"Who Are You" by DeepBlue Orchestra - Production of Recordings

The development and recording of 10 songs for a CD to accompany DeepBlue's new live orchestra production "Who Are You" which began touring Australia and Asia in 2012.

The use of CCTV to police public spaces : a case of big brother or big friend?

This paper considers the role of CCTV (closed circuit television) in the surveillance, policing and control of public space in urban and rural locations, specifically in relation to the use of public space by young people. The use of CCTV technology in public spaces is now an established and largely uncontested feature of everyday life in a number of countries and the assertion that they are essentially there for the protection of law abiding and consuming citizens has broadly gone unchallenged. With little or no debate in the U.K. to critique the claims made by the burgeoning security industry that CCTV protects people in the form of a ‘Big Friend’, the state at both central and local levels has endorsed the installation of CCTV apparatus across the nation. Some areas assert in their promotional material that the centre of the shopping and leisure zone is fully surveilled by cameras in order to reassure visitors that their personal safety is a matter of civic concern, with even small towns and villages expending monies on sophisticated and expensive to maintain camera systems. It is within a context of monitoring, recording and control procedures that young people’s use of public space is constructed as a threat to social order, in need of surveillance and exclusion which forms a major and contemporary feature in shaping thinking about urban and rural working class young people in the U.K. As Loader (1996) notes, young people’s claims on public space rarely gain legitimacy if ‘colliding’ with those of local residents, and Davis (1990) describes the increasing ‘militarization and destruction of public space’, while Jacobs (1965) asserts that full participation in the ‘daily life of urban streets’ is essential to the development of young people and beneficial for all who live in an area. This paper challenges the uncritical acceptance of widespread use of CCTV and identifies its oppressive and malevolent potential in forming a ‘surveillance gaze’ over young people (adapting Foucault’s ‘clinical gaze’c. 1973) which can jeopardise mental health and well being in coping with the ‘metropolis’, after Simmel, (1964).

Speaker linking using complete-linkage clustering

Speaker diarization determines instances of the same speaker within a recording. Extending this task to a collection of recordings for linking together segments spoken by a unique speaker requires speaker linking. In this paper we propose a speaker linking system using linkage clustering and state-of-the-art speaker recognition techniques. We evaluate our approach against two baseline linking systems using agglomerative cluster merging (AC) and agglomerative clustering with model retraining (ACR). We demonstrate that our linking method, using complete-linkage clustering, provides a relative improvement of 20% and 29% in attribution error rate (AER), over the AC and ACR systems, respectively.

