782 research outputs found
An Examination Of Tax–Deductible Donations Made By Individual Australian Taxpayers In 2003-04
Each year QUT’s Centre of Philanthropy and Nonprofit Studies collects and analyses statistics on the amount and extent of tax-deductible donations made and claimed by Australians in their individual income tax returns to deductible gift recipients (DGRs). The information presented in this working paper is based on the amount and type of tax-deductible donations made and claimed by Australian individual taxpayers to DGRs for the period 1 July 2003 to 30 June 2004. This information has been extracted mainly from the Australian Taxation Office's publication Taxation Statistics 2003-04. The 2004 report is the latest report that has been made publicly available. It represents information in tax returns for the 2003-2004 year processed by the ATO as at 31 October 2005. This year we have also been able to divide tax deductible donations by gender based on the ATO statistics
The influence of fluid ingestion on metabolism and soccer skills following intermittent high intensity shuttle running
The impact of fatigue on the intermittent high intensity exercise undertaken during
participation in team sports has not been extensively studied. Team sports are
characterised not only by intennittent exercise, but also by the contribution of a wide
range of skills. This thesis describes a series of studies conducted in a controlled
environment to assess the influence of fluid ingestion and fatigue on selected soccer
skills.
The aim of the first study was to examine the effect of 90-min of high intensity shuttle
running with and without water ingestion on a socc er-dribb ling test. The subjects
were allocated to two randomly assigned trials either ingesting or abstaining from
fluid intake during a 90 min intennittent exercise protocol (Loughborough
Intermittent Shuttle Test: LIST). In the absence of water ingestion soccer skill
deteriorated (p < 0.05) by 5% but was maintained when fluid was ingested.
The principal aim of the second study was to understand further the mechanisms
contributing to the deterioration observed during the LIST. Subjects completed the
LIST ingesting a 6.4% carbohydrate electrolyte solution (CHO), placebo (CON) or no
fluid (NON). Free fatty acids, cortisol and aldosterone responses were lower (P <
0.01) at the end of exercise during both CHO and CON in comparison to NON. There
was no difference in respiratory exchange ratio between trials. Fluid ingestion did not
appear to cause a shift in substrate metabolism even though there were differences in
plasma FFA concentrations.
The consumption of carbohydrate during exercise has been shown to increase
physical performance, capacity and cognitive function. The aim of the third study was
to assess the influence of a 6.4 % carbohydrate-electrolyte (CHO) placebo (CON) or
no fluid (NON) on passing and dribbling soccer skills following the LIST. During the
NON trial performance of the dribbling test followed a similar pattern to that in the
first study and performance of the passing test decreased (p < 0.05). This reduction in
performance was prevented during the CHO and CON trials.
The purpose of the final study was to identify whether a rehydration strategy
following the LIST would result in a recovery of skill performance. Subjects were
allocated to two randomly assigned trials either ingesting a volume of fluid equivalent
to 150% (L) or 9% (S) of body mass loss during the LIST, over a2h recovery period.
During the recovery period serum sodium and osmolality returned to resting
concentrations in the L trial but remained elevated in the S trial (P < 0.05). Despite
body mass returning to resting values following the rehydration period, performance
of the skills tests remained impaired.
