Deaths in custody in Australia to 30 June 2011

Abstract Compiled for two decades by the Australian Institute of Criminology, this report found both the Indigenous and non-Indigenous rates of deaths in custody have decreased over the last decade and are now some of the lowest ever seen (0.16 per 100 Indigenous prisoners and 0.22 per 100 non-Indigenous prisoners in 2010–11). For the last eight years in a row, the Indigenous rate of death in prison has been lower than the equivalent non-Indigenous rate. While Indigenous prisoners continue to be statistically less likely to die in custody than non-Indigenous prisoners, there is a concerning trend emerging, as the actual number of Indigenous deaths in prison are rising again, with 14 in 2009-10 which is equal to the highest on record. More concerning still is that over the 20 years since the Royal Commission, the proportion of prisoners that are Indigenous has almost doubled from 14% in 1991 to 26% in 2011

Review: Acoustic emission technique - Opportunities, challenges and current work at QUT

Acoustic emission (AE) is the phenomenon where high frequency stress waves are generated by rapid release of energy within a material by sources such as crack initiation or growth. AE technique involves recording these stress waves by means of sensors placed on the surface and subsequent analysis of the recorded signals to gather information such as the nature and location of the source. AE is one of the several non-destructive testing (NDT) techniques currently used for structural health monitoring (SHM) of civil, mechanical and aerospace structures. Some of its advantages include ability to provide continuous in-situ monitoring and high sensitivity to crack activity. Despite these advantages, several challenges still exist in successful application of AE monitoring. Accurate localization of AE sources, discrimination between genuine AE sources and spurious noise sources and damage quantification for severity assessment are some of the important issues in AE testing and will be discussed in this paper. Various data analysis and processing approaches will be applied to manage those issues

Damage quantification techniques in acoustic emission monitoring

Acoustic emission (AE) analysis is one of the several diagnostic techniques available nowadays for structural health monitoring (SHM) of engineering structures. Some of its advantages over other techniques include high sensitivity to crack growth and capability of monitoring a structure in real time. The phenomenon of rapid release of energy within a material by crack initiation or growth in form of stress waves is known as acoustic emission (AE). In AE technique, these stress waves are recorded by means of suitable sensors placed on the surface of a structure. Recorded signals are subsequently analysed to gather information about the nature of the source. By enabling early detection of crack growth, AE technique helps in planning timely retrofitting or other maintenance jobs or even replacement of the structure if required. In spite of being a promising tool, some challenges do still exist behind the successful application of AE technique. Large amount of data is generated during AE testing, hence effective data analysis is necessary, especially for long term monitoring uses. Appropriate analysis of AE data for quantification of damage level is an area that has received considerable attention. Various approaches available for damage quantification for severity assessment are discussed in this paper, with special focus on civil infrastructure such as bridges. One method called improved b-value analysis is used to analyse data collected from laboratory testing

Pedestrianisation zoning and air quality in Hong Kong.

Air quality assessment in the vicinity of the Causeway Bay Pedestrianisation Scheme is conducted. The study analyses the concentration of respiratory suspended particulates, nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxides, and shows that reductions for the three pollutants could be achieved at Hennessy Road and Great George Street. However, this would transfer the air pollution to nearby roads due to traffic diversion. The justifications of shifting air pollution from one place to another are that the targeted areas are more prone to pollutant buildup and the shift would maximise the number of benefactors. The improvement in air quality is compared with field data obtained from the roadside field data. Comparisons show that the improvement recorded at the station is lower than the predicted one. The difference between the projected and recorded improvements is because only part of the scheme has been implemented. The study shows that pedestrianisation does bring improvement in air quality in urban areas

Multi-temporal analysis of past and future land cover change in the highly urbanized state of Selangor, Malaysia

This study analysed the multi-temporal trend in land cover, and modelled a future scenario of land cover for the year 2030 in the highly urbanized state of Selangor, Malaysia. The study used a Decision Forest-Markov chain model in the land change modeller (LCM) tool of TerrSet software. Land cover maps of 1999, 2006 and 2017 were classified into 5 classes, namely water, natural vegetation, agriculture, built-up land and cleared land. A simulated land cover map of 2017 was validated against the actual land cover map 2017. The Area Under the Curve (AUC) value of 0.84 of Total Operating Characteristics (TOC) and higher percentage of components of agreement (Hits + Correct rejection) compared to components of disagreement (Misses + False alarm + Wrong hits) indicated successful validation of the model. The results showed between the years 1999 to 2017 there was an increase in built-up land cover of 608.8 km2 (7.5%), and agricultural land 285.5 km2 (3.5%), whereas natural vegetation decreased by 831.8 km2 (10.2%). The simulated land cover map of 2030 showed a continuation of this trend, where built-up area is estimated to increase by 723 km2 (8.9%), and agricultural land is estimated to increase by 57.2 km2 (0.7%), leading to a decrease of natural vegetation by 663.9 km2 (8.1%) for the period 2017 to 2030. The spatial trend of land cover change shows built-up areas mostly located in central Selangor where the highly urbanized and populated cities of Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya and the Klang valley are located. The future land cover modelling indicates that built-up expansion mostly takes place at edges of existing urban boundaries. The results of this study can be used by policy makers, urban planners and other stakeholders for future decision making and city planning