Calling for help : a responsive evaluation of Child Health Line

The project examined the responsiveness of the telenursing service provided by the Child Health Line (hereinafter referred to as CHL). It aimed to provide an account of population usage of the service, the call request types and the response of the service to the calls. In so doing, the project extends the current body of knowledge pertaining to the provision of parenting support through telenursing. Approximately 900 calls to the CHL were audio-recorded over the December 2005-2006 Christmas-New Year period. A protocol was developed to code characteristics of the call, the interactional features between the caller and nurse call-taker, and the extent to which there was (a) agreement on problem definition and the plan of action and (b) interactional alignment between nurse and caller. A quantitative analysis examined the frequencies of the main topics covered in calls to the CHL and any statistical associations between types of calls, length of calls and nurse-caller alignment. In addition, a detailed qualitative analysis was conducted on a subset of calls dealing with the nurse management of calls seeking medical advice and information. Key findings include: • Overall, 74% of the calls discussed parenting and child development issues, 48% discussed health/medical issues, and 16% were information-seeking calls. • More specifically: o 21% discussed health/medical and parenting and child development issues. o 3% discussed parenting and information-seeking issues. o 5% discussed health/medical, parenting/development and information issues. o 18% exclusively focussed on health and medical issues and therefore were outside the remit of the intended scope of the CHL. These calls caused interactional dilemmas for the nurse call-takers as they simultaneously dealt with parental expectations for help and the CHL guidelines indicating that offering medical advice was outside the remit of the service. • Most frequent reasons for calling were to discuss sleep, feeding, normative infant physical functions and parenting advice. • The average length of calls to the CHL was 7 minutes. • Longer calls were more likely to involve nurse call-takers giving advice on more than one topic, the caller displaying strong emotions, the caller not specifically providing the reason for the call, and the caller discussing parenting and developmental issues. • Shorter calls were characterised by the nurse suggesting that the child receive immediate medical attention, the nurse emphasising the importance or urgency of the plan of action, the caller referring to or requesting confirmation of a diagnosis, and caller and nurse call-taker discussion of health and medical issues. • The majority of calls, 92%, achieved parent-nurse alignment by the conclusion of the call. However, 8% did not. • The 8% of calls that were not aligned require further quantitative and qualitative investigation of the interactional features. The findings are pertinent in the current context where Child Health Line now resides within 13HEALTH. These findings indicate: 1. A high demand for parenting advice. 2. Nurse call-takers have a high level of competency in dealing with calls about parenting and normal child development, which is the remit of the CHL. 3. Nurse call-takers and callers achieve a high degree of alignment when both parties agree on a course of action. 4. There is scope for developing professional practice in calls that present difficulties in terms of call content, interactional behaviour and call closure. Recommendations of the project: 1. There are numerous opportunities for further research on interactional aspects of calls to the CHL, such as further investigations of the interactional features and the association of the features to alignment and nonalignment. The rich and detailed insights into the patterns of nurse-parent interactions were afforded by the audio-recording and analysis of calls to the CHL. 2. The regular recording of calls would serve as a way of increasing understanding of the type and nature of calls received, and provide a valuable training resource. Recording and analysing calls to CHL provides insight into the operation of the service, including evidence about the effectiveness of triaging calls. 3. Training in both recognising and dealing with problem calls may be beneficial. For example, calls where the caller showed strong emotion, appeared stressed, frustrated or troubled were less likely to be rated as aligned calls. In calls where the callers described being ‘at their wits end’, or responded to each proposed suggestion with ‘I’ve tried that’, the callers were fairly resistant to advice-giving. 4. Training could focus on strategies for managing calls relating to parenting support and advice, and parental well-being. The project found that these calls were more likely to be rated as being nonaligned. 5. With the implementation of 13HEALTH, future research could compare nurse-parent interaction following the implementation of triaging. Of the calls, 21% had both medical and parenting topics discussed and 5.3% discussed medical, parenting and information topics. Added to this, in 12% of calls, there was ambiguity between the caller and nurse call-taker as to whether the problem was medical or behavioural.

'Going live' : establishing the creative attributes of the live multi-camera television professional

In my capacity as a television professional and teacher specialising in multi-camera live television production for over 40 years, I was drawn to the conclusion that opaque or inadequately formed understandings of how creativity applies to the field of live television, have impeded the development of pedagogies suitable to the teaching of live television in universities. In the pursuit of this hypothesis, the thesis shows that television degrees were born out of film studies degrees, where intellectual creativity was aligned to single camera production, and the 'creative roles' of producers, directors and scriptwriters. At the same time, multi-camera live television production was subsumed under the 'mass communication' banner, leading to an understanding that roles other than producer and director are simply technical, and bereft of creative intent or acumen. The thesis goes on to show that this attitude to other television production personnel, for example, the vision mixer, videotape operator and camera operator, relegates their roles to that of 'button pusher'. This has resulted in university teaching models with inappropriate resources and unsuitable teaching practices. As a result, the industry is struggling to find people with the skills to fill the demands of the multi-camera live television sector. In specific terms the central hypothesis is pursued through the following sequenced approach. Firstly, the thesis sets out to outline the problems, and traces the origins of the misconceptions that hold with the notion that intellectual creativity does not exist in live multi-camera television. Secondly, this more adequately conceptualised rendition, of the origins particular to the misconceptions of live television and creativity, is then anchored to the field of examination by presentation of the foundations of the roles involved in making live television programs, using multicamera production techniques. Thirdly, this more nuanced rendition of the field sets the stage for a thorough analysis of education and training in the industry, and teaching models at Australian universities. The findings clearly establish that the pedagogical models are aimed at single camera production, a position that deemphasises the creative aspects of multi-camera live television production. Informed by an examination of theories of learning, qualitative interviews, professional reflective practice and observations, the roles of four multi-camera live production crewmembers (camera operator, vision mixer, EVS/videotape operator and director's assistant), demonstrate the existence of intellectual creativity during live production. Finally, supported by the theories of learning, and the development and explication of a successful teaching model, a new approach to teaching students how to work in live television is proposed and substantiated.