Deterioration in skill test performance may have been related to a reduction in
neuromuscular control either by a reduction in muscle glycogen or by an increase in
muscle damage during the no fluid trials. The mechanism responsible for the
deterioration in skill performance remains to be elucidated
Semantic Flexibility and Grounded Language Learning
International audienceWe explore the way that the flexibility inherent in the lexicon might be incorporated into the process by which an environmentally grounded artificial agent-a robot-acquires language. We take flexibility to indicate not only many-to-many mappings between words and extensions, but also the way that word meaning is specified in the context of a particular situation in the world. Our hypothesis is that embodiment and embededness are necessary conditions for the development of semantic representations that exhibit this flexibility. We examine this hypothesis by first very briefly reviewing work to date in the domain of grounded language learning, and then proposing two research objectives: 1) the incorporation of high-dimensional semantic representations that permit context-specific projections, and 2) an exploration of ways in which non-humanoid robots might exhibit language-learning capacities. We suggest that the experimental programme implicated by this theoretical investigation could be situated broadly within the enactivist paradigm, which approaches cognition from the perspective of agents emerging in the course of dynamic entanglements within an environment
Introduction: Social Protection for Social Justice
The articles in this IDS Bulletin are drawn from a conference hosted by the Centre for Social Protection at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Brighton, UK, in April 2011. The conference brought together academics and practitioners who understand social protection to be more than a palliative agenda for alleviating poverty and vulnerability, believing instead that social protection should be fundamentally interested in realising economic and social rights for all. This alternative agenda is one grounded in social justice, and it opens space for understanding how issues of rights, governance, distribution and access are critical for breaking the production and reproduction of vulnerability over time. The selection of articles in this IDS Bulletin aims to elaborate the linkages between social protection and social justice, to identify opportunities for operationalising the ‘transformative’ aspects of social protection and to strengthen the case for integrating social protection into broader social policy
Geometric Methods for Context Sensitive Distributional Semantics
PhDThis thesis describes a novel methodology, grounded in the distributional semantic paradigm,
for building context sensitive models of word meaning, affording an empirical exploration
of the relationship between words and concepts. Anchored in theoretical linguistic insight
regarding the contextually specified nature of lexical semantics, the work presented here
explores a range of techniques for the selection of subspaces of word co-occurrence dimensions
based on a statistical analysis of input terms as observed within large-scale textual
corpora. The relationships between word-vectors that emerge in the projected subspaces
can be analysed in terms of a mapping between their geometric features and their semantic
properties. The power of this modelling technique is its ability to generate ad hoc
semantic relationships in response to an extemporaneous linguistic or conceptual situation.
The product of this approach is a generalisable computational linguistic methodology,
capable of taking input in various forms, including word groupings and sentential context,
and dynamically generating output from a broad base model of word co-occurrence
data. To demonstrate the versatility of the method, this thesis will present competitive
empirical results on a range of established natural language tasks including word similarity
and relatedness rating, metaphor and metonymy detection, and analogy completion.
A range of techniques will be applied in order to explore the ways in which different
aspects of projected geometries can be mapped to different semantic relationships, allowing
for the discovery of a range of lexical and conceptual properties for any given input
and providing a basis for an empirical exploration of distinctions between the semantic
phenomena under analysis. The case made here is that the flexibility of these models
and their ability to extend output to evaluations of unattested linguistic relationships
constitutes the groundwork for a method for the extrapolation of dynamic conceptual
relationships from large-scale textual corpora.
This method is presented as a complement and a counterpoint to established distributional
methods for generating lexically productive word-vectors. Where contemporary
vector space models of distributional semantics have almost universally involved either
the factorisation of co-occurrence matrices or the incremental learning of abstract representations
using neural networks, the approach described in this thesis preserves the
connection between the individual dimensions of word-vectors and statistics pertaining
to observations in a textual corpus. The hypothesis tested here is that the maintenance
of actual, interpretable information about underlying linguistic data allows for the contextual
selection of non-normalised subspaces with more nuanced geometric features. In
addition to presenting competitive results for various computational linguistic targets,
the thesis will suggest that the transparency of its representations indicates scope for
the application of this model to various real-world problems where an interpretable relationship
between data and output is highly desirable. This, finally, demonstrates a way
towards the productive application of the theory and philosophy of language to computational
linguistic practice.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council of the UK, EP/L50483X/1
The Economic Impact of Projected Affordable Housing Developments : Does the Supply Side Matter?
