A qualitative investigation of sources of value in social marketing from the lens of a public health service

This paper seeks to identify the sources of value in a government health screening service. Consumers' use of such services for their won benefits demonstrates desirable behaviour and their continued use of these services indicates maintenance of the behaviour. There are also positive outcomes for society as the health of its members is improved overall through this behaviour. Individual-depth interview with 25 women who use breast cancer screening services provided by BreastScreen (BSQ) revealed five categories of sources of value. They are information sources, interaction sources, service, environment, and consumer participation. These findings provide valuable insights into the value construction of consumers and contribute towards our understanding of the value concept in social marketing.

Control and protection of a microgrid with converter interfaced micro sources

This paper describes protection and control of a microgrid with converter interfaced micro sources. The proposed protection and control scheme consider both grid connected and autonomous operation of the microgrid. A protection scheme, capable of detecting faults effectively in both grid connected and islanded operations is proposed. The main challenge of the protection, due to current limiting state of the converters is overcome by using admittance relays. The relays operate according to the inverse time characteristic based on measured admittance of the line. The proposed scheme isolates the fault from both sides, while downstream side of the microgrid operates in islanding condition. Moreover faults can be detected in autonomous operation. In grid connected mode distributed generators (DG) supply the rated power while in absence of the grid, DGs share the entire power requirement proportional to rating based on output voltage angle droop control. The protection scheme ensures minimum load shedding with isolating the faulted network and DG control provides a smooth islanding and resynchronization operation. The efficacy of coordinated control and protection scheme has been validated through simulation for various operating conditions.

Droop control of converter interfaced micro sources in rural distributed generation

This paper proposes new droop control methods for load sharing in a rural area with distributed generation. Highly resistive lines, typical of rural low voltage networks, always create a big challenge for conventional droop control. To overcome the conflict between higher feedback gain for better power sharing and system stability in angle droop, two control methods have been proposed. The first method considers no communication among the distributed generators (DGs) and regulates the converter output voltage and angle ensuring proper sharing of load in a system having strong coupling between real and reactive power due to high line resistance. The second method, based on a smattering of communication, modifies the reference output volt-age angle of the DGs depending on the active and reactive power flow in the lines connected to point of common coupling (PCC). It is shown that with the second proposed control method, an economical and minimum communication system can achieve significant improvement in load sharing. The difference in error margin between proposed control schemes and a more costly high bandwidth communication system is small and the later may not be justified considering the increase in cost. The proposed control shows stable operation of the system for a range of operating conditions while ensuring satisfactory load sharing.

Investigating Texts

The first chapter called 'Investigating texts' asks students to investigate the concept of text and what it might mean to 'behave like a reader'. After reading and comparing two short stories, the question, 'what is a story?' is posed. Students are then asked to distinguish a fiction text from a number of non-fiction texts and to identify the sources of the latter. It is suggested that although it is quite easy to perform these tasks, it is not so easy to describe texts in terms only of their features or ingredients; that it is necessary to talk about how texts are read, and what is more, how they are read on particular occasions. 'Making texts', the second chapter, asks students via a series of activities to consider what they expect of texts, and to investigate the conventions of fiction and non-fiction. They are given the opportunity to manipulate the 'ingredients' of texts, to read in terms of commonalities and to speculate about the rules by which both the composition and consumption of texts are organised. The ways in which particular kinds of reading and writing activities assume the text as a certain kind of object - as a model, for example, or as an object of criticism or as an occasion for self-questioning - is made explicit, and students are encouraged to investigate a range of uses of texts and the implications of these for reading and writing. Chapter three, 'Changing texts' asks students to consider, through a number of fascinating examples, how both fiction and non-fiction texts have changed over time, and how the ways in which readers read texts can change too. The 'retelling' of texts in terms of changing norms is considered via an 'updated' version of 'Scheherazade'; a student's feminist adaptation of her own text (initially written using a romance as a model), and an encyclopedia entry. 'Reading practices', the fourth chapter, poses further questions about different ways of reading. Through reading a number of didactic texts alongside three stories from a genre that is not usually read for morally improving lessons, students are asked to consider how different their reading practices can be.

