The Cambridge companion to creative writing [Edited book]

Creative writing has become a highly professionalised academic discipline, with popular courses and prestigious degree programmes worldwide. This book is a must for all students and teachers of creative writing, indeed for anyone who aspires to be a published writer. It engages with a complex art in an accessible manner, addressing concepts important to the rapidly growing field of creative writing, while maintaining a strong craft emphasis, analysing exemplary models of writing and providing related writing exercises. Written by professional writers and teachers of writing, the chapters deal with specific genres or forms – ranging from the novel to new media – or with significant topics that explore the cutting edge state of creative writing internationally (including creative writing and science, contemporary publishing and new workshop approaches).

Heritage language for young Chinese Australian adults in urban Australia : Capital and habitus in fields

Studies of Heritage Language learners‟ commitment and their ethnic identity are increasing, yet there is scant sociological research addressing topics relating to Chinese Heritage Language learners. Drawing on Bourdieu‟s signature notions of „habitus‟, „capital‟, and „field‟, this mixed methods study investigates two problems: (1) impacts of “Chineseness” and accessible resources on Chinese Heritage Language proficiency of young Chinese Australian adults in urban Australia; and (2) the meanings of Chinese Heritage Language to these young people.

Efficient real-time face detection for high resolution surveillance applications

This paper presents an efficient face detection method suitable for real-time surveillance applications. Improved efficiency is achieved by constraining the search window of an AdaBoost face detector to pre-selected regions. Firstly, the proposed method takes a sparse grid of sample pixels from the image to reduce whole image scan time. A fusion of foreground segmentation and skin colour segmentation is then used to select candidate face regions. Finally, a classifier-based face detector is applied only to selected regions to verify the presence of a face (the Viola-Jones detector is used in this paper). The proposed system is evaluated using 640 x 480 pixels test images and compared with other relevant methods. Experimental results show that the proposed method reduces the detection time to 42 ms, where the Viola-Jones detector alone requires 565 ms (on a desktop processor). This improvement makes the face detector suitable for real-time applications. Furthermore, the proposed method requires 50% of the computation time of the best competing method, while reducing the false positive rate by 3.2% and maintaining the same hit rate.

A reliable real-time transport protocol for control systems over wireless networks

Deploying networked control systems (NCSs) over wireless networks is becoming more and more popular. However, the widely-used transport layer protocols, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP), are not designed for real-time applications. Therefore, they may not be suitable for many NCS application scenarios because of their limitations on reliability and/or delay performance, which real-control systems concern. Considering a typical type of NCSs with periodic and sporadic real-time traffic, this paper proposes a highly reliable transport layer protocol featuring a packet loss-sensitive retransmission mechanism and a prioritized transmission mechanism. The packet loss-sensitive retransmission mechanism is designed to improve the reliability of all traffic flows. And the prioritized transmission mechanism offers differentiated services for periodic and sporadic flows. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol has better reliability than UDP and improved delay performance than TCP over wireless networks, particularly when channel errors and congestions occur.

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.

Slide attacks on the Sfinks stream cipher

Sfinks is a shift register based stream cipher designed for hardware implementation and submitted to the eSTREAM project. In this paper, we analyse the initialisation process of Sfinks. We demonstrate a slid property of the loaded state of the Sfinks cipher, where multiple key-IV pairs may produce phase shifted keystream sequences. The state update functions of both the initialisation process and keystream generation and also the pattern of the padding affect generation of the slid pairs.

