Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) for electric vehicles (EVs) - present and future trends

100 year old gasoline engine technology vehicles have now become one of the major contributors of greenhouse gases. Plug-in Electric Vehicles (PEVs) have been proposed to achieve environmental friendly transportation. Even though the PEV usage is currently increasing, a technology breakthrough would be required to overcome battery related drawbacks. Although battery technology is evolving, drawbacks inherited with batteries such as; cost, size, weight, slower charging characteristic and low energy density would still be dominating constrains for development of EVs. Furthermore, PEVs have not been accepted as preferred choice by many consumers due to charging related issues. To address battery related limitations, the concept of dynamic Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) enabled EVs have been proposed in which EV is being charged while it is in motion. WPT enabled infrastructure has to be employed to achieve dynamic EV charging concept. The weight of the battery pack can be reduced as the required energy storage is lower if the vehicle can be powered wirelessly while driving. Stationary WPT charging where EV is charged wirelessly when it is stopped, is simpler than dynamic WPT in terms of design complexity. However, stationary WPT does not increase vehicle range compared to wired-PEVs. State-of-art WPT technology for future transportation is discussed in this chapter. Analysis of the WPT system and its performance indices are introduced. Modelling the WPT system using different methods such as equivalent circuit theory, two port network theory and coupled mode theory is described illustrating their own merits in Sect. 2.3. Both stationary and dynamic WPT for EV applications are illustrated in Sect. 2.4. Design challenges and optimization directions are analysed in Sect. 2.5. Adaptive tuning techniques such as adaptive impedance matching and frequency tuning are also discussed. A case study for optimizing resonator design is presented in Sect. 2.6. Achievements by the research community is introduced highlighting directions for future research.

Repositioning "old" drugs for new causes : identifying new treatments for prostate cancer

The majority of prostate cancer related deaths are due to the spread of the disease. This project developed a screening protocol to identify existing drugs that could be used to prevent the spread of prostate cancer and thereby improve the survival of the patients.

Review of "English language education across Greater China"; edited by Anwei Feng

I formally learned English from Year Four until the completion of my undergraduate study in China. Because of this personal history, I was keen to review this book and revisit English education in China. The list of contributors to the book includes Anwei Feng (editor) and his colleagues, who play an insider role in English language practice, research, and policy-making in “Greater China”. Greater China according to Feng, can be defined as geographically close, demographically Chinese-dominated, and culturally, economically, and socio-politically interrelated countries and territories where Chinese is either the mother tongue or used as an official language.

Creating a legal framework for copyright management of open access within the Australian academic and research sector

This chapter analyses the copyright law framework needed to ensure open access to outputs of the Australian academic and research sector such as journal articles and theses. It overviews the new knowledge landscape, the principles of copyright law, the concept of open access to knowledge, the recently developed open content models of copyright licensing and the challenges faced in providing greater access to knowledge and research outputs.

Name-calling by a child diagnosed with asperger’s syndrome

Rendle-Short, Wilkinson, and Danby show how social interaction is directly relevant to maintaining friendships, mental health and well-being, and supportive peer relations. Using conversation analysis, the chapter focuses on conversational participants’ pursuit of affiliation and intimacy from a language as action perspective. It focuses on the use of derogatory naming practices by a 10-year-old girl diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. The analysis shows how derogatory address terms, part of a wider pattern of behaviour evident in this child’s interaction, result in behaviour that might be thought of as impolite or lacking in restraint. It also illustrates how a single case study can draw attention to the context-specific nature of interaction when working with children with Asperger’s Syndrome. The chapter contributes to our understanding of the difficulty in pinpointing, with precision and with clear evidence, what counts as a ‘social interaction difficulty’ due to the context specific nature of interaction.

Associations between early shared music activities in the home and later child outcomes : findings from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children

The benefits of early shared book reading between parents and children have long been established,yet the same cannot be said for early shared music activities in the home. This study investigated the parent–child home music activities in a sample of 3031 Australian children participating in Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) study. Frequency of shared home music activities was reported by parents when children were 2–3 years and a range of social, emotional,and cognitive outcomes were measured by parent and teacher report and direct testing two years later when children were 4–5 years old. A series of regression analyses (controlling for a set of important socio-demographic variables) found frequency of shared home music activities to have a small significant partial association with measures of children’s vocabulary, numeracy, attentional and emotional regulation, and prosocial skills. We then included both book reading and shared home music activities in the same models and found that frequency of shared home music activities maintained small partial associations with measures of prosocial skills, attentional regulation, and numeracy. Our findings suggest there may be a role for parent-child home music activities in supporting children’s development.

