The “inclusion” of students with vision impairments: generational perspectives in Australia

In this paper I draw upon findings of a recent qualitative project conducted in Queensland, Australia in which all actors – the researcher and 5 participants aged 13-17 years — were linked together by our shared experiences of being students with impaired vision (VI) and who were educated in inclusive secondary schools in Australia during the last two decades. The narrative demonstrates the alienating legacy of two everyday routines of schooling, the placement and the daily commute. In the paper I show how referential knowledge acquisition of a trans-identity research alliance can reveal barriers to inclusion that might be ordinarily overlooked. Theoretically I map the research relationship formed between myself and participants using both Foucault’s analysis of how human beings are made subjects (1982) and Bourdieu’s understanding of reflexive interviewing in qualitative research (1998). The empirical contribution of this paper is to demonstrate how special education discourses render subjects more “special” than the sum of their actual impairments, and methodologically to highlight the role of qualitative inquiry in the field of inclusive schooling.

Wireless sensor networks for heritage object deformation detection and tracking algorithm

Deformation is the direct cause of heritage object collapse. It is significant to monitor and signal the early warnings of the deformation of heritage objects. However, traditional heritage object monitoring methods only roughly monitor a simple-shaped heritage object as a whole, but cannot monitor complicated heritage objects, which may have a large number of surfaces inside and outside. Wireless sensor networks, comprising many small-sized, low-cost, low-power intelligent sensor nodes, are more useful to detect the deformation of every small part of the heritage objects. Wireless sensor networks need an effective mechanism to reduce both the communication costs and energy consumption in order to monitor the heritage objects in real time. In this paper, we provide an effective heritage object deformation detection and tracking method using wireless sensor networks (EffeHDDT). In EffeHDDT, we discover a connected core set of sensor nodes to reduce the communication cost for transmitting and collecting the data of the sensor networks. Particularly, we propose a heritage object boundary detecting and tracking mechanism. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that our EffeHDDT method outperforms the existing methods in terms of network traffic and the precision of the deformation detection.

Hydrologic response of a tropical watershed to urbanization

 Urbanization has profound influence on the hydrologic response of landscapes. Urban transformation affects the storages and processes that determine the generation of hydrologic fluxes. It also changes the time-scales associated with hydrologic processes. Shifts in hydrologic response of the watershed unit due to urban transformation may be more complex than the simple linear mixing (weighted sum) of responses from the urbanized and non-urbanized fractions of the landscape. This may especially be the case for tropical watersheds where the precipitation forcing of the watershed is frequent and intense - interacting with the shifting time-scales and changing storages with increasing urbanization. In this study, a fully distributed hydrological model (MOBIDIC) that captures hydrologic dynamics during storms and interstorms is applied in order to characterize the potentially nonlinear response of a tropical watershed to urban transformation. Indices that quantify the departures from linear response are introduced and used to test the effects of urbanization on different hydrologic processes and fluxes in a mixed (urban and non-urban) watershed. The tropical Kranji watershed in Singapore is used in this study. Fortunately two sub-watersheds within Kranji that have streamflow gaging stations are well-suited for the calibration of the model. One sub-watershed is nearly fully urbanized and another is pristine (non-urban). As a result the contrasting components (urban and non-urban) can be calibrated in the model. The simulation system is then used to assess the hydrologic response due to changing levels of urbanization. For some fluxes and storages, the hydrologic response due to changing urban fraction cannot be simply predicted from a linear mixing model.

Building Nature’s Safety Net 2014 : A decade of protected area achievements in Australia

