Jack F Hennessy, architect of the Great Court at The University of Queensland

John East discusses the work of Jack F Hennessy

Subject retrieval from full-text databases in the humanities

This paper examines the problems involved in subject retrieval from full-text databases of secondary materials in the humanities. Ten such databases were studied and their search functionality evaluated, focusing on factors such as Boolean operators, document surrogates, limiting by subject area, proximity operators, phrase searching, wildcards, weighting of search terms, limiting by type of document, controlled vocabulary indexing and ranking, and display of search results. The author suggests ways in which full-text searching might be improved, whether by enhancement of database records, by introduction of enhanced search functionality, or by the education of searchers in more effective search techniques. The conclusion is that current digitisation projects are not producing databases that meet the needs of scholars

The British Music Information Centre

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An Edwardian Architect in Brisbane: The Work of Claude William Chambers, 1889-1914

Claude William Chambers (1861-1947) had trained and worked as an architect in Melbourne and Sydney before coming to Brisbane in 1885. From 1889 to 1914 he was partner or solo practitioner in a series of architectural practices in that city, before moving to Sydney in 1915, where he spent the rest of his long working life. The present study focuses on Chambers' work in Brisbane, in the decades straddling 1900. His output included many fine examples of maritime, commercial and domestic architecture, in the styles popular during the period around Federation. An appendix gives details of about sixty of Chambers' Brisbane projects

Spacetime Dynamics of a Higgs Vacuum Instability During Inflation

A remarkable prediction of the Standard Model is that, in the absence of corrections lifting the energy density, the Higgs potential becomes negative at large field values. If the Higgs field samples this part of the potential during inflation, the negative energy density may locally destabilize the spacetime. We use numerical simulations of the Einstein equations to study the evolution of inflation-induced Higgs fluctuations as they grow towards the true (negative-energy) minimum. These simulations show that forming a single patch of true vacuum in our past light cone during inflation is incompatible with the existence of our Universe; the boundary of the true vacuum region grows outward in a causally disconnected manner from the crunching interior, which forms a black hole. We also find that these black hole horizons may be arbitrarily elongated---even forming black strings---in violation of the hoop conjecture. By extending the numerical solution of the Fokker-Planck equation to the exponentially suppressed tails of the field distribution at large field values, we derive a rigorous correlation between a future measurement of the tensor-to-scalar ratio and the scale at which the Higgs potential must receive stabilizing corrections in order for the Universe to have survived inflation until today.Comment: 36 pages, 11 figures; revised to match published versio

Testing of the Homestake Mine Tailings Deposit

This paper discusses the geotechnical investigation of a large gold tailings facility which has been in operation since December 1977. The very thorough test program included 670 m (2200 ft.) of piezocone probing, 65 self-boring pressuremeter tests down to a maximum of 35 m (118 ft.), 60 SPT\u27s and 9 laboratory triaxial tests as well as a well pump test. The study included a detailed geological and seismic study to determine earthquake design parameters and to assess the liquefaction potential of the deposit. Test results were utilized to determine the stability of an upstream constructed embankment employing the sub-aerial method of tailings deposition together with a comprehensive underdrainage system. The study indicates that liquefaction of the deposit is highly unlikely to occur and that the embankment has an acceptable factor of safety under sub-aerial conditions

"J.P.": The Life and Career of the Brisbane Architect John Patrick Donoghue (1894-1960)

Jack P. Donoghue practised as an architect in Brisbane from 1924 to 1959 and was principal partner in the firms Donoghue and Fulton, and Donoghue, Cusick and Edwards. He designed many churches, schools, convents and presbyteries for the Catholic Church in Queensland, and was a significant exponent of the Romanesque Revival. In the 1930s he was also active in the design of hotels. His largest body of work was in the design of hospitals, many of them in Queensland regional centres. The history of his family, with its convict origins, is an interesting case study in the social advancement of Irish Catholics in Australia