Fabrication of macro-mesoporous zirconia-alumina materials with a 1D hierarchical structure

A series of one dimensional (1D) zirconia/alumina nanocomposites were prepared by the deposition of zirconium species onto the 3D framework of boehmite nanofibres formed by dispersing boehmite nanofibres into butanol solution. The materials were calcined at 773K and characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscope (TEM), N2 adsorption/desorption, infrared emission spectroscopy (IES). The results demonstrated that when the molar percentage X=100*Zr/(Al+Zr) was > 30 %, extremely long ZrO2/Al2O3 composite nanorods with evenly distributed ZrO2 nanocrystals on the surface were formed. The stacking of such nanorods gave rise to a new kind of macroporous material without the use of any organic space filler\template or other specific technologies. The mechanism for the formation of long ZrO2/Al2O3 composite nanorods was proposed in this work.

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.

Quantum-like non-separability of concept combinations, emergent associates and abduction

Consider the concept combination ‘pet human’. In word association experiments, human subjects produce the associate ‘slave’ in relation to this combination. The striking aspect of this associate is that it is not produced as an associate of ‘pet’, or ‘human’ in isolation. In other words, the associate ‘slave’ seems to be emergent. Such emergent associations sometimes have a creative character and cognitive science is largely silent about how we produce them. Departing from a dimensional model of human conceptual space, this article will explore concept combinations, and will argue that emergent associations are a result of abductive reasoning within conceptual space, that is, below the symbolic level of cognition. A tensor-based approach is used to model concept combinations allowing such combinations to be formalized as interacting quantum systems. Free association norm data is used to motivate the underlying basis of the conceptual space. It is shown by analogy how some concept combinations may behave like quantum-entangled (non-separable) particles. Two methods of analysis were presented for empirically validating the presence of non-separable concept combinations in human cognition. One method is based on quantum theory and another based on comparing a joint (true theoretic) probability distribution with another distribution based on a separability assumption using a chi-square goodness-of-fit test. Although these methods were inconclusive in relation to an empirical study of bi-ambiguous concept combinations, avenues for further refinement of these methods are identified.

A quantum information retrieval approach to memory

As computers approach the physical limits of information storable in memory, new methods will be needed to further improve information storage and retrieval. We propose a quantum inspired vector based approach, which offers a contextually dependent mapping from the subsymbolic to the symbolic representations of information. If implemented computationally, this approach would provide exceptionally high density of information storage, without the traditionally required physical increase in storage capacity. The approach is inspired by the structure of human memory and incorporates elements of Gardenfors’ Conceptual Space approach and Humphreys et al.’s matrix model of memory.

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.

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.

Natural convection in the attic-shaped spaces

Heat transfer through an attic space into or out of buildings is an important issue for attic-shaped houses in both hot and cold climates. One of the important objectives for design and construction of houses is to provide thermal comfort for occupants. In the present energy-conscious society, it is also a requirement for houses to be energy efficient, i.e. the energy consumption for heating or air-conditioning houses must be minimized. Relevant to these objectives, research into heat transfer in attics has been conducted for about three decades. The transient behaviour of an attic space is directly relevant to our daily life. Certain periods of the day or night may be considered as having a constant ambient temperature (e.g. during 11am - 2pm or 11pm - 2am). However, at other times during the day or night the ambient temperature changes with time (e.g. between 5am - 9am or 5pm - 9pm). Therefore, the analysis of steady state solution is not sufficient to describe the fluid flow and heat transfer in the attic space. The discussion of the transient development of the boundary is required. A theoretical understanding of the transient behaviour of the flow in the enclosure is performed through scaling analysis for sudden and ramp heating conditions. A proper identification of the timescales, the velocity and the thickness relevant to the flow that develops inside the cavity makes it possible to predict theoretically the basic flow features that will survive once the thermal flow in the enclosure reaches a steady state. Those scaling predictions have been verified by a series of numerical simulations.

Living with strangers: Urban space and the ethics of civility

Urban regeneration is occuring in cities across the world, as cities increase in scale and complexity. This chapter argues that in planning public spaces, greater consideration should be paid to sociability through consideration of the affective dimension of urban life.

"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.

In search of the Korean digital wave

This article sets the context for this special themed issue on the 'Korean digital wave' by considering the symbiotic relationship between digital technologies, their techniques and practices, their uses and the affordances they provide, and Korea's 'compressed modernity' and swift industrialisation. It underscores the importance of interrogating a range of groundbreaking developments and innovations within Korea's digital mediascapes, and its creative and cultural industries, in order to gain a complex understanding of one of Australia's most significant export markets and trading partners. Given the financial and political commitment in Australia to a high-speed broadband network that aims to stimulate economic and cultural activity, recent technological developments in Korea, and the double-edged role played by government policy in shaping the 'Korean digital wave', merit close attention from media and communications scholars.

