Adaptive metering algorithm for electronic commercial vehicle preclearance systems

This paper presents an adaptive metering algorithm for enhancing the electronic screening (e-screening) operation at truck weight stations. This algorithm uses a feedback control mechanism to control the level of truck vehicles entering the weight station. The basic operation of the algorithm allows more trucks to be inspected when the weight station is underutilized by adjusting the weight threshold lower. Alternatively, the algorithm restricts the number of trucks to inspect when the station is overutilized to prevent queue spillover. The proposed control concept is demonstrated and evaluated in a simulation environment. The simulation results demonstrate the considerable benefits of the proposed algorithm in improving overweight enforcement with minimal negative impacts on nonoverweighed trucks. The test results also reveal that the effectiveness of the algorithm improves with higher truck participation rates in the e-screening program.

Regulating the coal industry : striking a balance between commercial and public interests - a Queensland case study

The coal industry in Queensland operates in a very complex regulatory environment with a matrix of Federal and State laws covering the environment, health and safety, taxation and royalties, tenure, and development approvals. The Queensland Government in 2012 recognised the validity of certain industry concerns and passed two Acts being the Environmental Protection (Greentape Reduction) Amendment Act 2012 (the Greentape Act) and the Mines Legislation (Streamlining) Amendment Act 2012 (the Streamlining Act). Other changes are foreshadowed in relation to overlapping tenure and in the development of common resources legislation. Accordingly there is a great level of activity and change that has occurred or which is on the horizon. This article focuses upon these regulatory changes and foreshadows other areas requiring consideration. It commences with a consideration of the changes that have already occurred, examines those regulatory amendments that are on the drawing board and concludes with suggestions as to further interventions and amendments that have the potential to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the legislative framework in which coal mining is conducted.

Investigation of energy efficient approaches for the energy performance improvement of commercial buildings

Energy efficiency of buildings is attracting significant attention from the research community as the world is moving towards sustainable buildings design. Energy efficient approaches are measures or ways to improve the energy performance and energy efficiency of buildings. This study surveyed various energy-efficient approaches for commercial building and identifies Envelope Thermal Transfer Value (ETTV) and Green applications (Living wall, Green facade and Green roof) as most important and effective methods. An in-depth investigation was carried out on these energy-efficient approaches. It has been found that no ETTV model has been developed for sub-tropical climate of Australia. Moreover, existing ETTV equations developed for other countries do not take roof heat gain into consideration. Furthermore, the relationship of ETTV and different Green applications have not been investigated extensively in any literature, and the energy performance of commercial buildings in the presence of Living wall, Green facade and Green roof has not been investigated in the sub-tropical climate of Australia. The study has been conducted in two phases. First, the study develops the new formulation, coefficient and bench mark value of ETTV in the presence of external shading devices. In the new formulation, roof heat gain has been included in the integrated heat gain model made of ETTV. In the 2nd stage, the study presents the relationship of thermal and energy performance of (a) Living wall and ETTV (b) Green facade and ETTV (c) Combination of Living wall, Green facade and ETTV (d) Combination of Living wall, Green Roof and ETTV in new formulations. Finally, the study demonstrates the amount of energy that can be saved annually from different combinations of Green applications, i.e., Living wall, Green facade; combination of Living wall and Green facade; combination of Living wall and Green roof. The estimations are supported by experimental values obtained from extensive experiments of Living walls and Green roofs.

Some extensions to representation and encoding of structure in models of distributional semantics

This thesis makes several contributions towards improved methods for encoding structure in computational models of word meaning. New methods are proposed and evaluated which address the requirement of being able to easily encode linguistic structural features within a computational representation while retaining the ability to scale to large volumes of textual data. Various methods are implemented and evaluated on a range of evaluation tasks to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

Australian Tax Analysis : Cases, Commentary, Commercial Applications and Questions [9th Ed.]

Now in its ninth edition, Australian Tax Analysis: Cases, Commentary, Commercial Applications and Questions has a proven track record as a high-level work for students of taxation law written by a team of authors with many years experience. Taking into account the fact that the volume of material needed to be processed by today’s taxation student can be overwhelming, the well-chosen extracts and thought-provoking commentary in Australian Tax Analysis, 9th edition, provide readers with the depth of knowledge, and reasoning and analytical skills which will be required of them as practitioners. In addition to the carefully selected case extracts and the helpful commentary, each chapter is supplemented by engaging practice questions involving problem solving, commercial decision-making, legal analysis and quantitative application. All these elements combined make Australian Tax Analysis an invaluable aid to the understanding of a subject which can be both technical and complex.

