Introduction: Animal Cultures

Creative writing, transdisciplinary literary animal studies, and law-anthropology don’t often appear in the same sentence, but this interdisciplinary mingling is where we as editors meet in animal studies. We were particularly enthused by discussions that emerged during the Australasian Animal Studies Conference, held at the University of Sydney in November 2023, providing a rich source from which to consider the conference theme: ‘Animal Cultures’. Keynote speaker, Carol Gigliotti, wondered about the animal cultural research ideas that can be taken with us to ‘make lives better for animals, both wild and captive\u27

An analytical approach of multi-dimensional Navier-Stokes equation in the framework of natural transform

This article introduces a new iterative transform method and homotopy perturbation transform method along with a natural transform to analyze the multi-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations. To solve the fractional-derivative, the Caputo-Fabrizio definition of the fractional derivative was employed. Four examples were considered to examine the efficacy and accuracy of the proposed methods. The efficiency and accuracy were also demonstrated by the solution comparison via graphs. The proposed methods’ convergence and uniqueness are also discussed. The methods mentioned above are straightforward and support a high rate of convergence

The influence of drilling technology on the qualitative assessment of the rock mass

A comparison of rock quality designation (RQD) parameters obtained from drill core analysis and the RQD determined from the walls of boreholes are presented in various type of rock mass. The borehole-walls imaging were carried out on the basis of optical and acoustic televiewer records evaluation. A comparison of the RQD calculated from the drill core and the RQD from the optical and acoustic televiewer records shows that the RQD values from the drill core are on average 30% lower. Significant differences were recorded particularly near the surface, or near mine excavations. The RQD parameter for rocks of the borehole walls boreholes was determined according to used methodology for each meter of the evauated borehole length separately. Open fractures identified by acoustic and optical televiewer were included in the RQD and frequency of dislocations calculation. Results show the impact of drilling technology on the the qualitative classification of the rock mass

Characterization of selected additive manufacturing materials for synchrotron monochromatic imaging and broad-beam radiotherapy at the Australian synchrotron-imaging and medical beamline

Objective. This study aims to characterize radiological properties of selected additive manufacturing (AM) materials utilizing both material extrusion and vat photopolymerization technologies. Monochromatic synchrotron x-ray images and synchrotron treatment beam dosimetry were acquired at the hutch 3B and 2B of the Australian Synchrotron-Imaging and Medical Beamline. Approach. Eight energies from 30 keV up to 65 keV were used to acquire the attenuation coefficients of the AM materials. Comparison of theoretical, and experimental attenuation data of AM materials and standard solid water for MV linac was performed. Broad-beam dosimetry experiment through attenuated dose measurement and a Geant4 Monte Carlo simulation were done for the studied materials to investigate its attenuation properties specific for a 4 tesla wiggler field with varying synchrotron radiation beam qualities. Main results. Polylactic acid (PLA) plus matches attenuation coefficients of both soft tissue and brain tissue, while acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, Acrylonitrile styrene acrylate, and Draft resin have close equivalence to adipose tissue. Lastly, PLA, co-polyester plus, thermoplastic polyurethane, and White resins are promising substitute materials for breast tissue. For broad-beam experiment and simulation, many of the studied materials were able to simulate RMI457 Solid Water and bolus within ±10% for the three synchrotron beam qualities. These results are useful in fabricating phantoms for synchrotron and other related medical radiation applications such as orthovoltage treatments. Significance and conclusion. These 3D printing materials were studied as potential substitutes for selected tissues such as breast tissue, adipose tissue, soft-tissue, and brain tissue useful in fabricating 3D printed phantoms for synchrotron imaging, therapy, and orthovoltage applications. Fabricating customizable heterogeneous anthropomorphic phantoms (e.g. breast, head, thorax) and pre-clinical animal phantoms (e.g. rodents, canine) for synchrotron imaging and radiotherapy using AM can be done based on the results of this study

Microstructure, microhardness and high-temperature tribological properties of CoCrFeNiMnTi0.3 high entropy alloy coating manufactured by powder-bed arc additive manufacturing

In this study, a high entropy alloy (HEA) coating of CoCrFeNiMnTi0.3 with good mechanical and tribological properties has been successfully manufactured on a mild carbon steel by the powder-bed arc additive manufacturing (PBAAM) technique. The HEA coating is consisted of a face-centred cubic (FCC) solid solution phase together with a small amount of in-situ formed fine TiN and TiO2 precipitates. The HEA coating has quite uniform chemical composition, microstructure, and hardness. The average Vickers microhardness is about 185.6 ± 3.1 HV0.1 in the HEA coating while 148.9 ± 3.4 HV0.1 in the mild carbon steel substrate. Besides, in comparison with the substrate, the PBAAM manufactured CoCrFeNiMnTi0.3 HEA coating always shows a lower friction coefficient and specific wear rate for a given wear testing temperature from RT to 800 °C. Particularly, the friction coefficient and specific wear rate of the HEA coating is only about 71.63 % and 3.68 %, respectively, of that of the mild carbon steel substrate at 800 °C. It can be concluded from the findings in this work that cladding a protective CoCrFeNiMnTi0.3 HEA coating on the mild carbon steel by PBAAM technique is beneficial into reducing both friction and wear, and thus is an effective strategy to significantly improve the application potential of mild carbon steel