Service condition of railroad corridors around the insulated rail joints

Railroad corridors contain large number of Insulated Rail Joints (IRJs) that act as safety critical elements in the circuitries of the signaling and broken rail identification systems. IRJs are regarded as sources of excitation for the passage of loaded wheels leading to high impact forces; these forces in turn cause dips, cross levels and twists to the railroad geometry in close proximity to the sections containing the IRJs in addition to the local damages to the railhead of the IRJs. Therefore, a systematic monitoring of the IRJs in railroad is prudent to mitigate potential risk of their sudden failure (e.g., broken tie plates) under the traffic. This paper presents a simple method of periodic recording of images using time-lapse photography and total station surveying measurements to understand the ongoing deterioration of the IRJs and their surroundings. Over a 500 day period, data were collected to examine the trends in narrowing of the joint gap due to plastic deformation the railhead edges and the dips, cross levels and twists caused to the railroad geometry due to the settlement of ties (sleepers) around the IRJs. The results reflect that the average progressive settlement beneath the IRJs is larger than that under the continuously welded rail, which leads to excessive deviation of railroad profile, cross levels and twists.

Successful outcomes in vocational education and training courses : how pedagogy and expectations influence achievement

This paper reports on a four year Australian Research Council funded Linkage Project titled Skilling Indigenous Queensland, conducted in regional areas of Queensland, Australia from 2009 to 2013. The project sought to investigate vocational education, training (VET) and teaching, Indigenous learners’ needs, employer cultural and expectations and community culture and expectations to identify best practice in numeracy teaching for Indigenous VET learners. Specifically it focused on ways to enhance the teaching and learning of courses and the associated mathematics in such courses to benefit learners and increase their future opportunities of employment. To date thirty-nine teachers/trainers/teacher aides and two hundred and thirty-one students consented to participate in the project. Nine VET courses were nominated to be the focus on the study. This paper focuses on questionnaire and interview responses from four trainers, two teacher aides and six students. In recent years a considerable amount of funding has been allocated to increasing Indigenous Peoples’ participation in education and employment. This increased funding is predicated on the assumption that it will make a difference and contribute to closing the education gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians (Council of Australia Governments, 2009). The central tenet is that access to education for Indigenous People will create substantial social and economic benefits for regional and remote Indigenous People. The project’s aim is to address some of the issues associated with the gap. To achieve the aims, the project adopted a mixed methods design aimed at benefitting research participants and included: participatory collaborative action research (Kemmis & McTaggart, 1988) and, community research (Smith, 1999). Participatory collaborative action research refers to a is a “collective, self-reflective enquiry undertaken by participants in social situations in order to improve the rationality and justice of their own social and educational practices” (Kemmis et al., 1988, p. 5). Community research is described as an approach that “conveys a much more intimate, human and self-defined space” (p. 127). Community research relies on and validates the community’s own definitions. As the project is informed by the social at a community level, it is described as “community action research or emancipatory research” (Smith, 1999, p. 127). It seeks to demonstrate benefit to the community, making positive differences in the lives of Indigenous People and communities. The data collection techniques included survey questionnaires, video recording of teaching and learning processes, teacher reflective video analysis of teaching, observations, semi-structured interviews and student numeracy testing. As a result of these processes, the findings indicate that VET course teachers work hard to adopt contextualising strategies to their teaching, however this process is not always straight forward because of the perceptions of how mathematics has been taught and learned historically. Further teachers, trainers and students have high expectations of one another with the view to successful outcomes from the courses.

