Overcoming data scarcity of Twitter: using tweets as bootstrap with application to autism-related topic content analysis

Notwithstanding recent work which has demonstrated the potential of using Twitter messages for content-specific data mining and analysis, the depth of such analysis is inherently limited by the scarcity of data imposed by the 140 character tweet limit. In this paper we describe a novel approach for targeted knowledge exploration which uses tweet content analysis as a preliminary step. This step is used to bootstrap more sophisticated data collection from directly related but much richer content sources. In particular we demonstrate that valuable information can be collected by following URLs included in tweets. We automatically extract content from the corresponding web pages and treating each web page as a document linked to the original tweet show how a temporal topic model based on a hierarchical Dirichlet process can be used to track the evolution of a complex topic structure of a Twitter community. Using autism-related tweets we demonstrate that our method is capable of capturing a much more meaningful picture of information exchange than user-chosen hashtags.

Topic model kernel classification with probabilistically reduced features

Probabilistic topic models have become a standard in modern machine learning to deal with a wide range of applications. Representing data by dimensional reduction of mixture proportion extracted from topic models is not only richer in semantics interpretation, but could also be informative for classification tasks. In this paper, we describe the Topic Model Kernel (TMK), a topicbased kernel for Support Vector Machine classification on data being processed by probabilistic topic models. The applicability of our proposed kernel is demonstrated in several classification tasks with real world datasets. TMK outperforms existing kernels on the distributional features and give comparative results on nonprobabilistic data types.

National and international disability rights legislation: a qualitative account of its enactment in Australia

In this paper, a detailed analysis based on the lived experiences of the study participants and the researcher (each with vision impairment) in education, post school and in the pursuit for employment is developed. The policy discourses of disability legislation - both at national and international levels - are explored with particular reference to their enactment in Australia. The analysis focuses on the collective indifference to detached others, which is evident in the linguistic construction of people with disabilities in the United Nations [(2006). Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. New York: United Nations] and the Australian Standards for Education 2005 [Australian Department of Education, Science and Training. 2006. Disability Standards for Education 2005 Plus Guidance Notes. Accessed March 12, 2012. http://nla.gov.au/nla.arc-7692.]. Together, these elements reflect the neoliberal principles that cast a shadow over the discourses of the disability policies.

The representation of engineering education as a social media topic on Twitter

Online social media systems have created new ways for individuals to communicate, share information and interact with a wide audience. For organisations, social media provide new avenues for communication and collaboration with their stakeholders. The potential value of social media tools to assist in the successful communication and marketing inside and outside of engineering organisations has been identified. In the context of engineering education, the potential of social media to open new modes of communication, interaction and experimentation between students and teachers has also been identified, and a limited number of examples can be found documented in the literature. One of the most widely-used social media tools is the ‘microblogging’ service Twitter. This research presents an analysis of nearly 19,000 tweets relating to ‘engineering education’ collected over a period of almost a year. Social network analysis is used to visualise the Twitter data. The Twitter social media communication is examined to identify who is active on this topic, who is influential, and what is the structure of the online conversations relating to engineering education. This work provides insights regarding how engineering education is currently represented in social media internationally, and offers a methodology to those interested in related future research.

Australian security of payment legislation: impact of inconsistent case law

In Australia, a supreme court has a supervisory role over the statutory adjudication process that has been established within the security of payment legislation. In this role, the courts have quashed many adjudication determinations on the grounds of jurisdictional error in recent years. This is a problem as the courts’ involvement in statutory adjudication is contrary to the object of the legislation. When reviewing adjudication determinations, the courts have adopted different approaches with respect to determining the role of adjudicators and the essential jurisdictional facts that must exist in order for an adjudicator to have jurisdiction to hear a referred disputed matter. This diversification of judicial interpretation with respect to jurisdictional error is confusing, not only to construction professionals, but also to many lawyers. Via a desktop study– where the evidence is mainly garnered from case law, governmental reports and commentaries – this paper reviews the legal complexities involved in diagnosing jurisdictional errors. In doing so, the paper aims to answer the question as to why the adjudication process has become bogged down in the quagmire of judicial review. The paper concludes that the evolving inconsistency of case law in relation to statutory adjudication is a crucial factor contributing to the erosion of the object of the security of payment legislation in Australia. Moving forward, the paper argues that establishing a legislative review mechanism of jurisdictional challenges may be sufficient to address this problem.

