Bubble geometry and chaotic pricing behaviour

This paper is a deductive theoretical enquiry into the flow of effects from the geometry of price bubbles/busts, to price indices, to pricing behaviours of sellers and buyers, and back to price bubbles/busts. The intent of the analysis is to suggest analytical approaches to identify the presence, maturity, and/or sustainability of a price bubble. We present a pricing model to emulate market behaviour, including numeric examples and charts of the interaction of supply and demand. The model extends into dynamic market solutions myopic (single- and multi-period) backward looking rational expectations to demonstrate how buyers and sellers interact to affect supply and demand and to show how capital gain expectations can be a destabilising influence – i.e. the lagged effects of past price gains can drive the market price away from long-run market-worth. Investing based on the outputs of past price-based valuation models appear to be more of a game-of-chance than a sound investment strategy.

Daylighting design in the architectural design studio

This paper discusses two different approaches to teaching design and their modes of delivery and reflects upon their successes and failures. Two small groups of third year design students have been given projects focussing on incorporation of daylighting to architectural design in studios having different design themes. In association with the curriculum, the themes were Digital Tools and Sustainability. Although both studios had the topic of daylighting, the aim and methodology used were different. Digital Tool studio’s aim was to teach how to design daylighting by using a digital tool, where as, Sustainability studio aimed at using scale modelling as a tool to learn about daylighting and integrating it into design. Positive results for providing student learning success within the University context were the students’ chance to learn and practice some new skills –using a new tool for designing; integration of the tutors’ extensive research expertise to their teaching practice; and the students’ construction of their own understanding of knowledge in a student-centred educational environment. This environment created a very positive attitude in the form of exchanging ideas and collaboration among the students of Digital Tools students at the discussion forum. Sustainability group students were enthusiastic about designing and testing various proposals. Problems that both studios experienced were mainly related to timing. Synchronizing with other groups of their studios and learning of a new skill on top of an already complicated process of design learning were the setbacks.

The relative age effect in Australian Football League players

Youth sports teams are usually grouped into yearly age groups based on fixed cut-off date (September 1st in the UK and January 1st in Australia). Children born just after this cut-off will be the oldest and most mature in their age group. This gives them an advantage in competitive sport, an advantage which has persisted into adulthood as shown by seasonal patterns in the dates of birth of professional ice hockey, football and basketball players. We were interested in whether a similar seasonal pattern exists in professional Australian Football League (AFL) players. We examined all AFL players in the 2009 season excluding foreign-born players. We compared the observed number of players’ born in each month with the expected number based on national statistics. There was a marked and statistically significant seasonality in players’ dates of birth. There were 33% more players than expected with dates of birth in January, and 25% fewer in December. Players who are relatively older in youth AFL teams have a better chance of turning professional.

The role of extreme sports in lifestyle enhancement and wellness

Alternative sports are fast becoming the physical activity of choice. Participation rates are even outstripping more traditional activities such as golf. At their most extreme there is no second chance, the most likely outcome of a mismanaged error or accident is death. At this level participants enjoy activities such as B.A.S.E. (Buildings, Antennae, Space, Earth) jumping, big wave surfing, waterfall kayaking, extreme skiing, rope-free climbing and extreme mountaineering. Probably the most common explanation for participation in extreme sports is the notion that participation is just a matter of some people‟s need to take unnecessary risks. This study reports on findings that indicate a more positive experience. A phenomenological method was used via unstructured interviews with 15 extreme sports participants (ages 30 – 72 years) and other firsthand accounts. Extreme sport participants directly related their experience to personal transformations that spill over to life in general. Athletes report feelings of deep psychological wellbeing and meaningfulness. The extreme sport experience enables a participant to break through personal barriers and develop an understanding of their own resourcefulness and emotional, cognitive, physical and spiritual capabilities. Furthermore such a breakthrough also seems to trigger a change in personal philosophy or view on life. The extreme sport experience transforms a participant though not in terms of working towards an external (social or cultural) perception of identity or towards some constructed perception of an ideal self, but by touching something within.

