Building envelope : performance optimisation processes for a daylight responsive architecture

Traditional shading design principles guide the vertical and horizontal orientation of fins, louvres and awnings being applied to orthogonal planar façades. Due to doubly curved envelopes characterising many contemporary designs, these rules of thumb are now not always applicable. Operable blinds attempt to regulate the fluctuating luminance of daylight and aid in shading direct sunlight. Mostly they remain closed, as workers are commonly too preoccupied to continually adjust them so a reliance on electrically powered lights remains a preference. To remedy these problems, the idea of what it is to sustainable enclose space is reconsidered through the geometric and kinetic optimisation of a parametric skin, with sunlight responsive modules that regulate interior light levels. This research concludes with an optimised design and also defines some unique metrics to gauge the design’s performance in terms of, the amount of exterior unobstructed view, its ability to shade direct sunlight and, its daylight glare probability.

Do drivers respond emotionally and behaviourally differently to an intentionally anger provoking driving situation than to an ambiguous, but potentially provocative, one? Results of a self-report survey.

Aggressive driving is considered an important road-safety concern for drivers in highly motorised countries. However, understanding of the causes and maintenance factors fundamental to aggressive driving is limited. In keeping with theoretical advances from general aggression research such as the General Aggression Model (GAM), research has begun to examine the emotional and cognitive antecedents of aggressive driving in order to better understand the underlying processes motivating aggressive driving. Early findings in the driving area have suggested that greater levels of aggression are elicited in response to an intentionally aggressive on-road event. In contrast, general aggression research suggests that greater levels of aggression are elicited in response to an ambiguous event. The current study examined emotional and cognitive responses to two hypothetical driving scenarios with differing levels of aggressive intent (intentional versus ambiguous). There was also an interest in whether factors influencing responses were different for hostile aggression (that is, where the action is intended to harm the other) versus instrumental aggression (that is, where the action is motivated by an intention to remove an impediment or attain a goal). Results were that significantly stronger negative emotion and negative attributions, as well as greater levels of threat were reported in response to the scenario which was designed to appear intentional in nature. In addition, participants were more likely to endorse an aggressive behavioural response to a situation that appeared deliberately aggressive than to one where the intention was ambiguous. Analyses to determine if greater levels of negative emotions and cognitions are able to predict aggressive responses provided different patterns of results for instrumental aggression from those for hostile aggression. Specifically, for instrumental aggression, negative emotions and negative attributions were significant predictors for both the intentional and the ambiguous scenarios. In addition, perceived threat was also a significant predictor where the other driver’s intent was clearly aggressive. However, lower rather than higher, levels of perceived threat were associated with greater endorsement of an aggressive response. For hostile aggressive behavioural responses, trait aggression was the strongest predictor for both situations. Overall the results suggest that in the driving context, instrumental aggression is likely to be a much more common response than hostile aggression. Moreover, aggressive responses are more likely in situations where another driver’s behaviour is clearly intentional rather than ambiguous. The results also support the conclusion that there may be different underlying mechanisms motivating an instrumental aggressive response to those motivating a hostile one. In addition, understanding the emotions and cognitions underlying aggressive driving responses may be helpful in predicting and intervening to reduce driving aggression. The finding that drivers appear to regard tailgating as an instrumental response is of concern since this behaviour has the potential to result in crashes.

Modelling processes and the question of impact

In this Column, I have teamed up with a colleague, Eike Bernhard, a doctoral student who is studying the impact of process modelling on organizational practices. Together, we want to shed light on an age-old question of Business Process Management: What is the value proposition of process modelling?

Velocity jump processes with proliferation

Cell invasion involves a population of cells that migrate along a substrate and proliferate to a carrying capacity density. These two processes, combined, lead to invasion fronts that move into unoccupied tissues. Traditional modelling approaches based on reaction–diffusion equations cannot incorporate individual–level observations of cell velocity, as information propagates with infinite velocity according to these parabolic models. In contrast, velocity jump processes allow us to explicitly incorporate individual–level observations of cell velocity, thus providing an alternative framework for modelling cell invasion. Here, we introduce proliferation into a standard velocity–jump process and show that the standard model does not support invasion fronts. Instead, we find that crowding effects must be explicitly incorporated into a proliferative velocity–jump process before invasion fronts can be observed. Our observations are supported by numerical and analytical solutions of a novel coupled system of partial differential equations, including travelling wave solutions, and associated random walk simulations.

