Drivers constraints and the future of off-site manufacture in Australia.

Much has been written on Off-site Manufacture (OSM) in construction, particularly regarding the perceived benefits and barriers to implementation. However, very little understanding of the state of OSM in the Australian construction industry exists. A ‘scoping study' has recently been undertaken to determine the ‘state-of-the-art’ of OSM in Australia. This involved several industry workshops, interviews and case studies across four major states of Australia. The study surveyed a range of suppliers across the construction supply-chain, incorporating the civil, commercial and housing segments of the market. This revealed that skills shortages and lack of adequate OSM knowledge are generally the greatest issues facing OSM in Australia. The drivers and constraints that emerged from the research were, in large measure, consistent with those found in the US and UK, although some Australian anomalies are evident, such as the geographical disparity of markets. A comparative analysis with similar studies in the UK and US is reported, illustrating both the drivers and constraints confronting the industry in Australia. OSM uptake into the future is however dependent on many factors, not least of which is a better understanding of the construction process and its associated costs.

The influence of instructions and body-scaling as constraints on decision-making processes in team sports

Team games conceptualized as dynamical systems engender a view of emergent decision-making behaviour under constraints, although specific effects of instructional and body-scaling constraints have yet to be verified empirically. For this purpose, we studied the effects of task and individual constraints on decision-making processes in basketball. Eleven experienced female players performed 350 trials in 1 vs. 1 sub-phases of basketball in which an attacker tried to perturb the stable state of a dyad formed with a defender (i.e. break the symmetry). In Experiment 1, specific instructions (neutral, risk taking or conservative) were manipulated to observe effects on emergent behaviour of the dyadic system. When attacking players were given conservative instructions, time to cross court mid-line and variability of the attacker's trajectory were significantly greater. In Experiment 2, body-scaling of participants was manipulated by creating dyads with different height relations. When attackers were considerably taller than defenders, there were fewer occurrences of symmetry-breaking. When attackers were considerably shorter than defenders, time to cross court mid-line was significantly shorter than when dyads were composed of athletes of similar height or when attackers were considerably taller than defenders. The data exemplify how interacting task and individual constraints can influence emergent decision-making processes in team ball games.

Ramifications of development projects deemed “state significant”

Purpose, Design/methodology / approach The acknowledgement of state significance in relation to development projects can result in special treatment by regulatory authorities, particularly in terms of environmental compliance and certain economic and other government support measures. However, defining just what constitutes a “significant project”, or a project of “state significance”, varies considerably between Australian states. In terms of establishing threshold levels, in Queensland there is even less clarity. Despite this lack of definition, the implications of “state significance” can nevertheless be considerable. For example, in Queensland if the Coordinator-General declares a project to be a “significant project” under the State Development and Public Works Organisation Act 1971, the environmental impact assessment process may become more streamlined – potentially circumventing certain provisions under The Integrated Planning Act 1997. If the project is not large enough to be so deemed, an extractive resource under the State Planning Policy 2/07 - Protection of Extractive Resources 2007 may be considered to be of State or regional significance and subsequently designated as a “Key Resource Area”. As a consequence, such a project is afforded some measure of resource protection but remains subject to the normal assessment process under the Integrated Development Assessment System, as well as the usual requirements of the vegetation management codes, and other regulations. Findings (Originality/value) & Research limitations / implications This paper explores the various meanings of “state significance” in Queensland and the ramifications for development projects in that state. It argues for a streamlining of the assessment process in order to avoid or minimise constraints acting on the state’s development. In so doing, it questions the existence of a strategic threat to the delivery of an already over-stretched infrastructure program.

An infinite-horizon robust filter for uncertain hidden Markov Models with conditional relative entropy constraints

We consider a robust filtering problem for uncertain discrete-time, homogeneous, first-order, finite-state hidden Markov models (HMMs). The class of uncertain HMMs considered is described by a conditional relative entropy constraint on measures perturbed from a nominal regular conditional probability distribution given the previous posterior state distribution and the latest measurement. Under this class of perturbations, a robust infinite horizon filtering problem is first formulated as a constrained optimization problem before being transformed via variational results into an unconstrained optimization problem; the latter can be elegantly solved using a risk-sensitive information-state based filtering.

