Cooperation in the Building Sector between Building Material Manufacturers and Contractors to Develop Products

The Australian Construction Industry is nowfacing skills shortages in all trades. As anindustry focused on the skill of its workforce,there is now concern the Australian standard inquality, workmanship, and productivity will inhibitboth at national and international level.This research paper addresses the underlying,influential factors concerning skills shortages inthe Australian construction industry. Theinfluential factors addressed include funding,training statistics, employer expectations,financial limitations, Industrial Relations andimmigration. Given the reference to skillsshortages within the industry, and documented inrelated literature, if skills shortages are tocontinue to exist, their effect will impact upon theoverall performance of construction companiesthroughout Australia

Cooperation in the Building Sector between Building Material Manufacturers and Contractors to Develop Products

The Australian Construction Industry is nowfacing skills shortages in all trades. As anindustry focused on the skill of its workforce,there is now concern the Australian standard inquality, workmanship, and productivity will inhibitboth at national and international level.This research paper addresses the underlying,influential factors concerning skills shortages inthe Australian construction industry. Theinfluential factors addressed include funding,training statistics, employer expectations,financial limitations, Industrial Relations andimmigration. Given the reference to skillsshortages within the industry, and documented inrelated literature, if skills shortages are tocontinue to exist, their effect will impact upon theoverall performance of construction companiesthroughout Australia

Cooperation in the Building Sector between Building Material Manufacturers and Contractors to Develop Products

The Australian Construction Industry is nowfacing skills shortages in all trades. As anindustry focused on the skill of its workforce,there is now concern the Australian standard inquality, workmanship, and productivity will inhibitboth at national and international level.This research paper addresses the underlying,influential factors concerning skills shortages inthe Australian construction industry. Theinfluential factors addressed include funding,training statistics, employer expectations,financial limitations, Industrial Relations andimmigration. Given the reference to skillsshortages within the industry, and documented inrelated literature, if skills shortages are tocontinue to exist, their effect will impact upon theoverall performance of construction companiesthroughout Australia

Rate Sensitive Continuum Damage Models and Mesh Dependence in Finite Element Analyses

The experiences from orthogonal machining simulations show that the Johnson-Cook (JC) dynamic failure model exhibits significant element size dependence. Such mesh dependence is a direct consequence of the utilization of local damage models. The current contribution is an investigation of the extent of the possible pathological mesh dependence. A comparison of the resulting JC model behavior combined with two types of damage evolution is considered. The first damage model is the JC dynamic failure model, where the development of the “damage” does not affect the response until the critical state is reached. The second one is a continuum damage model, where the damage variable is affecting the material response continuously during the deformation. Both the plasticity and the damage models are rate dependent, and the damage evolutions for both models are defined as a postprocessing of the effective stress response. The investigation is conducted for a series of 2D shear tests utilizing different FE representations of the plane strain plate with pearlite material properties. The results show for both damage models, using realistic pearlite material parameters, that similar extent of the mesh dependence is obtained and that the possible viscous regularization effects are absent in the current investigation

Micrometer-resolution X-ray tomographic full-volume reconstruction of an intact post-mortem juvenile rat lung

In this article, we present an X-ray tomographic imaging method that is well suited for pulmonary disease studies in animal models to resolve the full pathway from gas intake to gas exchange. Current state-of-the-art synchrotron-based tomographic phase-contrast imaging methods allow for three-dimensional microscopic imaging data to be acquired non-destructively in scan times of the order of seconds with good soft tissue contrast. However, when studying multi-scale hierarchically structured objects, such as the mammalian lung, the overall sample size typically exceeds the field of view illuminated by the X-rays in a single scan and the necessity for achieving a high spatial resolution conflicts with the need to image the whole sample. Several image stitching and calibration techniques to achieve extended high-resolution fields of view have been reported, but those approaches tend to fail when imaging non-stable samples, thus precluding tomographic measurements of large biological samples, which are prone to degradation and motion during extended scan times. In this work, we demonstrate a full-volume three-dimensional reconstruction of an intact rat lung under immediate post-mortem conditions and at an isotropic voxel size of (2.75 µm)3. We present the methodology for collecting multiple local tomographies with 360° extended field of view scans followed by locally non-rigid volumetric stitching. Applied to the lung, it allows to resolve the entire pulmonary structure from the trachea down to the parenchyma in a single dataset. The complete dataset is available online (https://doi.org/10.16907/7eb141d3-11f1-47a6-9d0e-76f8832ed1b2)

No recombination of mtDNA after heteroplasmy for 50 generations in the mouse maternal germline

Peer reviewe

Assets and domestic units: methodological challenges for longitudinal studies of poverty dynamics

Tracking change in assets access and ownership in longitudinal research is difficult. Assets are rarely assigned to individuals. Their benefit and management are spread across domestic units which morph over time. We review the challenges of using assets to understand poverty dynamics, and tracking the domestic units that own and manage assets. Using case studies from longitudinal research we demonstrate that assets can afford useful insights into important change

The Early Growth Genetics (EGG) and EArly Genetics and Lifecourse Epidemiology (EAGLE) consortia : design, results and future prospects

The impact of many unfavorable childhood traits or diseases, such as low birth weight and mental disorders, is not limited to childhood and adolescence, as they are also associated with poor outcomes in adulthood, such as cardiovascular disease. Insight into the genetic etiology of childhood and adolescent traits and disorders may therefore provide new perspectives, not only on how to improve wellbeing during childhood, but also how to prevent later adverse outcomes. To achieve the sample sizes required for genetic research, the Early Growth Genetics (EGG) and EArly Genetics and Lifecourse Epidemiology (EAGLE) consortia were established. The majority of the participating cohorts are longitudinal population-based samples, but other cohorts with data on early childhood phenotypes are also involved. Cohorts often have a broad focus and collect(ed) data on various somatic and psychiatric traits as well as environmental factors. Genetic variants have been successfully identified for multiple traits, for example, birth weight, atopic dermatitis, childhood BMI, allergic sensitization, and pubertal growth. Furthermore, the results have shown that genetic factors also partly underlie the association with adult traits. As sample sizes are still increasing, it is expected that future analyses will identify additional variants. This, in combination with the development of innovative statistical methods, will provide detailed insight on the mechanisms underlying the transition from childhood to adult disorders. Both consortia welcome new collaborations. Policies and contact details are available from the corresponding authors of this manuscript and/or the consortium websites.Peer reviewe