Learning processes in creative industries initiatives in developing countries : an examination of policy and practice

What does a dance group in Benin that mixes contemporary and ethnic dancing have in common with Mongolian felt producers that want to enter the design market in Europe? These are both examples of learning processes in Creative Industries initiatives in developing countries. Following the concept of sustainable development, I argue that the challenge for developing countries in contemporary society is to meet the very real need of people for economic development and opportunities for income generation, while at the same time avoiding unintended and unwanted consequences of economic development and globalisation. The concept of the Creative Industries may be a way to promote a development that is sustainable and avoids social exclusion of groups-at-risk. In line with this, I argue that the Creative Industries sector could, in fact, link economic development and the continuation and evolution of local traditions and cultural heritage. A pressing question then is: how can education and learning contribute to creating a context in which talent can flourish? This study aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the research problem of this thesis: what elements are conducive for individual learning processes in creative development initiatives? In this, I argue that it is crucial to determine what ingredients and characteristics contribute to making these initiatives successful, that is, to meet their specific goals, in a developing context. This is explored through a staged analysis: an overview of quantitative data, an inventory and comparative case studies and, finally, the description and analysis of two in-depth case studies – felt design in Mongolia (Asia) and dance in Benin (Africa), in which I was an observer of the action phase of the local interventions. The analysis culminates in practice-related outcomes related to the operation of creative development initiatives, as well as the contribution to the academic debate on issues like the cultural gap between developed and developing countries, transformative learning and the connection of learning spaces.

Engineering design processes in seventh-grade classrooms: bridging the engineering education gap

This paper reports on some findings from the first year of a three-year longitudinal study, in which seventh to ninth-graders were introduced to engineering education. Specifically, the paper addresses students’ responses to an initial design activity involving bridge construction, which was implemented at the end of seventh grade. This paper also addresses how students created their bridge designs and applied these in their bridge constructions; their reflections on their designs; their reflections on why the bridge failed to support increased weights during the testing process; and their suggestions on ways in which they would improve their bridge designs. The present findings include identification of six, increasingly sophisticated levels of illustrated bridge designs, with designs improving between the classroom and homework activities of two focus groups of students. Students’ responses to the classroom activity revealed a number of iterative design processes, where the problem goals, including constraints, served as monitoring factors for students’ generation of ideas, design thinking and construction of an effective bridge.

Protein monoubiquitination and polyubiquitination generate structural diversity to control distinct biological processes

Ubiquitination involves the attachment of ubiquitin (Ub) to lysine residues on substrate proteins or itself, which can result in protein monoubiquitination or polyubiquitination. Polyubiquitination through different lysines (seven) or the N-terminus of Ub can generate different protein-Ub structures. These include monoubiquitinated proteins, polyubiqutinated proteins with homotypic chains through a particular lysine on Ub or mixed polyubiquitin chains generated by polymerization through different Ub lysines. The ability of the ubiquitination pathway to generate different protein-Ub structures provides versatility of this pathway to target proteins to different fates. Protein ubiquitination is catalyzed by Ub-conjugating and Ub-ligase enzymes, with different combinations of these enzymes specifying the type of Ub modification on protein substrates. How Ub-conjugating and Ub-ligase enzymes generate this structural diversity is not clearly understood. In the current review, we discuss mechanisms utilized by the Ub-conjugating and Ub-ligase enzymes to generate structural diversity during protein ubiquitination, with a focus on recent mechanistic insights into protein monoubiquitination and polyubiquitination.

Critical timescales and time intervals for coupled linear processes

In 1991, McNabb introduced the concept of mean action time (MAT) as a finite measure of the time required for a diffusive process to effectively reach steady state. Although this concept was initially adopted by others within the Australian and New Zealand applied mathematics community, it appears to have had little use outside this region until very recently, when in 2010 Berezhkovskii and coworkers rediscovered the concept of MAT in their study of morphogen gradient formation. All previous work in this area has been limited to studying single–species differential equations, such as the linear advection–diffusion–reaction equation. Here we generalise the concept of MAT by showing how the theory can be applied to coupled linear processes. We begin by studying coupled ordinary differential equations and extend our approach to coupled partial differential equations. Our new results have broad applications including the analysis of models describing coupled chemical decay and cell differentiation processes, amongst others.

