The ownership question of plant gene and genome intellectual properties

The restructuring of the crop agriculture industry over the past two decades has enabled patent holders to exclude, prevent and deter others from using certain research tools and delay or block further follow-on inventions

Serendipitous road trips: Enhancing tourists’ experiences through social interaction

Driving can be a lonely activity. While there has been a lot of research and technical inventions concerning car-to-car communication and passenger entertainment, there is still little work concerning connecting drivers. Whereas tourism is very much a social activity, drive tourists have few options to communicate with fellow travellers. The proposed project is placed at the intersection of tourism and driving and aims to enhance the trip experience during driving through social interaction. This thesis explores how a mobile application that allows instant messaging between travellers sharing similar context can add to road trip experiences. To inform the design of such an application, the project adopted the principle of the user-centred design process. User needs were assessed by running an ideation workshop and a field trip. Findings of both studies have shown that tourists have different preferences and diverse attitudes towards contacting new people. Yet all participants stressed the value of social recommendations. Based on those results and a later expert review, three prototype versions of the system were created. A prototyping session with potential end users highlighted the most important features including the possibility to view user profiles, choose between text and audio input and receive up-to-date information. An implemented version of the prototype was evaluated in an exploratory study to identify usability related problems in an actual use case scenario as well as to find implementation bugs. The outcomes of this research are relevant for the design of future mobile tourist guides that leverage from benefits of social recommendations.

Prediction of masonry compressive behaviour using a damage mechanics inspired modelling method

Masonry under compression is affected by the properties of its constituents and their interfaces. In spite of extensive investigations of the behaviour of masonry under compression, the information in the literature cannot be regarded as comprehensive due to ongoing inventions of new generation products – for example, polymer modified thin layer mortared masonry and drystack masonry. As comprehensive experimental studies are very expensive, an analytical model inspired by damage mechanics is developed and applied to the prediction of the compressive behaviour of masonry in this paper. The model incorporates a parabolic progressively softening stress-strain curve for the units and a progressively stiffening stress-strain curve until a threshold strain for the combined mortar and the unit-mortar interfaces is reached. The model simulates the mutual constraints imposed by each of these constituents through their respective tensile and compressive behaviour and volumetric changes. The advantage of the model is that it requires only the properties of the constituents and considers masonry as a continuum and computes the average properties of the composite masonry prisms/wallettes; it does not require discretisation of prism or wallette similar to the finite element methods. The capability of the model in capturing the phenomenological behaviour of masonry with appropriate elastic response, stiffness degradation and post peak softening is presented through numerical examples. The fitting of the experimental data to the model parameters is demonstrated through calibration of some selected test data on units and mortar from the literature; the calibrated model is shown to predict the responses of the experimentally determined masonry built using the corresponding units and mortar quite well. Through a series of sensitivity studies, the model is also shown to predict the masonry strength appropriately for changes to the properties of the units and mortar, the mortar joint thickness and the ratio of the height of unit to mortar joint thickness. The unit strength is shown to affect the masonry strength significantly. Although the mortar strength has only a marginal effect, reduction in mortar joint thickness is shown to have a profound effect on the masonry strength. The results obtained from the model are compared with the various provisions in the Australian Masonry Structures Standard AS3700 (2011) and Eurocode 6.