Searching for a social democratic narrative in criminal justice

Paul Keating recently noted that what the Rudd Government lacked was an overall narrative or story. I would like to argue that Paul Keating is correct and suggest a narrative: that of retrieving and defending aspects of our social democratic heritage from some of the damaging effects wrought by neo-liberalism. Moreover I want to argue that criminal justice policy needs to be seen as a part of this broader narrative, which requires it being prised from its current site, where it is wedged firmly in the narrative of law and order.

Hybrid multi-channel cooperative spectrum sensing to satisfy channel target

Spectrum sensing of multiple primary user channels is a crucial function in cognitive radio networks. In this paper we propose an optimal, sensing resource allocation algorithm for multi-channel cooperative spectrum sensing. The channel target is implemented as an objective and constraint to ensure a pre-determined number of empty channels are detected for secondary user network operations. Based on primary user traffic parameters, we calculate the minimum number of primary user channels that must be sensed to satisfy the channel target. We implement a hybrid sensing structure by grouping secondary user nodes into clusters and assign each cluster to sense a different primary user channels. We then solve the resource allocation problem to find the optimal sensing configuration and node allocation to minimise sensing duration. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm requires the shortest sensing duration to achieve the channel target compared to existing studies that require long sensing and cannot guarantee the target.

Strategic capability development : a multi-level case study of the role of knowledge integration within product innovation

Capability development is at the heart of creating competitive advantage. This thesis intends to conceptualise Strategic Capability Development as a renewal of an organisation's existing capability in line with the requirements of the market. It followed and compared four product innovation projects within Iran Khodro Company (IKCO), an exemplar of capability development within the Iranian Auto industry. Findings show that the maturation of strategic capability at the organisational level has occurred through a sequence of product innovation projects and by dynamically shaping the learning and knowledge integration processes in accordance with emergence of the new structure within the industry. Accordingly, Strategic Capability Development is conceptualised in an interpretive model. Such findings are useful for development of an explanatory model and a practical capability development framework for managing learning and knowledge across different product innovation projects.

The consultative process used in outreach : a narrative account

Aim The aim of this paper was to provide a narrative account of the communication skills used in an effective outreach consultation utilizing Neighbour’s consultative model. Other consultation models were considered; however, because of their overly comprehensive approach or emphasis on behaviour modification, these were deemed inappropriate. Background The nursing profession has endured significant changes of late and as a result is developing more autonomous roles in both the community and the acute health care settings. In the past, the term consultancy was used within the medical context; nowadays, there are advance nurse practitioners for whom consultancy is an integral part of their role. Although every nursing interaction is in essence a consultation, the fact that nurses are taking up on new advanced roles highlights the necessity for nurses to develop their consultation skills even further. Therefore, it makes sense to explore what aspects of that consultancy role needs special consideration in order to ensure that positive outcomes are achieved. Conclusions This paper has used a narrative account to uncover those salient skills needed to enhance the therapeutic relationship with a patient requiring the services of outreach. Furthermore, the application of a recognized consultation model was used to elucidate the underpinning knowledge of systematic history taking and assessment as well as demonstrating the communication skills and strategies needed to increase the patient’s participation and empowerment throughout the consultation. Relevance to clinical practice Effective communication skills encompassed in a consultative model are integral to the success in safeguarding the well-being of patients requiring advanced levels of care. Prejudging or pre-empting information being conveyed can be detrimental to patient safety and may prolong or complicate treatment plans.

A multi-scaling approach to predict hydraulic damage of poromaterials

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of hydraulic damage and its numerical integration. Unlike the common phenomenological continuum damage mechanics approaches, the procedure introduced in this paper relies on mature concepts of homogenization, linear fracture mechanics, and thermodynamics. The model is applied to the problem of fault reactivation within resource reservoirs. The results show that propagation of weaknesses is highly driven by the contrasts of properties in porous media. In particular, it is affected by the fracture toughness of host rocks. Hydraulic damage is diffused when it takes place within extended geological units and localized at interfaces and faults.

Preventing pollution attacks in multi-source network coding

Network coding is a method for achieving channel capacity in networks. The key idea is to allow network routers to linearly mix packets as they traverse the network so that recipients receive linear combinations of packets. Network coded systems are vulnerable to pollution attacks where a single malicious node floods the network with bad packets and prevents the receiver from decoding correctly. Cryptographic defenses to these problems are based on homomorphic signatures and MACs. These proposals, however, cannot handle mixing of packets from multiple sources, which is needed to achieve the full benefits of network coding. In this paper we address integrity of multi-source mixing. We propose a security model for this setting and provide a generic construction.