Rethinking the tiered trauma team response: A case-series study in a regional trauma centre

Objective: To reduce perceived unnecessary resource use, we modified our tiered trauma response. If a patient was not physiologically compromised, surgical registrar attendance was not mandated. We investigated the effect of this change on missed injury, unplanned representation to ED, diagnostic imaging rates and staff satisfaction. Methods: A retrospective case series study assessing the 3-month period before and after the intervention was conducted. Logistic regression analyses were used to examine the association between ordering of computerised tomography (CT) and ED length of stay (LOS), injury severity (ISS), age, surgical review and admission. A staff survey was conducted to investigate staff perceptions of the practice change. Free text data were analysed using inductive content analysis. Results: There were 105 patients in the control and 166 in the intervention group and their mean (SD) ISS was the same (ISS [SD] = 4 [±4] [P = 0.608]). A higher proportion of the control group were admitted (56.3% vs 42.2% [P = 0.032]) and they had a shorter ED LOS (274 min [202–456] vs 326 min [225–560], P = 0.044). The rate of missed injury was unchanged. A surgical review resulted in a 26-fold increase in receipt of a whole-body CT scan (odds ratio = 26.89, 95% confidence interval = 3.31–218.17). Just over half of survey respondents felt the change was safe (54.4%), and more surgical (90%) than ED staff (69%) reported the change as positive. Conclusion: The removal of the surgical registrar from the initial trauma standby response did not result in any adverse events, reduced admissions, pathology and imaging, but resulted in an increased ED LOS and time to surgical review

Attribute-hiding fuzzy encryption for privacy-preserving data evaluation

Privacy-preserving data evaluation is one of the prominent research topics in the big data era. In many data evaluation applications that involve sensitive information, such as the medical records of patients in a medical system, protecting data privacy during the data evaluation process has become an essential requirement. Aiming at solving this problem, numerous fuzzy encryption systems for different similarity metrics have been proposed in literature. Unfortunately, the existing fuzzy encryption systems either fail to achieve attribute-hiding or achieve it, but are impractical. In this paper, we propose a new fuzzy encryption scheme for privacy-preserving data evaluation based on overlap distance, which can work in an integer domain while achieving attribute-hiding. In particular, we develop a novel approach to enable an accurate overlap distance to be fast calculated. This technique makes the number of pairing operations during decryption stage negative correlation with the size of the threshold, which is pretty practical for some applications especially with a large threshold. Additionally, we provide a formal security analysis of the proposed scheme, followed by a comprehensive experimental. Also we show that our scheme can be well applied to some scenarios, such as fuzzy keyword searchable encryption and attribute-hiding closest substring encryption

A communication link lifetime prediction-supported V2V partial computation offloading scheme for autonomous driving

Vehicle Edge Computing (VEC) is a promising technique to improve the quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) in autonomous driving by exploiting the resources at the network edge. However, the high mobility of the vehicles leads to stochastic communication link duration, and the tasks generated by various applications in autonomous driving incur fierce competition for resources. These challenges cause excessive task completion delays. In this paper, we propose a vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) partial computation offloading scheme that leverages the prediction results of the communication link lifetime between vehicles. A History track, Current interactions and Future planning trajectory-aware Gated Recurrent Units (HCF-GRU) network is built to capture the essential factors to improve the prediction accuracy. Then, we design a GRU-based Proximal Policy Optimization (GRU-PPO) algorithm to obtain an optimal one-to-many offloading decision to minimize the task execution cost. The HCF-GRU prediction algorithm is evaluated on a real world vehicle trajectory dataset, and the performance of the GRU-PPO algorithm is analyzed on extensive numerical simulations. Experimental results demonstrate that our prediction network and offloading decision algorithm outperform the baseline methods in terms of prediction accuracy and task execution cost

Eliminate all risks: A call to reexamine the link between canine scabies and rheumatic heart disease

Rheumatic heart disease (RHD) and acute rheumatic fever (ARF) disproportionately affect individuals in low-resource settings. ARF is attributed to an immune response to Group A Streptococcus (GAS) following GAS pharyngitis and potentially GAS impetigo in which infection can be initiated by scabies infestation. The burden of ARF and RHD in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia is among the highest globally. Following recent calls to include dog management programs in ARF and RHD prevention programs, we believe it is timely to assess the evidence for this, particularly since previous recommendations excluded resources to prevent zoonotic canine scabies. While phylogenetic analyses have suggested that the Sarcoptes mite is host specific, they have differed in interpretation of the strength of their findings regarding species cross-over and the need for canine scabies control to prevent human itch. Given that there is also indication from case reports that canine scabies leads to human itch, we propose that further investigation of the potential burden of zoonotic canine scabies and intervention trials of canine scabies prevention on the incidence of impetigo are warranted. Considering the devastating impacts of ARF and RHD, evidence is required to support policy to eliminate all risk factors