A novel representation of bioacoustic events for content-based search in field audio data

Bioacoustic data can provide an important base for environmental monitoring. To explore a large amount of field recordings collected, an automated similarity search algorithm is presented in this paper. A region of an audio defined by frequency and time bounds is provided by a user; the content of the region is used to construct a query. In the retrieving process, our algorithm will automatically scan through recordings to search for similar regions. In detail, we present a feature extraction approach based on the visual content of vocalisations – in this case ridges, and develop a generic regional representation of vocalisations for indexing. Our feature extraction method works best for bird vocalisations showing ridge characteristics. The regional representation method allows the content of an arbitrary region of a continuous recording to be described in a compressed format.

Writing the oriental woman : an examination of the representation of Japanese women in contemporary Australian crime fiction

This study considers the challenges in representing women from other cultures in the crime fiction genre. The study is presented in two parts; an exegesis and a creative practice component consisting of a full length crime fiction novel, Batafurai. The exegesis examines the historical period of a section of the novel—post-war Japan—and how the area of research known as Occupation Studies provides an insight into the conditions of women during this period. The exegesis also examines selected postcolonial theory and its exposition of representations of the 'other' as a western construct designed to serve Eurocentric ends. The genre of crime fiction is reviewed, also, to determine how characters purportedly representing Oriental cultures are constricted by established stereotypes. Two case studies are examined to investigate whether these stereotypes are still apparent in contemporary Australian crime fiction. Finally, I discuss my own novel, Batafurai, to review how I represented people of Asian background, and whether my attempts to resist stereotype were successful. My conclusion illustrates how novels written in the crime fiction genre are reliant on strategies that are action-focused, rather than character-based, and thus often use easily recognizable types to quickly establish frameworks for their stories. As a sub-set of popular fiction, crime fiction has a tendency to replicate rather than challenge established stereotypes. Where it does challenge stereotypes, it reflects a territory that popular culture has already visited, such as the 'female', 'black' or 'gay' detective. Crime fiction also has, as one of its central concerns, an interest in examining and reinforcing the notion of societal order. It repeatedly demonstrates that crime either does not pay or should not pay. One of the ways it does this is to contrast what is 'good', known and understood with what is 'bad', unknown, foreign or beyond our normal comprehension. In western culture, the east has traditionally been employed as the site of difference, and has been constantly used as a setting of contrast, excitement or fear. Crime fiction conforms to this pattern, using the east to add a richness and depth to what otherwise might become a 'dry' tale. However, when used in such a way, what is variously eastern, 'other' or Oriental can never be paramount, always falling to secondary side of the binary opposites (good/evil, known/unknown, redeemed/doomed) at work. In an age of globalisation, the challenge for contemporary writers of popular fiction is to be responsive to an audience that demands respect for all cultures. Writers must demonstrate that they are sensitive to such concerns and can skillfully manage the tensions caused by the need to deliver work that operates within the parameters of the genre, and the desire to avoid offence to any cultural or ethnic group. In my work, my strategy to manage these tensions has been to create a back-story for my characters of Asian background, developing them above mere genre types, and to situate them with credibility in time and place through appropriate historical research.

Reflexive Dwelling: The body as representation of wall

In a play-within-a-play, the Mechanicals' production within William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the character Snout announces his transformation to play the character of Wall. Snout's portrayal of Wall is both comical and menacing as he represents the forces that separate the lovers Pyramus and Thisbe. Wall becomes a subject in a manner no different from the lovers that he separates; his influence on their situation is brought to life. The unbecoming nature of walls to demarcate, separate, intimidate, influence and control is a relationship most can relate to in their experiences with architecture. It is in these moments that architecture leaps from the sphere of object into the realm of subject; where we might be involved in some intense struggle with the placement of a wall, the wall that might separate us from a lover, justice, freedom, power or privacy. This study investigates how this struggle is portrayed through the human body as representation of walls in performance.