Queensland Aborigines, multiple realities and the social sources of suffering: Psychiatry and moral regions of being (Part 1)

This two part paper considers the experience of a range of magico-religious experiences (such as visions and voices) and spirit beliefs in a rural Aboriginal town. The papers challenge the tendency of institutionalised psychiatry to medicalise the experiences and critiques the way in which its individualistic practice is intensified in the face of an incomprehensible Aboriginal „other‟ to become part of the power imbalance that characterises the relationship between Indigenous and white domains. The work reveals the internal differentiation and politics of the Aboriginal domain, as the meanings of these experiences and actions are contested and negotiated by the residents and in so doing they decentre the concerns of the white domain and attempt to control their relationship with it. Thus the plausibility structure that sustains these multiple realities reflects both accommodation and resistance to the material and historical conditions imposed and enacted by mainstream society on the residents, and to current socio- political realities. I conclude that the residents‟ narratives chart the grounds of moral adjudication as the experiences were rarely conceptualised by local people as signs of individual pathology but as reflections of social reality. Psychiatric drug therapy and the behaviourist assumptions underlying its practice posit atomised individuals as the appropriate site of intervention as against the multiple realities revealed by the phenomenology of the experiences. The papers thus call into question Australian mainstream „commonsense‟ that circulates about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people which justifies representations of them as sickly outcasts in Australian society.

Sources of coding discrepancies in injury morbidity data: Implications for injury surveillance

Objective: To examine the sources of coding discrepancy for injury morbidity data and explore the implications of these sources for injury surveillance.-------- Method: An on-site medical record review and recoding study was conducted for 4373 injury-related hospital admissions across Australia. Codes from the original dataset were compared to the recoded data to explore the reliability of coded data aand sources of discrepancy.---------- Results: The most common reason for differences in coding overall was assigning the case to a different external cause category with 8.5% assigned to a different category. Differences in the specificity of codes assigned within a category accounted for 7.8% of coder difference. Differences in intent assignment accounted for 3.7% of the differences in code assignment.---------- Conclusions: In the situation where 8 percent of cases are misclassified by major category, the setting of injury targets on the basis of extent of burden is a somewhat blunt instrument Monitoring the effect of prevention programs aimed at reducing risk factors is not possible in datasets with this level of misclassification error in injury cause subcategories. Future research is needed to build the evidence base around the quality and utility of the ICD classification system and application of use of this for injury surveillance in the hospital environment.

Evolutionary algorithms for sustainable building design

This approach to sustainable design explores the possibility of creating an architectural design process which can iteratively produce optimised and sustainable design solutions. Driven by an evolution process based on genetic algorithms, the system allows the designer to “design the building design generator” rather than to “designs the building”. The design concept is abstracted into a digital design schema, which allows transfer of the human creative vision into the rational language of a computer. The schema is then elaborated into the use of genetic algorithms to evolve innovative, performative and sustainable design solutions. The prioritisation of the project’s constraints and the subsequent design solutions synthesised during design generation are expected to resolve most of the major conflicts in the evaluation and optimisation phases. Mosques are used as the example building typology to ground the research activity. The spatial organisations of various mosque typologies are graphically represented by adjacency constraints between spaces. Each configuration is represented by a planar graph which is then translated into a non-orthogonal dual graph and fed into the genetic algorithm system with fixed constraints and expected performance criteria set to govern evolution. The resultant Hierarchical Evolutionary Algorithmic Design System is developed by linking the evaluation process with environmental assessment tools to rank the candidate designs. The proposed system generates the concept, the seed, and the schema, and has environmental performance as one of the main criteria in driving optimisation.