Regional avian species declines estimated from volunteer-collected long-term data using List Length Analysis

Long-term systematic population monitoring data sets are rare but are essential in identifying changes in species abundance. In contrast, community groups and natural history organizations have collected many species lists. These represent a large, untapped source of information on changes in abundance but are generally considered of little value. The major problem with using species lists to detect population changes is that the amount of effort used to obtain the list is often uncontrolled and usually unknown. It has been suggested that using the number of species on the list, the "list length," can be a measure of effort. This paper significantly extends the utility of Franklin's approach using Bayesian logistic regression. We demonstrate the value of List Length Analysis to model changes in species prevalence (i.e., the proportion of lists on which the species occurs) using bird lists collected by a local bird club over 40 years around Brisbane, southeast Queensland, Australia. We estimate the magnitude and certainty of change for 269 bird species and calculate the probabilities that there have been declines and increases of given magnitudes. List Length Analysis confirmed suspected species declines and increases. This method is an important complement to systematically designed intensive monitoring schemes and provides a means of utilizing data that may otherwise be deemed useless. The results of List Length Analysis can be used for targeting species of conservation concern for listing purposes or for more intensive monitoring. While Bayesian methods are not essential for List Length Analysis, they can offer more flexibility in interrogating the data and are able to provide a range of parameters that are easy to interpret and can facilitate conservation listing and prioritization. © 2010 by the Ecological Society of America.

Changing the game: The role of social media in overcoming old media's attention deficit toward women's sport

Social media is now an integral part of modern sports broadcasting, which combines old and new media into a redefined and multidimensional experience for fans. The popularity of social media has particular implications for professional women's sports due to this convergence, and may be utilised by organisations to address some of the issues women's sports face from a lack of traditional broadcast coverage. This article discusses Twitter activity surrounding the ANZ Championship netball competition and analyses the ways social media can help transcend the structural challenges that “old” media has placed on professional women's sports.

Book Review: "Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music around the World". Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

It is rare to find an anthology that realizes the possibilities of the form. We tend to regard our edited collections as lesser siblings, and forget their special value. But at times, a subject seems to require an edited collection much more than it does a classic monograph. So it is with the subject showcased here, which concerns the global circulation, performance and consumption of heavy metal. This is a relatively new and emerging body of work, hitherto scattered disparately in the broader popular music studies, but quickly gaining status as a “studies” with the establishment of a global conference, a journal, and publication of this anthology, all in recent years. Metal Rules the Globe took the editors’ a decade to compile. That they have thought deeply about how they want the collection to speak shows through in the book’s thoughtful arrangement and design, and in the way in which they draw on the contributions herein to develop for the field a research agenda that will take it forward...

Reading Australia Essay: "Romulus, My Father" by Raimond Gaita

This is an introductory essay about the memoir "Romulus, My Father" by Raimond Gaita. The essay was published as part of the Copyright Agency's "Reading Australia" initiative. "In a critical moment of reflection and pause, Romulus, My Father offers the reader a key to its interpretation. The author – philosopher Raimond Gaita – tells us that ‘Plato said that those who love and seek wisdom are clinging in recollection to things they once saw’. This reference to the Greek philosopher’s work Phaedrus occurs when the boy Raimond is about eight years old. He seems already to understand much about his father, in particular his father’s goodness, which he finds expressed in his workmanship, his honesty, and his commitment to friends. And yet, as Plato forewarns us, a search for the ultimate wisdom of such things must come later – several decades on, when Gaita is faced with the task of writing his father’s eulogy. It is then that a sense of his father’s character is joined to his own search for wisdom, a combination of biography and reflection that marks the memoir form at its best, and shapes the ultimate impact of Romulus, My Father...."--publisher website

Do-Rank: DCG optimization for learning-to-rank in tag-based item recommendation systems

Discounted Cumulative Gain (DCG) is a well-known ranking evaluation measure for models built with multiple relevance graded data. By handling tagging data used in recommendation systems as an ordinal relevance set of {negative,null,positive}, we propose to build a DCG based recommendation model. We present an efficient and novel learning-to-rank method by optimizing DCG for a recommendation model using the tagging data interpretation scheme. Evaluating the proposed method on real-world datasets, we demonstrate that the method is scalable and outperforms the benchmarking methods by generating a quality top-N item recommendation list.

A rare view: Barbara Hatley’s new book documents a career-long study of, and passion for performance in Central Java

Javanese Performances on an Indonesian Stage: Contesting Culture, Embracing Change, is Barbara Hatley’s first book about the performing arts in Indonesia, a topic that piqued her interest while undergoing a masters program at Yale University in the late 1960s. In this sense, it is a landmark study, for Hatley has since become very well known in Indonesianist circles, especially among those with an interest in matters of culture, popular and elite. Until recently, her writings on Indonesian performing arts have only been available in the form of journal articles and book chapters...