Exploring community building with an awareness display

In this paper, we present a field trial of a pervasive system called Panorama that is aimed at supporting social awareness in work environments. Panorama is an intelligent situated display in the staff room of an academic department. It artistically represents non-critical user generated content such as images from holidays, conferences and other social gatherings, as well as textual messages on its display. It also captures images and videos from different public spaces of the department and streams them onto the Panorama screen, using appropriate abstraction techniques. We studied the use of Panorama for two weeks and observed how Panorama affected staff members' social awareness and community building. We report that Panorama simulated curiosity and learning, initiated new interactions and provided a mechanism for cherishing old memories.

Ecological consequences of fragmentation and deforestation in an urban landscape : a case study

Landscape change is an ongoing process even within established urban landscapes. Yet, analyses of fragmentation and deforestation have focused primarily on the conversion of non-urban to urban landscapes in rural landscapes and ignored urban landscapes. To determine the ecological effects of continued urbanization in urban landscapes, tree-covered patches were mapped in the Gwynns Falls watershed (17158.6 ha) in Maryland for 1994 and 1999 to document fragmentation, deforestation, and reforestation. The watershed was divided into lower (urban core), middle (older suburbs), and upper (recent suburbs) subsections. Over the entire watershed a net of 264.5 of 4855.5 ha of tree-covered patches were converted to urban land use-125 new tree-covered patches were added through fragmentation, 4 were added through reforestation, 43 were lost through deforestation, and 7 were combined with an adjacent patch. In addition, 180 patches were reduced in size. In the urban core, deforestation continued with conversion to commercial land use. Because of the lack of vegetation, commercial land uses are problematic for both species conservation and derived ecosystem benefits. In the lower subsection, shape complexity increased for tree-covered patches less than 10 ha. Changes in shape resulted from canopy expansion, planted materials, and reforestation of vacant sites. In the middle and upper subsections, the shape index value for tree-covered patches decreased, indicating simplification. Density analyses of the subsections showed no change with respect to patch densities but pointed out the importance of small patches (≤5 ha) as "stepping stone" to link large patches (e. g., ≥100 ha). Using an urban forest effect model, we estimated, for the entire watershed, total carbon loss and pollution removal, from 1994 to 1999, to be 14,235,889.2 kg and 13,011.4 kg, respectively due to urban land-use conversions.

Talk Underwater

Short story

Downhill

Chapter one of my forthcoming novel, "The Bullroarers", being the creative component of my PHD at Murdoch University (in progress), re-written as a stand alone short story.

UNIFOLIATA regulates leaf and flower morphogenesis in pea

Background The vegetative phenotype of the pea mutant unifoliata (uni) is a simplification of the wild-type compound leaf to a single leaflet. Mutant uni plants are also self-sterile and the flowers resemble known floral meristem and organ identity mutants. In Antirrhinum and Arabidopsis, mutations in the floral meristem identity gene FLORICAULA/LEAFY (FLO/LFY) affect flower development alone, whereas the tobacco FLO/LFY homologue, NFL, is expressed in vegetative tissues, suggesting that NFL specifies determinacy in the progenitor cells for both flowers and leaves. In this paper, we characterised the pea homologue of FLO/LFY. Results The pea cDNA homologue of FLO/LFY, PEAFLO, mapped to the uni locus in recombinant-inbred mapping populations and markers based on PEAFLO cosegregated with uni in segregating sibling populations. The characterisation of two spontaneous uni mutant alleles, one containing a deletion and the other a point mutation in the PEAFLO coding sequences, predicted that PEAFLO corresponds to UNI and that the mutant vegetative phenotype was conferred by the defective PEAFLO gene. Conclusions The uni mutant demonstrates that there are shared regulatory processes in the morphogenesis of leaves and flowers and that floral meristem identity genes have an extended role in plant development. Pleiotropic regulatory genes such as UNI support the hypothesis that leaves and flowers derive from a common ancestral sporophyll-like structure. The regulation of indeterminacy during leaf and flower morphogenesis by UNI may reflect a primitive function for the gene in the pre-angiosperm era.