Beyond MOF constraints : multiple constraint set metamodelling for lifecycle management

The management of models over time in many domains requires different constraints to apply to some parts of the model as it evolves. Using EMF and its meta-language Ecore, the development of model management code and tools usually relies on the meta- model having some constraints, such as attribute and reference cardinalities and changeability, set in the least constrained way that any model user will require. Stronger versions of these constraints can then be enforced in code, or by attaching additional constraint expressions, and their evaluations engines, to the generated model code. We propose a mechanism that allows for variations to the constraining meta-attributes of metamodels, to allow enforcement of different constraints at different lifecycle stages of a model. We then discuss the implementation choices within EMF to support the validation of a state-specific metamodel on model graphs when changing states, as well as the enforcement of state-specific constraints when executing model change operations.

What happened to the education revolution? : new media technologies and the Australian curriculum : constraints and possibilities

This chapter investigates the place of new media in Queensland in the light of the Australian curriculum. ‘Multimodal texts’ in English are being defined as largely electronically ‘created’ and yet restricted access to digital resources at the chalkface may preclude this work from happening. The myth of the ‘digital native’ (Prensky, 2007), combined with the reality of the ‘digital divide’ coupled with technophobia amongst some quite experienced teachers, responsible for implementing the curriculum, paints a picture of constraints. These constraints are due in part to protective state bans in Queensland on social networking sites and school bans on mobile phone use. Some ‘Generation next’ will have access to digital platforms for the purpose of designing texts at home and school, and others will not. Yet without adequate Professional Development for teachers and substantially increased ICT infrastructure funding for all schools, the way new media and multimodal opportunities are interpreted at state level in the curriculum may leave much to be desired in schools. This chapter draws on research that I recently conducted on the professional development needs of beginning teachers, as well as a critical reading of the ACARA policy documents.

PartSS : An efficient partition-based filtering for edit distance constraints

This paper introduces PartSS, a new partition-based fil- tering for tasks performing string comparisons under edit distance constraints. PartSS offers improvements over the state-of-the-art method NGPP with the implementation of a new partitioning scheme and also improves filtering abil- ities by exploiting theoretical results on shifting and scaling ranges, thus accelerating the rate of calculating edit distance between strings. PartSS filtering has been implemented within two major tasks of data integration: similarity join and approximate membership extraction under edit distance constraints. The evaluation on an extensive range of real-world datasets demonstrates major gain in efficiency over NGPP and QGrams approaches.

Analytical model for fault section estimation and state identification of unobserved protective relays in power systems [电力系统故障诊断与不可观测保护状态识别的解析模型]

In recent years, some models have been proposed for the fault section estimation and state identification of unobserved protective relays (FSE-SIUPR) under the condition of incomplete state information of protective relays. In these models, the temporal alarm information from a faulted power system is not well explored although it is very helpful in compensating the incomplete state information of protective relays, quickly achieving definite fault diagnosis results and evaluating the operating status of protective relays and circuit breakers in complicated fault scenarios. In order to solve this problem, an integrated optimization mathematical model for the FSE-SIUPR, which takes full advantage of the temporal characteristics of alarm messages, is developed in the framework of the well-established temporal constraint network. With this model, the fault evolution procedure can be explained and some states of unobserved protective relays identified. The model is then solved by means of the Tabu search (TS) and finally verified by test results of fault scenarios in a practical power system.

