Gemma Smith and the intuitive abstract

This article examines the work of Brisbane artist Gemma Smith. It investigates the artist's career and her developmental abstract paintings and sculptures. It argues that the artist is fundamentally intuitive in her approach to the genre and also employs mimicry of certain abstract styles as a means through which to develop her own creative outcomes.

Adam Smith's Dinner

The Future of Financial Regulation is an edited collection of papers presented at a major conference at the University of Glasgow in Spring 2009. It draws together a variety of different perspectives on the international financial crisis which began in August 2007 and later turned into a more widespread economic crisis following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the Autumn of 2008. Spring 2009 was in many respects the nadir since valuations in financial markets had reached their low point and crisis management rather than regulatory reform was the main focus of attention. The conference and book were deliberately framed as an attempt to re-focus attention from the former to the latter. The first part of the book focuses on the context of the crisis, discussing the general characteristics of financial crises and the specific influences that were at work during this time. The second part focuses more specifically on regulatory techniques and practices implicated in the crisis, noting in particular an over-reliance on the capacity of regulators and financial institutions to manage risk and on the capacity of markets to self-correct. The third part focuses on the role of governance and ethics in the crisis and in particular the need for a common ethical framework to underpin governance practices and to provide greater clarity in the design of accountability mechanisms. The final part focuses on the trajectory of regulatory reform, noting the considerable potential for change as a result of the role of the state in the rescue and recuperation of the financial system and stressing the need for fundamental re-appraisal of business and regulatory models. This informative book will be of interest to financial regulators and theorists, commercial and financial law practitioners, and academics involved in the law and economics of regulation.

Adam Smith's dinner

In 1961, the East German government erected what they claimed was an anti-capitalist barricade. In 1989, this barricade was dismantled by those whom it was supposed to keep apart: the forces it was intended to contain had overwhelmed it. In the aftermath, the victims of Stalinist oppression and the planned economy opted for radical change. Some might have hoped that they would intellectually march resolutely westwards towards the forms of social democracy that had proven so successful in their nearest neighbours – Scandinavia, Germany and Austria – and stop when they had reached a point on the political spectrum with which they felt comfortable, and which worked for them. Unfortunately, they went to the opposite end of political economy. That choice was celebrated by those theorists who wanted our own countries to move in the same direction. Eastern Europe suffered a decline of 50% in its GDP. Much earlier in 1653, Peter Stuyvesant had erected an earth and wooden wall to protect the westernmost settlement of a great commercial nation from those they imagined to be barbarians. In 1699 Stuyvesant’s barrier was dismantled by the British, who replaced it with a street named after the wall. So it came to be that one of the most inconsequential walls in history became one of history’s most famous streets. I am not sure if the Dutch had left some tulip bulbs on either side of the wall, perhaps as a reminder of capitalism’s first bubble, and an inspiration to later bubbles. However, many of the victims of the latest burst bubble are pretty keen to tear down that Wall.1 As in 1989, they want to take action against the guardians of the system that failed them. And the more they suffer, the more likely it is that they will demand radical change, and the more likely that the resulting change will go too far – as seems to have been the case in Eastern Europe after the terminal crisis of communism, and in the majority of democracies that fell in the dozen years following the Great Crash. The current reaction is so strong that some are even wondering what role there will be for markets. I was invited to address a conference in the EU Parliament last November on the topic ‘Capitalism: Quo Vadis?’, where I apologized to the international audience that the topic was posed in a dead European language because the answer to this question is not going to be determined by the west alone. The problems we have been addressing emerged in the west and have affected the rest. However, the answers will not come, solely from the west, and may even come primarily from the south and the east.

Navigating, recognizing and describing urban spaces with vision and lasers

In this paper we describe a body of work aimed at extending the reach of mobile navigation and mapping. We describe how running topological and metric mapping and pose estimation processes concurrently, using vision and laser ranging, has produced a full six-degree-of-freedom outdoor navigation system. It is capable of producing intricate three-dimensional maps over many kilometers and in real time. We consider issues concerning the intrinsic quality of the built maps and describe our progress towards adding semantic labels to maps via scene de-construction and labeling. We show how our choices of representation, inference methods and use of both topological and metric techniques naturally allow us to fuse maps built from multiple sessions with no need for manual frame alignment or data association.

