Showing items 1 - 20 of 11631

"Regardless of age" : Australian university managers' attitudes and practices towards older academics

  • Authors: Earl, Catherine , Taylor, Philip , Cannizzo, Fabian
  • Date: 2018
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Work, Aging and Retirement Vol. 4, no. 3 (2018), p. 300-313
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  • Description: As with other industrialized nations Australia's population is aging and older workers are encouraged to work for longer. At the same time, Australia's university sector, which is aging, is being reconfigured through changes that potentially marginalize its older workers as higher education institutions try to become more competitive in a global market. In this context, youthfulness appears to embody competitiveness and academic institutions are increasingly aspiring to a young workforce profile. This qualitative article builds on previous research to explore to what extent ageist assumptions shape attitudes to older workers and human resource management (HRM) practices within Australian universities even when HRM practitioners are well versed in antidiscrimination legislation that (unlike the Age Discrimination in Employment Act in the United States) applies to workers of all ages. Semistructured interviews conducted with 22 HRM practitioners in Australian universities reveal that university HRM practices generally overlook the value of retaining an older workforce by conflating "potential" with "youthfulness," assuming that staff potential and performance share a negative correlation with age. While mostly lower-ranked institutions have attempted to retain older academics to maintain an adequate labor supply, this study finds that university policies targeting the ongoing utilization of older workers generally are underdeveloped. Consequently, the availability of late career employment arrangements is dependent upon institutions' strategic goals, with favorable ad hoc solutions offered to academics with outstanding performance records, while a rhetoric of performance decline threatens to marginalize older academic researchers and teachers more generally.

"There needs to be something there for people to remember" : Industrial heritage in Newcastle and the Hunter Valley, Australia

  • Authors: Eklund, Erik
  • Date: 2018
  • Type: Text , Book chapter
  • Relation: Industrial Heritage and Regional Identities (Routledge Cultural Heritage and Tourism Series) Chapter 8 p. 168-189
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  • Description: Newcastle is located on the east coast of Australia in the state of New South Wales (NSW). Coal mining began in the early 19th centrury, and from the 1850s encouraged the development of pit-top towns gathered around an increasingly busy river port. Coal mining shifted west into the Hunter Valley where there are still vast amounts of open pit coal production. Mining also encouraged industrial development in engineering, transport and, from 1915, iron and steel production. Deindustrialization in Newcastle dates from the mid-1970s and plant closures accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s as the steel works and other related manufacturing industries closed down.

A 'program of such potential' : The Australian Assistance Plan

  • Authors: Scott, Joanne , Oppenheimer, Melanie , Eklund, Erik
  • Date: 2018
  • Type: Book chapter , Text
  • Relation: The state of welfare : comparative studies of the welfare state at the end of the long boom, 1965-1980 Chapter 5 p. 85-104
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  • Description: The Australian Assistance Plan (AAP) was an innovative programme of social welfare reform. Foreshadowed in the late 1960s, launched in 1973, and abolished in 1977, it was the subject of substantial commentary during and immediately after its brief existence. Attracting more brickbats than bouquets, the AAP was variously described as ‘a feasible and indeed exciting approach’, ‘the most random of random experiments’, ‘welfare on the cheap’, ‘a confusing program’ and ‘good news’.2 In contrast to other major initiatives of the Whitlam Labor government, it has attracted almost no scholarly analysis since the 1970s.

A 12-month prospective cohort study of symptoms of common mental disorders among professional rugby players

  • Authors: Gouttebarge, Vincent , Hopley, Philip , Kerkhoffs, Gino , Verhagen, Evert , Viljoen, Wayne , Wylleman, Paul , Lambert, Mike
  • Date: 2018
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: European Journal of Sport Science Vol. 18, no. 7 (2018), p. 1004-1012
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  • Description: The primary aims were to determine the 12-month incidence (and comorbidity) of symptoms of common mental disorders (CMD) among male professional rugby players and to explore their association with potential stressors. A secondary aim was to explore the view of male professional rugby players about the consequences of symptoms of CMD and related medical support/needs. An observational prospective cohort study with three measurements over a 12-month period was conducted among male professional rugby players from several countries. Symptoms of CMD (distress, anxiety/depression, sleep disturbance, eating disorders and adverse alcohol use) and stressors (adverse life events, rugby career dissatisfaction) were assessed through validated questionnaires. A total of 595 players (mean age of 26 years; mean career duration of 6 years) were enrolled, of which 333 completed the follow-up period. The incidence of symptoms of CMD were: 11% for distress, 28% for anxiety/depression, 12% for sleep disturbance, 11% for eating disorders and 22% for adverse alcohol use (13% for two simultaneous symptoms of CMD). Professional rugby players reporting recent adverse life events or career dissatisfaction were more likely to report symptoms of CMD but statistically significant associations were not found. Around 95% of the participants stated that symptoms of CMD can negatively influence rugby performances, while 46% mentioned that specific support measures for players were not available in professional rugby. Supportive and preventive measures directed towards symptoms of CMD should be developed to improve not only awareness and psychological resilience of rugby players but also their rugby performance and quality-of-life. © 2018, © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

