The core of the global warming problem: energy

From the thermodynamic point of view, the global warming problem is an ''energy balance'' problem. The heat (energy) accumulation in the earth and its atmosphere is the cause of the global warming. This accumulation is mainly due to the imbalance of (solar) energy reaching and the energy leaving the earth, caused by ''greenhouse effect'' in which the CO₂ and other greenhouse gases play a critical role; so that balance of the energy entering and leaving the earth should be the key to solve the problem. Currently in the battle of tackling the global warming, we mainly focus on the development of CO₂-related measures, i.e., emission reduction, CO₂ sequestration, and CO₂ recycle technologies. It is right in technical aspect, because they are attempting thinner the CO₂ ''blanket'' around the earth. However, ''Energy'' that is the core of the problem has been overlooked, at least in management/policy aspect. This paper is proposing an ''Energy Credit'' i.e., the energy measure concept as an alternative to the ''CO₂ credit'' that is currently in place in the proposed emission trading scheme. The proposed energy credit concept has the advantages such as covering broad activities related to the global warming and not just direct emissions. Three examples are given in the paper to demonstrate the concept of the energy measure and its advantages over the CO₂ credit concept.

How Differences of Opinion Influence Students’ Capacity to Think Geographically

Currently, the Australian Government is working towards the development and implementation of a national geography curriculum for Australian Schools. A common response to the question of what geography education is based upon is ‘maps’ (Sorenson, 2009). Geography teachers, curriculum designers and educational researchers alike face the battle of broadening the perception of geography education beyond this view (Sorenson, 2009; Maude, 2009; McInerney, Berg, Hutchinson, Maude & Sorenson, 2009). The Shape of the National Curriculum for Geography (Australian Curriculum and Reporting Authority 2011, p8) states that the new curriculum will “develop students’ broader ability to think critically about contemporary events”. This new direction demonstrates a focus in on students’ capacity to ‘think geographically’ (Jackson 2006). This study engages with this new curriculum direction and explores the influence of an approach to group learning pedagogy based around students’ differences of opinion on students’ capacity to think geographically. A sample of 43 Year 9 Geography students participated in a two week learning sequence investigating the impacts of large scale earthquakes.
This paper communicates the findings from a comparative case study analysis of two student group conversations of different group types. According to the results of this study, organising students into groups around their differences of opinion encourages students to engage in and sustain higher levels of geographical thinking.

Multi-core security defense system (MSDS)

Today's security program developers are not only facing an uphill battle of developing and implementing. But now have to take into consideration, the emergence of next generation of multi-core system, and its effect on security application design. In our previous work, we developed a framework called bodyguard. The objective of this framework was to help security software developers, shift from their use of serialized paradigm, to a multi-core paradigm. Working within this paradigm, we developed a security bodyguard system called Farmer. This abstract framework placed particular applications into categories, like security or multi-media, which were ran on separate core processors within the multi-core system. With further analysis of the bodyguard paradigm, we found that this paradigm was suitable to be used in other computer science areas, such as spam filtering and multi-media. In this paper, we update our research work within the bodyguard paradigm, and showed a marked improvement of 110% speedup performance with an average cost of 1.5 ms.

Radical conservative experiment in New South Wales education

This study, written from the perspective of a parent activist, articulates the 'battle of ideas' or struggle 'around the truth' of public education in New South Wales since the conservative Greiner government came to power in 1988 and instituted the 'new right' agenda. Political control is theorised in the light of debates about hegemony, power, ideology and truth. Documents what happened in 'consultations' about educational reform between the Ministers and their appointees on on the one hand, and the public education lobby, on the other.

Fundacion Maquipucuna: an entrepreneurial Ecuadorian non-profit organisation

The purpose of this paper is to describe Fundacion Maquipucuna's community-based entrepreneurship activities. Fundacion Maquipucuna is a unique non-profit organisation in the Choco-Andes region of Ecuador. An ethnographic study and review of the literature is conducted to analyse the cacao, coffee, ecotourism and plastic thatch enterprises of Fundacion Maquipucuna. The enterprises Fundacion Maquipucuna is engaged in support the ongoing sustainability of the biodiverse ecological environment in the Choco-Andes region, which is one of the top five biodiverse hotspots in the world. On a global scale, more emphasis is being placed on promoting sustainability initiatives to preserve the environment. This paper discusses how a litre-government agency Fundacion Maquipucuna is changing from a non-profit to a for-profit structure in order to continue its community engagement projects. This paper integrates the social and community-based entrepreneurship literature to discuss how Fundacion Maquipucuna is engaging in innovative regional development that benefits the whole Choco-Andes community including the large Afro-Ecuadorian population.

Messages from Long Tan, Vietnam: memorialisation, reconciliation, and historical justice

This article explores the changing ways in which Australians and Vietnamese remember and memorialize their involvement in the Vietnam War and how these processes intersect with notions of reconciliation and historical justice in postwar contexts. It uses the Battle of Long Tan of August 1966 as an entrée into these considerations and questions how heritage-making and memorialization processes can facilitate the achievement of reconciliation between parties formerly in conflict. Not surprisingly, the Australian and Vietnamese veterans of the battle and the two states, the Commonwealth of Australia and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, have different motivations for wanting to remember Long Tan. On the Australian side, a sense that reconciliation and atonement are needed is often reflected in official government and veterans’ statements about the war and Australia-Vietnam relations, in the memorialization process at Long Tan and in the involvement of Australian veterans groups engaged in local economic development and community building in Vietnam. On the Vietnamese side, where the Vietnam War played out as a civil as well as an international war, efforts by those who actively supported the former Republic of Vietnam based in Saigon in the south and among the overseas Vietnamese (Viet kieu) to memorialize their engagement in the conflict have been frustrated. The usefulness of the notion of seeking historical justice is therefore questioned in post–civil war situations where people are locked into fixed histories and are unprepared or unable to revisit and retell personal and collective memories and histories.