Investigating erythemal UV exposure and vitamin D production in the urban canyon

Exposure to ultraviolet radiation (UV) results in both damaging and beneficial health outcomes. Excessive UV exposure has been linked to many skin and eye problems, but moderate exposure induces vitamin D production. It has been reported that humans receive 90-95% of their vitamin D from production that starts after UV exposure. Although it is possible to acquire vitamin D through dietary supplementation, the average person receives very little in this manner. Therefore, since most people acquire their vitamin D from synthesis after exposure to UV from sunlight, it is very important to understand the different environments in which people encounter UV. This project measured UV radiation and in-vitro vitamin D production in the urban canyon and at a nearby suburban location. The urban canyon is an environment consisting of tall buildings and tropospheric air pollution, which have an attenuating effect on UV. Typically, UV measurements are collected in areas outside the urban canyon, meaning that at times studies and public recommendations do not accurately represent the amount of UV reaching street-level in highly urbanized areas. Understanding of UV exposure in urban canyons becomes increasingly important as the number of people working and living in large cities steadily increases worldwide. This study was conducted in the central business district (CBD) of Brisbane, Australia, which models the urban canyons of large cities around the world in that it boasts a great number of tall buildings, including many skyscrapers, meaning that most areas only see a small amount of direct sunlight each day. During the winter of 2007 measurements of UV radiation and in-vitro vitamin D production were collected in the CBD and at a suburban site approximately 2.5km outside the CBD. Air pollution data was obtained from a central CBD measurement site. Data analysis showed that urban canyon measurements of both UV radiation and in-vitro vitamin D production were significantly lower than those collected at the suburban site. These results will aid both future researchers and policy makers in better understanding human UV exposure in Brisbane’s CBD and other urban canyons around the world.

In the mouth of the imagination : positioning children as co-researchers and co-artists to create a professional children's theatre production

In recent decades a number of Australian artists and teacher/artists have given serious attention to the creation of performance forms and performance engagement models that respect children’s intelligence, engage with themes of relevance, avoid the cliche´s of children’s theatre whilst connecting both sincerely and playfully with current understandings of the way in which young children develop and engage with the world. Historically a majority of performing arts companies touring Australian schools or companies seeking schools to view a performance in a dedicated performance venue engage with their audiences in what can be called a ‘drop-in drop-out’ model. A six-month practice-led research project (The Tashi Project) which challenged the tenets of the ‘drop-in drop-out’ model has been recently undertaken by Sandra Gattenhof and Mark Radvan in conjunction with early childhood students from three Brisbane primary school classrooms who were positioned as co-researchers and co-artists. The children, researchers and performers worked in a complimentary relationship in both the artistic process and the development of product.