It's time to be more serious about activating youngsters : lessons for childhood obesity

The epidemic of obesity is impacting an increasing proportion of children, adolescents and adults with a common feature being low levels of physical activity (PA). Despite having more knowledge than ever before about the benefits of PA for health and the growth and development of youngsters, we are only paying lip-service to the development of motor skills in children. Fun, enjoyment and basic skills are the essential underpinnings of meaningful participation in PA. A concurrent problem is the reported increase in sitting time with the most common sedentary behaviors being TV viewing and other screen-based games. Limitations of time have contributed to a displacement of active behaviors with inactive pursuits, which has contributed to reductions in activity energy expenditure. To redress the energy imbalance in overweight and obese children, we urgently need out-of-the-box multisectoral solutions. There is little to be gained from a shame and blame mentality where individuals, their parents, teachers and other groups are singled out as causes of the problem. Such an approach does little more than shift attention from the main game of prevention and management of the condition, which requires a concerted, whole-of-government approach (in each country). The failure to support and encourage all young people to participate in regular PA will increase the chance that our children will live shorter and less healthy lives than their parents. In short, we need novel environmental approaches to foster a systematic increase in PA. This paper provides examples of opportunities and challenges for PA strategies to prevent obesity with a particular emphasis on the school and home settings.

Surviving the Titanic disaster : economic, natural and social determinants

The sinking of the Titanic in April 1912 took the lives of 68 percent of the people aboard. Who survived? It was women and children who had a higher probability of being saved, not men. Likewise, people traveling in first class had a better chance of survival than those in second and third class. British passengers were more likely to perish than members of other nations. This extreme event represents a rare case of a well-documented life and death situation where social norms were enforced. This paper shows that economic analysis can account for human behavior in such situations.

Assessing the safety of a velocity sourced series elastic actuator using the head injury criterion

The Velocity Sourced Series Elastic Actuator has been proposed as a method for providing safe force or torque based actuation for robots without compromising the actuator performance. In this paper we assess the safety of Velocity Sourced Series Elastic Actuators by measuring the Head Injury Criterion scores for collisions with a model head. The study makes a comparative analysis against stiff, high impedance actuation using the same motor without the series elastic component, showing that the series elastic component brings about a massive reduction in the chance of head injury. The benefits of a collision detection and safe reaction system are shown to be limited to collisions at low speeds, providing greater interaction comfort but not necessarily contributing to safety from injury.

Single case experimental design : an overview

Background: In health related research, it is critical not only to demonstrate the efficacy of intervention, but to show that this is not due to chance or confounding variables. Content: Single case experimental design is a useful quasi-experimental design and method used to achieve these goals when there are limited participants and funds for research. This type of design has various advantages compared to group experimental designs. One such advantage is the capacity to focus on individual performance outcomes compared to group performance outcomes. Conclusions: This comprehensive review demonstrates the benefits and limitations of using single case experimental design, its various design methods, and data collection and analysis for research purposes.

The intention to notice : the collection, the tour and ordinary landscapes

The Intention to Notice: the collection, the tour and ordinary landscapes is concerned with how ordinary landscapes and places are enabled and conserved through making itineraries that are framed around the ephemera encountered by chance, and the practices that make possible the endurance of these material traces. Through observing and then examining the material and temporal aspects of a variety of sites/places, the museum and the expanded garden are identified as spaces where the expression of contemporary political, ecological and social attitudes to cultural landscapes can be realised through a curatorial approach to design, to effect minimal intervention. Three notions are proposed to encourage investigation into contemporary cultural landscapes: To traverse slowly to allow space for speculations framed by the topographies and artefacts encountered; to [re]make/[re]write cultural landscapes as discursive landscapes that provoke the intention to notice; and to reveal and conserve the fabric of everyday places. A series of walking, recording and making projects undertaken across a variety of cultural landscapes in remote South Australia, Melbourne, Sydney, London, Los Angeles, Chandigarh, Padova and Istanbul, investigate how communities of practice are facilitated through the invitation to notice and intervene in ordinary landscapes, informed by the theory and practice of postproduction and the reticent auteur. This community of practice approach draws upon chance encounters and it seeks to encourage creative investigation into places. The Intention to Notice is a practice of facilitating that also leads to recording traces and events; large and small, material and immaterial, that encourages both conjecture and archive. Most importantly, there is an open-ended invitation to commit and exchange through design interaction.