Review ["Telling the Evolutionary Time : Molecular Clocks and the Fossil Record" edited by Philip C. J. Donoghue and M. Paul Smith]

Determining the temporal scale of biological evolution has traditionally been the preserve of paleontology, with the timing of species originations and major diversifications all being read from the fossil record. However, the ages of the earliest (correctly identified) records will underestimate actual origins due to the incomplete nature of the fossil record and the necessity for lineages to have evolved sufficiently divergent morphologies in order to be distinguished. The possibility of inferring divergence times more accurately has been promoted by the idea that the accumulation of genetic change between modern lineages can be used as a molecular clock (Zuckerkandl and Pauling, 1965). In practice, though, molecular dates have often been so old as to be incongruent even with liberal readings of the fossil record. Prominent examples include inferred diversifications of metazoan phyla hundreds of millions of years before their Cambrian fossil record appearances (e.g., Nei et al., 2001) and a basal split between modern birds (Neoaves) that is almost double the age of their earliest recognizable fossils (e.g., Cooper and Penny, 1997).

"What is contemporary art? A review of two books by Terry Smith'

What is contemporary art and what are the key components of contemporary culture? This review demonstrates where Terry Smith provides important answers to this question. The books thus help to improve understanding of how art has changed in recent decades and how a global culture now shapes its parameters. This review does not however concur that Smith provides a convincing case for a complete cultural paradigm transformation.

Review : "The Man from Hong Kong" -- Brian Trenchard Smith

Synopsis and review of the Australian action film The Man from Hong Kong (Brian Trenchard Smith, 1975). Includes cast and credits. Australia’s first martial arts action film was a coproduction between Hong Kong production company Golden Harvest and director Brian Trenchard Smith’s Movie Company, with significant investment from BEF Distributors, a subsidiary of the Australian exhibition chain Greater Union. Two years previously, Golden Harvest had coproduced the Bruce Lee smash hit Enter the Dragon, with Warner Bros. The Man from Hong Kong was its first partnership with an Australian producer, and the first coproduction between Hong Kong and Australian based companies. Although the film was almost entirely set in Sydney, much of the production was shot in a Hong Kong studio, where sets including Wilton’s gloriously decorated apartment were built...

WNT16 influences bone mineral density, cortical bone thickness, bone strength, and osteoporotic fracture risk

We aimed to identify genetic variants associated with cortical bone thickness (CBT) and bone mineral density (BMD) by performing two separate genome-wide association study (GWAS) meta-analyses for CBT in 3 cohorts comprising 5,878 European subjects and for BMD in 5 cohorts comprising 5,672 individuals. We then assessed selected single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) for osteoporotic fracture in 2,023 cases and 3,740 controls. Association with CBT and forearm BMD was tested for ~2.5 million SNPs in each cohort separately, and results were meta-analyzed using fixed effect meta-analysis. We identified a missense SNP (Thr>Ile; rs2707466) located in the WNT16 gene (7q31), associated with CBT (effect size of -0.11 standard deviations [SD] per C allele, P = 6.2×10-9). This SNP, as well as another nonsynonymous SNP rs2908004 (Gly>Arg), also had genome-wide significant association with forearm BMD (-0.14 SD per C allele, P = 2.3×10-12, and -0.16 SD per G allele, P = 1.2×10-15, respectively). Four genome-wide significant SNPs arising from BMD meta-analysis were tested for association with forearm fracture. SNP rs7776725 in FAM3C, a gene adjacent to WNT16, was associated with a genome-wide significant increased risk of forearm fracture (OR = 1.33, P = 7.3×10-9), with genome-wide suggestive signals from the two missense variants in WNT16 (rs2908004: OR = 1.22, P = 4.9×10-6 and rs2707466: OR = 1.22, P = 7.2×10-6). We next generated a homozygous mouse with targeted disruption of Wnt16. Female Wnt16-/- mice had 27% (P<0.001) thinner cortical bones at the femur midshaft, and bone strength measures were reduced between 43%-61% (6.5×10-13<P<5.9×10-4) at both femur and tibia, compared with their wild-type littermates. Natural variation in humans and targeted disruption in mice demonstrate that WNT16 is an important determinant of CBT, BMD, bone strength, and risk of fracture. © 2012 Zheng et al.

