Animal stories : flash flood 2011

Flash flood disasters happen suddenly. The Toowoomba Lockyer Valley flash flood in January 2011 was not forecast by the Bureau of Meteorology until after it had occurred. Domestic and wild animals gave the first warning of the disaster in the days leading up to the event and large animals gave warnings on the morning of the disaster. Twenty-three people, including 5 children in the disaster zone died. More than 500 people were listed as missing. Some of those who died, perished because they stayed in the disaster zone to look after their animals while other members of their family escaped to safety. Some people who were in danger refused to be rescued because they could not take their pets with them. During a year spent recording accounts of the survivors of the disaster, animals were often mentioned by survivors. Despite the obvious perils, people risked their lives to save their animals; people saw animals try to save each other; animals rescued people; people rescued animals; animals survived where people died; animals were used to find human victims in the weeks after the disaster; and animals died. The stories of the flood present challenges for pet owners, farmers, counter disaster planners, weather forecasters and emergency responders in preparing for disasters, responding to them and recovering after them.

An opening : twelve love stories about art [Book Review]

Review(s) of: An opening: Twelve love stories about art, by Stephanie Radok 2012, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, xiv, 168 p., ISBN 9781743050415 (pbk).

From cinema to TV : still the same old stories about journalism

Television drama used to be the poor relation of the full length feature film made for cinema. No self-respecting movie star would be seen dead in the former, and successful TV actors rarely sustained careers of comparable brilliance in the film industry. Those days are gone, if a series such as House of Cards is any indicator of the trends.

Desert harmony : stories of collaboration between Indigenous musicians and university students

This article will discuss the ways in which community service learning programs in music can foster meaningful collaborations between universities and Indigenous communities. Drawing on recent pedagogical literature on service learning and insights from a four-year partnership between Australian Indigenous musicians at the Winanjjikari Music Centre in Tennant Creek and music students from Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University, it will describe how such programs can facilitate significant cross-cultural exchanges between students and Indigenous communities. By drawing on observations and interview data from those involved in the project, this paper argues that these partnerships can both assist communities with activities such as cultural maintenance, and provide students with intercultural experiences that have the potential to transform their understandings of Indigenous culture.

Circle Stories

Research background: Circle Stories was a live performance curated by Brydie-Leigh Bartleet, Naomi Sunderland, Gavin Carfoot and the Winanjjikari Music Centre as part of the Desert Harmony Festival 2013. The performance was the culmination of five years of research into intercultural performing arts practice, undertaken in partnership with Barkly Regional Arts. This work has built on existing scholarly work in community service learning by Marilynne Boyle-Baise, approaches to intercultural music making with Australian First Peoples by Karl Neuenfeldt, and studies of Indigenous popular music by Peter Dunbar-Hall and Chris Gibson. The performance followed the popular songwriters’ circle approach, in which Aboriginal musicians and elders presented their songs along with tertiary music students, as part of a broader dialogue with each other and the audience. Each performance provided an opportunity to highlight the importance of music in the development of intercultural knowledge and understanding. The project asked the research question, how can collaborative music performance foster mutual learning, intercultural knowledge and reconciliation? Research contribution: The project development and performance of Circle Stories identified that mutual learning and intercultural knowledge can result most effectively through long-term and meaningful relationships underpinning collaborative creative practice. Research significance: Following a general call for proposals, the performance was peer reviewed and selected for inclusion in the Desert Harmony Festival program. The research context of the work is detailed in Brydie-Leigh Bartleet and Gavin Carfoot 2013. "Desert harmony: Stories of collaboration between Indigenous musicians and university students." International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives 12 (1): 180-196.

DeepBlue India Stories

Original Staged Music Performance incorporating Projected Sand Art and Narrator at Woodford Festival 2013

Trade, travel and disease : the role of law in pandemic preparedness

In 2009 the world experienced an influenza pandemic caused by the H1N1 virus. While the pandemic was milder then expected, it nonetheless provided the world with an opportunity to do real-time testing of pandemic preparedness. This paper examines the threats to human health posed by infectious diseases and the challenges for the global community in development of effective surveillance systems for emerging infectious diseases. In 2005 a new revised version of the International Health Regulations (IHR) was adopted. The requirements of the IHR (2005) are outlined and considered in light of the constraints facing resource-poor countries. Finally, the paper addresses the role of domestic law-making in supporting public health preparedness and articulates a number of ethical principles that should be considered when developing new public health laws.

