Electronic states of trans-polyacetylene, poly(p-phenylene vinylene) and sp-hybridised carbon species in amorphous hydrogenated carbon probed by resonant Raman scattering

Inclusions of sp-hybridised, trans-polyacetylene [trans-(CH)x] and poly(p-phenylene vinylene) (PPV) chains are revealed using resonant Raman scattering (RRS) investigation of amorphous hydrogenated carbon (a-C:H) films in the near IR – UV range. The RRS spectra of trans-(CH)x core Ag modes and the PPV CC-H phenylene mode are found to transform and disperse as the laser excitation energy ћωL is increased from near IR through visible to UV, whereas sp-bonded inclusions only become evident in UV. This is attributed to ћωL probing of trans-(CH)x chain inhomogeneity and the distribution of chains with varying conjugation length; for PPV to the resonant probing of phelynene ring disorder; and for sp segments, to ћωL probing of a local band gap of end-terminated polyynes. The IR spectra analysis confirmed the presence of sp, trans-(CH)x and PPV inclusions. The obtained RRS results for a-C:H denote differentiation between the core Ag trans-(CH)x modes and the PPV phenylene mode. Furthermore, it was found that at various laser excitation energies the changes in Raman spectra features for trans-(CH)x segments included in an amorphous carbon matrix are the same as in bulk trans-polyacetylene. The latter finding can be used to facilitate identification of trans-(CH)x in the spectra of complex carbonaceous materials.

Improving daylighting performance of mirrored light pipes

This paper assesses and compares the performances of two daylight collection strategies, one passive and one active, for large-scale mirrored light pipes (MLP) illuminating deep plan buildings. Both strategies use laser cut panels (LCP) as the main component of the collection system. The passive system comprises LCPs in pyramid form, whereas the active system uses a tiled LCP on a simple rotation mechanism that rotates 360° in 24 hours. Performance is assessed using scale model testing under sunny sky conditions and mathematical modelling. Results show average illuminance levels for the pyramid LCP ranging from 50 to 250 lux and 150 to 200 lux for the rotating LCPs. Both systems improve the performance of a MLP. The pyramid LCP increases the performance of a MLP by 2.5 times and the rotating LCP by 5 times, when compared to an open pipe particularly for low sun elevation angles.

Regioregular poly(3-hexyl-thiophene) helical self-organization on carbon nanotubes

Mixtures of Regioregular Poly(3-hexyl-thiophene) (rrP3HT) and multi wall carbon nanotubes have been investigated by Scanning Tunneling Microscopy in Ultra High Vacuum. Carbon nanotubes covered by rrP3HT have been imaged and analyzed, providing a clear evidence that this polymer self assembles on the nanotube surface following geometrical constraints and adapting its equilibrium chain-to-chain distance. Largely spaced covered nanotubes have been analyzed to investigate the role played by nanotube chirality in the polymer wrapping, evidencing strong rrP3HT interactions along well defined directions.

Why, how, what for? : motivations, actions and expectations in habitual entrepreneurship

Principal topic: Is habitual entrepreneurship different? Answering this is important to the field, however there is little systematic evidence, thus far. We addresses this by examining the role experience plays at three possible points of difference: motivations, actions and expectations; and by comparing those currently in the process of starting a business with those who have recent success in business creation. Firstly, we assess the balance of opportunity versus necessity motivation, internally versus externally stimulated decision processes and future growth aspirations. Literature suggests novices are more likely motivated to nascency out of necessity, and favour a manageable business size, while habitual entrepreneurs are more likely motivated by internally stimulated or idea driven processes. Secondly, we examine actions undertaken by successful experienced founders during gestation, contrasting ‘information collection’ and ‘opportunity definition’. Drawing on prior research we expect novices more likely to have enacted ‘information search’ while habitual entrepreneurs enact ‘opportunity definition’. Thirdly, we examine perceptions of venture success, where findings on overconfidence suggest that habitual entrepreneurs expect a higher chance of success for their ventures, while inexperience leads novices to underestimate the difficulty of entrepreneurial survival. Method: Empirical evidence to test these conjectures was drawn from a screened random sample of over 1100 Australian nascent and newly started business ventures. This information was collected during 2007/8 using a telephone survey. Results and Implications: Why do habitual entrepreneurs keep coming back? Findings suggest that while the pursuit of opportunity is shared by novice and experienced entrepreneur alike, consideration of repeat entrepreneurship may be motivated by a desire for growth. While idea driven motivations might not delineate a distinction during nascency, it does seem to be a factor contributing to the success of young firms. This warrants further research. How do habitual entrepreneurs behave differently? It seems they act to clearly define market opportunities as a matter of priority during venture gestation. What effect does entrepreneurial experience have on future expectations? Clearly a sense of realism is drawn over the difficulties that might be faced, and accords more circumspect judgements of venture survival. This finding informs practitioners considering entrepreneurship for the first time.

