Going out and the search for originality in China

Can China improve the competitiveness of its culture in world markets? Should it focus less on quantity and more on quality? How should Chinese cultural producers and distributors target audiences overseas? These are important questions facing policy makers today. In this paper I investigate how China might best deploy its soft power capabilities: for instance, should it try to demonstrate that it is a creative, innovative nation, capable of original ideas? Or should it put the emphasis on validating its credentials as an enduring culture and civilisation? In order to investigate these questions I introduce the cultural innovation timeline, a model that explains how China is adding value. There are six stages in the timeline but I will focus in particular on how the timeline facilitates cultural trade. In the second part of the paper I look at some of the challenges facing China, particularly the reception of its cultural products in international markets.

A hybrid smoothed finite element method (H-SFEM) to solid mechanics problems

In this paper, a hybrid smoothed finite element method (H-SFEM) is developed for solid mechanics problems by combining techniques of finite element method (FEM) and Node-based smoothed finite element method (NS-FEM) using a triangular mesh. A parameter is equipped into H-SFEM, and the strain field is further assumed to be the weighted average between compatible stains from FEM and smoothed strains from NS-FEM. We prove theoretically that the strain energy obtained from the H-SFEM solution lies in between those from the compatible FEM solution and the NS-FEM solution, which guarantees the convergence of H-SFEM. Intensive numerical studies are conducted to verify these theoretical results and show that (1) the upper and lower bound solutions can always be obtained by adjusting ; (2) there exists a preferable at which the H-SFEM can produce the ultrasonic accurate solution.

Solving inherent problems of anomaly detection by cooperation

Anomaly detection compensates shortcomings of signature-based detection such as protecting against Zero-Day exploits. However, Anomaly Detection can be resource-intensive and is plagued by a high false-positive rate. In this work, we address these problems by presenting a Cooperative Intrusion Detection approach for the AIS, the Artificial Immune System, as an example for an anomaly detection approach. In particular we show, how the cooperative approach reduces the false-positive rate of the detection and how the overall detection process can be organized to account for the resource constraints of the participating devices. Evaluations are carried out with the novel network simulation environment NeSSi as well as formally with an extension to the epidemic spread model SIR

Problems and awareness of support services among University students

Although Australian universities have allocated significant resources toward the development of student support services, administrators have little systematic information about the problems undergraduate university students experience or students' knowledge about available support services. The author surveyed 441 students in an urban, nonresidential university to examine the prevalence of difficulties associated with learning, sexual harassment, discrimination, emotional distress, health problems, course and career concerns, financial difficulties, and difficulties with lecturers; he also assessed students' knowledge of support services in each of these areas. Course concerns were the most common problem, followed by emotional distress, worry about career choices, financial difficulties, and problems with lecturers. More than half of the students were unaware of the support services available to them to address a range of concerns from sexual harassment and discrimination to emotional distress. Approximately 20% of the students reported having used university counseling or career services. Implications for targeting specific areas for outreach programs are discussed.

Genome-wide search for markers associated with bovine spongiform encephalopathy

A genome-wide search for markers associated with BSE incidence was performed by using Transmission-Disequilibrium Tests (TDTs). Significant segregation distortion, i.e., unequal transmission probabilities of alleles within a locus, was found for three marker loci on Chromosomes (Chrs) 5, 10, and 20. Although TDTs are robust to false associations owing to hidden population substructures, it cannot distinguish segregation distortion caused by a true association between a marker and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) from a population-wide distortion. An interaction test and a segregation distortion analysis in half-sib controls were used to disentangle these two alternative hypotheses. None of the markers showed any significant interaction between allele transmission rates and disease status, and only the marker on Chr 10 showed a significant segregation distortion in control individuals. Nevertheless, the control group may have been a mixture of resistant and susceptible but unchallenged individuals. When new genotypes were generated in the vicinity of these three markers, evidence for an association with BSE was confirmed for the locus on Chr 5.

Dealing with heterogeneity problems and causal effect estimation in entrepreneurship research

This paper deals with causal effect estimation strategies in highly heterogeneous empirical settings such as entrepreneurship. We argue that the clearer used of modern tools developed to deal with the estimation of causal effects in combination with our analysis of different sources of heterogeneity in entrepreneurship can lead to entrepreneurship with higher internal validity. We specifically lend support from the counterfactual logic and modern research of estimation strategies for causal effect estimation.

