Understanding the performance of green commercial buildings: a Sustainable Built Environment National Research Centre (SBEnrc) briefing report

Efforts to reduce carbon emissions in the buildings sector have been focused on encouraging green design, construction and building operation; however, the business case is not very compelling if considering the energy cost savings alone. In recent years green building has been driven by a sense that it will improve the productivity of occupants,something with much greater economic returns than energy savings. Reducing energy demand in green commercial buildings in a way that encourages greater productivity is not yet well understood as it involves a set of complex and interdependent factors. This project investigates these factors and focuses on the performance of and interaction between: green design elements, internal environmental quality, occupant experience, tenant/leasing agreements, and building regulation and management. This paper suggests six areas of strategic research that are needed to understand how conditions can be created to support productivity in green buildings, and deliver significant energy consumption reductions.

Blur, eye movements and performance on a driving visual recognition slide test

Purpose Optical blur and ageing are known to affect driving performance but their effects on drivers' eye movements are poorly understood. This study examined the effects of optical blur and age on eye movement patterns and performance on the DriveSafe slide recognition test which is purported to predict fitness to drive. Methods Twenty young (27.1 ± 4.6 years) and 20 older (73.3 ± 5.7 years) visually normal drivers performed the DriveSafe under two visual conditions: best-corrected vision and with +2.00 DS blur. The DriveSafe is a Visual Recognition Slide Test that consists of brief presentations of static, real-world driving scenes containing different road users (pedestrians, bicycles and vehicles). Participants reported the types, relative positions and direction of travel of the road users in each image; the score was the number of correctly reported items (maximum score of 128). Eye movements were recorded while participants performed the DriveSafe test using a Tobii TX300 eye tracking system. Results There was a significant main effect of blur on DriveSafe scores (best-corrected: 114.9 vs blur: 93.2; p < 0.001). There was also a significant age and blur interaction on the DriveSafe scores (p < 0.001) such that the young drivers were more negatively affected by blur than the older drivers (reductions of 22% and 13% respectively; p < 0.001): with best-corrected vision, the young drivers performed better than the older drivers (DriveSafe scores: 118.4 vs 111.5; p = 0.001), while with blur, the young drivers performed worse than the older drivers (88.6 vs 95.9; p = 0.009). For the eye movement patterns, blur significantly reduced the number of fixations on road users (best-corrected: 5.1 vs blur: 4.5; p < 0.001), fixation duration on road users (2.0 s vs 1.8 s; p < 0.001) and saccade amplitudes (7.4° vs 6.7°; p < 0.001). A main effect of age on eye movements was also found where older drivers made smaller saccades than the young drivers (6.7° vs 7.4°; p < 0.001). Conclusions Blur reduced DriveSafe scores for both age groups and this effect was greater for the young drivers. The decrease in number of fixations and fixation duration on road users, as well as the reduction in saccade amplitudes under the blurred condition, highlight the difficulty experienced in performing the task in the presence of optical blur, which suggests that uncorrected refractive errors may have a detrimental impact on aspects of driving performance.

Commercial friendships between gay sales associates and straight female customers in luxury settings: A proposed theoretical framework

This study investigates friendships between gay sales associates and heterosexual female customers in luxury retail settings. By employing grounded theory methodology, the study integrates theories and findings from diverse literature streams into an original conceptual framework to illustrate the resources gay sales associates and straight female customers receive from and provide to each other during retail exchanges. The study explains why gay male–straight female friendships are uniquely suited for luxury consumption settings. Female customers characterize their friendships with gay sales associates as providing honesty, security, trust, and comfort, which stems from the absence of sexual interest and a lack of inter-female competition. Gay sales associates receive acceptance for who they are and for their displays of unconventional masculinity in retail settings. They also obtain a temporary rite from their female customers, a so-called mandate of privacy, which permits both parties to ignore the bounds of modesty and accept a degree of intimacy. Such intimacy facilitates transactions that require both personalization and customer–employee closeness, such as the selling of high-end apparel, accessories, and jewelry.

Commercial Law in East Asia

The shift of economic gravity towards East Asia requires a critical examination of law's role in the Asian Century. This volume explores the diverse scholarly perspectives on law's role in the economic rise of East Asia and moves from general debates, such as whether law enjoys primacy over culture, state intervention or free markets in East Asian capitalism, to specific case studies looking at the nature of law in East Asian negotiations, contracts, trade policy and corporate governance. The collection of articles exposes the clefts and cleavages in the scholarly literature explaining law's form, function and future in the Asian Century.