Health law : scope, sources and forces

• For the purposes of this chapter, “health law” encapsulates regulation of the medical and health professions, the administration of health services and the maintenance of public health to the extent that it is connected to the provision of health services. • There are diverging views as to whether health law can be regarded as a discrete “area of law”. • Health law draws on other areas of law such as tort law, criminal law and family law. It is also draws upon other disciplines, most notably medical and health ethics. • Social and economic forces have influenced the development and direction of health law, and these forces may become even more influential as the century develops. • The increasingly globalised world has implications for Australia’s health systems and raises questions and creates commitments in respect of the international community. • Technological developments, including in respect of treatment, diagnosis and information management, create ongoing challenges for health law. • Patient rights, human rights and consumerism are increasingly key drivers in the development of health law. • Health law is significant to contemporary Australian society because of the gravity of the topics that fall within its ambit, its social relevance to so many aspects of human existence and endeavour, the important role it plays in protecting the vulnerable, and the extent to which it engages with fundamental principles of justice.

Green energy : sustainable energy sources and alternative technologies

Despite the general evolution and broadening of the scope of the concept of infrastructure in many other sectors, the energy sector has maintained the same narrow boundaries for over 80 years. Energy infrastructure is still generally restricted in meaning to the transmission and distribution networks of electricity and, to some extent, gas. This is especially true in the urban development context. This early 20th century system is struggling to meet community expectations that the industry itself created and fostered for many decades. The relentless growth in demand and changing political, economic and environmental challenges require a shift from the traditional ‘predict and provide’ approach to infrastructure which is no longer economically or environmentally viable. Market deregulation and a raft of demand and supply side management strategies have failed to curb society’s addiction to the commodity of electricity. None of these responses has addressed the fundamental problem. This chapter presents an argument for the need for a new paradigm. Going beyond peripheral energy efficiency measures and the substitution of fossil fuels with renewables, it outlines a new approach to the provision of energy services in the context of 21st century urban environments.

An examination of communication across cultures in news media and at informal/personal levels : with concentration on relations among two South East Asian countries and Australia and those two countries and Germany

In the age of globalisation dominated by mass communication, the flow of information contributes to a big extent to the worldviews of its "global citizens". From this point of view the mass media can be seen as one of the most salient sources of cross-cultural communication. This study investigates mass communication across cultures, focusing on South East Asia (Malaysia and Singapore), Australia and Germany. The centre of attention is the Western media coverage of South East Asia and vice versa. In this context a content analysis of newspapers of the three regions has been conducted. In addition, working practices and conditions of Western foreign correspondents in South East Asia have been examined. Apart from the investigation of inter-cultural media coverage, another focus of attention will be the examination of two levels of communication: The business level, concentrating on issues like e.g. the Asian business etiquette; and the private level, looking into the transition to a different culture from the perspective of Australian and German expatriates. Apart from investigating mass communication across cultures and to provide a written analysis of the findings, a series of radio documentaries in English and in German has been produced. They cover the following issues: Foreign correspondents in South East Asia, the expatriate-lifestyle of Australians and Germans in South East Asia, business etiquette in Asia, student exchange Germany-Asia, image and prejudices East-West and Tourism.

Estimation of travel time on urban networks with midlink sources and sinks

This paper presents a methodology for estimation of average travel time on signalized urban networks by integrating cumulative plots and probe data. This integration aims to reduce the relative deviations in the cumulative plots due to midlink sources and sinks. During undersaturated traffic conditions, the concept of a virtual probe is introduced, and therefore, accurate travel time can be obtained when a real probe is unavailable. For oversaturated traffic conditions, only one probe per travel time estimation interval—360 s or 3% of vehicles traversing the link as a probe—has the potential to provide accurate travel time.