What are the health needs, familial and social problems of Thai migrants in a local community in Australia? A focus group study

This study explored the health needs, familial and social problems of Thai migrants in a local community in Brisbane, Australia. Five focus groups with Thai migrants were conducted. The qualitative data were examined using thematic content analysis that is specifically designed for focus group analysis. Four themes were identified: (1) positive experiences in Australia, (2) physical health problems, (3) mental health problems, and (4) familial and social health problems. This study revealed key health needs related to chronic disease and mental health, major barriers to health service use, such as language skills, and facilitating factors, such as the Thai Temple. We concluded that because the health needs, familial and social problems of Thai migrants were complex and culture bound, the development of health and community services for Thai migrants needs to take account of the ways in which Thai culture both negatively impacts health and offer positive solutions to problems.

Integrating collaborative filtering and matching-based search for product recommendation

Currently, recommender systems (RS) have been widely applied in many commercial e-commerce sites to help users deal with the information overload problem. Recommender systems provide personalized recommendations to users and thus help them in making good decisions about which product to buy from the vast number of product choices available to them. Many of the current recommender systems are developed for simple and frequently purchased products like books and videos, by using collaborative-filtering and content-based recommender system approaches. These approaches are not suitable for recommending luxurious and infrequently purchased products as they rely on a large amount of ratings data that is not usually available for such products. This research aims to explore novel approaches for recommending infrequently purchased products by exploiting user generated content such as user reviews and product click streams data. From reviews on products given by the previous users, association rules between product attributes are extracted using an association rule mining technique. Furthermore, from product click streams data, user profiles are generated using the proposed user profiling approach. Two recommendation approaches are proposed based on the knowledge extracted from these resources. The first approach is developed by formulating a new query from the initial query given by the target user, by expanding the query with the suitable association rules. In the second approach, a collaborative-filtering recommender system and search-based approaches are integrated within a hybrid system. In this hybrid system, user profiles are used to find the target user’s neighbour and the subsequent products viewed by them are then used to search for other relevant products. Experiments have been conducted on a real world dataset collected from one of the online car sale companies in Australia to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed recommendation approaches. The experiment results show that user profiles generated from user click stream data and association rules generated from user reviews can improve recommendation accuracy. In addition, the experiment results also prove that the proposed query expansion and the hybrid collaborative filtering and search-based approaches perform better than the baseline approaches. Integrating the collaborative-filtering and search-based approaches has been challenging as this strategy has not been widely explored so far especially for recommending infrequently purchased products. Therefore, this research will provide a theoretical contribution to the recommender system field as a new technique of combining collaborative-filtering and search-based approaches will be developed. This research also contributes to a development of a new query expansion technique for infrequently purchased products recommendation. This research will also provide a practical contribution to the development of a prototype system for recommending cars.

Using Wikipedia to improve web service discovery

Building and maintaining software are not easy tasks. However, thanks to advances in web technologies, a new paradigm is emerging in software development. The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a relatively new approach that helps bridge the gap between business and IT and also helps systems remain exible. However, there are still several challenges with SOA. As the number of available services grows, developers are faced with the problem of discovering the services they need. Public service repositories such as Programmable Web provide only limited search capabilities. Several mechanisms have been proposed to improve web service discovery by using semantics. However, most of these require manually tagging the services with concepts in an ontology. Adding semantic annotations is a non-trivial process that requires a certain skill-set from the annotator and also the availability of domain ontologies that include the concepts related to the topics of the service. These issues have prevented these mechanisms becoming widespread. This thesis focuses on two main problems. First, to avoid the overhead of manually adding semantics to web services, several automatic methods to include semantics in the discovery process are explored. Although experimentation with some of these strategies has been conducted in the past, the results reported in the literature are mixed. Second, Wikipedia is explored as a general-purpose ontology. The benefit of using it as an ontology is assessed by comparing these semantics-based methods to classic term-based information retrieval approaches. The contribution of this research is significant because, to the best of our knowledge, a comprehensive analysis of the impact of using Wikipedia as a source of semantics in web service discovery does not exist. The main output of this research is a web service discovery engine that implements these methods and a comprehensive analysis of the benefits and trade-offs of these semantics-based discovery approaches.

