Developing a Research Culture and Scholarship Plan in Information Studies

Information research may take many forms. When the researchers are situated within an information technology faculty, there is a natural orientation towards the technology and the systems that make possible the use of the technology. Despite this, a focus on information itself and its effective utilisation can be achieved in an environment that may otherwise be more concerned with the technology than the information that the technology carries. This focus can contribute to research that has a systems orientation, as well as both foster and be fostered by interdisciplinary work in areas such as education, management and psychology. Here we explain the development of a research program in ‘information use’ within the Socio-technical systems theme of the School of Information Systems at QUT. Our emphasis is on the processes – research supervision, industry linkage, consultancy, grant development, conference contribution and publication - that have advanced the development of the research group. We also provide a summary of research projects in the form of models that are being developed to help illuminate the research frameworks

Changes in Behavior, Movement, and Home Ranges of Largemouth Bass Following Large-scale Hydrilla Removal in Lake Seminole, Georgia

About 1,200 ha of hydrilla ( Hydrilla verticillata L.f. Royle) was eliminated in the Spring Creek embayment of Lake Seminole, Georgia, using a drip-delivery application of fluridone (1- methyl-3-phenyl-5-[3-(trifluoromethl) phenyl]-4(1H)-pyridinone) in 2000 and 2001. Two groups of 15 and 20 largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides Lacepede) were implanted with 400-day radio tags in February 2000 and 2001 to determine changes in movement and behavior before and after hydrilla reduction.(PDF contains 8 pages.

Reevaluation of the Impact of Coal Mining on the Virginia State Budge

Downstream Strategies, an environmental consulting and policy analysis firm, published The Impact of Coal on the Virginia State Budget in 2012, finding that the coal mining industry was responsible for a net cost of 21.9 million USD to the Commonwealth in 2009 (considering only the Virginia General Assembly's General Fund and Transportation Fund revenues and expenditures). We provide a reanalysis of the same topic, considering the effect the presence of the coal industry has on the entire state budget that is not limited to the General Fund. We estimate that in our study year of 2011, the coal industry contributed 31.95 million USD in taxes and fees to the state while the Commonwealth's expenditures relating to the coal industry totaled 24.4 million USD. However, firms producing coal in Virginia also benefit from two exclusive refundable tax credits which we estimate combine to 49.37 million USD. We find that the coal industry was associated with a net cost of 36.7 million USD to the Virginia state budget in 2011

Emergency medicine in Dubai, UAE

Dubai has rapidly risen to prominence in the Persian Gulf region as a center of global commerce and tourism and as a cultural crossroad between East and West. The health-care infrastructure has undergone rapid development. Collaborations with academic medical centers now exist to advance clinical care, teaching and research. Emergency medicine has also advanced and is undergoing dynamic change. Dubai may soon emerge as a regional leader in emergency medicine training and practice

VLA Observations of Ultraluminous IRAS Galaxies: Active Nuclei or Starbursts?

We employed the Very Large Array (VLA) of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in C configuration to map 39 ultraluminous IRAS galaxies at 6~cm and 20~cm, at resolutions of ~ 4" and 15", respectively, and 24 sources at 6~cm with in the A configuration with a resolution of ~0.5". Most of the sources have radio spectral indices indicative of synchrotron emission (alpha ~ -0.65). There is one source, however, that shows an inverted spectrum with alpha = +2.1; observations at higher frequencies show that the spectrum peaks between 5 and 8 GHz, as high as any of the ``gigahertz peaked spectrum'' sources studied by O'Dea etal. We discuss the implications of this source for observations of fluctuations in the CMB. Two of the sources show multiple unresolved components, another four are doubles with at least one resolved component, 14 show extended emission which could arise from a disk, and two show arc-second long jets. Our data fit the tight correlation found by Helou etal (1985) between far-infrared and microwave luminosity; this correlation extends to the highest infrared luminosities. The correlation is weaker if only the extended or the nuclear components of the radio luminosity are used. Therefore the far-infrared emission in the majority of these higher luminosity galaxies is due to the same mechanism as the lower luminosity FIR sources, which is believed to be star formation, rather than non-thermal activity in the nucleus. Moreover, the star formation is not confined to the extended disk in these sources, but is important in the nucleus as well.Comment: In press, Astrophysical Journal. 34 pages, uuencoded gzip'ed postscript of text, tables and figures. 3 figures not included; contact Margaret Best at [email protected] for hardcopies of thes

Zero Temperature Thermodynamics of Asymmetric Fermi Gases at Unitarity

The equation of state of a dilute two-component asymmetric Fermi gas at unitarity is subject to strong constraints, which affect the spatial density profiles in atomic traps. These constraints require the existence of at least one non-trivial partially polarized (asymmetric) phase. We determine the relation between the structure of the spatial density profiles and the T=0 equation of state, based on the most accurate theoretical predictions available. We also show how the equation of state can be determined from experimental observations.Comment: 10 pages and 7 figures. (Minor changes to correspond with published version.

Studies of relativistic backward-wave oscillator operation in the cross-excitation regime

We first reported the operation of a relativistic backward-wave oscillator (BWO) in the so-called cross-excitation regime in 1998. This instability, whose general properties were predicted earlier through numerical studies, resulted from the use of a particularly shallow rippled-wall waveguide [slow wave structure (SWS)] that was installed in an experiment to diagnose pulse shortening in a long-pulse electron beam-driven high-power microwave (HPM) source. This SWS was necessary to accommodate laser interferometry measurements along the SWS during the course of microwave generation. Since those early experiments, we have studied this regime in greater detail using two different SWS lengths. We have invoked time-frequency analysis, the smoothed-pseudo Wigner-Ville distribution in particular, to interpret the heterodyned signals of the radiated power measurements. These recent results are consistent with earlier theoretical predictions for the onset and voltage scaling for this instability. This paper presents data for a relativistic BWO operating in the single-frequency regime for two axial modes, operating in the cross-excitation regime, and discusses the interpretation of the data, as well as the methodology used for its analysis. Although operation in the cross-excitation regime is typically avoided due to its poorer efficiency, it may prove useful for future HPM effects studies