Multi-party computation with conversion of secret sharing

Classical results in unconditionally secure multi-party computation (MPC) protocols with a passive adversary indicate that every n-variate function can be computed by n participants, such that no set of size t < n/2 participants learns any additional information other than what they could derive from their private inputs and the output of the protocol. We study unconditionally secure MPC protocols in the presence of a passive adversary in the trusted setup (‘semi-ideal’) model, in which the participants are supplied with some auxiliary information (which is random and independent from the participant inputs) ahead of the protocol execution (such information can be purchased as a “commodity” well before a run of the protocol). We present a new MPC protocol in the trusted setup model, which allows the adversary to corrupt an arbitrary number t < n of participants. Our protocol makes use of a novel subprotocol for converting an additive secret sharing over a field to a multiplicative secret sharing, and can be used to securely evaluate any n-variate polynomial G over a field F, with inputs restricted to non-zero elements of F. The communication complexity of our protocol is O(ℓ · n 2) field elements, where ℓ is the number of non-linear monomials in G. Previous protocols in the trusted setup model require communication proportional to the number of multiplications in an arithmetic circuit for G; thus, our protocol may offer savings over previous protocols for functions with a small number of monomials but a large number of multiplications.

An intuitive multi-touch surface and gesture based interaction for video surveillance systems

This paper discusses the idea and demonstrates an early prototype of a novel method of interacting with security surveillance footage using natural user interfaces in place of traditional mouse and keyboard interaction. Current surveillance monitoring stations and systems provide the user with a vast array of video feeds from multiple locations on a video wall, relying on the user’s ability to distinguish locations of the live feeds from experience or list based key-value pair of location and camera IDs. During an incident, this current method of interaction may cause the user to spend increased amounts time obtaining situational and location awareness, which is counter-productive. The system proposed in this paper demonstrates how a multi-touch screen and natural interaction can enable the surveillance monitoring station users to quickly identify the location of a security camera and efficiently respond to an incident.

Entropic bounds for multi-scale and multi-physics coupling in earth sciences

The ability to understand and predict how thermal, hydrological,mechanical and chemical (THMC) processes interact is fundamental to many research initiatives and industrial applications. We present (1) a new Thermal– Hydrological–Mechanical–Chemical (THMC) coupling formulation, based on non-equilibrium thermodynamics; (2) show how THMC feedback is incorporated in the thermodynamic approach; (3) suggest a unifying thermodynamic framework for multi-scaling; and (4) formulate a new rationale for assessing upper and lower bounds of dissipation for THMC processes. The technique is based on deducing time and length scales suitable for separating processes using a macroscopic finite time thermodynamic approach. We show that if the time and length scales are suitably chosen, the calculation of entropic bounds can be used to describe three different types of material and process uncertainties: geometric uncertainties,stemming from the microstructure; process uncertainty, stemming from the correct derivation of the constitutive behavior; and uncertainties in time evolution, stemming from the path dependence of the time integration of the irreversible entropy production. Although the approach is specifically formulated here for THMC coupling we suggest that it has a much broader applicability. In a general sense it consists of finding the entropic bounds of the dissipation defined by the product of thermodynamic force times thermodynamic flux which in material sciences corresponds to generalized stress and generalized strain rates, respectively.

Online self-supervised multi-instance segmentation of dynamic objects

This paper presents a method for the continuous segmentation of dynamic objects using only a vehicle mounted monocular camera without any prior knowledge of the object’s appearance. Prior work in online static/dynamic segmentation is extended to identify multiple instances of dynamic objects by introducing an unsupervised motion clustering step. These clusters are then used to update a multi-class classifier within a self-supervised framework. In contrast to many tracking-by-detection based methods, our system is able to detect dynamic objects without any prior knowledge of their visual appearance shape or location. Furthermore, the classifier is used to propagate labels of the same object in previous frames, which facilitates the continuous tracking of individual objects based on motion. The proposed system is evaluated using recall and false alarm metrics in addition to a new multi-instance labelled dataset to evaluate the performance of segmenting multiple instances of objects.

