Particle number and mass emission factors from combustion of wood samples collected from Queensland forest

Knowledge of particle emission characteristics associated with forest fires and in general, biomass burning, is becoming increasingly important due to the impact of these emissions on human health. Of particular importance is developing a better understanding of the size distribution of particles generated from forest combustion under different environmental conditions, as well as provision of emission factors for different particle size ranges. This study was aimed at quantifying particle emission factors from four types of wood found in South East Queensland forests: Spotted Gum (Corymbia citriodora), Red Gum (Eucalypt tereticornis), Blood Gum (Eucalypt intermedia), and Iron bark (Eucalypt decorticans); under controlled laboratory conditions. The experimental set up included a modified commercial stove connected to a dilution system designed for the conditions of the study. Measurements of particle number size distribution and concentration resulting from the burning of woods with a relatively homogenous moisture content (in the range of 15 to 26 %) and for different rates of burning were performed using a TSI Scanning Mobility Particle Sizer (SMPS) in the size range from 10 to 600 nm and a TSI Dust Trak for PM2.5. The results of the study in terms of the relationship between particle number size distribution and different condition of burning for different species show that particle number emission factors and PM2.5 mass emission factors depend on the type of wood and the burning rate; fast burning or slow burning. The average particle number emission factors for fast burning conditions are in the range of 3.3 x 1015 to 5.7 x 1015 particles/kg, and for PM2.5 are in the range of 139 to 217 mg/kg.

Uses of YouTube : digital literacy and the growth of knowledge

I invented YouTube. Well, not YouTube exactly, but something close – something called YIRN; and not by myself exactly, but with a team. In 2003-5 I led a research project designed to link geographically dispersed young people, to allow them to post their own photos, videos and music, and to comment on the same from various points of view – peer to peer, author to public, or impresario to audience. We wanted to find a way to take the individual creative productivity that is associated with the Internet and combine it with the easy accessibility and openness to other people’s imagination that is associated with broadcasting; especially, in the context of young people, listening to the radio. So we called it the Youth Internet Radio Network, or YIRN.

Leveraging sponsorships on the Internet: Activation, congruence, and articulation

This paper considers how the Internet can be used to leverage commercial sponsorships to enhance audience attitudes toward the sponsor. Definitions are offered that distinguish the terms leverage and activation with respect to sponsorship-linked marketing; leveraging encompasses all marketing communications collateral to the sponsorship investment, whereas activation relates to those communications that encourage interaction with the sponsor. Although activation in many instances may be limited to the immediate event-based audience, leveraging sponsorships via sponsors' Web sites enables activation at the mass-media audience level. Results of a Web site navigation experiment demonstrate that activational sponsor Web sites promote more favorable attitudes than do nonactivational Web sites. It is also shown that sponsorsponsee congruence effects generalize to the online environment, and that the effects of sponsorship articulation on audience attitudes are moderated by the commerciality of the explanation for the sponsor-sponsee relationship. Importantly, the study reveals that attitudinal effects associated with variations in leveraging, congruence, and orientation of articulation may be sustained across time.

Artists, audience and participations

We spent a fare amount of time thinking and debating where to draw the line between what is and what is not single-screen-based interactive media. This really is a tricky category. I would like to use this opportunity to raise certain issues about this very new category introduced this year to ifva. First of all, what do we mean by "interactive" media? If we conceptually or philosophically try to describe it, almost every artifact (not only those who are intended as a piece of art) can be perceived as "interactive" media as soon as one sees/ recognises it and begins interacting with it physically and/or mentally. What about when we limit this to computer related media? This certainly limits the scope, but well, it is becoming increasinly difficult to find art and design that are considered innovative without the use of computer. the term "single-screen" certainly makes it more specific, but as we saw from a range of works submitted to this category, people do come up with various interpretations to it. Some simply submitted work that can be viewed with computer screen, which didn't allow much user participation, while others provided various degrees of user/audience participation. What does "singel-screen-based interactive media" mean?

In search of a theory of integrated marketing communication

For the most part, the literature base for Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) has developed from an applied or tactical level rather than from an intellectual or theoretical one. Since industry, practitioner and even academic studies have provided little insight into what IMC is and how it operates, our approach has been to investigate that other IMC community, that is, the academic or instructional group responsible for disseminating IMC knowledge. We proposed that the people providing course instruction and directing research activities have some basis for how they organize, consider and therefore instruct in the area of IMC. A syllabi analysis of 87 IMC units in six countries investigated the content of the unit, its delivery both physically and conceptually, and defined the audience of the unit. The study failed to discover any type of latent theoretical foundation that might be used as a base for understanding IMC. The students who are being prepared to extend, expand and enhance IMC concepts do not appear to be well-served by the curriculum we found in our research. The study concludes with a model for further IMC curriculum development.

