Can compensation be claimed under the standard commercial land and building contract where the property sold has no legally enforceable vehicular access?

This was the question that confronted Wilson J in Jarema Pty Ltd v Michihiko Kato [2004] QSC 451. Facts The plaintiff was the buyer of a commercial property at Bundall. The property comprised a 6 storey office building with a basement car park with 54 car parking spaces. The property was sold for $5 million with the contract being the standard REIQ/QLS form for Commercial Land and Buildings (2nd ed GST reprint). The contract provided for a “due diligence” period. During this period, the buyer’s solicitors discovered that there was no direct access from a public road to the car park entrance. Access to the car park was over a lot of which the Gold Coast City Council was the registered owner under a nomination of trustees, the Council holding the property on trust for car parking and town planning purposes. Due to the absence of a registered easement over the Council’s land, the buyer’s solicitors sought a reduction in the purchase price. The seller would not agree to this. Finally the sale was completed with the buyer reserving its rights to seek compensation.

Getting to know a stranger-rural nurses' experiences of mentoring : a grounded theory

Background: Mentoring is often proposed as a solution to the problem of successfully recruiting and retaining nursing staff. The aim of this constructivist grounded theory study was to explore Australian rural nurses' experiences of mentoring. Design: The research design used was reflexive in nature resulting in a substantive, constructivist grounded theory study. Participants: A national advertising campaign and snowball sampling were used to recruit nine participants from across Australia. Participants were rural nurses who had experience in mentoring others. Methods: Standard grounded theory methods of theoretical sampling, concurrent data collection and analysis using open, axial and theoretical coding and a story line technique to develop the core category and category saturation were used. To cultivate the reflexivity required of a constructivist study, we also incorporated reflective memoing, situational analysis mapping techniques and frame analysis. Data was generated through eleven interviews, email dialogue and shared situational mapping. Results: Cultivating and growing new or novice rural nurses using supportive relationships such as mentoring was found to be an existing, integral part of experienced rural nurses' practice, motivated by living and working in the same communities. Getting to know a stranger is the first part of the process of cultivating and growing another. New or novice rural nurses gain the attention of experienced rural nurses through showing potential or experiencing a critical incidence. Conclusions: The problem of retaining nurses is a global issue. Experienced nurses engaged in clinical practice have the potential to cultivate and grow new or novice nurses-many already do so. Recognising this role and providing opportunities for development will help grow a positive, supportive work environment that nurtures the experienced nurses of tomorrow.

Improving visual noise insensitivity in small vocabulary audio visual speech recognition applications

Visual noise insensitivity is important to audio visual speech recognition (AVSR). Visual noise can take on a number of forms such as varying frame rate, occlusion, lighting or speaker variabilities. The use of a high dimensional secondary classifier on the word likelihood scores from both the audio and video modalities is investigated for the purposes of adaptive fusion. Preliminary results are presented demonstrating performance above the catastrophic fusion boundary for our confidence measure irrespective of the type of visual noise presented to it. Our experiments were restricted to small vocabulary applications.

Can audio-visual speech recognition outperform acoustically enhanced speech recognition in automotive environment?

The use of visual features in the form of lip movements to improve the performance of acoustic speech recognition has been shown to work well, particularly in noisy acoustic conditions. However, whether this technique can outperform speech recognition incorporating well-known acoustic enhancement techniques, such as spectral subtraction, or multi-channel beamforming is not known. This is an important question to be answered especially in an automotive environment, for the design of an efficient human-vehicle computer interface. We perform a variety of speech recognition experiments on a challenging automotive speech dataset and results show that synchronous HMM-based audio-visual fusion can outperform traditional single as well as multi-channel acoustic speech enhancement techniques. We also show that further improvement in recognition performance can be obtained by fusing speech-enhanced audio with the visual modality, demonstrating the complementary nature of the two robust speech recognition approaches.

