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New public management lessons from abroad

New Work - Collaborative Ceramics with Belinda Fox

  • Authors: French, Neville
  • Date: 2011
  • Type: Text , Visual art work
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Nitrogen fixation associated with sago (Metroxylon sagu) and some implications

  • Authors: Shipton, Warren , Baker, Anthony , Blaney, Barry , Horwood, Paul , Warner, Jeffrey , Pelowa, Daniel , Greenhill, Andrew
  • Date: 2011
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Letters in Applied Microbiology Vol. 52, no. 1 (2011), p. 56-61
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  • Description: Aims: To determine the presence and contribution of diazotrophic bacteria to nitrogen concentrations in edible starch derived from the sago palm (Metroxylon sagu).Methods and Results: Isolation of diazotrophic bacteria and analysis of nitrogen fixation were conducted on pith, root and sago starch samples. Acetylene reduction showed that five of ten starch samples were fixing nitrogen. Two presumptive nitrogen-fixing bacteria from starch fixed nitrogen in pure culture and five isolates were positive for the nif H gene. Nitrogen concentrations in 51 starch samples were low (37 samples <0.2 g kg-1; 14 ranging from 0.2 to 2.0 g kg-1).Conclusions: Nitrogen fixation occurs in sago starch, which undoubtedly plays a role in fermentation ecology. Nitrogen levels are considered too low to be of nutritional benefit and to protect against nutritional-associated illnesses.Significance and Impact of the Study: Sago starch does not add significantly to the protein calorie intake and may be associated with susceptibility to nutritional-associated illness.

No longer lost in translation : The art and science of sports injury prevention implementation research

  • Authors: Finch, Caroline
  • Date: 2011
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: British Journal of Sports Medicine Vol. 45, no. 16 (December 2011), p. 1253-1257
  • Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/nhmrc/565900
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  • Description: It is now understood that sports injury interventions will not have significant public health impact if they are not widely accepted and adopted by target sports participants. Although there has been increasing recognition of the need for intervention studies conducted within the real-world context of sports delivery, very few studies have been conducted in this important area. A major reason for this is that there are significant challenges in conducting implementation research; the more traditional sports medicine approaches may not be fully appropriate and new ways of thinking about how to design, conduct and report such research is needed. Moreover, real-world implementation of sports injury interventions and evaluation of their effectiveness needs to start to take into account the broad ecological context in which they are introduced, as well as considering the best way to translate this knowledge to reach the audiences who most need to benefit from such research. This overview paper provides perspectives and guidance on the design, conduct and evaluation of sports injury intervention implementation studies, including better understanding of the complexity of the ecological settings for intervention delivery. Some conceptual approaches that could be adopted in future implementation studies are discussed; particular emphasis is given to Intervention Mapping as a tool to assist intervention development, Diffusion of Innovations Theory to guide the planning of intervention strategies and the RE-AIM (reach, effectiveness, adoption, implementation and maintenance) framework for programme evaluation and programme design. Finally, a broad agenda for this emerging important field of sports medicine research is outlined.

Non-existence of bipartite graphs of diameter at least 4 and defect 2

  • Authors: Pineda-Villavicencio, Guillermo
  • Date: 2011
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics Vol. 34, no. 2 (2011), p. 163-182
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  • Description: The Moore bipartite bound represents an upper bound on the order of a bipartite graph of maximum degree Δ and diameter D. Bipartite graphs of maximum degree Δ, diameter D and order equal to the Moore bipartite bound are called Moore bipartite graphs. Such bipartite graphs exist only if D=2,3,4 and 6, and for D=3,4,6, they have been constructed only for those values of Δ such that Δ-1 is a prime power. The scarcity of Moore bipartite graphs, together with the applications of such large topologies in the design of interconnection networks, prompted us to investigate what happens when the order of bipartite graphs misses the Moore bipartite bound by a small number of vertices. In this direction the first class of graphs to be studied is naturally the class of bipartite graphs of maximum degree Δ, diameter D, and two vertices less than the Moore bipartite bound (defect 2), that is, bipartite (Δ,D,-2)-graphs. For Δ≥3 bipartite (Δ,2,-2)-graphs are the complete bipartite graphs with partite sets of orders Δ and Δ-2. In this paper we consider bipartite (Δ,D,-2)-graphs for Δ≥3 and D≥3. Some necessary conditions for the existence of bipartite (Δ,3,-2)-graphs for Δ≥3 are already known, as well as the non-existence of bipartite (Δ,D,-2)-graphs with Δ≥3 and D=4,5,6,8. Furthermore, it had been conjectured that bipartite (Δ,D,-2)-graphs for Δ≥3 and D≥4 do not exist. Here, using graph spectra techniques, we completely settle this conjecture by proving the non-existence of bipartite (Δ,D,-2)-graphs for all Δ≥3 and all D≥6. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.

