Recidivist drink drivers self reported reasons for driving whilst unlicensed: A qualitative analysis

Aim: This paper presents qualitative data from an in-depth interview study of 40 repeat drink drivers in Perth Western Australia to inform countermeasures for these high risk offenders. Background: Licence sanctions are effective countermeasures for most drink drivers but the small group of repeat offenders are less responsive. Many choose to drive while unlicensed as the probability of detection is low and the social and economic costs of not driving can be high. This undermines other drink drive countermeasures.Results: Most respondents who had had their licence suspended admitted to driving while under suspension. Employment and social factors were key themes emerging in respondents accounts of driving while under licence suspension. Conclusions: While a range of enforcement countermeasures are needed to deter drunk and unlicensed driving, this study suggests that where possible we aim to keep offenders within the system that consists of formal laws and informal social controls, rather than apply penalties in ways that undermine adherence to the law by increasing unlicensed driving. Allowing for interlock installation early in the driving suspension period, and allowing fines to offset cost of interlock installation and monitoring, may maximise community benefit and reduce unlicensed driving

MoreFusion: Multi-object Reasoning for 6D Pose Estimation from Volumetric Fusion

Robots and other smart devices need efficient object-based scene representations from their on-board vision systems to reason about contact, physics and occlusion. Recognized precise object models will play an important role alongside non-parametric reconstructions of unrecognized structures. We present a system which can estimate the accurate poses of multiple known objects in contact and occlusion from real-time, embodied multi-view vision. Our approach makes 3D object pose proposals from single RGB-D views, accumulates pose estimates and non-parametric occupancy information from multiple views as the camera moves, and performs joint optimization to estimate consistent, non-intersecting poses for multiple objects in contact. We verify the accuracy and robustness of our approach experimentally on 2 object datasets: YCB-Video, and our own challenging Cluttered YCB-Video. We demonstrate a real-time robotics application where a robot arm precisely and orderly disassembles complicated piles of objects, using only on-board RGB-D vision.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures, IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 202

Pelvo-ureteric junction obstruction in the lower pole moiety of a duplex kidney with an associated intraparenchymal abscess: a case report

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Introduction</p> <p>Pelvo-ureteric junction obstruction and duplex kidney are common radiological findings. However, pelvo-ureteric junction obstruction in a duplex kidney is a rare finding. We present the case of a patient who presented with septic complications secondary to this combination.</p> <p>Case presentation</p> <p>An adult woman presented with urinary sepsis, and her initial investigation with ultrasound revealed hydronephrosis of the lower moiety of a duplex kidney. Further investigations with computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging showed an associated intrarenal abscess and a pelvo-ureteric junction obstruction of the lower moiety of a duplex kidney.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>This patient had a rare and unreported complication of an unusual congenital urological abnormality. This case report highlights the role of multiple imaging modalities in correct diagnosis for clinical management.</p

Daisyworld: a review

Daisyworld is a simple planetary model designed to show the long-term effects of coupling between life and its environment. Its original form was introduced by James Lovelock as a defense against criticism that his Gaia theory of the Earth as a self-regulating homeostatic system requires teleological control rather than being an emergent property. The central premise, that living organisms can have major effects on the climate system, is no longer controversial. The Daisyworld model has attracted considerable interest from the scientific community and has now established itself as a model independent of, but still related to, the Gaia theory. Used widely as both a teaching tool and as a basis for more complex studies of feedback systems, it has also become an important paradigm for the understanding of the role of biotic components when modeling the Earth system. This paper collects the accumulated knowledge from the study of Daisyworld and provides the reader with a concise account of its important properties. We emphasize the increasing amount of exact analytic work on Daisyworld and are able to bring together and summarize these results from different systems for the first time. We conclude by suggesting what a more general model of life-environment interaction should be based on

Comparing the Activity Profiles of Wheelchair Rugby Using a Miniaturised Data Logger and Radio-Frequency Tracking System

Copyright © 2014 Barry Mason et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

Estimates of economic and environmental damages from tipping points cannot be reconciled with the scientific literature

Peer reviewe

Comparing the activity profiles of wheelchair rugby using a miniaturised data logger and radio-frequency tracking system

Comparing the activity profiles of wheelchair rugby using a miniaturised data logger and radio-frequency tracking syste

Safe and just operating spaces for regional social-ecological systems

Humanity faces a major global challenge in achieving wellbeing for all, while simultaneously ensuring that the biophysical processes and ecosystem services that underpin wellbeing are exploited within scientifically informed boundaries of sustainability. We propose a framework for defining the safe and just operating space for humanity that integrates social wellbeing into the original planetary boundaries concept (Rockström et al., 2009a,b) for application at regional scales. We argue that such a framework can: (1) increase the policy impact of the boundaries concept as most governance takes place at the regional rather than planetary scale; (2) contribute to the understanding and dissemination of complexity thinking throughout governance and policy-making; (3) act as a powerful metaphor and communication tool for regional equity and sustainability. We demonstrate the approach in two rural Chinese localities where we define the safe and just operating space that lies between an environmental ceiling and a social foundation from analysis of time series drawn from monitored and palaeoecological data, and from social survey statistics respectively. Agricultural intensification has led to poverty reduction, though not eradicated it, but at the expense of environmental degradation. Currently, the environmental ceiling is exceeded for degraded water quality at both localities even though the least well-met social standards are for available piped water and sanitation. The conjunction of these social needs and environmental constraints around the issue of water access and quality illustrates the broader value of the safe and just operating space approach for sustainable development