Indoor environments : design, productivity and health

In a typical large office block, by far the largest lifetime expense is the salaries of the workers - 84% for salaries compared with : office rent (14%), total energy (1%), and maintenance (1%). The key drive for business is therefore the maximisation of the productivity of the employees as this is the largest cost. Reducing total energy use by 50% will not produce the same financial return as 1% productivity improvement? The aim of the project which led to this review of the literature was to understand as far as possible the state of knowledge internationally about how the indoor environment of buildings does influence occupants and the impact this influence may have on the total cost of ownership of buildings. Therefore one of the main focus areas for the literature has been identifying whether there is a link between productivity and health of building occupants and the indoor environment. Productivity is both easy to define - the ratio of output to input - but at the same time very hard to measure in a relatively small environment where individual contributions can influence the results, in particular social interactions. Health impacts from a building environment are also difficult to measure well, as establishing casual links between the indoor environment and a particular health issue can be very difficult. All of those issues are canvassed in the literature reported here. Humans are surprisingly adaptive to different physical environments, but the workplace should not test the limits of human adaptability. Physiological models of stress, for example, accept that the body has a finite amount of adaptive energy available to cope with stress. The importance of, and this projects' focus on, the physical setting within the integrated system of high performance workplaces, means this literature survey explores research which has been undertaken on both physical and social aspects of the built environment. The literature has been largely classified in several different ways, according to the classification scheme shown below. There is still some inconsistency in the use of keywords, which is being addressed and greater uniformity will be developed for a CD version of this literature, enabling searching using this classification scheme.

ARCS collaboration tools and support workshop

Registration fees for this workshop are being met by ARCS. There is no cost to attend; however space is limited.----- The Australian Research Collaboration Service (ARCS) has been supporting a wide range of Collaboration Services and Tools which have been allowing researchers, groups and research communities to share ideas and collaborate across organisational boundaries.----- This workshop will give an introduction into a number of web based and real-time collaboration tools and services which researchers may find useful for day-to-day collaboration with members of a research team located within an institution or across institutions. Attendees will be shown how a number of these tools work with strong emphasis placed on how these tools can help facilitate communication and collaboration. Attendees will have the opportunity to try out a number of examples themselves, and interact with the workshop staff to discuss how their own use cases could benefit from the tools and services which can be provided.----- Outline: A hands on introduction will be given to a number of services which ARCS is now operating and/or supporting such as:--- * EVO – A video conferencing environment, which is particularly suited to desktop or low bandwidth applications.--- * AccessGrid – An open source video conferencing and collaboration tool kit, which is great for room to room meetings.--- * Sakai – An online collaboration and learning environment, support teaching and learning, ad hoc group collaboration, support for portfolios and research collaboration.--- * Plone and Drupal – A ready-to-run content management system, that provides you with a system for managing web content that is ideal for project groups, communities, web sites, extranets and intranets.--- * Wikis – A way to easily create, edit, and link pages together, to create collaborative websites.