Lignocellulosics as a renewable feedstock for chemical industry : chemical hydrolysis and pretreatment processes

Lignocellulosic materials including agricultural, municipal and forestry residues, and dedicated bioenergy crops offer significant potential as a renewable feedstock for the production of fuels and chemicals. These products can be chemically or functionally equivalent to existing products that are produced from fossil-based feedstocks. To unlock the potential of lignocellulosic materials, it is necessary to pretreat or fractionate the biomass to make it amenable to downstream processing. This chapter explores current and developing technologies for the pretreatment and fractionation of lignocellulosic biomass for the production of chemicals and fuels.

Queer theory, media studies and editorial processes in queer student media

Australian queer (GLBTIQ) university student activist media is an important site of self-representation. Community media is a significant site for the development of queer identity, community and a key part of queer politics. This paper reviews my research into queer student media, which is grounded in a queer theoretical perspective. Rob Cover argues that queer theoretical approaches that study media products fail to consider the material contexts that contribute to their construction. I use an ethnographic approach to examine how editors construct queer identity and community in queer student media. My research contributes to queer media scholarship by addressing the gap that Cover identifies, and to the rich scholarship on negotiations of queer community.

Efficient route update and maintenance processes for multipath routing in large-scale industrial wireless sensor networks

Reliable communications is one of the major concerns in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Multipath routing is an effective way to improve communication reliability in WSNs. However, most of existing multipath routing protocols for sensor networks are reactive and require dynamic route discovery. If there are many sensor nodes from a source to a destination, the route discovery process will create a long end-to-end transmission delay, which causes difficulties in some time-critical applications. To overcome this difficulty, the efficient route update and maintenance processes are proposed in this paper. It aims to limit the amount of routing overhead with two-tier routing architecture and introduce the combination of piggyback and trigger update to replace the periodic update process, which is the main source of unnecessary routing overhead. Simulations are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed processes in improvement of total amount of routing overhead over existing popular routing protocols.

Silver Gelatin Print: A group exhibition curated by Karen Milder that investigates and captures the traditional processes using photograms, liquid emulsion, toning, hand-colouring and film. Part of the Queensland Festival of Photography 4 (QFP4).

Pillar of salt: (3 hand-applied silver gelatin photographs) Statement: For women moving into new experiences and spaces, loss and hardship is often a price to be paid. These courageous women look back to things they have overcome in order to continue to grow.

Automated risk mitigation in business processes

This paper proposes a concrete approach for the automatic mitigation of risks that are detected during process enactment. Given a process model exposed to risks, e.g. a financial process exposed to the risk of approval fraud, we enact this process and as soon as the likelihood of the associated risk(s) is no longer tolerable, we generate a set of possible mitigation actions to reduce the risks' likelihood, ideally annulling the risks altogether. A mitigation action is a sequence of controlled changes applied to the running process instance, taking into account a snapshot of the process resources and data, and the current status of the system in which the process is executed. These actions are proposed as recommendations to help process administrators mitigate process-related risks as soon as they arise. The approach has been implemented in the YAWL environment and its performance evaluated. The results show that it is possible to mitigate process-related risks within a few minutes.

Procuring OSM : base-line models of off-site manufacture business processes in Australia

A pressing cost issue facing construction is the procurement of off-site pre-manufactured assemblies. In order to encourage Australian adoption of off-site manufacture (OSM), a new approach to underlying processes is required. The advent of object oriented digital models for construction design assumes intelligent use of data. However, the construction production system relies on traditional methods and data sources and is expected to benefit from the application of well-established business process management techniques. The integration of the old and new data sources allows for the development of business process models which, by capturing typical construction processes involving OSM, provides insights into such processes. This integrative approach is the foundation of research into the use of OSM to increase construction productivity in Australia. The purpose of this study is to develop business process models capturing the procurement, resources and information flow of construction projects. For each stage of the construction value chain, a number of sub-processes are identified. Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN), a mainstream business process modelling standard, is used to create base-line generic construction process models. These models identify OSM decision-making points that could provide cost reductions in procurement workflow and management systems. This paper reports on phase one of an on-going research aiming to develop a proto-type workflow application that can provide semi-automated support to construction processes involving OSM and assist in decision-making in the adoption of OSM thus contributing to a sustainable built environment.