Introduction: Mapping the Contours of East Asian Commercial Law for the Asian Century

The centre of economic gravity in the new century is shifting to the East. Since 200 1, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Asia's contribution to world economic growth has matched that of the United States and Europe combined, and, since 2006, has even exceeded it (IMF, 20 I I; Neumann and Arora, 20 II ). This surge is easy to explain: China has emerged as a global super-power; Japan remains the third-largest world economy, despite only recently emerging from over twenty years of economic stagnation (The Age, 2013); South Korea and the ' tiger ' economies of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore have achieved high-level economic development through capital investment and technological innovation; and Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia have supplied riches in labour and resources to the regional economy (Macintyre and Naughton, 2005, p. 78). A growing middle class is lifting consumption. ‘Billions of Asians,' writes Mahbubani (2008, p. 3), 'are marching to modernity.’ This book examines scholarly interpretations for the role commercial law has played in East Asia's economic rise. At first blush, this might seem a daunting task. After all, as some theorists have argued, the East Asian experience is largely neglected in writings on Jaw generally and commercial law more broadly (Wolff, 20 12). This is because law, as a discipline, was largely forged in the prior European and American centuries; these 'Anglo-American moorings' ill-serve legal analysis in the new Asian Century (Cossman, 1997, p. 539).

Comparison of visual status of Iranian military and commercial drivers

Background There is no legal requirement for Iranian military truck drivers to undergo regular visual checkups as compared to commercial truck drivers. Objectives This study aimed to evaluate the impact of drivers’ visual checkups by comparing the visual function of Iranian military and commercial truck drivers. Patients and Methods In this comparative cross-sectional study, two hundred military and 200 commercial truck drivers were recruited and their Visual Acuity (VA), Visual Field (VF), color vision and Contrast Sensitivity (CS) were assessed and compared using the Snellen chart, confrontation screening method, D15 test and Pelli-Robson letter chart, respectively. A questionnaire regarding driving exposure and history of motor-vehicle crashes (MVCs) was also filled by drivers. Results were analyzed using an independent samples t-test, one-way ANOVA (assessing difference in number of MVCs across different age groups), chi-square test and Pearson correlation at statistical significance level of P < 0.05. Results Mean age was 41.6 ± 9.2 for the military truck drivers and 43.4 ± 10.9 for commercial truck drivers (P > 0.05). No significant difference between military and commercial drivers was found in terms of driving experience, number of MVCs, binocular VA, frequency of color vision defects and CS scores. In contrast, the last ocular examination was significantly earlier in military drivers than commercial drivers (P < 0.001). In addition, 4% of military drivers did not meet the national standards to drive as opposed to 2% of commercial drivers. There was a significant but weak correlation between binocular VA and age (r = 0.175, P < 0.001). However, CS showed a significantly moderate correlation with age (r = -0.488, P < 0.001). Conclusions The absence of legal requirement for regular eye examination in military drivers caused the incompetent drivers to be missed in contrast to commercial drivers. The need for scientific revision of VA standard for Iranian drivers is also discussed. The CS measurement in visual checkups of older drivers deserves to be investigated more thoroughly.

Performance analysis of solar desiccant-evaporative cooling for a commercial building under different Australian climates

This paper evaluates and compares the system performance of a solar desiccant-evaporative cooling (SDEC) system with a referenced conventional variable air volume (VAV) system for a typical office building in all 8 Australian capital cities. A simulation model of the building is developed using the whole building simulation software EnergyPlus. The performance indicators for the comparison are system coefficient of performance (COP), annual primary energy consumption, annual energy savings, and annual CO2 emissions reduction. The simulation results show that Darwin has the most apparent advantages for SDEC system applications with an annual energy savings of 557 GJ and CO2 emission reduction of 121 tonnes. The maximum system COP is 7. For other climate zones such as Canberra, Hobart and Melbourne, the SDEC system is not as energy efficient as the conventional VAV system.