Narratives of possession : reading for saga authorship

The aim of this thesis is to show how character analysis can be used to approach conceptions of saga authorship in medieval Iceland. The idea of possession is a metaphor that is adopted early in the thesis, and is used to describe Icelandic sagas as works in which traditional material is subtly interpreted by medieval authors. For example, we can say that if authors claim greater possession of the sagas, they interpret, and not merely record, the sagas' historical information. On the other hand, tradition holds onto its possession of the narrative whenever it is not possible for an author to develop his own creative and historical interests. The metaphor of possession also underpins the character analysis in the thesis, which is based on the idea that saga authors used characters as a vehicle by which to possess saga narratives and so develop their own historical interests. The idea of possession signals the kinds of problems of authorship study which are addressed here, in particular, the question of the authors' sense of saga writing as an act either of preservation or of creation. While, in that sense, the thesis represents an additional voice in a long-standing debate about the saga writers' relation to their source materials, I argue against a clear-cut distinction between creative and non-creative authors, and focus instead on the wide variation in authorial control over saga materials. This variation suggests that saga authorship is a multi-functional activity, or one which co-exists with tradition. Further, by emphasising characterisation as a method, I am adding to the weight of scholarship that seeks to understand the sagas in terms of their literary effects. The Introduction and chapter one lay out the theoretical scope of this thesis. My aim in these first two sections is to inform the reader of the type of critical questions that arise when authorship is approached in relation to characterisation, and to suggest an interpretive framework with which to approach these questions. In the Introduction this aim manifests as a brief discussion of the application of the term "authorship" to the medieval Icelandic corpus, a definition of the scope of this study, and an introduction to the connections, made throughout this thesis, between saga authors, the sagas' narrative style, and the style of characterisation in the sagas. Chapter one is a far more detailed discussion of our ability to make these connections. In particular, the chapter develops the definition of the analytical term "secondary authorship" that I introduce in order to delineate the type of characterisation that is of most interest in this thesis. "Secondary authorship" is a literary term that aims to sharpen our approach to saga authors' relationship to their characters by focusing on characters who make representations about the events of the saga. The term refers to any instance in which characters behave in a manner that resembles the creativity, interpretation, and understanding associated with authorship more generally. Character analysis cannot, however, be divorced from socio-historical approaches to the saga corpus. Most importantly, the sagas themselves are socio-historical representations that claim some degree of truth value. This claim that the sagas make by implication about their historicity is the starting point of a discussion of authorship in medieval Iceland. Therefore, at the beginning of chapter one I discuss some of the approaches to the social context of saga writing. This discussion serves as an introduction to both the culture of saga writing in medieval Iceland and to the nature of the sagas' historical perspective, and reflects my sense that literary interpretations of the sagas cannot be isolated from the historical discourses that frame them. The chapter also discusses possession, which, as I note above, is used alongside the concept of secondary authorship to describe the saga authors' relationship with the stories and characters of the past. At the close of chapter one, I offer a preliminary list the various functions of saga authorship, and give some examples of secondary authorship. From this point I am able to tie my argument about secondary authorship to specific examples from the sagas. Chapter two examines the effect of family obligations and domestic points of view in the depiction of characters' choices and conception of themselves. The examples that are given in that chapter - from Gisla saga Súrssonar and Íslendinga saga - are the first of a number of textual analyses that demonstrate the application of the concepts of secondary authorship and possession of saga narratives. The relationship between narratives about national and domestic matters shows how authorial creativity in the area of kinship obligation provides the basis for the saga's development of historical themes. Thus, the two major case studies given in chapter two tie authorial engagement with characters to the most influential social institution in early and medieval Iceland, the family. The remaining chapters represent similar attempts to relate authorial possession of saga characters to central socio-historical themes in the sagas, such as the settlement process in early Iceland and its influence on the development of regional political life (chapter three). Likewise, the strong authorial interest in an Icelander's journey to Norway in Heimskringla is presented as evidence of the author's use of a saga character to express an Icelandic interpretation of Norwegian history and to promote a sense that Iceland shared the ownership of regal history with Norway (chapter four). In that authorial engagement with the Icelander abroad, we witness saga characterisation being used as a basis for historical interpretation and the means by which foreign traditions and influence, not least the narratives of royal lives and of the Christianisation, are claimed as part of medieval Icelanders' self-conception. While saga authors observe the conventions of saga narration, characters are often subtly positioned as the authors' interpretive mirrors, especially clear than when they act as secondary authors. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Brennu- Njáls saga, which contains many characters who voice the author's claim to interpret the past. Even Hrútr Herjólfsson, through his remarkable perception of events and his conspicuous comments about them, acts as a secondary author by enabling the author to emphasise the importance of the disposition of characters. In Laxdœla saga and Þorgils saga ok Hafliða, authorial interest in characters' perception is matched by the thematising of learning, from the inception of knowledge as prophecy or advice to complete understanding by saga characters (chapter six). In Þorgils saga skarða, a character's inner development from an excessively ambitious and politically ruthless youth to a Christian leader killed by his kinsman allows the author to shape a political life into a lesson about leadership and the community's ability to moderate and contain the behaviour of extraordinary individuals. The portrayal draws on methods of characterisation that we can identify in Grettis saga Ásmundarson, Fóstbrœðra saga, and Orkneyinga saga. A comparison of the characterisation of figures with intense political or military ambitions suggests that saga authors were interested in the community's ability to balance their strength and ability with a degree of social moderation. The discussion of these sagas shows that character study can be used to analyse how the saga authors added their own voice to the voices passed down to medieval Icelanders in traditional narratives. Authorial engagement with characters allowed inherited traditions about early Norway and Iceland and records of thirteenth century events to be transformed into sophisticated historical works with highly creative elements. Through secondary authorship, saga authors took joint-possession of narratives and contested the power of tradition in setting the interpretive framework of a saga.

