Effective health communication in the mining industry

Historically, occupational health and safety has primarily presented as attempts to create a safer work environment for employees. The mining industry carries health and safety risks, often greater than other occupations. Whilst the mining industry is regulated by stringent workplace health and safety regulations, the very nature of the work and environmental influences expose employees to a greater number of injury risk factors than many other industries. The application of risk management techniques has resulted in a substantial decline in injury rates observed for mining operations in developed countries (Donoghue, 2004). This essential focus can be complemented by a more comprehensive approach to occupational health and safety that also supports the design and delivery of proactive health promotion programs...

Deep Raman spectroscopy for the non-invasive standoff detection of concealed chemical threat agents

Deep Raman spectroscopy has been utilized for the standoff detection of concealed chemical threat agents from a distance of 15 meters under real life background illumination conditions. By using combined time and space resolved measurements, various explosive precursors hidden in opaque plastic containers were identified non-invasively. Our results confirm that combined time and space resolved Raman spectroscopy leads to higher selectivity towards the sub-layer over the surface layer as well as enhanced rejection of fluorescence from the container surface when compared to standoff spatially offset Raman spectroscopy. Raman spectra that have minimal interference from the packaging material and good signal-to-noise ratio were acquired within 5 seconds of measurement time. A new combined time and space resolved Raman spectrometer has been designed with nanosecond laser excitation and gated detection, making it of lower cost and complexity than picosecond-based laboratory systems.

PySSM : a Python module for Bayesian inference of linear Gaussian state space models

PySSM is a Python package that has been developed for the analysis of time series using linear Gaussian state space models (SSM). PySSM is easy to use; models can be set up quickly and efficiently and a variety of different settings are available to the user. It also takes advantage of scientific libraries Numpy and Scipy and other high level features of the Python language. PySSM is also used as a platform for interfacing between optimised and parallelised Fortran routines. These Fortran routines heavily utilise Basic Linear Algebra (BLAS) and Linear Algebra Package (LAPACK) functions for maximum performance. PySSM contains classes for filtering, classical smoothing as well as simulation smoothing.

Communication, Cultural and Media Studies : The Key Concepts (4th Edition)

This fourth edition of Communication, Cultural and Media Studies: The Key Concepts is an indispensible guide to the most important terms in the field. It offers clear explanations of the key concepts, exploring their origins, what they’re used for and why they provoke discussion. The author provides a multi-disciplinary explanation and assessment of the key concepts, from ‘authorship’ to ‘censorship’; ‘creative industries’ to ‘network theory’; ‘complexity’ to ‘visual culture’. The new edition of this classic text includes: * Over 200 entries including 50 new entries * All entries revised, rewritten and updated * Coverage of recent developments in the field * Insight into interactive media and the knowledge-based economy * A fully updated bibliography with 400 items and suggestions for further reading throughout the text

Place and Space: Community in the Internet Economy and What This Will Mean for Property

By 2020 Australia‟s National Digital Economy Strategy aims to increase household online participation and engage 12 per cent of all employees in teleworking arrangements. Achieving these goals is generally perceived as positive due to the reduced impact on the natural environment from less use of transport. However, this also will enable greater flexibility as to where people live and thus will impact upon the maintenance and formation of communities and on property use. This paper commences by clarifying what is Australia‟s internet economy before highlighting the impact of the internet on community formation and maintenance. The paper concludes by identifying what the achievement of these goals will mean for property use in the future.

Doing blog research

Blogs and other online platforms for personal writing such as LiveJournal have been of interest to researchers across the social sciences and humanities for a decade now. Although growth in the uptake of blogging has stalled somewhat since the heyday of blogs in the early 2000s, blogging continues to be a major genre of Internet-based communication. Indeed, at the same time that mass participation has moved on to Facebook, Twitter, and other more recent communication phenomena, what has been left behind by the wave of mass adoption is a slightly smaller but all the more solidly established blogosphere of engaged and committed participants. Blogs are now an accepted part of institutional, group, and personal communications strategies (Bruns and Jacobs, 2006); in style and substance, they are situated between the more static information provided by conventional Websites and Webpages and the continuous newsfeeds provided through Facebook and Twitter updates. Blogs provide a vehicle for authors (and their commenters) to think through given topics in the space of a few hundred to a few thousand words – expanding, perhaps, on shorter tweets, and possibly leading to the publication of more fully formed texts elsewhere. Additionally, they are also a very flexible medium: they readily provide the functionality to include images, audio, video, and other additional materials – as well as the fundamental tool of blogging, the hyperlink itself. Indeed, the role of the link in blogs and blog posts should not be underestimated. Whatever the genre and topic that individual bloggers engage in, for the most part blogging is used to provide timely updates and commentary – and it is typical for such material to link both to relevant posts made by other bloggers, and to previous posts by the present author, both to background material which provides readers with further information about the blogger’s current topic, and to news stories and articles which the blogger found interesting or worthy of critique. Especially where bloggers are part of a larger community of authors sharing similar interests or views (and such communities are often indicated by the presence of yet another type of link – in blogrolls, often in a sidebar on the blog site, which list the blogger’s friends or favourites), then, the reciprocal writing and linking of posts often constitutes an asynchronous, distributed conversation that unfolds over the course of days, weeks, and months. Research into blogs is interesting for a variety of reasons, therefore. For one, a qualitative analysis of one or several blogs can reveal the cognitive and communicative processes through which individual bloggers define their online identity, position themselves in relation to fellow bloggers, frame particular themes, topics and stories, and engage with one another’s points of view. It may also shed light on how such processes may differ across different communities of interest, perhaps in correlation with the different societal framing and valorisation of specific areas of interest, with the socioeconomic backgrounds of individual bloggers, or with other external or internal factors. Such qualitative research now looks back on a decade-long history (for key collections, see Gurak, et al., 2004; Bruns and Jacobs, 2006; also see Walker Rettberg, 2008) and has recently shifted also to specifically investigate how blogging practices differ across different cultures (Russell and Echchaibi, 2009). Other studies have also investigated the practices and motivations of bloggers in specific countries from a sociological perspective, through large-scale surveys (e.g. Schmidt, 2009). Blogs have also been directly employed within both K-12 and higher education, across many disciplines, as tools for reflexive learning and discussion (Burgess, 2006).

