View northeast over single story apartment, Cotton Tree Housing Estate, Maroochydore

This pilot project at Cotton Tree, Maroochydore, on two adjacent, linear parcels of land has one of the properties privately owned while the other is owned by the public housing authority. Both owners commissioned Lindsay and Kerry Clare to design housing for their separate needs which enabled the two projects to be governed by a single planning and design strategy. This entailed the realignment of the dividing boundary to form two approximately square blocks which made possible the retention of an important stand of mature paperbark trees and gave each block a more useful street frontage. The scheme provides seven two-bedroom units and one single-bedroom unit as the private component, with six single-bedroom units, three two-bedroom units and two three-bedroom units forming the public housing. The dwellings are deployed as an interlaced mat of freestanding blocks, car courts, courtyard gardens, patios and decks. The key distinction between the public and private parts of the scheme is the pooling of the car parking spaces in the public housing to create a shared courtyard. The housing climbs to three storeys on its southern edge and falls to a single storey on the north-western corner. This enables all units and the principal private outdoor spaces to have a northern orientation. The interiors of both the public and private units are skilfully arranged to take full advantage of views, light and breeze.

Bimanual aiming and overt attention: one law for two hands

Reaching to interact with an object requires a compromise between the speed of the limb movement and the required end-point accuracy. The time it takes one hand to move to a target in a simple aiming task can be predicted reliably from Fitts' law, which states that movement time is a function of a combined measure of amplitude and accuracy constraints (the index of difficulty, ID). It has been assumed previously that Fitts' law is violated in bimanual aiming movements to targets of unequal ID. We present data from two experiments to show that this assumption is incorrect: if the attention demands of a bimanual aiming task are constant then the movements are well described by a Fitts' law relationship. Movement time therefore depends not only on ID but on other task conditions, which is a basic feature of Fitts' law. In a third experiment we show that eye movements are an important determinant of the attention demands in a bimanual aiming task. The results from the third experiment extend the findings of the first two experiments and show that bimanual aiming often relies on the strategic co-ordination of separate actions into a seamless behaviour. A number of the task specific strategies employed by the adult human nervous system were elucidated in the third experiment. The general strategic pattern observed in the hand trajectories was reflected by the pattern of eye movements recorded during the experiment. The results from all three experiments demonstrate that eye movements must be considered as an important constraint in bimanual aiming tasks.

One size doesn't fit all: Research methodologies in a language variation study of Sudanese teens

The research reported here draws on a study of five teenagers from a Dinka-speaking community of Sudanese settling in Australia. A range of factors including language proficiency, social network structure and language attitudes are examined as possible causes for the variability of language use. The results and discussion illustrate how the use of a triangular research approach captured the complexity of the participants' language situation and was critical to developing a full understanding of the interplay of factors influencing the teens' language maintenance and shift in a way that no single method could. Further, it shows that employment of different methodologies allowed for flexibility in data collection to ensure the fullest response from participants. Overall, this research suggests that for studies of non-standard communities, variability in research methods may prove more of a strength that the use of standardised instruments and approaches.

'Living together on one's own': Cohousing for older people - an example from Denmark and The Netherlands

‘Living together on one’s own’ is the seemingly contradictory expression of the National Association of Housing Communities for Elderly People (LVGO) in The Netherlands which in fact captures the essence of cohousing. Cohousing is a novel kind of neighbourhood, housing a novel form of intentional community, which began to take shape in Denmark in the early to mid-1960s and, independently, in The Netherlands a few years later. The inventors of cohousing wanted to live in a much more communal or community-oriented neighbourhood than was usual, but they wanted to do so without sacrificing the privacy of individual families or households and their dwellings. Could they have their cake and eat it too? It would seem so. What is cohousing for older people (op-cohousing)? Op-cohousing is essentially no different, except for the differences in outlook or expectations, experience, interests and abilities that a particular, exclusively older, group of people have brought to this housing type. I discuss and analyse several communities in both countries.