A chronological history of the school

  • Authors: Reeves, Mark , Dyson, Michael , Plunkett, Margaret
  • Date: 2018
  • Type: Text , Book chapter
  • Relation: Surviving, thriving and reviving in adolescence : Research and narratives from the school for student leadership Chapter 2 p. 7-25
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  • Description: This chapter introduces the Alpine School and its original purpose and goals before leading into the story of the historical development of the current School for Student Leadership (SSL). It outlines the extensive political background behind the creation of this unique Victorian school and the search for an appropriate principal. The development of the school from a single campus to the current three campuses is detailed, with photos of each included to illustrate the diverse environmental contexts that are represented. Also presented is an outline of some of the major differences in the curriculum and overall experience that students receive through a term spent at the SSL, compared to that offered via traditional mainstream education. The different learning opportunities resulting from a program that focuses on providing a rite of passage for adolescents and includes experiential learning, reflection and a Community Learning Project are discussed, illustrating the contemporary approach used at the school to meet the cognitive, physical, social and emotional needs of the attending Year 9 students.

A comparative assessment of models to predict monthly rainfall in Australia

  • Authors: Bagirov, Adil , Mahmood, Arshad
  • Date: 2018
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Water Resources Management Vol. 32, no. 5 (2018), p. 1777-1794
  • Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DP140103213
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  • Description: Accurate rainfall prediction is a challenging task. It is especially challenging in Australia where the climate is highly variable. Australia’s climatic zones range from high rainfall tropical regions in the north to the driest desert region in the interior. The performance of prediction models may vary depending on climatic conditions. It is, therefore, important to assess and compare the performance of these models in different climatic zones. This paper examines the performance of data driven models such as the support vector machines for regression, the multiple linear regression, the k-nearest neighbors and the artificial neural networks for monthly rainfall prediction in Australia depending on climatic conditions. Rainfall data with five meteorological variables over the period of 1970–2014 from 24 geographically diverse weather stations are used for this purpose. The prediction performance of each model was evaluated by comparing observed and predicted rainfall using various measures for prediction accuracy. © 2018, Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature.

A conceptual framework for a theory of liquidity

  • Authors: Culham, James
  • Date: 2018
  • Type: Text , Thesis , PhD
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  • Description: This study contributes to the understanding of liquidity in two ways. First, it considers the multifaceted nature of liquidity and its relationship with money. Second, it constructs a conceptual framework for a theory of liquidity. The first contribution is achieved by clarifying and categorising the various forms of liquidity to identify those overlooked by the existing literature. The second contribution consists of a realist critique of the literature on liquidity and money to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each theoretical approach. The study reflects on the attempts to analyse liquidity using moneyless models of perfect barter with the assumption that every commodity exhibits perfect saleability; an assumption that removes any need for a medium of exchange and, moreover, crowds out all other forms of liquidity. It is concluded that, because liquidity is a social and monetary phenomenon, it cannot be analysed with models populated by a representative agent consuming a single commodity. Furthermore, this conclusion is not altered by the introduction of ‘financial frictions’, which are fundamentally at odds with the nature of money. Instead, the clarification of the nature of liquidity forms the basis for an interpretation of Keynes’s theory of liquidity preference that emphasises its reliance on liquidity in general, not money in particular. The study introduces the terms redemption liquidity and exchange liquidity to explain the trade-off that underpins the theory of liquidity preference. Properly interpreted, the theory of liquidity preference can then address many of the deficiencies prevalent in the dominant theories of the rate of interest. The study therefore has implications for monetary policy and asset pricing.
  • Description: Doctor of Philosophy

A detector of structural similarity for multi-modal microscopic image registration