Review : "Networking : commercial television in Australia : a history" -- Nick Herd

Nick Herd begins his institutional history of Australian commercial television in the early 1890s, when an amateur inventor named Henry Sutton designed the ‘telephane’ with the intent of watching the Melbourne Cup in his home town of Ballarat. The ‘race that stops a nation’ was not broadcast live on television until 1960, but Sutton’s initiative indicates how closely sport and television were aligned in Australia even before the medium existed. The first licensed commercial stations to begin regular broadcasting went on air in Sydney and Melbourne shortly before the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games, although Herd claims that this was ‘almost accidental’ rather than planned. (49) Only Melbourne viewers were able to see some events live, many via television sets in Ampol service stations following the company’s last minute sponsorship of coverage on Melbourne station GTV-9...

The remediation of the personal photograph and the politics of self-representation in digital storytelling

Over the past couple of decades, the cultural field formerly known as ‘domestic’, and later ‘personal’ photography has been remediated and transformed as part of the social web, with its convergence of personal expression, interpersonal communication, and online social networks (most recently via platforms like Flickr, Facebook and Twitter). Meanwhile, the Digital Storytelling movement (involving the workshop-based production of short autobiographical videos) from its beginnings in the mid 1990s relied heavily on the narrative power of the personal photograph, often sourced from family albums, and later from online archives. This paper addresses the new issues arising for the politics of self-representation and personal photography in the era of social media, focusing particularly on the consequences of online image-sharing. It discusses in detail the practices of selection, curation, manipulation and editing of personal photographic images among a group of activist-oriented queer digital storytellers who have in common a stated desire to share their personal stories in pursuit of social change, and whose stories often aim to address both intimate and antagonistic publics.

A novel representation of bioacoustic events for content-based search in field audio data

Bioacoustic data can provide an important base for environmental monitoring. To explore a large amount of field recordings collected, an automated similarity search algorithm is presented in this paper. A region of an audio defined by frequency and time bounds is provided by a user; the content of the region is used to construct a query. In the retrieving process, our algorithm will automatically scan through recordings to search for similar regions. In detail, we present a feature extraction approach based on the visual content of vocalisations – in this case ridges, and develop a generic regional representation of vocalisations for indexing. Our feature extraction method works best for bird vocalisations showing ridge characteristics. The regional representation method allows the content of an arbitrary region of a continuous recording to be described in a compressed format.

The need for legislative reform of the privity doctrine in commercial contracts in Malaysia : a comparative analysis

This thesis commences with the proposition that the first limb of the doctrine of privity causes injustice to third party beneficiaries in Malaysia, particularly in commercial contracts. The doctrine of privity has been the subject of criticism by the judiciary and academic commentators in common law jurisdictions, mainly directed at the first limb of the doctrine, whereby only parties to a contract can sue and be sued. The first limb prevents a third party from enforcing benefits conferred on them by those contracts thereby resulting in third parties suffering loss and injustice to those parties. In several common law countries, such as England, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, legislative reform of the doctrine has occurred. The legislative reform has abrogated to a significant extent the doctrine of privity in commercial contracts. Malaysia is a common law country, where the doctrine of privity is still applied to contracts. An analysis of Malaysian case law demonstrates that the most affected third party beneficiaries are those seeking to enforce insurance and construction contracts. While a small number of other third parties to commercial contracts, such as agreements to pay for work done, sale and purchase agreements and tenancy agreements are also affected, the detriment is not as significant. As a consequence, this thesis focuses primarily on the impact of the doctrine of privity on commercial contracts in the areas of insurance and construction in Malaysia The thesis aims to recommend appropriate reforms to address the injustices arising from the privity doctrine for third parties seeking to obtain the benefit of insurance and construction contracts, which may also benefit third parties to other types of commercial contracts. While the Malaysian insurance, consumer protection, negotiable instruments and agency laws allow third party beneficiaries to enforce benefits in contracts, the rights are found to be inadequate. As not all third parties seeking to enforce an insurance or construction contract can rely upon the legislation, the injustice arising from the doctrine of privity remains and needs to be addressed. To achieve this aim, a comparative analysis of the rights of third party beneficiaries under insurance and construction contracts in Malaysia, Australia and England is undertaken. The results of the analysis are used to identify appropriate elements for a legislative framework guided by the three essential criteria for effective law reform developed in the thesis. The three criteria are certainty, public interest and justice. The thesis recommends first the enactment of general legislation applicable to all commercial contracts including insurance contracts. Secondly, the thesis recommends specific targeted legislation to address the injustice faced by third party beneficiaries in construction contracts.

