Perception Quality Evaluation with Visual and Infrared Cameras in Challenging Environmental Conditions

This work aims to contribute to the reliability and integrity of perceptual systems of unmanned ground vehicles (UGV). A method is proposed to evaluate the quality of sensor data prior to its use in a perception system by utilising a quality metric applied to heterogeneous sensor data such as visual and infrared camera images. The concept is illustrated specifically with sensor data that is evaluated prior to the use of the data in a standard SIFT feature extraction and matching technique. The method is then evaluated using various experimental data sets that were collected from a UGV in challenging environmental conditions, represented by the presence of airborne dust and smoke. In the first series of experiments, a motionless vehicle is observing a ’reference’ scene, then the method is extended to the case of a moving vehicle by compensating for its motion. This paper shows that it is possible to anticipate degradation of a perception algorithm by evaluating the input data prior to any actual execution of the algorithm.

Physiological tolerance times while wearing explosive ordnance disposal protective clothing in simulated environmental extremes

Explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) technicians are required to wear protective clothing to protect themselves from the threat of overpressure, fragmentation, impact and heat. The engineering requirements to minimise these threats results in an extremely heavy and cumbersome clothing ensemble that increases the internal heat generation of the wearer, while the clothing’s thermal properties reduce heat dissipation. This study aimed to evaluate the heat strain encountered wearing EOD protective clothing in simulated environmental extremes across a range of differing work intensities. Eight healthy males [age 25±6 years (mean ± sd), height 180±7 cm, body mass 79±9 kg, V˙O2max 57±6 ml.kg−1.min−1] undertook nine trials while wearing an EOD9 suit (weighing 33.4 kg). The trials involved walking on a treadmill at 2.5, 4 and 5.5 km⋅h−1 at each of the following environmental conditions, 21, 30 and 37°C wet bulb globe temperature (WBGT) in a randomised controlled crossover design. The trials were ceased if the participants’ core temperature reached 39°C, if heart rate exceeded 90% of maximum, if walking time reached 60 minutes or due to fatigue/nausea. Tolerance times ranged from 10–60 minutes and were significantly reduced in the higher walking speeds and environmental conditions. In a total of 15 trials (21%) participants completed 60 minutes of walking; however, this was predominantly at the slower walking speeds in the 21°C WBGT environment. Of the remaining 57 trials, 50 were ceased, due to attainment of 90% maximal heart rate. These near maximal heart rates resulted in moderate-high levels of physiological strain in all trials, despite core temperature only reaching 39°C in one of the 72 trials.

The enemy of music : modeling the behavior of a cultural industry in crisis

The purpose of this explorative study is to contribute to the understanding of current music industry dynamics. The situation is undeniably quite dramatic: Since the turn of the millennium, the global music industry has declined by $ US 6.2 billion in value—a fall of 16.3% in constant dollar terms. IFPI, the trade organization representing the international recording industry, identifies a number of exogenous factors as the main drivers of the downturn. This article suggests that other factors, in addition to those identified by IFPI, may have contributed to the current difficulties. A model is presented which indicates that business strategies which were designed to cope with the challenging business environment have reduced product diversity, damaged profitability, and contributed to the problem they were intended to solve.

Cycling for transport and recreation : associations with socio-economic position, environmental perceptions, and psychological disposition

OBJECTIVE Interest is growing in promoting utility cycling (i.e., for transport) as a means of incorporating daily physical activity (PA) into people’s lives, but little is known about correlates of utility cycling. Our primary aim was to examine cross-sectional relationships between socio-economic characteristics, neighborhood environment perceptions and psychological disposition with utility cycling (with or without additional recreational cycling). A secondary aim was to compare these relationships with those for recreation-only cycling. METHOD Baseline survey data (2007) from 10,233 participants in HABITAT, a multilevel longitudinal study of PA, sedentary behavior, and health in Brisbane adults aged 40-65 years, were analysed using multinomial regression modelling. RESULTS Greater income, habitual PA, and positive beliefs about PA were associated with utility and recreation-only cycling (p<0.05). Always having vehicle access and not in the labor force were associated with recreation-only cycling (p<0.05). Some or no vehicle access, part-time employment, and perceived environmental factors (little crime, few cul-de-sacs, nearby transport and recreational destinations) were associated with utility cycling (p<0.05). CONCLUSION Our findings suggest differences in associations between socio-economic, neighborhood perceptions and psychological factors and utility and recreation-only cycling in Brisbane residents aged 40-65 years. Tailored approaches appear to be required to promote utility and recreational cycling.

The environmental enigma : why do producers professing stewardship continue to practice poor natural resource management?