Public spaces/public disgraces : crowds and the state in contemporary Vietnam

This article argues that a semantic shift in the crowd in Vietnam over the last decade has allowed public space to become a site through which transgressive ideologies and desires may have an outlet. At a time of accelerating social change, the state has effectively delimited public criticism yet a fragile but assertive form of Vietnamese democratic practice has arisen in public space, at the margins of official society, in sites previously equated with state control. Official state functions attract only small audiences, and rather than celebrating the dominance of the party, reveal the disengagement of the populace in the party's activities. Where crowds were always a component of state (stage)-managed events, now public spaces are attracting large numbers of people for supposedly non-political activities which may become transgressive acts condemned by the regime. In support of the notion that crowding is an opening up of the possibility of more subversive political actions, the paper presents an analysis of recent crowd formations and the state's reaction to them. The analysis reveals the modalities through which popular culture has provided the public with the means to transcend the constraints of official, authorized, and legitimate codes of behaviour in public space. Changes in the use of public space, it is argued, map the sets of relations between the public and the state, making these transforming relationships visible, although fraught with contradictions and anomalies.

Optimal camera planning under versatile user constraints in multi-camera image processing systems

The selection of optimal camera configurations (camera locations, orientations, etc.) for multi-camera networks remains an unsolved problem. Previous approaches largely focus on proposing various objective functions to achieve different tasks. Most of them, however, do not generalize well to large scale networks. To tackle this, we propose a statistical framework of the problem as well as propose a trans-dimensional simulated annealing algorithm to effectively deal with it. We compare our approach with a state-of-the-art method based on binary integer programming (BIP) and show that our approach offers similar performance on small scale problems. However, we also demonstrate the capability of our approach in dealing with large scale problems and show that our approach produces better results than two alternative heuristics designed to deal with the scalability issue of BIP. Last, we show the versatility of our approach using a number of specific scenarios.

On optimal control of constrained linear systems with imperfect state information and stochastic disturbances

We address the problem of finite horizon optimal control of discrete-time linear systems with input constraints and uncertainty. The uncertainty for the problem analysed is related to incomplete state information (output feedback) and stochastic disturbances. We analyse the complexities associated with finding optimal solutions. We also consider two suboptimal strategies that could be employed for larger optimization horizons.

Spin it to win it: A comparison of constraints-led versus traditional coaching approaches

This thesis aimed to compare the effects of constraints-led and traditional coaching approaches on young cricket spin bowlers, with a specific research focus on increasing spin rates (i.e., Revolutions per Minute). Participants were 22 spin bowlers from either an Australia state youth squad or an academy in England. Results indicate that adopting a constraints-led approach can benefit younger, inexperienced bowlers, whilst a traditional approach may assist more skilled, older bowlers. The findings are discussed with regards to how they may inform the learning design of training programs by cricket coaches.

Dark-energy constraints and correlations with systematics from CFHTLS weak lensing, SNLS supernovae Ia and WMAP5

Aims We combine measurements of weak gravitational lensing from the CFHTLS-Wide survey, supernovae Ia from CFHT SNLS and CMB anisotropies from WMAP5 to obtain joint constraints on cosmological parameters, in particular, the dark-energy equation-of-state parameter w. We assess the influence of systematics in the data on the results and look for possible correlations with cosmological parameters. Methods We implemented an MCMC algorithm to sample the parameter space of a flat CDM model with a dark-energy component of constant w. Systematics in the data are parametrised and included in the analysis. We determine the influence of photometric calibration of SNIa data on cosmological results by calculating the response of the distance modulus to photometric zero-point variations. The weak lensing data set is tested for anomalous field-to-field variations and a systematic shape measurement bias for high-redshift galaxies. Results Ignoring photometric uncertainties for SNLS biases cosmological parameters by at most 20% of the statistical errors, using supernovae alone; the parameter uncertainties are underestimated by 10%. The weak-lensing field-to-field variance between 1 deg2-MegaCam pointings is 5-15% higher than predicted from N-body simulations. We find no bias in the lensing signal at high redshift, within the framework of a simple model, and marginalising over cosmological parameters. Assuming a systematic underestimation of the lensing signal, the normalisation increases by up to 8%. Combining all three probes we obtain -0.10 < 1 + w < 0.06 at 68% confidence ( -0.18 < 1 + w < 0.12 at 95%), including systematic errors. Our results are therefore consistent with the cosmological constant . Systematics in the data increase the error bars by up to 35%; the best-fit values change by less than 0.15.