View along western boundary; paperbark trees between private and public housing, Cotton Tree Housing Estate, Maroochydore

This pilot project at Cotton Tree, Maroochydore, on two adjacent, linear parcels of land has one of the properties privately owned while the other is owned by the public housing authority. Both owners commissioned Lindsay and Kerry Clare to design housing for their separate needs which enabled the two projects to be governed by a single planning and design strategy. This entailed the realignment of the dividing boundary to form two approximately square blocks which made possible the retention of an important stand of mature paperbark trees and gave each block a more useful street frontage. The scheme provides seven two-bedroom units and one single-bedroom unit as the private component, with six single-bedroom units, three two-bedroom units and two three-bedroom units forming the public housing. The dwellings are deployed as an interlaced mat of freestanding blocks, car courts, courtyard gardens, patios and decks. The key distinction between the public and private parts of the scheme is the pooling of the car parking spaces in the public housing to create a shared courtyard. The housing climbs to three storeys on its southern edge and falls to a single storey on the north-western corner. This enables all units and the principal private outdoor spaces to have a northern orientation. The interiors of both the public and private units are skilfully arranged to take full advantage of views, light and breeze.

East elevation, overlooking driveway, private housing, Cotton Tree Housing Estate, Maroochydore

This pilot project at Cotton Tree, Maroochydore, on two adjacent, linear parcels of land has one of the properties privately owned while the other is owned by the public housing authority. Both owners commissioned Lindsay and Kerry Clare to design housing for their separate needs which enabled the two projects to be governed by a single planning and design strategy. This entailed the realignment of the dividing boundary to form two approximately square blocks which made possible the retention of an important stand of mature paperbark trees and gave each block a more useful street frontage. The scheme provides seven two-bedroom units and one single-bedroom unit as the private component, with six single-bedroom units, three two-bedroom units and two three-bedroom units forming the public housing. The dwellings are deployed as an interlaced mat of freestanding blocks, car courts, courtyard gardens, patios and decks. The key distinction between the public and private parts of the scheme is the pooling of the car parking spaces in the public housing to create a shared courtyard. The housing climbs to three storeys on its southern edge and falls to a single storey on the north-western corner. This enables all units and the principal private outdoor spaces to have a northern orientation. The interiors of both the public and private units are skilfully arranged to take full advantage of views, light and breeze.

North (rear) elevation, public housing, Cotton Tree Housing Estate, Maroochydore

This pilot project at Cotton Tree, Maroochydore, on two adjacent, linear parcels of land has one of the properties privately owned while the other is owned by the public housing authority. Both owners commissioned Lindsay and Kerry Clare to design housing for their separate needs which enabled the two projects to be governed by a single planning and design strategy. This entailed the realignment of the dividing boundary to form two approximately square blocks which made possible the retention of an important stand of mature paperbark trees and gave each block a more useful street frontage. The scheme provides seven two-bedroom units and one single-bedroom unit as the private component, with six single-bedroom units, three two-bedroom units and two three-bedroom units forming the public housing. The dwellings are deployed as an interlaced mat of freestanding blocks, car courts, courtyard gardens, patios and decks. The key distinction between the public and private parts of the scheme is the pooling of the car parking spaces in the public housing to create a shared courtyard. The housing climbs to three storeys on its southern edge and falls to a single storey on the north-western corner. This enables all units and the principal private outdoor spaces to have a northern orientation. The interiors of both the public and private units are skilfully arranged to take full advantage of views, light and breeze.

North (rear) elevation and driveway, public housing, Cotton Tree Housing Estate, Maroochydore

This pilot project at Cotton Tree, Maroochydore, on two adjacent, linear parcels of land has one of the properties privately owned while the other is owned by the public housing authority. Both owners commissioned Lindsay and Kerry Clare to design housing for their separate needs which enabled the two projects to be governed by a single planning and design strategy. This entailed the realignment of the dividing boundary to form two approximately square blocks which made possible the retention of an important stand of mature paperbark trees and gave each block a more useful street frontage. The scheme provides seven two-bedroom units and one single-bedroom unit as the private component, with six single-bedroom units, three two-bedroom units and two three-bedroom units forming the public housing. The dwellings are deployed as an interlaced mat of freestanding blocks, car courts, courtyard gardens, patios and decks. The key distinction between the public and private parts of the scheme is the pooling of the car parking spaces in the public housing to create a shared courtyard. The housing climbs to three storeys on its southern edge and falls to a single storey on the north-western corner. This enables all units and the principal private outdoor spaces to have a northern orientation. The interiors of both the public and private units are skilfully arranged to take full advantage of views, light and breeze.

