Description:
When Blaise Pascal talks about 'here rather there, now rather than then' he is talking about place. His fright and amazement I take to be an expression of awe at actually being in place. His fright and amazement I take to be an expression of awe at actually being in place marked by his physical presence in a moment of time, a place that his body brings into being. It could be said that his body, inserted into time and space, creates place. Spurred by Pascal's wonder at the immensity of the universe and the fragile, responsible position he occupies within it, my PhD offers a proposition about body, place and theatre which is positioned in the here and now. I propose that theatre makes place with the body, and further, that we can only hope to know ourselves as human beings in place. Conversely, I suggest that the place we create and inhabit tells us something about ourselves. This relationship between body, place and theatre provides the inspirational frame for my project, which poses the question: if theatre makes place with the body, what kind of place are contemporary theatre makers making of Australia.
Description:
The applications of machine learning algorithms to the analysis of data sets of DNA sequences are very important. The present chapter is devoted to the experimental investigation of applications of several machine learning algorithms for the analysis of a JLA data set consisting of DNA sequences derived from non-coding segments in the junction of the large single copy region and inverted repeat A of the chloroplast genome in Eucalyptus collected by Australian biologists. Data sets of this sort represent a new situation, where sophisticated alignment scores have to be used as a measure of similarity. The alignment scores do not satisfy properties of the Minkowski metric, and new machine learning approaches have to be investigated. The authors' experiments show that machine learning algorithms based on local alignment scores achieve very good agreement with known biological classes for this data set. A new machine learning algorithm based on graph partitioning performed best for clustering of the JLA data set. Our novel k-committees algorithm produced most accurate results for classification. Two new examples of synthetic data sets demonstrate that the authors' k-committees algorithm can outperform both the Nearest Neighbour and k-medoids algorithms simultaneously.
Description:
Developments in technology and the Internet have led to an increase in number of digital images and videos. Thousands of images are added to WWW every day. Content based Image Retrieval (CBIR) system typically consists of a query example image, given by the user as an input, from which low-level image features are extracted. These low level image features are used to find images in the database which are most similar to the query image and ranked according their similarity. This chapter evaluates various CBIR techniques based on fuzzy logic and neural networks and proposes a novel fuzzy approach to classify the colour images based on their content, to pose a query in terms of natural language and fuse the queries based on neural networks for fast and efficient retrieval. A number of experiments were conducted for classification, and retrieval of images on sets of images and promising results were obtained.
Description:
This chapter draws on findings from research focused on learning that occurs for men in diverse community organizations rather than in dedicated educational settings. It provides evidence of the benefits for men of learning over the life course, as the relevance and availability of more formal options for learning in educational settings decrease. It seeks to broaden the discussion about learning in ways that are inclusive of perspectives other than those about learning for work, but which look specifically at men's interests, needs and pedagogies in community contexts..."From introduction"
Description:
Motivating employees is one of the most important managerial functions. Successfully motivating employees is essential in the quest to utilise the full potential of people. This helps to maximize the quality of products and service. In Australia, being such a multi-cultural society and with a very diverse workforce, motivation is a vert complex issue. This is owing to the uniqueness of people and the wide range of internal and external factors that impact on it. Motivation is interdisciplinary and therefore cannot be separated from other branches of social sciences. An example is leadership, which is the ability to inspire people to voluntarily and enthusiastically work towards the attainment of organisational goals. But what is motivation? And how does one motivate people? The purpose of this chapter is to provide a comprehensive approach to the question of employee motivation. First, we explore the meaning of motivation. We investigate the practical application of various content and process theories in the workplace. The role of goal setting in motivation is examined, and the power of money as a motivator is considered. We also consider new developments in the study of motivation.
Description:
Guest Box 5 Loss of biodiversity is among the greatest problems facing the world today. Conservation and the Genetics of Populations gives a comprehensive overview of the essential background, concepts, and tools needed to understand how genetic information can be used to conserve species threatened with extinction, and to manage species of ecological or commercial importance. New molecular techniques, statistical methods, and computer programs, genetic principles, and methods are becoming increasingly useful in the conservation of biological diversity. Using a balance of data and theory, coupled with basic and applied research examples, this book examines genetic and phenotypic variation in natural populations, the principles and mechanisms of evolutionary change, the interpretation of genetic data from natural populations, and how these can be applied to conservation. The book includes examples from plants, animals, and microbes in wild and captive populations. This second edition contains new chapters on Climate Change and Exploited Populations as well as new sections on genomics, genetic monitoring, emerging diseases, metagenomics, and more. One-third of the references in this edition were published after the first edition. This book is essential for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of conservation genetics, natural resource management, and conservation biology, as well as professional conservation biologists working for wildlife and habitat management agencies.
