A generative nervous system for the planet

Generative systems are now being proposed for addressing major ecological problems. The Complex Urban Systems Project (CUSP) founded in 2008 at the Queensland University of Technology, emphasises the ecological significance of the generative global networking of urban environments. It argues that the natural planetary systems for balancing global ecology are no longer able to respond sufficiently rapidly to the ecological damage caused by humankind and by dense urban conurbations in particular as evidenced by impacts such as climate change. The proposal of this research project is to provide a high speed generative nervous system for the planet by connecting major cities globally to interact directly with natural ecosystems to engender rapid ecological response. This would be achieved by active interactions of the global urban network with the natural ecosystem in the ecological principle of entropy. The key goal is to achieve ecologically positive cities by activating self-organising cities capable of full integration into natural eco-systems and to netowork the cities globally to provide the planet with a nervous system.

Crossing boundaries to explore sustainable architecture by open system design

This paper argues a model of open system design for sustainable architecture, based on a thermodynamics framework of entropy as an evolutionary paradigm. The framework can be simplified to stating that an open system evolves in a non-linear pattern from a far-from-equilibrium state towards a non-equilibrium state of entropy balance, which is a highly ordered organization of the system when order comes out of chaos. This paper is work in progress on a PhD research project which aims to propose building information modelling for optimization and adaptation of buildings environmental performance as an alternative sustainable design program in architecture. It will be used for efficient distribution and consumption of energy and material resource in life-cycle buildings, with the active involvement of the end-users and the physical constraints of the natural environment.

Managing creativity and its paradoxes in the film industry

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the various types of paradoxes underlying the nature of creativity, which in turn affect the foundations of organizations and organization change in the 21 st century. The film industry best illustrate the interaction of such paradoxes, creativity and organizational change. This paper examines how small and medium-sized finns in the emerging Singapore film industry stay competitive by managing or not managing these paradoxes. Design/methodology/approach: The study reported in this paper explores the opinions, attitudes and experiences of key decision-makers in the Singaporean film industry. Findings: This paper introduces the idea that an analysis of the various paradoxes driven by creativity in today's society provides hints on a deeper understanding of organizational change and development in the 21" century. Practical implications: The findings indicate that managers need practical tools that will enable them to comprehend and better manage these emerging contradictions and fully understand the implications of paradoxical situations and organizational change. Research limitations: The distinctive nature of the Singaporean firms means that certain factors examined may be more or less significant in the film industry in other countries. Originality/value: The value of this paper lies in the knowledge that paradox considerations are becoming significant in understanding pluralism and the processes of organizational change.

Flight testing of an augmented separation management system providing separation protection during failure of the central communication network

Future air traffic management concepts often involve the proposal of automated separation management algorithms that replaces human air traffic controllers. This paper proposes a new type of automated separation management algorithm (based on the satisficing approach) that utilizes inter-aircraft communication and a track file manager (or bank of Kalman filters) that is capable of resolving conflicts during periods of communication failure. The proposed separation management algorithm is tested in a range of flight scenarios involving during periods of communication failure, in both simulation and flight test (flight tests were conducted as part of the Smart Skies project). The intention of the conducted flight tests was to investigate the benefits of using inter-aircraft communication to provide an extra layer of safety protection in support air traffic management during periods of failure of the communication network. These benefits were confirmed.

Common mode voltage in a motor drive system with PFC

Common mode voltage generated by a power converter in combination with parasitic capacitive couplings is a potential source of shaft voltage in an AC motor drive system. In this paper, a three-phase motor drive system supplied with a single-phase AC-DC diode rectifier is investigated in order to reduce shaft voltage in a three-phase AC motor drive system. In this topology, the common mode voltage generated by the inverter is influenced by the AC-DC diode rectifier because the placement of the neutral point is changing in different rectifier circuit states. A pulse width modulation technique is presented by a proper placement of the zero vectors to reduce the common mode voltage level, which leads to a cost effective shaft voltage reduction technique without load current distortion, while keeping the switching frequency constant. Analysis and simulations have been presented to investigate the proposed method.

Channel plasmon-polariton modes in V grooves filled with dielectric

We investigated the effect of dielectric filling in a V groove on the propagation parameters of channel plasmon-polariton (CPP) modes. In particular, existence conditions and critical groove angles, mode localization, field structure, dispersion, and propagation distances of CPP modes are analyzed as functions of dielectric permittivity inside the groove. It is demonstrated that increasing dielectric permittivity in the groove results in a rapid increase of mode localization near the tip of the groove and increase of both the critical angles that determine a range of groove angles for which CPP modes can exist. Detailed analysis of the field structure has demonstrated that the maximum of the field in a CPP mode is typically reached at a small distance from the tip of the groove. The effect of rounded tip is also investigated.

