The urban littoral frontier : land reclamation in the history of human settlements

The urban waterfront may be regarded as the littoral frontier of human settlement. Typically, over the years, it advances, sometimes retreats, where terrestrial and aquatic processes interact and frequently contest this margin of occupation. Because most towns and cities are sited beside water bodies, many of these urban centers on or close to the sea, their physical expansion is constrained by the existence of aquatic areas in one or more directions from the core. It is usually much easier for new urban development to occur along or inland from the waterfront. Where other physical constraints, such as rugged hills or mountains, make expansion difficult or expensive, building at greater densities or construction on steep slopes is a common response. This kind of development, though technically feasible, is usually more expensive than construction on level or gently sloping land, however. Moreover, there are many reasons for developing along the shore or riverfront in preference to using sites further inland. The high cost of developing existing dry land that presents serious construction difficulties is one reason for creating new land from adjacent areas that are permanently or periodically under water. Another reason is the relatively high value of artificially created land close to the urban centre when compared with the value of existing developable space at a greater distance inland. The creation of space for development is not the only motivation for urban expansion into aquatic areas. Commonly, urban places on the margins of the sea, estuaries, rivers or great lakes are, or were once, ports where shipping played an important role in the economy. The demand for deep waterfronts to allow ships to berth and for adjacent space to accommodate various port facilities has encouraged the advance of the urban land area across marginal shallows in ports around the world. The space and locational demands of port related industry and commerce, too, have contributed to this process. Often closely related to these developments is the generation of waste, including domestic refuse, unwanted industrial by-products, site formation and demolition debris and harbor dredgings. From ancient times, the foreshore has been used as a disposal area for waste from nearby settlements, a practice that continues on a huge scale today. Land formed in this way has long been used for urban development, despite problems that can arise from the nature of the dumped material and the way in which it is deposited. Disposal of waste material is a major factor in the creation of new urban land. Pollution of the foreshore and other water margin wetlands in this way encouraged the idea that the reclamation of these areas may be desirable on public health grounds. With reference to examples from various parts of the world, the historical development of the urban littoral frontier and its effects on the morphology and character of towns and cities are illustrated and discussed. The threat of rising sea levels and the heritage value of many waterfront areas are other considerations that are addressed.

Quantitative approaches to content analysis : identifying conceptual drift across publication outlets

Unstructured text data, such as emails, blogs, contracts, academic publications, organizational documents, transcribed interviews, and even tweets, are important sources of data in Information Systems research. Various forms of qualitative analysis of the content of these data exist and have revealed important insights. Yet, to date, these analyses have been hampered by limitations of human coding of large data sets, and by bias due to human interpretation. In this paper, we compare and combine two quantitative analysis techniques to demonstrate the capabilities of computational analysis for content analysis of unstructured text. Specifically, we seek to demonstrate how two quantitative analytic methods, viz., Latent Semantic Analysis and data mining, can aid researchers in revealing core content topic areas in large (or small) data sets, and in visualizing how these concepts evolve, migrate, converge or diverge over time. We exemplify the complementary application of these techniques through an examination of a 25-year sample of abstracts from selected journals in Information Systems, Management, and Accounting disciplines. Through this work, we explore the capabilities of two computational techniques, and show how these techniques can be used to gather insights from a large corpus of unstructured text.

Controlled drift: an investigation into the controllability of underwater vehicles with minimal actuation

This paper is directed towards providing an answer to the question, ”Can you control the trajectory of a Lagrangian float?” Being a float that has minimal actuation (only buoyancy control), their horizontal trajectory is dictated through drifting with ocean currents. However, with the appropriate vertical actuation and utilising spatio-temporal variations in water speed and direction, we show here that broad controllabilty results can be met such as waypoint following to keep a float inside of a bay or out of a designated region. This paper extends theory experimen- tally evaluted on horizontally actuated Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) for trajectory control utilising ocean forecast models and presents an initial investi- gation into the controllability of these minimally actuated drifting AUVs. Simulated results for offshore coastal and within highly dynamic tidal bays illustrate two tech- niques with the promise for an affirmative answer to the posed question above.

The drift

In this video, text floats on screen amidst a field of swirling coloured orbs and a stock music soundtrack. The text is sourced from Internet dating websites and combine into a single animated portrait charting an array of likes, dislikes, influences, beliefs and hobbies. This work examines the nature of consciousness and identity in a contemporary context. It reworks the languages of Internet dating websites to question how we construct and communicate our sense of self. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s theoretical work on “liquid modernity”, this work presents an exaggerated take on contemporary identity that emphasizes its construction through consumer tastes, lifestyle choices and relationships with popular culture.