Engaging middle school students in context-based science : One teacher's approach

In Australia, there is a crisis in science education with students becoming disengaged with canonical science in the middle years of schooling. One recent initiative that aims to improve student interest and motivation without diminishing conceptual understanding is the context-based approach. Contextual units that connect the canonical science with the students’ real world of their local community have been used in the senior years but are new in the middle years. This ethnographic study explored the learning transactions that occurred in one 9th grade science class studying an Environmental Science unit for 11 weeks. Data were derived from field notes, audio and video recorded conversations, interviews, student journals and classroom documents with a particular focus on two selected groups of students. Data were analysed qualitatively through coding for emergent themes. This paper presents an outline of the program and discussion of three assertions derived from the preliminary analysis of the data. Firstly, an integrated, coherent sequence of learning experiences that included weekly visits to a creek adjacent to the school enabled the teacher to contextualise the science in the students’ local community. Secondly, content was predominantly taught on a need-to-know basis and thirdly, the lesson sequence aligned with a model for context-based teaching. Research, teaching and policy implications of these results for promoting the context-based teaching of science in the middle years are discussed.

Content-based video indexing for sports applications using integrated multi-modal approach

To sustain an ongoing rapid growth of video information, there is an emerging demand for a sophisticated content-based video indexing system. However, current video indexing solutions are still immature and lack of any standard. This doctoral consists of a research work based on an integrated multi-modal approach for sports video indexing and retrieval. By combining specific features extractable from multiple audio-visual modalities, generic structure and specific events can be detected and classified. During browsing and retrieval, users will benefit from the integration of high-level semantic and some descriptive mid-level features such as whistle and close-up view of player(s).

Towards an understanding of teacher judgement in the context of social moderation

Social moderation involves teachers gathering together to discuss their judgements of the quality of student work and to reach agreement regarding the standard awarded. This qualitative study conducted over a three-year period investigated the social practice of moderation and the influence on teachers’ judgements of students work. An initial survey of teachers’ understandings of moderation and standards, pre-interviews of teachers who participated in the moderation meetings, observations of these meetings with a particular focus on one teacher (focus teachers) comprised the data collection methods. Data analysis involved organising, matching, coding, identifying patterns and themes using a constant comparative method. Socio-cultural theories of learning and assessment underpinned the approach to data analysis and proved helpful in explaining the diverse influences on teachers’ judgements beyond the task criteria, and the progressive development of shared understandings through engaging in professional discussions of students’ work. The study revealed that the process is not clear and linear and is influenced by factors such as the representation of the standards and the knowledge base of the teachers.

Acoustic hazard detection for pedestrians with obscured hearing

Pedestrians’ use of mp3 players or mobile phones can pose the risk of being hit by motor vehicles. We present an approach for detecting a crash risk level using the computing power and the microphone of mobile devices that can be used to alert the user in advance of an approaching vehicle so as to avoid a crash. A single feature extractor classifier is not usually able to deal with the diversity of risky acoustic scenarios. In this paper, we address the problem of detection of vehicles approaching a pedestrian by a novel, simple, non resource intensive acoustic method. The method uses a set of existing statistical tools to mine signal features. Audio features are adaptively thresholded for relevance and classified with a three component heuristic. The resulting Acoustic Hazard Detection (AHD) system has a very low false positive detection rate. The results of this study could help mobile device manufacturers to embed the presented features into future potable devices and contribute to road safety.

Young adults’ accounts of scientific knowledge when responding to a television news report of contested science

This paper reports one aspect of a study of 28 young adults (18–26 years) engaging with the uncertain (contested) science of a television news report about recent research into mobile phone health risks. The aim of the study was to examine these young people’s ‘accounts of scientific knowledge’ in this context. Seven groups of friends responded to the news report, initially in focus group discussions. Later in semi-structured interviews they elaborated their understanding of the nature of science through their explanations of the scientists’ disagreement and described their mobile phone safety risk assessments. This paper presents their accounts in terms of their views of the nature of science and their concept understanding. Discussions were audio-recorded then analysed by coding the talk in terms of issues raised, which were grouped into themes and interpreted in terms of a moderate social constructionist theoretical framing. In this context, most participants expressed a ‘common sense’ view of the nature of science, describing it as an atheoretical, technical procedure of scientists testing their personal opinions on the issue, subject to the influence of funding sponsors. The roles of theory and data interpretation were largely ignored. It is argued that the nature of science understanding is crucial to engagement with contemporary socioscientific issues, particularly the roles of argumentation, theory, data interpretation, and the distinction of science from common sense. Implications for school science relate primarily to nature of science teaching and the inclusion of socioscientific issues in school science curricula. Future research directions are considered.

