Automatic image scaling for place recognition in changing environments

Robustness to variations in environmental conditions and camera viewpoint is essential for long-term place recognition, navigation and SLAM. Existing systems typically solve either of these problems, but invariance to both remains a challenge. This paper presents a training-free approach to lateral viewpoint- and condition-invariant, vision-based place recognition. Our successive frame patch-tracking technique infers average scene depth along traverses and automatically rescales views of the same place at different depths to increase their similarity. We combine our system with the condition-invariant SMART algorithm and demonstrate place recognition between day and night, across entire 4-lane-plus-median-strip roads, where current algorithms fail.

Place recognition with ConvNet landmarks: Viewpoint-robust, condition-robust, training-free

Place recognition has long been an incompletely solved problem in that all approaches involve significant compromises. Current methods address many but never all of the critical challenges of place recognition – viewpoint-invariance, condition-invariance and minimizing training requirements. Here we present an approach that adapts state-of-the-art object proposal techniques to identify potential landmarks within an image for place recognition. We use the astonishing power of convolutional neural network features to identify matching landmark proposals between images to perform place recognition over extreme appearance and viewpoint variations. Our system does not require any form of training, all components are generic enough to be used off-the-shelf. We present a range of challenging experiments in varied viewpoint and environmental conditions. We demonstrate superior performance to current state-of-the- art techniques. Furthermore, by building on existing and widely used recognition frameworks, this approach provides a highly compatible place recognition system with the potential for easy integration of other techniques such as object detection and semantic scene interpretation.

Advance care planning in stroke: Influence of time on engagement in the process

Purpose Individuals who experience stroke have a higher likelihood of subsequent stroke events, making it imperative to plan for future medical care. In the event of a further serious health event, engaging in the process of advanced care planning (ACP) can help family members and health care professionals (HCPs) make medical decisions for individuals who have lost the capacity to do so. Few studies have explored the views and experiences of patients with stroke about discussing their wishes and preferences for future medical events, and the extent to which stroke HCPs engage in conversations around planning for such events. In this study, we sought to understand how the process of ACP unfolded between HCPs and patients post-stroke. Patients and methods Using grounded theory (GT) methodology, we engaged in direct observation of HCP and patient interactions on an acute stroke unit and two stroke rehabilitation units. Using semi-structured interviews, 14 patients and four HCPs were interviewed directly about the ACP process. Results We found that open and continual ACP conversations were not taking place, patients experienced an apparent lack of urgency to engage in ACP, and HCPs were uncomfortable initiating ACP conversations due to the sensitive nature of the topic. Conclusion In this study, we identified lack of engagement in ACP post-stroke, attributable to patient and HCP factors. This encourages us to look further into the process of ACP in order to develop open communication between the patient with stroke, their families, and stroke HCPs.

'There is nothing that identifies me to that place’: Indigenous Women’s Perceptions of Health Spaces and Places

This chapter provides an overview of the gendered realities of Indigenous men’s and Indigenous women’s lives and gendered Indigenous health perspectives. It offers the nurse some examples of the role of the nurse in working within gendered Indigenous health care.

Goodbye Brigadoon: Place, Production, and Identity in Global Glasgow

Goodbye Brigadoon examines the shifting role media production plays in the economic and cultural strategies of global cities in small market nations, specifically Glasgow, Scotland. In particular, this project focuses on the formation of a digital media village along the banks of the River Clyde to argue the site constitutes a logical component to Glasgow’s ongoing transformation into a cosmopolitan center. Yet, as the regional government’s economic strategies and policy directives work to transform the abandoned waterfront into a center of cultural activity, this project also underscores the contradictory cultural dynamics to emerge from media production’s new role in the post-industrial city. At its core, the media hub reveals a regional government more interested in the technology used to deliver “national” stories than the manner of the stories themselves or the cultural practices responsible for creating them. Indeed, Goodbye Brigadoon is most interested in how media professionals based at the emergent cluster negotiate a sense of cultural identity and creative license against the institutional constraints, policy matters, and commercial logic they also must navigate in their workaday rituals. Ultimately, the conclusions offered in this project argue for a more complicated conception of the global-local location where these professionals work. Glasgow’s digital media village, in other words, is much more than an innocuous site of competitive advantage, urban regeneration, and job growth. It is best understood as a site of intense social struggle and unequal power relations where local mediamakers often find the site’s impetus for multiplatform media production an institutionally enforced false promise at odds with the realities of creative labor in the city.