Mission drift or strategic shift? Group formation strategies within MEPs

Microenterprise development programs (MEPs) have been recognised as a valuable way to help the poor engage in micro-businesses (Green et al., 2006; Vargas, 2000), presenting a way out of poverty (Choudhury et al., 2008; Strier, 2010). Concerns have been raised however, that the benefits of MEPs often don’t reach the extremely poor (Jones et al., 2004; Midgley, 2008; Mosley and Hulme, 1998; Nawaz, 2010; Pritchett, 2006). Balancing reach of these programs with depth is a challenging task. Targeting as many poor people as possible often results in MEPs focusing on the upper or middle poor, overlooking the most challenging group. As such, MEPs have been criticised for mission drift – losing sight of the organisation’s core purpose; assisting those more likely to succeed.

Littoral Marginalia

Poem

Monitoring style drift : evidence from U.S. Equity funds

This thesis examines the stewardship and investment style monitoring by managers and boards of U.S. equity funds. Results indicate that complying with a fund’s declared style, especially in value-growth dimension, remains a challenge for fund managers and boards, and that style-based investors should be aware of the risk of style drift since fund managers and boards do not always monitor the fund’s investment style as stated in the prospectus. Results also show that the quality of fund stewardship, as reflected by fund board quality, corporate culture, manager compensation, regulatory history, and fees are effective in ensuring that fund managers and boards perform their fiduciary obligation by increasing monitoring of the fund investment style.

Fast and accurate business process drift detection

Business processes are prone to continuous and unexpected changes. Process workers may start executing a process differently in order to adjust to changes in workload, season, guidelines or regulations for example. Early detection of business process changes based on their event logs – also known as business process drift detection – enables analysts to identify and act upon changes that may otherwise affect process performance. Previous methods for business process drift detection are based on an exploration of a potentially large feature space and in some cases they require users to manually identify the specific features that characterize the drift. Depending on the explored feature set, these methods may miss certain types of changes. This paper proposes a fully automated and statistically grounded method for detecting process drift. The core idea is to perform statistical tests over the distributions of runs observed in two consecutive time windows. By adaptively sizing the window, the method strikes a trade-off between classification accuracy and drift detection delay. A validation on synthetic and real-life logs shows that the method accurately detects typical change patterns and scales up to the extent it is applicable for online drift detection.

Detecting drift from event streams of unpredictable business processes

Existing business process drift detection methods do not work with event streams. As such, they are designed to detect inter-trace drifts only, i.e. drifts that occur between complete process executions (traces), as recorded in event logs. However, process drift may also occur during the execution of a process, and may impact ongoing executions. Existing methods either do not detect such intra-trace drifts, or detect them with a long delay. Moreover, they do not perform well with unpredictable processes, i.e. processes whose logs exhibit a high number of distinct executions to the total number of executions. We address these two issues by proposing a fully automated and scalable method for online detection of process drift from event streams. We perform statistical tests over distributions of behavioral relations between events, as observed in two adjacent windows of adaptive size, sliding along with the stream. An extensive evaluation on synthetic and real-life logs shows that our method is fast and accurate in the detection of typical change patterns, and performs significantly better than the state of the art.

Hydrazine-hydrate intercalated halloysite under controlled-rate thermal analysis conditions

The thermal behaviour of halloysite fully expanded with hydrazine-hydrate has been investigated in nitrogen atmosphere under dynamic heating and at a constant, pre-set decomposition rate of 0.15 mg min-1. Under controlled-rate thermal analysis (CRTA) conditions it was possible to resolve the closely overlapping decomposition stages and to distinguish between adsorbed and bonded reagent. Three types of bonded reagent could be identified. The loosely bonded reagent amounting to 0.20 mol hydrazine-hydrate per mol inner surface hydroxyl is connected to the internal and external surfaces of the expanded mineral and is present as a space filler between the sheets of the delaminated mineral. The strongly bonded (intercalated) hydrazine-hydrate is connected to the kaolinite inner surface OH groups by the formation of hydrogen bonds. Based on the thermoanalytical results two different types of bonded reagent could be distinguished in the complex. Type 1 reagent (approx. 0.06 mol hydrazine-hydrate/mol inner surface OH) is liberated between 77 and 103°C. Type 2 reagent is lost between 103 and 227°C, corresponding to a quantity of 0.36 mol hydrazine/mol inner surface OH. When heating the complex to 77°C under CRTA conditions a new reflection appears in the XRD pattern with a d-value of 9.6 Å, in addition to the 10.2 Ĺ reflection. This new reflection disappears in contact with moist air and the complex re-expands to the original d-value of 10.2 Å in a few h. The appearance of the 9.6 Å reflection is interpreted as the expansion of kaolinite with hydrazine alone, while the 10.2 Å one is due to expansion with hydrazine-hydrate. FTIR (DRIFT) spectroscopic results showed that the treated mineral after intercalation/deintercalation and heat treatment to 300°C is slightly more ordered than the original (untreated) clay.