A cybernetic approach to land management issues

This work is a digital version of a dissertation that was first submitted in partial fulfillment of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in March 1994. The work was concerned with problems of self-organisation and organisation ranging from local to global levels of hierarchy. It considers organisations as living entities from local to global things that a living entity – more particularly, an individual, a body corporate or a body politic - must know and do to maintain an existence – that is to remain viable – or to be sustainable. The term ‘land management’ as used in 1994 was later subsumed into a more general concept of ‘natural resource management’ and then merged with ideas about sustainable socioeconomic and sustainable ecological development. The cybernetic approach contains many cognitive elements of human observation, language and learning that combine into production processes. The approach tends to highlight instances where systems (or organisations) can fail because they have very little chance of succeeding. Thus there are logical necessities as well as technical possibilities in designing, constructing, operating and maintaining production systems that function reliably over extended periods. Chapter numbers and titles to the original thesis are as follows: 1. Land management as a problem of coping with complexity 2. Background theory in systems theory and cybernetic principles 3. Operationalisation of cybernetic principles in Beer’s Viable System Model 4. Issues in the design of viable cadastral surveying and mapping organisation 5. An analysis of the tendency for fragmentation in surveying and mapping organisation 6. Perambulating the boundaries of Sydney – a problem of social control under poor standards of literacy 7. Cybernetic principles in the process of legislation 8. Closer settlement policy and viability in agricultural production 9. Rate of return in leasing Crown lands

A functional screen identifies lateral transfer of beta-glucuronidase (gus) from bacteria to fungi

Lateral gene transfer (LGT) from prokaryotes to microbial eukaryotes is usually detected by chance through genome-sequencing projects. Here, we explore a different, hypothesis-driven approach. We show that the fitness advantage associated with the transferred gene, typically invoked only in retrospect, can be used to design a functional screen capable of identifying postulated LGT cases. We hypothesized that beta-glucuronidase (gus) genes may be prone to LGT from bacteria to fungi (thought to lack gus) because this would enable fungi to utilize glucuronides in vertebrate urine as a carbon source. Using an enrichment procedure based on a glucose-releasing glucuronide analog (cellobiouronic acid), we isolated two gus(+) ascomycete fungi from soils (Penicillium canescens and Scopulariopsis sp.). A phylogenetic analysis suggested that their gus genes, as well as the gus genes identified in genomic sequences of the ascomycetes Aspergillus nidulans and Gibberella zeae, had been introgressed laterally from high-GC gram(+) bacteria. Two such bacteria (Arthrobacter spp.), isolated together with the gus(+) fungi, appeared to be the descendants of a bacterial donor organism from which gus had been transferred to fungi. This scenario was independently supported by similar substrate affinities of the encoded beta-glucuronidases, the absence of introns from fungal gus genes, and the similarity between the signal peptide-encoding 5' extensions of some fungal gus genes and the Arthrobacter sequences upstream of gus. Differences in the sequences of the fungal 5' extensions suggested at least two separate introgression events after the divergence of the two main Euascomycete classes. We suggest that deposition of glucuronides on soils as a result of the colonization of land by vertebrates may have favored LGT of gus from bacteria to fungi in soils.

Addressing childhood obesity through increased physical activity

Obesity is affecting an increasing proportion of children globally. Despite an appreciation that physical activity is essential for the normal growth and development of children and prevents obesity and obesity-related health problems, too few children are physically active. A concurrent problem is that today’s young people spend more time than previous generations did in sedentary pursuits, including watching television and engaging in screen-based games. Active behavior has been displaced by these inactive recreational choices, which has contributed to reductions in activity-related energy expenditure. Implementation of multifactorial solutions considered to offer the best chance of combating these trends is urgently required to redress the energy imbalance that characterizes obesity. The counterproductive ‘shame and blame’ mentality that apportions responsibility for the childhood obesity problem to sufferers, their parents, teachers or health-care providers needs to be changed. Instead, these groups should offer constant support and encouragement to promote appropriate physical activity in children. Failure to provide activity opportunities will increase the likelihood that the children of today will live less healthy (and possibly shorter)lives than their parents.