Writing the oriental woman : an examination of the representation of Japanese women in contemporary Australian crime fiction

This study considers the challenges in representing women from other cultures in the crime fiction genre. The study is presented in two parts; an exegesis and a creative practice component consisting of a full length crime fiction novel, Batafurai. The exegesis examines the historical period of a section of the novel—post-war Japan—and how the area of research known as Occupation Studies provides an insight into the conditions of women during this period. The exegesis also examines selected postcolonial theory and its exposition of representations of the 'other' as a western construct designed to serve Eurocentric ends. The genre of crime fiction is reviewed, also, to determine how characters purportedly representing Oriental cultures are constricted by established stereotypes. Two case studies are examined to investigate whether these stereotypes are still apparent in contemporary Australian crime fiction. Finally, I discuss my own novel, Batafurai, to review how I represented people of Asian background, and whether my attempts to resist stereotype were successful. My conclusion illustrates how novels written in the crime fiction genre are reliant on strategies that are action-focused, rather than character-based, and thus often use easily recognizable types to quickly establish frameworks for their stories. As a sub-set of popular fiction, crime fiction has a tendency to replicate rather than challenge established stereotypes. Where it does challenge stereotypes, it reflects a territory that popular culture has already visited, such as the 'female', 'black' or 'gay' detective. Crime fiction also has, as one of its central concerns, an interest in examining and reinforcing the notion of societal order. It repeatedly demonstrates that crime either does not pay or should not pay. One of the ways it does this is to contrast what is 'good', known and understood with what is 'bad', unknown, foreign or beyond our normal comprehension. In western culture, the east has traditionally been employed as the site of difference, and has been constantly used as a setting of contrast, excitement or fear. Crime fiction conforms to this pattern, using the east to add a richness and depth to what otherwise might become a 'dry' tale. However, when used in such a way, what is variously eastern, 'other' or Oriental can never be paramount, always falling to secondary side of the binary opposites (good/evil, known/unknown, redeemed/doomed) at work. In an age of globalisation, the challenge for contemporary writers of popular fiction is to be responsive to an audience that demands respect for all cultures. Writers must demonstrate that they are sensitive to such concerns and can skillfully manage the tensions caused by the need to deliver work that operates within the parameters of the genre, and the desire to avoid offence to any cultural or ethnic group. In my work, my strategy to manage these tensions has been to create a back-story for my characters of Asian background, developing them above mere genre types, and to situate them with credibility in time and place through appropriate historical research.

Capturing the 'authentic voice' : challenges and opportunities for voice and self-representation in two ABC storytelling projects

In recent years there has been a noticeable move by various public institutions, such as public service broadcasters and community media organisations, to capture and disseminate the voices and viewpoints of ‘ordinary people’ through inviting them to share stories about their lives. One of the foremost objectives of many such projects is to provide under-represented individuals and groups with an opportunity to express and represent themselves; as such, the capture and broadcast of ‘authentic voices’ is a central value. This paper discusses the notion of ‘authentic voice’, and questions the framing role of public media organisations in storytelling projects that aim to provide individuals with space for self-expression and self-representation. It considers the ways in which tensions arise on multiple levels when individuals are asked to express and represent themselves within projects and spaces that are managed by institutions. This paper begins by discussing the challenges and opportunities that arise within storytelling projects that are facilitated by public institutions and community media arts organisations, and that aim to amplify the voices of “ordinary people” (Thumim, 2009). It examines ways in which ‘voice’ is facilitated, curated, broadcast and distributed within such projects, particularly questioning the ways in which project facilitation and the curation of stories for public broadcast can both help and hinder the amplification of ‘authentic voice’. Furthermore, we seek to discuss how ‘authentic voice’ is defined, and what is involved in the process of amplification. The paper moves on to discuss a case study in order to demonstrate some of the tensions that are evident within a storytelling project that is managed by a public institution – Australia’s national broadcaster – and the ways these tensions impact upon the capture and broadcast of an ‘authentic voice’ for project participants. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) ‘Heywire’ project is a storytelling competition and website that aims to ‘give voice’ to 16-22 year olds who live in rural, regional and remote parts of Australia. Looking at tensions that exist on organisational, political and philosophical levels within the Heywire project reveals a number of conflicts of interest and objectives between the institution and project participants. This leads us to question whether institutionally-managed storytelling projects can effectively support individuals to have an ‘authentic voice’, and whether struggles of aims and objectives diminish the personal benefits that people may derive from expressing and representing themselves within such projects.

