Summary judgment for plaintiff

The decision in Burke v Van Eeuwen (unreported, District Court of Queensland, No 1490/2002) reminds practitioners of the importance of an appearance for a party at any hearing of an application, even when a party's representatives may consider an opposing party is clearly not entitled to the order it seeks.

Practice and Procedures - costs - offer to settle by plaintiff under UCPR r360 for amount of claim plus costs

In JLG Industries Inc v Teetree Pty Ltd [2002] QDC 031 the court considered the implications in terms of costs of an offer to settle by the plaintiff under the UCPR where the element of compromise involved only acceptance of the amount of claim without interest.

Tables of compound interest and annuities; 48 rates, proceeding by intervals of one-sixteenth per cent. for from 1 to 120 years or periods and carried to nine decimal places ... With miscellaneous tables appended.

Mode of access: Internet.

Funding irregularities in presidential housing at three state universities, Western Illinois, Eastern Illinois, Illinois State : a report to the Illinois General Assembly /

Mode of access: Internet.

Patterns of reporting to child protection services in Canada by healthcare and nonhealthcare professionals

Background: All Canadian jurisdictions require certain professionals to report suspected or observed child maltreatment. This study examined the types of maltreatment, level of harm and child functioning issues, controlling for family socioeconomic status, age and gender of the child reported by healthcare and non-healthcare professionals. Methods: We conducted chi-square analyses and logistic regression on a national child welfare sample from the 2003 Canadian Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect (CIS-2003) and compared the differences in professional reporting with its previous cycle (CIS-1998) using Bonferroni-corrected confidence intervals. Results: Our analysis of CIS-2003 data revealed that the majority of substantiated child maltreatment is reported to service agencies by non-healthcare professionals (57%), followed by non-professionals (33%) and healthcare professionals (10%). The number of professional reports increased 2.5 times between CIS-1998 and CIS-2003, while non-professionals’ increased 1.7 times. Of the total investigations, professional reports represented 59% in CIS-1998 and 67% in CIS-2003 (p<0.001). Compared to non-healthcare professionals, healthcare professionals more often reported younger children, children who experienced neglect and emotional maltreatment and those assessed as suffering harm and child functioning issues, but less often exposure to domestic violence. Conclusion: The results indicate that healthcare professionals played an important role in identifying children in need of protection considering harm and other child functioning issues. The authors discuss the reasons why underreporting is likely to remain an issue.

Measuring building quality of shopping centres in Surabaya by Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP)

Quality has been an important factor for shopping centers in competitive conditions. However, quality measurement has no standard. In Surabaya, only two regional shopping centers will be measured in this research. The objective is assessing quality of shopping centers building using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method and calculating the Building Quality Index. An overall ranking of Hierarchy priorities of quality criteria founded as a result from AHP analysis. Access and Circulation became the highest priority in affecting quality of shopping centers building according to respondents’ perception of quality. Weightened value as a result from comparison between two shopping centers as follows: Tunjungan Plaza get 0,732 point and Surabaya Plaza get 0,268 point. The first shopping center got higher weight than the second shopping center. The BQI for Tunjungan Plaza is 66% and for Surabaya Plaza is 64%.

Closing the cultural distance gap: managing value-based knowledge in MNC by using MEP

Today more than ever, generating and managing knowledge is an essential source of competitive advantage for every organization, and particularly for Multinational corporations (MNC). However, despite the undisputed agreement about the importance of creating and managing knowledge, there are still a large number of corporations that act unethically or illegally. Clearly, there is a lack of attention in gaining more knowledge about the management of ethical knowledge in organizations. This paper refers to value-based knowledge, as the process of recognise and manage those values that stand at the heart of decision-making and action in organizations. In order to support MNCs in implementing value-based knowledge process, the managerial ethical profile (MEP) has been presented as a valuable tool to facilitate knowledge management process at both the intra-organizational network level and at the inter-organizational network level.