On APT 6 : Rohan Wealleans performing identity at the disjuncture between customary and contemporary culture

A review of the 6th APT focusing on the work and performance of Rohan Wealleans

Disaster strikes, then what? Using evaluation in narrative driven (oral history & digital storytelling) community-based projects

In 2011 Queensland suffered both floods and cyclones, leaving residents without homes and their communities in ruins (2011). This paper presents how researchers from QUT, who are also members of the Oral History Association of Australia (OHAA) Queensland’s chapter, are using oral history, photographs, videography and digital storytelling to help heal and empower rural communities around the state and how evaluation has become a key element of our research. QUT researchers ran storytelling workshops in the capital city of Brisbane i early 2011, after the city suffered sever flooding. Cyclone Yasi then struck the town of Cardwell (in February 2011) destroying their historical museum and recording equipment. We delivered an 'emergency workshop', offering participants hands on use of the equipment, ethical and interviewing theory, so that the community could start to build a new collection. We included oral history workshops as well as sessions on how best to use a video camera, digital camera and creative writing sessions, so the community would also know how to make 'products' or exhibition pieces out of the interviews they were recording. We returned six months later to conduct follow-up workshops and the material produced by and with the community had been amazing. More funding has now been secured to replicate audio/visual/writing workshops in other remote rural Queensland communities including Townsville, Mackay and Cunnamulla and Toowoomba in 2012, highlighting the need for a multi media approach, to leverage the most out of OH interviews as a mechanism to restore and promote community resilience and pride.

Paleomagnetic data support Early Permian age for the Abor Volcanics in the lower Siang Valley, NE India; significance for Gondwana-related break-up models

Confusion exists as to the age of the Abor Volcanics of NE India. Some consider the unit to have been emplaced in the Early Permian, others the Early Eocene, a difference of ∼230 million years. The divergence in opinion is significant because fundamentally different models explaining the geotectonic evolution of India depend on the age designation of the unit. Paleomagnetic data reported here from several exposures in the type locality of the formation in the lower Siang Valley indicate that steep dipping primary magnetizations (mean = 72.7 ± 6.2°, equating to a paleo-latitude of 58.1°) are recorded in the formation. These are only consistent with the unit being of Permian age, possibly Artinskian based on a magnetostratigraphic argument. Plate tectonic models for this time consistently show the NE corner of the sub-continent >50°S; in the Early Eocene it was just north of the equator, which would have resulted in the unit recording shallow directions. The mean declination is counter-clockwise rotated by ∼94°, around half of which can be related to the motion of the Indian block; the remainder is likely due local Himalayan-age thrusting in the Eastern Syntaxis. Several workers have correlated the Abor Volcanics with broadly coeval mafic volcanic suites in Oman, NE Pakistan–NW India and southern Tibet–Nepal, which developed in response to the Cimmerian block peeling-off eastern Gondwana in the Early-Middle Permian, but we believe there are problems with this model. Instead, we suggest that the Abor basalts relate to India–Antarctica/India–Australia extension that was happening at about the same time. Such an explanation best accommodates the relevant stratigraphical and structural data (present-day position within the Himalayan thrust stack), as well as the plate tectonic model for Permian eastern Gondwana.

Large igneous provinces and silicic large igneous provinces : progress in our understanding over the last 25 years

Large Igneous Provinces are exceptional intraplate igneous events throughout Earth’s history. Their significance and potential global impact is related to the total volume of magma intruded and released during these geologically brief events (peak eruptions are often within 1-5 Myrs duration) where millions to tens of millions of cubic kilometers of magma are produced. In some cases, at least 1% of the Earth’s surface has been directly covered in volcanic rock, being equivalent to the size of small continents with comparable crustal thicknesses. Large Igneous Provinces are thus important, albeit episodic episodes of new crust addition. However, most magmatism is basaltic so that contributions to crustal growth will not always be picked up in zircon geochronology studies that better trace major episodes of extension-related silicic magmatism and the silicic Large Igneous Provinces. Much headway has been made on our understanding of these anomalous igneous events over the last 25 years, driving many new ideas and models. This includes their: 1) global spatial and temporal distribution, with a long-term average of one event approximately every 20 Myrs, but a clear clustering of events at times of supercontinent break-up – Large Igneous Provinces are thus an integral part of the Wilson cycle and are becoming an increasingly important tool in reconnecting dispersed continental fragments; 2) compositional diversity that in part reflects their crustal setting of ocean basins, and continental interiors and margins where in the latter setting, LIP magmatism can be silicicdominant; 3) mineral and energy resources with major PGE and precious metal resources being hosted in these provinces, as well as magmatism impacting on the hydrocarbon potential of volcanic basins and rifted margins through enhancing source rock maturation, providing fluid migration pathways, and trap formation; 4) biospheric, hydrospheric and atmospheric impacts, with Large Igneous Provinces now widely regarded as a key trigger mechanism for mass extinctions, although the exact kill mechanism(s) are still being resolved; 5) role in mantle geodynamics and thermal evolution of the Earth, by potentially recording the transport of material from the lower mantle or core-mantle boundary to the Earth's surface and being a fundamental component in whole mantle convection models; and 6) recognition on the inner planets where the lack of plate tectonics and erosional processes and planetary antiquity means that the very earliest record of LIP events during planetary evolution may be better preserved than on Earth.