From mass communication to mass conversation : why 1984 wasn't like 1984

Marketers and commercial media alike are confronted by shifts in the social relations of media production and consumption in the global services economy, including the challenge of capturing, managing and commercialising media-user productivity. This trajectory of change in media cultures and economies is described here as ‘mass conversation’. Two media texts and a new media object provide a starting point for charting the ascendance and social impact of mass conversation. Apple’s 1984 television commercial, which launched the Macintosh computer, inverted George Orwell’s dystopian vision of the social consequences of panoptic communications systems. It invoked a revolutionary rhetoric to anticipate the social consequences of a new type of interactivity since theorised as ‘intercreativity’. This television commercial is contrasted with another used in Nike’s 2006 launch of its Nike+ (Apple iPod) system. The Nike+ online brand community is also used to consider how a multiplatform brand channel is seeking to manage the changing norms and practices of consumption and end-user agency. This analysis shows that intercreativity modifies the operations of ‘Big Brother’ but serves the more mundane than revolutionary purpose of generating commercial value from the affective labour of end-users.

Development of a particle number and particle mass vehicle emissions inventory for an urban fleet

Motor vehicles are major emitters of gaseous and particulate pollution in urban areas, and exposure to particulate pollution can have serious health effects, ranging from respiratory and cardiovascular disease to mortality. Motor vehicle tailpipe particle emissions span a broad size range from 0.003-10µm, and are measured as different subsets of particle mass concentrations or particle number count. However, no comprehensive inventories currently exist in the international published literature covering this wide size range. This paper presents the first published comprehensive inventory of motor vehicle tailpipe particle emissions covering the full size range of particles emitted. The inventory was developed for urban South-East Queensland by combining two techniques from distinctly different disciplines, from aerosol science and transport modelling. A comprehensive set of particle emission factors were combined with traffic modelling, and tailpipe particle emissions were quantified for particle number (ultrafine particles), PM1, PM2.5 and PM10 for light and heavy duty vehicles and buses. A second aim of the paper involved using the data derived in this inventory for scenario analyses, to model the particle emission implications of different proportions of passengers travelling in light duty vehicles and buses in the study region, and to derive an estimate of fleet particle emissions in 2026. It was found that heavy duty vehicles (HDVs) in the study region were major emitters of particulate matter pollution, and although they contributed only around 6% of total regional vehicle kilometres travelled, they contributed more than 50% of the region’s particle number (ultrafine particles) and PM1 emissions. With the freight task in the region predicted to double over the next 20 years, this suggests that HDVs need to be a major focus of mitigation efforts. HDVs dominated particle number (ultrafine particles) and PM1 emissions; and LDV PM2.5 and PM10 emissions. Buses contributed approximately 1-2% of regional particle emissions.

Audience and Market Foresight Trends and Foresight in Digital Media

This report provides an overview of trends in digital media over the period from 2009-2015. It applies scenario analysis to provide foresight on macro trends in the economy, politics, society and culture that will impact upon digital media market development in Australia, and the prospects for growth in online and digital media industries. It considers developments in the diffusion of innovations in advertising and marketing, mobile media, user-created content, and legal issues for consumers engaging in online transactions.

Audience & Market Foresight : Consumer Trends in Digital News and Information in Australia

We all know that the future of news is digital. But mainstream news providers are still grappling with how to entice more customers to digital news. This paper provides context for a survey currently underway on user intentions towards digital news and entertainment, by exploring: 1. Consumer behaviours and intentions towards digital news and information use; 2. Current trends in the Australian online news and information sector; 3. Issues and emerging opportunities in the Australian (and global) environment. Key influences on digital use of news and information are pricing and access. The paper highlights emerging technical opportunities and flags service gaps as at December 2008. These gaps include multiple disconnects between: 1. Changing user intentions towards online and location based news (news based on a specific locality as chosen by the user) and information; 2. The ability by consumers to act on these intentions via the availability and cost of technologies; 3. Younger users prefer entertainment to news; 4. Current digital offerings of traditional news providers and opportunities. These disconnects present an opportunity for online news suppliers to appraise and resolve. Doing so may enhance their online news and information offering, attract consumers and improve loyalty. Outcomes from this paper will be used to identify knowledge gaps and contribute to the development of further analysis on Australian consumers and their behaviours and intentions towards online news and information. This will be ndertaken via focus groups as part of a broader study by researchers at the Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology supported by the Smart Services Cooperative Research Centre.

Increase in Body Mass Index decreases body satisfaction of their abdominal, arm and thigh regions in young Japanese women [in Japanese]

The aim of the present study was to examine body concern and satisfactions in 191 female university students and their relationships with measured body composition and circumferences of selected body parts. Body composition and circumference measurements of participants were conducted after obtaining their consent. Body concern and satisfaction were determined using the Body Shape Questionnaire (BSQ) and the Body parts and General subscales from the Body Satisfaction Scales (BSS). Increase in body composition and circumferences were associated with decrease in body concern and satisfaction. Increase in body size, including circumferences did not decrease whole body satisfaction but increased dissatisfaction at the abdominal, arm and thigh regions.