Measuring bitrate and quality trade-off in a fast region-of-interest based video coding

Prevailing video adaptation solutions change the quality of the video uniformly throughout the whole frame in the bitrate adjustment process; while region-of-interest (ROI)-based solutions selectively retains the quality in the areas of the frame where the viewers are more likely to pay more attention to. ROI-based coding can improve perceptual quality and viewer satisfaction while trading off some bandwidth. However, there has been no comprehensive study to measure the bitrate vs. perceptual quality trade-off so far. The paper proposes an ROI detection scheme for videos, which is characterized with low computational complexity and robustness, and measures the bitrate vs. quality trade-off for ROI-based encoding using a state-of-the-art H.264/AVC encoder to justify the viability of this type of encoding method. The results from the subjective quality test reveal that ROI-based encoding achieves a significant perceptual quality improvement over the encoding with uniform quality at the cost of slightly more bits. Based on the bitrate measurements and subjective quality assessments, the bitrate and the perceptual quality estimation models for non-scalable ROI-based video coding (AVC) are developed, which are found to be similar to the models for scalable video coding (SVC).

An audio wiki supporting mobile collaboration

Wikis have proved to be very effective collaboration and knowledge management tools in large variety of fields thanks to their simplicity and flexible nature. Another important development for the internet is the emergence of powerful mobile devices supported by fast and reliable wireless networks. The combination of these developments begs the question of how to extend wikis on mobile devices and how to leverage mobile devices' rich modalities to supplement current wikis. Realizing that composing and consuming through auditory channel is the most natural and efficient way for mobile device user, this paper explores the use of audio as the medium of wiki. Our work, as the first step towards this direction, creates a framework called Mobile Audio Wiki which facilitates asynchronous audio-mediated collaboration on the move. In this paper, we present the design of Mobile Audio Wiki. As a part of such design, we propose an innovative approach for a light-weight audio content annotation system for enabling group editing, versioning and cross-linking among audio clips. To elucidate the novel collaboration model introduced by Mobile Audio Wiki, its four usage modes are identified and presented in storyboard format. Finally, we describe the initial design for presentation and navigation of Mobile Audio Wiki.

Improvisation in interactive music systems

This project investigates machine listening and improvisation in interactive music systems with the goal of improvising musically appropriate accompaniment to an audio stream in real-time. The input audio may be from a live musical ensemble, or playback of a recording for use by a DJ. I present a collection of robust techniques for machine listening in the context of Western popular dance music genres, and strategies of improvisation to allow for intuitive and musically salient interaction in live performance. The findings are embodied in a computational agent – the Jambot – capable of real-time musical improvisation in an ensemble setting. Conceptually the agent’s functionality is split into three domains: reception, analysis and generation. The project has resulted in novel techniques for addressing a range of issues in each of these domains. In the reception domain I present a novel suite of onset detection algorithms for real-time detection and classification of percussive onsets. This suite achieves reasonable discrimination between the kick, snare and hi-hat attacks of a standard drum-kit, with sufficiently low-latency to allow perceptually simultaneous triggering of accompaniment notes. The onset detection algorithms are designed to operate in the context of complex polyphonic audio. In the analysis domain I present novel beat-tracking and metre-induction algorithms that operate in real-time and are responsive to change in a live setting. I also present a novel analytic model of rhythm, based on musically salient features. This model informs the generation process, affording intuitive parametric control and allowing for the creation of a broad range of interesting rhythms. In the generation domain I present a novel improvisatory architecture drawing on theories of music perception, which provides a mechanism for the real-time generation of complementary accompaniment in an ensemble setting. All of these innovations have been combined into a computational agent – the Jambot, which is capable of producing improvised percussive musical accompaniment to an audio stream in real-time. I situate the architectural philosophy of the Jambot within contemporary debate regarding the nature of cognition and artificial intelligence, and argue for an approach to algorithmic improvisation that privileges the minimisation of cognitive dissonance in human-computer interaction. This thesis contains extensive written discussions of the Jambot and its component algorithms, along with some comparative analyses of aspects of its operation and aesthetic evaluations of its output. The accompanying CD contains the Jambot software, along with video documentation of experiments and performances conducted during the project.

Supreme Court Decision Results in a Change to Standard Contracts

The decision of Dalton J in Lai v Soineva [2011] QSC 247 has resulted in a change in the latest versions of the Real Estate Institute of Queensland (REIQ) contracts.