  • Authors: Lv, Guohua , Teng, Shyh , Lu, Guojun
  • Date: 2018
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Multimedia Tools and Applications Vol. 77, no. 6 (2018), p. 7675-7701
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  • Description: This paper presents a Detector of Structural Similarity (DSS) to minimize the visual differences between brightfield and confocal microscopic images. The context of this work is that it is very challenging to effectively register such images due to a low structural similarity in image contents. To address this issue, DSS aims to maximize the structural similarity by utilizing the intensity relationships among red-green-blue (RGB) channels in images. Technically, DSS can be combined with any multi-modal image registration technique in registering brightfield and confocal microscopic images. Our experimental results show that DSS significantly increases the visual similarity in such images, thereby improving the registration performance of an existing state-of-the-art multi-modal image registration technique by up to approximately 27%. © 2017, Springer Science+Business Media New York.

A lack of aquatic rescue competency : A drowning risk factor for young adults involved in aquatic emergencies

  • Authors: Petrass, Lauren , Blitvich, Jennifer
  • Date: 2018
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Journal of Community Health Vol. 43, no. 4 (2018), p. 688-693
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  • Description: Drowning is an important public health issue with major impacts on young adults aged 15–24 years, yet little is known about the causal factors for drowning for this group. As young adults recreate with peers in unpatrolled aquatic environments, the capacity to perform effective and efficient rescues seems pivotal. This study examined perceived ability of young adults to perform a rescue; determined the level of aquatic rescue knowledge; and measured the effect of an aquatic rescue intervention. In total, 135 participants completed pre- and post-intervention surveys and rescue practical testing. Wilcoxon matched pairs signed rank tests were used to assess significant differences pre- and post-intervention and Mann–Whitney tests used to compare groups. Pre-intervention, participants had a low level of rescue knowledge (Mdn = 50) and the relationship between perceived rescue ability and practical rescue testing was weak (rs = 0.33, p ≤ 0.001). Post-intervention, ability to perform a contact tow demonstrated significant improvement (z = − 9.09, p < 0.001, r = − 0.79) and rescue knowledge also improved significantly (Mdn = 100, z = − 9.42, p < 0.001, r = − 0.81). Many young adults lacked both the physical capacity and knowledge required to safely perform a rescue, a factor that may place them at increased drowning risk if they attempt an aquatic rescue. As a rescue based intervention can significantly improve competency of young adults regardless of previous experience and/or qualifications, research needs to consider how best these competencies can be promoted and/or developed with this high risk group.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

  • Authors: Stone, Greg
  • Date: 2018
  • Type: Text
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  • Description: 27th April-5th May 2018 Drama, politics, romance, comedy, magic, music and mystery – this play truly has it all. Four young lovers escape the stifling, conservative, patriarchal government, only to fall prey to the mischievous politics of the mystical world.

A narrative account of the research journey

  • Authors: Dyson, Michael , Plunkett, Margaret
  • Date: 2018
  • Type: Text , Book chapter
  • Relation: Surviving, thriving and reviving in adolescence : Research and narratives from the school for student leadership Chapter 3 p. 27-42
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  • Description: This narrative chapter unravels the story of the research journey undertaken over the last 16 years as part of a partnership between the Alpine School/School for Student Leadership and staff from Monash University’s Gippsland campus, which later became part of Federation University, Australia. It has been written in a narrative style to provide a conceptual context for discussing some of the major research insights from this partnership, including the significance of a ‘Landscape of Transformation’ as an overarching framework that has emerged from this longitudinal study. An outline of the research directions, and the associated teams who have been involved, is clarified. Also presented is a full listing of publications and reports associated with the research, with a focus on some of the key findings which are covered in more detail in later chapters.

A new image dissimilarity measure incorporating human perception

  • Authors: Shojanazeri, Hamid , Teng, Shyh , Aryal, Sunil , Zhang, Dengsheng , Lu, Guojun
  • Date: 2018
  • Type: Text , Unpublished work
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  • Description: Pairwise (dis) similarity measure of data objects is central to many applications of image anlaytics, such as image retrieval and classification. Geometric distance, particularly Euclidean distance ((

A novel error indicator and an adaptive refinement technique using the scaled boundary finite element method

  • Authors: Song, Chongmin , Ooi, Ean Tat , Pramod, Aladurthi , Natarajan, Sundararajan
  • Date: 2018
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements Vol. 94, no. (2018), p. 10-24
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  • Description: In this paper, an adaptive refinement strategy based on the scaled boundary finite element method on quadtree meshes for linear elasticity problems is discussed. Within this framework, the elements with hanging nodes are treated as polygonal elements and thus does not require special treatment. The adaptive refinement is supplemented with a novel error indicator. The local error is estimated directly from the solution of the scaled boundary governing equations. The salient feature is that it does not require any stress recovery techniques. The efficacy and the robustness of the proposed approach are demonstrated with a few numerical examples.

