Potential economic implications for regional tourism of a Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak in North Queensland

International and domestic tourism are sensitive to disastrous events which make areas inaccessible to visitors, less attractive or more dangerous. One form of tourism disaster is the outbreak of an exotic disease, of which Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) is a prime case. It is now well documented that the 2001 FMD outbreak in the UK had a greater impact on tourism than on agriculture. It has been estimated than an FMD outbreak in Australia would impose a cost of about $13 million. The impact on tourism would be highly dependent on the extent and duration of an FMD outbreak, as well as on any management and containment restrictions imposed by the authorities in their attempt to control and eventually eradicate the disease. Public perception and thus the provision of accurate information and the way in which the media report disasters will also play an important role in determining the impact on the tourism industry. The economy of Tropical North Queensland relies heavily on international visitors, and an FMD outbreak in the region would impose a large cost to the regional economy, conservatively estimated here to be of the order of$200 million per year

Fatal Aircraft Accidents

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Optimal Distributed Algorithms in Unlabelled Tori and Chordal Rings

We study the message complexity of distributed algorithms in Tori and Chordal Rings when the communication links are unlabelled, which implies that the processors do not have a globally consistent labelling of the communication links. They have no "Sense of Direction" but have only a topological awareness. We use a preprocessing algorithm to introduce the notion of handrail, a partial structural information, which allows messages to travel with a "globally consistent direction". Hence, we give a distributed algorithm which confirms the conjecture suggested in [12] that the Leader Election problem for unlabelled Tori of N processors can be solved using \Theta(N ) messages instead of O(N log N ). Using the same handrail paradigm, we solve the Election problem using \Theta(N ) messages in unlabelled chordal rings with one chord (of length approximately p N ). This solves a longstanding open problem [2] of the minimal number of chords and minimal Sense of Direction required to decrease t..

Portable Distributed Priority Queues with MPI

Part of this work has been presented in [17]. This paper analyzes the performances of portable distributed priority queues by examining the theoretical features required and by comparing various implementations. In spite of intrinsic bottlenecks and induced hot-spots, we argue that tree topologies are attractive to manage the natural centralized control required for the deletemin operation in order to detect the site which holds the item with the largest priority. We introduce an original perfect balancing to cope with the load variation due to the priority queue operations which continuously modify the overall number of items in the network. For comparison, we introduce the d-heap and the binomial distributed priority queue. The purpose of this experiment is to convey, through executions on Cray-T3D and MeikoT800, an understanding of the nature of the distributed priority queues, the range of their concurrency and a comparison of their efficiency to reduce requests latency. In particu..

Randomised Techniques to Efficiently Approximate Spectral Coefficients and Autocorrelation Coefficients

In this paper we provide polynomial time approximation techniques which allow us to calculate, to arbitrary levels of accuracy and with high probability of success, the spectral coefficients and autocorrelation coefficients of Boolean functions, given that those functions are expressed in either Sum-of-Products or Product-of-Sums form. 1 Introduction The focus of this paper is on the generation of spectral coefficients and autocorrelation coefficients for Boolean functions. Efficient calculation of those coefficients would allow digital logic analysts to draw on the large body of research already effectively employed in the area of signal processing. Utilisation of coefficient-based techniques in areas such as logic testing and synthesis has traditionally been hampered by the computational requirements for coefficient calculation. To reduce the computational demands, we use an approximation technique to estimate the coefficient values. As any specified level of accuracy can still be o..

Nano-Mechanical Computing Using Multiple-Valued Logic Programmable Logic Arrays

One fascinating direction for computational logic design is the development of nanomechanical computers. That is, computers built at the molecular level. In this paper the design of ternary computation blocks, particularly PLAs, is considered. While many aspects of these nano-PLAs are similar to their cousins in digital logic designs, there are some significant, and useful, differences. The problem of propagation delay -- a significant drawback for PLAs in digital circuitry -- can be almost entirely sidestepped at the nano-computing level, where all computing can be carried out in a fast 6-step cycle. Included is discussion of the PLA size and speed, and possible fault models for the new technology

Copy of the diary of the Northern Expedition under the Leadership of Mr. William Hann / [William Hann].

"Presented to both Houses of Parliament."; Electronic reproduction. Canberra, A.C.T. : National Library of Australia, 2010

Multi-scale Adaptive Segmentation using Edge and Region Based Attributes

We present an adaptive multi-scale algorithm using edge and region information for segmenting intensity images into closed regions. The need for segmentation is determined by region statistics and segmentation is actually performed using edge based information. Results are shown for a number of images displaying significant improvements over mono-scale segmentation. 2 1 Introduction The issue of segmentation is one of the central issues related to computer vision research but it is also one of the more difficult problems to solve. There have been two major approaches to the segmentation problem thus far - edge based and region based methods. Edge based approaches typically find edges in an image, however, they do not always produce good regions (ie they may not produce closed regions), and often produce spurious edges. On the other hand, region based methods, do produce closed regions, but typically do not make use of edge information and hence cannot segment two similar regions sep..

Weakly Bounded Probabilistic Polytime is Contained in POLYSIZE

It is known that bounded error probabilistic polynomial time (BPP) languages are accepted by polynomial size circuit families (POLYSIZE). We sharpen and extend this result to WBPP for which the BPP error bound ffl ? 0 is weakened to ffl(n) =\Omega\Gamma3 =n O(1) ) for length n inputs. The WBPP result is obtained by using Turing randomness to avoid involved counting arguments. 1 Introduction Complexity theory is the part of computer science that identifies computing resources and establishes quantitative relationships among them. In this way, one resource can be measured in terms of others. We will be concerned with measuring randomness in terms of Boolean circuit size. Additional details about the notions used here may be obtained from [2]. It will be convenient to express computation in terms of language acceptance. Languages will be subsets of f0; 1g + . The output of a Turing machine M on input x will be designated by M(x). If a Turing machine M with inputs over f0; 1g + ha..