Commonwealth place-based service delivery initiatives: key learnings project

Overview: Place-based initiatives are programs designed and delivered with the intention of targeting a specific geographical location and particular population group in order to respond to complex social problems. Typically, they focus on areas and communities with entrenched disadvantage or deprivation. This report investigates the key factors and characteristics associated with successful outcomes with such programs, drawing on the international literature and evaluation studies of Australian government and overseas programs. Key messages: Many Commonwealth place-based initiatives reviewed had features that accord with those of international place-based initiatives, including common program elements such as design, delivery, implementation and evaluation. Evaluation of all these common elements is rarely done by either international or Commonwealth place-based initiatives. In particular, evaluations of Commonwealth place-based initiatives lacked sufficient evidence to establish the causal effects of initiatives, their cost-effectiveness and an understanding of how these initiatives work to achieve their goals. This was more pronounced among the evaluation of Commonwealth initiatives than in international evaluations

The Trigger System of the ARGO-YBJ detector

The ARGO-YBJ experiment has been designed to detect air shower events over a large size scale and with an energy threshold of a few hundreds GeV. The building blocks of the ARGO-YBJ detector are single-gap Resistive Plate Counters (RPCs). The trigger logic selects the events on the basis of their hit multiplicity. Inclusive triggers as well as dedicated triggers for specific physics channels or calibration purposes have been developed. This paper describes the architecture and the main features of the trigger system.Comment: 4 pages, to be published in the Proceedings of the 28th International Cosmic Ray Conference (Tsukuba, Japan 2003

Robust Geotechnical Design – A New Design Perspective

In routine geotechnical engineering practice, the engineer has to work with a small sample of data due to budget constraint. Because of complexity of soil deposits, it is often difficult to determine correctly the statistics of soil parameters that are required for reliability-based design of foundations. Furthermore, the traditional reliability-based design is sensitive to the variation of noise factors such as uncertain soil parameters. To address this dilemma, the authors present a new design methodology, termed robust geotechnical design. This new design methodology aims to make the response of a geotechnical system immune to, or robust against, the variation of noise factors by carefully adjusting the design parameters. This methodology is realized through a multi-objective optimization, in which all the design requirements such as safety, robustness, and cost are explicitly considered. The results of such optimization are often expressed as a Pareto Front, which defines a trade-off relationship between cost and robustness, whereas safety is guaranteed. This enables the engineer to make an informed design decision according to a target cost or robustness. The significance of new design methodology is illustrated with an example of shallow foundation design