Insider comes out : an artist's inquiry and narrative about the relationship of art and mental health

Background Through an account of prevailing experiences of art and mental illness, this paper aims to raise awareness, open dialogue and create agency about art created by people with experience of mental illness. Methods This paper draws on personal narrative and inquiry by an artist with mental illness and data collected as part of a larger participatory action research project that investigated understandings of identity, art and mental illness. Result An inquiry through art raised awareness and attentiveness to the importance of choice in identity construction and exposed frequent dichotomies in art and mental illness that were negotiated to eschew prescribed social stratification. As an artist, the first author challenged values present in one idea and absent in the other, and the options and concessions available to authorise her own dialogue and agency of being an artist. Conclusion Constructing an identity is an important part of being human, the labels that we choose or are chosen for us attribute to our identity. Reflections and recommendations are offered to consider expanded ways of thinking about art and mental illness and the functions that art play in identity construction.

Binary image steganographic techniques classification based on multi-class steganalysis

In this paper, we propose a new multi-class steganalysis for binary image. The proposed method can identify the type of steganographic technique used by examining on the given binary image. In addition, our proposed method is also capable of differentiating an image with hidden message from the one without hidden message. In order to do that, we will extract some features from the binary image. The feature extraction method used is a combination of the method extended from our previous work and some new methods proposed in this paper. Based on the extracted feature sets, we construct our multi-class steganalysis from the SVM classifier. We also present the empirical works to demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively identify five different types of steganography.

Multi-party computation with omnipresent adversary

Secure multi-party computation (MPC) protocols enable a set of n mutually distrusting participants P 1, ..., P n , each with their own private input x i , to compute a function Y = F(x 1, ..., x n ), such that at the end of the protocol, all participants learn the correct value of Y, while secrecy of the private inputs is maintained. Classical results in the unconditionally secure MPC indicate that in the presence of an active adversary, every function can be computed if and only if the number of corrupted participants, t a , is smaller than n/3. Relaxing the requirement of perfect secrecy and utilizing broadcast channels, one can improve this bound to t a  < n/2. All existing MPC protocols assume that uncorrupted participants are truly honest, i.e., they are not even curious in learning other participant secret inputs. Based on this assumption, some MPC protocols are designed in such a way that after elimination of all misbehaving participants, the remaining ones learn all information in the system. This is not consistent with maintaining privacy of the participant inputs. Furthermore, an improvement of the classical results given by Fitzi, Hirt, and Maurer indicates that in addition to t a actively corrupted participants, the adversary may simultaneously corrupt some participants passively. This is in contrast to the assumption that participants who are not corrupted by an active adversary are truly honest. This paper examines the privacy of MPC protocols, and introduces the notion of an omnipresent adversary, which cannot be eliminated from the protocol. The omnipresent adversary can be either a passive, an active or a mixed one. We assume that up to a minority of participants who are not corrupted by an active adversary can be corrupted passively, with the restriction that at any time, the number of corrupted participants does not exceed a predetermined threshold. We will also show that the existence of a t-resilient protocol for a group of n participants, implies the existence of a t’-private protocol for a group of n′ participants. That is, the elimination of misbehaving participants from a t-resilient protocol leads to the decomposition of the protocol. Our adversary model stipulates that a MPC protocol never operates with a set of truly honest participants (which is a more realistic scenario). Therefore, privacy of all participants who properly follow the protocol will be maintained. We present a novel disqualification protocol to avoid a loss of privacy of participants who properly follow the protocol.

The development of a simple multi-nodal tool to identify performance issues in existing commercial buildings

Australia’s building stock includes many older commercial buildings with numerous factors that impact energy performance and indoor environment quality. The built environment industry has generally focused heavily on improving physical building design elements for greater energy efficiency (such as retrofits and environmental upgrades), however there are noticeable ‘upper limits’ to performance improvements in these areas. To achieve a stepchange improvement in building performance, the authors propose that additional components need to be addressed in a whole of building approach, including the way building design elements are managed and the level of stakeholder engagement between owners, tenants and building managers. This paper focuses on the opportunities provided by this whole-of-building approach, presenting the findings of a research project undertaken through the Sustainable Built Environment National Research Centre (SBEnrc) in Australia. Researchers worked with a number of industry partners over two years to investigate issues facing stakeholders at base building and tenancy levels, and the barriers to improving building performance. Through a mixed-method, industry-led research approach, five ‘nodes’ were identified in whole-of-building performance evaluation, each with interlinking and overlapping complexities that can influence performance. The nodes cover building management, occupant experience, indoor environment quality, agreements and culture, and design elements. This paper outlines the development and testing of these nodes and their interactions, and the resultant multi-nodal tool, called the ‘Performance Nexus’ tool. The tool is intended to be of most benefit in evaluating opportunities for performance improvement in the vast number of existing low-performing building stock.