The effectiveness of using a simple ARIA based geographical classification to identify road crash patterns in rural and urban areas of Queensland

Research has noted a ‘pronounced pattern of increase with increasing remoteness' of death rates in road crashes. However, crash characteristics by remoteness are not commonly or consistently reported, with definitions of rural and urban often relying on proxy representations such as prevailing speed limit. The current paper seeks to evaluate the efficacy of the Accessibility / Remoteness Index of Australia (ARIA+) to identifying trends in road crashes. ARIA+ does not rely on road-specific measures and uses distances to populated centres to attribute a score to an area, which can in turn be grouped into 5 classifications of increasing remoteness. The current paper uses applications of these classifications at the broad level of Australian Bureau of Statistics' Statistical Local Areas, thus avoiding precise crash locating or dedicated mapping software. Analyses used Queensland road crash database details for all 31,346 crashes resulting in a fatality or hospitalisation occurring between 1st July, 2001 and 30th June 2006 inclusive. Results showed that this simplified application of ARIA+ aligned with previous definitions such as speed limit, while also providing further delineation. Differences in crash contributing factors were noted with increasing remoteness such as a greater representation of alcohol and ‘excessive speed for circumstances.' Other factors such as the predominance of younger drivers in crashes differed little by remoteness classification. The results are discussed in terms of the utility of remoteness as a graduated rather than binary (rural/urban) construct and the potential for combining ARIA crash data with census and hospital datasets.

Teachers reporting suspected child sexual abuse : results of a three-state study

Over 3000 cases of child sexual abuse are identified every year in Australia, but the real incidence is higher still. As a strategy to identify child sexual abuse, Australian States and Territories have enacted legislation requiring members of selected professions, including teachers, to report suspected cases. In addition, policy-based reporting obligations have been developed by professions, including the teaching profession. These legislative and industry-based developments have occurred in a context of growing awareness of the incidence and consequences of child sexual abuse. Teachers have frequent contact and close relationships with children, and possess expertise in monitoring changes in children’s behaviour. Accordingly, teachers are seen as being well-placed to detect and report suspected child sexual abuse. To date, however, there has been little empirical research into the operation of these reporting duties. The extent of teachers’ awareness of their duties to report child sexual abuse is unknown. Further, there is little evidence about teachers’ past reporting practice. Teachers’ duties to report sexual abuse, especially those in legislation, differ between States, and it is not known whether or how these differences affect reporting practice. This article presents results from the first large-scale Australian survey of teachers in three States with different reporting laws: New South Wales, Queensland, and Western Australia. The results indicate levels of teacher knowledge of reporting duties, reveal evidence about past reporting practice, and provide insights into anticipated future reporting practice and legal compliance. The findings have implications for reform of legislation and policy, training of teachers about the reporting of child sexual abuse, and enhancement of child protection.

neXus2. An investigation into the library and information services workforce in Australia: The institutional perspective. Final report prepared for the Australian Library and Information Association and National and State Libraries Australia

The neXus2 research project has sought to investigate the library and information services (LIS) workforce in Australia, from the institutional or employer perspective. The study builds on the neXus1 study, which collected data from individuals in the LIS workforce in order to present a snapshot of the profession in 2006, highlighting the demographics, educational background and career details of library and information professionals in Australia. To counterbalance this individual perspective, library institutions were invited to participate in a survey to contribute further data as employers. This final report on the neXus2 project compares the findings from the different library sectors, ie academic libraries, TAFE libraries, the National and State libraries, public libraries, special libraries and school libraries.

Synthesis of orchestrators from service choreographies

With service interaction modelling, it is customary to distinguish between two types of models: choreographies and orchestrations. A choreography describes interactions within a collection of services from a global perspective, where no service plays a privileged role. Instead, services interact in a peer-to-peer manner. In contrast, an orchestration describes the interactions between one particular service, the orchestrator, and a number of partner services. The main proposition of this work is an approach to bridge these two modelling viewpoints by synthesising orchestrators from choreographies. To start with, choreographies are defined using a simple behaviour description language based on communicating finite state machines. From such a model, orchestrators are initially synthesised in the form of state machines. It turns out that state machines are not suitable for orchestration modelling, because orchestrators generally need to engage in concurrent interactions. To address this issue, a technique is proposed to transform state machines into process models in the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN). Orchestrations represented in BPMN can then be augmented with additional business logic to achieve value-adding mediation. In addition, techniques exist for refining BPMN models into executable process definitions. The transformation from state machines to BPMN relies on Petri nets as an intermediary representation and leverages techniques from theory of regions to identify concurrency in the initial Petri net. Once concurrency has been identified, the resulting Petri net is transformed into a BPMN model. The original contributions of this work are: an algorithm to synthesise orchestrators from choreographies and a rules-based transformation from Petri nets into BPMN.