Venture idea newness, relatedness and performance in nascent ventures

Principal Topic The study of the origin and characteristics of venture ideas - or ''opportunities'' as they are often called - and their contextual fit are key research goals in entrepreneurship (Davidsson, 2004). We define venture idea as ''the core ideas of an entrepreneur about what to sell, how to sell, whom to sell and how an entrepreneur acquire or produce the product or service which he/she sells'' for the purpose of this study. When realized the venture idea becomes a ''business model''. Even though venture ideas are central to entrepreneurship yet its characteristics and their effect to the entrepreneurial process is mysterious. According to Schumpeter (1934) entrepreneurs could creatively destruct the existing market condition by introducing new product/service, new production methods, new markets, and new sources of supply and reorganization of industries. The introduction, development and use of new ideas are generally called as ''innovation'' (Damanpour & Wischnevsky, 2006) and ''newness'' is a property of innovation and is a relative term which means that the degree of unfamiliarity of venture idea either to a firm or to a market. However Schumpeter's (1934) discusses five different types of newness, indicating that type of newness is an important issue. More recently, Shane and Venkataraman (2000) called for research taking into consideration not only the variation of characteristics of individuals but also heterogeneity of venture ideas, Empirically, Samuelson (2001, 2004) investigated process differences between innovative venture ideas and imitative venture ideas. However, he used only a crude dichotomy regarding the venture idea newness. According to Davidsson, (2004) as entrepreneurs could introduce new economic activities ranging from pure imitation to being new to the entire world market, highlighting that newness is a matter of degree. Dahlqvist (2007) examined the venture idea newness and made and attempt at more refined assessment of the degree and type of newness of venture idea. Building on these predecessors our study refines the assessment of venture idea newness by measuring the degree of venture idea newness (new to the world, new to the market, substantially improved while not entirely new, and imitation) for four different types of newness (product/service, method of production, method of promotion, and customer/target market). We then related type and degree of newness to the pace of progress in nascent venturing process. We hypothesize that newness will slow down the business creation process. Shane & Venkataraman (2000) introduced entrepreneurship as the nexus of opportunities and individuals. In line with this some scholars has investigated the relationship between individuals and opportunities. For example Shane (2000) investigates the relatedness between individuals' prior knowledge and identification of opportunities. Shepherd & DeTinne (2005) identified that there is a positive relationship between potential financial reward and the identification of innovative venture ideas. Sarasvathy's 'Effectuation Theory'' assumes high degree of relatedness with founders' skills, knowledge and resources in the selection of venture ideas. However entrepreneurship literature is scant with analyses of how this relatedness affects to the progress of venturing process. Therefore, we assess the venture ideas' degree of relatedness to prior knowledge and resources, and relate these, too, to the pace of progress in nascent venturing process. We hypothesize that relatedness will increase the speed of business creation. Methodology For this study we will compare early findings from data collected through the Comprehensive Australian Study of Entrepreneurial Emergence (CAUSEE). CAUSEE is a longitudinal study whose primary objective is to uncover the factors that initiate, hinder and facilitate the process of emergence and development of new firms. Data were collected from a representative sample of some 30,000 households in Australia using random digit dialing (RDD) telephone survey interviews. Through the first round of data collection identified 600 entrepreneurs who are currently involved in the business start-up process. The unit of the analysis is the emerging venture, with the respondent acting as its spokesperson. The study methodology allows researchers to identify ventures in early stages of creation and to longitudinally follow their progression through data collection periods over time. Our measures of newness build on previous work by Dahlqvist (2007). Our adapted version was developed over two pre-tests with about 80 participants in each. The measures of relatedness were developed through the two rounds of pre-testing. The pace of progress in the venture creation process is assessed with the help of time-stamped gestation activities; a technique developed in the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED). Results and Implications We hypothesized that venture idea newness slows down the venturing process whereas relatedness facilitates the venturing process. Results of 600 nascent entrepreneurs in Australia indicated that there is marginal support for the hypothesis that relatedness assists the gestation progress. Newness is significant but is the opposite sign to the hypothesized. The results give number of implications for researchers, business founders, consultants and policy makers in terms of better knowledge of the venture creation process.

PhD forum : multiple camera management using wide base-line matching

Manual calibration of large and dynamic networks of cameras is labour intensive and time consuming. This is a strong motivator for the development of automatic calibration methods. Automatic calibration relies on the ability to find correspondences between multiple views of the same scene. If the cameras are sparsely placed, this can be a very difficult task. This PhD project focuses on the further development of uncalibrated wide baseline matching techniques.

An institutional understanding of triple bottom line evaluations and the use of social and environmental metrics

Measuring social and environmental metrics of property is necessary for meaningful triple bottom line (TBL) assessments. This paper demonstrates how relevant indicators derived from environmental rating systems provide for reasonably straightforward collations of performance scores that support adjustments based on a sliding scale. It also highlights the absence of a corresponding consensus of important social metrics representing the third leg of the TBL tripod. Assessing TBL may be unavoidably imprecise, but if valuers and managers continue to ignore TBL concerns, their assessments may soon be less relevant given the emerging institutional milieu informing and reflecting business practices and society expectations.

Learning through collaboration and co-production in the Singapore film industry : opportunities for development

Co-production and strategic partnerships may generate valuable learning opportunities for firms to access to the knowledge and expertise of their partners. Such sharing and transfer of knowledge has become an increasingly common way for organising corporate finance and resources. However, not all collaborations result in a net positive experience for both partners. It can be a zero-sum game in which the partner learning the fastest dominates the relationship. In some cases, failure to gain access to partner knowledge results in unequal benefits accruing from such alliances. By examining the Singapore film industry from a learning perspective and taking into account particular forms of alliances, the study contributes to our understanding of the potential benefit and challenges of coproduction as a strategy for development.

Catalogue essay : a thin white line

Objects have consequences, seemingly. They move, atomic, formlessly – when static they are seen. That they vibrate constantly, that they are NOW present, is something we will have to trust the physicists on. They only seem here. Now is their moment of form, but later, who knows? Things SEEM when we recognise our own transience and temporary-ness. We call upon a bevy of senses that forever frustrate us with their limitation, despite our little understanding of what we actually have – is this here? So some forms seem to be telling us to trust our senses – that this world IS as it seems. Their form constantly refines and is refined and refined until in its essentialness it cannot be doubted – it absolutely IS. Is this our eyes? Can we only see it? But light is also a particle, if I remember correctly, so there is some weight to seeing. So to SEEM is also to FEEL,as this light imposes its visual weight upon our skins – we see with every pore of our body.