The single most important asset for the conservation of Australia’s unique and globally significant biodiversity is the National Reserve System, a mosaic of over 10,000 discrete protected areas on land on all tenures: government, Indigenous and private,including on-farm covenants, as well as state, territory and Commonwealth marine parks and reserves.THE NATIONAL RESERVE SYSTEMIn this report, we cover major National Reserve System initiatives that have occurred in the period 2002 to the present and highlight issues affecting progress toward agreed national objectives. We define a minimum standard for the National Reserve System to comprehensively, adequately and representatively protect Australia’s ecosystem and species diversity on sea and land. Using government protected area, species and other relevant spatial data, we quantify gaps: those areas needing to move from the current National Reserve System to one which meets this standard. We also provide new estimates of financial investments in protected areas and of the benefits that protected areas secure for society. Protected areas primarily serve to secure Australia’s native plants and animals against extinction, and to promote their recovery.BENEFITSProtected areas also secure ecosystem services that provide economic benefits forhuman communities including water, soil and beneficial species conservation, climatemoderation, social, cultural and health benefits. On land, we estimate these benefitsare worth over $38 billion a year, by applying data collated by the Ecosystem ServicesPartnership. A much larger figure is estimated to have been secured by marineprotected areas in the form of moderation of climate and impact of extreme eventsby reef and mangrove ecosystems. While these estimates have not been verified bystudies specific to Australia, they are indicative of a very large economic contributionof protected areas. Visitors to national parks and nature reserves spend over $23.6 billion a year in Australia, generating tax revenue for state and territory governments of $2.36 billion a year. All these economic benefits taken together greatly exceed the aggregate annual protected area expansion and management spending by all Australian governments, estimated to be ~$1.28 billion a year. It is clear that Australian society is benefiting far greater than its governments’ investment into strategic growth and maintenance of the National Reserve System.Government investment and policy settings play a leading role in strategic growth of the National Reserve System in Australia, and provide a critical stimulus fornon-government investment. Unprecedented expansion of the National Reserve System followed an historic boost in Australian Government funding under Caring for Our Country 2008–2013. This expansion was highly economical for the Australian Government, costing an average of only $44.40 per hectare to buy and protect land forever. State governments have contributed about six times this amount toward the expansion of the National Reserve System, after including in-perpetuity protected area management costs. The growth of Indigenous Protected Areas by the Australian Government has cost ~$26 per hectare on average, including management costs capitalised in-perpetuity, while also delivering Indigenous social and economic outcomes. The aggregate annual investment by all Australian governments has been ~$72.6 million per year on protected area growth and ~$1.21 billion per year on recurrent management costs. For the first time in almost two decades, however, the Australian Government’s National Reserve System Program, comprising a specialist administrative unit and funding allocation, was terminated in late 2012. This program was fundamental in driving significant strategic growth in Australia’s protected area estate. It is highly unlikely that Australia can achieve its long-standing commitments to an ecologically representative National Reserve System, and prevent major biodiversity loss, without this dedicated funding pool. The Australian Government has budgeted ~$400 million per year over the next five years (2013-2018) under the National Landcare and related programs. This funding program should give high priority to delivery of national protected area commitments by providing a distinct National Reserve System funding allocation. Under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), Australia has committed to bringing at least 17 percent of terrestrial and at least 10 per cent of marine areas into ecologically representative, well-connected systems of protected areas by 2020 (Aichi Target 11).BIODIVERSITY CONSERVATIONAustralia also has an agreed intergovernmental Strategy for developing a comprehensive, adequate and representative National Reserve System on land andsea that, if implemented, would deliver on this CBD target. Due to dramatic recent growth, the National Reserve System covers 16.5 per cent of Australia’s land area, with highly protected areas, such as national parks, covering 8.3 per cent. The marine National Reserve System extends over one-third of Australian waters with highly protected areas such as marine national parks, no-take or green zones covering 13.5 per cent. Growth has been uneven however, and the National Reserve System is still far from meeting Aichi Target 11, which requires that it also be ecologically representative and well-connected. On land, 1,655 of 5,815 ecosystems and habitats for 138 of 1,613 threatened species remain unprotected. Nonetheless, 436 terrestrial ecosystems and 176 threatened terrestrial species attained minimum standards of protection due to growth of the National Reserve System on land between 2002 and 2012. The gap for ecosystem protection on land – the area needed to bring all ecosystems to the minimum standard of protection – closed by a very substantial 20 million hectares (from 77 down to 57 million hectares) between 2002 and 2012, not including threatened species protection gaps. Threatened species attaining a minimum standard for habitat protection increased from 27 per cent to 38 per cent over the decade 2002–2012. A low proportion of critically endangered species meeting the standard (29 per cent) and the high proportion with no protection at all (20 per cent) are cause for concern, but one which should be relatively easy to amend, as the distributions of these species tend to be small and localised. Protected area connectivity has increased modestly for terrestrial protected areas in terms of the median distance between neighbouring protected areas, but this progress has been undermined by increasing land use intensity in landscapes between protected areas.A comprehensive, adequate and representative marine reserve system, which meetsa standard of 15 per cent of each of 2,420 marine ecosystems and 30 per cent of thehabitats of each of 177 marine species of national environmental significance, wouldrequire expansion of marine national parks, no-take or green zones up to nearly 30per cent of state and Australian waters, not substantially different in overall extentfrom that of the current marine reserve system, but different in configuration.Protection of climate change refugia, connectivity and special places for biodiversityis still low and requires high priority attention. FINANCING TO FILL GAPS AND MEET COMMITMENTSIf the ‘comprehensiveness’ and ‘representativeness’ targets in the agreed terrestrial National Reserve System Strategy were met by 2020, Australia would be likely to have met the ‘ecologically representative’ requirement of Aichi Target 11. This would requireexpanding the terrestrial reserve system by at least 25 million hectares. Considering that the terrestrial ecosystem protection gap has closed by 20 million hectares over the past decade, this required expansion would be feasible with a major boost in investment and focus on long-standing priorities. A realistic mix of purchases, Indigenous Protected Areas and private land covenants would require an Australian Government National Reserve System investment of ~$170 million per year over the five years to 2020, representing ~42 per cent of the $400 million per year which the Australian Government has budgeted for landcare and conservation over the next five years. State, territory and local governments, private and Indigenous partners wouldlikewise need to boost financial commitments to both expand and maintain newprotected areas to meet the agreed National Reserve System strategic objectives.The total cost of Australia achieving a comprehensive, adequate and representativemarine reserve system that would satisfy Aichi Target 11 is an estimated $247 million.