Despite a wide acceptance that primary producers in Australia subscribe to a stewardship ethic, land and water degradation remains an ongoing problem. Recent calculations suggest that the economic cost of Australia's environmental degradation is amounting to more than $A3.5 billion a year with an estimated cost of managing (not overcoming) problems of salinity, acidification, soil erosion totalling $A60 billion over the next decade. This paper argues that stewardship itself is an unsatisfactory concept when looking to landholders to respond to environmental problems, for rarely does the attitude of stewardship translate into behaviours of improving natural resource management practices on private land. Whilst there is some acceptance of the environmental problem among primary producers, a number of external constraints may also impede the uptake of conservation-orientated practices. In light of the prevailing accounts of poor adoption of sustainable practices a number of policy options are reviewed in this paper, including formal regional partnerships, regulatory frameworks and market-based measures. It is concluded that the contentious nature of some of these new opportunities for change will mean that any moves aimed at reversing environmental degradation in Australia will be slow.

Climate Change and the Resilience of Commodity Food Production in Australia

The current view of Australian state and national governments about the effects of climate change on agriculture is that farmers – through the adoption of mitigation and adaptation strategies – will remain resilient, and agricultural production will continue to expand. The assumption is that neoliberalism will provide the best ‘free market’ options for climate change mitigation and adaptation in farming. In contrast, we argue that neoliberalism will increase the move towards productivis (‘high-tech’) agriculture – the very system that has caused major environmental damage to the Australian continent. High-tech farming is highly dependent upon access to water and fossil fuels, both of which would appear to be the main limits to production in future decades. Productivist agriculture is a system highly reliant upon fertilizers and fuels that are derived from the petrochemical industry, and are currently increasing in cost as the price of oil increases.

Mining universities : can we count on the integrity of research coming out of today's mining-funded tertiary sector?

Australia's economic growth and national identity have been widely celebrated as being founded on the nation's natural resources. With the golden era of pastoralism fading into the distance, a renewed love affair with primary industries has been much lauded, particularly by purveyors of neoliberal ideology. The considerable wealth generated by resource extraction has, despite its environmental and social record, proved seductive to the university sector. The mining industry is one of a number of industries and sectors (alongside pharmaceutical, chemical and biotechnological) that is increasingly courting Australian universities. These new public-private alliances are often viewed as the much-needed cash cow to bridge the public funding shortfall in the tertiary sector. However, this trend also raises profound questions about the capacity of public good institutions, as universities were once assumed to be, to maintain institutional independence and academic freedoms.

Supermarkets’ governance of the agri-food supply chain : is the ‘corporate-environmental’ food regime evident in Australia?

This article investigates the extent to which the purported greening of food retailing and consumption in Australia is consistent with the development of a corporate-environmental food regime. Recent developments in food regime theory, particularly the concept of an emerging third food regime (the so-called ‘corporate-environmental food regime’), provide a useful organizing framework for understanding recent agri-restructuring trends. We find that, while a globally based, third food regime is becoming more apparent, the attributes that relate to corporate retail-driven greening of the supply chain are less evident within Australia’s domestic market than in its EU counterparts. However, there is some evidence that Australia’s export market is subject to some degree of ‘greening at a distance’ due to private regulations imposed by supermarkets overseas. We argue that while broader agri-restructuring trends may be evident at an international level, elements of greening specific to national contexts are important for determining the trajectory of any third food regime.

The Global Financial Crisis : Neo-Liberalism, Social Democracy, and Criminology

This chapter begins with a discussion of the economic, political, and social context of the recent global financial crisis, which casts into relief current boundaries of criminology, permeated and made fluid in criminology's recent cultural turn. This cultural turn has reinvigorated criminology, providing new objects of analysis and rich and thick descriptions of the relationship between criminal justice and the conditions of life in ‘late modernity’. Yet in comparison with certain older traditions that sought to articulate criminal justice issues with a wider politics of contestation around political economies and social welfare policies of different polities, many of the current leading culturalist accounts tend in their globalized convergences to produce a strangely decontextualized picture in which we are all subject to the zeitgeist of a unitary ‘late modernity’ which does not differ between, for example, social democratic and neo-liberal polities, let alone allow for the widespread persistence of the pre-modern. It is argued that that contrary to this globalizing trend there are signs within criminology that life is being breathed back into social democratic and penal welfare concerns, habitus, and practices. The chapter discusses three of these signs: the emergence of neo-liberalism as a subject of criminology; a developing comparative penology which recognizes differences in the political economies of capitalist states and evinces a renewed interest in inequality; and a nascent revolt against the ‘generative grammar’, ‘pathological disciplinarities’, and ‘imaginary penalities’ of neoliberal managerialism.

The mirror manoeuvre : telling the same story twice

The emerging field of ecopsychology is marked by two theoretical concerns which can be seen as mirror images of each other. One is the concern with what humans need, psychologically, from the non-human natural world (e.g. Wolsko & Lindberg 2013). The other is what nature needs from us (e.g. Swim 2013). Ecocriticism has been exploring these questions for at least two decades, but ecocritical theory examines ways of reading texts rather than ways of writing them (Bate 2000; Buell 2001; Garrard 2012). Undertaking theoretically-informed “creative manoeuvres”, and reflecting and reporting on the results, is one way for practice-led researchers in the field of creative writing to progress the knowledge claims of our discipline. This paper describes an ecowriting practice experiment based on the premise that specific techniques of narrative fiction writing can deepen reader engagement with ecopsychology’s twin concerns, and help motivate ecological action. Exploring this premise is time-critical given the current environmental crisis (Rust & Totton 2012), and emerging evidence that contemporary modes of representing the non-human natural world fail to elicit activist responses (Crompton & Kasser 2009; Joffe 2008). In the practice experiment reported here, a unique reading experience has been constructed such that the reader encounters from two different perspectives, through two different novels, a single story of humans benefiting from non-destructive interactions with non-human nature. This paper argues that the two novels create a complex and intense relationship between reader and story which generates specific psychological effects, and ultimately demands an activist response.