Comparison of the performance of two commercial genome-wide association study genotyping platforms in Han Chinese samples

Most genome-wide association studies to date have been performed in populations of European descent, but there is increasing interest in expanding these studies to other populations. The performance of genotyping chips in Asian populations is not well established. Therefore, we sought to test the performance of widely used fixed-marker, genome-wide association studies chips in the Han Chinese population. Non-HapMap Chinese samples (n = 396) were genotyped using the Illumina OmniExpress and Affymetrix 6.0 platforms, whereas a subset also were genotyped using the Immunochip. Genotyped markers from the Affymetrix 6.0 and Illumina OmniExpress were used for full genome imputation based on the HapMap 2 JPT+CHB (Japanese from Tokyo, Japan and Chinese from Beijing, China) reference panel. The concordance between markers genotypes for the three platforms was very high whether directly genotyped or genotyped and imputed single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs; .99.8% for directly genotyped and .99.5% for genotyped and imputed SNPs, respectively) were compared. The OmniExpress chip data enabled more SNPs to be imputed, particularly SNPs with minor allele frequency .5%. The OmniExpress chip achieved better coverage of HapMap SNPs than the Affymetrix 6.0 chip (73.6% vs. 65.9%, respectively, for minor allele frequency .5%). The Affymetrix 6.0 and Illumina OmniExpress chip have similar genotyping accuracy and provide similar accuracy of imputed SNPs. The OmniExpress chip however provides better coverage of Asian HapMap SNPs, although its coverage of HapMap SNPs is moderate. © 2013 Jiang et al.

Solar powered high voltage energization for vehicular exhaust cleaning: A step towards possible retrofitting in vehicles

This paper proposes a novel way of generating high voltage for electric discharge plasma in controlling NOx emission in diesel engine exhaust. A solar powered high frequency electric discharge topology has been suggested that will improve the size and specific energy density required when compared to the traditional repetitive pulse or 50 Hz AC energization. This methodology has been designed, fabricated and experimentally verified by conducting studies on real diesel engine exhaust.

'How much love are you going to give this brand?' Lifestyle journalists on commercial influences in their work

The news increasingly provides help, advice, guidance, and information about the management of self and everyday life, in addition to its traditional role in political communication. Yet such forms of journalism are still regularly denigrated in scholarly discussions, as they often deviate from normative ideals. This is particularly true in lifestyle journalism, where few studies have examined the impact of commercial influences. Through in-depth interviews with 89 Australian and German lifestyle journalists, this paper explores the ways in which journalists experience how the lifestyle industries try to shape their daily work, and how these journalists deal with these influences. We find that lifestyle journalists are in a constant struggle over the control of editorial content, and their responses to increasing commercial pressures vary between resistance and resignation. This has implications for our understanding of journalism as a whole in that it broadens it beyond traditional conceptualizations associated with political journalism.

Analysing commercial catch and effort data from a penaeid trawl fishery: A comparison of linear models, mixed models, and generalised estimating equations approaches

Statistical methods are often used to analyse commercial catch and effort data to provide standardised fishing effort and/or a relative index of fish abundance for input into stock assessment models. Achieving reliable results has proved difficult in Australia's Northern Prawn Fishery (NPF), due to a combination of such factors as the biological characteristics of the animals, some aspects of the fleet dynamics, and the changes in fishing technology. For this set of data, we compared four modelling approaches (linear models, mixed models, generalised estimating equations, and generalised linear models) with respect to the outcomes of the standardised fishing effort or the relative index of abundance. We also varied the number and form of vessel covariates in the models. Within a subset of data from this fishery, modelling correlation structures did not alter the conclusions from simpler statistical models. The random-effects models also yielded similar results. This is because the estimators are all consistent even if the correlation structure is mis-specified, and the data set is very large. However, the standard errors from different models differed, suggesting that different methods have different statistical efficiency. We suggest that there is value in modelling the variance function and the correlation structure, to make valid and efficient statistical inferences and gain insight into the data. We found that fishing power was separable from the indices of prawn abundance only when we offset the impact of vessel characteristics at assumed values from external sources. This may be due to the large degree of confounding within the data, and the extreme temporal changes in certain aspects of individual vessels, the fleet and the fleet dynamics.

Impact of cool roof application on commercial buildings: A contribution to sustainable design in Australia

This study investigated the cool roof technology effects on annual energy saving of a large one-storey commercial building in Queensland, Australia. A computer model of the case study was developed using commercial software by using the appropriate geometrical and thermal building specifications. Field study data were used to validate the model. The model was then used to extend the investigation to other cities in various Australian climate zones. The results of this research show that significant energy savings can be obtained using cool roof technology, particularly in warm, sunny climates, and the thesis can contribute to provide a guideline for application of cool roof technology to single-storey commercial building throughout Australia.