Consuming Urban Culture in Contemporary Vietnam

Vietnam is currently undergoing a metamorphosis from a relatively closed society with a centrally planned economy, to a rapidly urbanising one with a global outlook. These changes have been the catalyst for an exciting ferment of activity in popular culture. This volume contains contributions from scholars engaged in the most up-to-date social research in Vietnam, as well as some of Vietnam's most popular cultural producers who are forging new ways of imagining the present whilst at the same time engaging actively in reinterpreting the past. The diverse ways that Vietnam is culturally and socially negotiating the future are examined as the book addresses issues of indigenisation of cultural influences, ambivalence surrounding change, and the consistent blurring of boundaries between informal, non-state cultural activities and formal institutional structures in the evolution of a civil society in Vietnam.

Street Computing : Urban Informatics and City Interfaces

This book develops tools and techniques that will help urban residents gain access to urban computing. Metaphorically speaking, it is taking computing to the street by giving the general public – rather than just researchers and professionals – the power to leverage available city infrastructure and create solutions tailored to their individual needs. It brings together five chapters that are based on presentations given at the Street Computing Workshop held on 24 November 2009 in Melbourne in conjunction with the Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference (OZCHI 2009). This book focuses on applying urban informatics, urban and community sensing and open application programming interfaces (APIs) to the public space through the delivery of online services, on demand and in real time. It then offers a case study of how the city of Singapore has harnessed the potential of an online infrastructure so that residents and visitors can access services electronically. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Urban Technology, 19(2), 2012.

Developing schedules for mixed rail and road cane transport systems

This paper addresses the problem of scheduling a cane transport system involving both rail transport and road transport, where the road transport operates from several sidings in the rail network. An iterative approach for scheduling the rail transport system has been developed using existing rail transport scheduling tools. The assumption that harvesters serviced by road transport are effectively operating from the rail siding from which their bins are supplied seems a reasonable starting point for the analysis. There is a need to manually modify the schedule to take into account the road transport schedule to ensure that full bins are not collected before the road transport system delivers them back to the rail siding.

Why are children the most important audience for pornography in Australia?

Who watches pornography in Australia? If you listen to public debates about the genre the answer is clear – it’s children. Children are accessing pornography on smartphones (Murray and Tin 2011). Children are taking ‘lewd’ photographs of themselves, creating their own pornography (Nelligan and Etheridge 2011). Indigenous Australian children must be protected by banning pornography (the Age 2011). Pornographic magazines are placed where children can see them (O'Rourke 2011). Exposure to pornography is damaging children (Sundstrom 2011). The Australian Government insists that the Internet must be filtered to protect children from pornography (Collerton 2010). And if indeed any adults are watching pornography in Australia, then it’s child pornography (MacDonald 2011; Ralston and Howden 2011).In story after story, public debate about pornography focuses on children as its audience. There is no suggestion that children are numerically the largest audience of pornography in Australia. But emphatically the suggestion is that children are the most important audience to be taken into account when thinking about the genre. This chapter explores why this is the case, and notes the political advantages and disadvantages of focusing on children as the most important audience for pornography in Australia.