Parametric modelling for the efficient design of daylight strategies with complex geometries

Daylight devices are important components of any climate responsive façade system. But, the evolution of parametric CAD systems and digital fabrication has had an impact on architectural form so that regular forms are shifting to complex geometries. Architectural and engineering integration of daylight devices in envelopes with complex geometries is a challenge in terms of design and performance evaluation. The purpose of this paper is to assess daylight performance of a building with a climatic responsive envelope with complex geometry that integrates shading devices in the façade. The case study is based on the Esplanade buildings in Singapore. Climate-based day-light metrics such as Daylight Availability and Useful Daylight Illuminance are used. DIVA (daylight simulation), and Grasshopper (parametric analysis) plug-ins for Rhinoceros have been employed to examine the range of performance possibilities. Parameters such as dimension, inclination of the device, projected shadows and shape have been changed in order to maximize daylight availability and Useful Daylight Illuminance while minimizing glare probability. While orientation did not have a great impact on the results, aperture of the shading devices did, showing that shading devices with a projection of 1.75 m to 2.00 m performed best, achieving target lighting levels without issues of glare.

Aboriginality and the Northern Territory intervention

Architects and supporters of the Northern Territory Emergency Response (the intervention) mobilised a range of ideas about Aboriginality to introduce and justify the policy program. These representations link Aboriginality to abuse of Aboriginal children, establishing a debate about the nature and future of Aboriginality in a context that limits the discursive authority of Aboriginal people. Aboriginality is represented as savage and in need of settler-imposed control, and also primitive and in need of development. These constructions understand Aboriginality temporally, situating it in the past but providing moral justification for coercing Indigenous people into the settler present. Aboriginality is also constructed spatially in this discourse, with prescribed communities framed as the location of both authentic Aboriginality and of threatening disorder. The intervention is framed as extending settler authority over this troubling terrain, containing and redeeming Aboriginality through inclusion in the settler nation’s moral order.

Labour attraction and retention in rural and remote Queensland communities

Attracting and retaining a skilled labour force is a critical yet complex issue for rural and remote communities. This article reports the findings of a study investigating the current approaches to attraction and retention in two separate Australian regions. Building on previously developed models, this research analyses the roles employers and wider communities are playing, or potentially could play, in addressing issues that influence labour shortages. The findings of this research highlight the complexities of labour attraction and retention and emphasise the need for communities and businesses to work together to overcome labour shortages in rural and remote locations.

The innovation potential of living-labs to strengthen small and medium enterprises in regional Australia

The small and medium enterprise (SME) sector has been the major source of well-being and employment opportunities in regional Australia. Consequently, fostering the innovative capacity of SMEs in regions that are struggling to grow their economies and distribute the growth fairly while not degrading the environment has never been more important. While SMEs generally face more uncertainties in relation to resources (e.g. financial, human and social capital) when compared to larger businesses, collaborative, cuttingedge mechanisms to enhance innovation capabilities of regional SMEs are lacking. This paper responds to this gap and proposes a Living Laboratory – an open, multi-disciplinary and multi-stakeholder action research platform where innovations can be co-created, tested and evaluated in the every-day environment of SMEs – as a way to strengthen the SME sector in regional Australia.

The research lottery : the pressures on the Australian grant system

NHMRC Project Grants and ARC Discovery Grants are two of the major sources of funding for new ideas in Australian science. Many scientists rely on them for their job or the jobs of their staff. They are highly competitive with only around 1 in 5 applications winning funding. To increase the chances of winning funding, scientists spend a long time writing carefully crafted applications, generally at the sacrifice of their research output. And the pressures on the system and our scientists are only going to get worse.

