REFLECTION ON TEACHING A POSTGRADUATE, PROJECT-BASED LEARNING COURSE WITH DIVERSE DISCIPLINES

This paper is a teaching reflection on the delivery of the postgraduate, project-based learning (PBL) engineering course (subject) that is common to five Masters of Engineering program at School of Engineering, RMIT. The data was sourced from end-of-semester surveys of the perceptions of students who completed the course between 2017, when we taught the course for the first time, and 2019. The analysis showed substantial improvements in overall satisfaction, percentage of agreement on the project-based learning helping students to work well with peers, and percentage of agreement that students became more able to apply the theories to practice. The mastery in teaching such a course, especially when the students from various disciplines are involved, demands an adaptive teaching approach wherein the instructors or teachers experiment to continuously improve on the shortcomings in subsequent offerings to enhance the students’ learning experience. A PBL course that is well-designed, well-supported, well-implemented, and well-taught can engage students by improving their comprehension, helping them to work well with peers, improving their communication, and assisting them to apply theories to real application or practice

Most Likely Transformations

We propose and study properties of maximum likelihood estimators in the class of conditional transformation models. Based on a suitable explicit parameterisation of the unconditional or conditional transformation function, we establish a cascade of increasingly complex transformation models that can be estimated, compared and analysed in the maximum likelihood framework. Models for the unconditional or conditional distribution function of any univariate response variable can be set-up and estimated in the same theoretical and computational framework simply by choosing an appropriate transformation function and parameterisation thereof. The ability to evaluate the distribution function directly allows us to estimate models based on the exact likelihood, especially in the presence of random censoring or truncation. For discrete and continuous responses, we establish the asymptotic normality of the proposed estimators. A reference software implementation of maximum likelihood-based estimation for conditional transformation models allowing the same flexibility as the theory developed here was employed to illustrate the wide range of possible applications.Comment: Accepted for publication by the Scandinavian Journal of Statistics 2017-06-1

Factors affecting patterns of tick parasitism on forest rodents in tick-borne encephalitis risk areas, Germany

Identifying factors affecting individual vector burdens is essential for understanding infectious disease systems. Drawing upon data of a rodent monitoring programme conducted in nine different forest patches in southern Hesse, Germany, we developed models which predict tick (Ixodes spp. and Dermacentor spp.) burdens on two rodent species Apodemus flavicollis and Myodes glareolus. Models for the two rodent species were broadly similar but differed in some aspects. Patterns of Ixodes spp. burdens were influenced by extrinsic factors such as season, unexplained spatial variation (both species), relative humidity and vegetation cover (A. flavicollis). We found support for the ‘body mass’ (tick burdens increase with body mass/age) and for the ‘dilution’ hypothesis (tick burdens decline with increasing rodent densities) and little support for the ‘sex-bias’ hypothesis (both species). Surprisingly, roe deer densities were not correlated with larvae counts on rodents. Factors influencing the mean burden did not significantly explain the observed dispersion of tick counts. Co-feeding aggregations, which are essential for tick-borne disease transmission, were mainly found in A. flavicollis of high body mass trapped in areas with fast increase in spring temperatures. Locally, Dermacentor spp. appears to be an important parasite on A. flavicollis and M. glareolus. Dermacentor spp. was rather confined to areas with higher average temperatures during the vegetation period. Nymphs of Dermacentor spp. mainly fed on M. glareolus and were seldom found on A. flavicollis. Whereas Ixodes spp. is the dominant tick genus in woodlands of our study area, the distribution and epidemiological role of Dermacentor spp. should be monitored closely

Optimising corticosteroid injection for lateral epicondylalgia with the addition of physiotherapy: A protocol for a randomised control trial with placebo comparison

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Corticosteroid injection and physiotherapy are two commonly prescribed interventions for management of lateral epicondylalgia. Corticosteroid injections are the most clinically efficacious in the short term but are associated with high recurrence rates and delayed recovery, while physiotherapy is similar to injections at 6 weeks but with significantly lower recurrence rates. Whilst practitioners frequently recommend combining physiotherapy and injection to overcome harmful effects and improve outcomes, study of the benefits of this combination of treatments is lacking. Clinicians are also faced with the paradox that the powerful anti-inflammatory corticosteroid injections work well, albeit in the short term, for a non-inflammatory condition like lateral epicondylalgia. Surprisingly, these injections have not been rigorously tested against placebo injections. This study primarily addresses both of these issues.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial with a 2 × 2 factorial design will evaluate the clinical efficacy, cost-effectiveness and recurrence rates of adding physiotherapy to an injection. In addition, the clinical efficacy and adverse effects of corticosteroid injection beyond that of a placebo saline injection will be studied. 132 participants with a diagnosis of lateral epicondylalgia will be randomly assigned by concealed allocation to one of four treatment groups – corticosteroid injection, saline injection, corticosteroid injection with physiotherapy or saline injection with physiotherapy. Physiotherapy will comprise 8 sessions of elbow manipulation and exercise over an 8 week period. Blinded follow-up assessments will be conducted at baseline, 4, 8, 12, 26 and 52 weeks after randomisation. The primary outcome will be a participant rating of global improvement, from which measures of success and recurrence will be derived. Analyses will be conducted on an intention-to-treat basis using linear mixed and logistic regression models. Healthcare costs will be collected from a societal perspective, and along with willingness-to-pay and quality of life data will facilitate cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analyses.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>This trial will utilise high quality trial methodologies in accordance with CONSORT guidelines. Findings from this study will assist in the development of evidence based practice recommendations and potentially the optimisation of resource allocation for rehabilitating lateral epicondylalgia.</p> <p>Trial registration</p> <p>Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Register ACTRN12609000051246</p