State-of-the-Art Review on Opinion Mining from Online Customers’ Feedback

Dealing with the ever-growing information overload in the Internet, Recommender Systems are widely used online to suggest potential customers item they may like or find useful. Collaborative Filtering is the most popular techniques for Recommender Systems which collects opinions from customers in the form of ratings on items, services or service providers. In addition to the customer rating about a service provider, there is also a good number of online customer feedback information available over the Internet as customer reviews, comments, newsgroups post, discussion forums or blogs which is collectively called user generated contents. This information can be used to generate the public reputation of the service providers’. To do this, data mining techniques, specially recently emerged opinion mining could be a useful tool. In this paper we present a state of the art review of Opinion Mining from online customer feedback. We critically evaluate the existing work and expose cutting edge area of interest in opinion mining. We also classify the approaches taken by different researchers into several categories and sub-categories. Each of those steps is analyzed with their strength and limitations in this paper.

Stakeholder impact analysis of infrastructure project management in developing countries : a study of perception of project managers in state-owned engineering firms in Vietnam

Construction projects can involve a diverse range of stakeholders and the success of the project depends very much on fulfilling their needs and expectations. It is important, therefore, to identify and recognize project stakeholders and develop a rigorous stakeholder management process. However, limited research has investigated the impact of stakeholders on construction projects in developing countries. A stakeholder impact analysis (SIA), based on an approach developed by Olander (2007), was adopted to investigate the stakeholders' impact on state-owned civil engineering projects in Vietnam. This involved the analysis of a questionnaire survey of 57 project managers to determine the relative importance of different stakeholders. The results show the client to have the highest level of impact on the projects, followed by project managers and the senior management of state-owned engineering firms. The SIA also provides suggestions to project managers in developing and evaluating the stakeholder management process.

Damage assessment in structures using vibration characteristics

Changes in load characteristics, deterioration with age, environmental influences and random actions may cause local or global damage in structures, especially in bridges, which are designed for long life spans. Continuous health monitoring of structures will enable the early identification of distress and allow appropriate retrofitting in order to avoid failure or collapse of the structures. In recent times, structural health monitoring (SHM) has attracted much attention in both research and development. Local and global methods of damage assessment using the monitored information are an integral part of SHM techniques. In the local case, the assessment of the state of a structure is done either by direct visual inspection or using experimental techniques such as acoustic emission, ultrasonic, magnetic particle inspection, radiography and eddy current. A characteristic of all these techniques is that their application requires a prior localization of the damaged zones. The limitations of the local methodologies can be overcome by using vibration-based methods, which give a global damage assessment. The vibration-based damage detection methods use measured changes in dynamic characteristics to evaluate changes in physical properties that may indicate structural damage or degradation. The basic idea is that modal parameters (notably frequencies, mode shapes, and modal damping) are functions of the physical properties of the structure (mass, damping, and stiffness). Changes in the physical properties will therefore cause changes in the modal properties. Any reduction in structural stiffness and increase in damping in the structure may indicate structural damage. This research uses the variations in vibration parameters to develop a multi-criteria method for damage assessment. It incorporates the changes in natural frequencies, modal flexibility and modal strain energy to locate damage in the main load bearing elements in bridge structures such as beams, slabs and trusses and simple bridges involving these elements. Dynamic computer simulation techniques are used to develop and apply the multi-criteria procedure under different damage scenarios. The effectiveness of the procedure is demonstrated through numerical examples. Results show that the proposed method incorporating modal flexibility and modal strain energy changes is competent in damage assessment in the structures treated herein.

The Dragon stream cipher: Design, analysis and implementation issues

Dragon is a word-based stream cipher. It was submitted to the eSTREAM project in 2005 and has advanced to Phase 3 of the software profile. This paper discusses the Dragon cipher from three perspectives: design, security analysis and implementation. The design of the cipher incorporates a single word-based non-linear feedback shift register and a non-linear filter function with memory. This state is initialized with 128- or 256-bit key-IV pairs. Each clock of the stream cipher produces 64 bits of keystream, using simple operations on 32-bit words. This provides the cipher with a high degree of efficiency in a wide variety of environments, making it highly competitive relative to other symmetric ciphers. The components of Dragon were designed to resist all known attacks. Although the design has been open to public scrutiny for several years, the only published attacks to date are distinguishing attacks which require keystream lengths greatly exceeding the stated 264 bit maximum permitted keystream length for a single key-IV pair.

Cosmopolitanism, the nation-state and imaginative realism

Contemporary writing on cosmopolitanism has asserted the need for a new sociological toolkit to deal with an emergent post-national social order. At the heart of this agenda is a misunderstanding about the role of the nation-state, which has led to some rather unhelpful theorizations. The state is assumed to be a dead hand in the development of post-national sentiments or an increasingly irrelevant social structure. We argue that the superseding of the nation-state is not necessary for the development of cosmopolitan sentiments of solidarity. In addition to classical sociology, it is work surrounding the concepts of cosmopolitan democracy and constitutional patriotism and the public sphere that can assist us in theorizing cosmopolitanism. What distinguishes this tradition is the utilization of social science concepts such as democracy, state, public sphere and law in an attempt to ground the idea of cosmopolitanism within the context of existing social structures.