United Arab Emirates

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is part of the geographic region known as the Middle East. With a land mass of 82,000 square kilometres, predominantly desert and mountains it is bordered by Oman, Saudi Arabia and the Arabian Gulf. The UAE is strategically located due to its proximity to other oil rich Middle Eastern countries such as Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. The UAE was formed from a federation of seven emirates (Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ras Al Khaimah, Ajman, Fujuriah, and Um Al Quain) in December 1971 (Ras Al Khaimah did not join the federation until 1972) (Heard-bey, 2004, 370). Abu Dhabi is the political capital, and the richest emirate; while Dubai is the commercial centre. The majority of the population of the various Emirates live along the coast line as sources of fresh water often heavily influenced the site of different settlements. Unlike some near neighbours (Iran and Iraq) the UAE has not undergone any significant political instability since it was formed in 1971. Due to this early British influences the UAE has had very strong political and economic ties with first Britain, and, more recently, the United States of America (Rugh, 2007). Until the economic production of oil in the early 1960’s the different Emirates had survived on a mixture of primary industry (dates), farming (goats and camels), pearling and subsidies from Britain (Davidson 2005, 3; Hvit, 2007, 565) Along with near neighbours Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the UAE is part of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), a trading bloc. (Hellyer, 2001, 166-168).

Digital media literacy : connecting young people’s identities, creative production and learning about video games

This chapter outlines examples of classroom activities that aim to make connections between young people’s everyday experiences with video games and the formal high school curriculum. These classroom activities were developed within the emerging field of digital media literacy. Digital media literacy combines elements of ‘traditional’ approaches to media education with elements of technology and information education (Buckingham, 2007; Warschauer, 2006). It is an educational field that has gained significant attention in recent years. For example, digital media literacy has become a significant objective for media policy makers in response to the increased social and cultural roles of new media technologies and controversies associated with young people’s largely unregulated online participation. Media regulators, educational institutions and independent organizations1 in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia have developed digital media literacy initiatives that aim to provide advice to parents, teachers and young people.

A study of entrepreneurship : Taiwanese digital content companies in China

China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has greatly enhanced global interest in investment in the Chinese media market, where demand for digital content is growing rapidly. The East Asian region is positioned as a growth area in many forms of digital content and digital service industries. China is attempting to catch up and take its place as a production centre to offset challenges from neighbouring countries. Meanwhile, Taiwan is seeking to use China both as an export market and as a production site for its digital content. This research investigates entry strategies of Taiwanese digital content firms into the Chinese market. By examining the strategies of a sample of Taiwan-based companies, this study also explores the evolution of their market strategies. However, the focus is on how distinctive business practices such as guanxi are important to Taiwanese business and to relations with Mainland China. This research examines how entrepreneurs manage the characteristics of digital content products and in turn how digital content entrepreneurs adapt to changing market circumstances. This project selected five Taiwan-based digital content companies that have business operations in China: Wang Film, Artkey, CnYES, Somode and iPartment. The study involved a field trip, undertaken between November 2006 and March 2007 to Shanghai and Taiwan to conduct interviews and to gather documentation and archival reports. Six senior managers and nine experts were interviewed. Data were analysed according to Miller’s firm-level entrepreneurship theory, foreign direct investment theory, Life Cycle Model and guanxi philosophy. Most studies of SMEs have focused on free market (capitalist) environments. In contrast, this thesis examines how Taiwanese digital content firms’ strategies apply in the Chinese market. I identified three main types of business strategy: cost-reduction, innovation and quality-enhancement; and four categories of functional strategies: product, marketing, resource acquisition and organizational restructuring. In this study, I introduce the concept of ‘entrepreneurial guanxi’, special relationships that imply mutual obligation, assurance and understanding to secure and exchange favors in entrepreneurial activities. While guanxi is a feature of many studies of business in Pan-Chinese society, it plays an important mediating role in digital content industries. In this thesis, I integrate the ‘Life Cycle Model’ with the dynamic concept of strategy. I outline the significant differences in the evolution of strategy between two types of digital content companies: off-line firms (Wang Film and Artkey) and web-based firms (CnYES, Somode and iPartment). Off-line digital content firms tended to adopt ‘resource acquisition strategies’ in their initial stages and ‘marketing strategies’ in second and subsequent stages. In contrast, web-based digital content companies mainly adopted product and marketing strategies in the early stages, and would adopt innovative approaches towards product and marketing strategies in the whole process of their business development. Some web-based digital content companies also adopted organizational restructuring strategies in the final stage. Finally, I propose the ‘Taxonomy Matrix of Entrepreneurial Strategies’ to emphasise the two dimensions of this matrix: innovation, and the firm’s resource acquisition for entrepreneurial strategy. This matrix is divided into four cells: Effective, Bounded, Conservative, and Impoverished.

