Population growth and housing affordability in the modern city-Sydney a case study

Urban populations are forecast to increase in coming decades. Population growth is a major underlying factor for the demand of housing and without a new supply of dwellings, it pushes up the prices for both renting and purchasing dwellings. The resultant fall in affordability is a problem that is further compounded in many large cities by the change in living preferences that has resulted in a fall in household occupancy rates, particularly in the western world

Is there a relationship between price and new construction in the residential markets of Australia? A preliminary finding.

This paper undertakes a study using a series of correlation analysis to investigate the relationship between new residential construction and prices. It also investigates to see whether there are any common factors that influence the residential prices and new residential dwellings over the past 25 years

An analysis of new supply of residential dwellings in Australia

This paper investigates the reasons for new residential supply not being forthcoming and in particular focus on government compliances, policy, taxation and other associated costs

Is Australia Selling Off Its Real Estate?

In the recent Federal election campaign in Australia, the Greens political party and several other candidates from other political persuasion expressed a concern that Australia was opening up and selling off its real estate to foreign buyers. They also argued that this has resulted in making residential real estate unaffordable to the average person in Australia. According to the Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB), the level of 'expected' foreign investment in Australian real estate has increased from $269 million to$45 billion over the past 30 years. This paper will examine the regulations for foreign investment in the Australian real estate market and identify the critical changes to these regulations over the past three decades. It will also identify the changing investment patterns and the level of investment and see if there is a relationship between foreign investment and rising prices in the Australian residential real estate market

Modelling and simulation of turbulence in unsteady separated and suddenly-expanded flows

The scope of this PhD thesis is the simulation of turbulence in time-dependent, separated and suddenly-expanded channel flows. High-resolution and very high-order numerical methods have been employed in the framework of Implicit Large Eddy Simulation (ILES) to elucidate open questions about the physics in flows with sudden expansion. It is well known that the planar sudden expansion (PSE), despite its simple and symmetric geometry it produces a very complex behaviour and a distinctly asymmetric flow pattern ascribed mainly to the Coanda effect. Such flows are encountered in a wide range of practical engineering applications, such as combustion, hydraulic and fluidic devices, air ducts, and mixing equipments. It is of great importance, therefore, to understand the mechanisms that dominate flows with separation and reattachment of the shear layers, as well as flows with regions of strong reversed motion. This thesis has for the first time analysed in detail the turbulent kinetic energy budget (TKEB) for the PSE. This analysis has been extended to examine the influence of Mach number on each individual component of the TKEB. The resulting data can be used as reference for further development of turbulence models capable of accurately resolving the flow behaviour in suddenly-expanded flows. Cont/d

Broadband Dynamic Modification Using Feedforward Control

The use of feedforward control for dynamic modification is relatively new to the area of structural vibration control. In this thesis the disturbance path dynamics of a flexible aluminum beam, pinned at both ends and under the influence of broadband excitation inputs, are modified through the use of feedforward control. The ideal algebraically determined feedforward control method for response cancellation is first presented. Theoretically, this compensator modifies the disturbance path dynamics to any desired behavior. This ideal algebraic approach can only be used for minimum phase systems. In non-minimum phase systems, right half s-plane plant zeros emerge as unstable poles in the compensated system, hence an alternative method is required. A technique called the correction factor method is introduced, which can arbitrarily place the disturbance path poles of the controlled system. The dynamic behavior of the system using the correction factor feedforward compensator is compared to the theoretical behavior of the ideal feedforward compensated system. The performance of a reduced-order correction factor type compensator is also investigated. Computer simulations of the system dynamic response, with continuous and discrete implementations of the correction factor compensator, are illustrated. Experimental results are used to verify the behavior of the analytical model

Kinect vs. low-cost inertial sensing for gesture recognition

In this paper, we investigate efficient recognition of human gestures / movements from multimedia and multimodal data, including the Microsoft Kinect and translational and rotational acceleration and velocity from wearable inertial sensors. We firstly present a system that automatically classifies a large range of activities (17 different gestures) using a random forest decision tree. Our system can achieve near real time recognition by appropriately selecting the sensors that led to the greatest contributing factor for a particular task. Features extracted from multimodal sensor data were used to train and evaluate a customized classifier. This novel technique is capable of successfully classifying various gestures with up to 91 % overall accuracy on a publicly available data set. Secondly we investigate a wide range of different motion capture modalities and compare their results in terms of gesture recognition accuracy using our proposed approach. We conclude that gesture recognition can be effectively performed by considering an approach that overcomes many of the limitations associated with the Kinect and potentially paves the way for low-cost gesture recognition in unconstrained environments