Youth Festival Music Performance : Deception Bay

Research Background - Young people with negative experiences of mainstream education often display low levels of traditional academic achievement. These young people tend to display considerable cultural and social resources developed through their repeated experiences of adversity. Education research has a duty to provide these young people with opportunities to showcase, assess and translate their social and cultural resources into symbolic forms of capital. This creative work addresses the following research question. How can educators develop disengaged teenager's social and cultural capital through live music performances? Research Contribution - These live music performances afford the young participants opportunities to display their artistic, technical, social and cultural resources through a popular cultural format. In doing so they require education institutions to provide venues that demonstrate the skills these young people acquire through flexible learning environments. The new knowledge derived from this research focuses on the academic and self confidence benefits for disengaged young people using festival performances as authentic learning activities. Research Significance - This research is significant because it aims to maximise the number of tangible outcomes related to a school-based arts project. The young participants gained technical, artistic, social and commercial skills during this project. This performance led to more recording and opportunities to perform at other youth festivals in SE QLD. Individual performances were distributed and downloaded via creative commons licences at the Australian Creative Resource Archive. It also contributed to their certified qualifications and acted as pilot research data for two competitively funded ARC grants (DP0209421 & LP0883643)

Review of vibration-based damage detection and condition assessment of bridge structures using structural health monitoring

As a part of vital infrastructure and transportation networks, bridge structures must function safely at all times. However, due to heavier and faster moving vehicular loads and function adjustment, such as Busway accommodation, many bridges are now operating at an overload beyond their design capacity. Additionally, the huge renovation and replacement costs always make the infrastructure owners difficult to undertake. Structural health monitoring (SHM) is set to assess condition and foresee probable failures of designated bridge(s), so as to monitor the structural health of the bridges. The SHM systems proposed recently are incorporated with Vibration-Based Damage Detection (VBDD) techniques, Statistical Methods and Signal processing techniques and have been regarded as efficient and economical ways to solve the problem. The recent development in damage detection and condition assessment techniques based on VBDD and statistical methods are reviewed. The VBDD methods based on changes in natural frequencies, curvature/strain modes, modal strain energy (MSE) dynamic flexibility, artificial neural networks (ANN) before and after damage and other signal processing methods like Wavelet techniques and empirical mode decomposition (EMD) / Hilbert spectrum methods are discussed here.

Automatic Detection of Marine Mammal from Aerial Imagery

The following technical report describes the approach and algorithm used to detect marine mammals from aerial imagery taken from manned/unmanned platform. The aim is to automate the process of counting the population of dugongs and other mammals. We have developed and algorithm that automatically presents to a user a number of possible candidates of these mammals. We tested the algorithm in two distinct datasets taken from different altitudes. Analysis and discussion is presented in regards with the complexity of the input datasets, the detection performance.

An inverse time admittance relay for fault detection in distribution networks containing DGs

Isolation of a faulted segment, from either side of a fault, in a radial feeder that has several converter interfaced DGs is a challenging task when current sensing protective devices are employed. The protective device, even if it senses a downstream fault, may not operate if fault current level is low due to the current limiting operation of converters. In this paper, a new inverse type relay is introduced based on line admittance measurement to protect a distribution network, which has several converter interfaced DGs. The basic operation of this relay, its grading and reach settings are explained. Moreover a method is proposed to compensate the fault resistance such that the relay operation under this condition is reliable. Then designed relay performances are evaluated in a radial distribution network. The results are validated through PSCAD/EMTDC simulation and MATLAB calculations.