Description:
Object analysis using visual sensors is one of the most important and challenging issues in computer vision research due principally to difficulties in object representation, segmentation, and recognition within a general framework. This has motivated researchers to investigate exploiting the potential identification capability of RFID (radio frequency identification) technology for object analysis. RFID however, has a number of fundamental limitations including a short sensing range, missing tag detection, not working for all objects, and some items being just too small to be tagged. This has meant applying RFID alone has not been entirely effective in computer vision applications. To address these restrictions, object analysis approaches based on a combination of visual sensors and RFID have recently been successfully introduced. This chapter presents a contemporary review on these object analysis techniques for localisation, tracking, and object and activity recognition, together with some future research directions in this burgeoning field.
Description:
One could line up a suite of palaeoecological research papers published about Australian sites and, while they would not extend from Lake Wangoom to Lynch’s Crater, they would fill much of the pollen microscope laboratory at Monash University. In one way, that, in fact, would be the best place to start to assemble the bibliography, as many of the papers have emanated from Peter Kershaw and the long list of honours and postgraduate students he has supervised, his post-doctoral fellows and the palaeoecological diaspora that is the legacy of this legend from Littleborough.
Description:
One could line up a suite of palaeoecological research papers published about Australian sites and, while they would not extend from Lake Wangoom to Lynch’s Crater, they would fill much of the pollen microscope laboratory at Monash University. In one way, that, in fact, would be the best place to start to assemble the bibliography, as many of the papers have emanated from Peter Kershaw and the long list of honours and postgraduate students he has supervised, his post-doctoral fellows and the palaeoecological diaspora that is the legacy of this legend from Littleborough.
Description:
Permo-Drive Technologies Limited is a small public company, based on the north-east coast of Australia, that made the first functional Regenerative Drive System (RDS) for motor vehicles. The RDS technology captures energy expended in braking the vehicle, and then applying this energy to assist moving the vehicle when required from stoppages and on steep inclines. Permo-Drive created this intelligent hybrid hydraulic system for vehicles leading to savings in fuel and therefore reductions in carbon emissions and other pollutants. RDS is a significant ecologically sustainable technology which as at 2011 has become a mainstream ecological technology to the extent that the Toyota Prius model has been promoted with three energy sources; petrol, electricity and regenerative drive. In 'The Weekend Australian Magazine' on the 5th July 2003, an article on Permo-Drive called "Oily Rages to Riches", lauded the innovation in this technology and predicted an exciting future with the US Army at that time keen to retrofit all its trucks with the RDS technology. As of 2011, Permo-Drive is still struggling to make a mark in the business world, having gone through many trials of survival related to plethora of governance issues including legal (patents and bankruptcy), management, marketing, financial, regional development, and public innovation support. What went wrong? This is the question that this study aims to explain, using a specific technology commercialisation of innovation model set up by V.K. Jolly in the book 'Commercializing New Technologies: Getting from mind to market' (1997). From a two-man private innovation company, Permo-Drive went on to be a small private company with a large shareholding list of many "mums and dads" who bought into the idea with $3 million of shares at shopping malls, clubs and schools on the north coast of NSW. Then Permo-Drive morphed into a broad-based public stock company with an international managment team. The road to realising a commercial return on this innovation has been very bumpy with an uncertain end; a process that has also had significant implications for governance of the company. More than anything, it reveals just how tenous and uncertain the innovation process can be.
Description:
Machine learning is an emerging area of computer science that deals with the design and development of new algorithms based on various types of data. Machine Learning Algorithms for Problem Solving in Computational Applications: Intelligent Techniques addresses the complex realm of machine learning and its applications for solving various real-world problems in a variety of disciplines, such as manufacturing, business, information retrieval, and security. This premier reference source is essential for professors, researchers, and students in artificial intelligence as well as computer science and engineering.
Description:
There can be little doubt that we currently live in interesting educational times. During the past 20-30 years, there have been major changes in government and public thinking about education. This has occured in Australia and in most Western countries (Alexander, 2009; Lingard, 2010) and also in many developing nations (Nordveit, 2010). There has been what Ball (2006, p.10) and many others regard a 'a major transformation in the organising principles of social provision right across the public sector'. Although Ball's main concern is with education, his point is that the nature of western society as a whole, including its underlying values and organising norms, has substanially changed in less than a generation. In this chapter, I describe changes in values and policy directions that have occured in Australia and elsewhere and explain the impact of such changes on the teaching profession. I will argue that the changes, by and large, have had a deleterious effect on teaching and have, in fact, contributed to a substantial deprofessionalisn of teachers to the point that serious debate is needed on what kind of schooling desirable for the twenty-first century and what kind of teachers universities should be endeavouring to educate.
Description:
Rated Multiple Classification Ripple Down Rules (RM) and Ripple Down Models (RDM) are two of the successful prudent RDR approaches published. To date, there has not been a published, dedicated comparison of the two. This paper presents a systematic preliminary evaluation and analysis of the two techniques. The tests and results reported in this paper are the first phase of direct evaluations of RM and RDM against each other.