Difference in mosquito species (Diptera: Culicidae) and the transmission of Ross River Virus between coastline and inland areas in Brisbane, Australia

This study examined the distribution of major mosquito species and their roles in the transmission of Ross River virus (RRV) infection for coastline and inland areas in Brisbane, Australia (27°28′ S, 153°2′ E). We obtained data on the monthly counts of RRV cases in Brisbane between November 1998 and December 2001 by statistical local areas from the Queensland Department of Health and the monthly mosquito abundance from the Brisbane City Council. Correlation analysis was used to assess the pairwise relationships between mosquito density and the incidence of RRV disease. This study showed that the mosquito abundance of Aedes vigilax (Skuse), Culex annulirostris (Skuse), and Aedes vittiger (Skuse) were significantly associated with the monthly incidence of RRV in the coastline area, whereas Aedes vigilax, Culex annulirostris, and Aedes notoscriptus (Skuse) were significantly associated with the monthly incidence of RRV in the inland area. The results of the classification and regression tree (CART) analysis show that both occurrence and incidence of RRV were influenced by interactions between species in both coastal and inland regions. We found that there was an 89% chance for an occurrence of RRV if the abundance of Ae. vigifax was between 64 and 90 in the coastline region. There was an 80% chance for an occurrence of RRV if the density of Cx. annulirostris was between 53 and 74 in the inland area. The results of this study may have applications as a decision support tool in planning disease control of RRV and other mosquito-borne diseases.

(Dia)logics of difference : disability, performance & spectatorship

In this paper I examine the way artists with disabilities use performances in public spaces to encourage people to reflect on their own contribution to the construction of publics, or counter-publics, during and after the moment of encounter. I focus on Liz Crow’s Resistance on the Plinth. This is the title Crow gave her performance on the Forth Plinth in Trafalgar Square as part of Antony Gormley’s One and Other project in 2009. Described as a public art project presenting a portrait of the U.K., Gormley’s One and Other gave 2400 people selected at random via a lottery the chance to do whatever they chose for an hour on the vacant Forth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. In her hour, Crow chose to present herself in a Nazi uniform, in her wheelchair. In this paper, I discuss how Crow’s performance used a counterposition of images – the Nazi uniform, associated with eugenics and a desire to eliminate people who do not accord with the Arayan ‘norm’, counterposed with her wheelchair – to encourage passersby to “stop, look, think.” I examine how Crow used this counterposition to prevent passersby from attributing a single, stable, monologic meaning to the image – forestalling the risk that passersby would read the image as a Nazi on the Plinth – and instead draw passersby into a dialogue in which the impossibility of reconciling the contradictory images, ideologies and cultural logics Crow embodied encouraged people to continue thinking and talking about these cultural logics during and after the encounter.

Longitudinal investigation of wandering behavior in department of veterans affairs nursing home care units

Objectives To explore the extent of and factors associated with male residents who change wandering status post nursing home admission. Design Longitudinal design with secondary data analyses. Admissions over a 4-year period were examined using repeat assessments with the Minimum Data Set (MDS) to formulate a model understanding the development of wandering behavior. Setting One hundred thirty-four Veterans Administration (VA) nursing homes throughout the United States. Participants: Included 6673 residents admitted to VA nursing homes between October 2000 and October 2004. Measurements MDS variables (cognitive impairment, mood, behavior problems, activities of daily living and wandering) included ratings recorded at residents’ admission to the nursing home and a minimum of two other time points at quarterly intervals. Results The majority (86%) of the sample were classified as non wanderers at admission and most of these (94%) remained non wanderers until discharge or the end of the study. Fifty one per cent of the wanderers changed status to non wanderers with 6% of these residents fluctuating in status more than two times. Admission variables associated with an increased risk of changing status from non-wandering to wandering included older age, greater cognitive impairment, more socially inappropriate behavior, resisting care, easier distractibility, and needing less help with personal hygiene. Requiring assistance with locomotion and having three or more medical comorbidities were associated with a decreased chance of changing from non-wandering to wandering status. Conclusion A resident’s change from non-wandering to wandering status may reflect an undetected medical event that affects cognition, but spares mobility.