Community broadcasting and the enclosure of the public sphere

One of the normative tenets of the Habermasian public sphere is that it should be an open and universally accessible forum. In Australia, one way of achieving this is the provision for community broadcasting in the Broadcasting Services Act. A closer examination of community broadcasting, however, suggests practices that contradict the idea of an open and accessible public sphere. Community broadcasting organizations regulate access to their media assets through a combination of formal and informal structures. This suggests that the public sphere can be understood as a resource, and that community broadcasting organizations can be analysed as ‘commons regimes’. This approach reveals a fundamental paradox inherent in the public sphere: access, participation and the quality of discourse in the public sphere are connected to its enclosure, which limits membership and participation through a system of rules and norms that govern the conduct of a group. By accepting the view that a public sphere is governed by property rights, it follows that an open and universally accessible public sphere is neither possible nor desirable.

I-Spi: innovative shared practical ideas: a support guide for literacy and numeracy in the early years of schooling, for home tutor/supervisors in distance education

Innovative Shared Practical Ideas (I-Spi) is a guide to help you and your children learn together. It is designed to affirm, support and strengthen your role as home tutor/supervisors in your daily learning sessions with your children. In this guide particular emphasis is given to the value of talk, formal and informal early literacy and numeracy practices (including ideas from distance school lessons, from home tutor/supervisors, research, and beyond), assessment of these practices together with informal assessment ideas for gauging your children’s literacy and numeracy progress, and stepping in and building on strategies

An automated failure mode and effect analysis based on high-level design specificication with behavior trees

Formal methods have significant benefits for developing safety critical systems, in that they allow for correctness proofs, model checking safety and liveness properties, deadlock checking, etc. However, formal methods do not scale very well and demand specialist skills, when developing real-world systems. For these reasons, development and analysis of large-scale safety critical systems will require effective integration of formal and informal methods. In this paper, we use such an integrative approach to automate Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA), a widely used system safety analysis technique, using a high-level graphical modelling notation (Behavior Trees) and model checking. We inject component failure modes into the Behavior Trees and translate the resulting Behavior Trees to SAL code. This enables us to model check if the system in the presence of these faults satisfies its safety properties, specified by temporal logic formulas. The benefit of this process is tool support that automates the tedious and error-prone aspects of FMEA.