A 'deleterious' effect? : Australian legal education and the production of the legal identity

A body of critical legal scholarship argues that, by the time they have completed their studies, students who enter legal education holding social ideals and intending to use their legal education to achieve social change, have become cynical about the ability of the law to do so and no longer possess such ideals. This is explained by critical scholars to be the result of a process of ideological indoctrination, aimed at ensuring that graduates uphold the narrow and conservative interests of the legal profession and capitalist society, being exercised by law schools acting as adjuncts of the legal profession, and exercised upon the passive body of the law student. By using Foucault’s work on knowledge, power, and the subject to interrogate the assumptions upon which this narrative is based, this thesis intends to suggest a way of thinking differently to the approach taken by many critical legal scholars. It then uses an analytics of government (based on Foucault’s notion of ‘governmentality’) to consider the construction of the legal identity differently. It examines the ways in which the governance of the legal identity is rationalised, programmed, and implemented, in three Queensland law schools. It also looks at the way that five prescriptive texts to ‘surviving’ law school suggest students establish and practise a relation to themselves in order to construct their own legal identities. Overall, this analysis shows that governance is not simply conducted in the profession’s interests, but occurs due to a complex arrangement of different practices, which can lead to the construction of skilled legal professional identities as well as ethical lawyer-citizens that hold an interest in justice. The implications of such an analytics provide the basis for original ways of understanding legal education, and legal education scholarship.

Trends in online journalism : a case study approach based on euaustralia online

This paper takes stock of current changes affecting journalism, and as a case study brings up to date the record of progress made with an online publishing enterprise, EUAustralia Online, first reported on in 2007. It perceives the development of news publishing on line as being in two sectors: media corporations moving to occupy the online publishing field, through complex business stratagems and product-making, and small publications enjoying low production costs and the ability to strike up relationships with numerous users, even on a mass scale. Recent developments in both major publishing and niche publishing are appraised in a literature review, considering both broad-scale industry trends; and pressure from fresh advances in information and communication technology to produce ever-more sophisticated media artefacts, like multi-platform news coverage. The paper also recounts the pattern of work on EUAustralia Online, showing how such publications, ubiquitous ‘blogs’ or newsletters, may be placed in a prospective online order, where large and small operations might co-exist.

Urban network travel time estimation from stop-line loop detector data and signal controller data

This paper presents a model to estimate travel time using cumulative plots. Three different cases considered are i) case-Det, for only detector data; ii) case-DetSig, for detector data and signal controller data and iii) case-DetSigSFR: for detector data, signal controller data and saturation flow rate. The performance of the model for different detection intervals is evaluated. It is observed that detection interval is not critical if signal timings are available. Comparable accuracy can be obtained from larger detection interval with signal timings or from shorter detection interval without signal timings. The performance for case-DetSig and for case-DetSigSFR is consistent with accuracy generally more than 95% whereas, case-Det is highly sensitive to the signal phases in the detection interval and its performance is uncertain if detection interval is integral multiple of signal cycles.

Optimal allocation and sizing of capacitors to minimize the transmission line loss and to improve the voltage profile

To allocate and size capacitors in a distribution system, an optimization algorithm, called Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization (DPSO), is employed in this paper. The objective is to minimize the transmission line loss cost plus capacitors cost. During the optimization procedure, the bus voltage, the feeder current and the reactive power flowing back to the source side should be maintained within standard levels. To validate the proposed method, the semi-urban distribution system that is connected to bus 2 of the Roy Billinton Test System (RBTS) is used. This 37-bus distribution system has 22 loads being located in the secondary side of a distribution substation (33/11 kV). Reducing the transmission line loss in a standard system, in which the transmission line loss consists of only about 6.6 percent of total power, the capabilities of the proposed technique are seen to be validated.

Towards automatic power line detection for a UAV surveillance system using pulse coupled neural filter and an improved Hough transform

Spatial information captured from optical remote sensors on board unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has great potential in automatic surveillance of electrical infrastructure. For an automatic vision-based power line inspection system, detecting power lines from a cluttered background is one of the most important and challenging tasks. In this paper, a novel method is proposed, specifically for power line detection from aerial images. A pulse coupled neural filter is developed to remove background noise and generate an edge map prior to the Hough transform being employed to detect straight lines. An improved Hough transform is used by performing knowledge-based line clustering in Hough space to refine the detection results. The experiment on real image data captured from a UAV platform demonstrates that the proposed approach is effective for automatic power line detection.