Aspects of reproduction and diet of the Australian endemic skate Dipturus polyommata (Ogilby) (Elasmobranchii: Rajidae), by-catch of a commercial prawn trawl fishery

The Australian endemic skate Dipturus polyommata collected from by-catch of a benthic prawn fishery off southern Queensland was examined to provide information on reproduction and diet. Morphological relationships of total length (LT) to disc width and LT to mass were estimated. Size at birth was estimated at c. 100-110 mm and size at first feeding at c. 105-110 mm LT. Size at 50% maturity (LT50 and 95% CI) was 321 (305-332) and 300 (285-306) mm LT for females and males, respectively. Size at first maturity corresponded to 87.7% of observed maximum size in females (366 mm LT) and 87.5% in males (343 mm L T). Two females, representing 18.2% of mature females sampled in the austral winter were each carrying two egg cases. Descriptions of egg cases are given. Diet described by the index of relative importance as a percentage (%IRI) was predominantly crustacean based with carid shrimps (53.64%) and penaeoid prawns (23.30%) the most significant prey groups. Teleosts (11.72%), gammarid amphipods (5.31%) and mysids (4.72%) were also important to the diet of the species, while a further six prey groups made only a minor contribution to diet (1.31%). An ontogenetic change was evident between the diets of immature and mature skates. Immature animals fed more extensively on carids and amphipods and mature animals on penaeoids, teleosts and mysids.

Modelling the impact of traffic incidents on travel time reliability

Traffic incidents are recognised as one of the key sources of non-recurrent congestion that often leads to reduction in travel time reliability (TTR), a key metric of roadway performance. A method is proposed here to quantify the impacts of traffic incidents on TTR on freeways. The method uses historical data to establish recurrent speed profiles and identifies non-recurrent congestion based on their negative impacts on speeds. The locations and times of incidents are used to identify incidents among non-recurrent congestion events. Buffer time is employed to measure TTR. Extra buffer time is defined as the extra delay caused by traffic incidents. This reliability measure indicates how much extra travel time is required by travellers to arrive at their destination on time with 95% certainty in the case of an incident, over and above the travel time that would have been required under recurrent conditions. An extra buffer time index (EBTI) is defined as the ratio of extra buffer time to recurrent travel time, with zero being the best case (no delay). A Tobit model is used to identify and quantify factors that affect EBTI using a selected freeway segment in the Southeast Queensland, Australia network. Both fixed and random parameter Tobit specifications are tested. The estimation results reveal that models with random parameters offer a superior statistical fit for all types of incidents, suggesting the presence of unobserved heterogeneity across segments. What factors influence EBTI depends on the type of incident. In addition, changes in TTR as a result of traffic incidents are related to the characteristics of the incidents (multiple vehicles involved, incident duration, major incidents, etc.) and traffic characteristics.

Spatial and temporal variation and effects of changes in management in discard rates from the commercial reef line fishery of the Great Barrier Reef, Australia

Discarding in commercially exploited fisheries has received considerable attention in the last decade, though only more recently in Australia. The Reef Line fishery (RLF) of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) in Australia is a large-scale multi-sector, multi-species, highly regulated hook and line fishery with the potential for high levels of discarding. We used a range of data sources to estimate discard rates and discard quantities for the two main target groups of the RLF, the coral trout, Plectropomus spp, and the red throat emperor, Lethrinus miniatus, and investigated possible effects on discarding of recent changes in management of the fishery. Fleet-wide estimates of total annual quantities discarded from 1989 to 2003 were 292-622 t and 33-95 t for coral trout and red throat emperor, respectively. Hypothetical scenarios of high-grading after the introduction of a total allowable commercial catch for coral trout resulted in increases in discard quantities up to 3895 t, while no high-grading still meant 421 t were discarded. Increasing the minimum size limit of red throat emperor from 35 to 38 cm also increased discards to an estimated 103 t. We provide spatially and temporally explicit estimates of discarding for the two most important species in the GBR RLF of Australia to demonstrate the importance of accounting for regional variation in quantification of discarding. Effects of management changes on discarding are also highlighted. This study provides a template for exploring discarding levels for other species in the RLF and elsewhere.