A practical approach for identifying expected solution performance and robustness in operations research applications

A practical approach for identifying solution robustness is proposed for situations where parameters are uncertain. The approach is based upon the interpretation of a probability density function (pdf) and the definition of three parameters that describe how significant changes in the performance of a solution are deemed to be. The pdf is constructed by interpreting the results of simulations. A minimum number of simulations are achieved by updating the mean, variance, skewness and kurtosis of the sample using computationally efficient recursive equations. When these criterions have converged then no further simulations are needed. A case study involving several no-intermediate storage flow shop scheduling problems demonstrates the effectiveness of the 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.

Semantic service discovery in the service ecosystem

Electronic services are a leitmotif in ‘hot’ topics like Software as a Service, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Service oriented Computing, Cloud Computing, application markets and smart devices. We propose to consider these in what has been termed the Service Ecosystem (SES). The SES encompasses all levels of electronic services and their interaction, with human consumption and initiation on its periphery in much the same way the ‘Web’ describes a plethora of technologies that eventuate to connect information and expose it to humans. Presently, the SES is heterogeneous, fragmented and confined to semi-closed systems. A key issue hampering the emergence of an integrated SES is Service Discovery (SD). A SES will be dynamic with areas of structured and unstructured information within which service providers and ‘lay’ human consumers interact; until now the two are disjointed, e.g., SOA-enabled organisations, industries and domains are choreographed by domain experts or ‘hard-wired’ to smart device application markets and web applications. In a SES, services are accessible, comparable and exchangeable to human consumers closing the gap to the providers. This requires a new SD with which humans can discover services transparently and effectively without special knowledge or training. We propose two modes of discovery, directed search following an agenda and explorative search, which speculatively expands knowledge of an area of interest by means of categories. Inspired by conceptual space theory from cognitive science, we propose to implement the modes of discovery using concepts to map a lay consumer’s service need to terminologically sophisticated descriptions of services. To this end, we reframe SD as an information retrieval task on the information attached to services, such as, descriptions, reviews, documentation and web sites - the Service Information Shadow. The Semantic Space model transforms the shadow's unstructured semantic information into a geometric, concept-like representation. We introduce an improved and extended Semantic Space including categorization calling it the Semantic Service Discovery model. We evaluate our model with a highly relevant, service related corpus simulating a Service Information Shadow including manually constructed complex service agendas, as well as manual groupings of services. We compare our model against state-of-the-art information retrieval systems and clustering algorithms. By means of an extensive series of empirical evaluations, we establish optimal parameter settings for the semantic space model. The evaluations demonstrate the model’s effectiveness for SD in terms of retrieval precision over state-of-the-art information retrieval models (directed search) and the meaningful, automatic categorization of service related information, which shows potential to form the basis of a useful, cognitively motivated map of the SES for exploratory search.

A new approach to automatically producing schedules for cane railways

The scheduling of locomotive movements on cane railways has proven to be a very complex task. Various optimisation methods have been used over the years to try and produce an optimised schedule that eliminates or minimises bin supply delays to harvesters and the factory, while minimising the number of locomotives, locomotive shifts and cane bins, and also the cane age. This paper reports on a new attempt to develop an automatic scheduler using a mathematical model solved using mixed integer programming and constraint programming approaches and blocking parallel job shop scheduling fundamentals. The model solution has been explored using conventional constraint programming search techniques and found to produce a reasonable schedule for small-scale problems with up to nine harvesters. While more effort is required to complete the development of the full model with metaheuristic search techniques, the work completed to date gives confidence that the metaheuristic techniques will provide near optimal solutions in reasonable time.

A case of community safety : displacing complex ‘social’ problems in Fortitude Valley

Public dialogue regarding the high concentration of drug use and crime in inner city locations is frequently legitimised through visibility of drug-using populations and a perception of high crime rates. The public space known as the Brunswick Street Mall (Valley mall), located in the inner city Brisbane suburb of Fortitude Valley, has long provided the focal point for discussions regarding the problem of illicit drug use and antisocial behaviour in Brisbane. During the late 1990s a range of stakeholders in Fortitude Valley became mobilised to tackle crime and illicit drugs. In particular they wanted to dismantle popular perceptions of the area as representing the dark and unsafe side of Brisbane. The aim of this campaign was to instil a sense of safety in the area and dislodge Fortitude Valley from its reputation as a =symbolic location of danger‘. This thesis is a case study about an urban site that became contested by the diverse aims of a range of stakeholders who were invested in an urban renewal program and community safety project. This case study makes visible a number of actors that were lured from their existing roles in an indeterminable number of heterogeneous networks in order to create a community safety network. The following analysis of the community safety network emphasises some specific actors: history, ideas, technologies, materialities and displacements. The case study relies on the work of Foucault, Latour, Callon and Law to draw out the rationalities, background contingencies and the attempts to impose order and translate a number of entities into the community safety project in Fortitude Valley. The results of this research show that the community safety project is a case of ontological politics. Specifically the data indicates that both the (reality) problem of safety and the (knowledge) solution to safety were created simultaneously. This thesis explores the idea that while violence continues to occur in the Valley, evidence that community safety got done is located through mapping its displacement and eventual disappearance. As such, this thesis argues that community safety is a =collateral reality‘.