Non-thermal food processing: impact on chemical, nutritional and bioactive

Non-thermal food processing: Impact on chemical, nutritional and bioactive components

  • Authors: Gamlath, Shirani , Wakeling, Lara
  • Date: 2011
  • Type: Text , Book
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  • Description: This book focuses on current research in the application of non-thermal technologies such as high pressure processing (HPP), pulsed electric field (PEF) and ultrasonics (US) and their impact on nutritional and bioactive components in a range of food commodities, with an emphasis on identifying suitable processing regimes for commercial applications. Pressures around 400-600 MPa at shorter treatment times retain nutritional properties and enhance the retention of bioactive components in foods with high levels of antioxidant activity. PEF indicated superior results in extracting phenolic and anthocyanins in fruit juices compared to HPP and US due to the electroporation of cellular membranes. However, more research with standardised processing conditions, such as pulse geometry, pulse duration, treatment time and energy levels, on a range of commodiites are necessary to validate PEF conditions for commercial processes. Ultrasonic in combination with mild temperature, enzymes and other non-thermal technologies has a great potential for extraction of nutritional and bioactive components from plant materials with reduced energy, chemicals and processing waste. While HPP technologies are being used commercially, further research and standardisation of processing conditions are required before other non-thermal technologies see commercial application. © 2011 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.

Not just petrol heads: men' learning in the community through participation in motor sports

  • Authors: Golding, Barry
  • Date: 2011
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults Vol. 2, no. 1 (2011), p. 1-16
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  • Description: This paper examines the learning experienced through participation by men in two quite different two motor sports organisations in Western Australia. It relies on interview data from volunteers about what they do and what they learn as a consequence of their participation in staging complex but safe, competitive, public events. The paper provides evidence of a deep well of learning and wide range of skills produced as a consequence of participation. This learning would rarely be recognised as education or training, illustrating the need for caution when concluding that adult education is not taking place and learning outcomes are not being achieved other than through courses where teaching occurs, or in contexts that are regarded as literary. What men skills men learnt, though significant as outcomes, were not the object of the motor sport activity, supporting Biesta's (2006) view that the amassing of knowledge and skills can be achieved in other valuable ways aside from through education.

Novel local improvement techniques in clustered memetic algorithm for protein structure prediction

  • Authors: Islam, Md Kamrul , Chetty, Madhu , Murshed, Manzur
  • Date: 2011
  • Type: Text , Conference paper
  • Relation: IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (IEEE CEC) p. 1003-1011
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  • Description: Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) often fail to find the global optimum due to genetic drift. As the protein structure prediction problem is multimodal having several global optima, EAs empowered with combined application of local and global search e.g., memetic algorithms, can be more effective. This paper introduces two novel local improvement techniques for the clustered memetic algorithm to incorporate both problem specific and search-space specific knowledge to find one of the optimum structures of a hydrophobic-polar protein sequence on lattice models. Experimental results show the superiority of the proposed techniques against existing EAs on benchmark sequences.