Of repetition and of song

Allyson Reynolds, for many years now, has been a keen student of nature. Nature’s forms have always been important to her work, but it would be wrong to see Reynolds as simply transcribing directly from the natural world. For this artist, nature and the natural world represents an elusive invitation and so Reynolds doesn’t so much paint from nature, although resemblance and imitation are clearly evident, as work to render visually and emotionally tangible this invitation. And for a viewer this is no small thing as the invitation is to become attuned and connect with nature as it exists in ourselves, that is to see as nature. Reynolds’ is inviting us as viewers to connect and participate with the nature of nature that is evident in ourselves through the act of perceiving. Reynolds’ work can do this because it is a work born of deep evocation. The sensibility from which it emerges or is transacted is poetic, intensely so, but more than that it works to make of viewing an act of poetry, through a celebration of seeing. Reynolds evocation is born of a deep feeling towards and contemplation of the natural world - it is as though the world lives in her and is now a seamless part of her creative vocabulary. In such personal work there is a profoundly felt and revealed sense of the intimate and like true intimacy it revels in both its dark and quiet, as well as its playful and light, aspects. What is special about Reynolds’ visual poetry is that it able to render this intimacy so accessible. It is an accessibility that is available for the viewer who is able to not only look but also surrender to that looking, accepting and working with the flow of thoughts and associations it occasions...

A Comprehensive Benchmarking Framework (CoBeFra) for conformance analysis between procedural process models and event logs in ProM

Process mining encompasses the research area which is concerned with knowledge discovery from information system event logs. Within the process mining research area, two prominent tasks can be discerned. First of all, process discovery deals with the automatic construction of a process model out of an event log. Secondly, conformance checking focuses on the assessment of the quality of a discovered or designed process model in respect to the actual behavior as captured in event logs. Hereto, multiple techniques and metrics have been developed and described in the literature. However, the process mining domain still lacks a comprehensive framework for assessing the goodness of a process model from a quantitative perspective. In this study, we describe the architecture of an extensible framework within ProM, allowing for the consistent, comparative and repeatable calculation of conformance metrics. For the development and assessment of both process discovery as well as conformance techniques, such a framework is considered greatly valuable.

Towards configuring the Internet for social development in the Philippines

The Internet is one of the most significant information and communication technologies to emerge during the end of the last century. It created new and effective means by which individuals and groups communicate. These advances led to marked institutional changes most notably in the realm of commercial exchange: it did not only provide the high-speed communication infrastructure to business enterprises; it also opened them to the global consumer base where they could market their products and services. Commercial interests gradually dominated Internet technology over the past several years and have been a factor in the increase of its user population and enhancement of infrastructure. Such commercial interests fitted comfortably within the structures of the Philippine government. As revealed in the study, state policies and programs make use of Internet technology as an enabler of commercial institutional reforms using traditional economic measures. Yet, despite efforts to maximize the Internet as an enabler for market-driven economic growth, the accrued benefits are yet to come about; it is largely present only in major urban areas and accessible to a small number of social groups. The failure of the Internet’s developmental capability can be traced back to the government’s wholesale adoption of commercial-centered discourse. The Internet’s developmental gains (i.e. instrumental, communicative and emancipatory) and features, which were always there since its inception, have been visibly left out in favor of its commercial value. By employing synchronic and diachronic analysis, it can be shown that the Internet can be a vital technology in promoting genuine social development in the Philippines. In general, the object is to realize a social environment of towards a more inclusive and participatory application of Internet technology, equally aware of the caveats or risks the technology may pose. It is argued further that there is a need for continued social scientific research regarding the social as and developmental implications of Internet technology at local level structures, such social sectors, specific communities and organizations. On the meta-level, such approach employed in this research can be a modest attempt in increasing the calculus of hope especially among the marginalized Filipino sectors, with the use of information and communications technologies. This emerging field of study—tentatively called Progressive Informatics—must emanate from the more enlightened social sectors, namely: the non-government, academic and locally-based organizations.

Using patterns co-occurrence matrix for cleaning closed sequential patterns for text mining

With the overwhelming increase in the amount of texts on the web, it is almost impossible for people to keep abreast of up-to-date information. Text mining is a process by which interesting information is derived from text through the discovery of patterns and trends. Text mining algorithms are used to guarantee the quality of extracted knowledge. However, the extracted patterns using text or data mining algorithms or methods leads to noisy patterns and inconsistency. Thus, different challenges arise, such as the question of how to understand these patterns, whether the model that has been used is suitable, and if all the patterns that have been extracted are relevant. Furthermore, the research raises the question of how to give a correct weight to the extracted knowledge. To address these issues, this paper presents a text post-processing method, which uses a pattern co-occurrence matrix to find the relation between extracted patterns in order to reduce noisy patterns. The main objective of this paper is not only reducing the number of closed sequential patterns, but also improving the performance of pattern mining as well. The experimental results on Reuters Corpus Volume 1 data collection and TREC filtering topics show that the proposed method is promising.