A novel no-reference subjective quality metric for free viewpoint video using human eye movement

  • Authors: Podder, Pallab , Paul, Manoranjan , Murshed, Manzur
  • Date: 2018
  • Type: Text , Conference proceedings , Conference Paper
  • Relation: 8th Pacific-Rim Symposium on Image and Video Technology, PSIVT 2017; Wuhan, China; 20th-24th November 2017; published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) Vol. 10749 LNCS, p. 237-251
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  • Description: The free viewpoint video (FVV) allows users to interactively control the viewpoint and generate new views of a dynamic scene from any 3D position for better 3D visual experience with depth perception. Multiview video coding exploits both texture and depth video information from various angles to encode a number of views to facilitate FVV. The usual practice for the single view or multiview quality assessment is characterized by evolving the objective quality assessment metrics due to their simplicity and real time applications such as the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) or the structural similarity index (SSIM). However, the PSNR or SSIM requires reference image for quality evaluation and could not be successfully employed in FVV as the new view in FVV does not have any reference view to compare with. Conversely, the widely used subjective estimator- mean opinion score (MOS) is often biased by the testing environment, viewers mode, domain knowledge, and many other factors that may actively influence on actual assessment. To address this limitation, in this work, we devise a no-reference subjective quality assessment metric by simply exploiting the pattern of human eye browsing on FVV. Over different quality contents of FVV, the participants eye-tracker recorded spatio-temporal gaze-data indicate more concentrated eye-traversing approach for relatively better quality. Thus, we calculate the Length, Angle, Pupil-size, and Gaze-duration features from the recorded gaze trajectory. The content and resolution invariant operation is carried out prior to synthesizing them using an adaptive weighted function to develop a new quality metric using eye traversal (QMET). Tested results reveal that the proposed QMET performs better than the SSIM and MOS in terms of assessing different aspects of coded video quality for a wide range of FVV contents.
  • Description: Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

A novel scaled boundary finite element formulation with stabilization and its application to image-based elastoplastic analysis

  • Authors: He, Ke , Song, Chongmin , Ooi, Ean Tat
  • Date: 2018
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering Vol. 115, no. 8 (2018), p. 956-985
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  • Description: Digital images are increasingly being used as input data for computational analyses. This study presents an efficient numerical technique to perform image-based elastoplastic analysis of materials and structures. The quadtree decomposition algorithm is employed for image-based mesh generation, which is fully automatic and highly efficient. The quadtree cells are modeled by scaled boundary polytope elements, which eliminate the issue of hanging nodes faced by standard finite elements. A novel, simple, and efficient scaled boundary elastoplastic formulation with stablisation is developed. In this formulation, the return-mapping calculation is only required to be performed at a single point in a polytope element, which facilitates the computational efficiency of the elastoplastic analysis and simplicity of implementation. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed technique for performing the elastoplastic analysis of high-resolution images.

A potentially important role for T cells and regulatory T cells in Langerhans cell histiocytosis

  • Authors: Mitchell, Jenne , Berzins, Stuart , Kannourakis, George
  • Date: 2018
  • Type: Text , Journal article , Review
  • Relation: Clinical Immunology Vol. 194, no. (2018), p. 19-25
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  • Description: Langerhans cell histiocytosis is characterized by lesions containing inflammatory immune cells, including myeloid cells and T cells. Patient mortality remains unacceptably high and new treatment options are required. Several LCH studies have identified aberrant frequencies of T cell subsets with potential immune regulatory properties. High numbers of Foxp3+ regulatory T cells and gamma-delta T cells have been reported in patients with LCH, although, the cause of their presence or their significance is not yet clear. This review describes the current understanding of how LCH develops and progresses, focusing on the growing evidence that regulatory T cell subsets may be important and discussing the exciting potential for harnessing these cells to treat LCH using immune based therapies.

