Policy into practice: Adoption of hazard mitigation measures by local government in Queensland:A collaborative research project between Queensland University of Technology and Emergency Management Queensland in association with Local Government of Queensland Disaster Management Alliance

The focus of the present research was to investigate how Local Governments in Queensland were progressing with the adoption of delineated DM policies and supporting guidelines. The study consulted Local Government representatives and hence, the results reflect their views on these issues. Is adoption occurring? To what degree? Are policies and guidelines being effectively implemented so that the objective of a safer, more resilient community is being achieved? If not, what are the current barriers to achieving this, and can recommendations be made to overcome these barriers? These questions defined the basis on which the present study was designed and the survey tools developed.\ud \ud While it was recognised that LGAQ and Emergency Management Queensland (EMQ) may have differing views on some reported issues, it was beyond the scope of the present study to canvass those views.\ud \ud The study resolved to document and analyse these questions under the broad themes of: \ud \ud • Building community capacity (notably via community awareness).\ud • Council operationalisation of DM. \ud • Regional partnerships (in mitigation/adaptation).\ud \ud Data was collected via a survey tool comprising two components: \ud \ud • An online questionnaire survey distributed via the LGAQ Disaster Management Alliance (hereafter referred to as the “Alliance”) to DM sections of all Queensland Local Government Councils; and\ud • a series of focus groups with selected Queensland Councils\u

GoGlobal Rural-Urban

This is a book of edited articles and design projects from five years of collaborative international design projects in developed and developing economies, including China, Thailand, Ghana and Japan. Part One contains articles on initiatives including e-commerce models for developing economies, massclusivity and craft design. Part Two is dedicated to design solutions for China’s rural-urban migration issues, which affect 55 million people a year. The project enhances knowledge about the application of design thinking to national-level issues connecting policy to implementation, extending design activity into large-scale social and economic areas. The book follows an exhibition of design outcomes in London and Beijing (2010). Hall developed his chapter (‘Go Global: Ghana’) from a conference paper given at the ‘International Association of Societies of Design Research Conference’, South Korea (2009) and further expanded as a book chapter (with Barker) entitled ‘e-Artisans: Contemporary design for the global market’ in Global Design History (2011). ‘eArtisans’ researched a proposed e-commerce model linking designer-craftsmen with a global Internet sale and distribution model for African countries. The originality lay in proposing and testing knowledge, through design collaborations, in a combination of e-commerce enterprise models; it was significant in deploying the proposed model in an experimental educational initiative. The research was based on previous experience of design, craft and enterprise projects in Thailand and China, and aligned with a creative economies report by UNESCO (2008). The context was a collaboration at the KNUST, Kumasi, Ghana, where action-based research methods resulted in a case study illustrating cultural transfer. Support and partnership were also provided by Aid To Artisans, the British Council and Africa 53. A vital aspect was the discovery of how an e-commerce model changed design concepts and creative proposals. The GoGlobal project has continued with an edited publication, Designing Social City Experiences (Jin Nam and Hall 2013)

Using demonstrations to stimulate inquiry and students' thinking

Aquest article descriu com es poden utilitzar els experiments demostratius per estimular la investigació i iniciar el procés d'ensenyament de les ciències basat en la indagació. Això significa fer experiments demostratius no només per diversió o per il·lustrar algun tema, sinó també per captar l'atenció dels estudiants, així com per involucrar-los en el procés d'investigació per mitjà de preguntes i el suggeriment de solucions. Alguns exemples d'aquest enfocament es donen mitjançant una selecció de demostracions científiques que es van presentar en una conferència a Barcelona el novembre de 2013. L'article se centra en la fase d'implicació del model d'indagació 5E, que és el model emprat en el projecte TEMI, un nou projecte d'ensenyament de les ciències basat en la indagació (ECBI).This article describes how demonstrations can be used to stimulate inquiry and initiate the process of inquiry-based science education. This means doing demonstrations not just for fun or to illustrate some topic, but to catch students’ attention, and engage them in the inquiry process by asking questions and suggesting solutions. Some examples of such an approach are given using a selection of science demonstrations, used in a lecture in Barcelona in November 2013. The article focuses on the engagement phase of the 5E enquiry model, which is being development in the TEMI project, a new FPY IBSE project

How women work together in masculinised parliaments to represent the interests of women

How do representatives act for those they represent? Peter Allen and Sarah Childs use the case of the Labour Party’s Women’s Committee to illustrate how it advances women’s interests in a feminist direction by sustaining its focus on a small number of issues and interacting with party leadership

Public-private partnership in disaster management: a case study of the Gold Coast

Public-private partnership has important roles to play in disaster management, including building business and community resilience, developing community risk awareness and providing essential services. This paper reports on two recent initiatives in public-private partnerships on Queensland's Gold Coast. The first is an initiative by a local community group 'Varsity Lakes Community Limited' to prepare a disaster management guide for the masterplanned community of Varsity Lakes with support from NRMA insurance company and the local council. The second is the 'Community Watch' program initiated by the Gold Coast City Council to involve local community groups in various parts of the City for building disaster resilience. These two examples provide insights on evolving disaster management public-private partnerships that are more communitybased and bottom-up by nature. The study indicates that there is potential for including an additional layer of 'community' when conceptualising the existing fourtiered (commonwealth, state, district and local government) disaster management framework of Queensland