Planar difference functions

In 1980 Alltop produced a family of cubic phase sequences that nearly meet the Welch bound for maximum non-peak correlation magnitude. This family of sequences were shown by Wooters and Fields to be useful for quantum state tomography. Alltop’s construction used a function that is not planar, but whose difference function is planar. In this paper we show that Alltop type functions cannot exist in fields of characteristic 3 and that for a known class of planar functions, x^3 is the only Alltop type function.

Can a community pharmacy sleep assessment tool aid the identification of patients at risk of sleep disorders in the community : a pilot study

Background: When experiencing sleep problems for the first time, consumers may often approach community pharmacists for advice as they are easily accessible health care professionals in the community. In Australian community pharmacies there are no specific tools available for use by pharmacists to assist with the assessment and handling of consumers with sleep enquiries. Objective: To assess the feasibility of improving the detection of sleep disorders within the community through the pilot of a newly developed Community Pharmacy Sleep Assessment Tool (COP-SAT). Method: The COP-SAT was designed to incorporate elements from a number of existing, standardized, and validated clinical screening measures. The COP-SAT was trialed in four Australian community pharmacies over a 4-week period. Key findings: A total of 241 community pharmacy consumers were assessed using the COP-SAT. A total of 74 (30.7%) were assessed as being at risk of insomnia, 26 (10.7%) were at risk of daytime sleepiness, 19 (7.9%) were at risk of obstructive sleep apnea, and 121 (50.2%) were regular snorers. A total of 116 (48.1%) participants indicated that they consume caffeine before bedtime, of which 55 (47%) had associated symptoms of sleep onset insomnia. Moreover, 85 (35%) consumed alcohol before bedtime, of which 50 (58%) experienced fragmented sleep, 50 (58%) were regular snorers, and nine (10.6%) had apnea symptoms. The COP-SAT was feasible in the community pharmacy setting. The prevalence of sleep disorders in the sampled population was high, but generally consistent with previous studies on the general population. Conclusion: A large proportion of participants reported sleep disorder symptoms, and a link was found between the consumption of alcohol and caffeine substances at bedtime and associated symptoms. While larger studies are needed to assess the clinical properties of the tool, the results of this feasibility study have demonstrated that the COP-SAT may be a practical tool for the identification of patients at risk of developing sleep disorders in the community.

Daylighting design and simulation : ease of use analysis of digital tools for architects

Good daylighting design in buildings not only provides a comfortable luminous environment, but also delivers energy savings and comfortable and healthy environments for building occupants. Yet, there is still no consensus on how to assess what constitutes good daylighting design. Currently amongst building performance guidelines, Daylighting factors (DF) or minimum illuminance values are the standard; however, previous research has shown the shortcomings of these metrics. New computer software for daylighting analysis contains new more advanced metrics for daylighting (Climate Base Daylight Metrics-CBDM). Yet, these tools (new metrics or simulation tools) are not currently understood by architects and are not used within architectural firms in Australia. A survey of architectural firms in Brisbane showed the most relevant tools used by industry. The purpose of this paper is to assess and compare these computer simulation tools and new tools available architects and designers for daylighting. The tools are assessed in terms of their ease of use (e.g. previous knowledge required, complexity of geometry input, etc.), efficiency (e.g. speed, render capabilities, etc.) and outcomes (e.g. presentation of results, etc. The study shows tools that are most accessible for architects, are those that import a wide variety of files, or can be integrated into the current 3d modelling software or package. These software’s need to be able to calculate for point in times simulations, and annual analysis. There is a current need in these software solutions for an open source program able to read raw data (in the form of spreadsheets) and show that graphically within a 3D medium. Currently, development into plug-in based software’s are trying to solve this need through third party analysis, however some of these packages are heavily reliant and their host program. These programs however which allow dynamic daylighting simulation, which will make it easier to calculate accurate daylighting no matter which modelling platform the designer uses, while producing more tangible analysis today, without the need to process raw data.

