The effect of smoke-free policies on electronic gaming machine expenditure in Victoria, Australia

Objective: To examine the impact of smoke-free policies in Victorian gambling venues on electronic gaming machine (EGM) expenditure.

Method: Monthly EGM expenditure from July 1998 to December 2005, provided by the Victorian Commission for Gambling Regulation and the Office of the Liquor and Gambling Commissioner in South Australia, was analysed. The outcome measure was the ratio of monthly expenditure for Victoria to monthly expenditure in South Australia. Intervention analysis and autoregressive integrated moving average modelling were used to assess the impact of the smoke-free policy on expenditure.

Results: The smoke-free policy resulted in an abrupt, long-term decrease in the level of EGM expenditure. The mean level of monthly expenditure decreased by approximately 14%.

Conclusion: The smoke-free policy not only protects hospitality workers and patrons from exposure to secondhand smoke but has also had an impact on slowing gambling losses.

Choreographer-mathematician collaboration: developing machine segmentation techniques for motion capture analysis of dance

This paper/presentation focuses on the science of human movement, motion capture and cognition in action, and examines the necessity of choreographer-mathematician collaboration in developing appropriate analysis techniques.

Cutting choreography : redefining dance on screen

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Linear-motor based five-axis parallel machine for effective material processing

The aim of the work was to reduce the cost and improve the performance of five-axis machines. The main performance criteria were motion cycle-time and positioning accuracy/precision. A novel machine that utilizes the concept of parallel-kinematics and linear motor technology is proposed, designed, built and controlled for this sake.

Candidate working set strategy based SMO algorithm in support vector machine

Sequential minimal optimization (SMO) is quite an efficient algorithm for training the support vector machine. The most important step of this algorithm is the selection of the working set, which greatly affects the training speed. The feasible direction strategy for the working set selection can decrease the objective function, however, may augment to the total calculation for selecting the working set in each of the iteration. In this paper, a new candidate working set (CWS) Strategy is presented considering the cost on the working set selection and cache performance. This new strategy can select several greatest violating samples from Cache as the iterative working sets for the next several optimizing steps, which can improve the efficiency of the kernel cache usage and reduce the computational cost related to the working set selection. The results of the theory analysis and experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can reduce the training time, especially on the large-scale datasets.

Protein export in Plasmodium parasites : from the endoplasmic reticulum to the vacuolar export machine

It is somewhat paradoxical that the malaria parasite’s survival strategy involves spending almost all of its blood-stage existence residing behind a two-membrane barrier in a host red blood cell, yet giving considerable attention to exporting parasite-encoded proteins back across these membranes. These exported proteins are thought to play diverse roles and are crucial in pathogenic processes, such as re-modelling of the erythrocyte cytoskeleton and mediating the export of a major virulence protein known as Plasmodium falciparum erythrocyte membrane protein 1 (PfEMP1), and in metabolic processes such as nutrient uptake and solute exchange. Despite these varied roles most exported proteins have at least one common link; they share a trafficking pathway that begins with entry into the endoplasmic reticulum and concludes with passage across the vacuole membrane via a proteinaceous translocon known as the Plasmodium translocon of exported proteins (PTEX). In this commentary we review recent advances in our understanding of this export pathway and suggest several models by which different aspects of the process may be interconnected.

Machine learning approaches for modeling spammer behavior

Spam is commonly known as unsolicited or unwanted email messages in the Internet causing potential threat to Internet Security. Users spend a valuable amount of time deleting spam emails. More importantly, ever increasing spam emails occupy server storage space and consume network bandwidth. Keyword-based spam email filtering strategies will eventually be less successful to model spammer behavior as the spammer constantly changes their tricks to circumvent these filters. The evasive tactics that the spammer uses are patterns and these patterns can be modeled to combat spam. This paper investigates the possibilities of modeling spammer behavioral patterns by well-known classification algorithms such as Naïve Bayesian classifier (Naive Bayes), Decision Tree Induction (DTI) and Support Vector Machines (SVMs). Preliminary experimental results demonstrate a promising detection rate of around 92%, which is considerably an enhancement of performance compared to similar spammer behavior modeling research.

Wry-necked memory : the matter of Ireland in cutting green hay and memory Ireland, and the poems of the pattern.

This paper examines the matter of Ireland in Buckley’s two memoirs, Cutting Green Hay (1983) and Memory Ireland (1985), and the poems of The Pattern (1979), in order to revisit critically the ways in which he constructs himself as a diasporic Irish-Australian, a participant in the most remote Gaeltacht. It raises questions of victimhood, of similar and different experience of being at the mercy of the land, and of his re-engineering of the place of the political in poetry. It argues that Buckley’s agonized positioning as Ireland’s ‘guest/foreigner/son’ was a project that was doomed by its utopianism, and that, obsessed as he became with Ireland, the angst within had little to do with ‘the Ireland within’ or without. The paper suggests that the poet’s slow and unacknowledged abandonment in his Irish period of a key tenet of modernism, its distrust of propaganda and the political, is in itself a new formation which had some continuity with the radicalism of his thinking during the formative years of the revolutionary catholic apostolate he led both at the University of Melbourne and nationally. It also points to the deployment of an ancient medieval Irish trope, that of the ocean (rather than a landmass) linking a dispersed community, as one of the ways the poetry effects a resolution of the issues of being ‘Irish’ in a remote country.

Evaluation of the thermal behaviour of bevelled cutting inserts using a numerical approach

The nose geometry of a hard and brittle metal cutting tool is generally modified in order to avoid the premature failure due to fracture under tensile stresses. While most research findings point to a favourable mechanical load pattern, the possible influence of the shape of the geometry on the thermal fields and the consequent changes in the stressed state of the tool seem to have attained less attention. The present work aims at establishing the thermal behaviour of bevelled tools under varying geometrical and process parameters. Data generated from statistically designed experiments and quick-stop chip samples are coupled to conduct numerical investigations using a mixed finite and boundary element solution to obtain the temperature distribution in bevelled carbide inserts. Due consideration is given to the presence of the stagnation zone and its size and shape. While the cutting forces and temperatures increased owing to the blunt shape of the tool, the possible absence of tensile stresses was found to be the likely effect of a more uniform temperature distribution resulting from a significant plastic contact on the principal flank and the consequent flank heat source. The characteristic low-temperature zones close to the nose of the conventional tool are taken over by the stagnation zone in bevelled tools. © IMechE 2007.

Evaluating cutting fluid machinability performance

Changes in the metal-working industry, as a result of new environmental legislation or health and safety initiatives, creates the need for constant re-formulation of soluble cutting fluids. In order for there to be confidence in the product's ability to perform its required function successfully, there must be some clearly defined test methods for assessing machinability. Such a test methodology must provide comprehensive data on the fluid's lubrication and cooling properties, which are likely to occur in application. This paper describes the functions of soluble cutting fluids and discusses ways in which performance has been previously determined. Furthermore, it presents a new method for assessing machinability which is proposed as the basis for the development of a new and universal test protocol.