Athletes series

The researcher was invited to photograph athletes in the lead-up to the 2006 Commonwealth Games held in Melbourne. She photographed four indigenous athletes, to produce a series of four large-scale cotton rag prints, 1 meter x 1 meter, printed onto photorag paper from digital files. “My photographic practice can be described as both political and spiritual, in the sense that as an Aboriginal Indigenous artist I take stock of the rationalising effect of the technologies I use, and create work that evokes nature and spirit. My methods often involve re-photographing or digitally re-working landscape photographs and adding historical or cultural icons of significance. Working with Indigenous athletes has been an honour and a pleasure. I admire the athletes’ passion and dedication to their chosen sport, and above all their humility, which seems a trait somewhat in contrast to what it takes to attain the highest levels of achievement. Indigenous athletes are wonderful role models for all Australians, and in making creative work that places their luminary presence with the land, I am aligning sportspeople with a deep sense of nature and spirit.” – Leah King-Smith. These works were commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery for the exhibition FLASH: Australian Athletes in Focus. The exhibition was a significant element in Melbourne2006 Festival, the cultural festival of the Commonwealth Games. The exhibition was prominently reviewed in Portrait: Magazine of Australian and International Portraiture and was subsequently remounted at Old Parliament House, Canberra (15 July to 12 November, 2006). One image was used for the front cover of Art Monthly, (March 2006).

A study of environmental and management drivers of non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions in Australian agro-ecosystems

Australian climate, soils and agricultural management practices are significantly different from those of the northern hemisphere nations. Consequently, experimental data on greenhouse gas production from European and North American agricultural soils and its interpretation are unlikely to be directly applicable to Australian systems. A programme of studies of non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture has been established that is designed to reduce uncertainty of non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions in the Australian National Greenhouse Gas Inventory and provide outputs that will enable better on-farm management practices for reducing non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions, particularly nitrous oxide. The systems being examined and their locations are irrigated pasture (Kyabram Victoria), irrigated cotton (Narrabri, NSW), irrigated maize (Griffith, NSW), rain-fed wheat (Rutherglen, Victoria) and rain-fed wheat (Cunderdin, WA). The field studies include treatments with and without fertilizer addition, stubble burning versus stubble retention, conventional cultivation versus direct drilling and crop rotation to determine emission factors and treatment possibilities for best management options. The data to date suggest that nitrous oxide emissions from nitrogen fertilizer, applied to irrigated dairy pastures and rain-fed winter wheat, appear much lower than the average of northern hemisphere grain and pasture studies. More variable emissions have been found in studies of irrigated cotton/vetch/wheat rotation and substantially higher emissions from irrigated maize.

Engaging new digital locals with interactive urban screens to collaboratively improve the city

Local governments struggle to engage time poor and seemingly apathetic citizens, as well as the city’s young digital natives, the digital locals. This project aims at providing a lightweight, technological contribution towards removing the hierarchy between those who build the city and those who use it. We aim to narrow this gap by enhancing people’s experience of physical spaces with digital, civic technologies that are directly accessible within that space. This paper presents the findings of a design trial allowing users to interact with a public screen via their mobile phones. The screen facilitated a feedback platform about a concrete urban planning project by promoting specific questions and encouraging direct, in-situ, real-time responses via SMS and twitter. This new mechanism offers additional benefits for civic participation as it gives voice to residents who otherwise would not be heard. It also promotes a positive attitude towards local governments and gathers information different from more traditional public engagement tools.

Outdoor experiential training as a medium for the development of today’s leaders

Outdoor experiential training is often used for the enhancement of generalised workplace skills including those considered relevant for effective leadership. Traditionally, facilitation processes and strategies employed in outdoor experiential training have often relied on theories delivered as part of an outdoor leadership training program. This was premised on the assumption that skills and capabilities developed in such programs transfer to the mainstream business market. In this paper we present data from an International study on the characteristics of outdoor education professionals that adds further insights into the role that outdoor experiential training plays in the development of generic leadership characteristics. Outdoor leaders were found to characterise transformational leadership qualities and considered that the development of these qualities were directly linked to their outdoor experiential training.