Integrating object locations in the memory representation of a spatial layout

The present study investigated how object locations learned separately are integrated and represented as a single spatial layout in memory. Two experiments were conducted in which participants learned a room-sized spatial layout that was divided into two sets of five objects. Results suggested that integration across sets was performed efficiently when it was done during initial encoding of the environment but entailed cost in accuracy when it was attempted at the time of memory retrieval. These findings suggest that, once formed, spatial representations in memory generally remain independent and integrating them into a single representation requires additional cognitive processes.

The rise and demise of the Inspector of Schools in Queensland

The colony of Queensland, established on 10 December 1859, passed its first Education Act in 1860. This enabled the government to provide for the education of all children from six to twelve years of age. The Board of General Education appointed its first Inspector of Schools in 1863, and he was followed by over 400 men — and later women — to inspect schools and teachers to guarantee conformity and efficiency. In 1875, education became a ministerial responsibility and the Department of Public Instruction was established. Teachers never seemed to enjoy a friendly working relationship with inspectors, and with the establishment of the Queensland Teachers Union, hostility increased. Eventually, in 1989, the Inspector of Schools position was abolished.

Graph theory based representation of building information models for access control applications

Building information models are increasingly being utilised for facility management of large facilities such as critical infrastructures. In such environments, it is valuable to utilise the vast amount of data contained within the building information models to improve access control administration. The use of building information models in access control scenarios can provide 3D visualisation of buildings as well as many other advantages such as automation of essential tasks including path finding, consistency detection, and accessibility verification. However, there is no mathematical model for building information models that can be used to describe and compute these functions. In this paper, we show how graph theory can be utilised as a representation language of building information models and the proposed security related functions. This graph-theoretic representation allows for mathematically representing building information models and performing computations using these functions.

Representation of facial expression categories in continuous arousal-valence space: Feature and correlation

Representation of facial expressions using continuous dimensions has shown to be inherently more expressive and psychologically meaningful than using categorized emotions, and thus has gained increasing attention over recent years. Many sub-problems have arisen in this new field that remain only partially understood. A comparison of the regression performance of different texture and geometric features and investigation of the correlations between continuous dimensional axes and basic categorized emotions are two of these. This paper presents empirical studies addressing these problems, and it reports results from an evaluation of different methods for detecting spontaneous facial expressions within the arousal-valence dimensional space (AV). The evaluation compares the performance of texture features (SIFT, Gabor, LBP) against geometric features (FAP-based distances), and the fusion of the two. It also compares the prediction of arousal and valence, obtained using the best fusion method, to the corresponding ground truths. Spatial distribution, shift, similarity, and correlation are considered for the six basic categorized emotions (i.e. anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise). Using the NVIE database, results show that the fusion of LBP and FAP features performs the best. The results from the NVIE and FEEDTUM databases reveal novel findings about the correlations of arousal and valence dimensions to each of six basic emotion categories.

Mirror neurons, the representation of word meaning, and the foot of the third left frontal convolution

Previous neuroimaging research has attempted to demonstrate a preferential involvement of the human mirror neuron system (MNS) in the comprehension of effector-related action word (verb) meanings. These studies have assumed that Broca's area (or Brodmann's area 44) is the homologue of a monkey premotor area (F5) containing mouth and hand mirror neurons, and that action word meanings are shared with the mirror system due to a proposed link between speech and gestural communication. In an fMRI experiment, we investigated whether Broca's area shows mirror activity solely for effectors implicated in the MNS. Next, we examined the responses of empirically determined mirror areas during a language perception task comprising effector-specific action words, unrelated words and nonwords. We found overlapping activity for observation and execution of actions with all effectors studied, i.e., including the foot, despite there being no evidence of foot mirror neurons in the monkey or human brain. These "mirror" areas showed equivalent responses for action words, unrelated words and nonwords, with all of these stimuli showing increased responses relative to visual character strings. Our results support alternative explanations attributing mirror activity in Broca's area to covert verbalisation or hierarchical linearisation, and provide no evidence that the MNS makes a preferential contribution to comprehending action word meanings.