Numerical evaluation of the performance of a compression ignition CNG engine for heavy duty trucks with an optimum speed power turbine

  • Authors: Boretti, Alberto
  • Date: 2011
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: International Journal of Engineering and Technology Innovation Vol. 1, no. 1 (2011), p. 12-26
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  • Description: The turbocharged direct injection lean burn Diesel engine is the most efficient engine now in production for transport applications. CNG is an alternative fuel with a better carbon to hydrogen ratio therefore permitting reduced carbon dioxide emissions. It is injected in gaseous form for a much cleaner combustion almost cancelling some of the emissions of the Diesel and it permits a much better energy security within Australia. The paper discusses the best options currently available to convert Diesel engine platforms to CNG, with particular emphasis to the use of these CNG engines within Australia where the refuelling network is scarce. This option is determined in the dual fuel operation with a double injector design that couples a second CNG injector to the Diesel injector. This configuration permits the operation Diesel only or Diesel pilot and CNG main depending on the availability of refuelling stations where the vehicle operates. Results of engine performance simulations are performed for a straight six cylinder 13 litres truck engine with a novel power turbine connected to the crankshaft through a constant variable transmission that may be by-passed when non helpful to increase the fuel economy of the vehicle or when damaging the performances of the after treatment system.

Numerical modelling of desiccation cracking

  • Authors: Amarasiri, Aruna , Kodikara, Jayantha , Costa, Susanga
  • Date: 2011
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: International Journal for Numerical and Analytical Methods in Geomechanics Vol. 35, no. 1 (2011), p. 82-96
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  • Description: The ability to model and predict the formation of desiccation cracks is potentially beneficial in many applications such as clay liner design, earth dam construction, and crop science, etc. However, most studies have focused on statistical analysis of crack patterns and qualitative study of contributing factors to crack development rather than prediction. Because it is exceedingly difficult to capture the nonlinear processes during desiccation in analytical modelling, most such models handle crack formation without considering variation of material properties with time, and are unattractive to use in realistic modelling. The data obtained from laboratory experiments on clay soil desiccating in moulds were used as a basis to develop a more refined model of desiccation cracking. In this study, the properties, such as matric suction, stiffness and tensile strength of soil, and base adhesion, could be expressed approximately as functions of moisture content. The initial conditions and the development of suction due to desiccation and the varying material properties were inputted to UDEC, a distinct element code, using its internal programming language FISH. The model was able to capture some essential physical aspects of crack evolution in soil contained in moulds with varying lengths, heights, and materials of construction. Extension of this methodology is potentially beneficial not only for modelling desiccation cracking in clay, but also in other systems with evolving material properties such as concrete structures and road pavements.

Observations of caregiver supervision of children at beaches : Identification of factors associated with high supervision

  • Authors: Petrass, Lauren , Blitvich, Jennifer , Finch, Caroline
  • Date: 2011
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Injury Prevention Vol. 17, no. 4 (2011), p. 244-249
  • Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/nhmrc/565900
  • Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/nhmrc/565904
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  • Description: Objective: To identify independent factors associated with caregiver supervision levels at beaches. Methods: Children (aged 1-14 years) engaged in beach play and their caregivers were observed at Australian beaches during September-April, 2008/09. Caregiver, child, and environmental factor data were collected and recorded on a validated observation instrument. The main outcome of interest was a continuous measure of supervision. After adjusting for potential clustering by beach/state, multivariable linear regression was used to identify independent factors associated with caregiver supervision. Results: Four independent predictors of supervision and one interaction effect (child age by the caregiver and child position on beach) were identified. Caregivers who were supervising from a different position to where the child was playing were less likely to provide high supervision, as were older caregivers (>35 years) compared to younger caregivers (≤34 years). Compared to children playing alone, children playing with one, or two or more others were less likely to receive high supervision, and children aged 1-4 years were likely to receive higher supervision than older children. Conclusion: This study provides new knowledge about underlying factors associated with the level of caregiver supervision in beach settings. Future studies should continue to explore independent predictors of supervision so that effective programmes, which focus on caregiver supervision, can be targeted to address poor supervision practices.

Off-campus learning: what do students want?

  • Authors: Mosse, Jennifer , Panther, Barbara , Wright, Wendy
  • Date: 2011
  • Type: Text , Conference paper
  • Relation: Australian Conference on Science and Mathematics Education (ACSME) p. 205-210
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  • Description: As universities attempt to increase enrolments of ‘time-poor’ students, effective teaching strategies that minimise attendance requirements are required. The increasing use of technology to record face-to-face lectures provides a useful alternative for students unable to attend. However, this study indicates that recorded lectures, alone, are inadequate for distant students, who make extensive use of a wide range of materials. Study guides remain the most highly valued and highly used items in the suite of materials available to off-campus students. The importance of contact between off-campus students, their lecturers and their peers is highlighted.