Business Innovation and Disruption in Publishing

This is the first volume in a book series examining how organizations in the creative industries respond to disruptive change and how they themselves generate business innovations. The aspiration of this book series is to understand some of the common forces behind the disruptions occurring in so many creative industries today and identifying the most promising strategies and responses by organizations to create new value propositions, business models and business practices that can enable these industry participants to cope with and eventually thrive as their industries and sectors are transformed. The chapters included in the volume examine the processes of disruption and transformation due to the technology of the Internet, social forces driven by social media, the development of new portable digital devices with greater capabilities and smaller size, the decreasing costs of new information, and the creation of new business models and forms of intellectual property ownership rights for a digitized industry. The context for this volume is the publishing industries, understood as the industries for the publishing of fiction and non-fiction books, academic literature, consumer as well as trade magazines, and daily newspapers. This volume includes chapters by an internationally diverse array of media scholars whose chapters provide insights into these phenomena in Eastern Europe, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Portugal, Russia, and the United States, using different methodological frameworks including, but not limited to, surveys, in-depth interviews and multiple-case studies. One gap that this book series seeks to fill is that between the study of business innovation and disruption by innovation scholars largely based in business school settings and similar studies by scholarly experts from non-business school disciplines, including the broader social sciences (e.g. sociology, political science, economic geography) and creative industry based professional school disciplines (e.g. architecture, communications, design, film making, journalism, media studies, performing arts, photography and television). Future volumes of this book series will examine disruption and business innovation in the film, video and photography sectors (volume two), the music sector (volume three) and interactive entertainment (volume four), with subsequent volumes focusing on the most relevant developments in creative industry business innovation and disruption that emerge.

Crime, justice, and inequality : Oh Canada, where art thou?

Since Canada’s colonial beginnings, it has become increasingly riddled with classism, racism,sexism, and other damaging outcomes of structured social inequality. In 2006, however,many types of social injustice were turbo‐charged under the federal leadership of the Harper government. For example, a recent southern Ontario study shows that less than half of working people between the ages of 25 and 65 have full‐time jobs with benefits. The main objective of this paper is to critique the dominant Canadian political economic order and the pain and suffering it has caused for millions of people. Informed by left realism and other progressive ways of knowing, I also suggest some ways of turning the tide.

Rapid quantification of free cholesterol in tears using direct insertion/electron ionization-Mass spectrometry

Purpose. To establish a simple and rapid analytical method, based on direct insertion/electron ionization-mass spectrometry (DI/EI-MS), for measuring free cholesterol in tears from humans and rabbits. Methods. A stable-isotope dilution protocol employing DI/EI-MS in selected ion monitoring mode was developed and validated. It was used to quantify the free cholesterol content in human and rabbit tear extracts. Tears were collected from adult humans (n = 15) and rabbits (n = 10) and lipids extracted. Results. Screening, full-scan (m/z 40-600) DI/EI-MS analysis of crude tear extracts showed that diagnostic ions located in the mass range m/z 350 to 400 were those derived from free cholesterol, with no contribution from cholesterol esters. DI/EI-MS data acquired using selected ion monitoring (SIM) were analyzed for the abundance ratios of diagnostic ions with their stable isotope-labeled analogues arising from the D6-cholesterol internal standard. Standard curves of good linearity were produced and an on-probe limit of detection of 3 ng (at 3:1 signal to noise) and limit of quantification of 8 ng (at 10:1 signal to noise). The concentration of free cholesterol in human tears was 15 ± 6 μg/g, which was higher than in rabbit tears (10 ± 5 μg/g). Conclusions. A stable-isotope dilution DI/EI-SIM method for free cholesterol quantification without prior chromatographic separation was established. Using this method demonstrated that humans have higher free cholesterol levels in their tears than rabbits. This is in agreement with previous reports. This paper provides a rapid and reliable method to measure free cholesterol in small-volume clinical samples. © 2013 The Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology, Inc.

