Deriving Low-Cost, Dwelling-Level Statistics for Exploring Urban Sustainability: Income, Land Surface Temperature, EnvironmentalAttitudes and Swimming Pool Ownership

Improving urban sustainability requires an understanding of the determinants of resource consumption. The determinants of such consumption are poorly understood despite more than 40 years of investigation. Detailed exploration requires data at the dwelling scale. Such data are usually difficult or expensive to collect. This work derived dwelling-level statistics for each of ~ 200,000 dwellings in the city of Canberra, Australia. Swimming pool locations and size were derived from satellite imagery (a); household wealth was estimated from unimproved land value (b); summer daytime micro-climate temperature was estimated from thermal satellite imagery (c) and environmental attitudes were estimated from the interpolated percentage of Greens party votes from polling station election results (d). All four variables were correlated with residential water consumption. This work demonstrates how these explanatory variables can be derived from publicly available datasets and at low cost. It also shows their value in understanding the determinants of household water consumption

Where to From Here for the Catholic Church- Recommendations 94 and 95 of the Redress and Civil Litigation Report

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse handed down its Final Report in December 2017. In 2015 it presented its interim Redress and Civil Litigation Report which contained final recommendations in relation to reform in civil litigation. Recommendations 94 and 95 of the Redress and Civil Litigation Report both directly and indirectly address the lack of legal entity for the Catholic Church in Australia and the problems this causes litigants seeking legal recompense. This paper considers the current legal status of the Catholic Church in Australia in light of the Recommendations

The 'Price' of Justice? Costs-Conditional Special Leave in the High Court

This article considers the High Court of Australia's occasional practice of granting special leave to appeal on a costs-conditional basis, whereby the appellant pays the respondent's costs regardless of the outcome. Despite the dissonance between this practice and traditional costs principles, there is little academic or judicial reflection on costs-conditional special leave. While several policy considerations support this practice, it is not unproblematic. What factors guide the exercise of this discretion? Why must an ultimately successful appellant fund the litigation? Should a party's financial status be a relevant consideration? If the Court is willing to depart from traditional costs rules here, why not elsewhere? This article uses quantitative and qualitative frameworks to consider such issues

Efficient high-resolution video compression scheme using background and foreground layers

Video coding using dynamic background frame achieves better compression compared to the traditional techniques by encoding background and foreground separately. This process reduces coding bits for the overall frame significantly; however, encoding background still requires many bits that can be compressed further for achieving better coding efficiency. The cuboid coding framework has been proven to be one of the most effective methods of image compression which exploits homogeneous pixel correlation within a frame and has better alignment with object boundary compared to traditional block-based coding. In a video sequence, the cuboid-based frame partitioning varies with the changes of the foreground. However, since the background remains static for a group of pictures, the cuboid coding exploits better spatial pixel homogeneity. In this work, the impact of cuboid coding on the background frame for high-resolution videos (Ultra-High-Definition (UHD) and 360-degree videos) is investigated using the multilayer framework of SHVC. After the cuboid partitioning, the method of coarse frame generation has been improved with a novel idea by keeping human-visual sensitive information. Unlike the traditional SHVC scheme, in the proposed method, cuboid coded background and the foreground are encoded in separate layers in an implicit manner. Simulation results show that the proposed video coding method achieves an average BD-Rate reduction of 26.69% and BD-PSNR gain of 1.51 dB against SHVC with significant encoding time reduction for both UHD and 360 videos. It also achieves an average of 13.88% BD-Rate reduction and 0.78 dB BD-PSNR gain compared to the existing relevant method proposed by X. Hoang Van. © 2013 IEEE