At the precipice: Australia’s community sector through the cost-of-living crisis, findings from the Australian Community Sector Survey.

This report outlines how Australia's community sector was experiencing challenges during late 2022. Data comes from the Australian Community Sector Survey (ACSS), conducted by the Social Policy Research Centre at UNSW Sydney, in collaboration with the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) and the State and Territory Councils of Social Service of Australia. The information comes from 1,476 community sector staff, including 318 CEOs and senior managers. Findings offer insight into the operational challenges confronting the sector, including funding, contracting and workforce issues. Service providers have faced unprecedented pressure to help growing numbers of people in need, yet resource levels remain inadequate. As a result, community organisations struggle not only to help as many people as possible, but also to plan, optimise and manage all aspects of delivering complex and essential services in a context of rising costs

Care theft: Family impacts of employer control in Australia's retail industry

Paid work promises pathways to financial security and wellbeing for families, yet variable scheduling and low pay can interfere with the routines and rhythms of family life, and contribute to caregiving challenges and stress. Using qualitative data from a survey of retail workers, this article shows how Australian employment policies have enabled flexibility practices to be strongly oriented around the needs of employers, reducing employees’ resources for care. We develop the concept of ‘care theft’ from employees’ accounts of the ways flexible scheduling and low pay converge to transform and deplete their temporal, financial and ethical resources for care. As an extension of ‘time theft’ and alternative to individualised notions of ‘work-family balance’, care theft helps make visible the ways employment practices strip resources for care from working people, and shift risk to low-income families and communities

Implicit essential boundaries in the Material Point Method

The Material Point Method (MPM) is a numerical boundary value problem (BVP) solver developed from particle- in-cell (PIC) methods that discretises the continuum into a set of material points. Information at these material points is mapped to a background Eulerian grid which is used to solve the governing equations. Once solved information is updated at the material points and these points are convected through the grid. The background grid is then reset, allowing the method to easily handle problems involving large deformations without mesh distortion. However, imposition of essential boundary conditions in the (MPM) is challenging when the physical domain does not conform to the background grid. In this research, an implicit boundary method (IBM), based on the work of Kumar et al. [1], is proposed to ensure that essential boundary conditions are satisfied in elastostatic MPM problems

A model of dispersive transport across sharp interfaces between porous materials

Recent laboratory experiments on solute migration in composite porous columns have shown an asymmetry in the solute arrival time upon reversal of the flow direction, which is not explained by current paradigms of transport. In this work, we propose a definition for the solute flux across sharp interfaces and explore the underlying microscopic particle dynamics by applying Monte Carlo simulation. Our results are consistent with previous experimental findings and explain the observed transport asymmetry. An interpretation of the proposed physical mechanism in terms of a flux rectification is also provided. The approach is quite general and can be extended to other situations involving transport across sharp interfaces.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Multiscale modelling of the textile composite materials

This paper presents an initial computational multiscale modelling of the fibre-reinforced composite materials. This study will constitute an initial building block of the computational framework, developed for the DURCOMP (providing confidence in durable composites) EPSRC project, the ultimate goal of which is the use of advance composites in the construction industry, while concentrating on its major limiting factor ”durability”. The use of multiscale modelling gives directly the macroscopic constitutive behaviour of the structures based on its microscopically heterogeneous representative volume element (RVE). The RVE is analysed using the University of Glasgow in-house parallel computational tool, MoFEM (Mesh Oriented Finite Element Method), which is a C++ based finite-element code. A single layered plain weave is used to model the textile geometry. The geometry of the RVE mainly consists of two parts, the fibre bundles and matrix, and is modelled with CUBIT, which is a software package for the creation of parameterised geometries and meshes. Elliptical cross sections and cubic splines are used respectively to model the cross sections and paths of the fibre bundles, which are the main components of the yarn geometry. In this analysis, transversely isotropic material is introduced for the fibre bundles, and elastic material is used for the matrix part. The directions of the fibre bundles are calculated using a potential flow analysis across the fibre bundles, which are then used to define the principal direction for the transversely isotropic material. The macroscopic strain field is applied using linear displacement boundary conditions. Furthermore, appropriate interface conditions are used between the fibre bundles and the matrix

Monte Carlo evaluation of FADE approach to anomalous kinetics

In this paper we propose a comparison between the CTRW (Monte Carlo) and Fractional Derivative approaches to the modelling of anomalous diffusion phenomena in the presence of an advection field. Galilei variant and invariant schemes are revised.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figure

Some Insights in Superdiffusive Transport

In this paper we deal with high-order corrections for the Fractional Derivative approach to anomalous diffusion, in super-diffusive regime, which become relevand whenever one attempts to describe the behavior of particles close to normal diffusion.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figure