Surviving (thriving) in academia : feminist support networks and women ECRs

In this paper, we reflect upon our experiences and those of our peers as doctoral students and early career researchers in an Australian political science department. We seek to explain and understand the diverse ways that participating in an unofficial Feminist Reading Group in our department affected our experiences. We contend that informal peer support networks like reading groups do more than is conventionally assumed, and may provide important avenues for sustaining feminist research in times of austerity, as well as supporting and enabling women and emerging feminist scholars in academia. Participating in the group created a community of belonging and resistance, providing women with personal validation, information and material support, as well as intellectual and political resources to understand and resist our position within the often hostile spaces of the University. While these experiences are specific to our context, time and location, they signal that peer networks may offer critical political resources for responding to the ways that women’s bodies and concerns are marginalised in increasingly competitive and corporatised university environments.

Global Human Trafficking : Critical Issues and Contexts

Human trafficking has moved from relative obscurity to a major area of research, policy and teaching over the past ten years. Research has sprung from criminology, public policy, women’s and gender studies, sociology, anthropology, and law, but has been somewhat hindered by the failure of scholars to engage beyond their own disciplines and favoured methodologies. Recent research has begun to improve efforts to understand the causes of the problem, the experiences of victims, policy efforts, and their consequences in specific cultural and historical contexts. Global Human Trafficking: Critical issues and contexts foregrounds recent empirical work on human trafficking from an interdisciplinary, critical perspective. The collection includes classroom-friendly features, such as introductory chapters that provide essential background for understanding the trafficking literature, textboxes explaining key concepts, discussion questions for each chapter, and lists of additional resources, including films, websites, and additional readings for each chapter. The authors include both eminent and emerging scholars from around the world, drawn from law, anthropology, criminology, sociology, cultural studies, and political science and the book will be useful for undergraduate and graduate courses in these areas, as well as for scholars interested in trafficking.

Natural ventilation heuristics in high-rise residential buildings : evaluation and prediction

Complex behaviour of air flow in the buildings makes it difficult to predict. Consequently, architects use common strategies for designing buildings with adequate natural ventilation. However, each climate needs specific strategies and there are not many heuristics for subtropical climate in literature. Furthermore, most of these common strategies are based on low-rise buildings and their performance for high-rise buildings might be different due to the increase of the wind speed with increase in the height. This study uses Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to evaluate these rules of thumb for natural ventilation for multi-residential buildings in subtropical climate. Four design proposals for multi-residential towers with natural ventilation which were produced in intensive two days charrette were evaluated using CFD. The results show that all the buildings reach acceptable level of wind speed in living areas and poor amount of air flow in sleeping areas.

Australia’s first Pharmacist Immunisation Pilot - who did pharmacists inject?

The Queensland Pharmacist Immunisation Pilot is Australia’s first to allow pharmacists vaccination. The pilot ran between April 1st 2014 and August 31st 2014, with pharmacists administering influenza vaccination during the flu season. METHODS Participant demographics and previous influenza vaccination experiences were recorded using GuildCare software. Participants also completed a ‘post-vaccination satisfaction survey’ following their influenza vaccination. RESULTS A total of 11,475 participant records were analysed. Females accounted for 63% of participants, with the majority of participants aged between 45 – 64 years (53%). Overall, 49% of participants had been vaccinated before, the majority at a GP clinic (60%). Most participants reported receiving their previous influenza vaccination from a nurse (61%). Interestingly, 1% thought a pharmacist had administered their previous vaccination, while 7% were unsure which health professional had administer it. It was also of note that approximately 10% of all participants were eligible to receive a free vaccination from the National Immunisation Program, but still opted to receive their vaccine in a pharmacy. Over 8,000 participants took part in the post-vaccination survey, 93% were happy to receive their vaccination from a pharmacy in the future while 94% would recommend this service to other people. The remaining 7% and 6% respectively had omitted to fill in those questions. DISCUSSION Participants were overwhelmingly positive in their response to the pharmacist vaccination pilot. These findings have helped pave the way for expanding the scope of practice for pharmacists with the aim to increase vaccination rates across the state.