A space for spirituality : Dutton Park Community House. Kuril dhagun, State Library of Queensland

A Space for Spirituality: Dutton Park Community House Exhibition of QUT Student Design Work for Murri Watch Men’s Shed, Dutton Park. As designers it is important to work with communities to develop inclusive spaces and be mindful of the diversity of cultures, histories and indeed spirituality. This exhibition includes a selection of proposals from QUT Interior Design students for the adaptation of the Murri Watch Men’s Shed, Dutton Park. The designs respond to local community narratives and environmental qualities, such as site texture, landscape and light to propose a dwelling space for spirituality and gathering.

The Artful Interpretation of Science through Picture Books

Science picture books offer pleasurable and educational reading experiences. These texts open up opportunities for cross-curriculum teaching and learning and a means for developing students’ visual literacy skills, aesthetic appreciation, and higher level thinking skills. Picture books demonstrate how one mode or semiotic system (visual and verbal) mediates the other, often complementing, extending, and filling-in the gaps between words and images. Students’ meaning making is further extended when they can understand the subtleties and effects (and affects) of the visual elements of art and design, and the different styles of writing and language use.

Securing Australia's future: The role of science, research and technology in lifting Australian productivity

A three-year research program funded by the Australian Research Council and conducted by the four Learned Academies through the Australian Council of Learned Academies for PMSEIC, through the Office of the Chief Scientist. Securing Australia’s Future delivers research-based evidence and findings to support policy development in areas of importance to Australia’s future.

An integrated mathematical approach to measure the capacity of MMTS

This article focusses upon multi-modal transportation systems (MMTS) and the issues surrounding the determination of system capacity. For that purpose a multi-objective framework is advocated that integrates all the different modes and many different competing capacity objectives. This framework is analytical in nature and facilitates a variety of capacity querying and capacity expansion planning.

A transcriptomic analysis of the kidney tissue of Tra catfish (pangasianodon hypophthalmus) reared in saline condition: De novo assembly, annotation, SNP discovery

Pangasianodon hypophthalmus is a commercially important freshwater fish used in inland aquaculture in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam. The current study using Ion Torrent technology generated EST resources from the kidney for Tra catfish reared at a salinity level of 9 ppt. We obtained 2,623,929 reads after trimming and processing with an average length of 104 bp. De novo assemblies were generated using CLC Genomic Workbench, Trinity and Velvet/Oases with the best overall contig performance resulting from the CLC assembly. De novo assembly using CLC yielded 29,940 contigs, and allowing identification of 5,710 putative genes when comppared with NCBI non-redundant database. A large number of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were also detected. The sequence collection generated in our study represents the most comprehensive transcriptomic resource for P. hypophthalmus available to date.

Popper or Kuhn: Truth and the progress of science

The questions of whether science pursues truth as correspondence to reality and whether science in fact progresses towards attaining a truthful understanding of physical reality are fundamental and contested in the philosophy of science. On one side of the debate stands Popper, who argues that science is objective, necessarily assumes a correspondence theory of truth, and inevitably progresses toward truth as physical theories develop, gaining a more truthful understanding of reality through progressively more sophisticated empirical analysis. Conversely Kuhn, influenced by postmodern philosophy, argues that ultimate truth cannot be attained since no objective metaphysical reality exists and it cannot be known, and consequently the notion of scientific objectivity and "progress" is a myth, marred by philosophical and ideological value judgments. Ultimately, Kuhn reduces so-called scientific progress through the adoption of successive paradigms to leaps of "faith". This paper seeks a reconciliation of the two extremes, arguing that Popper is correct in the sense that science assumes a correspondence theory of truth and may progress toward truth as physical theories develop, while simultaneously acknowledging with Kuhn that science is not purely objective and free of value judgments. The notion of faith is also critical, for it was the acknowledgement of God's existence as the creator and instituter of observable natural laws which allowed the development of science and the scientific method in the first place. Therefore, accepting and synthesising the contentions that science is to some extent founded on faith, assumes and progresses toward truth, and is subject to value judgments is necessary for the progress of science.