Cardiac state diagnosis using higher order spectra of heart rate variability

Heart rate variability (HRV) refers to the regulation of the sinoatrial node, the natural pacemaker of the heart, by the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system. Heart rate variability analysis is an important tool to observe the heart's ability to respond to normal regulatory impulses that affect its rhythm. A computer-based intelligent system for analysis of cardiac states is very useful in diagnostics and disease management. Like many bio-signals, HRV signals are nonlinear in nature. Higher order spectral analysis (HOS) is known to be a good tool for the analysis of nonlinear systems and provides good noise immunity. In this work, we studied the HOS of the HRV signals of normal heartbeat and seven classes of arrhythmia. We present some general characteristics for each of these classes of HRV signals in the bispectrum and bicoherence plots. We also extracted features from the HOS and performed an analysis of variance (ANOVA) test. The results are very promising for cardiac arrhythmia classification with a number of features yielding a p-value < 0.02 in the ANOVA test.

Cherbourg State School in historical context.

Cherbourg State School is some 300 kilometres northwest of Brisbane. It is situated in an Aboriginal community at Cherbourg with approximately 250 students, all of whom are Indigenous Australian children. Cherbourg State School aims to generate good academic outcomes for its students from kindergarten to Year 7 and nurture a strong and positive sense of what it means to be Aboriginal in today's society. In a context where the community continues to grapple with many social issues born of the historical processes of dispossession and disempowerment, Cherbourg State School is determined that its children can and will learn to become 'Strong and Smart'. It is a journey that has been charted by Chris Sarra, the school's first Aboriginal principal, in his paper Young and Black and Deadly: Strategies for Improving Outcomes for Indigenous Students, which describes how pride and expectations were engendered in the school over a four-year period from 1998. In this article the author discusses the historical context of the school and its impact on the Indigenous people of Cherbourg. The aim is to consider the historical, political, social and cultural context around the creation of Cherbourg State School. The author critically examines the historical records of the role of the State Government and the white settlers in the setting up and creation of the Aboriginal Reserve and later the primary school. Throughout the author addresses an absence � a voice missing from history � the voice of the Aboriginal people. This exercise in collective memory was designed to provide an opportunity for those who have seldom been given the opportunity to tell their story. Instead of the official view of Cherbourg School it provides a narrative which restores the victims of history to a place of dignity and indeed humanity.

Solid-state nanocrystalline dye-sensitized solar cell using 2-mercapto benzimidazole doped poly(ethylene oxide) as a new polymer electrolyte

New composite doped poly (ethylene oxide) polymer electrolyte was developed using 2-mercapto benzimidazole as plasticizer and iodide/triiodide as redox couple. The fabrication of the cell involves Poly(ethylene oxide)/ 2-mercapto benzimidazole / iodide/triiodide as polymer electrolyte in dye-sensitized solar cell fabricated with N3 dye and TiO2 nanoparticles as the photoanode and Platinum coated FTO (fluorine doped SnO2) as counter electrode. The current-volatage characteristics under simulated sunlight AM1.5 shows a short circuit current Isc of 8.7mA and open circuit photovoltage 508 mV. The conductivity measurements for the new polymer electrolyte and the photoelectrochemical measurments were carried out systematically. In 2-mercapto benzimidazole the electron rich sulphur and nitrogen atoms, act as pi-electron donors that form good interaction with iodine which plays a vital role in the performance of the fabricated dye-sensitized solar cells. The resonance effect increases the stability of the cell to a considerable extent. These results suggest that the new composite polymer electrolyte performs as a promising new doped polymer-electrolyte.

An analysis of the effectiveness of parliamentary questions in the Uttar Pradesh State Legislative Assembly (India)

Parliamentary questions are the most popular and visible tool for making the executive accountable to the legislature. However, their use, purpose and effectiveness vary in different countries. In this study, 4023 parliamentary questions asked in the Uttar Pradesh State Legislative Assembly were analysed. The results show that half of the total members of the Assembly used this device. Contrary to findings in the Australian parliamentary system, there was no evidence of ‘Dorothy Dix’ and party influence on parliamentary questions. Furthermore, 30% of the questions were aimed at seeking information and 70% pressed for action. The government provided the required information in 95% of the questions in the former category but only took action in 37% in the latter category. The study concludes that parliamentary questions serve as an effective legislative tool in the Uttar Pradesh Legislature

Multi-output DC-DC converters based on diode-clamped converters configuration : topology and control strategy

This paper presents a new DC-DC Multi-Output Boost (MOB) converter which can share its total output between different series of output voltages for low and high power applications. This configuration can be utilised instead of several single output power supplies. This is a compatible topology for a diode-clamed inverter in the grid connection systems, where boosting low rectified output-voltage and series DC link capacitors is required. To verify the proposed topology, steady state and dynamic analysis of a MOB converter are examined. A simple control strategy has been proposed to demonstrate the performance of the proposed topology for a double-output boost converter. The topology and its control strategy can easily be extended to offer multiple outputs. Simulation and experimental results are presented to show the validity of the control strategy for the proposed converter.