Ladder operator for the one-dimensional Hubbard model

The one-dimensional Hubbard model is integrable in the sense that it has an infinite family of conserved currents. We explicitly construct a ladder operator which can be used to iteratively generate all of the conserved current operators. This construction is different from that used for Lorentz invariant systems such as the Heisenberg model. The Hubbard model is not Lorentz invariant, due to the separation of spin and charge excitations. The ladder operator is obtained by a very general formalism which is applicable to any model that can be derived from a solution of the Yang-Baxter equation.

Lower Carboniferous microfloras of Spitsbergen, Part One

Describes and discusses the stratigraphic value of dispersed microspores from Culm localities, particularly from three of the most complete sections of the Billefjorden sandstones in the region. Two successive microfloral assemblages are distinguished. Correlations can be made locally and with various zones of Europe and North America. One new genus and many new species are represented in the microfloras.

Improved one-step solid-phase extraction method for morphine, morphine-3-glucuronide, and morphine-6-glucuronide from plasma and quantitation using high-performance liquid chromatography with electrochemical detection

This communication describes an improved one-step solid-phase extraction method for the recovery of morphine (M), morphine-3-glucuronide (M3G), and morphine-6-glucuronide (M6G) from human plasma with reduced coextraction of endogenous plasma constituents, compared to that of the authors' previously reported method. The magnitude of the peak caused by endogenous plasma components in the chromatogram that eluted immediately before the retention time of M3G has been reduced (similar to 80%) significantly (p < 0.01) while achieving high extraction efficiencies for the compounds of interest, viz morphine, M6G, and M3G (93.8 +/- 2.5, 91.7 +/- 1.7, and 93.1 +/- 2.2%, respectively). Furthermore, when the improved solid-phase extraction method was used, the extraction cartridge-derived late-eluting peak (retention time 90 to 100 minutes) reported in our previous method, was no longer present in the plasma extracts. Therefore the combined effect of reducing the recovery of the endogenous components of plasma that chromatographed just before the retention time of M3G and the removal of the late-eluting, extraction cartridge-derived peak has resulted in a decrease in the chromatographic run-time to 20 minutes, thereby increasing the sample throughput by up to 100%.

Phase diagram of the one-dimensional Holstein model of spinless fermions

The one-dimensional Holstein model of spinless fermions interacting with dispersionless phonons is studied using a new variant of the density matrix renormalization group. By examining various low-energy excitations of finite chains, the metal-insulator phase boundary is determined precisely and agrees with the predictions of strong coupling theory in the antiadiabatic regime and is consistent with renormalization group arguments in the adiabatic regime. The Luttinger liquid parameters, determined by finite-size scaling, are consistent with a Kosterlitz-Thouless transition.

Algebraic Bethe ansatz for integrable Kondo impurities in the one-dimensional supersymmetric t-J model

An integrable Kondo problem in the one-dimensional supersymmetric t-J model is studied by means of the boundary supersymmetric quantum inverse scattering method. The boundary K matrices depending on the local moments of the impurities are presented as a nontrivial realization of the graded reflection equation algebras in a two-dimensional impurity Hilbert space. Further, the model is solved by using the algebraic Bethe ansatz method and the Bethe ansatz equations are obtained. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V.

Quantum oscillations in quasi-one-dimensional metals with spin-density-wave ground states

We consider the magnetoresistance oscillation phenomena in the Bechgaard salts (TMTSF)(2)X, where X = ClO4, PF6, and AsF6 in pulsed magnetic fields to 51 T. Of particular importance is the observation of a new magnetoresistance oscillation for X = ClO4 in its quenched state. In the absence of any Fermi-surface reconstruction due to anion order at low temperatures, all three materials exhibit nonmonotonic temperature dependence of the oscillation amplitude in the spin-density-wave (SDW) state. We discuss a model where, below a characteristic temperature T* within the SDW state, a magnetic breakdown gap opens. [S0163-1829(99)00904-2].