Are dietetics educators' attitudes to assessment a barrier to expanding placement opportunities? Results of a Delphi study

Aim Assessment of entry-level health professionals is complex, especially in the work-based setting, placing additional pressures on these learning environments. The present study aims to gain understanding and ideally consensus regarding the setting for assessment of all elements of competence for entry-level dietitians across Australia. Methods Seventy-five experienced academic and practitioner assessors were invited to participate in an online Delphi survey. The 166 entry-level performance criteria of the competency standards for dietitians formed the basis of the questions in the survey, with rating on which ones could be assessed in the practice setting, those which could be assessed in a classroom/university setting and which could be assessed in either setting. Forty-three of 75 invited assessors responded to the first round of the Delphi. A second modified survey was sent to the 43 participants with 34 responding. Results Consensus was achieved for the assessment setting for 86 (52%) of the performance criteria after two rounds of surveying. The majority of these performance criteria achieved consensus at round one (n = 44) and were deemed to be best assessed in the practice setting (n = 55). This study highlighted the perspectives of assessors and their preference for the work-based setting for assessment. Conclusions To reduce the focus on work-based settings as the only place for competence-based assessment of health professionals, there is a need to support individual and organisational change through challenging existing norms around assessment.

The purpose and place of mentoring for women managers in organisations: An Australian perspective

Mentoring has been identified as an important career development activity for women managers. Over the last four decades, organisations world-wide have implemented formal mentoring programs for women and for members of minority groups in recognition of the personal and professional benefits mentoring provides, not only for persons who are mentored but also, for those who undertake the mentoring. This chapter reviews the literature on mentoring and the contribution it can make to the career development of women managers. It reviews several inter-related bodies of literature: women’s representation in management positions worldwide; theories and frameworks of mentoring; empirical research exploring the impact of mentoring relationships on women managers’ career development; current illustrations of formal programs offered to women managers in the public and private sectors; and some critical issues that continue to impact women managers in relation to mentoring relationships. The chapter concludes by making an argument for further research on gender and mentoring.

Remaking Guangzhou: Geo-identity and place-making on Sina Weibo

This study uses the concept of 'place-making' to consider the formation of geo-identity on Sina Weibo, one of the most popular microblogging services in China. Besides articulating state-public confrontation during major social controversies, Weibo has been used to recollect and re-narrate the memories of a city, such as Guangzhou, where dramatic social and cultural changes took place during the economic reform era. This study aims to explore how Weibo sustains political engagement through maintaining Guangzhou people's sense of belonging to their city. By collecting data from a Weibo group over a period of twelve months, I argue that Weibo politics not only takes place during a contentious events, but is sustained within the realm of everyday life. This study has the potential to contribute to the limited knowledge of Weibo use during non-contentious period in China, hence broadening the notion of popular polity in the age of social media.

PEOPLE and PLACE: lecture notes and workshops

This a compilation of lecture notes and tutorial workshops that were prepared for the former QUT unit DLB310 People and Place. This unit introduced second year students to fundamental ideas about environmental psychology and cultural landscape theory for landscape architects.

Reconfiguring Guangzhou identity – a study of place and locality on Sina Weibo

This thesis investigates the role of Chinese microblogging platform Sina Weibo in how the people of Guangzhou understand and negotiate their sense of locality. The geo-identity approach used in this thesis opens up a new approach to explore the complex power relationships that structure our society in and through digital media. It finds that although the Chinese government is trying to orchestrate a homogeneous sense of national belonging, Weibo is constantly reinforcing people's awareness of and identification with the local. The findings show that as new communication technologies and practices reconfigure people's daily experience and social lives, they redefine our sense of self and belonging.

A preference-based semantics for CTD reasoning

In [8] the authors developed a logical system based on the definition of a new non-classical connective ⊗ capturing the notion of reparative obligation. The system proved to be appropriate for handling well-known contrary-to-duty paradoxes but no model-theoretic semantics was presented. In this paper we fill the gap and define a suitable possible-world semantics for the system for which we can prove soundness and completeness. The semantics is a preference-based non-normal one extending and generalizing semantics for classical modal logics.

