Influence of aging pre-treatment on the compressive deformation of WE54 alloy

The effect of aging pre-treatment on the compressive deformation of a commercial WE54 alloy is studied. Age hardening treatments were performed at 170 °C, 250 °C and 300 °C. Compression testing was then carried out for the peak aged samples at temperatures between ambient and 450 °C. Twinning dominated the deformation at lower temperatures for all initial microstructures. This behaviour was replaced by slip dominated flow when the temperature was raised. The temperature of the transition from twinning to slip dominated flow was only mildly sensitive to the pre-treatment. It is also evident that dynamic recrystallization is retarded in this alloy.

Implications of the IFRS goodwill accounting treatment

Purpose – This paper aims to critically examine the change in accounting treatment for goodwill pursuant to international financial reporting standards (IFRSs) by reference to the Australian reporting regime.

Design/methodology/approach – The paper discusses and compares the former Australian and the new IFRS treatments for goodwill. This comparison focuses on the advantages and potential complexities of the new method, with the aim of identifying the issues and challenges that preparers, independent auditors and those involved in corporate governance face in complying with the new requirements.

Findings – The paper highlights that the identification and valuation of cash-generating units and goodwill require numerous assumptions to be made in estimating fair value, value in use and recoverable amount. Considerable ambiguity and subjectivity are inherent in the IFRS requirements.

Research limitations/implications – Findings suggest that future research should examine how financial report preparers and corporate governance mechanisms are dealing with the complex change required by the new goodwill accounting treatment and how the many critical issues involved in auditing the resulting figures are being addressed.

Practical implications – The research has practical implications for financial report preparers in identifying the issues that must be addressed in complying with the international goodwill accounting treatment. In turn, the paper highlights conceptual issues of relevance to auditors in their role of providing assurance on the resulting accounting numbers. It also has implications for others involved in corporate governance, such as audit committee members, in emphasising the areas in which they should be providing oversight of the accounting judgments. These issues are of relevance in any reporting regime based on IFRSs.

Originality/value – While much has been written about the mechanics of the new goodwill accounting requirements, there has been a lack of critical research highlighting the many problems and ambiguities that will arise in the application of those rules.

Risk management or goods promotion : the relationship between approach and avoidance goals in treatment for sex offenders

In this paper, we propose that there is a direct relationship between risk management and goods (or goal) promotion in the treatment of sexual offenders. We argue that the causal conditions required to promote specific goods are likely, in turn, to eliminate or modify dynamic risk factors (i.e., criminogenic needs). First, the concepts of risk and goals are briefly discussed and their important dimensions clarified. Second, the relationship between criminogenic needs and goals are analyzed in depth. Third, we further clarify our arguments by focusing on four classes of criminogenic needs recently identified in the sexual offending literature: sexual self-regulation, offense supportive cognitions, level of interpersonal functioning, and general self-management problems. Finally, we conclude the paper with some suggestions for future research and treatment.

Dynamic recrystallization of austenite in Ni-30 Pct Fe model alloy : microstructure and texture evolution

The microstructure and crystallographic texture development in an austenitic Ni-30 pct Fe model alloy was investigated within the dynamic recrystallization (DRX) regime using hot torsion testing. The prominent DRX nucleation mechanism was strain-induced grain boundary migration accompanied by the formation of large-angle sub-boundaries and annealing twins. The increase in DRX volume fraction occurred through the formation of multiple twinning chains. With increasing strain, the pre-existing Σ3 twin boundaries became gradually converted to general boundaries capable of acting as potent DRX nucleation sites. The texture characteristics of deformed grains resulted from the preferred consumption of high Taylor factor components by new recrystallized grains. Similarly, the texture of DRX grains was dominated by low Taylor factor components as a result of their lower consumption rate during the DRX process. The substructure of deformed grains was characterized by “organized,” banded subgrain arrangements, while that of the DRX grains displayed “random,” more equiaxed subgrain/cell configurations.