Towards Humane Technologies: Biotechnologies, New Media and Ethics

What are the ethical and political implications when the very foundations of life —things of awe and spiritual significance — are translated into products accessible to few people? This book critically analyses this historic recontextualisation. Through mediation — when meaning moves ‘from one text to another, from one discourse to another’ — biotechnology is transformed into analysable data and into public discourses. The unique book links biotechnology with media and citizenship. As with any ‘commodity’, biological products have been commodified. Because enormous speculative investment rests on this, risk will be understated and benefit will be overstated. Benefits will be unfairly distributed. Already, the bioprospecting of Southern megadiverse nations, legally sanctioned by U.S. property rights conventions, has led to wealth and health benefits in the North. Crucial to this development are biotechnological discourses that shift meanings from a “language of life” into technocratic discourses, infused with neo-liberal economic assumptions that promise progress and benefits for all. Crucial in this is the mass media’s representation of biotechnology for an audience with poor scientific literacy. Yet, even apparently benign biotechnology spawned by the Human Genome Project such as prenatal screening has eugenic possibilities, and genetic codes for illness are eagerly sought by insurance companies seeking to exclude certain people. These issues raise important questions about a citizenship that is founded on moral responsibility for the wellbeing of society now and into the future. After all, biotechnology is very much concerned with the essence of life itself. This book provides a space for alternative and dissident voices beyond the hype that surrounds biotechnology.

Uncertainty budget in the measurement of typical airborne number, surface area and mass particle distributions

The effects of particulate matter on environment and public health have been widely studied in recent years. A number of studies in the medical field have tried to identify the specific effect on human health of particulate exposure, but agreement amongst these studies on the relative importance of the particles’ size and its origin with respect to health effects is still lacking. Nevertheless, air quality standards are moving, as the epidemiological attention, towards greater focus on the smaller particles. Current air quality standards only regulate the mass of particulate matter less than 10 μm in aerodynamic diameter (PM10) and less than 2.5 μm (PM2.5). The most reliable method used in measuring Total Suspended Particles (TSP), PM10, PM2.5 and PM1 is the gravimetric method since it directly measures PM concentration, guaranteeing an effective traceability to international standards. This technique however, neglects the possibility to correlate short term intra-day variations of atmospheric parameters that can influence ambient particle concentration and size distribution (emission strengths of particle sources, temperature, relative humidity, wind direction and speed and mixing height) as well as human activity patterns that may also vary over time periods considerably shorter than 24 hours. A continuous method to measure the number size distribution and total number concentration in the range 0.014 – 20 μm is the tandem system constituted by a Scanning Mobility Particle Sizer (SMPS) and an Aerodynamic Particle Sizer (APS). In this paper, an uncertainty budget model of the measurement of airborne particle number, surface area and mass size distributions is proposed and applied for several typical aerosol size distributions. The estimation of such an uncertainty budget presents several difficulties due to i) the complexity of the measurement chain, ii) the fact that SMPS and APS can properly guarantee the traceability to the International System of Measurements only in terms of number concentration. In fact, the surface area and mass concentration must be estimated on the basis of separately determined average density and particle morphology. Keywords: SMPS-APS tandem system, gravimetric reference method, uncertainty budget, ultrafine particles.

Militarising the body politic : new media as weapons of mass instruction

As militarization of bodies politic continues apace the world over, as military organizations again reveal themselves as primary political, economic and cultural forces in many societies, we argue that the emergent and potentially dominant form of political economic organization is a species of neo-feudal corporatism. Drawing upon Bourdieu, we theorize bodies politic as living habitus. Bodies politic are prepared for war and peace through new mediations, powerful means of public pedagogy. The process of militarization requires the generation of new, antagonistic evaluations of other bodies politic. Such evaluations are inculcated via these mediations, the movement of meanings across time and space, between formerly disparate histories, places, and cultures. New mediations touch new and different aspects of the body politic: its eyes, its ears, its organs, but they are consistently targeted at the formation of dispositions, the prime movers of action.