University of Glasgow at ImageCLEFPhoto 2009 : optimising similarity and diversity in image retrieval

In this paper we describe the approaches adopted to generate the runs submitted to ImageCLEFPhoto 2009 with an aim to promote document diversity in the rankings. Four of our runs are text based approaches that employ textual statistics extracted from the captions of images, i.e. MMR [1] as a state of the art method for result diversification, two approaches that combine relevance information and clustering techniques, and an instantiation of Quantum Probability Ranking Principle. The fifth run exploits visual features of the provided images to re-rank the initial results by means of Factor Analysis. The results reveal that our methods based on only text captions consistently improve the performance of the respective baselines, while the approach that combines visual features with textual statistics shows lower levels of improvements.

Neoliberal social inclusion? The agenda of the Australian Universities Community Engagement Alliance

University–community engagement (UCE) represents a hybrid discourse and a set of practices within contemporary higher education. As a modality of research and teaching, ‘engagement’ denotes the process of universities forming partnerships with external communities for the promised generation of mutually beneficial and socially responsive knowledge, leading to enhanced economic, social and cultural developments. A critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 2003. Analysing Discourse: Textual analysis for social research. London: Routledge) of the Australian Universities Community Engagement Alliance’s (AUCEA) ‘Position Paper’(2008 Universities and community engagement (Position paper 2008–2010)), as reported in this article, suggests that its uneasy synthesis of neoliberal, social inclusion and civic engagement discourses into a hybrid UCE discourse semantically privileges neoliberal forms of engagement. Perhaps, as a result, the AUCEA seems to have missed an opportunity to influence the Australian ‘widening participation’ debate on securing access and opportunity for marginalised students at universities and building social and cultural capital within their communities of origin.

CFD and experimental modelling of an impinging jet for thunderstorm downburst simulation

A thunderstorm downburst in its simplest form can be modelled as a steady flow impinging air jet. Although this simplification neglects some important atmospheric and physical parameters it has proven to be a useful tool for understanding the kinematics of these events. Assuming this simple impinging jet model also allows numerical models to be developed which can be directly compared with experimental results to validate the use of CFD. Confidence gained from these simulations will allow the use of more complex atmospheric impinging jet models that cannot be directly validated. Thunderstorm downbursts are important for wind engineers because in many parts of the world they produce the design wind speeds used in design standards, but are not structurally represented in these documents.

