Children's Fiction About 9/11: Ethnic, Heroic and National Identities

In this study, Lampert examines how cultural identities are constructed within fictional texts for young people written about the attacks on the Twin Towers. It identifi es three significant identity categories encoded in 9/11 books for children:ethnic identities, national identities, and heroic identities,arguing that the identities formed within the selected children’s texts are in flux, privileging performances of identities that are contingent on post-9/11 politics. Looking at texts including picture books, young adult fiction, and a selection of DC Comics, Lampert finds in post-9/11 children’s literature a co-mingling of xenophobia and tolerance; a binaried competition between good and evil and global harmony and national insularity; and a lauding of both the commonplace hero and the super-human. The shifting identities evident in texts that are being produced for children about 9/11 offer implicit and explicit accounts of what constitutes good citizenship, loyalty to nation and community, and desirable attributes in a Western post-9/11 context. This book makes an original contribution to the field of children’s literature by providing a focused and sustained analysis of how texts for children about 9/11 contribute to formations of identity in these complex times of cultural unease and global unrest.

The future face of school guidance and counselling : what will it look like in 25 years?

The author undertook a qualitative and quantitative survey of 130 guidance counsellors and primary school principles focusing on perceptions of what school guidance and counselling will be like in 25 years. Generally the participants held similar beliefs and were bullish about employment prospects.

Using self-referencing to explain the effectiveness of ethnic minority models in advertising

Advertising research has generally not gone beyond offering support for a positive effect where ethnic models in advertising are viewed by consumers of the same ethnicity. This study offers an explanation behind this phenomenon that can be useful to marketers using self-reference theory. Our experiment reveals a strong self-referencing effect for ethnic minority individuals. Specifically, Asian subjects (the ethnic minority group) self-referenced ads with Asian models more than white subjects (the ethnic majority group). However, this result was not evident for white subjects. Implications for academics and advertisers are discussed.

Ethnic differences in the BMI-%BF relationships between young Japanese and Australian-Caucasian males living in Australia using dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry

The Body Mass Index (BMI) has been used worldwide as an indicator of fatness. However, the universal cut-off points by the World Health Organisation (WHO) classification may not be appropriate for every ethnic group when consider the relationship with their actual total body fatness(%BF). The application of population-specific classifications to assess BMI may be more relevant to public health. Ethnic differences in the BMI%BF relationship between 45 Japanese and 42 Australian-Caucasian males were assessed using whole body dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) scan and anthropometry using a standard protocol. Japanese males had significantly (p<0.05) greater %BF at given BMI values than Australian males. When this is taken into account the newly proposed Asia-Pacific BMI classification of BMI 23 as overweight and 25 as obese may better assess the level of obesity that is associated increased health risks for this population. To clarify the current findings, further studies that compare the relationships across other Japanese populations are recommended.

Ethnic differences in body composition and anthropometric characteristics in Australian Caucasian and urban Indigenous children

The objective was to compare ethnic differences in anthropometry, including size, proportions and fat distribution, and body composition in a cohort of seventy Caucasian (forty-four boys, twenty-six girls) and seventy-four urban Indigenous (thirty-six boys, thirty-eight girls) children (aged 9–15 years). Anthropometric measures (stature, body mass, eight skinfolds, thirteen girths, six bone lengths and five bone breadths) and body composition assessment using dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry were conducted. Body composition variables including total body fat percentage and percentage abdominal fat were determined and together with anthropometric indices, including BMI (kg/m2), abdominal:height ratio (AHtR) and sum of skinfolds, ethnic differences were compared for each sex. After adjustment for age, Indigenous girls showed significantly (P < 0·05) greater trunk circumferences and proportion of overweight and obesity than their Caucasian counterparts. In addition, Indigenous children had a significantly greater proportion (P < 0·05) of trunk fat. The best model for total and android fat prediction included sum of skinfolds and age in both sexes (>93 % of variation). Ethnicity was only important in girls where abdominal circumference and AHtR were included and Indigenous girls showed significantly (P < 0·05) smaller total/android fat deposition than Caucasian girls at the given abdominal circumference or AHtR values. Differences in anthropometric and fat distribution patterns in Caucasian and Indigenous children may justify the need for more appropriate screening criteria for obesity in Australian children relevant to ethnic origin.