The state of legislation and policy protecting Australia's mangrove and salt marsh and their ecosystem services

Saline coastal wetlands, such as mangrove and coastal salt marsh, provide many ecosystem services. In Australia, large areas have been lost since European colonization, particularly as a result of drainage, infilling and flood-mitigation works, often starting in the mid-19th century and aimed primarily towards converting land to agricultural, urban or industrial uses. These threats remain ongoing, and will be exacerbated by rapid population growth and climate change in the 21st century. Establishing the effect of wetland loss on the delivery of ecosystem services is confounded by the absence of a nationally consistent approach to mapping wetlands and defining the boundaries of different types of coastal wetland. In addition, climate change and its projected effect on mangrove and salt marsh distribution and ecosystem services is poorly, if at all, acknowledged in existing legislation and policy. Intensifying climate change means that there is little time to be complacent; indeed, there is an urgent need for proper valuation of ecosystem services and explicit recognition of ecosystem services within policy and legislation. Seven actions are identified that could improve protection of coastal wetlands and the ecosystem services they provide, including benchmarking and improving coastal wetland extent and health, reducing complexity and inconsistency in governance arrangements, and facilitating wetland adaptation and ecosystem service delivery using a range of relevant mechanisms. Actions that build upon the momentum to mitigate climate change by sequestering carbon – ‘blue carbon’ – could achieve multiple desirable objectives, including climate-change mitigation and adaptation, floodplain rehabilitation and habitat protection.

Other people's country : law, water, entitlement

This issue of Settler Colonial Studies comes out of a long-term collaboration between the guest editors which began, in earnest, with a panel on the theme of ‘Other People’s Country: Law, Water, Entitlement’ at the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia conference held at the University of Sydney in December 2012. The panel’s topic was drawn from our own work on encounters between settler and indigenous ‘laws’ over specific waters, including Lake Omapere in the Hokianga district of Aotearoa/New Zealand, Lake Okanagan in British Columbia, Canada, Lake Cayuga in upper New York State, and the Wenlock, Archer, Stewart and Lockhart rivers in far north Queensland, Australia.1 Further, the conference’s provocative title (Materialities: Economies, Empiricism, & Things) corresponded to our own interest in thinking through the entangled objects of law – legislation, policies, institutions, treaties and so on – that ‘govern’ waters and that make bodies of water ‘lawful’ within these settler colonial sites today. Informed by the theoretical interventions of cosmopolitics and political ecology, each opening up new approaches to questions of politics and ‘the political’, we were interested in attempting to locate these insights within material settler colonial ‘places’ rather than abstract structures of domination. A claim to water is not simply a claim to a resource. It is a claim to knowledge and to the constitution of place and therefore, in the terms of Isabelle Stengers, to the continued constitution of the past, present and future of a ‘real world’.

Mental health legislation (civil) in Australia and China: a comparative study

This comparative review of statutory provisions of Australian and Chinese law focuses on accessibility of mental health care, diagnosis, admission and treatment orders for involuntary patients in civil cases as well as discharge procedures. The introduction contextualises the object of the comparative study, including key rights and principles that are used as the basis for analysis. Such factors as different political and legal systems, history, culture, and infrastructure resources of China and Australia form the background for the legal examination. Not surprisingly, these five factors, rather than statutory texts per se, are found to be the most important drivers of each country’s approach to the law of mental health. Two cases, XX v WW [2014] VSC 564 in Australia and Xu Lixin v Xu Canxing, Qingchun Psychiatric Rehabilitation Hospital of Shanghai [2015], known as the Right to Liberty Case, in China illustrate practical differences in legal approach to involuntary treatment. The comparative analysis concludes by identifying the most problematic aspects of the legislation in each country.