Дизайнът на взаимодействията, масовата комуникация и предизвикателствата на споделеното експертно знание (Interaction Design, Mass Communication And the Challenge of Distributed Expertise)

This paper considers some of the implications of the rise of design as a master-metaphor of the information age. It compares the terms 'interaction design' and 'mass communication', suggesting that both can be seen as a contradiction in terms, inappropriately preserving an industrial-age division between producers and consumers. With the shift from mass media to interactive media, semiotic and political power seems to be shifting too - from media producers to designers. This paper argues that it is important for the new discipline of 'interactive design' not to fall into habits of thought inherited from the 'mass' industrial era. Instead it argues for the significance, for designers and producers alike, of what I call 'distributed expertise' -including social network markets, a DIY-culture, user-led innovation, consumer co-created content, and the use of Web 2.0 affordances for social, scientific and creative purposes as well as for entertainment. It considers the importance of the growth of 'distributed expertise' as part of a new paradigm in the growth of knowledge, which has 'evolved' through a number of phases, from 'abstraction' to 'representation', to 'productivity'. In the context of technologically mediated popular participation in the growth of knowledge and social relationships, the paper argues that design and media-production professions need to cross rather than to maintain the gap between experts and everyone else, enabling all the agents in the system to navigate the shift into the paradigm of mass productivity.

Development of a particle number and particle mass emissions inventory for an urban fleet : a study in South-East Queensland

Motor vehicles are a major source of gaseous and particulate matter pollution in urban areas, particularly of ultrafine sized particles (diameters < 0.1 µm). Exposure to particulate matter has been found to be associated with serious health effects, including respiratory and cardiovascular disease, and mortality. Particle emissions generated by motor vehicles span a very broad size range (from around 0.003-10 µm) and are measured as different subsets of particle mass concentrations or particle number count. However, there exist scientific challenges in analysing and interpreting the large data sets on motor vehicle emission factors, and no understanding is available of the application of different particle metrics as a basis for air quality regulation. To date a comprehensive inventory covering the broad size range of particles emitted by motor vehicles, and which includes particle number, does not exist anywhere in the world. This thesis covers research related to four important and interrelated aspects pertaining to particulate matter generated by motor vehicle fleets. These include the derivation of suitable particle emission factors for use in transport modelling and health impact assessments; quantification of motor vehicle particle emission inventories; investigation of the particle characteristic modality within particle size distributions as a potential for developing air quality regulation; and review and synthesis of current knowledge on ultrafine particles as it relates to motor vehicles; and the application of these aspects to the quantification, control and management of motor vehicle particle emissions. In order to quantify emissions in terms of a comprehensive inventory, which covers the full size range of particles emitted by motor vehicle fleets, it was necessary to derive a suitable set of particle emission factors for different vehicle and road type combinations for particle number, particle volume, PM1, PM2.5 and PM1 (mass concentration of particles with aerodynamic diameters < 1 µm, < 2.5 µm and < 10 µm respectively). The very large data set of emission factors analysed in this study were sourced from measurement studies conducted in developed countries, and hence the derived set of emission factors are suitable for preparing inventories in other urban regions of the developed world. These emission factors are particularly useful for regions with a lack of measurement data to derive emission factors, or where experimental data are available but are of insufficient scope. The comprehensive particle emissions inventory presented in this thesis is the first published inventory of tailpipe particle emissions prepared for a motor vehicle fleet, and included the quantification of particle emissions covering the full size range of particles emitted by vehicles, based on measurement data. The inventory quantified particle emissions measured in terms of particle number and different particle mass size fractions. It was developed for the urban South-East Queensland fleet in Australia, and included testing the particle emission implications of future scenarios for different passenger and freight travel demand. The thesis also presents evidence of the usefulness of examining modality within particle size distributions as a basis for developing air quality regulations; and finds evidence to support the relevance of introducing a new PM1 mass ambient air quality standard for the majority of environments worldwide. The study found that a combination of PM1 and PM10 standards are likely to be a more discerning and suitable set of ambient air quality standards for controlling particles emitted from combustion and mechanically-generated sources, such as motor vehicles, than the current mass standards of PM2.5 and PM10. The study also reviewed and synthesized existing knowledge on ultrafine particles, with a specific focus on those originating from motor vehicles. It found that motor vehicles are significant contributors to both air pollution and ultrafine particles in urban areas, and that a standardized measurement procedure is not currently available for ultrafine particles. The review found discrepancies exist between outcomes of instrumentation used to measure ultrafine particles; that few data is available on ultrafine particle chemistry and composition, long term monitoring; characterization of their spatial and temporal distribution in urban areas; and that no inventories for particle number are available for motor vehicle fleets. This knowledge is critical for epidemiological studies and exposure-response assessment. Conclusions from this review included the recommendation that ultrafine particles in populated urban areas be considered a likely target for future air quality regulation based on particle number, due to their potential impacts on the environment. The research in this PhD thesis successfully integrated the elements needed to quantify and manage motor vehicle fleet emissions, and its novelty relates to the combining of expertise from two distinctly separate disciplines - from aerosol science and transport modelling. The new knowledge and concepts developed in this PhD research provide never before available data and methods which can be used to develop comprehensive, size-resolved inventories of motor vehicle particle emissions, and air quality regulations to control particle emissions to protect the health and well-being of current and future generations.