Ethical fashion : the human stories driving a fashion movement

This paper examines and compares two stories, the novel Helen Fleetwood (Elizabeth, 1841) and the film China Blue (Teddy Bear Films, 2005), in relation to the Ethical Fashion movement. In 2005, more than 50 designers from around the world took part in The Ethical Fashion Show in Paris. This movement dictates that designers ensure that their garments are produced in an ethical manner, rather than support the ‘sweatshop’ environments of some industrialists determined to make a profit at the expense of workers rights. The momentum of the Ethical Fashion movement suggests that it is possible for fashion to be ethical, desirable and profitable in the 21st century. In 1841, after extensive research, Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna (using the pseudonym Charlotte Elizabeth) began to write about the atrocities of the factory system in industrialised England. Her novel, Helen Fleetwood, is one of the earliest examples of this kind of work, providing the reader with an extensive insight into the life of English factory workers in the mid-19th century. The story is about the Widow Green and her orphan dependents who are led, through circumstance, to leave their rural home and take up employment in the cotton mills of Manchester, with the hope of having an independent existence. Instead they discover the realities of factory life – extremely long hours, unsafe conditions, poor wages and a steady decline into extreme poverty. In his film China Blue (Teddy Bear Films, 2005), director Micha X. Peled tells an alarmingly similar tale set in 21st century China. This ‘docu-drama’ (a recreation from actual interviews and diary entries) tells the story of ‘Little Jasmine’ who leaves her family’s farm to pursue an independent life in Southern China’s manufacturing district. It is not long before the realities of modern factory life are revealed to the teenage ‘heroine’ – crowded dormitories, long working hours, arbitrary fines and wages that do not compare with those of workers in the Western world. While much of the human story remains unchanged, there have been significant improvements in technology and safety in the last 165 years that result in the reality that not all clothing manufacture is performed in ‘sweatshop’ conditions. After a recent visit to a manufacturing plant in China, consultation with peers in the industry and having worked in the Australian fashion industry for many years, the author compares these stories with her own experiences.

Pedagogy and participation : literacy education for low-literate refugee students of African origin in a western school system

For ESL teachers working with low-literate adolescents the challenge is to provide instruction in basic literacy capabilities while also realising the benefits of interactive and dialogic pedagogies advocated for the students. In this article we look at literacy pedagogy for refugees of African origin in Australian classrooms. We report on an interview study conducted in an intensive English language school for new arrival adolescents and in three regular secondary schools. Brian Street’s ideological model is used. From this perspective, literacy entails not only technical skills, but also social and cultural ways of making meaning that are embedded within relations of power. The findings showed that teachers were strengthening control of instruction to enable mastery of technical capabilities in basic literacy and genre analysis. We suggest that this approach should be supplemented by a critical approach transforming relations of linguistic power that exclude, marginalise and humiliate the study students in the classroom.

