Understanding drivers and barriers : the key to water use behaviour change

In southwest Victoria, like many other regions in Australia, drought, climate change and population growth have exposed gaps in water supply. To develop effective demand management strategies for rural and regional areas, this paper investigates the drivers and barriers to water saving in southwest Victoria. Although the majority of people felt water saving was important, the drivers for water saving differed between different groups. Residential users were saving water for altruistic reasons, while for farmers the drivers were farm viability and productivity. Although the barriers differed between property types, common barriers included lack of understanding of the impact their water use has on supplies, lack of knowledge, the pricing system and distrust of the water authority. The findings provide information for effective demand management strategies for the region.

The drivers of corporate social responsibility : a critical review

The paper criticises the dominant discourse of corporate social responsibility (CSR) by examining six sets of factors conventionally considered as promoting outcomes consistent with core principles of social responsibility: intra-organizational factors, competitive dynamics, institutional investors, end-consumers, government regulators and non-governmental organizations. Each factor is addressed conceptually, empirically, and with respect to its likely future significance in promoting outcomes consistent with CSR. Our overall conclusions are not promising on any of these dimensions.

The drivers of corporate social responsibility : a critical review

The paper criticises the dominant discourse of corporate social responsibility (CSR) by examining six sets of factors conventionally considered as promoting outcomes consistent with core principles of social responsibility: intra-organizational factors, competitive dynamics, institutional investors, end-consumers, government regulators and non-governmental organizations. Each factor is addressed conceptually, empirically, and with respect to its likely future significance in promoting outcomes consistent with CSR. Our overall conclusions are not promising on any of these dimensions.

Policy drivers of international entrepreneurship in Europe

The diversity of countries and cultures in Europe necessitates an international outlook for most businesses. This paper examines the internationalisation of business in Europe through a literature review on international entrepreneurship theory. The role of the individual business owner and of business and interorganisational activity in facilitating the internationalisation of businesses in Europe is discussed by utilising the theoretical framework of international entrepreneurship and by putting forward three main propositions. The main aim and intent of this paper is to understand how the policies of individual governments and institutions such as the European Union help businesses in Europe to internationalise, with particular emphasis on businesses in the Baltic region. The paper discusses policy implications and suggestions for future research, which highlight the importance for firms in Europe of focussing on international markets.

Examining and quantifying the drivers behind alterations and extensions to commercial buildings in a central business district

The drive to undertake building adaptation has increased in momentum, the primary reason being adaptation can be less expensive than new build and conventionally result in faster project delivery times. The issue of sustainable development is another clear driver for adaptation and collectively buildings contribute around half of all greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time governments seek effective and efficient ways of reducing the contribution of cities to climate change and building adaptation appears to offer a practical means of reducing building-related emissions. One example is the ‘1200 building program’ which aims to increase adaptation rates with a target of 1200 city centre office adaptations by 2020 as part of the strategy to achieve carbon neutrality. Through a longitudinal examination of building adaptations it is possible to identify the nature and extent of typical levels of adaptation, as well as determining the inter-relationship between different types of adaptation and building attributes. Melbourne city centre was used for a case study which analysed 5290 building adaptation events between 1998 and 2008. The findings promote the adaptive reuse of buildings in specific circumstances and are directly applicable for increasing sustainability in the built environment. The case study focused on existing buildings in a global city to ensure relevance to urban centres where existing commercial buildings can become part of the solution to mitigate climate change.

The global obesity pandemic : shaped by global drivers and local environments

The simultaneous increases in obesity in almost all countries seem to be driven mainly by changes in the global food system, which is producing more processed, affordable, and effectively marketed food than ever before. This passive overconsumption of energy leading to obesity is a predictable outcome of market economies predicated on consumption-based growth. The global food system drivers interact with local environmental factors to create a wide variation in obesity prevalence between populations. Within populations, the interactions between environmental and individual factors, including genetic makeup, explain variability in body size between individuals. However, even with this individual variation, the epidemic has predictable patterns in subpopulations. In low-income countries, obesity mostly affects middle-aged adults (especially women) from wealthy, urban environments; whereas in high-income countries it affects both sexes and all ages, but is disproportionately greater in disadvantaged groups. Unlike other major causes of preventable death and disability, such as tobacco use, injuries, and infectious diseases, there are no exemplar populations in which the obesity epidemic has been reversed by public health measures. This absence increases the urgency for evidence-creating policy action, with a priority on reduction of the supply-side drivers.

Drought-rainfall cycles as potential environmental drivers of fowl plague and Newcastle disease uutbreaks in Australian poultry

Climatic conditions in Australia are erratic and characterised by periods of intense rainfall followed by periods of intense drought. This has considerable impact on the population dynamics and ecology of many Australian species of waterfowl, which are thought to form the reservoir of avian influenza viruses (AIV) but may also be important carriers (and possibly reservoirs) of other diseases (e.g. bursal disease, Newcastle disease). During the wet, waterfowl numbers increase with many serologically naive juveniles entering the population. During the subsequent period of drought, bird densities increase in the few remaining wetlands. We hypothesise that it is during this period of increasing densities of naive birds that the population’s viral prevalence of some infectious diseases may increase dramatically. Indeed, there exists a remarkable and suggestive coincidence between outbreaks of fowl plaque and Newcastle disease in Australian poultry farms and the periods of drought following a very wet period. In other words, we suspect a link between increased risk for disease outbreaks in poultry farms and the hypothesised high in the prevalences of the viruses causing these diseases in waterfowl. Given that poultry farms may provide ideal conditions for development of high-pathogenic strains, there is also a reciprocal risk for wildlife involved during these periods.

Comparative evaluation of pedestrian detection methods for mobile bus surveillance

We present a comparative evaluation of the state-of-art algorithms for detecting pedestrians in low frame rate and low resolution footage acquired by mobile sensors. Four approaches are compared: a) The Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HoG) approach [1]; b) A new histogram feature that is formed by the weighted sum of both the gradient magnitude and the filter responses from a set of elongated Gaussian filters [2] corresponding to the quantised orientation, called Histogram of Oriented Gradient Banks (HoGB) approach; c) The codebook based HoG feature with branch-and-bound (efficient subwindow search) algorithm [3] and; d) The codebook based HoGB approach. Results show that the HoG based detector achieves the highest performance in terms of the true positive detection, the HoGB approach has the lowest false positives whilst maintaining a comparable true positive rate to the HoG, and the codebook approaches allow computationally efficient detection.

Passenger monitoring in moving bus video

In this paper, we present a novel person detection system for public transport buses tackling the problem of changing illumination conditions. Our approach integrates a stable SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) background seat modeling mechanism with a human shape model into a weighted Bayesian framework to detect passengers on-board buses. SIFT background modeling extracts local stable features on the pre-annotated background seat areas and tracks these features over time to build a global statistical background model for each seat. Since SIFT features are partially invariant to lighting, this background model can be used robustly to detect the seat occupancy status even under severe lighting changes. The human shape model further confirms the existence of a passenger when a seat is occupied. This constructs a robust passenger monitoring system which is resilient to illumination changes. We evaluate the performance of our proposed system on a number of challenging video datasets obtained from bus cameras and the experimental results show that it is superior to state-of-art people detection systems.