Pore structure characterization of North American shale gas reservoirs using USANS/SANS, gas adsorption, and mercury intrusion

Small-angle and ultra-small-angle neutron scattering (SANS and USANS), low-pressure adsorption (N2 and CO2), and high-pressure mercury intrusion measurements were performed on a suite of North American shale reservoir samples providing the first ever comparison of all these techniques for characterizing the complex pore structure of shales. The techniques were used to gain insight into the nature of the pore structure including pore geometry, pore size distribution and accessible versus inaccessible porosity. Reservoir samples for analysis were taken from currently-active shale gas plays including the Barnett, Marcellus, Haynesville, Eagle Ford, Woodford, Muskwa, and Duvernay shales. Low-pressure adsorption revealed strong differences in BET surface area and pore volumes for the sample suite, consistent with variability in composition of the samples. The combination of CO2 and N2 adsorption data allowed pore size distributions to be created for micro–meso–macroporosity up to a limit of �1000 Å. Pore size distributions are either uni- or multi-modal. The adsorption-derived pore size distributions for some samples are inconsistent with mercury intrusion data, likely owing to a combination of grain compression during high-pressure intrusion, and the fact that mercury intrusion yields information about pore throat rather than pore body distributions. SANS/USANS scattering data indicate a fractal geometry (power-law scattering) for a wide range of pore sizes and provide evidence that nanometer-scale spatial ordering occurs in lower mesopore–micropore range for some samples, which may be associated with inter-layer spacing in clay minerals. SANS/USANS pore radius distributions were converted to pore volume distributions for direct comparison with adsorption data. For the overlap region between the two methods, the agreement is quite good. Accessible porosity in the pore size (radius) range 5 nm–10 lm was determined for a Barnett shale sample using the contrast matching method with pressurized deuterated methane fluid. The results demonstrate that accessible porosity is pore-size dependent.

Characterization of tight gas reservoir pore structure using USANS/SANS and gas adsorption analysis

Small-angle and ultra-small-angle neutron scattering (SANS and USANS) measurements were performed on samples from the Triassic Montney tight gas reservoir in Western Canada in order to determine the applicability of these techniques for characterizing the full pore size spectrum and to gain insight into the nature of the pore structure and its control on permeability. The subject tight gas reservoir consists of a finely laminated siltstone sequence; extensive cementation and moderate clay content are the primary causes of low permeability. SANS/USANS experiments run at ambient pressure and temperature conditions on lithologically-diverse sub-samples of three core plugs demonstrated that a broad pore size distribution could be interpreted from the data. Two interpretation methods were used to evaluate total porosity, pore size distribution and surface area and the results were compared to independent estimates derived from helium porosimetry (connected porosity) and low-pressure N2 and CO2 adsorption (accessible surface area and pore size distribution). The pore structure of the three samples as interpreted from SANS/USANS is fairly uniform, with small differences in the small-pore range (<2000 Å), possibly related to differences in degree of cementation, and mineralogy, in particular clay content. Total porosity interpreted from USANS/SANS is similar to (but systematically higher than) helium porosities measured on the whole core plug. Both methods were used to estimate the percentage of open porosity expressed here as a ratio of connected porosity, as established from helium adsorption, to the total porosity, as estimated from SANS/USANS techniques. Open porosity appears to control permeability (determined using pressure and pulse-decay techniques), with the highest permeability sample also having the highest percentage of open porosity. Surface area, as calculated from low-pressure N2 and CO2 adsorption, is significantly less than surface area estimates from SANS/USANS, which is due in part to limited accessibility of the gases to all pores. The similarity between N2 and CO2-accessible surface area suggests an absence of microporosity in these samples, which is in agreement with SANS analysis. A core gamma ray profile run on the same core from which the core plug samples were taken correlates to profile permeability measurements run on the slabbed core. This correlation is related to clay content, which possibly controls the percentage of open porosity. Continued study of these effects will prove useful in log-core calibration efforts for tight gas.