The effect of mechanochemical activation upon the intercalation of a high-defect kaolinite with formamide

The effect of mechanochemical activation upon the intercalation of formamide into a high-defect kaolinite has been studied using a combination of X-ray diffraction, thermal analysis, and DRIFT spectroscopy. X-ray diffraction shows that the intensity of the d(001) spacing decreases with grinding time and that the intercalated high-defect kaolinite expands to 10.2 A. The intensity of the peak of the expanded phase of the formamide-intercalated kaolinite decreases with grinding time. Thermal analysis reveals that the evolution temperature of the adsorbed formamide and loss of the inserting molecule increases with increased grinding time. The temperature of the dehydroxylation of the formamide-intercalated high-defect kaolinite decreases from 495 to 470oC with mechanochemical activation. Changes in the surface structure of the mechanochemically activated formamide-intercalated high-defect kaolinite were followed by DRIFT spectroscopy. Fundamentally the intensity of the high-defect kaolinite hydroxyl stretching bands decreases exponentially with grinding time and simultaneously the intensity of the bands attributed to the OH stretching vibrations of water increased. It is proposed that the mechanochemical activation of the high-defect kaolinite caused the conversion of the hydroxyls to water which coordinates the kaolinite surface. Significant changes in the infrared bands assigned to the hydroxyl deformation and amide stretching and bending modes were observed. The intensity decrease of these bands was exponentially related to the grinding time. The position of the amide C&unknown;O vibrational mode was found to be sensitive to grinding time. The effect of mechanochemical activation of the high-defect kaolinite reduces the capacity of the kaolinite to be intercalated with formamide.

Abstracting and correlating heterogeneous events to detect complex scenarios

The research presented in this thesis addresses inherent problems in signaturebased intrusion detection systems (IDSs) operating in heterogeneous environments. The research proposes a solution to address the difficulties associated with multistep attack scenario specification and detection for such environments. The research has focused on two distinct problems: the representation of events derived from heterogeneous sources and multi-step attack specification and detection. The first part of the research investigates the application of an event abstraction model to event logs collected from a heterogeneous environment. The event abstraction model comprises a hierarchy of events derived from different log sources such as system audit data, application logs, captured network traffic, and intrusion detection system alerts. Unlike existing event abstraction models where low-level information may be discarded during the abstraction process, the event abstraction model presented in this work preserves all low-level information as well as providing high-level information in the form of abstract events. The event abstraction model presented in this work was designed independently of any particular IDS and thus may be used by any IDS, intrusion forensic tools, or monitoring tools. The second part of the research investigates the use of unification for multi-step attack scenario specification and detection. Multi-step attack scenarios are hard to specify and detect as they often involve the correlation of events from multiple sources which may be affected by time uncertainty. The unification algorithm provides a simple and straightforward scenario matching mechanism by using variable instantiation where variables represent events as defined in the event abstraction model. The third part of the research looks into the solution to address time uncertainty. Clock synchronisation is crucial for detecting multi-step attack scenarios which involve logs from multiple hosts. Issues involving time uncertainty have been largely neglected by intrusion detection research. The system presented in this research introduces two techniques for addressing time uncertainty issues: clock skew compensation and clock drift modelling using linear regression. An off-line IDS prototype for detecting multi-step attacks has been implemented. The prototype comprises two modules: implementation of the abstract event system architecture (AESA) and of the scenario detection module. The scenario detection module implements our signature language developed based on the Python programming language syntax and the unification-based scenario detection engine. The prototype has been evaluated using a publicly available dataset of real attack traffic and event logs and a synthetic dataset. The distinct features of the public dataset are the fact that it contains multi-step attacks which involve multiple hosts with clock skew and clock drift. These features allow us to demonstrate the application and the advantages of the contributions of this research. All instances of multi-step attacks in the dataset have been correctly identified even though there exists a significant clock skew and drift in the dataset. Future work identified by this research would be to develop a refined unification algorithm suitable for processing streams of events to enable an on-line detection. In terms of time uncertainty, identified future work would be to develop mechanisms which allows automatic clock skew and clock drift identification and correction. The immediate application of the research presented in this thesis is the framework of an off-line IDS which processes events from heterogeneous sources using abstraction and which can detect multi-step attack scenarios which may involve time uncertainty.

Under great pressure, a diamond is being formed: The SBS over time

This article observes a paradox in the recent history of the Special Broadcasting Service. It is argued that, in contrast to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the role and general direction of SBS were not extensively debated as part of the ‘culture wars’ that occurred during the years of the Howard government. While that made SBS a less fraught space during that period, it may now be a factor in the comparative lack of support being given by the Rudd Labor government to SBS in comparison with the ABC, as some of the ‘special’ status of SBS has been blunted by its drift towards more mainstream programming and a mixed economy of commercial advertising, as well as government funding.