Mathematical modelling of controlled drug release from polymer micro-spheres : incorporating the effects of swelling, diffusion and dissolution via moving boundary problems

Controlled drug delivery is a key topic in modern pharmacotherapy, where controlled drug delivery devices are required to prolong the period of release, maintain a constant release rate, or release the drug with a predetermined release profile. In the pharmaceutical industry, the development process of a controlled drug delivery device may be facilitated enormously by the mathematical modelling of drug release mechanisms, directly decreasing the number of necessary experiments. Such mathematical modelling is difficult because several mechanisms are involved during the drug release process. The main drug release mechanisms of a controlled release device are based on the device’s physiochemical properties, and include diffusion, swelling and erosion. In this thesis, four controlled drug delivery models are investigated. These four models selectively involve the solvent penetration into the polymeric device, the swelling of the polymer, the polymer erosion and the drug diffusion out of the device but all share two common key features. The first is that the solvent penetration into the polymer causes the transition of the polymer from a glassy state into a rubbery state. The interface between the two states of the polymer is modelled as a moving boundary and the speed of this interface is governed by a kinetic law. The second feature is that drug diffusion only happens in the rubbery region of the polymer, with a nonlinear diffusion coefficient which is dependent on the concentration of solvent. These models are analysed by using both formal asymptotics and numerical computation, where front-fixing methods and the method of lines with finite difference approximations are used to solve these models numerically. This numerical scheme is conservative, accurate and easily implemented to the moving boundary problems and is thoroughly explained in Section 3.2. From the small time asymptotic analysis in Sections 5.3.1, 6.3.1 and 7.2.1, these models exhibit the non-Fickian behaviour referred to as Case II diffusion, and an initial constant rate of drug release which is appealing to the pharmaceutical industry because this indicates zeroorder release. The numerical results of the models qualitatively confirms the experimental behaviour identified in the literature. The knowledge obtained from investigating these models can help to develop more complex multi-layered drug delivery devices in order to achieve sophisticated drug release profiles. A multi-layer matrix tablet, which consists of a number of polymer layers designed to provide sustainable and constant drug release or bimodal drug release, is also discussed in this research. The moving boundary problem describing the solvent penetration into the polymer also arises in melting and freezing problems which have been modelled as the classical onephase Stefan problem. The classical one-phase Stefan problem has unrealistic singularities existed in the problem at the complete melting time. Hence we investigate the effect of including the kinetic undercooling to the melting problem and this problem is called the one-phase Stefan problem with kinetic undercooling. Interestingly we discover the unrealistic singularities existed in the classical one-phase Stefan problem at the complete melting time are regularised and also find out the small time behaviour of the one-phase Stefan problem with kinetic undercooling is different to the classical one-phase Stefan problem from the small time asymptotic analysis in Section 3.3. In the case of melting very small particles, it is known that surface tension effects are important. The effect of including the surface tension to the melting problem for nanoparticles (no kinetic undercooling) has been investigated in the past, however the one-phase Stefan problem with surface tension exhibits finite-time blow-up. Therefore we investigate the effect of including both the surface tension and kinetic undercooling to the melting problem for nanoparticles and find out the the solution continues to exist until complete melting. The investigation of including kinetic undercooling and surface tension to the melting problems reveals more insight into the regularisations of unphysical singularities in the classical one-phase Stefan problem. This investigation gives a better understanding of melting a particle, and contributes to the current body of knowledge related to melting and freezing due to heat conduction.

A systematic review of naturalistic interventions in refugee populations

Naturalistic interventions with refugee populations examine outcomes following mental health interventions in existing refugee service organisations. The current review aimed to examine outcomes of naturalistic interventions and quality of the naturalistic intervention literature in refugee populations with the view to highlight the strengths and limitations of naturalistic intervention studies. Database search was conducted using the search terms ‘refugee’, ‘asylum seeker’, ‘treatment’, ‘therapy’ and ‘intervention. No date limitations were applied, but searches were limited to articles written in English. Seven studies were identified that assessed the outcome of naturalistic interventions on adult refugees or asylum seekers in a country of resettlement using quantitative outcome measures. Results showed significant variation in the outcomes of naturalistic intervention studies, with a trend towards showing decreased symptomatology at post-intervention. However, conclusions are limited by methodological problems of the studies reviewed, particularly poor documentation of intervention methods and lack of control in the design of naturalistic intervention studies. Further examination of outcomes following naturalistic interventions is needed with studies which focus on increasing the rigour of the outcome assessment process.

