Sustainability Profitability and Australian Landcare

The landcare movement in Australia has contributed towards a significant change in environmental awareness, and understanding of the immediate and real issues that face landholders. Consequently, many are now questioning the very farming systems that they implement and are keenly aware of the fragility of the environment around them. The long-term future for Australia's agriculture depends on linking environmental management with sound commercial food and fibre production. Sustainable and profitable farm systems are the key to achieving this future. The farming community is faced with increasing calls for the farming community to be more sustainable. Unfortunately, while most farmers accept this, they do not have access to regional indicators for the measurement of sustainability. Therefore, there is an immediate need to develop further some of the work that has been completed nationally into regional models, where farmers reliably adapt the sustainability indicators to on farm applications. To achieve this, national leadership and cooperation between government, industry and research organisations is required. Environmental Management Systems (EMS) are receiving close scrutiny as a means of measuring the impact of a business on the environment. There are many perceived advantages of EMS. These include achieving market access, protection and enhancement of the environment, provision of better management information, and providing a positive image for agriculture. Equally, the farming community is wary of yet more administration and bureaucracy, and would like to be convinced of the positive cost benefits from EMS before embracing EMS as a concept. In comparison to many overseas countries, Australian agriculture is relatively unregulated in an environmental sense. The need to address the challenging question of sustainability, and the potential of EMS as a tool of measurement, provide grounds for strong debate within the country. There is no question that Australia must establish credible systems that are profitable and sustainable. To achieve this, both national leadership and a commitment from the farming community are required.Environmental Economics and Policy, Farm Management,

Improving Object Localization with Fitness NMS and Bounded IoU Loss

We demonstrate that many detection methods are designed to identify only a sufficently accurate bounding box, rather than the best available one. To address this issue we propose a simple and fast modification to the existing methods called Fitness NMS. This method is tested with the DeNet model and obtains a significantly improved MAP at greater localization accuracies without a loss in evaluation rate, and can be used in conjunction with Soft NMS for additional improvements. Next we derive a novel bounding box regression loss based on a set of IoU upper bounds that better matches the goal of IoU maximization while still providing good convergence properties. Following these novelties we investigate RoI clustering schemes for improving evaluation rates for the DeNet wide model variants and provide an analysis of localization performance at various input image dimensions. We obtain a MAP of 33.6%@79Hz and 41.8%@5Hz for MSCOCO and a Titan X (Maxwell). Source code available from: https://github.com/lachlants/denetComment: CVPR2018 Main Conference (Poster

Gender Differences and Digital Learning Games – One Size Does not fit all

The intrinsic motivation demonstrated towards digital games provides the opportunity for its use as a learning tool irrespective of gender differences. This has resulted in the combination of the motivation of games with curricular content referred to as Digital Game-Based Learning. While some related studies have argued that there are no gender differences in the motivational appeal of digital educational games, others present an opposing view. This paper reports the result of an investigation into the motivational appeal of digital educational games for 11-14 years old girls and boys. There is evidence that this age group is pivotal to the shrinking pipeline phenomenon in which fewer females progressively engage with computer science education and careers. The investigation involved a two stage study composed of a qualitative exploratory study, which identified the key criteria for the successful appeal of some digital entertainment games to young girls and boys and a main study. The main study generate both qualitative and quantitative data to further investigate the motivational appeal of digital educational games for learning basic computer science concepts for both girls and boys of age 11-14 years old. For the main study, two experimental games for learning basic computer science concepts were created based on the key criteria identified from the exploratory study. The first included the game characteristics that appeared to support the motivational appeal of the girls. The second game was antithetical to the first. Both genders from the participating population engaged with both games and online questionnaires were used to capture data on their perception of both games. The outcome of the investigation which involved 304 participants (girls = 152 and boys =152) from Southeast England, United Kingdom provided the empirical evidence in support of the argument that there are gender differences in the motivational appeal of digital educational game characteristics which can either support or thwart motivation i.e. one size does not fit all. The result of this investigation should support educationists, researchers and digital educational game designers in having an inclusive approach towards the creation of digital educational games for learning

Developing an Action Concept Inventory

We report on progress towards the development of an Action Concept Inventory (ACI), a test that measures student understanding of action principles in introductory mechanics and optics. The ACI also covers key concepts of many-paths quantum mechanics, from which classical action physics arises. We used a multi-stage iterative development cycle for incorporating expert and student feedback into successive revisions of the ACI. The student feedback, including think-aloud interviews, enabled us to identify their misconceptions about action physics.Comment: 6 pages. This paper started out as arXiv:1507.06075v1, then split into arXiv:1507.06075v2 and this paper as a result of feedback from referees and an editor. arXiv:1507.06075v2 presents the case for teaching action physics, while this paper presents an evaluation too

Range extension, habitat and conservation status of three rare mallees, Eucalyptus castrensis, Eucalyptus fracta and Eucalyptus pumila from the Hunter Valley, NSW

New populations of three threatened mallee species, Eucalyptus castrensis K.D.Hill, Eucalyptus fracta K.D.Hill and Eucalyptus pumila Cambage (all Myrtaceae), have recently been found in the Singleton Military Area in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales (32°45’S, 151°15’E). Each population is significant as they increase the known distribution and total numbers of three highly restricted species. Details of the habitat and size of each additional population are given and conservation notes provided