HOUSE: Building energy efficiency understanding through an enabled boundary object

We report the results of an empirical study on an enabled application’s ability to act as a boundary object and build understanding of energy efficiency solutions. Combining digital and tangible technology with radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, we have created an interactive, digitally enabled device and application called HOUSE (Home User and Stakeholder Environment). The HOUSE tool and application have been designed and developed to support interaction and collaboration in the exploration of domestic energy efficiency solutions. HOUSE allows users to associate information with physical representations, and to explore this information through manipulation of enabled objects. The interactive application consists of a 24:1 scale representation of an archetypal UK home and thirteen model energy efficiency interventions integrated with a digital application. Each energy efficiency intervention is enabled with RFID tagging and detection, to allow participants to physically interact with the HOUSE application. The app detects when a model energy efficiency intervention is placed in the model HOUSE. Participants then receive real-time feedback on their energy efficiency selection and the implication of their retrofit decisions. We explore the role of HOUSE acting as a boundary object, in facilitating the transfer of knowledge across domains. The application was evaluated in academic non-expert and industry (expert) stakeholder workshops. Results showed there is a self-reported increase in collaboration and consensus amongst non-experts (Group A) using the HOUSE interactive application. There is also a self-reported difference in the decision-making process surrounding retrofit selection for experts (Group D) using the HOUSE interactive application. Moreover, there is evidence from experts to conclude that the HOUSE can assist in transmitting findings in meaningful ways to non-experts in the field

An Assessment of Personality Traits and Their Implication for Creativity Amongst Innovation Design Engineering Masters Students Using the MBTI and KTS Instruments

Creativity and its realisation are vitally important to industry as identified, for example, by the Capitalizing on Complexity report undertaken by IBM. The scope of this study is to explore masters level design engineering students’ creativity in terms of personality correlation. A personality survey conducted on Innovative Design Engineering (IDE) masters students by applying the MBTI and Keirsey Temperament Sorter (KTS) to investigate individual creativity is reported. The results reveal that intuition, which is suggested to potentially strongly link with creativity, is quite prominent among the IDE students. That extraversion is positively correlated with creativity in the engineering domain is modestly confirmed. Contrary to expectation, perceptors did not outnumber judgers. From KTS theory, although Idealists and Rationals account for a small part of the whole population, they mark exceptional appearances in IDE sample. It is reasonable to speculate that more creative potentials, which lead to better creative outcomes, exist among people who belong to those personality groups and possess certain personality traits in the design engineering fields where creativity is desired

Evolution of size-dependent flowering in a variable environment: construction and analysis of a stochastic integral projection model

Understanding why individuals delay reproduction is a classic problem in evolutionary biology. In plants, the study of reproductive delays is complicated because growth and survival can be size and age dependent, individuals of the same size can grow by different amounts and there is temporal variation in the environment. We extend the recently developed integral projection approach to include size- and age-dependent demography and temporal variation. The technique is then applied to a long-term individually structured dataset for Carlina vulgaris, a monocarpic thistle. The parameterized model has excellent descriptive properties in terms of both the population size and the distributions of sizes within each age class. In Carlina, the probability of flowering depends on both plant size and age. We use the parameterized model to predict this relationship, using the evolutionarily stable strategy approach. Considering each year separately, we show that both the direction and the magnitude of selection on the flowering strategy vary from year to year. Provided the flowering strategy is constrained, so it cannot be a step function, the model accurately predicts the average size at flowering. Elasticity analysis is used to partition the size- and age-specific contributions to the stochastic growth rate, λs. We use λs to construct fitness landscapes and show how different forms of stochasticity influence its topography. We prove the existence of a unique stochastic growth rate, λs, which is independent of the initial population vector, and show that Tuljapurkar's perturbation analysis for log(λs) can be used to calculate elasticities

‘Scripted fantasies’: writing the twenty-first century

If fiction is seldom perceived to be a contemporary form oriented towards global, ecological, or nonhuman concerns, it documents and dramatises crises, particularly of identity, that demonstrate these contexts. The twentyfirst century novel both reflects and seeks to influence ethical, philosophical and critical discussion while negotiating its status as a medium that gained a strong cultural foothold because it addressed the establishment and imposition of civilizational norms in human societies from the Enlightenment through to the twentieth century. This essay considers how novels have approached challenges to human and humanist centrality from a range of forces in the last twenty years as multiple debates have taken a nonhuman turn

Evaluation of a cheap ultrasonic stage for light source coherence function measurement, optical coherence tomography and dynamic focusing

We evaluate the performance of a cheap ultrasonic stage in setups related to optical coherence tomography. The stage was used in several configurations: (1) optical delay line in an optical coherence tomography (OCT) setup; (2) as a delay line measuring coherence function of a low coherence source (e. g. superluminescent diode) and (3) in a dynamic focusing arrangement. The results are as follows: the stage is suitable for coherence function measurement (coherence length up to 70 mu m) of the light source and dynamic focusing. We found it unsuitable for OCT due to an unstable velocity profile. Despite this, the velocity profile has a repeatable shape (4% over 1000 A-scans) and slight modifications to the stage promise wider applications