A systematic review on quality of life among patients at 1 year after treatment for head and neck cancer

Introduction: Although advances in treatment modalities have improved the survival of head and neck (H&N) cancer patients over recent years, survivors’ quality of life (QoL) could be impaired for a number of reasons. The investigation of QoL determinants can inform the design of supportive interventions for this population. Objectives: To examine the QoL of H&N cancer survivors at 1 year after treatment and to identify potential determinants affecting their QoL. Methods: A systematic search of literature was done in December 2011 in five databases: Pubmed, Medline, Scopus, Sciencedirect and CINAHL, using combined search terms ‘head and neck cancer’, ‘quality of life’, ‘health-related quality of life’ and ‘systematic review’. The methodological qualities of selected studies were assessed by two reviewers using predefined criteria. The study characteristics and results were abstracted and summarized. Results: Thirty-seven studies met all inclusion criteria with methodological quality from moderate to high. The global QoL of H&N cancer survivors returned to baseline at 1 year after treatment. Significant improvement showed in emotional functioning while physical functioning, xerostomia, sticky/insufficient saliva, and fatigue were consistently worse at 12 months compared with baseline. Age, cancer sites and stages, social support, smoking, presence of feeding tube are significant QoL determinants at 12 months. Conclusions: Although the global QoL of H&N cancer survivors recover by 12 months after treatment, problems with physical functioning, fatigue, xerostomia and sticky saliva persist. Regular assessment should be carried out to monitor these problems. Further research is required to develop appropriate and effective interventions for this population.

Achieving high reliability for ambiguity resolutions with multiple GNSS constellations

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS)-based observation systems can provide high precision positioning and navigation solutions in real time, in the order of subcentimetre if we make use of carrier phase measurements in the differential mode and deal with all the bias and noise terms well. However, these carrier phase measurements are ambiguous due to unknown, integer numbers of cycles. One key challenge in the differential carrier phase mode is to fix the integer ambiguities correctly. On the other hand, in the safety of life or liability-critical applications, such as for vehicle safety positioning and aviation, not only is high accuracy required, but also the reliability requirement is important. This PhD research studies to achieve high reliability for ambiguity resolution (AR) in a multi-GNSS environment. GNSS ambiguity estimation and validation problems are the focus of the research effort. Particularly, we study the case of multiple constellations that include initial to full operations of foreseeable Galileo, GLONASS and Compass and QZSS navigation systems from next few years to the end of the decade. Since real observation data is only available from GPS and GLONASS systems, the simulation method named Virtual Galileo Constellation (VGC) is applied to generate observational data from another constellation in the data analysis. In addition, both full ambiguity resolution (FAR) and partial ambiguity resolution (PAR) algorithms are used in processing single and dual constellation data. Firstly, a brief overview of related work on AR methods and reliability theory is given. Next, a modified inverse integer Cholesky decorrelation method and its performance on AR are presented. Subsequently, a new measure of decorrelation performance called orthogonality defect is introduced and compared with other measures. Furthermore, a new AR scheme considering the ambiguity validation requirement in the control of the search space size is proposed to improve the search efficiency. With respect to the reliability of AR, we also discuss the computation of the ambiguity success rate (ASR) and confirm that the success rate computed with the integer bootstrapping method is quite a sharp approximation to the actual integer least-squares (ILS) method success rate. The advantages of multi-GNSS constellations are examined in terms of the PAR technique involving the predefined ASR. Finally, a novel satellite selection algorithm for reliable ambiguity resolution called SARA is developed. In summary, the study demonstrats that when the ASR is close to one, the reliability of AR can be guaranteed and the ambiguity validation is effective. The work then focuses on new strategies to improve the ASR, including a partial ambiguity resolution procedure with a predefined success rate and a novel satellite selection strategy with a high success rate. The proposed strategies bring significant benefits of multi-GNSS signals to real-time high precision and high reliability positioning services.