CSR communication and legitimacy : an institutional and rhetorical perspective

This study drew on the notions of institutional theory, legitimacy, and rhetoric, and explored propositions drawn from these concepts to consider the why and how of corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication. In doing so, this thesis found that there was often a disconnect between why the organisations were communicating about CSR activities in their reports and how the organisations were communicating about these activities.

Sensitive methods for studying the environmental performance of protective coatings

The safe working lifetime of a structure in a corrosive or other harsh environment is frequently not limited by the material itself but rather by the integrity of the coating material. Advanced surface coatings are usually crosslinked organic polymers such as epoxies and polyurethanes which must not shrink, crack or degrade when exposed to environmental extremes. While standard test methods for environmental durability of coatings have been devised, the tests are structured more towards determining the end of life rather than in anticipation of degradation. We have been developing prognostic tools to anticipate coating failure by using a fundamental understanding of their degradation behaviour which, depending on the polymer structure, is mediated through hydrolytic or oxidation processes. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) is a widely-used laboratory technique for the analysis of polymer degradation and with the development of portable FTIR spectrometers, new opportunities have arisen to measure polymer degradation non-destructively in the field. For IR reflectance sampling, both diffuse (scattered) and specular (direct) reflections can occur. The complexity in these spectra has provided interesting opportunities to study surface chemical and physical changes during paint curing, service abrasion and weathering, but has often required the use of advanced statistical analysis methods such as chemometrics to discern these changes. Results from our studies using this and related techniques and the technical challenges that have arisen will be presented.

Accounting for forests in Fiji : the experience of Future Forests (Fiji) Limited

"in a world which is experiencing unprecedented deforestation and widespread global environmental threats there is something intuitively right about planting a tree" (Future Forests (Fiji) Limited) The above quote demonstrates that even in the wake of global environmental crisis that hope still remains and that humans can still control their destiny. This opportunity to effect positive environmental change is one of the main aims of the South Pacific Stock Exchange’s (SPSE) most recent publicly listed company: Future Forest (Fiji) Limited. Incorporated in 2004 and listed on SPSE in 2011, the company is Fiji’s first large-scale commercial hardwood forest plantation and nursery. Future Forest (FF) is the only company listed on the SPSE with biological assets or “living assets.” The accounting standard for biological assets is IAS 41: Agriculture. This standard prescribes the use of fair value as the basis of valuation. While a more relevant method of valuation, the application of fair value accounting can be more costly and burdensome for companies in developing economies (White 2008). In line with the journal’s theme of agriculture, this article explores the issues, challenges and potential benefits involved in applying fair value accounting for biological assets in a developing economy such as Fiji using the case of Future Forest (Fiji) Limited.

A preliminary study into the environmental and economic consequences of a sugar factory depithing operation

Bagasse stockpile operations have the potential to lead to adverse environmental and social impacts. Dust releases can cause occupational health and safety concerns for factory workers and dust emissions impact on the surrounding community. Preliminary modelling showed that bagasse depithing would likely reduce the environmental risks, particularly dust emissions, associated with large-scale bagasse stockpiling operations. Dust emission properties were measured and used for dispersion modelling with favourable outcomes. Modelling showed a 70% reduction in peak ground level concentrations of PM10 dust (particles with an aerodynamic diameter less than 10 μm) from operations on depithed bagasse stockpiles compared to similar operations on stockpiles of whole bagasse. However, the costs of a depithing operation at a sugar factory were estimated to be approximately $2.1 million in capital expenditure to process 100 000 t/y of bagasse and operating costs were 200 000 p.a. The total capital cost for a 10 000 t/y operation was approximately $1.6 million. The cost of depithing based on a discounted cash flow analysis was $5.50 per tonne of bagasse for the 100 000 t/y scenario. This may make depithing prohibitively expensive in many situations if installed exclusively as a dust control measure.

Managing and analysing big audio data for environmental monitoring

Environmental monitoring is becoming critical as human activity and climate change place greater pressures on biodiversity, leading to an increasing need for data to make informed decisions. Acoustic sensors can help collect data across large areas for extended periods making them attractive in environmental monitoring. However, managing and analysing large volumes of environmental acoustic data is a great challenge and is consequently hindering the effective utilization of the big dataset collected. This paper presents an overview of our current techniques for collecting, storing and analysing large volumes of acoustic data efficiently, accurately, and cost-effectively.