Venture idea newness, relatedness and performance in nascent ventures

Principal Topic The study of the origin and characteristics of venture ideas - or ''opportunities'' as they are often called - and their contextual fit are key research goals in entrepreneurship (Davidsson, 2004). We define venture idea as ''the core ideas of an entrepreneur about what to sell, how to sell, whom to sell and how an entrepreneur acquire or produce the product or service which he/she sells'' for the purpose of this study. When realized the venture idea becomes a ''business model''. Even though venture ideas are central to entrepreneurship yet its characteristics and their effect to the entrepreneurial process is mysterious. According to Schumpeter (1934) entrepreneurs could creatively destruct the existing market condition by introducing new product/service, new production methods, new markets, and new sources of supply and reorganization of industries. The introduction, development and use of new ideas are generally called as ''innovation'' (Damanpour & Wischnevsky, 2006) and ''newness'' is a property of innovation and is a relative term which means that the degree of unfamiliarity of venture idea either to a firm or to a market. However Schumpeter's (1934) discusses five different types of newness, indicating that type of newness is an important issue. More recently, Shane and Venkataraman (2000) called for research taking into consideration not only the variation of characteristics of individuals but also heterogeneity of venture ideas, Empirically, Samuelson (2001, 2004) investigated process differences between innovative venture ideas and imitative venture ideas. However, he used only a crude dichotomy regarding the venture idea newness. According to Davidsson, (2004) as entrepreneurs could introduce new economic activities ranging from pure imitation to being new to the entire world market, highlighting that newness is a matter of degree. Dahlqvist (2007) examined the venture idea newness and made and attempt at more refined assessment of the degree and type of newness of venture idea. Building on these predecessors our study refines the assessment of venture idea newness by measuring the degree of venture idea newness (new to the world, new to the market, substantially improved while not entirely new, and imitation) for four different types of newness (product/service, method of production, method of promotion, and customer/target market). We then related type and degree of newness to the pace of progress in nascent venturing process. We hypothesize that newness will slow down the business creation process. Shane & Venkataraman (2000) introduced entrepreneurship as the nexus of opportunities and individuals. In line with this some scholars has investigated the relationship between individuals and opportunities. For example Shane (2000) investigates the relatedness between individuals' prior knowledge and identification of opportunities. Shepherd & DeTinne (2005) identified that there is a positive relationship between potential financial reward and the identification of innovative venture ideas. Sarasvathy's 'Effectuation Theory'' assumes high degree of relatedness with founders' skills, knowledge and resources in the selection of venture ideas. However entrepreneurship literature is scant with analyses of how this relatedness affects to the progress of venturing process. Therefore, we assess the venture ideas' degree of relatedness to prior knowledge and resources, and relate these, too, to the pace of progress in nascent venturing process. We hypothesize that relatedness will increase the speed of business creation. Methodology For this study we will compare early findings from data collected through the Comprehensive Australian Study of Entrepreneurial Emergence (CAUSEE). CAUSEE is a longitudinal study whose primary objective is to uncover the factors that initiate, hinder and facilitate the process of emergence and development of new firms. Data were collected from a representative sample of some 30,000 households in Australia using random digit dialing (RDD) telephone survey interviews. Through the first round of data collection identified 600 entrepreneurs who are currently involved in the business start-up process. The unit of the analysis is the emerging venture, with the respondent acting as its spokesperson. The study methodology allows researchers to identify ventures in early stages of creation and to longitudinally follow their progression through data collection periods over time. Our measures of newness build on previous work by Dahlqvist (2007). Our adapted version was developed over two pre-tests with about 80 participants in each. The measures of relatedness were developed through the two rounds of pre-testing. The pace of progress in the venture creation process is assessed with the help of time-stamped gestation activities; a technique developed in the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED). Results and Implications We hypothesized that venture idea newness slows down the venturing process whereas relatedness facilitates the venturing process. Results of 600 nascent entrepreneurs in Australia indicated that there is marginal support for the hypothesis that relatedness assists the gestation progress. Newness is significant but is the opposite sign to the hypothesized. The results give number of implications for researchers, business founders, consultants and policy makers in terms of better knowledge of the venture creation process.