A quadtree-polygon-based scaled boundary finite element method for crack propagation modeling in functionally graded materials

  • Authors: Chen, Xiaojun , Luo, Tao , Ooi, Ean Tat , Ooi, Ean Hin , Song, Chongmin
  • Date: 2018
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Theoretical and Applied Fracture Mechanics Vol. 94, no. (2018), p. 120-133
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  • Description: This paper presents a method to improve the computational efficiency of the scaled boundary finite element formulation for functionally graded materials. Both isotropic and orthotropic functionally graded materials are considered. This is achieved using a combination of quadtree and polygon meshes. This hybrid meshing approach is particularly suitable to be used with the SBFEM for functionally graded materials because of the significant amount of calculations required to compute the stiffness matrices of the polygons/cells in the mesh. When a quadtree structure is adopted, most of the variables required for the numerical simulation can be pre-computed and stored in the memory, retrieved and scaled as required during the computations, leading to an efficient method for crack propagation modeling. The scaled boundary finite element formulation enables accurate computation of the stress intensity factors directly from the stress solutions without any special post-processing techniques or local mesh refinement in the vicinity of the crack tip. Numerical benchmarks demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method as opposed to using a purely polygon-mesh based approach. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd

A review of early Indigenous artefacts incorporating bird materials in the Lower Murray River region, South Australia

  • Authors: Clarke, Philip
  • Date: 2018
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia Vol. 142, no. 1 (2018), p. 27-48
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  • Description: This paper is a literature review of the use of birds in the Indigenous material culture of the Lower Murray River region in temperate South Australia, as observed in the early years of British colonisation. This record is augmented with additional data from fieldwork in the 1980s and early 1990s. It was found that Aboriginal people in this region made artefacts incorporating avian materials based upon their perceived physical and cultural properties. Analysis of material culture with respect to birds contributes to the understanding of Aboriginal use and perception of the Australian landscape. © 2018 Royal Society of South Australia.

A review of the scaled boundary finite element method for two-dimensional linear elastic fracture mechanics

  • Authors: Song, Chongmin , Ooi, Ean Tat , Natarajan, Sundararajan
  • Date: 2018
  • Type: Text , Journal article , Review
  • Relation: Engineering Fracture Mechanics Vol. 187, no. (2018), p. 45-73
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  • Description: The development and the application of the scaled boundary finite element method for fracture analysis is reviewed. In this method, polygonal elements (referred to as subdomains) of arbitrary number of edges are constructed, with the only limitation that the whole boundary is directly visible from the scaling centre. The element solution is semi-analytical. When applied to two-dimensional linear fracture mechanics, any kinds of stress singularities are represented analytically without local refinement, special elements and enrichment functions. The flexibility of polygons to represent arbitrary geometric shapes leads to simple yet efficient remeshing algorithms to model crack propagation. Coupling procedures with the extended finite element method, meshless method and boundary element method to handle changes in the crack morphology have been established. These developments result in an efficient framework for fracture modelling. Examples of applications are provided to demonstrate their feasibility. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd

A technology review for regeneration of sulfur rich amine systems

  • Authors: Garg, Bharti , Verheyen, Vincent , Pearson, Pauline , Feron, Paul , Cousins, Ashleigh
  • Date: 2018
  • Type: Text , Journal article , Review
  • Relation: International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control Vol. 75, no. (2018), p. 243-253
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  • Description: Reducing the capital cost of post combustion CO2 capture by eliminating flue gas desulfurisation (FGD) pre-treatment, requires management of the amines preferential SO2 absorption. Novel technologies such as CS-Cap restrict the impact of SO2 to only a small fraction of the amine inventory resulting in high sulfate burden amines. Traditional thermal reclamation of these spent absorbents has advantages regarding simplicity, but ranks poorly for industrial ecology around PCC. These amines require low energy regeneration technologies compatible with their physico-chemical properties that also maximise the potential for valorising by-products. This review summarises the sulfur chemistry and outlines several amine reclamation processes. It assesses the status of established and novel regeneration technologies for their applicability to high sulfur loaded amines. Should deep sulfur removal be required, a hybrid approach with initial bulk removal (as product) followed by a polishing step to further reduce sulfur is prospective. A preliminary estimation of the relative cost of using standard reclamation methods for treating Sulfur loaded CS-Cap absorbent revealed the cost would increase due to its higher sulfate burden despite comparable treatment volumes. Research gaps are identified which would enable better comparison between the costs of traditional FGD versus higher reclamation costs for combined capture technologies.