'I Only Looked Away for a Split Second...': The Role of Distraction in Driver and Rider Crashes in Rural and Remote North Queensland

The overall program goal is to reduce the incidence and economic, medical and social costs of road crashes in rural and remote Queensland. Why rural road safety? 21% of the population of Queensland live in rural areas. 39% of serious road crash injuries occur there. Study aims: - Understand behavioural and social factors contributing to crashes - Develop, identify and trial targeted interventions. Study area: - North and west of Bowen excluding urban areas of Townsville and Cairns - 40% of Queensland's land area

Multinationality In The Oil And Gas Industry

This Masters Research offers uses new data analysis techniques to address intra-firm data segmented by business and geography for an industry specific set of firms. It tests whether oil and gas firms are global in their operations and hence sales to/revenues from consumers. Rugman and Verbeke (2004) suggest firms demonstrate a preference for local over global strategies when investing abroad and Rugman (2005) augments this theoretical position with industry level analysis and firm level case studies. They make a quantitative analysis of geographic revenue dispersion for 500 firms and find results supporting regional theories. The analysis takes nine years of data as a longitudinal panel data set that offers, for the first time, trend data analysis into the debate around global versus local strategies. Corporate finance theory informs selection of performance proxies that recover 'missing' observations but high regional focus in revenues is again found in the numerical majority of firms. 67% of weighted total firm revenue for FY2008 is intra-regional, as suggested by Rugman (2005). This extended data now shows new global and bi-regional cases, a variation in comparative global focus across the value chain for the largest oil and gas firms and movement away from home country and region. Modelling using this new data shows no support for the existence of multiple-order regression equations linking regionalism to firm performance. No correlation is found between oil price, performance and multi-nationality for these firms but there is an inverse correlation between multi-nationality and revenue. This suggests that extant theories of decreased performance against increased scale are not evidenced in this specific industry and hence suggests that both size and history do matter

Ordering the braid groups

We give an explicit geometric argument that Artin's braid group $B_n$ is right-orderable. The construction is elementary, natural, and leads to a new, effectively computable, canonical form for braids which we call left-consistent canonical form. The left-consistent form of a braid which is positive (respectively negative) in our order has consistently positive (respectively negative) exponent in the smallest braid generator which occurs. It follows that our ordering is identical to that of Dehornoy, constructed by very different means, and we recover Dehornoy's main theorem that any braid can be put into such a form using either positive or negative exponent in the smallest generator but not both. Our definition of order is strongly connected with Mosher's normal form and this leads to an algorithm to decide whether a given braid is positive, trivial, or negative which is quadratic in the length of the braid word.Comment: 24 pages, 10 figure

Quorum sensing primes the oxidative stress response in the insect endosymbiont, Sodalis glossinidius

Journal ArticleSodalis glossinidius, a maternally transmitted bacterial endosymbiont of tsetse flies (Glossina spp.), uses an acylated homoserine lactone (AHL)-based quorum sensing system to modulate gene expression in accordance with bacterial cell density. The S. glossinidius quorum sensing system relies on the function of two regulatory proteins; SogI (aLuxI homolog) synthesizes a signaling molecule, characterized as N-(3-oxohexanoyl) homoserine lactone (OHHL), and SogR1 (a LuxR homolog) interacts with OHHL to modulate transcription of specific target genes

Kinetics of maturation of trypanosome infections in tsetse

Journal ArticleEstimates of the time delay between the infective bloodmeal and maturation (incubation or maturation time) for 4 trypanosome stocks (2 Trypanozoon and 2 Trypanosoma congolense) show that maturation time in tsetse is not a parasite species-specific constant. The mean incubation time of a Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense stock (EATRO 2340 - 18 days) was not significantly different from one T. congolense stock (SIKUDA88 - 15-5 days) but was significantly greater than another (1/148 FLY9 - 12-5 days)