Investigation of MEMS inertial sensors and aircraft dynamic models in global positioning system integrity monitoring for approaches with vertical guidance

An Approach with Vertical Guidance (APV) is an instrument approach procedure which provides horizontal and vertical guidance to a pilot on approach to landing in reduced visibility conditions. APV approaches can greatly reduce the safety risk to general aviation by improving the pilot’s situational awareness. In particular the incidence of Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT) which has occurred in a number of fatal air crashes in general aviation over the past decade in Australia, can be reduced. APV approaches can also improve general aviation operations. If implemented at Australian airports, APV approach procedures are expected to bring a cost saving of millions of dollars to the economy due to fewer missed approaches, diversions and an increased safety benefit. The provision of accurate horizontal and vertical guidance is achievable using the Global Positioning System (GPS). Because aviation is a safety of life application, an aviation-certified GPS receiver must have integrity monitoring or augmentation to ensure that its navigation solution can be trusted. However, the difficulty with the current GPS satellite constellation alone meeting APV integrity requirements, the susceptibility of GPS to jamming or interference and the potential shortcomings of proposed augmentation solutions for Australia such as the Ground-based Regional Augmentation System (GRAS) justifies the investigation of Aircraft Based Augmentation Systems (ABAS) as an alternative integrity solution for general aviation. ABAS augments GPS with other sensors at the aircraft to help it meet the integrity requirements. Typical ABAS designs assume high quality inertial sensors to provide an accurate reference trajectory for Kalman filters. Unfortunately high-quality inertial sensors are too expensive for general aviation. In contrast to these approaches the purpose of this research is to investigate fusing GPS with lower-cost Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (MEMS) Inertial Measurement Units (IMU) and a mathematical model of aircraft dynamics, referred to as an Aircraft Dynamic Model (ADM) in this thesis. Using a model of aircraft dynamics in navigation systems has been studied before in the available literature and shown to be useful particularly for aiding inertial coasting or attitude determination. In contrast to these applications, this thesis investigates its use in ABAS. This thesis presents an ABAS architecture concept which makes use of a MEMS IMU and ADM, named the General Aviation GPS Integrity System (GAGIS) for convenience. GAGIS includes a GPS, MEMS IMU, ADM, a bank of Extended Kalman Filters (EKF) and uses the Normalized Solution Separation (NSS) method for fault detection. The GPS, IMU and ADM information is fused together in a tightly-coupled configuration, with frequent GPS updates applied to correct the IMU and ADM. The use of both IMU and ADM allows for a number of different possible configurations. Three are investigated in this thesis; a GPS-IMU EKF, a GPS-ADM EKF and a GPS-IMU-ADM EKF. The integrity monitoring performance of the GPS-IMU EKF, GPS-ADM EKF and GPS-IMU-ADM EKF architectures are compared against each other and against a stand-alone GPS architecture in a series of computer simulation tests of an APV approach. Typical GPS, IMU, ADM and environmental errors are simulated. The simulation results show the GPS integrity monitoring performance achievable by augmenting GPS with an ADM and low-cost IMU for a general aviation aircraft on an APV approach. A contribution to research is made in determining whether a low-cost IMU or ADM can provide improved integrity monitoring performance over stand-alone GPS. It is found that a reduction of approximately 50% in protection levels is possible using the GPS-IMU EKF or GPS-ADM EKF as well as faster detection of a slowly growing ramp fault on a GPS pseudorange measurement. A second contribution is made in determining how augmenting GPS with an ADM compares to using a low-cost IMU. By comparing the results for the GPS-ADM EKF against the GPS-IMU EKF it is found that protection levels for the GPS-ADM EKF were only approximately 2% higher. This indicates that the GPS-ADM EKF may potentially replace the GPS-IMU EKF for integrity monitoring should the IMU ever fail. In this way the ADM may contribute to the navigation system robustness and redundancy. To investigate this further, a third contribution is made in determining whether or not the ADM can function as an IMU replacement to improve navigation system redundancy by investigating the case of three IMU accelerometers failing. It is found that the failed IMU measurements may be supplemented by the ADM and adequate integrity monitoring performance achieved. Besides treating the IMU and ADM separately as in the GPS-IMU EKF and GPS-ADM EKF, a fourth contribution is made in investigating the possibility of fusing the IMU and ADM information together to achieve greater performance than either alone. This is investigated using the GPS-IMU-ADM EKF. It is found that the GPS-IMU-ADM EKF can achieve protection levels approximately 3% lower in the horizontal and 6% lower in the vertical than a GPS-IMU EKF. However this small improvement may not justify the complexity of fusing the IMU with an ADM in practical systems. Affordable ABAS in general aviation may enhance existing GPS-only fault detection solutions or help overcome any outages in augmentation systems such as the Ground-based Regional Augmentation System (GRAS). Countries such as Australia which currently do not have an augmentation solution for general aviation could especially benefit from the economic savings and safety benefits of satellite navigation-based APV approaches.

Low-Cost vision-based AUV guidance system for reef navigation

Ensuring the long term viability of reef environments requires essential monitoring of many aspects of these ecosystems. However, the sheer size of these unstructured environments (for example Australia’s Great Barrier Reef pose a number of challenges for current monitoring platforms which are typically remote operated and required significant resources and infrastructure. Therefore, a primary objective of the CSIRO robotic reef monitoring project is to develop and deploy a large number of AUV teams to perform broadscale reef surveying. In order to achieve this, the platforms must be cheap, even possibly disposable. This paper presents the results of a preliminary investigation into the performance of a low-cost sensor suite and associated processing techniques for vision and inertial-based navigation within a highly unstructured reef environment.