That's a rap : the making of an Australian hip hop integrated musical film

To date, the majority of films that utilise or feature hip hop music and culture, have either been in the realms of documentary, or in ‘show musicals’ (where the film musical’s device of characters’ bursting into song, is justified by the narrative of a pursuit of a career in the entertainment industry). Thus, most films that feature hip hop expression have in some way been tied to the subject of hip hop. A research interest and enthusiasm was developed for utilising hip hop expression in film in a new way, which would extend the narrative possibilities of hip hop film to wider topics and themes. The creation of the thesis film Out of My Cloud, and the writing of this accompanying exegesis, investigates a research concern of the potential for the use of hip hop expression in an ‘integrated musical’ film (where characters’ break into song without conceit or explanation). Context and rationale for Out of My Cloud (an Australian hip hop ‘integrated musical’ film) is provided in this writing. It is argued that hip hop is particularly suitable for use in a modern narrative film, and particularly in an ‘integrated musical’ film, due to its: current vibrancy and popularity, rap (vocal element of hip hop) music’s focus on lyrical message and meaning, and rap’s use as an everyday, non-performative method of communication. It is also argued that Australian hip hop deserves greater representation in film and literature due to: its current popularity, and its nature as a unique and distinct form of hip hop. To date, representation of Australian hip hop in film and television has almost solely been restricted to the documentary form. Out of My Cloud borrows from elements of social realist cinema such as: contrasts with mainstream cinema, an exploration/recognition of the relationship between environment and development of character, use of non-actors, location-shooting, a political intent of the filmmaker, displaying sympathy for an underclass, representation of underrepresented character types and topics, and a loose narrative structure that does not offer solid resolution. A case is made that it may be appropriate to marry elements of social realist film with hip hop expression due to common characteristics, such as: representation of marginalised or underrepresented groups and issues in society, political objectives of the artist/s, and sympathy for an underclass. In developing and producing Out of My Cloud, a specific method of working with, and filming actor improvisation was developed. This method was informed by improvisation and associated camera techniques of filmmakers such as Charlie Chaplin, Mike Leigh, Khoa Do, Dogme 95 filmmakers, and Lars von Trier (post-Dogme 95). A review of techniques used by these filmmakers is provided in this writing, as well as the impact it has made on my approach. The method utilised in Out of My Cloud was most influenced by Khoa Do’s technique of guiding actors to improvise fairly loosely, but with a predetermined endpoint in mind. A variation of this technique was developed for use in Out of My Cloud, which involved filming with two cameras to allow edits from multiple angles. Specific processes for creating Out of My Cloud are described and explained in this writing. Particular attention is given to the approaches regarding the story elements and the music elements. Various significant aspects of the process are referred to including the filming and recording of live musical performances, the recording of ‘freestyle’ performances (lyrics composed and performed spontaneously) and the creation of a scored musical scene involving a vocal performance without regular timing or rhythm. The documentation of processes in this writing serve to make the successful elements of this film transferable and replicable to other practitioners in the field, whilst flagging missteps to allow fellow practitioners to avoid similar missteps in future projects. While Out of My Cloud is not without its shortcomings as a short film work (for example in the areas of story and camerawork) it provides a significant contribution to the field as a working example of how hip hop may be utilised in an ‘integrated musical’ film, as well as being a rare example of a narrative film that features Australian hip hop. This film and the accompanying exegesis provide insights that contribute to an understanding of techniques, theories and knowledge in the field of filmmaking practice.

Designing a workflow system using coloured petri nets

Traditional workflow systems focus on providing support for the control-flow perspective of a business process, with other aspects such as data management and work distribution receiving markedly less attention. A guide to desirable workflow characteristics is provided by the well-known workflow patterns which are derived from a comprehensive survey of contemporary tools and modelling formalisms. In this paper we describe the approach taken to designing the newYAWL workflow system, an offering that aims to provide comprehensive support for the control-flow, data and resource perspectives based on the workflow patterns. The semantics of the newYAWL workflow language are based on Coloured Petri Nets thus facilitating the direct enactment and analysis of processes described in terms of newYAWL language constructs. As part of this discussion, we explain how the operational semantics for each of the language elements are embodied in the newYAWL system and indicate the facilities required to support them in an operational environment. We also review the experiences associated with developing a complete operational design for an offering of this scale using formal techniques.

Development of an online condition monitoring system for slow speed machinery

One of the main challenges of slow speed machinery condition monitoring is that the energy generated from an incipient defect is too weak to be detected by traditional vibration measurements due to its low impact energy. Acoustic emission (AE) measurement is an alternative for this as it has the ability to detect crack initiations or rubbing between moving surfaces. However, AE measurement requires high sampling frequency and consequently huge amount of data are obtained to be processed. It also requires expensive hardware to capture those data, storage and involves signal processing techniques to retrieve valuable information on the state of the machine. AE signal has been utilised for early detection of defects in bearings and gears. This paper presents an online condition monitoring (CM) system for slow speed machinery, which attempts to overcome those challenges. The system incorporates relevant signal processing techniques for slow speed CM which include noise removal techniques to enhance the signal-to-noise and peak-holding down sampling to reduce the burden of massive data handling. The analysis software works under Labview environment, which enables online remote control of data acquisition, real-time analysis, offline analysis and diagnostic trending. The system has been fully implemented on a site machine and contributing significantly to improve the maintenance efficiency and provide a safer and reliable operation.

The Proposal [Film Review]

The Proposal is a well-executed romantic comedy that easily meets its low ambitions. Director Anne Fletcher (Step Up, 27 Dresses) and newcomer writer Peter Chiarelli team up to deliver a lighthearted comedy termpered with heartwarming family values. The cute and lovable cast, headed by Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds, enriches this simple tale...