Fuzzy neural networks for control of dynamic systems

This thesis provides a unified and comprehensive treatment of the fuzzy neural networks as the intelligent controllers. This work has been motivated by a need to develop the solid control methodologies capable of coping with the complexity, the nonlinearity, the interactions, and the time variance of the processes under control. In addition, the dynamic behavior of such processes is strongly influenced by the disturbances and the noise, and such processes are characterized by a large degree of uncertainty. Therefore, it is important to integrate an intelligent component to increase the control system ability to extract the functional relationships from the process and to change such relationships to improve the control precision, that is, to display the learning and the reasoning abilities. The objective of this thesis was to develop a self-organizing learning controller for above processes by using a combination of the fuzzy logic and the neural networks. An on-line, direct fuzzy neural controller using the process input-output measurement data and the reference model with both structural and parameter tuning has been developed to fulfill the above objective. A number of practical issues were considered. This includes the dynamic construction of the controller in order to alleviate the bias/variance dilemma, the universal approximation property, and the requirements of the locality and the linearity in the parameters. Several important issues in the intelligent control were also considered such as the overall control scheme, the requirement of the persistency of excitation and the bounded learning rates of the controller for the overall closed loop stability. Other important issues considered in this thesis include the dependence of the generalization ability and the optimization methods on the data distribution, and the requirements for the on-line learning and the feedback structure of the controller. Fuzzy inference specific issues such as the influence of the choice of the defuzzification method, T-norm operator and the membership function on the overall performance of the controller were also discussed. In addition, the e-completeness requirement and the use of the fuzzy similarity measure were also investigated. Main emphasis of the thesis has been on the applications to the real-world problems such as the industrial process control. The applicability of the proposed method has been demonstrated through the empirical studies on several real-world control problems of industrial complexity. This includes the temperature and the number-average molecular weight control in the continuous stirred tank polymerization reactor, and the torsional vibration, the eccentricity, the hardness and the thickness control in the cold rolling mills. Compared to the traditional linear controllers and the dynamically constructed neural network, the proposed fuzzy neural controller shows the highest promise as an effective approach to such nonlinear multi-variable control problems with the strong influence of the disturbances and the noise on the dynamic process behavior. In addition, the applicability of the proposed method beyond the strictly control area has also been investigated, in particular to the data mining and the knowledge elicitation. When compared to the decision tree method and the pruned neural network method for the data mining, the proposed fuzzy neural network is able to achieve a comparable accuracy with a more compact set of rules. In addition, the performance of the proposed fuzzy neural network is much better for the classes with the low occurrences in the data set compared to the decision tree method. Thus, the proposed fuzzy neural network may be very useful in situations where the important information is contained in a small fraction of the available data.

Mechanisms of dynamic strain induced transformation and post-deformation evolution

In this study, a novel experimental approach was applied to study the mechanism of the equiaxed shape retention in dynamic strain induced ferrite during deformation. The post-deformation ferrite evolution in both static and dynamic transformation was studied. The refinement potential and the origin of their differences in both mechanisms were analysed.

Dynamic due diligence : an entrepreneurial business planning method for evaluating mergers and acquisitions: theory, case application and general implications

This paper presents a method for conducting dynamic due diligence to evaluate Mergers and Acquisitions; demonstrates its effectiveness in a particular case; and extrapolates its theoretical and practical implications to the general case. It may be called the ‘ECIPP’ method - an acronym for: Establishing mandates; Creating projections; Identifying issues; Prioritizing procedures and Performing them.

Two established alternative due diligence methods are examined. The prevailing finance-theory-based procedure has the virtues of simplicity and elegance; the vice is abstraction. The prevailing practitioner-based regime has the virtues of thoroughness and concreteness but the vices of rigidity and inefficiency. Resolving the tradeoffs inherent in both static prescriptions provides an opportunity for a dynamic, innovative approach derived from grounded theory and an application of Hindle’s (1993) theory of venture renaissance through application of an enhanced paradigm of Entrepreneurial Business Planning. The ECIPP method retains simplicity, concreteness and thoroughness but eliminates abstraction, rigidity and inefficiency.

This is demonstrated in a case. ChildCo’s CEO had only one month to complete his M&A evaluation; no expertise or previous experience; severely limited budget for the exercise and had been flatly informed by prevailing M&A experts that what he wanted could not be done. Using the ECIPP method, the CEO and the author did it: on time, within budget and to the satisfaction of a previously skeptical board of one of the world’s largest multi-national companies including arguably the world’s most professional corporate M&A division.