A pilot study on affective classification of facial images for emerging news topics

The proliferation of news reports published in online websites and news information sharing among social media users necessitates effective techniques for analysing the image, text and video data related to news topics. This paper presents the first study to classify affective facial images on emerging news topics. The proposed system dynamically monitors and selects the current hot (of great interest) news topics with strong affective interestingness using textual keywords in news articles and social media discussions. Images from the selected hot topics are extracted and classified into three categorized emotions, positive, neutral and negative, based on facial expressions of subjects in the images. Performance evaluations on two facial image datasets collected from real-world resources demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed system in affective classification of facial images in news reports. Facial expression shows high consistency with the affective textual content in news reports for positive emotion, while only low correlation has been observed for neutral and negative. The system can be directly used for applications, such as assisting editors in choosing photos with a proper affective semantic for a certain topic during news report preparation.

Development and pilot study of the Primary Care Practice Improvement Tool (PC-PIT) : an innovative approach

Objective To assess the usability and validity of the Primary Care Practice Improvement Tool (PC-PIT), a practice performance improvement tool based on 13 key elements identified by a systematic review. It was co-created with a range of partners and designed specifically for primary health care. Design This pilot study examined the PC-PIT using a formative assessment framework and mixed-methods research design. Setting and participants Six high-functioning general practices in Queensland, Australia, between February and July 2013. A total of 28 staff participated — 10 general practitioners, six practice or community nurses, 12 administrators (four practice managers; one business manager and eight reception or general administrative staff). Main outcome measures Readability, content validity and staff perceptions of the PC-PIT. Results The PC-PIT offers an appropriate and acceptable approach to internal quality improvement in general practice. Quantitative assessment scores and qualitative data from all staff identified two areas in which the PC-PIT required modification: a reduction in the indicative reading age, and simplification of governance-related terms and concepts. Conclusion The PC-PIT provides an innovative approach to address the complexity of organisational improvement in general practice and primary health care. This initial validation will be used to develop a suite of supporting, high-quality and free-to-access resources to enhance the use of the PC-PIT in general practice. Based on these findings, a national trial is now underway.

Whose story is it anyway? : the screenwriter as author in the process of adaptation

This project explores issues confronted when authoring a previously authored story, one received from history. Using the defection of Soviet spies, Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov as its focal point, it details how a screenwriter addresses issues arising in the adaptation of both fictional and biographical representations suitable for contemporary cinema. Textual fidelity and concepts of interpretation, aesthetics and audience, negotiating factual and fictional imperatives, authorial visibility and invisibility, moral and ethical conundrums are negotiated and a set of guiding principles emerge from this practice-led investigation.

Development of gas sensing technology for ground and airborne applications powered by solar energy : methodology and experimental results