On the Markovian efficiency of Bertrand and Cournot equilibria

We characterize and compare closed-loop (feedback) price and quantity strategies within a full-fledged dynamic model of oligopolistic competition in which production requires exploitation of a renewable productive asset. Unlike previous papers on the strategic exploitation of productive assets, we allow for imperfect product substitutability, which enables us to deal with price competition. We show that the traditional result that the Bertrand equilibrium is more efficient than the Cournot equilibrium does not necessarily hold in a Markovian environment, either in the short-run or at the stationary equilibrium, or using the discounted sum of welfare as a criterion for relative efficiency.

Mining allocating patterns in one-sum weighted items

An Association Rule (AR) is a common knowledge model in data mining that describes an implicative cooccurring relationship between two disjoint sets of binary-valued transaction database attributes (items), expressed in the form of an "antecedent⇒ consequent" rule. A variant of the AR is the Weighted Association Rule (WAR). With regard to a marketing context, this paper introduces a new knowledge model in data mining -ALlocating Pattern (ALP). An ALP is a special form of WAR, where each rule item is associated with a weighting score between 0 and 1, and the sum of all rule item scores is 1. It can not only indicate the implicative co-occurring relationship between two (disjoint) sets of items in a weighted setting, but also inform the "allocating" relationship among rule items. ALPs can be demonstrated to be applicable in marketing and possibly a surprising variety of other areas. We further propose an Apriori based algorithm to extract hidden and interesting ALPs from a "one-sum" weighted transaction database. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. © 2008 IEEE.

Reinforcement and deformation behaviors of polyvinyl alcohol/graphene/montmorillonite clay composites

We report the synergistic reinforcement and deformation of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA)/graphene/montmorillonite clay (MMT) composites with the tensile properties being improved greatly. Particularly, the tensile strength and modulus of PVA composite with 0.9 wt% graphene and 0.3 wt% of MMT were improved by more than 58% and 43% when compared to the neat PVA, respectively, and were at least 10% higher than the enhanced sum of dual PVA composites with 0.9 wt% graphene and 0.3 wt% MMT. This reinforcement was resulted from the good dispersion and effective interfacial interactions as confirmed from morphology investigation, increased glass transition temperature and the shift of O-H stretching. When there were no fillers i.e. in situ reduced graphene (IRG) or MMT or their loading was low, high alignment of PVA could be observed, with increased crystallinity, melting point, lamellae thickness but narrowed crystallite size distribution. The synergistic reinforcement of PVA achieved from combined incorporation of IRG and MMT will pave the way for the development of stronger PVA composites in various applications.

An experimental study of square aluminium tubes with honeycomb core subjected to quasi-static compressive loads

Thin-Walled honeycombs have been extensively investigated and they are often used as sandwich panels to enhance the energy absorption in many applications including vehicles. In this study, axial compressive tests at three different velocities (3, 30 and 300 mm/min, respectively) by using an MTS machine were conducted with both empty and hybrid aluminium tubes filled with aluminium honeycomb. The aim of this work is to study the contribution of aluminium honeycomb in square hybrid tubes in terms of the deformation mode and energy absorption. Square aluminium tubes made of AA 6060-T5 with two different side lengths, 40 and 50 mm, were used. Two types of honeycombs made of AA 5052 with different cell wall thicknesses were used in this study. The force and displacement of the tubes were recorded during the test. The specific energy absorption (SEA) of honeycomb-Filled tubes was compared with the sum of the SEA of an empty tube and honeycomb. It was noticed that the SEA of the hybrid tubes depended on the honeycomb density and the loading velocity within the velocity range studied. © (2015) Trans Tech Publications, Switzerland.