Leveraging Lean Production Philosophy for Rationalising a Non-Linear Representation of Construction Specifications

This paper presents an approach, based on Lean production philosophy, for rationalising the processes involved in the production of specification documents for construction projects. Current construction literature erroneously depicts the process for the creation of construction specifications as a linear one. This traditional understanding of the specification process often culminates in process-wastes. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that though generalised, the activities involved in producing specification documents are nonlinear. Drawing on the outcome of participant observation, this paper presents an optimised approach for representing construction specifications. Consequently, the actors typically involved in producing specification documents are identified, the processes suitable for automation are highlighted and the central role of tacit knowledge is integrated into a conceptual template of construction specifications. By applying the transformation, flow, value (TFV) theory of Lean production the paper argues that value creation can be realised by eliminating the wastes associated with the traditional preparation of specification documents with a view to integrating specifications in digital models such as Building Information Models (BIM). Therefore, the paper presents an approach for rationalising the TFV theory as a method for optimising current approaches for generating construction specifications based on a revised specification writing model.

Evaluating viewpoint entropy for ribbon representation of protein structure

While many measures of viewpoint goodness have been proposed in computer graphics, none have been evaluated for ribbon representations of protein secondary structure. To fill this gap, we conducted a user study on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform, collecting human viewpoint preferences from 65 participants for 4 representative su- perfamilies of protein domains. In particular, we evaluated viewpoint entropy, which was previously shown to be a good predictor for human viewpoint preference of other, mostly non-abstract objects. In a second study, we asked 7 molecular biology experts to find the best viewpoint of the same protein domains and compared their choices with viewpoint entropy. Our results show that viewpoint entropy overall is a significant predictor of human viewpoint preference for ribbon representations of protein secondary structure. However, the accuracy is highly dependent on the complexity of the structure: while most participants agree on good viewpoints for small, non-globular structures with few secondary structure elements, viewpoint preference varies considerably for complex structures. Finally, experts tend to choose viewpoints of both low and high viewpoint entropy to emphasize different aspects of the respective structure.

Detaining the usual suspects : charting the use of segregated settings in New South Wales government schools, Australia

In this paper, we examine the increase in segregated placements in the New South Wales government school sector. Using disaggregated enrolment data, we point to the growing over-representation of boys in special schools and classes; particularly those of a certain age in certain support categories. In the discussion that follows, we question the role of special education in the development of new and additional forms of being “at risk.” In effect, we invert the traditional concept by asking: Who is at risk of what? In focusing on the containment of risk, are modern practices of diagnosis and segregation perpetuating risks that already disproportionately affect certain groups of individuals? Do these perceptions of and responses to risk in local schools now place these students at greater personal risk of school failure and a future marked by social exclusion? And, finally, is that risk worth the cost?

The psychology of containment : mis/representing emotional and behavioural difficulties in Australian schools

The number of students in special schools has increased at a rapid rate in some Australian states, due in part to increased enrolment under the categories of emotional disturbance (ED) and behaviour disorder (BD). Nonetheless, diagnostic distinctions between ED and BD are unclear. Moreover, despite international findings that students with particular backgrounds are over-represented in special schools, little is known about the backgrounds of students entering such settings in Australia. This study examined the government school enrolment data from New South Wales, the most populous of the Australian states. Linear and quadratic trends were used to describe the numbers and ages of students enrolled in special schools in the ED and BD categories. Changes between 1997 and 2007 were observed. Results showed an over-representation of boys that increased across the decade and a different pattern across age for boys and girls. Consistent with international findings, these results indicate that trends in special school placements are unrelated to disability prevalence in the population. Rather, it is suggested that schools act to preserve time and resources for others by removing their more challenging students: most typically, boys.

Representation and learning of visual information for pose recognition

Recovering position from sensor information is an important problem in mobile robotics, known as localisation. Localisation requires a map or some other description of the environment to provide the robot with a context to interpret sensor data. The mobile robot system under discussion is using an artificial neural representation of position. Building a geometrical map of the environment with a single camera and artificial neural networks is difficult. Instead it would be simpler to learn position as a function of the visual input. Usually when learning images, an intermediate representation is employed. An appropriate starting point for biologically plausible image representation is the complex cells of the visual cortex, which have invariance properties that appear useful for localisation. The effectiveness for localisation of two different complex cell models are evaluated. Finally the ability of a simple neural network with single shot learning to recognise these representations and localise a robot is examined.