An assessment system for evaluation of driving competencies

Automobiles have deeply impacted the way in which we travel but they have also contributed to many deaths and injury due to crashes. A number of reasons for these crashes have been pointed out by researchers. Inexperience has been identified as a contributing factor to road crashes. Driver’s driving abilities also play a vital role in judging the road environment and reacting in-time to avoid any possible collision. Therefore driver’s perceptual and motor skills remain the key factors impacting on road safety. Our failure to understand what is really important for learners, in terms of competent driving, is one of the many challenges for building better training programs. Driver training is one of the interventions aimed at decreasing the number of crashes that involve young drivers. Currently, there is a need to develop comprehensive driver evaluation system that benefits from the advances in Driver Assistance Systems. A multidisciplinary approach is necessary to explain how driving abilities evolves with on-road driving experience. To our knowledge, driver assistance systems have never been comprehensively used in a driver training context to assess the safety aspect of driving. The aim and novelty of this thesis is to develop and evaluate an Intelligent Driver Training System (IDTS) as an automated assessment tool that will help drivers and their trainers to comprehensively view complex driving manoeuvres and potentially provide effective feedback by post processing the data recorded during driving. This system is designed to help driver trainers to accurately evaluate driver performance and has the potential to provide valuable feedback to the drivers. Since driving is dependent on fuzzy inputs from the driver (i.e. approximate distance calculation from the other vehicles, approximate assumption of the other vehicle speed), it is necessary that the evaluation system is based on criteria and rules that handles uncertain and fuzzy characteristics of the driving tasks. Therefore, the proposed IDTS utilizes fuzzy set theory for the assessment of driver performance. The proposed research program focuses on integrating the multi-sensory information acquired from the vehicle, driver and environment to assess driving competencies. After information acquisition, the current research focuses on automated segmentation of the selected manoeuvres from the driving scenario. This leads to the creation of a model that determines a “competency” criterion through the driving performance protocol used by driver trainers (i.e. expert knowledge) to assess drivers. This is achieved by comprehensively evaluating and assessing the data stream acquired from multiple in-vehicle sensors using fuzzy rules and classifying the driving manoeuvres (i.e. overtake, lane change, T-crossing and turn) between low and high competency. The fuzzy rules use parameters such as following distance, gaze depth and scan area, distance with respect to lanes and excessive acceleration or braking during the manoeuvres to assess competency. These rules that identify driving competency were initially designed with the help of expert’s knowledge (i.e. driver trainers). In-order to fine tune these rules and the parameters that define these rules, a driving experiment was conducted to identify the empirical differences between novice and experienced drivers. The results from the driving experiment indicated that significant differences existed between novice and experienced driver, in terms of their gaze pattern and duration, speed, stop time at the T-crossing, lane keeping and the time spent in lanes while performing the selected manoeuvres. These differences were used to refine the fuzzy membership functions and rules that govern the assessments of the driving tasks. Next, this research focused on providing an integrated visual assessment interface to both driver trainers and their trainees. By providing a rich set of interactive graphical interfaces, displaying information about the driving tasks, Intelligent Driver Training System (IDTS) visualisation module has the potential to give empirical feedback to its users. Lastly, the validation of the IDTS system’s assessment was conducted by comparing IDTS objective assessments, for the driving experiment, with the subjective assessments of the driver trainers for particular manoeuvres. Results show that not only IDTS was able to match the subjective assessments made by driver trainers during the driving experiment but also identified some additional driving manoeuvres performed in low competency that were not identified by the driver trainers due to increased mental workload of trainers when assessing multiple variables that constitute driving. The validation of IDTS emphasized the need for an automated assessment tool that can segment the manoeuvres from the driving scenario, further investigate the variables within that manoeuvre to determine the manoeuvre’s competency and provide integrated visualisation regarding the manoeuvre to its users (i.e. trainers and trainees). Through analysis and validation it was shown that IDTS is a useful assistance tool for driver trainers to empirically assess and potentially provide feedback regarding the manoeuvres undertaken by the drivers.

Semi-supervised intelligent surveillance system for secure environments

This paper proposes a semi-supervised intelligent visual surveillance system to exploit the information from multi-camera networks for the monitoring of people and vehicles. Modules are proposed to perform critical surveillance tasks including: the management and calibration of cameras within a multi-camera network; tracking of objects across multiple views; recognition of people utilising biometrics and in particular soft-biometrics; the monitoring of crowds; and activity recognition. Recent advances in these computer vision modules and capability gaps in surveillance technology are also highlighted.

Thin film solar cells based on CU2ZnSnS4 absorber

Cu2ZnSnS4 (CZTS) is considered to be one of the most promising light absorbing materials for low cost, high efficiency thin film solar cells. Compared to conventional CuIn(S, Se)2 (CIS) and Cu(InGa)(S,Se)2 (CIGS) as well as CdTe light absorber, CZTS is only composed of earth-abundant non-toxic elements, ensuring the price competitiveness of this kind of solar cell in the future PV market. However, the research in this area is very limited compared to CIS and CIGS. Detailed studies of both the material and the device are rare, which significantly restricts the development in this area. This paper reviews the progress in the research field of CZTS, particularly the methods which were employed to prepare CZTS absorber material.