Analysis of alternative water sources for use in the manufacture of concrete

In Australia and many other countries worldwide, water used in the manufacture of concrete must be potable. At present, it is currently thought that concrete properties are highly influenced by the water type used and its proportion in the concrete mix, but actually there is little knowledge of the effects of different, alternative water sources used in concrete mix design. Therefore, the identification of the level and nature of contamination in available water sources and their subsequent influence on concrete properties is becoming increasingly important. Of most interest, is the recycled washout water currently used by batch plants as mixing water for concrete. Recycled washout water is the water used onsite for a variety of purposes, including washing of truck agitator bowls, wetting down of aggregate and run off. This report presents current information on the quality of concrete mixing water in terms of mandatory limits and guidelines on impurities as well as investigating the impact of recycled washout water on concrete performance. It also explores new sources of recycled water in terms of their quality and suitability for use in concrete production. The complete recycling of washout water has been considered for use in concrete mixing plants because of the great benefit in terms of reducing the cost of waste disposal cost and environmental conservation. The objective of this study was to investigate the effects of using washout water on the properties of fresh and hardened concrete. This was carried out by utilizing a 10 week sampling program from three representative sites across South East Queensland. The sample sites chosen represented a cross-section of plant recycling methods, from most effective to least effective. The washout water samples collected from each site were then analysed in accordance with Standards Association of Australia AS/NZS 5667.1 :1998. These tests revealed that, compared with tap water, the washout water was higher in alkalinity, pH, and total dissolved solids content. However, washout water with a total dissolved solids content of less than 6% could be used in the production of concrete with acceptable strength and durability. These results were then interpreted using chemometric techniques of Principal Component Analysis, SIMCA and the Multi-Criteria Decision Making methods PROMETHEE and GAIA were used to rank the samples from cleanest to unclean. It was found that even the simplest purifying processes provided water suitable for the manufacture of concrete form wash out water. These results were compared to a series of alternative water sources. The water sources included treated effluent, sea water and dam water and were subject to the same testing parameters as the reference set. Analysis of these results also found that despite having higher levels of both organic and inorganic properties, the waters complied with the parameter thresholds given in the American Standard Test Method (ASTM) C913-08. All of the alternative sources were found to be suitable sources of water for the manufacture of plain concrete.

Grassland management activity data : current sources and future needs

Estimates of potential and actual C sequestration require areal information about various types of management activities. Forest surveys, land use data, and agricultural statistics contribute information enabling calculation of the impacts of current and historical land management on C sequestration in biomass (in forests) or in soil (in agricultural systems). Unfortunately little information exists on the distribution of various management activities that can impact soil C content in grassland systems. Limited information of this type restricts our ability to carry out bottom-up estimates of the current C balance of grasslands or to assess the potential for grasslands to act as C sinks with changes in management. Here we review currently available information about grassland management, how that information could be related to information about the impacts of management on soil C stocks, information that may be available in the future, and needs that remain to be filled before in-depth assessments may be carried out. We also evaluate constraints induced by variability in information sources within and between countries. It is readily apparent that activity data for grassland management is collected less frequently and on a coarser scale than data for forest or agricultural inventories and that grassland activity data cannot be directly translated into IPCC-type factors as is done for IPCC inventories of agricultural soils. However, those management data that are available can serve to delineate broad-scale differences in management activities within regions in which soil C is likely to change in response to changes in management. This, coupled with the distinct possibility of more intensive surveys planned in the future, may enable more accurate assessments of grassland C dynamics with higher resolution both spatially and in the number management activities.

Colonization and osteogenic differentiation of different stem cell sources on electrospun nanofiber meshes

Numerous challenges remain in the successful clinical translation of cell-based therapies for musculoskeletal tissue repair, including the identification of an appropriate cell source and a viable cell delivery system. The aim of this study was to investigate the attachment, colonization, and osteogenic differentiation of two stem cell types, human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) and human amniotic fluid stem (hAFS) cells, on electrospun nanofiber meshes. We demonstrate that nanofiber meshes are able to support these cell functions robustly, with both cell types demonstrating strong osteogenic potential. Differences in the kinetics of osteogenic differentiation were observed between hMSCs and hAFS cells, with the hAFS cells displaying a delayed alkaline phosphatase peak, but elevated mineral deposition, compared to hMSCs. We also compared the cell behavior on nanofiber meshes to that on tissue culture plastic, and observed that there is delayed initial attachment and proliferation on meshes, but enhanced mineralization at a later time point. Finally, cell-seeded nanofiber meshes were found to be effective in colonizing three-dimensional scaffolds in an in vitro system. This study provides support for the use of the nanofiber mesh as a model surface for cell culture in vitro, and a cell delivery vehicle for the repair of bone defects in vivo.