The comprehensive Australian Study of entrepreneurial emergence (CAUSEE) high potential nascent entrepreneurs : some preliminary findings

Principal Topic The Comprehensive Australian Study of Entrepreneurial Emergence (CAUSEE) represents the first Australian study to employ and extend the longitudinal and large scale systematic research developed for the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED) in the US (Gartner, Shaver, Carter and Reynolds, 2004; Reynolds, 2007). This research approach addresses several shortcomings of other data sets including under coverage; selection bias; memory decay and hindsight bias, and lack of time separation between the assessment of causes and their assumed effects (Johnson et al 2006; Davidsson 2006). However, a remaining problem is that any a random sample of start-ups will be dominated by low potential, imitative ventures. In recognition of this issue CAUSEE supplemented PSED-type random samples with theoretically representative samples of the 'high potential' emerging ventures employing a unique methodology using novel multiple screening criteria. We define new ''high-potential'' ventures as new entrepreneurial innovative ventures with high aspirations and potential for growth. This distinguishes them from those ''lifestyle'' imitative businesses that start small and remain intentionally small (Timmons, 1986). CAUSEE is providing the opportunity to explore, for the first time, if process and outcomes of high potentials differ from those of traditional lifestyle firms. This will allows us to compare process and outcome attributes of the random sample with the high potential over sample of new firms and young firms. The attributes in which we will examine potential differences will include source of funding, and internationalisation. This is interesting both in terms of helping to explain why different outcomes occur but also in terms of assistance to future policymaking, given that high growth potential firms are increasingly becoming the focus of government intervention in economic development policies around the world. The first wave of data of a four year longitudinal study has been collected using these samples, allowing us to also provide some initial analysis on which to continue further research. The aim of this paper therefore is to present some selected preliminary results from the first wave of the data collection, with comparisons of high potential with lifestyle firms. We expect to see owing to greater resource requirements and higher risk profiles, more use of venture capital and angel investment, and more internationalisation activity to assist in recouping investment and to overcome Australia's smaller economic markets Methodology/Key Propositions In order to develop the samples of 'high potential' in the NF and YF categories a set of qualification criteria were developed. Specifically, to qualify, firms as nascent or young high potentials, we used multiple, partly compensating screening criteria related to the human capital and aspirations of the founders as well as the novelty of the venture idea, and venture high technology. A variety of techniques were also employed to develop a multi level dataset of sources to develop leads and firm details. A dataset was generated from a variety of websites including major stakeholders including the Federal and State Governments, Australian Chamber of Commerce, University Commercialisation Offices, Patent and Trademark Attorneys, Government Awards and Industry Awards in Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Industry lead associations, Venture Capital Association, Innovation directories including Australian Technology Showcase, Business and Entrepreneurs Magazines including BRW and Anthill. In total, over 480 industry, association, government and award sources were generated in this process. Of these, 74 discrete sources generated high potentials that fufilled the criteria. 1116 firms were contacted as high potential cases. 331 cases agreed to participate in the screener, with 279 firms (134 nascents, and 140 young firms) successfully passing the high potential criteria. 222 Firms (108 Nascents and 113 Young firms) completed the full interview. For the general sample CAUSEE conducts screening phone interviews with a very large number of adult members of households randomly selected through random digit dialing using screening questions which determine whether respondents qualify as 'nascent entrepreneurs'. CAUSEE additionally targets 'young firms' those that commenced trading from 2004 or later. This process yielded 977 Nascent Firms (3.4%) and 1,011 Young Firms (3.6%). These were directed to the full length interview (40-60 minutes) either directly following the screener or later by appointment. The full length interviews were completed by 594 NF and 514 YF cases. These are the cases we will use in the comparative analysis in this report. Results and Implications The results for this paper are based on Wave one of the survey which has been completed and the data obtained. It is expected that the findings will assist in beginning to develop an understanding of high potential nascent and young firms in Australia, how they differ from the larger lifestyle entrepreneur group that makes up the vast majority of the new firms created each year, and the elements that may contribute to turning high potential growth status into high growth realities. The results have implications for Government in the design of better conditions for the creation of new business, firms who assist high potentials in developing better advice programs in line with a better understanding of their needs and requirements, individuals who may be considering becoming entrepreneurs in high potential arenas and existing entrepreneurs make better decisions.