Older men's learning through age-related community organisations in Australia

Older men's wellbeing through community participation in Australia

  • Authors: Golding, Barry
  • Date: 2011
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: International Journal of Men's Health Vol. 10, no. 1 (2011), p. 26-44
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  • Description: This paper explores the wellbeing implications of older men's community involvement. It is based on data from recent, mixed method, Australian research that investigated learning and wellbeing for older men (age over 50) in diverse sites for six community organisation types. It investigates men's wellbeing outcomes as a consequence of participation in community organisations. The data illustrate the important health and wellbeing benefits, particularly to many older men, of regular, practical, hands-on activity and involvement. The paper includes a critical examination of the opportunities for enhancing health and wellbeing filtered through the World Health Organisation's (WHO, 2003) Social Determinants of Health. This research illustrates how diverse community organisations have the capacity to address men's health and wellbeing, particularly if they acknowledge the importance of both the role of men's cultural norms and values and the value of men's agency through grassroots organisations such as community men's sheds. © 2011 by the Men's Studies Press, LLC. All rights reserved.

On bipartite graphs of defect at most 4

  • Authors: Feria-Purón, Ramiro , Pineda-Villavicencio, Guillermo
  • Date: 2011
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Discrete Applied Mathematics Vol.160, no.1-2 (2011), p.140-154
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  • Description: We consider the bipartite version of the degree/diameter problem, namely, given natural numbers Δ ≥ 2 and D ≥ 2, find the maximum number Nb (Δ, D) of vertices in a bipartite graph of maximum degree Δ and diameter D. In this context, the Moore bipartite bound Mb (Δ, D) represents an upper bound for Nb (Δ, D). Bipartite graphs of maximum degree Δ, diameter D and order Mb (Δ, D)-called Moore bipartite graphs-have turned out to be very rare. Therefore, it is very interesting to investigate bipartite graphs of maximum degree Δ ≥ 2, diameter D ≥ 2 and order Mb (Δ, D) - ε{lunate} with small ε{lunate} > 0, that is, bipartite (Δ, D, - ε{lunate})-graphs. The parameter ε{lunate} is called the defect. This paper considers bipartite graphs of defect at most 4, and presents all the known such graphs. Bipartite graphs of defect 2 have been studied in the past; if Δ ≥ 3 and D ≥ 3, they may only exist for D = 3. However, when ε{lunate} > 2 bipartite (Δ, D, - ε{lunate})-graphs represent a wide unexplored area. The main results of the paper include several necessary conditions for the existence of bipartite (Δ, D, - 4)-graphs; the complete catalogue of bipartite (3, D, - ε{lunate})-graphs with D ≥ 2 and 0 ≤ ε{lunate} ≤ 4; the complete catalogue of bipartite (Δ, D, - ε{lunate})-graphs with Δ ≥ 2, 5 ≤ D ≤ 187 (D ≠ 6) and 0 ≤ ε{lunate} ≤ 4; a proof of the non-existence of all bipartite (Δ, D, - 4)-graphs with Δ ≥ 3 and odd D ≥ 5. Finally, we conjecture that there are no bipartite graphs of defect 4 for Δ ≥ 3 and D ≥ 5, and comment on some implications of our results for the upper bounds of Nb (Δ, D). © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