Semi-binary based video features for activity representation

Efficient and effective feature detection and representation is an important consideration when processing videos, and a large number of applications such as motion analysis, 3D scene understanding, tracking etc. depend on this. Amongst several feature description methods, local features are becoming increasingly popular for representing videos because of their simplicity and efficiency. While they achieve state-of-the-art performance with low computational complexity, their performance is still too limited for real world applications. Furthermore, rapid increases in the uptake of mobile devices has increased the demand for algorithms that can run with reduced memory and computational requirements. In this paper we propose a semi binary based feature detectordescriptor based on the BRISK detector, which can detect and represent videos with significantly reduced computational requirements, while achieving comparable performance to the state of the art spatio-temporal feature descriptors. First, the BRISK feature detector is applied on a frame by frame basis to detect interest points, then the detected key points are compared against consecutive frames for significant motion. Key points with significant motion are encoded with the BRISK descriptor in the spatial domain and Motion Boundary Histogram in the temporal domain. This descriptor is not only lightweight but also has lower memory requirements because of the binary nature of the BRISK descriptor, allowing the possibility of applications using hand held devices.We evaluate the combination of detectordescriptor performance in the context of action classification with a standard, popular bag-of-features with SVM framework. Experiments are carried out on two popular datasets with varying complexity and we demonstrate comparable performance with other descriptors with reduced computational complexity.

Access to commercial destinations within the neighbourhood and walking among Australian older adults

BACKGROUND: Physical activity, particularly walking, is greatly beneficial to health; yet a sizeable proportion of older adults are insufficiently active. The importance of built environment attributes for walking is known, but few studies of older adults have examined neighbourhood destinations and none have investigated access to specific, objectively-measured commercial destinations and walking. METHODS: We undertook a secondary analysis of data from the Western Australian state government's health surveillance survey for those aged 65--84 years and living in the Perth metropolitan region from 2003--2009 (n = 2,918). Individual-level road network service areas were generated at 400 m and 800 m distances, and the presence or absence of six commercial destination types within the neighbourhood service areas identified (food retail, general retail, medical care services, financial services, general services, and social infrastructure). Adjusted logistic regression models examined access to and mix of commercial destination types within neighbourhoods for associations with self-reported walking behaviour. RESULTS: On average, the sample was aged 72.9 years (SD = 5.4), and was predominantly female (55.9%) and married (62.0%). Overall, 66.2% reported some weekly walking and 30.8% reported sufficient walking (>=150 min/week). Older adults with access to general services within 400 m (OR = 1.33, 95% CI = 1.07-1.66) and 800 m (OR = 1.20, 95% CI = 1.02-1.42), and social infrastructure within 800 m (OR = 1.19, 95% CI = 1.01-1.40) were more likely to engage in some weekly walking. Access to medical care services within 400 m (OR = 0.77, 95% CI = 0.63-0.93) and 800 m (OR = 0.83, 95% CI = 0.70-0.99) reduced the odds of sufficient walking. Access to food retail, general retail, financial services, and the mix of commercial destination types within the neighbourhood were all unrelated to walking. CONCLUSIONS: The types of neighbourhood commercial destinations that encourage older adults to walk appear to differ slightly from those reported for adult samples. Destinations that facilitate more social interaction, for example eating at a restaurant or church involvement, or provide opportunities for some incidental social contact, for example visiting the pharmacy or hairdresser, were the strongest predictors for walking among seniors in this study. This underscores the importance of planning neighbourhoods with proximate access to social infrastructure, and highlights the need to create residential environments that support activity across the life course.

Commercial successes in the music industry

Commercial success in the music industry is obviously related to one’s ability to use musical artisanship as a basis for generating profits and to accumulate substantial wealth. That may seem fairly straightforward, but commercial success is an elusive concept that is continuously negotiated within the industry to determine both what should be considered “success” as well as how it should be measured. This entry discusses commercial success in the popular music industry and strategies used to achieve it.