Text mining and probabilistic language modeling for online review spam detecting

In the era of Web 2.0, huge volumes of consumer reviews are posted to the Internet every day. Manual approaches to detecting and analyzing fake reviews (i.e., spam) are not practical due to the problem of information overload. However, the design and development of automated methods of detecting fake reviews is a challenging research problem. The main reason is that fake reviews are specifically composed to mislead readers, so they may appear the same as legitimate reviews (i.e., ham). As a result, discriminatory features that would enable individual reviews to be classified as spam or ham may not be available. Guided by the design science research methodology, the main contribution of this study is the design and instantiation of novel computational models for detecting fake reviews. In particular, a novel text mining model is developed and integrated into a semantic language model for the detection of untruthful reviews. The models are then evaluated based on a real-world dataset collected from amazon.com. The results of our experiments confirm that the proposed models outperform other well-known baseline models in detecting fake reviews. To the best of our knowledge, the work discussed in this article represents the first successful attempt to apply text mining methods and semantic language models to the detection of fake consumer reviews. A managerial implication of our research is that firms can apply our design artifacts to monitor online consumer reviews to develop effective marketing or product design strategies based on genuine consumer feedback posted to the Internet.

An audio wiki supporting mobile collaboration

Wikis have proved to be very effective collaboration and knowledge management tools in large variety of fields thanks to their simplicity and flexible nature. Another important development for the internet is the emergence of powerful mobile devices supported by fast and reliable wireless networks. The combination of these developments begs the question of how to extend wikis on mobile devices and how to leverage mobile devices' rich modalities to supplement current wikis. Realizing that composing and consuming through auditory channel is the most natural and efficient way for mobile device user, this paper explores the use of audio as the medium of wiki. Our work, as the first step towards this direction, creates a framework called Mobile Audio Wiki which facilitates asynchronous audio-mediated collaboration on the move. In this paper, we present the design of Mobile Audio Wiki. As a part of such design, we propose an innovative approach for a light-weight audio content annotation system for enabling group editing, versioning and cross-linking among audio clips. To elucidate the novel collaboration model introduced by Mobile Audio Wiki, its four usage modes are identified and presented in storyboard format. Finally, we describe the initial design for presentation and navigation of Mobile Audio Wiki.

Efficient and secure self-escrowed public-key infrastructures

A self-escrowed public key infrastructure (SE-PKI) combines the usual functionality of a public-key infrastructure with the ability to recover private keys given some trap-door information. We present an additively homomorphic variant of an existing SE-PKI for ElGamal encryption. We also propose a new efficient SE-PKI based on the ElGamal and Okamoto-Uchiyama cryptosystems that is more efficient than the previous SE-PKI. This is the first SE-PKI that does not suffer from a key doubling problem of previous SE-PKI proposals. Additionally, we present the first self-escrowed encryption schemes secure against chosen-ciphertext attack in the standard model. These schemes are also quite efficient and are based on the Cramer-Shoup cryptosystem, and the Kurosawa-Desmedt hybrid variant in different groups.

Transcriptome Profiling of Sexual Maturation and Mating in the Mediterranean Fruit Fly, Ceratitis capitata

Sexual maturation and mating in insects are generally accompanied by major physiological and behavioural changes. Many of these changes are related to the need to locate a mate and subsequently, in the case of females, to switch from mate searching to oviposition behaviour. The prodigious reproductive capacity of the Mediterranean fruit fly, Ceratitis capitata, is one of the factors that has led to its success as an invasive pest species. To identify the molecular changes related to maturation and mating status in male and female medfly, a microarray-based gene expression approach was used to compare the head transcriptomes of sexually immature, mature virgin, and mated individuals. Attention was focused on the changes in abundance of transcripts related to reproduction, behaviour, sensory perception of chemical stimulus, and immune system processes. Broad transcriptional changes were recorded during female maturation, while post-mating transcriptional changes in females were, by contrast, modest. In male medfly, transcriptional changes were consistent both during maturation and as a consequence of mating. Of particular note was the lack of the mating-induced immune responses that have been recorded for Drosophila melanogaster, that may be due to the different reproductive strategies of these species. This study, in addition to increasing our understanding of the molecular machinery behind maturation and mating in the medfly, has identified important gene targets that might be useful in the future management of this pest.