A key current objective of Scottish policymakers is to increase the availability of affordable and social housing, with an expectation that this will have both societal and economic impacts. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the potential economic impacts of meeting the projections of affordable housing needed in Scotland to combat homelessness. Typical economic impact assessments of social housing investment have focused exclusively on the effect of expenditures on demand, using input-output models (IO). However, recently some have argued that housing, like transport, should be treated as a type of infrastructure investment that is likely also to have potential supply side impacts – such as an increase in both labour supply and productivity. In this paper, we use both IO and Computable Generable Equilibrium (CGE) models to evaluate the economic impact of social housing investment, with a particular emphasis on the supply side impacts
Contributions of lower extremity kinematics to trunk accelerations during moderate treadmill running
Cyberspace and Personal Cyber Insurance: A Systematic Review
As individuals become increasingly digitally dependent, cyber threats and cyber insurance to mitigate them gain relevance. This literature review conceptualizes a framework for siting Personal Cyber Insurance (PCI) within the context of cyberspace. The lack of empirical research within this domain demonstrates a need to identify and define the scope of PCI in order to allow cyber insurers to understand customer needs, and to conduct effective management and distribution of PCI products and services. We conducted a systematic literature review of 229 articles that were clustered into three meta-level themes: cyberspace, personal cyber risk, and PCI. The literature review indicates a significant paucity of research related to PCI particularly as it is influenced by antecedent risk externalities, the nature of cyberspace itself, the PCI market and operations, and post-cyber event support. The paper concludes with a proposal for a future research agenda
Re-representing metaphor:Modeling metaphor perception using dynamically contextual distributional semantics
In this paper, we present a novel context-dependent approach to modeling word meaning, and apply it to the modeling of metaphor. In distributional semantic approaches, words are represented as points in a high dimensional space generated from co-occurrence statistics; the distances between points may then be used to quantifying semantic relationships. Contrary to other approaches which use static, global representations, our approach discovers contextualized representations by dynamically projecting low-dimensional subspaces; in these ad hoc spaces, words can be re-represented in an open-ended assortment of geometrical and conceptual configurations as appropriate for particular contexts. We hypothesize that this context-specific re-representation enables a more effective model of the semantics of metaphor than standard static approaches. We test this hypothesis on a dataset of English word dyads rated for degrees of metaphoricity, meaningfulness, and familiarity by human participants. We demonstrate that our model captures these ratings more effectively than a state-of-the-art static model, and does so via the amount of contextualizing work inherent in the re-representational process
Solar cell based on electrodeposited CdS and CdTe films.
The aim of this study was to understand the properties of glass/TCO/CdS/CdTe/metal solar cells, the CdS and CdTe being grown by aqueous electrodeposition. Deposited films and completed cells were characterised using electrical, structural and optical techniques. This report describes the production of well-formed polycrystalline CdS and CdTe with well defined XRD peaks and band gap. Experiments were performed to investigate the pre-conditioning of the CdTe bath on the overall cell performance. Pre-conditioning the CdTe deposition bath was found to improve the Voc value of the completed devices.It has been known for some time that treating the CdTe layer of a CdS/CdTe solar cell with chlorine brings about significant improvements in the efficiency of these devices. This report presents results on a systematic variation of the chlorine concentration within a CdTe deposition bath. Solar simulated I-V measurements of completed devices clearly show that the addition of CdCl[2] to the CdTe deposition bath significantly improved the efficiency values for the glass/TCO/CdS/CdTe/metal devices. The electrical parameter most significantly affected by the addition of chlorine is the J[sc] value. In terms of the Voc performance of the device, this investigation showed that there was a trend of improving Voc with increasing chlorine concentration. Addition of chlorine also produces improvements in the preferred orientation of CdTe films as measured by XRD. Optical absorption results showed a correlation that the minima of the band gap vs. chlorine concentration graph for annealed samples matches up with the maximum in the efficiency and J[sc] graphs.To investigate whether this phenomenon was specific to chlorine or was displayed by other elements, similar experiments were performed with no chlorine inclusion but varying the indium concentration in the deposition bath. Solar simulated I-V measurements of completed devices clearly show that the addition of In[2](SO[4])[3] to the CdTe deposition bath significantly reduced the efficiency values for the glass/TCO/CdS/CdTe/metal devices. The electrical parameter most significantly affected by the addition of indium is the J[sc] value. The addition of indium also had a detrimental effect on the preferred orientation measured by XRD
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