Sounds of the suburb

Sounds of the Suburb was a commissioned public art proposal based upon a brief set by Queensland Rail for the major redevelopment at their Brunswick Street Railway Station, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane. I proposed a large scale, electronic artwork to be distributed across the glass fronted structure of their station’s new concourse building. It was designed as a network of LED based ‘tracking’ - along which would travel electronically animated, ‘trains’ of text synchronised to the actual train timetables. Each message packet moved endlessly through a complex spatial network of ‘tracks’ and ‘stations’ set both inside, outside and via the concourse. The design was underpinned by large scale image of sound waves etched onto the architecture’s glass and was accompanied by two inset monitors each presenting ghosted images of passenger movements within the concourse, time-delay recorded and then cross-combined in realtime to form new composites.----- Each moving, reprogrammable phrase was conceived as a ‘train of thought’ and ostensibly contained an idea or concept about popular cultures surrounding contemporary music – thereby meeting the brief that the work should speak to the diverse musical cultures central to Fortitude Valley’s image as an entertainment hub. These cultural ‘memes’, gathered from both passengers and the music press were situated alongside quotes from philosophies of networking, speed and digital ecologies. These texts would continually propagate, replicate and cross fertlise as they moved throughout the ‘network’, thereby writing a constantly evolving ‘textual soundcape’ of that place. This idea was further cemented through the pace, scale and rhythm of passenger movements continually recorded and re-presented on the smaller screens.

From the consciousness industry to the creative industries : consumer-created content, social network markets, & the growth of knowledge

In studies of media industries, too much attention has been paid to providers and firms, too little to consumers and markets. But with user-created content, the question first posed more than a generation ago by the uses & gratifications method and taken up by semiotics and the active audience tradition (‘what do audiences do with media?’), has resurfaced with renewed force. What’s new is that where this question (of what the media industries and audiences did with each other) used to be individualist and functionalist, now, with the advent of social networks using Web 2.0 affordances, it can be re-posed at the level of systems and populations as well.

Cooperation using a robotic ad hoc network made from Bluetooth, JXTA, OSGi and other commercial off the shelf (COTS) products

Abstract - Mobile devices in the near future will need to collaborate to fulfill their function. Collaboration will be done by communication. We use a real world example of robotic soccer to come up with the necessary structures required for robotic communication. A review of related work is done and it is found no examples come close to providing a RANET. The robotic ad hoc network (RANET) we suggest uses existing structures pulled from the areas of wireless networks, peer to peer and software life-cycle management. Gaps are found in the existing structures so we describe how to extend some structures to satisfy the design. The RANET design supports robot cooperation by exchanging messages, discovering needed skills that other robots on the network may possess and the transfer of these skills. The network is built on top of a Bluetooth wireless network and uses JXTA to communicate and transfer skills. OSGi bundles form the skills that can be transferred. To test the nal design a reference implementation is done. Deficiencies in some third party software is found, specifically JXTA and JamVM and GNU Classpath. Lastly we look at how to fix the deciencies by porting the JXTA C implementation to the target robotic platform and potentially eliminating the TCP/IP layer, using UDP instead of TCP or using an adaptive TCP/IP stack. We also propose a future areas of investigation; how to seed the configuration for the Personal area network (PAN) Bluetooth protocol extension so a Bluetooth TCP/IP link is more quickly formed and using the STP to allow multi-hop messaging and transfer of skills.

Cipher cities : effective user interface design for building a digital social network around location-based gaming

In this paper we explore what is required of a User Interface (UI) design in order to encourage participation around playing and creating Location-Based Games (LBGs). To base our research in practice, we present Cipher Cities, a web based system. Through the design of this system, we investigate how UI design can provide tools for complex content creation to compliment and encourage the use of mobile phones for designing, distributing, and playing LBGs. Furthermore we discuss how UI design can promote and support socialisation around LBGs through the design of functional interface components and services such as groups, user profiles, and player status listings.