The replicability logic of the case research permits two generalisations. (1) ECIPP extends the range and utility of Entrepreneurial Business Planning as a management technology, well beyond the constraints to which it is usually confined. (2) The ECIPP method of dynamic due diligence is an innovation worthy of mature consideration and further investigation by theorists and practitioners in the M&A field, in the disciplines of both Finance and Entrepreneurship and, well beyond, in the realms of general management theory, methodology and practice.

Climate change impacts and adaptation in Bangladesh : an agent-based approach

Bangladesh exemplifies the complex challenges facing densely populated coastal regions. The
pressures on the country are immense: around 145 million people live within an area of just 145,000 sq-km at
the confluence of three major river systems: the Ganges, the Brahmaputra and the Meghna. While progress
has been made, poverty remains widespread, with around 39% of children under five malnourished. Most of
its land-mass lies below 10m above sea level with considerable areas at sea level, leading to frequent and
prolonged flooding during the monsoons. Sea level rise is leading to more flooding as storm surges rise off
higher sea levels, pushing further inland. Higher sea levels also result in salt-water intrusion into freshwater
coastal aquifers and estuaries, contaminating drinking water and farmland. Warmer ocean waters are also
expected to lead to an increase in the intensity of tropical storms.
Bangladesh depends on the South Asian summer monsoon for most of its rainfall which is expected to
increase, leading to more flooding. Climate scientists are also concerned about the stability of monsoon and
the potential for it to undergo a nonlinear phase shift to a drier regime. Bangladesh faces an additional
hydrological challenge in that the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers both rise in the Himalaya-Tibetan Plateau
region, where glaciers are melting rapidly. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
concluded that rapid melting is expected to increase river flows until around the late-2030s, by which time
the glaciers are expected to have shrunk from their 1995 extent of 500,000 sq-km to an expected 100,000 sqkm.
After the 2030s, river flows could drop dramatically, turning the great glacier-fed rivers of Asia into
seasonal monsoon-fed rivers. The IPCC concluded that as a result, water shortages in Asia could affect more
than a billion people by the 2050s. Over the same period, crop yields are expected to decline by up to 30% in
South Asia due to a combination of drought and crop heat stress. Bangladesh is therefore likely to face
substantial challenges in the coming decades.
In order to adequately understand the complex, dynamic, spatial and nonlinear challenges facing Bangladesh,
an integrated model of the system is required. An agent-based model (ABM) permits the dynamic
interactions of the economic, social, political, geographic, environmental and epidemiological dimensions of
climate change impacts and adaptation policies to be integrated via a modular approach. Integrating these
dimensions, including nonlinear threshold events such as mass migrations, or the outbreak of conflicts or
epidemics, is possible to a far greater degree with an ABM than with most other approaches.
We are developing a prototype ABM, implemented in Netlogo, to examine the dynamic impacts on poverty,
migration, mortality and conflict from climate change in Bangladesh from 2001 to 2100. The model employs
GIS and sub-district level census and economic data and a coarse-graining methodology to allow model
statistics to be generated on a national scale from local dynamic interactions. This approach allows a more
realistic treatment of distributed spatial events and heterogeneity across the country. The aim is not to
generate precise predictions of Bangladesh’s evolution, but to develop a framework that can be used for
integrated scenario exploration. This paper represents an initial report on progress on this project. So far the
prototype model has demonstrated the desirability and feasibility of integrating the different dimensions of
the complex adaptive system and, once completed, is intended to be used as the basis for a more detailed
policy-oriented model.

On the characteristics of substructure development through dynamic recrystallization

Substructure development in an austenitic Ni-30%Fe model alloy was investigated within a dynamic recrystallization (DRX) regime. The substructure characteristics of the deformed matrix and DRX grains were markedly different regardless of the grain size and orientation. The former largely displayed 'organized', banded subgrain arrangements with alternating misorientations, resulting from a limited number of active slip systems. In contrast, the substructure of DRX grains was generally more 'random' and exhibited complex subgrain/cell arrangements characterized by local accumulation of misorientations, suggesting multiple slip. The proposed mechanism of the unique substructure development within DRX grains suggests that the DRX nuclei, forming along pre-existing grain boundaries and triple points, essentially represent grain boundary regions, which experience multiple slip to preserve the compatibility with neighbouring deformed grains. This results in the formation of a complex cell/subgrain structure, which progressively extends as the grain boundary regions expand outwards during DRX growth.