Houses near Cotton Tree Housing Estate, Maroochydore

This pilot project at Cotton Tree, Maroochydore, on two adjacent, linear parcels of land has one of the properties privately owned while the other is owned by the public housing authority. Both owners commissioned Lindsay and Kerry Clare to design housing for their separate needs which enabled the two projects to be governed by a single planning and design strategy. This entailed the realignment of the dividing boundary to form two approximately square blocks which made possible the retention of an important stand of mature paperbark trees and gave each block a more useful street frontage. The scheme provides seven two-bedroom units and one single-bedroom unit as the private component, with six single-bedroom units, three two-bedroom units and two three-bedroom units forming the public housing. The dwellings are deployed as an interlaced mat of freestanding blocks, car courts, courtyard gardens, patios and decks. The key distinction between the public and private parts of the scheme is the pooling of the car parking spaces in the public housing to create a shared courtyard. The housing climbs to three storeys on its southern edge and falls to a single storey on the north-western corner. This enables all units and the principal private outdoor spaces to have a northern orientation. The interiors of both the public and private units are skilfully arranged to take full advantage of views, light and breeze.

A cross-linguistic comparison of address pronoun use in four European languages: Intralingual and interlingual dimensions

As part of a major ongoing project, we consider and compare contemporary patterns of address pronoun use in four major European languages- French, German, Italian and Swedish. We are specifically interested in two major aspects: intralingual behaviour, that is, within the same language community, and interlingual dimensions of address pronoun use. With respect to the former, we summarize our key findings to date. We then give consideration in a more preliminary fashion to issues and evidence relevant to the latter.

A first-principles density-functional calculation of the electronic and vibrational structure of the key melanin monomers

We report first-principles density-functional calculations for hydroquinone (HQ), indolequinone (IQ), and semiquinone (SQ). These molecules are believed to be the basic building blocks of the eumelanins, a class of biomacromolecules with important biological functions (including photoprotection) and with the potential for certain bioengineering applications. We have used the difference of self-consistent fields method to study the energy gap between the highest occupied molecular orbital and the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital, HL. We show that HL is similar in IQ and SQ, but approximately twice as large in HQ. This may have important implications for our understanding of the observed broadband optical absorption of the eumelanins. The possibility of using this difference in HL to molecularly engineer the electronic properties of eumelanins is discussed. We calculate the infrared and Raman spectra of the three redox forms from first principles. Each of the molecules have significantly different infrared and Raman signatures, and so these spectra could be used in situ to nondestructively identify the monomeric content of macromolecules. It is hoped that this may be a helpful analytical tool in determining the structure of eumelanin macromolecules and hence in helping to determine the structure-property-function relationships that control the behavior of the eumelanins.

And then came Complex Project Management

The subject of management is renowned for its addiction to fads and fashions. Project Management is no exception. The issue of interest for this paper is the establishment of the 'College of Complex Project Managers' and their 'competency standard for complex project managers.' Both have generated significant interest in the Project Management community, and like any other human endeavour they should be subject to critical evaluation. The results of this evaluation show significant flaws in the definition of complex in this case, the process by which the College and its standard have emerged, and the content of the standard. However, there is a significant case for a portfolio of research that extends the existing bodies of knowledge into large-scale complicated (or major) projects that would be owned by the relevant practitioner communities, rather than focused on one organization. Research questions are proposed that would commence this stream of activity towards an intelligent synthesis of what is required to manage in both complicated and truly complex environments.

The future of tobacco control: project summary

The National Health and Medical Research Council has funded Professor Wayne Hall (University of Queensland) and Professor Simon Chapman (University of Sydney) for three years 2006-2008, to research aspects of the future of tobacco control, particularly in nations with advanced tobacco control programs like Australia. Dr Coral Gartner (UQ) and Ms Becky Freeman (USyd) are also working on the project. The University of Queensland's eSpace site provides links to papers and data appendices produced by the University of Queensland team on the project. Materials relevant to this project produced by the University of Sydney group are available at the link provided.

Scalable Visualization of Galaxies, Oceans, and Brains

One of the challenges in scientific visualization is to generate software libraries suitable for the large-scale data emerging from tera-scale simulations and instruments. We describe the efforts currently under way at SDSC and NPACI to address these challenges. The scope of the SDSC project spans data handling, graphics, visualization, and scientific application domains. Components of the research focus on the following areas: intelligent data storage, layout and handling, using an associated “Floor-Plan” (meta data); performance optimization on parallel architectures; extension of SDSC’s scalable, parallel, direct volume renderer to allow perspective viewing; and interactive rendering of fractional images (“imagelets”), which facilitates the examination of large datasets. These concepts are coordinated within a data-visualization pipeline, which operates on component data blocks sized to fit within the available computing resources. A key feature of the scheme is that the meta data, which tag the data blocks, can be propagated and applied consistently. This is possible at the disk level, in distributing the computations across parallel processors; in “imagelet” composition; and in feature tagging. The work reflects the emerging challenges and opportunities presented by the ongoing progress in high-performance computing (HPC) and the deployment of the data, computational, and visualization Grids.

Personal Reflexive Instruments for Monitoring Engineering Development (PRIMED) Project

This was an early pre-Catalyst collaboration about developing reflexivity in student engineers. It was funded by (then) CUTSD.