A system dynamics approach to life cycle assessment

Cars consume a large amount of energy and material resources, and generate large environmental impacts, through their production, use, and disposal. Some automotive engineers use the life cycle assessment (LCA) method to estimate and understand these environmental impacts arising from their design decisions. The standard LCA method, however, makes some limiting assumptions that exclude changes in parameter values over time. This lack of the temporal dimension leads to uncertainty in estimates, especially for new, high-volume, long-life products, such as cars. The aim of this thesis is to explore the value and challenges of an LCA method that can account for changes in resource consumptions and environmental impacts over time. This thesis modifies the standard LCA method to include some dynamics-the way that the state of a system changes over time in response to internally-generated and externally-imposed forces. A case study considers the technological intervention of replacing steel with lightweight materials in passenger cars in Australia. It considers the dynamics of the wider 'car system' at the level of the product fleet and resource flows, but not at the level of the environmental impacts. This thesis takes a System Dynamics (SD) approach by developing a computational model, a hypothesis of how the system works. The model explains the growth in the Australian car-fleet fuel consumption despite persistent policy intervention by government to decrease fuel consumption, compliance and technology innovation by car manufacturers, and shifts in transportation preferences to non-car modes by travellers. The model also allows the exploration of future scenarios wherein some car manufacturers adopt lightweight-material components and battery-electric powertrains. The computed values are used in spreadsheet calculations of resource flows and environmental impacts. The simulations of the SD model estimate that many resource benefits of lightweight cars take decades to accumulate because steel cars drain out of the fleet slowly. Furthermore, if the population of car travellers continues to grow, then oil depletion and growth in urban density could cause rapid declines in driving intensity and in the size of the petrol car fleet. Low driving intensity makes it difficult to recover the high energy investment in lightweight materials. Finally, the adoption of battery-electric cars enables car travellers to avoid most effects of oil depletion, but traffic congestion could still cause moderate declines in driving intensity and in the car fleet. The inclusion of the dynamics in an LCA study leads to surprising insights-some computational parameters, usually assumed to be constants or fixed functions of time, are considerably nonlinear. The results of the case study suggest that mass-reduction and similar 'efficiency' interventions are less effective than intended because the balancing loops and buffers of the system prevent parameters from operating in critical ranges that shift feedback loop dominance. The considerable investment into such technological interventions could be redirected, for greater effect, to policy interventions that target fuel security and traffic congestion through the behaviour and decision-making of travellers. The superiority of such interventions can be difficult to identify with a linear worldview of complex systems

Factor 5 in eco-cement: Zeobond Pty Ltd.

Cement production is estimated to be responsible for approximately 6 per cent of total global greenhouse gas emissions. One of the most promising alternatives to common Portland cement is geopolymer cement, and Australian company Zeobond is a bone fide leader in its manufacture

Interpolation-Based Framework for Generation of Ground Truth Data for Testing Lane Detection Algorithm for Automated Vehicle

Automated vehicles, predicted to be fully electric in future, are expected to reduce road fatalities and road traffic emissions. The lane departure warning system, an important feature of automated vehicles, utilize lane detection and tracking algorithms. Researchers are constrained to test their lane detection algorithms because of the small publicly available datasets. Additionally, those datasets may not represent differences in road geometries, lane marking and other details unique to a particular geographic location. Existing methods to develop the ground truth datasets are time intensive. To address this gap, this study proposed a framework for an interpolation approach for quickly generating reliable ground truth data. The proposed method leverages the advantage of the existing manual and time-slice approaches. A detailed framework for the interpolation approach is presented and the performance of the approach is compared with the existing methods. Video datasets for performance evaluation were collected in Melbourne, Australia. The results show that the proposed approach outperformed four existing approaches with a reduction in time for generating ground truth data in the range from 4.8% to 87.4%. A reliable and quick method for generating ground truth data, as proposed in this study, will be valuable to researchers as they can use it to test and evaluate their lane detection and tracking algorithms