Substructure development through dynamic recrystallisation in an austenitic Ni–30%Fe alloy

This data looks at the effect of grain boundary movement on the characteristics of substructure development within the DRX regime. Different thermo-mechanical processing routes were employed to produce a range of DRX grain sizes at a given deformation temperature. The development of dislocation substructure was investigated using electron back-scattered diffraction (EBSD) in conjunction with transmission electron microscopy (TEM).

On the characteristics of substructure development through dynamic recrystallization

This body of data is the result of an investigation into the effect of grain boundary movement on the characteristics of substructure development in an austenitic Ni-30%Fe model alloy within the DRX regime. Different thermo-mechanical processing routes were employed to produce a range of DRX grain sizes at a given deformation temperature. The development of dislocation substructure was investigated using electron back-scattered diffraction (EBSD) in conjunction with transmission electron microscopy (TEM).

A method and its optimal parameters for the measurement of mass transfer coefficient in heat treatment furnaces

The mass transfer coefficient is an important kinetic factor to control the thermo-chemical treatment processes of metals and alloys. More importantly, the mass transfer coefficient is different at different surface positions of a metallic part treated, which depends on the dynamic characteristics of the atmosphere close to the treated surface. Understanding the local mass transfer coefficient would be significant to approach the expected physical and mechanical properties of treated surfaces. In this paper, a reverse method was proposed to measure the mass transfer coefficient at component surface and the diffusivity in metal during heat treatment. The methodology of the reverses method and the optimal parame-ters are discussed in some detail. This method was successfully used to determine the car-bon transfer coefficient at the surface of a part in a carburizing furnace and carbon diffusiv-ity from the carbon distribution within the diffusion layer.

Prospective randomized controlled trial comparing dynamic hip screw and screw fixation for undisplaced subcapital hip fractures

Background
Neck of femur fractures (NOFFs) are a common cause of morbidity and mortality in our community. Minimally displaced intracapsular fractures are treated with internal fixation by a two-hole dynamic hip screw (DHS) or three partially threaded cancellous screws. Data to support the superiority of one are limited. This prospective randomized controlled trial compares outcomes with these two fixation methods.

Methods
We prospectively recruited patients over 50 years, with an acute fracture subcapital NOFF, who walked and lived independently, and were cognitively intact. They were randomized into DHS or cancellous screw groups and followed up for 2 years (overall 75.9%). Outcomes of mortality, revision, loss of fixation, avascular necrosis, surgical complications, WOMAC, Harris hip score and SF-12 were measured.

Results
We recruited 62 patients (31 DHS, 29 cancellous screws, 2 failed consent). Six deaths (19.3%) were seen in each group. A total of 3.2% of DHS (1 out of 31) and 10.3% (3 out of 29) of cancellous screw patients required re-operation (P = 0.272). There was no statistical significant difference in patient satisfaction, quality of life (QoL), radiological union or osteonecrosis. There are trends towards better functional scores and QoL in cancellous screws, particularly at 1 year (P = 0.0061), but with a higher re-operation rate. There was a combined mortality and transition to institutional care of 40.0% (24 out of 60) at 2 years.

Conclusions
This study found no difference in outcomes between DHS and cancellous screws in the treatment of subcapital NOFFs in a fit, independent population, but we found a high level of physical decline in previously fit, independently ambulating patients. A large, multicentre trial will be required to differentiate between these two fixation methods.

Handover of patient information from the crisis assessment and treatment team to the inpatient psychiatric unit.

Handover, or the communication of patient information between clinicians, is a fundamental component of health care. Psychiatric settings are dynamic environments relying on timely and accurate communication to plan care and manage risk. Crisis assessment and treatment teams are the primary interface between community and mental health services in many Australian and international health services, facilitating access to assessment, treatment, and admission to hospital. No previous research has investigated the handover between crisis assessment and treatment teams and inpatient psychiatric units, despite the importance of handover to care planning. The aim of the present study was to identify the nature and types of information transferred during these handovers, and to explore how these guides initial care planning. An observational, exploratory study design was used. A 20-item handover observation tool was used to observe 19 occasions of handover. A prospective audit was undertaken on clinical documentation arising from the admission. Clinical information, including psychiatric history and mental state, were handed over consistently; however, information about consumer preferences was reported less consistently. The present study identified a lack of attention to consumer preferences at handover, despite the current focus on recovery-oriented models for mental health care, and the centrality of respecting consumer preferences within the recovery paradigm.