A novel human-infection-derived bacterium provides insights into the evolutionary origins of mutualistic insect-bacterial symbioses

pre-printDespite extensive study, little is known about the origins of the mutualistic bacterial endosymbionts that inhabit approximately 10% of the world's insects. In this study, we characterized a novel opportunistic human pathogen, designated ‘‘strain HS,'' and found that it is a close relative of the insect endosymbiont Sodalis glossinidius. Our results indicate that ancestral relatives of strain HS have served as progenitors for the independent descent of Sodalis-allied endosymbionts found in several insect hosts. Comparative analyses indicate that the gene inventories of the insect endosymbionts were independently derived from a common ancestral template through a combination of irreversible degenerative changes. Our results provide compelling support for the notion that mutualists evolve from pathogenic progenitors. They also elucidate the role of degenerative evolutionary processes in shaping the gene inventories of symbiotic bacteria at a very early stage in these mutualistic associations

Do OB Runaway Stars Have Pulsar Companions?

We have conducted a VLA search for radio pulsars at the positions of 44 nearby OB runaway stars. The observations involved both searching images for point sources of continuum emission and a time series analysis. Our mean flux sensitivity to pulsars slower than 50 ms was 0.2 mJy. No new pulsars were found in the survey. The size of the survey, combined with the high sensitivity of the observations, sets a significant constraint on the probability, $f_p$, of a runaway OB star having an observable pulsar companion. We find $f_p \le 6.5$\% with 95\% confidence, if the general pulsar luminosity function is applicable to OB star pulsar companions. If a pulsar beaming fraction of \onethird\ is assumed, then we estimate that fewer than 20\% of runaway OB stars have neutron star companions, unless pulsed radio emission is frequently obscured by the OB stellar wind. Our result is consistent with the dynamical (or cluster) ejection model for the formation of OB runaways. The supernova ejection model is not ruled out, but is constrained by these observations to allow only a small binary survival fraction, which may be accommodated if neutron stars acquire significant natal kicks. According to Leonard, Hills and Dewey (1994), a 20\% survival fraction corresponds to a 3-d kick velocity of 420 km s$^{-1}$. This value is in close agreement with recent revisions of the pulsar velocity distribution.Comment: Submitted to the Astronomical Journal. 16 pages. Latex uses aaspp4.sty. 3 postscript figures. Address correspondence to Colin Philp ([email protected]). Revision was to replace .ps file with latex fil

Cooperative Effort Leads to the Development of Tools to Assist Pork Producers in Evaluating Structural Soundness of Replacement Gilts

The objective of the project described here was to develop and deliver new visual tools to assist pork producers to evaluate the structural and reproductive soundness of replacement gilts within their sow herds. The development and distribution of the posters demonstrates how Extension, industry commodity groups, industry partners, and business media can work together to deliver the tools needed to have a positive economic impact at the farm level. Ideas like these are needed to meet the increasingly complex educational needs of modern agricultural industries like the U.S. pork industry

Traces of Ossianic imagery in selected piano works of Robert Schumann

Student Number : 0009509E - MA research report - School of Arts - Faculty of HumanitiesThis research report examines the phenomenon of Ossianic poetry and its widespread, if not always palpable, impact on the cultural life of Europe. This ‘trace’ of Ossian extends to several piano compositions of Robert Schumann. Divided into three sections, the first of these describes and explains the genesis of the poems, their possible political background and their wide-ranging influence throughout Europe and even North America, despite the scathing exposé of James Macpherson written by Dr. Samuel Johnson. For one-and a-half centuries the poems continued to kindle the imaginations of artists, writers and musicians in works that either directly cite Ossian or Ossianic characters in their titles or texts or are virtual clones of this spurious but popular body of literature. Section B, ‘Interlude’, deals specifically with aspects of the life of Robert Schumann and engages in a hermeneutic reading of many of his musical compositions. Referring to the Derridean concept of arche-writing and ‘the trace’ as well as the Foucauldian theory of polysemia (1969: 123), the report offers a number of alternative interpretations of standard repertoire. Section C highlights four works; Exercices (Variationen über einem thema von Beethoven), Op. Post, Phantasie in C major, Op. 17, Waldszenen, Op. 82 and Gesänge der Frühe, Op. 133. It also touches on a number of other works that reveal his conscious and unconscious awareness of Ossianic imagery and narrative