On dynamic scene geometry for view-invariant action matching

  • Authors: Ul-Haq, Anwaar , Gondal, Iqbal , Murshed, Manzur
  • Date: 2011
  • Type: Text , Conference paper
  • Relation: 24th IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) p. 3305-3312
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  • Description: Variation in viewpoints poses significant challenges to action recognition. One popular way of encoding view-invariant action representation is based on the exploitation of epipolar geometry between different views of the same action. Majority of representative work considers detection of landmark points and their tracking by assuming that motion trajectories for all landmark points on human body are available throughout the course of an action. Unfortunately, due to occlusion and noise, detection and tracking of these landmarks is not always robust. To facilitate it, some of the work assumes that such trajectories are manually marked which is a clear drawback and lacks automation introduced by computer vision. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing view invariant action matching score based on epipolar geometry between actor silhouettes, without tracking and explicit point correspondences. In addition, we explore multi-body epipolar constraint which facilitates to work on original action volumes without any pre-processing. We show that multi-body fundamental matrix captures the geometry of dynamic action scenes and helps devising an action matching score across different views without any prior segmentation of actors. Extensive experimentation on challenging view invariant action datasets shows that our approach not only removes long standing assumptions but also achieves significant improvement in recognition accuracy and retrieval.

On graphs of defect at most 2

  • Authors: Feria-Purón, Ramiro , Miller, Mirka , Pineda-Villavicencio, Guillermo
  • Date: 2011
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Discrete Applied Mathematics Vol. 159, no. 13 (2011), p. 1331-1344
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  • Description: In this paper we consider the degree/diameter problem, namely, given natural numbers Δ<2 and D<1, find the maximum number N(Δ,D) of vertices in a graph of maximum degree Δ and diameter D. In this context, the Moore bound M(Δ,D) represents an upper bound for N(Δ,D). Graphs of maximum degree Δ, diameter D and order M(Δ,D), called Moore graphs, have turned out to be very rare. Therefore, it is very interesting to investigate graphs of maximum degree Δ<2, diameter D<1 and order M(Δ,D)- with small >0, that is, (Δ,D,-)-graphs. The parameter is called the defect. Graphs of defect 1 exist only for Δ=2. When >1, (Δ,D,-)-graphs represent a wide unexplored area. This paper focuses on graphs of defect 2. Building on the approaches developed in Feria-Purón and Pineda-Villavicencio (2010) [11] we obtain several new important results on this family of graphs. First, we prove that the girth of a (Δ,D,-2)-graph with Δ<4 and D<4 is 2D. Second, and most important, we prove the non-existence of (Δ,D,-2)-graphs with even Δ<4 and D<4; this outcome, together with a proof on the non-existence of (4,3,-2)-graphs (also provided in the paper), allows us to complete the catalogue of (4,D,-)-graphs with D<2 and 0≤≤2. Such a catalogue is only the second census of (Δ,D,-2)-graphs known at present, the first being that of (3,D,-)-graphs with D<2 and 0≤≤2 Jørgensen (1992) [14]. Other results of this paper include necessary conditions for the existence of (Δ,D,-2)-graphs with odd Δ<5 and D<4, and the non-existence of (Δ,D,-2)-graphs with odd Δ<5 and D<5 such that Δ≡0,2(modD). Finally, we conjecture that there are no (Δ,D,-2)-graphs with Δ<4 and D<4, and comment on some implications of our results for the upper bounds of N(Δ,D). © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

On low-rank regularized least squares for scalable nonlinear classification

  • Authors: Fu, Zhouyu , Lu, Guojun , Ting, Kaiming , Zhang, Dengsheng
  • Date: 2011
  • Type: Text , Conference paper
  • Relation: International Conference on Neural Information Processing p. 490-499
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  • Description: In this paper, we revisited the classical technique of Regularized Least Squares (RLS) for the classification of large-scale nonlinear data. Specifically, we focus on a low-rank formulation of RLS and show that it has linear time complexity in the data size only and does not rely on the number of labels and features for problems with moderate feature dimension. This makes low-rank RLS particularly suitable for classification with large data sets. Moreover, we have proposed a general theorem for the closed-form solutions to the Leave-One-Out Cross Validation (LOOCV) estimation problem in empirical risk minimization which encompasses all types of RLS classifiers as special cases. This eliminates the reliance on cross validation, a computationally expensive process for parameter selection, and greatly accelerate the training process of RLS classifiers. Experimental results on real and synthetic large-scale benchmark data sets have shown that low-rank RLS achieves comparable classification performance while being much more efficient than standard kernel SVM for nonlinear classification. The improvement in efficiency is more evident for data sets with higher dimensions.

On not loving everyone : Comments on Jean-Luc Nancy’s “L’amour en éclats [Shattered Love]”