Time, place and space – student group collaboration using Google Drive

Virtual working environments are intrinsic to the contemporary workplace and collaborative skills are a vital graduate capability. To develop students’ collaborative skills, first year medical laboratory science students undertake a group poster project, based on a blended learning model. Learning is scaffolded in lectures, workshops in collaborative learning spaces, practitioner mentoring sessions, and online resources. Google Drive provides an online collaborative space for students to realise tangible outcomes from this learning. A Google Drive document is created for each group and shared with members. In this space, students assign tasks and plan workflow, share research, progressively develop poster content, reflect and comment on peer contributions and use the messaging functions to ‘talk’ to group members. This provides a readily accessible, transparent record of group work, crucial in peer assessment, and a communication channel for group members and the lecturer, who can support groups if required. This knowledge creation space also augments productivity and effectiveness of face-to-face collaboration. As members are randomly allocated to groups and are often of diverse backgrounds and unknown to each other, resilience is built as students navigate the uncertainties and complexities of group dynamics, learning to focus on the goal of the team task as they constructively and professionally engage in team dialogue. Students are responsible and accountable for individual and group work. The use of Google Drive was evaluated in a survey including Likert scale and open ended qualitative questions. Statistical analysis was carried out. Results show students (79%) valued the inclusion of online space in collaborative work and highly appreciated (78%) the flexibility provided by Google Drive, while recognising the need for improved notification functionality. Teaching staff recognised the advantages in monitoring and moderating collaborative group work, and the transformational progression in student collaborative as well as technological skill acquisition, including professional dialogue.

Place making facilitators of knowledge and innovation spaces: Insights from European best practices

Knowledge economy seeks its nourishment from diversity and dissemination of ideas and creativity of its talent base. This has led to the acknowledgement of place making as a major strategy to attract and retain the knowledge base into the emerging knowledge and innovation spaces. The study seeks to explore the adoption of place making in this context. Literature and practice provide information to understand the evolution of various spatial typologies and the specialised role of place making in such locations. This helps in determining the key facilitators of place making. The paper takes an interdisciplinary approach and develops an integrated conceptual framework considering dimensions and facilitators of place making. Through the lens of the framework, best practices across Europe—i.e., Cambridge Science Park (UK), 22@Barcelona (Spain), Arabianranta (Finland), Strijp-S (Netherlands), and Digital Hub (Ireland)—are scrutinised to highlight various approaches to place making. The findings provide insights and a discussion into the interplay of form, function, image and underlying processes in globally emerging spatial typologies of contemporary knowledge and innovation spaces.

What parents want: Parent preference regarding sleep for their preschool child when attending Early Care and Education

Background While most children cease napping between the ages of 2 and 5 years, across a range of international settings the allocation of a mandatory naptime is a common feature of the daily routine in Early Care and Education (ECE) programs for children of this age. Evidence regarding the developmental effects of napping is limited but, beyond age 2, is consistently associated with delayed night sleep onset and increased number of awakenings. Objectives The present study examined parent preferences towards napping in ECE. Methods Participants were 750 parents of preschool-aged children attending a representative sample of Australian ECE programs across metropolitan, regional and rural sites in 2011. We analysed quantitative and open-ended questionnaire data from a large, longitudinal study of the effectiveness of Australian early education programs (E4Kids). Statistical analyses examined prevalence of parent preference for sleep and demographic correlates. Thematic analyses were employed to identify parents' rationale for this preference. Results The majority of parents (78.7%) preferred that their children did not regularly sleep while attending ECE. The dominant explanation provided by parents was that regular naps were no longer appropriate and adversely impacted their children's health and development. Parents of younger children were more likely to support regular naps. Conclusions The results highlight a disjuncture between parent preferences and current sleep policy and practices in ECE. Further research is needed to establish evidence-based guidelines to support healthy sleep-rest practices in ECE. Such evidence will guide appropriate practice and support parent-educator communication regarding sleep and rest.

Caught between a rock and a hard place: Disruptive boys’ views on mainstream and special schools in New South Wales, Australia

Students with disruptive behaviour in the Australian state of New South Wales are increasingly being educated in separate “behaviour” schools. There is however surprisingly little research on how students view these settings, or indeed the mainstream schools from which they were excluded. To better understand excluded students’ current and past educational experiences, we interviewed 33 boys, aged between 9 and 16 years of age, who were enrolled in separate special schools for students with disruptive behaviour. Analyses reveal that the majority of participants began disliking school in the early years due to difficulties with school work and teacher conflict. Interestingly, while most indicated that they preferred the behaviour school, more than half still wanted to return to their old school. It is therefore clear that separate special educational settings are not a solution to disruptive behaviour in mainstream schools. Whilst these settings do fulfil a function for some students, the preferences of the majority of boys suggest that “mainstream” school reform is of first order importance.