Aplicação informática para dimensionamento de barramentos em subestações

Trabalho Final de Mestrado para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia de Electrónica e Telecomunicações

Bwembya Chikolwa interviewed by Nicole Lindsay for Herald Sun 20th August 2009, Property trusts hit hard by US crash,

Listed Australian property companies wrote off more than $8.5 billlion from their ill-fated US investment adventures during this reporting season.

A soft approach to solving hard problems in construction project management

Construction projects are faced with a challenge that must not be underestimated. These projects are increasingly becoming highly competitive, more complex, and difficult to manage. They become ‘wicked problems’, which are difficult to solve using traditional approaches. Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) is a systems approach that is used for analysis and problem solving in such complex and messy situations. SSM uses “systems thinking” in a cycle of action research, learning and reflection to help understand the various perceptions that exist in the minds of the different people involved in the situation. This paper examines the benefits of applying SSM to wicked problems in construction project management, especially those situations that are challenging to understand and difficult to act upon. It includes relevant examples of its use in dealing with the confusing situations that incorporate human, organizational and technical aspects.

Hard Lessons : Reflections on Governance and Crime Control in Late Modernity

The essays in this book catalogue a wide and varied range of instances where 'things go wrong' in the practice of criminal justice. The contributions document instances where laws, policies and practices have produced unintended consequences of the most deleterious kind, drawing attention to 'boot camps', detention centres and specific penal policies such as 'short, sharp shock' and 'three strikes and you're out'. Also examined are policing practices such as 'zero tolerance', 'saturation policing' and punitive laws in the area of drug use, sex offences, and prostitution. It will be demonstrated that in each of these cases, the objectives of government resulted in the creation of new and unforeseen problems requiring further reform to the justice system.

'Try hard' : Attitudes to advertising in online social networks

Advertising has recently entered many new spaces it does not fully understand. The rules that apply in traditional media do not always translate in new media environments. However, their low cost of entry and the availability of hard-to-reach target markets, such as Generation Y, make environments such as online social networking sites attractive to marketers. This paper accumulates teenage perspectives from two qualitative studies to identify attitudes towards advertising in online social network sites and develop implications for marketers seeking to advertising on social network sites.

The mechanical heterogeneity of the hard callus influences local tissue strains during bone healing : a finite element study based on sheep experiments

During secondary fracture healing, various tissue types including new bone are formed. The local mechanical strains play an important role in tissue proliferation and differentiation. To further our mechanobiological understanding of fracture healing, a precise assessment of local strains is mandatory. Until now, static analyses using Finite Elements (FE) have assumed homogenous material properties. With the recent quantification of both the spatial tissue patterns (Vetter et al., 2010) and the development of elastic modulus of newly formed bone during healing (Manjubala et al., 2009), it is now possible to incorporate this heterogeneity. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate the effect of this heterogeneity on the strain patterns at six successive healing stages. The input data of the present work stemmed from a comprehensive cross-sectional study of sheep with a tibial osteotomy (Epari et al., 2006). In our FE model, each element containing bone was described by a bulk elastic modulus, which depended on both the local area fraction and the local elastic modulus of the bone material. The obtained strains were compared with the results of hypothetical FE models assuming homogeneous material properties. The differences in the spatial distributions of the strains between the heterogeneous and homogeneous FE models were interpreted using a current mechanobiological theory (Isakson et al., 2006). This interpretation showed that considering the heterogeneity of the hard callus is most important at the intermediate stages of healing, when cartilage transforms to bone via endochondral ossification.

Frock Paper Scissors [annual hard copy fashion magazine editions]

The Frock Paper Scissors magazine (and accompanying web site, www.frockpapersissors.com ) has been the focus of assessment in a Fashion and Style Journalism unit from 2006 to 2011 (current). The research has focused on the ways in which synergies across disciplines can be developed through student engagement on authentic projects (with a public audience). Up to 80 students from the Fashion Design, Journalism, Media Communication, Creative Industries, Business, Creative Writing and Communication Design discipline areas in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) work on the content, production, layout and funding for the Frock Paper Scissors magazine (and web site). Research focusses on how this authentic assessment task has been integrated into the classes; discussing the approaches taken by teaching staff, the challenges faced, and the ways in which student learning outcomes have been improved and their career outcomes enhanced. The final output requires staff to curate a professional hard copy fashion magazine(and website) where 5,000 copies are distributed annually throughout south east Queensland, Sydney, Melbourne, London, New York and Amsterdam.

Seeing a hard country : Lawrence’s Australian landscape

In 1944 Australian author Eleanor Dark wrote that Australia is a hard country for an outsider to see, citing, in evidence, the writing of the “strange, foreign-looking little man with the beard” -- the self-described by D. H. Lawrence. According to Dark, Lawrence was bewildered by Australia because what his eyes saw was not what they were accustomed to seeing. Kangaroo, she wrote, suggests one long, tormented effort to see. Lawrence appears, for Dark, to be half-blind, struggling, and irritated almost beyond belief with his visit to New South Wales. Eleanor Dark wrote this critique in 1944, long after Lawrence’s 1922 visit, but for her, as for other Australian writers, Kangaroo continued to register as an important book, even if the content rankled. Katharine Susannah Prichard and Christina Stead, both advocates in general of Lawrence, likewise rejected the tenor of Kangaroo, although Lawrence would not have been worried about the response. In 1929 he referred to his irritation with Australia in letters to P.R. “Inky” Stephensen, the Australian nationalist and publisher, and he does not seem to have changed his opinions since writing Kangaroo. Yet the novel continued to be significant for Australian writers, even if as a provocation. My discussion traces the responses of the women authors to Kangaroo, and refers to Lawrence’s letters to Stephensen, as a way of emphasizing this significance, seen especially in relation to ideas about ‘seeing’ and the Australian landscape.

Addressing quality teaching in hard to staff settings : the Exceptional Teachers for Disadvantaged Schools Project

This Exceptional Teachers for Disadvantaged Schools (ETDS) project sets out to design a new model of Australian teacher education responding to recent demands for quality education in low SES and disadvantaged schools. The project moves teacher education from the ‘missionary’ (Larabee, 2010) or deficit (Comber and Kamler 2004; Flessa, 2007) approaches, towards a focus on notions of quality and academic excellence. Rice (2008, p.1) argues for a need to place more of the “very best teachers into the most challenging schools”, yet the problem is not merely one of training more teachers, for disadvantaged schools already receive disproportionate numbers of beginning teachers (Connell, 1994; Vickers & Ferfolja, 2006). Rather, Grossman and Loeb (2010, p. 245) argue the problem centers on the common practice of “[p]lacing the least experienced teachers with the most needy students”. This paper reports on the first year trial of the project. The ETDS project is at present, the only mainstream Australian teacher education model that targets cohorts of academically high achieving pre-service teachers with the overt aim of preparing graduates of the program to teach in disadvantaged schools. At the end of its first year, the ETDS program graduated 20 new teachers, each of whom had over the previous 18 months engaged with a specialized curriculum and carefully monitored/scaffolded practicum placements in disadvantaged schools around Brisbane, Australia.