Treebank-based acquisition of a Chinese lexical-functional grammar

Scaling wide-coverage, constraint-based grammars such as Lexical-Functional Grammars (LFG) (Kaplan and Bresnan, 1982; Bresnan, 2001) or Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammars (HPSG) (Pollard and Sag, 1994) from fragments to naturally occurring unrestricted text is knowledge-intensive, time-consuming and (often prohibitively) expensive. A number of researchers have recently presented methods to automatically acquire wide-coverage, probabilistic constraint-based grammatical resources from treebanks (Cahill et al., 2002, Cahill et al., 2003; Cahill et al., 2004; Miyao et al., 2003; Miyao et al., 2004; Hockenmaier and Steedman, 2002; Hockenmaier, 2003), addressing the knowledge acquisition bottleneck in constraint-based grammar development. Research to date has concentrated on English and German. In this paper we report on an experiment to induce wide-coverage, probabilistic LFG grammatical and lexical resources for Chinese from the Penn Chinese Treebank (CTB) (Xue et al., 2002) based on an automatic f-structure annotation algorithm. Currently 96.751% of the CTB trees receive a single, covering and connected f-structure, 0.112% do not receive an f-structure due to feature clashes, while 3.137% are associated with multiple f-structure fragments. From the f-structure-annotated CTB we extract a total of 12975 lexical entries with 20 distinct subcategorisation frame types. Of these 3436 are verbal entries with a total of 11 different frame types. We extract a number of PCFG-based LFG approximations. Currently our best automatically induced grammars achieve an f-score of 81.57% against the trees in unseen articles 301-325; 86.06% f-score (all grammatical functions) and 73.98% (preds-only) against the dependencies derived from the f-structures automatically generated for the original trees in 301-325 and 82.79% (all grammatical functions) and 67.74% (preds-only) against the dependencies derived from the manually annotated gold-standard f-structures for 50 trees randomly selected from articles 301-325

Synthesis of a new biocomposite for fertiliser coating: assessment of biodegradability and thermal stability.

The bio- and thermal degradation as well as the water absorption properties of a novel biocomposite comprising cellulosenanoparticles, natural rubber and polylactic acid have been investigated. The biodegradation process was studied throughan assembled condition based on the soil collected from the central Malaysian palm oil forests located in the University ofNottingham Malaysia. The effects of the presence of the cellulose nanoparticles and natural rubber on the biodegradationof polylactic acid were investigated. The biodegradation process was studied via thermal gravimetric analysis and scanningelectron microscopy. It was understood that the reinforcement of polylactic acid with cellulose nanoparticles and naturalrubber increases the thermal stability by ~ 20 °C. Limited amorphous regions on the surface of the cellulose nanoparticlesaccelerated the biodegradation and water absorption processes. Based on the obtained results, it is predicted that completebiodegradation of the synthesised biocomposites can take place in 3062 h, highlighting promising agricultural applicationsfor this biocomposite

A gaming perspective on mathematics education.

This article explores how motivation in computer games could be integrated into mathematics education. The scope of the study was confined to four motivation dimensions, namely challenge, control, complexity and collaboration. A phenomenology study was conducted with the purpose to obtain a common understanding of nine teachers and 11 students about mathematics education, particularly focusing on teaching practices and learning difficulties in mathematical problem-solving. Qualitative interviews have revealed that the existing mathematics education is built on drill-Andpractice approach with Polya's problem-solving technique, i.e. exam-oriented, rote memorization and the use of predefined strategies. This approach to learning has failed to motivate students to learn (affective) and failed to develop an understanding and creativity (cognitive/metacognitive). Looking from a gaming perspective, mathematics problems should be challenging and complex, and students should be given control to carry out a plan. And finally, collaboration should be encouraged to enable reflective learning

Similarities and differences in learning of metacognitive skills: computer games versus mathematics education.

This article explores the potential use metacognitive skills learned in computer games to teach mathematics. This study explored the similarities and differences in the learning of metacognitive skills between computer games and mathematics education. A mixed-methods approach was employed in which a quantitative survey (students, n=174) and a qualitative interview (six mathematics teachers, eight students) were administered to concurrently at two secondary schools in Malaysia. Data collected has shown that there is no direct and explicit connection between the two learning contexts. In computer games, pupils could learn: (a) multitasking, (b) land navigation, (c) teamwork, (d) bottom-up approach to problem solving, and (e) concentration skills. However, it is understandable that a mathematics education (a) is single-tasking, e.g. solves problems step-by-step, (b) uses graphic representation, (c) involves collaborative learning, (d) follows top-down approach to problem-solving, and (e) could use multiple sensory modalities to ameliorate learning