Monitoring gases for environmental, industrial and agricultural fields is a demanding task that requires long periods of observation, large quantity of sensors, data management, high temporal and spatial resolution, long term stability, recalibration procedures, computational resources, and energy availability. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are currently representing the best alternative to monitor large, remote, and difficult access areas, as these technologies have the possibility of carrying specialised gas sensing systems, and offer the possibility of geo-located and time stamp samples. However, these technologies are not fully functional for scientific and commercial applications as their development and availability is limited by a number of factors: the cost of sensors required to cover large areas, their stability over long periods, their power consumption, and the weight of the system to be used on small UAVs. Energy availability is a serious challenge when WSN are deployed in remote areas with difficult access to the grid, while small UAVs are limited by the energy in their reservoir tank or batteries. Another important challenge is the management of data produced by the sensor nodes, requiring large amount of resources to be stored, analysed and displayed after long periods of operation. In response to these challenges, this research proposes the following solutions aiming to improve the availability and development of these technologies for gas sensing monitoring: first, the integration of WSNs and UAVs for environmental gas sensing in order to monitor large volumes at ground and aerial levels with a minimum of sensor nodes for an effective 3D monitoring; second, the use of solar energy as a main power source to allow continuous monitoring; and lastly, the creation of a data management platform to store, analyse and share the information with operators and external users. The principal outcomes of this research are the creation of a gas sensing system suitable for monitoring any kind of gas, which has been installed and tested on CH4 and CO2 in a sensor network (WSN) and on a UAV. The use of the same gas sensing system in a WSN and a UAV reduces significantly the complexity and cost of the application as it allows: a) the standardisation of the signal acquisition and data processing, thereby reducing the required computational resources; b) the standardisation of calibration and operational procedures, reducing systematic errors and complexity; c) the reduction of the weight and energy consumption, leading to an improved power management and weight balance in the case of UAVs; d) the simplification of the sensor node architecture, which is easily replicated in all the nodes. I evaluated two different sensor modules by laboratory, bench, and field tests: a non-dispersive infrared module (NDIR) and a metal-oxide resistive nano-sensor module (MOX nano-sensor). The tests revealed advantages and disadvantages of the two modules when used for static nodes at the ground level and mobile nodes on-board a UAV. Commercial NDIR modules for CO2 have been successfully tested and evaluated in the WSN and on board of the UAV. Their advantage is the precision and stability, but their application is limited to a few gases. The advantages of the MOX nano-sensors are the small size, low weight, low power consumption and their sensitivity to a broad range of gases. However, selectivity is still a concern that needs to be addressed with further studies. An electronic board to interface sensors in a large range of resistivity was successfully designed, created and adapted to operate on ground nodes and on-board UAV. The WSN and UAV created were powered with solar energy in order to facilitate outdoor deployment, data collection and continuous monitoring over large and remote volumes. The gas sensing, solar power, transmission and data management systems of the WSN and UAV were fully evaluated by laboratory, bench and field testing. The methodology created to design, developed, integrate and test these systems was extensively described and experimentally validated. The sampling and transmission capabilities of the WSN and UAV were successfully tested in an emulated mission involving the detection and measurement of CO2 concentrations in a field coming from a contaminant source; the data collected during the mission was transmitted in real time to a central node for data analysis and 3D mapping of the target gas. The major outcome of this research is the accomplishment of the first flight mission, never reported before in the literature, of a solar powered UAV equipped with a CO2 sensing system in conjunction with a network of ground sensor nodes for an effective 3D monitoring of the target gas. A data management platform was created using an external internet server, which manages, stores, and shares the data collected in two web pages, showing statistics and static graph images for internal and external users as requested. The system was bench tested with real data produced by the sensor nodes and the architecture of the platform was widely described and illustrated in order to provide guidance and support on how to replicate the system. In conclusion, the overall results of the project provide guidance on how to create a gas sensing system integrating WSNs and UAVs, how to power the system with solar energy and manage the data produced by the sensor nodes. This system can be used in a wide range of outdoor applications, especially in agriculture, bushfires, mining studies, zoology, and botanical studies opening the way to an ubiquitous low cost environmental monitoring, which may help to decrease our carbon footprint and to improve the health of the planet.

Domestic ecologies : gender and domesticity in Harold Pinter's Rooms

Harold Pinter's work opens the walls to the relatively closed rooms of domesticity. The room of the love affair, the unpredictable liaison, the cramped cluttered rooms of poverty and the disaffected. This study uses Pinter's rooms to analyse existing ideologies of gender, territory, power and domesticity. Pinter's rooms are more often than not reflections of familiar domestic spaces. This research investigates Pinter's rooms through a case study of a theatre set for one of his plays and textual analysis of selected works, developing an understanding of how Pinter's characters reflect behaviours within the domestic environment, mimicking while subverting domestic ecologies.

Mandatory reporting laws

As part of the effort to protect children from significant abuse and neglect, each state and territory in Australia has enacted legislation commonly known as "mandatory reporting laws". There is much confusion about the nature and effects of these laws, both generally and within each jurisdiction. Accordingly, the main aim of this chapter is to review and explain the legislative principles across Australia. In doing so, the chapter will identify differences between the state and territory laws and will situate the laws as part of a system of responses to the whole spectrum of child abuse and neglect. We will also highlight the need for effective reporter training and public awareness, especially given the tension between the widely perceived need for a community response to child abuse and neglect and the simultaneous concern to avoid unnecessary reporting of innocuous events and situations.