Ad hoc innovation by users of social networks : the case of Twitter

Generic, flexible social media spaces such as Facebook and Twitter constitute an increasingly important element in our overall media repertoires. They provide a technological basis for instant and world-wide, ad hoc, many-to-many communication, and their effect on global communication patterns has already been highlighted. The short-messaging platform Twitter, for example, caters for uses ranging from interpersonal and quasi-private phatic exchanges to ‘ambient journalism’: ad hoc new reporting and dissemination as major events break. Many such uses have themselves emerged through user-driven processes: even standard Twitter conventions such as the @reply (to publicly address a fellow user) or the #hashtag(to collect related messages in an easily accessible space) are user inventions, in fact, and were incorporated into Twitter’s own infrastructure only subsequently. This demonstrates the substantial potential of social, user-led innovation in social media spaces.

Redland city youth and public space report : provisions for good practice

Written for Redland City Council in collaboration with the Capalaba Stakeholders Group. The provisions detailed in this report constitute a protocol agreement developed through the Capalaba Stakeholders Group between 2009 and 2011 around young people and public spaces in Redland City, Queensland. These provisions include agreed principles, standards and responses to tensions or unacceptable behaviour, how various tensions and problems can be resolved in constructive ways and how people, including young people can work together to make a public or community accessed space safe and accessible. It is based on the recognition that young people are part of the community and that strategies to resolve tensions that arise should be inclusive and employ a mixed methods approach.

Field portable time resolved SORS sensor for the identification of concealed hazards

Raman spectroscopy, when used in spatially offset mode, has become a potential tool for the identification of explosives and other hazardous substances concealed in opaque containers. The molecular fingerprinting capability of Raman spectroscopy makes it an attractive tool for the unambiguous identification of hazardous substances in the field. Additionally, minimal sample preparation is required compared with other techniques. We report a field portable time resolved Raman sensor for the detection of concealed chemical hazards in opaque containers. The new sensor uses a pulsed nanosecond laser source in conjunction with an intensified CCD detector. The new sensor employs a combination of time and space resolved Raman spectroscopy to enhance the detection capability. The new sensor can identify concealed hazards by a single measurement without any chemometric data treatments.

Studying Mobile Media : Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone

The iPhone represents an important moment in both the short history of mobile media and the long history of cultural technologies. Like the Walkman of the 1980s, it marks a juncture in which notions about identity, individualism, lifestyle and sociality require rearticulation. This book explores not only the iPhone’s particular characteristics, uses and "affects," but also how the "iPhone moment" functions as a barometer for broader patterns of change. In the iPhone moment, this study considers the convergent trajectories in the evolution of digital and mobile culture, and their implications for future scholarship. Through the lens of the iPhone—as a symbol, culture and a set of material practices around contemporary convergent mobile media—the essays collected here explore the most productive theoretical and methodological approaches for grasping media practice, consumer culture and networked communication in the twenty-first century.

A Context Space Model for Detecting Anomalous Behaviour in Video Surveillance

Having a good automatic anomalous human behaviour detection is one of the goals of smart surveillance systems’ domain of research. The automatic detection addresses several human factor issues underlying the existing surveillance systems. To create such a detection system, contextual information needs to be considered. This is because context is required in order to correctly understand human behaviour. Unfortunately, the use of contextual information is still limited in the automatic anomalous human behaviour detection approaches. This paper proposes a context space model which has two benefits: (a) It provides guidelines for the system designers to select information which can be used to describe context; (b)It enables a system to distinguish between different contexts. A comparative analysis is conducted between a context-based system which employs the proposed context space model and a system which is implemented based on one of the existing approaches. The comparison is applied on a scenario constructed using video clips from CAVIAR dataset. The results show that the context-based system outperforms the other system. This is because the context space model allows the system to considering knowledge learned from the relevant context only.

