Improving boiler performance with modified boiler control systems

For timely processing of the crop, sugar factories need boiler stations that can reliably produce steam when fired with fuel of variable quality. The control systems installed on most sugar factory boilers have changed little in the last thirty years and in some cases the default control system response to changes in fuel and/or fuel quality is not correct and operator intervention is required to prevent factory stoppages or reductions in crushing rate caused by poor combustion. Some factories have recently modified their boiler control systems for improved combustion performance and reduced maintenance costs. This paper describes testing carried out to evaluate some of these control system modifications and identifies boiler control system changes that can be applied more widely in the sugar industry.

Regulatory reforms and productivity : an empirical analysis of the Japanese electricity industry

The Japanese electricity industry has experienced regulatory reforms since the mid-1990s. This article measures productivity in Japan's steam power-generation sector and examines the effect of reforms on the productivity of this industry over the period 1978-2003. We estimate the Luenberger productivity indicator, which is a generalization of the commonly used Malmquist productivity index, using a data envelopment analysis approach. Factors associated with productivity change are investigated through dynamic generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation of panel data. Our empirical analysis shows that the regulatory reforms have contributed to productivity growth in the steam power-generation sector in Japan.

How can partnerships between the universities and schools exploit new opportunities for pedagogies at the intersection of the arts/design and the sciences?

Driven by information accessibility-on-demand provided by the internet, education modes are changing from a teacher-led approach focused on content delivery and assessible outcomes, to a learner-based approach encouraging self-directed, peer-tutored, and cooperative learning. New pedagogies are required to extend learning beyond the classroom and traditional subject areas such as contemporary arts, in alignment with the cross disciplinary priorities of the Australian Curriculum and values of the International Baccalaureate Organisation. This research explores how partnerships with universities and cultural organisations are implicated in the generation of these new forms of pedagogy and contribute to the field of educational research within the context of Education Queensland’s Framework For Gifted Education. In particular, this paper explores a new pedagogical framework for highly capable year five to nine Queensland state school students at the intersection of arts, design and the sciences, which has arisen from an explicit secondary/ tertiary partnership between the Queensland University of Technology Creative Industries Faculty and Precincts and the Queensland Academies Young Scholars Program. The Young Scholars Program offers experiences in the International Baccalaureate and Australian Curriculum contexts to enhance outcomes via global understanding, unique industry partnerships and 21st century pedagogical innovation based not on 'content' but tacit/experiential learning concepts including immersive, creative, intellectual and social strategies. These strategies for highly capable students are centred around authentic opportunities, primary resources, transdisciplinary learning and relationships with likeminded peers including tertiary arts, design and STEM educators and students, professionals and researchers. The presentation details case studies which are hands-on real time workshops involving inquiry based challenges in the arts, design and sciences, mathematics, history, creative writing and other disciplines, with content drawn from collections from public institutions, academic research and tertiary pedagogy. Both programs implicate student collaboration and creative production as methodology/data capture for ongoing action research, in alignment with the Framework For Gifted Education’s emphasis on evidence-based practices. They also challenge gifted students “to continue their development through curricular activities that require depth of study, complexity of thinking, fast pace of learning, high-level skills development and/or creative and critical thinking (e.g. through independent investigations, tiered tasks, diverse real-world applications, mentors)”(Education Queensland, 2011:3). This presentation highlights the strengths of the ongoing collaboration between QUT Creative industries Faculty and Queensland Academies, which not only provides successful extra curricular activities for gifted students towards a place in the International Baccalaureate Program, but also provides mentoring opportunities for tertiary students in their field of endeavor to assist with their own learning, and unique research opportunities for the Faculty as it focuses on excellence in arts, design and creative education and research. Education Queensland.(2011). Framework For Gifted Education Revised Edition 2011 (accessed Nov 19 2011)