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease : can ultrasound assist in early diagnosis of prediabetes and delay progression to type2 diabetes mellitus

Non Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD) is a condition that is frequently seen but seldom investigated. Until recently, NAFLD was considered benign, self-limiting and unworthy of further investigation. This opinion is based on retrospective studies with relatively small numbers and scant follow-up of histology data. (1) The prevalence for adults, in the USA is, 30%, and NAFLD is recognized as a common and increasing form of liver disease in the paediatric population (1). Australian data, from New South Wales, suggests the prevalence of NAFLD in “healthy” 15 year olds as being 10%.(2) Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is a condition where fat progressively invades the liver parenchyma. The degree of infiltration ranges from simple steatosis (fat only) to steatohepatitis (fat and inflammation) steatohepatitis plus fibrosis (fat, inflammation and fibrosis) to cirrhosis (replacement of liver texture by scarred, fibrotic and non functioning tissue).Non-alcoholic fatty liver is diagnosed by exclusion rather than inclusion. None of the currently available diagnostic techniques -liver biopsy, liver function tests (LFT) or Imaging; ultrasound, Computerised tomography (CT) or Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) are specific for non-alcoholic fatty liver. An association exists between NAFLD, Non Alcoholic Steatosis Hepatitis (NASH) and irreversible liver damage, cirrhosis and hepatoma. However, a more pervasive aspect of NAFLD is the association with Metabolic Syndrome. This Syndrome is categorised by increased insulin resistance (IR) and NAFLD is thought to be the hepatic representation. Those with NAFLD have an increased risk of death (3) and it is an independent predictor of atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease (1). Liver biopsy is considered the gold standard for diagnosis, (4), and grading and staging, of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Fatty-liver is diagnosed when there is macrovesicular steatosis with displacement of the nucleus to the edge of the cell and at least 5% of the hepatocytes are seen to contain fat (4).Steatosis represents fat accumulation in liver tissue without inflammation. However, it is only called non-alcoholic fatty liver disease when alcohol - >20gms-30gms per day (5), has been excluded from the diet. Both non-alcoholic and alcoholic fatty liver are identical on histology. (4).LFT’s are indicative, not diagnostic. They indicate that a condition may be present but they are unable to diagnosis what the condition is. When a patient presents with raised fasting blood glucose, low HDL (high density lipoprotein), and elevated fasting triacylglycerols they are likely to have NAFLD. (6) Of the imaging techniques MRI is the least variable and the most reproducible. With CT scanning liver fat content can be semi quantitatively estimated. With increasing hepatic steatosis, liver attenuation values decrease by 1.6 Hounsfield units for every milligram of triglyceride deposited per gram of liver tissue (7). Ultrasound permits early detection of fatty liver, often in the preclinical stages before symptoms are present and serum alterations occur. Earlier, accurate reporting of this condition will allow appropriate intervention resulting in better patient health outcomes. References 1. Chalasami N. Does fat alone cause significant liver disease: It remains unclear whether simple steatosis is truly benign. American Gastroenterological Association Perspectives, February/March 2008 www.gastro.org/wmspage.cfm?parm1=5097 Viewed 20th October, 2008 2. Booth, M. George, J.Denney-Wilson, E: The population prevalence of adverse concentrations with adiposity of liver tests among Australian adolescents. Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health.2008 November 3. Catalano, D, Trovato, GM, Martines, GF, Randazzo, M, Tonzuso, A. Bright liver, body composition and insulin resistance changes with nutritional intervention: a follow-up study .Liver Int.2008; February 1280-9 4. Choudhury, J, Sanysl, A. Clinical aspects of Fatty Liver Disease. Semin in Liver Dis. 2004:24 (4):349-62 5. Dionysus Study Group. Drinking factors as cofactors of risk for alcohol induced liver change. Gut. 1997; 41 845-50 6. Preiss, D, Sattar, N. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease: an overview of prevalence, diagnosis, pathogenesis and treatment considerations. Clin Sci.2008; 115 141-50 7. American Gastroenterological Association. Technical review on nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. Gastroenterology.2002; 123: 1705-25

Delay-dependent robust H-infinity control for uncertain systems with time-varying delay

This paper proposes a new approach for delay-dependent robust H-infinity stability analysis and control synthesis of uncertain systems with time-varying delay. The key features of the approach include the introduction of a new Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional, the construction of an augmented matrix with uncorrelated terms, and the employment of a tighter bounding technique. As a result, significant performance improvement is achieved in system analysis and synthesis without using either free weighting matrices or model transformation. Examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.