Genetic determinants of heel bone properties: Genome-wide association meta-analysis and replication in the GEFOS/GENOMOS consortium

Quantitative ultrasound of the heel captures heel bone properties that independently predict fracture risk and, with bone mineral density (BMD) assessed by X-ray (DXA), may be convenient alternatives for evaluating osteoporosis and fracture risk. We performed a meta-analysis of genome-wide association (GWA) studies to assess the genetic determinants of heel broadband ultrasound attenuation (BUA; n 5 14 260), velocity of sound (VOS; n 5 15 514) and BMD (n 5 4566) in 13 discovery cohorts. Independent replication involved seven cohorts with GWA data (in silico n 5 11 452) and new genotyping in 15 cohorts (de novo n 5 24 902). In combined random effects, meta-analysis of the discovery and replication cohorts, nine single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) had genome-wide significant (P < 5 3 108) associations with heel bone properties. Alongside SNPs within or near previously identified osteoporosis susceptibility genes including ESR1 (6q25.1: rs4869739, rs3020331, rs2982552), SPTBN1 (2p16.2: rs11898505), RSPO3 (6q22.33: rs7741021), WNT16 (7q31.31: rs2908007), DKK1 (10q21.1: rs7902708) and GPATCH1 (19q13.11: rs10416265), we identified a new locus on chromosome 11q14.2 (rs597319 close to TMEM135, a gene recently linked to osteoblastogenesis and longevity) significantly associated with both BUA and VOS (P < 8.23 3 1014). In meta-analyses involving 25 cohorts with up to 14 985 fracture cases, six of 10 SNPs associated with heel bone properties at P < 5 3 106 also had the expected direction of association with any fracture (P < 0.05), including threeSNPswithP < 0.005: 6q22.33 (rs7741021), 7q31.31 (rs2908007) and 10q21.1 (rs7902708). In conclusion, thisGWAstudy reveals the effect of several genescommon to central DXA-derivedBMDand heel ultrasound/DXAmeasures and points to anewgenetic locus with potential implications for better understanding of osteoporosis pathophysiology.

Genome-wide meta-analysis identifies 56 bone mineral density loci and reveals 14 loci associated with risk of fracture

Bone mineral density (BMD) is the most widely used predictor of fracture risk. We performed the largest meta-analysis to date on lumbar spine and femoral neck BMD, including 17 genome-wide association studies and 32,961 individuals of European and east Asian ancestry. We tested the top BMD-associated markers for replication in 50,933 independent subjects and for association with risk of low-trauma fracture in 31,016 individuals with a history of fracture (cases) and 102,444 controls. We identified 56 loci (32 new) associated with BMD at genome-wide significance (P < 5 × 10−8). Several of these factors cluster within the RANK-RANKL-OPG, mesenchymal stem cell differentiation, endochondral ossification and Wnt signaling pathways. However, we also discovered loci that were localized to genes not known to have a role in bone biology. Fourteen BMD-associated loci were also associated with fracture risk (P < 5 × 10−4, Bonferroni corrected), of which six reached P < 5 × 10−8, including at 18p11.21 (FAM210A), 7q21.3 (SLC25A13), 11q13.2 (LRP5), 4q22.1 (MEPE), 2p16.2 (SPTBN1) and 10q21.1 (DKK1). These findings shed light on the genetic architecture and pathophysiological mechanisms underlying BMD variation and fracture susceptibility.

Genome-wide association study of CNVs in 16,000 cases of eight common diseases and 3,000 shared controls

Copy number variants (CNVs) account for a major proportion of human genetic polymorphism and have been predicted to have an important role in genetic susceptibility to common disease. To address this we undertook a large, direct genome-wide study of association between CNVs and eight common human diseases. Using a purpose-designed array we typed 19,000 individuals into distinct copy-number classes at 3,432 polymorphic CNVs, including an estimated 50% of all common CNVs larger than 500 base pairs. We identified several biological artefacts that lead to false-positive associations, including systematic CNV differences between DNAs derived from blood and cell lines. Association testing and follow-up replication analyses confirmed three loci where CNVs were associated with diseaseIRGM for Crohns disease, HLA for Crohns disease, rheumatoid arthritis and type 1 diabetes, and TSPAN8 for type 2 diabetesalthough in each case the locus had previously been identified in single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)-based studies, reflecting our observation that most common CNVs that are well-typed on our array are well tagged by SNPs and so have been indirectly explored through SNP studies. We conclude that common CNVs that can be typed on existing platforms are unlikely to contribute greatly to the genetic basis of common human diseases. © 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.

An abuse of process - traditionally: Smith v Lucht [2014] QDC 302

In Smith v Lucht [2014] QDC 302 McGill DCJ considered whether in Queensland the concept of abuse of process was sufficiently broad as to encompass circumstances in which the resources of the court and the parties to be expended to determine the claim were out of all proportion to the interest at stake. Stay of proceedings - abuse of process - whether disproportionality between interest at stake and costs of litigating may amount to abuse of process - plaintiff with good cause of action entitled to pursue it.