Work health and safety and the criminal law in Australia

This paper analyses recent Australian debates about the use of the criminal law in work health and safety regulation. It argues that these debates have to be seen in the context of the historical development of work health and safety regulation in the United Kingdom and Australia. The first part of the paper shows that, since the late 19th century, contraventions against the Australian work health and safety statutes have not been regarded as 'really criminal', and have largely been addressed by informal measures and, since the 1980s, by administrative sanctions. When prosecutions have taken place, work health and safety issues have been individualised and decontextualised, so that defendants have been able to reduce their culpability in the eyes of the court. Significant legal barriers have undermined the use of the crime of gross negligence manslaughter against corporations and individuals. The second part of the paper analyses recent debates about restructuring gross negligence manslaughter and bolstering the 'criminality' of offences under the work health and safety statutes. It argues that the latter debate has been constrained by the historical forces examined in the first part of the paper, and that the current position, embodied in the recently harmonised Work Health and Safety Acts, favours attempting to recriminalise the work health and safety legislation. The debate about reforming gross negligence manslaughter has stalled.

Caribbean schooling and the social divide – what will it take to change neo-colonial education systems?

When Professor N’Dri Assie-Lumumba asked me to reflect on what ‘ubuntu’ might mean in the context of education in the Caribbean, the first thing that came to mind was an image of pit latrines in impoverished primary schools in poor countries. In this essay, I argue that the continuing problem of pit latrines in these schools symbolizes the failure to solve the problem of poverty, neglect and inadequate provision of education services for people at the bottom rungs of Caribbean and other decolonising societies. I ask what implications the ‘ubuntu’ concept chosen for the 2015 CIES conference would have for reforming education in a direction that combines global reform, ethics and good sense. Educators rarely consider toilets when they are thinking about what is needed to reform the system. But talking about toilets draws attention to the entrenched inequity that persists in education systems across the globe – an inequity that forces many schools and young people to remain at the base of the social pyramid, and that perpetuates a dysfunctional model of education holding back many societies. Starting from the twin images of social pyramids and toilets, we can ask some pointed questions about education reform.

Enhancing the auditor's report : to what extent is there support for the IAASB's proposed changes?

This article outlines proposed reforms to auditor reporting currently being considered by the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (IAASB), and other key national and transnational standard-setters and regulatory bodies. It adds to recent academic contributions on reforming the auditor’s report by analyzing the 165 stakeholder responses to the IAASB’s 2012 Invitation to Comment: Improving the Auditor’s Report to determine levels of support for the IAASB’s proposed reforms, and the differences, if any, between the views of various respondents based on stakeholder groups (e.g. audit and assurance firms, users, preparers, regulators, etc.) and regional classifications. Guided by insights from communication theory, our results show the levels of stakeholder support for the IAASB’s proposed reforms addressing auditors’ expectations, information and communication gaps are mixed. The strongest overall support was for enhanced auditor reporting on other information attached to, or intended to be read with, the financial statements, and the least supported initiative was including additional information in the auditor’s report about the auditor’s judgements and processes. Whilst overall there is generally consensus across both stakeholder groups and regions concerning the various questions investigated, we highlight where statistically significant differences between groups do exist. Notably, North American respondents were less likely to support a number of the IAASB’s proposed reforms than their counterparts from other regions.

Antisocial personality disorder and therapeutic justice court programs

It has become commonplace for courts to supervise an offender as part of the sentencing process. Many of them have Anti Social Personality Disorder (ASPD). The focus of this article is how the work of specialist and/or problem solving courts can be informed by the insights of the psychology profession into the best practice in the treatment and management of people with ASPD. It is a legitimate purpose of legal work to consider and improve the well-being of the participants in the legal process. Programs designed specifically to deal with those with ASPD could be incorporated into existing Drug Courts, or implemented separately by courts to aid with reforming offenders with ASPD and in managing the re-entry of offenders into the community as part of their sentence. For the success of this initiative on the part of the court, ASPD will need to be specifically diagnosed and treated. Close co-operation between courts and psychologists is required to improve the effectiveness of court programs to treat people with ASPD and to evaluate their success.