Poly(3-hexyl-thiophene) coil-wrapped single wall carbon nanotube investigated by scanning tunneling spectroscopy

Scanning Tunneling Spectroscopy was performed on a (15,0) single wall carbon nanotube partially wrapped by Poly(3-hexyl-thiophene). On the bare nanotube section, the local density of states is in good agreement with the theoretical model based on local density approximation and remarkably is not perturbed by the polymer wrapping. On the coiled section, a rectifying current-voltage characteristic has been observed along with the charge transfer from the polymer to the nanotube. The electron transfer from Poly(3-hexyl-thiophene) to metallic nanotube was previously theoretically proposed and contributes to the presence of the Schottky barrier at the interface responsible for the rectifying behavior.

The role of land use and psycho-social factors in high density residents' work travel mode choices : implications for sustainable transport policy

Imperatives to improve the sustainability of cities often hinge upon plans to increase urban residential density to facilitate greater reliance on sustainable forms of transport and minimise car use. However there is ongoing debate about whether high residential density land use in isolation results in sustainable transport outcomes. Findings from surveys with residents of inner-urban high density dwellings in Brisbane, Australia, suggest that solo car travel accounts for the greatest modal share of typical work journeys and attitudes toward dwelling and neighbourhood transport-related features, residential sorting factors and socio-demographics, alongside land use such as public transport availability, are significantly associated with work travel mode choice. We discuss the implications of our findings for transport policy and management including encouraging relatively sustainable intermodal forms of transport for work journeys.

Building information modelling : an issue of adoption and change management

Building Information Modelling (BIM) is an IT enabled technology that allows storage, management, sharing, access, update and use of all the data relevant to a project through out the project life-cycle in the form of a data repository. BIM enables improved inter-disciplinary collaboration across distributed teams, intelligent documentation and information retrieval, greater consistency in building data, better conflict detection and enhanced facilities management. While the technology itself may not be new, and similar approaches have been in use in some other sectors like Aircraft and Automobile industry for well over a decade now, the AEC/FM (Architecture, Engineering and Construction/ Facilities Management) industry is still to catch up with them in its ability to exploit the benefits of the IT revolution. Though the potential benefits of the technology in terms of knowledge sharing, project management, project co-ordination and collaboration are near to obvious, the adoption rate has been rather lethargic, inspite of some well directed efforts and availability of supporting commercial tools. Since the technology itself has been well tested over the years in some other domains the plausible causes must be rooted well beyond the explanation of the ‘Bell Curve of innovation adoption’. This paper discusses the preliminary findings of an ongoing research project funded by the Cooperative Research Centre for Construction Innovation (CRC-CI) which aims to identify these gaps and come up with specifications and guidelines to enable greater adoption of the BIM approach in practice. A detailed literature review is conducted that looks at some of the similar research reported in the recent years. A desktop audit of some of the existing commercial tools that support BIM application has been conducted to identify the technological issues and concerns, and a workshop was organized with industry partners and various players in the AEC industry for needs analysis, expectations and feedback on the possible deterrents and inhibitions surrounding the BIM adoption.

When the object speaks, a postcolonial encounter : anthropological, representations and Aboriginal's women's self-presentations

As an Aboriginal woman currently reviewing feminist literature in Australia, I have found that representations of Aboriginal women's gender have been generated predominantly by women anthropologists. Australian feminists utilise this literature in their writing and teaching and accept its truths without question; the most often quoted ethnographic text is Diane Bell's Daughters of the Dreaming (1983a).1 Feminists' lack of critical engagement with this literature implies that they are content to accept women anthropologists' representations because Aboriginal women are not central to their constructions of feminism.2 Instead the Aboriginal woman is positioned on the margins, a symbol of difference; a reminder that it is feminists who are the bearers of true womanhood.