Predicting residue-wise contact orders in proteins by support vector regression

Background The residue-wise contact order (RWCO) describes the sequence separations between the residues of interest and its contacting residues in a protein sequence. It is a new kind of one-dimensional protein structure that represents the extent of long-range contacts and is considered as a generalization of contact order. Together with secondary structure, accessible surface area, the B factor, and contact number, RWCO provides comprehensive and indispensable important information to reconstructing the protein three-dimensional structure from a set of one-dimensional structural properties. Accurately predicting RWCO values could have many important applications in protein three-dimensional structure prediction and protein folding rate prediction, and give deep insights into protein sequence-structure relationships. Results We developed a novel approach to predict residue-wise contact order values in proteins based on support vector regression (SVR), starting from primary amino acid sequences. We explored seven different sequence encoding schemes to examine their effects on the prediction performance, including local sequence in the form of PSI-BLAST profiles, local sequence plus amino acid composition, local sequence plus molecular weight, local sequence plus secondary structure predicted by PSIPRED, local sequence plus molecular weight and amino acid composition, local sequence plus molecular weight and predicted secondary structure, and local sequence plus molecular weight, amino acid composition and predicted secondary structure. When using local sequences with multiple sequence alignments in the form of PSI-BLAST profiles, we could predict the RWCO distribution with a Pearson correlation coefficient (CC) between the predicted and observed RWCO values of 0.55, and root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.82, based on a well-defined dataset with 680 protein sequences. Moreover, by incorporating global features such as molecular weight and amino acid composition we could further improve the prediction performance with the CC to 0.57 and an RMSE of 0.79. In addition, combining the predicted secondary structure by PSIPRED was found to significantly improve the prediction performance and could yield the best prediction accuracy with a CC of 0.60 and RMSE of 0.78, which provided at least comparable performance compared with the other existing methods. Conclusion The SVR method shows a prediction performance competitive with or at least comparable to the previously developed linear regression-based methods for predicting RWCO values. In contrast to support vector classification (SVC), SVR is very good at estimating the raw value profiles of the samples. The successful application of the SVR approach in this study reinforces the fact that support vector regression is a powerful tool in extracting the protein sequence-structure relationship and in estimating the protein structural profiles from amino acid sequences.

Feasibility study for thermal treatment of solid tire wastes in Bangladesh by using pyrolysis technology

In this study on the basis of lab data and available resources in Bangladesh, feasibility study has been carried out for pyrolysis process converting solid tire wastes into pyrolysis oils, solid char and gases. The process considered for detailed analysis was fixed-bed fire-tube heating pyrolysis reactor system. The comparative techno-economic assessment was carried out in US$ for three different sizes plants: medium commercial scale (144 tons/day), small commercial scale (36 tons/day), pilot scale (3.6 tons/day). The assessment showed that medium commercial scale plant was economically feasible, with the lowest unit production cost than small commercial and pilot scale plants for the production of crude pyrolysis oil that could be used as boiler fuel oil and for the production of upgraded liquid-products.

Valorization of solid tire wastes available in Bangladesh by thermal treatment

In this study available solid tire wastes in Bangladesh were characterized through proximate and ultimate analyses, gross calorific values and thermogravimetric analysis to investigate their suitability as feedstock for thermal recycling by pyrolysis technology. A new approach in heating system, fixedbed fire-tube heating pyrolysis reactor has been designed and fabricated for the recovery of liquid hydrocarbons from solid tire wastes. The tire wastes were pyrolysed in the internally heated fixed-bed fire-tube heating reactor and maximum liquid yield of 46-55 wt% of solid tire waste was obtained at a temperature of 475 oC, feed size 4 cm3, with a residence time of 5 s under N2 atmosphere. The liquid products were characterized by physical properties, elemental analysis, FT-IR, 1H-NMR, GC MS techniques and distillation. The results show that the liquid products are comparable to petroleum fuels whereas fractional distillations and desulphurization are essential to be used as alternative for diesel engine fuels.

Review: "Transfigured Stages : Major Practitioners and Theatre Aesthetics in Australia" by Margaret Hamilton

In Transfigured Stages: Major Practitioners and Theatre Aesthetics in Australia, Margaret Hamilton traces the emergence of a postdramatic performance aesthetic in Australian theatre in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s through what she characterizes as an ‘analysis’ (p. 15) or ‘critique’ (p. 16)of a series of pivotal productions. For Hamilton, the transfigured aesthetic in the spotlight here is one typified by a focus on memory, imagination, desire, fear or disgust as facets of the human condition; by a visual, televisual or interactive dramaturgy; and, most critically, by a metatheatrical tendency to make tensions in the theatre-making process part and parcel of the tensions in the performance itself (pp.18–20)...