The combination of plant-expressed cellobiohydrolase and low dosages of cellulases for the hydrolysis of sugar cane bagasse

Background The expression of biomass-degrading enzymes (such as cellobiohydrolases) in transgenic plants has the potential to reduce the costs of biomass saccharification by providing a source of enzymes to supplement commercial cellulase mixtures. Cellobiohydrolases are the main enzymes in commercial cellulase mixtures. In the present study, a cellobiohydrolase was expressed in transgenic corn stover leaf and assessed as an additive for two commercial cellulase mixtures for the saccharification of pretreated sugar cane bagasse obtained by different processes. Results Recombinant cellobiohydrolase in the senescent leaves of transgenic corn was extracted using a simple buffer with no concentration step. The extract significantly enhanced the performance of Celluclast 1.5 L (a commercial cellulase mixture) by up to fourfold on sugar cane bagasse pretreated at the pilot scale using a dilute sulfuric acid steam explosion process compared to the commercial cellulase mixture on its own. Also, the extracts were able to enhance the performance of Cellic CTec2 (a commercial cellulase mixture) up to fourfold on a range of residues from sugar cane bagasse pretreated at the laboratory (using acidified ethylene carbonate/ethylene glycol, 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium chloride, and ball-milling) and pilot (dilute sodium hydroxide and glycerol/hydrochloric acid steam explosion) scales. We have demonstrated using tap water as a solvent (under conditions that mimic an industrial process) extraction of about 90% recombinant cellobiohydrolase from senescent, transgenic corn stover leaf that had minimal tissue disruption. Conclusions The accumulation of recombinant cellobiohydrolase in senescent, transgenic corn stover leaf is a viable strategy to reduce the saccharification cost associated with the production of fermentable sugars from pretreated biomass. We envisage an industrial-scale process in which transgenic plants provide both fibre and biomass-degrading enzymes for pretreatment and enzymatic hydrolysis, respectively.

Searching for people using semantic soft biometric descriptions

It is not uncommon to hear a person of interest described by their height, build, and clothing (i.e. type and colour). These semantic descriptions are commonly used by people to describe others, as they are quick to communicate and easy to understand. However such queries are not easily utilised within intelligent video surveillance systems, as they are difficult to transform into a representation that can be utilised by computer vision algorithms. In this paper we propose a novel approach that transforms such a semantic query into an avatar in the form of a channel representation that is searchable within a video stream. We show how spatial, colour and prior information (person shape) can be incorporated into the channel representation to locate a target using a particle-filter like approach. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance for locating a subject in video based on a description, achieving a relative performance improvement of 46.7% over the baseline. We also apply this approach to person re-detection, and show that the approach can be used to re-detect a person in a video steam without the use of person detection.

Becoming-topologies of education: Deformations, networks and the database effect

This article uses topological approaches to suggest that education is becoming-topological. Analyses presented in a recent double-issue of Theory, Culture & Society are used to demonstrate the utility of topology for education. In particular, the article explains education's topological character through examining the global convergence of education policy, testing and the discursive ranking of systems, schools and individuals in the promise of reforming education through the proliferation of regimes of testing at local and global levels that constitute a new form of governance through data. In this conceptualisation of global education policy changes in the form and nature of testing combine with it the emergence of global policy network to change the nature of the local (national, regional, school and classroom) forces that operate through the ‘system’. While these forces change, they work through a discursivity that produces disciplinary effects, but in a different way. This new–old disciplinarity, or ‘database effect’, is here represented through a topological approach because of its utility for conceiving education in an increasingly networked world.

Improving factory performance using an integrated sugar factory model

A whole of factory model of a raw sugar factory was developed in SysCAD software to assess and improve factory operations. The integrated sugar factory model ‘Sugar-SysCAD’ includes individual models for milling, heating and clarification, evaporation, crystallisation, steam cycle, sugar dryer and process and injection water circuits. These individual unit operation models can be either used as standalone models to optimise the unit operation or in the integrated mode to provide more accurate prediction of the effects of changes in any part of the process on the outputs of the whole factory process. Using the integrated sugar factory model, the effect of specific process operations can be understood and practical solutions can be determined to address process problems. The paper presents two factory scenarios to show the capabilities of the whole of factory model.

