigitcanlar, 2010a). Making space and place that concentrate on knowledge generation, thus, has become a priority for many nations (van Winden, 2010). Along with this movement, concepts like knowledge cities and knowledge precincts are coined as places where citizenship undertakes a deliberate and systematic initiative for founding its development on the identification and sustainable balance of its shared value system, and bases its ability to create wealth on its capacity to generate and leverage its knowledge capabilities (Carrillo, 2006; Yigitcanlar, 2008a). In recent years, the term knowledge precinct (Hu & Chang, 2005) in its most contemporary interpretation evolved into knowledge community precinct (KCP). KCP is a mixed-use post-modern urban setting—e.g., flexible, decontextualized, enclaved, fragmented—including a critical mass of knowledge enterprises and advanced networked infrastructures, developed with the aim of collecting the benefits of blurring the boundaries of living, shopping, recreation and working facilities of knowledge workers and their families. KCPs are the critical building blocks of knowledge cities, and thus, building successful KCPs significantly contributes to the formation of prosperous knowledge cities. In the literature this type of development—a place containing economic prosperity, environmental sustainability, just socio‐spatial order and good governance—is referred as knowledge-based urban development (KBUD). This chapter aims to provide a conceptual understanding on KBUD and its contribution to the building of KCPs that supports the formation of prosperous knowledge cities.

A review of modern computational algorithms for Bayesian optimal design

Bayesian experimental design is a fast growing area of research with many real-world applications. As computational power has increased over the years, so has the development of simulation-based design methods, which involve a number of algorithms, such as Markov chain Monte Carlo, sequential Monte Carlo and approximate Bayes methods, facilitating more complex design problems to be solved. The Bayesian framework provides a unified approach for incorporating prior information and/or uncertainties regarding the statistical model with a utility function which describes the experimental aims. In this paper, we provide a general overview on the concepts involved in Bayesian experimental design, and focus on describing some of the more commonly used Bayesian utility functions and methods for their estimation, as well as a number of algorithms that are used to search over the design space to find the Bayesian optimal design. We also discuss other computational strategies for further research in Bayesian optimal design.

A computational model for BMP movement in sea urchin embryos

Bone morphogen proteins (BMPs) are distributed along a dorsal-ventral (DV) gradient in many developing embryos. The spatial distribution of this signaling ligand is critical for correct DV axis specification. In various species, BMP expression is spatially localized, and BMP gradient formation relies on BMP transport, which in turn requires interactions with the extracellular proteins Short gastrulation/Chordin (Chd) and Twisted gastrulation (Tsg). These binding interactions promote BMP movement and concomitantly inhibit BMP signaling. The protease Tolloid (Tld) cleaves Chd, which releases BMP from the complex and permits it to bind the BMP receptor and signal. In sea urchin embryos, BMP is produced in the ventral ectoderm, but signals in the dorsal ectoderm. The transport of BMP from the ventral ectoderm to the dorsal ectoderm in sea urchin embryos is not understood. Therefore, using information from a series of experiments, we adapt the mathematical model of Mizutani et al. (2005) and embed it as the reaction part of a one-dimensional reaction–diffusion model. We use it to study aspects of this transport process in sea urchin embryos. We demonstrate that the receptor-bound BMP concentration exhibits dorsally centered peaks of the same type as those observed experimentally when the ternary transport complex (Chd-Tsg-BMP) forms relatively quickly and BMP receptor binding is relatively slow. Similarly, dorsally centered peaks are created when the diffusivities of BMP, Chd, and Chd-Tsg are relatively low and that of Chd-Tsg-BMP is relatively high, and the model dynamics also suggest that Tld is a principal regulator of the system. At the end of this paper, we briefly compare the observed dynamics in the sea urchin model to a version that applies to the fly embryo, and we find that the same conditions can account for BMP transport in the two types of embryos only if Tld levels are reduced in sea urchin compared to fly.

Statutory occupational health and safety workplace arrangements for the modern labour market

Over the past 20 years there has been a significant refashioning of the labour market within Australia and other industrialised countries. This paper examines the implications of the growth of more flexible work arrangements for mechanisms designed to facilitate worker involvement in occupational health and safety at the workplace—a pivotal feature of post-Robens OHS legislation in Australia. It is argued that the growth of subcontracting, casual and home-based work has undermined both coverage and the effectiveness of these provisions, especially in a context where union membership and influence has also been declining. Looking at international experience, the paper examines a number of ways of remedying these deficiencies.