The effect of low parental warmth and low monitoring on disordered eating in mid-adolescence: findings from the Australian Temperament Project

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the interactions between low parental warmth and monitoring at age 13-14 years and disordered eating attitudes and behaviours at age 15-16 years. METHOD: Data on 1300 (667 females) adolescents and their parents were drawn from The Australian Temperament Project (ATP), a 30 year (15 wave) population based longitudinal study of social-emotional development. Parent participants completed surveys on parenting practices in late childhood, and adolescent participants reported disordered eating using the drive for thinness and bulimia subscales of the Eating Disorder Inventory (EDI) and an additional body dissatisfaction scale. Interaction was examined on the additive scale by estimating super-additive risk; i.e., risk in excess of the sum of individual risks. RESULTS: For boys, neither parental warmth or monitoring, nor their interaction, was related to disordered eating. For girls, low parental warmth (alone) was associated with bulimic behaviours. In contrast, exposure to both low monitoring and warmth was associated with ∼3½-fold, ∼4-fold and ∼5-fold increases in the odds of reporting body dissatisfaction, drive for thinness and bulimia, respectively. For body dissatisfaction and drive for thinness, risk associated with joint exposure exceeded the sum of individual risks, suggesting an additive interaction between parenting styles. CONCLUSION: Further investment in family-level interventions that focus on promoting parental monitoring behaviour and a warm parent-child relationship remain important strategies for preventing a range of disordered eating behaviours in adolescents.

Microstructure characteristics of the (111) oriented grains in a Fe-30Ni-Nb model austenitic steel deformed in hot uniaxial compression

The work presents a detailed investigation of the microstructure characteristics of the (111) oriented grains in a Fe-30Ni-Nb austenitic model steel subjected to hot uniaxial compression at 925 °C at a strain rate of 1 s- 1. The above grains exhibited a tendency to split into deformation bands having alternating orientations and largely separated by transition regions comprising arrays of closely spaced, extended sub-boundaries collectively accommodating large misorientations across very small distances. On a fine scale, the (111) oriented grains typically contained a mix of "microbands" (MBs) closely aligned with {111} slip planes and those significantly deviated from these planes. The above deformation substructure thus markedly differed from the microstructure type, comprising strictly non-{111} aligned MBs, expected within such grains on the basis of the uniaxial compression experiments performed using aluminium. Both the crystallographic MBs and their non-crystallographic counterparts typically displayed similar misorientations and formed self-screening arrays characterized by systematically alternating misorientations. The crystallographic MBs were exclusively aligned with {111} slip planes containing slip systems whose sum of Schmid factors was the largest among the four available slip planes. The corresponding boundaries appeared to mainly display either a large twist or a large tilt component.

On the proximal Landweber Newton method for a class of nonsmooth convex problems

We consider a class of nonsmooth convex optimization problems where the objective function is a convex differentiable function regularized by the sum of the group reproducing kernel norm and (Formula presented.)-norm of the problem variables. This class of problems has many applications in variable selections such as the group LASSO and sparse group LASSO. In this paper, we propose a proximal Landweber Newton method for this class of convex optimization problems, and carry out the convergence and computational complexity analysis for this method. Theoretical analysis and numerical results show that the proposed algorithm is promising.

Adding fuel to the "fire of life": energy budgets across levels of variation in ectotherms and endotherms

Energy metabolism - the "fire of life" - is the sum of the processes by which animals acquire energy, channel energy into useful functions, and dissipate energy from their bodies. Acquisition and allocation processes deal with energy mainly as a quantity, but energy is absorbed or expended over a period of time; therefore, the most relevant way to conceptualize energy budgets is with the use of rate functions. A large number of recent studies have examined co-variation in metabolic and behavioral traits among individuals. A general finding stemming from this body of work is that there is no single cause-and-effect mechanism driving these relationships, but that the direction of the effects is dynamic and shifts in different contexts and environments. However, the remarkable energetic differences between endotherms and ectotherms are an unexploited basis for achieving a further understanding of such relationships.