The effects of gas and air flow distributions on the performance of the Farleigh No. 3 boiler

As more raw sugar factories become involved in the manufacture of by-products and cogeneration, bagasse is becoming an increasingly valuable commodity. However, in most factories, most of the bagasse produced is used to generate steam in relatively old and inefficient boilers. Efficient bagasse fired boilers are a high capital cost item and the cost of supplying the steam required to run a sugar factory by other means is prohibitive. For many factories a more realistic way to reduce bagasse consumption is to increase the efficiency of existing boilers. The Farleigh No. 3 boiler is a relatively old low efficiency boiler. Like many in the industry, the performance of this boiler has been adversely affected by uneven gas and air flow distributions and air heater leaks. The combustion performance and efficiency of this boiler have been significantly improved by making the gas and air flow distributions through the boiler more uniform and repairing the air heater. The estimated bagasse savings easily justify the cost of the boiler improvements.

Control of Ship Roll Motion

The undesirable effects of roll motion of ships (rocking about the longitudinal axis) became noticeable in the mid-nineteenth century when significant changes were introduced to the design of ships as a result of sails being replaced by steam engines and the arrangement being changed from broad to narrow hulls. The combination of these changes led to lower transverse stability (lower restoring moment for a given angle of roll) with the consequence of larger roll motion. The increase in roll motion and its effect on cargo and human performance lead to the development several control devices that aimed at reducing and controlling roll motion. The control devices most commonly used today are fin stabilizers, rudder, anti-roll tanks, and gyrostabilizers. The use of different types of actuators for control of ship roll motion has been amply demonstrated for over 100 years. Performance, however, can still fall short of expectations because of difficulties associated with control system design, which have proven to be far from trivial due to fundamental performance limitations and large variations of the spectral characteristics of wave-induced roll motion. This short article provides an overview of the fundamentals of control design for ship roll motion reduction. The overview is limited to the most common control devices.

We need to fund more than just science priorities for Australia’s future

Australia's Science and Research Priorities focus on activating STEM researchers (science, technology, engineering, maths). In this article in The Conversation, Professor Marcus Foth argues that we need to fund more than just science priorities for Australia’s future.

Suomen Taideyhdistyksestä Ateneumiin : Fredrik Cygnaeus, Carl Gustaf Estlander ja taidekokoelman roolit

From the Finnish Art Society to the Ateneum: Fredrik Cygnaeus, Carl Gustaf Estlander and the Roles of the Art Collection My dissertation deals with the Finnish Art Society and the development of its collection in the evolving field of the visual arts from the foundation of the society in 1846 to its exhibition in the Ateneum, a palace of art that was opened to the public in Helsinki in 1888. The main questions that it addresses are why and how the collection came into being, what its purpose was and what kind of future prospects were projected for it in the rapidly evolving field of the visual arts. I have examined the subject of my study from the perspectives of institutional history, the organisation of the field of art and the history of art collections. The prisms through which I have viewed the subject are the history of museums in Europe, the written history of art, the art association movement and the organisation of art education in relation to an ideology of enlightenment. Thus the activities of the Finnish Art Society are here mirrored for the first time in a wider context and the history of its collection located on the map of European collections. My research shows that the history of the collection of the Finnish Art Society initially depended on certain players in the visual arts and their particular leanings. The most important of these custodians were two long-serving chairmen of the society, Fredrik Cygnaeus (1807 1881) and Carl Gustaf Estlander (1834 1910). When the foundations for art activities had been laid through the establishment of the society, Cygnaeus and Estlander began to plan how the field of art might be moulded so as to improve the level of training for artists and to improve the quality of the collections and the opportunities for their display. Cygnaeus campaigned for the establishment of the Finnish Fine Arts Academy, while Estlander saw opportunities to combine the visual and applied arts. The findings of my research bring new information about the history of the collection of the Finnish Art Society, its profile, the professional abilities of those who were mainly responsible for developing it and the relationship between it and plans for reforming art education. The major findings are connected with the position of the collection in the field of art at different stages of its development. Despite the central monopoly of the Finnish Art Society in the field of art, the position of the collection was closely bound up with leading players in the field of art and their personal interests. This subservience also created an impediment to its full-blown enhancement and purposeful profiling, and it remained evident for a long time when the collection was seeking its own place in the Finnish art world.