"The greatest harbour in the world" : Sydney Harbour as a contested space in Australian culture

It is a matter of public record that the former Prime Minister of Australia, the Honourable Paul Keating, upset certain Australian architects with his intervention into the redevelopment of the 22-hectare “Barangaroo” site on Sydney Harbour. While Keating’s intervention continues to provide engaging theatre for Sydney residents the debate is also an interesting expression of the narrative of contestation that has been played out historically about the waters of Sydney Harbour. From a cultural studies perspective, the Harbour, and the Sydney Harbour Bridge, has been for many years a political and imaginative space that captures a diversity of local and national preoccupations. Keating’s announcement that planners have a “once-in-200-year opportunity to call a halt to the kind of encroachments we have seen in the past” is in fact another moment in the long history of disputation over the impact of the man-made environment on the natural landform in this area. This paper addresses the spaces of Sydney Harbour as represented in recent debates and in writing and film from previous decades. The argument suggests that the Harbour is a complex site of public and private enactment that is played out in a diverse range of cultural representations. In particular, the paper notes the work of Michel de Certeau on the mythic qualities of certain spaces in relation to the space of the Harbour. ‘The Greatest Harbour in the World’ argues that the Harbour, and the Bridge, fulfils a particular historical and cultural function that gives this space a set of meanings that are well beyond the typical parameters of urban development.

Computationally efficient methods for solving time-variable-order time-space fractional reaction-diffusion equation

Fractional differential equations are becoming more widely accepted as a powerful tool in modelling anomalous diffusion, which is exhibited by various materials and processes. Recently, researchers have suggested that rather than using constant order fractional operators, some processes are more accurately modelled using fractional orders that vary with time and/or space. In this paper we develop computationally efficient techniques for solving time-variable-order time-space fractional reaction-diffusion equations (tsfrde) using the finite difference scheme. We adopt the Coimbra variable order time fractional operator and variable order fractional Laplacian operator in space where both orders are functions of time. Because the fractional operator is nonlocal, it is challenging to efficiently deal with its long range dependence when using classical numerical techniques to solve such equations. The novelty of our method is that the numerical solution of the time-variable-order tsfrde is written in terms of a matrix function vector product at each time step. This product is approximated efficiently by the Lanczos method, which is a powerful iterative technique for approximating the action of a matrix function by projecting onto a Krylov subspace. Furthermore an adaptive preconditioner is constructed that dramatically reduces the size of the required Krylov subspaces and hence the overall computational cost. Numerical examples, including the variable-order fractional Fisher equation, are presented to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the approach.

Efficient preconditioning of the method of lines for solving nonlinear two-sided space-fractional diffusion equations

A standard method for the numerical solution of partial differential equations (PDEs) is the method of lines. In this approach the PDE is discretised in space using �finite di�fferences or similar techniques, and the resulting semidiscrete problem in time is integrated using an initial value problem solver. A significant challenge when applying the method of lines to fractional PDEs is that the non-local nature of the fractional derivatives results in a discretised system where each equation involves contributions from many (possibly every) spatial node(s). This has important consequences for the effi�ciency of the numerical solver. First, since the cost of evaluating the discrete equations is high, it is essential to minimise the number of evaluations required to advance the solution in time. Second, since the Jacobian matrix of the system is dense (partially or fully), methods that avoid the need to form and factorise this matrix are preferred. In this paper, we consider a nonlinear two-sided space-fractional di�ffusion equation in one spatial dimension. A key contribution of this paper is to demonstrate how an eff�ective preconditioner is crucial for improving the effi�ciency of the method of lines for solving this equation. In particular, we show how to construct suitable banded approximations to the system Jacobian for preconditioning purposes that permit high orders and large stepsizes to be used in the temporal integration, without requiring dense matrices to be formed. The results of numerical experiments are presented that demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.

Discussions in space : interactive urban screens for enhancing citizen engagement

Local governments struggle to engage time poor and seemingly apathetic citizens, as well as the city's young digital natives, the digital locals. Capturing the attention of this digitally literate community who are technology and socially savvy adds a new quality to the challenge of community engagement for urban planning. This project developed and tested a lightweight design intervention towards removing the hierarchy between those who plan the city and those who use it. The aim is to narrow this gap by enhancing people's experience of physical spaces with digital, civic technologies that are directly accessible within that space. The study's research informed the development of a public screen system called Discussions In Space (DIS). It facilitates a feedback platform about specific topics, e.g., a concrete urban planning project, and encourages direct, in-situ, real-time user responses via SMS and Twitter. The thesis presents the findings of deploying and integrating DIS in a wide range of public and urban environments, including the iconic urban screen at Federation Square in Melbourne, to explore the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) related challenges and implications. It was also deployed in conjunction with a major urban planning project in Brisbane to explore the system's opportunities and challenges of better engaging with Australia's new digital locals. Finally, the merits of the short-texted and ephemeral data generated by the system were evaluated in three focus groups with professional urban planners. DIS offers additional benefits for civic participation as it gives voice to residents who otherwise would not be easily heard. It also promotes a positive attitude towards local governments and gathers complementary information that is different than that captured by more traditional public engagement tools.