Night Rage/ Night Fall

A new form of media installation combining image, multi-channel sound and internally lit objects into a mysterious, deep image plane. Staged on the very edge of spectrum blackout, and moving into the deep of night, Version 1 (Night Rage) for ISEA 2013 examined the many shades of 'nocturnal', threats to night biodiversity and the myriad myths and stories that have shaped our cultural understandings of life after light. Barely recognisable images float within landscapes of media, noise and sound as the work asserts a profound resistance to today's all consuming media mesh. Version 2 (Night Fall) for the Queensland State Museum examined contemporary ideas around the ‘night’ and the 'nocturnal'. Beginning with the dark myths and stories that have long shaped our cultural understandings of life after light, NIGHT FALL considers how fearful ideas have often underpinned actions that continue to reduce Australia’s extraordinary night biodiversity. Today’s growing hostility towards Australia’s ancient, iconic flying foxes - who have been quietly pollinating our forests for millennia - hints at just how far we have yet to travel in our thinking. Enter the darkened tunnel to experience mysterious, edge-of-perception 3D forms, enhanced by a range of cinematic, illusionary and animatronic techniques, and become immersed in a strangely familiar sound track based upon seasonal field recordings made after dark, sourced from across the eastern coast of Queensland.

Benefit of accident reduction considering the improvement of travel time reliability

Traffic accidents often cause lane closure, and diminish stability of travel time as well as the level of road services. On the other hand, research on the implementation of ITS services aiming at the reduction of traffic accidents has made considerable progress lately. However there has been little discussion on the benefits obtained by traffic accident reduction from the view point of travel time reliability. Therefore, in this research, relationships between traffic accidents and travel time reliability are examined, and the benefit of traffic accident reduction is calculated based on the scheduling model under travel time uncertainties. The results show the significance of traffic accident reduction for the improvement of travel time reliability.

Broken gates and leaky graves : spectral language and Australia's ghost stories

Ghost stories are unusual amongst supernatural literatures in their modelling of a recognisable, mimetic reality interrupted or infiltrated by immaterial forces. In its discussion of Australian ghost stories, this thesis advances a new approach to ghost narratives which seeks to model and articulate the mechanics of ghosts and hauntings as something reliant on and engaged with the material and the mundane.

Bluetooth vehicle trajectory by fusing Bluetooth and loops : motorway travel time statistics

Loop detectors are widely used on the motorway networks where they provide point speed and traffic volumes. Models have been proposed for temporal and spatial generalization of speed for average travel time estimation. Advancement in technology provides complementary data sources such as Bluetooth MAC Scanner (BMS), detecting the MAC ID of the Bluetooth devices transported by the traveller. Matching the data from two BMS stations provides individual vehicle travel time. Generally, on the motorways loops are closely spaced, whereas BMS are placed few kilometres apart. In this research, we fuse BMSs and loops data to define the trajectories of the Bluetooth vehicles. The trajectories are utilised to estimate the travel time statistics between any two points along the motorway. The proposed model is tested using simulation and validated with real data from Pacific motorway, Brisbane. Comparing the model with the linear interpolation based trajectory provides significant improvements.

Agent-based modelling simulation case study : assessment of airport check-in and evacuation process by considering group travel behaviour of air passengers

Passenger experience has become a major factor that influences the success of an airport. In this context, passenger flow simulation has been used in designing and managing airports. However, most passenger flow simulations failed to consider the group dynamics when developing passenger flow models. In this paper, an agent-based model is presented to simulate passenger behaviour at the airport check-in and evacuation process. The simulation results show that the passenger behaviour can have significant influences on the performance and utilisation of services in airport terminals. The model was created using AnyLogic software and its parameters were initialised using recent research data published in the literature.

Public transport travel time variability definitions and monitoring

Public Transport Travel Time Variability (PTTV) is essential for understanding the deteriorations in the reliability of travel time, optimizing transit schedules and route choices. This paper establishes the key definitions of PTTV in which firstly include all buses, and secondly include only a single service from a bus route. The paper then analyzes the day-to-day distribution of public transport travel time by using Transit Signal Priority data. A comprehensive approach, using both parametric bootstrapping Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and Bayesian Information Creation technique is developed, recommends Lognormal distribution as the best descriptor of bus travel time on urban corridors. The probability density function of Lognormal distribution is finally used for calculating probability indicators of PTTV. The findings of this study are useful for both traffic managers and statisticians for planning and analyzing the transit systems.