Government involvement in high performance sport: An Australian national sporting organisation perspective

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between the Australian Sports Commission (ASC) and Summer Olympic National Sporting Organisations (NSOs) to determine the effect the relationship has on Olympic performance outcomes. Five Olympic NSOs were examined: Athletics Australia, Cycling Australia, Rowing Australia, Swimming Australia and Yachting Australia. All five NSOs represent sports in which Australia has consistently achieved strong results at previous Olympic Games. These NSOs receive significant funding from the ASC and, as such, are expected to achieve success at the Olympic Games. The ASC–NSO relationship was examined through an agency theory framework whereby the ‘contracts’ between the ASC (principal) and the NSOs (agents) were investigated through a survey, interviews and document analysis to identify potential management issues that may affect Olympic performance outcomes, such as agent or principal opportunism. The findings identified a lack of a collaborative high performance sport system in Australia, with the findings emphasising concerns over the ASC’s management of NSO programmes. While the ASC staff identified their organisation as the leader of high performance sport in Australia, the study’s NSO participants did not believe that the ASC had the capacity, capability and knowledge to fulfil this role.No Full Tex

The polymerisation of hydrocarbons in the liquid phase at high pressure

Imperial Users onl

SPARC Data Initiative: climatology uncertainty assessment

The SPARC Data Initiative aims to produce trace gas climatologies for a number of species from a number of instruments. In order to properly compare these climatologies, and interpret differences between them, it is necessary to know the uncertainty in each calculated climatological mean field. The inhomogeneous and finite temporal-spatial sampling pattern of each instrument can lead to biases and uncertainties in the mean climatologies. Sampling which is unevenly weighted in time and space leads to biases between a data set's climatology and the truth. Furthermore, the systematic sampling patterns of some instruments may mean that uncertainties in mean fields calculated through traditional methods that assume random sampling may be inappropriate. We aim to address these issues through an exercise wherein high resolution chemical fields from a coupled Chemistry Climate Model are sub-sampled based on the sampling pattern of each instrument. Climatologies based on the sub-sampled data can be compared to those calculated with the full data set, in order to assess sampling biases. Furthermore, investigating the ensemble variability of climatologies based on subsampled fields will allow us to assess the proper methodology for estimating the uncertainty in climatological mean fields

Recent Development: Motor Vehicle Admin. v. Deering: A Driver Whose License is Suspended Under the Implied Consent, Administrative Per Se Law Is Not Entitled to Consult With an Attorney Before Deciding Whether to Take a Breath Test

The Court of Appeals of Maryland held the implied consent, administrative per se law (“administrative per se law”) does not require that a suspected drunk driver be given the opportunity to consult an attorney before deciding whether to take a breath test. Motor Vehicle Admin. v. Deering, 438 Md. 611, 637, 92 A.3d 495, 511 (2014). The court found that the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution does not establish a pre-test right to counsel for a suspected drunk driver in an administrative proceeding

Wrecked: Impacts of Atlantic Tropical Cyclones on Neotropical Bird Migrants

North American birds are under pressure. With nearly 3 billion birds lost in the last half century (Rosenberg et al., 2019), understanding and quantifying incremental avian mortality is vital. There are many perils for birds that migrate from their breeding grounds in the mid and high latitudes of the continent to their wintering grounds in the Neotropics, including Atlantic tropical cyclones that birds can encounter as they cross through some of the busy hurricane corridors of the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean, and western North Atlantic. The aim of my research is to provide the first comprehensive measure of the effect of Atlantic tropical cyclone activity on bird migration intensity by testing whether active hurricane seasons may cause a significant reduction in the number of Neotropical migrants. I used weather surveillance radars spanning the Gulf of Mexico to determine bird migration intensity from 1995 to 2018. I employed a dataset for which artificial intelligence processes separated avian targets from precipitation and background interference and that included an estimate of total seasonal bird passage. I determined the level of tropical cyclone activity from the Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) index. To establish whether there was a relation between tropical cyclone activity and migrants, I used generalized additive mixed-effects models to test spring bird passage as a function of ACE during the peak of the fall migration season. I did this first with ACE extracted for the entire Atlantic basin and subsequently for subregions of the Atlantic (e.g., Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean), and compared all models. I found a strong negative relationship between tropical cyclone activity in the Atlantic basin and the subsequent spring’s migrant bird passage. When there were more storms and/or stronger hurricanes across the whole North Atlantic Ocean during the peak of the fall migration between August and November, fewer birds returned the following spring. Specifically, there was a predicted decrease of 21.8% in the number of birds crossing the Gulf during springs following the most active Atlantic hurricane seasons compared to the least active seasons. While this finding might imply that storms directly impacted birds, a more granular examination of the data suggests other possibilities. The relationship between storm activity and spring bird passage was much weaker in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean compared to the open Atlantic, even though more bird migration occurs in those areas. Instead, the negative association between storm activity and migration traffic may reflect a link between the short-term climatic variability that drives Atlantic hurricane seasons and (1) rainfall amounts in the wintering grounds, (2) winds across migration corridors, and/or (3) other environmental responses that impact birds’ survival. Knowing whether migrating birds are being killed or displaced by storms and/or other meteorological and climatic teleconnection patterns is especially important today in the face of further declines in North American bird abundance brought on by the expanding human footprint, rapid climate change, and more extreme weather events. An in-depth understanding of the impact of cyclones and/or related oceanic-atmospheric structures on bird migration could provide valuable insight into new subdisciplines and studies in aeroecology and meteorology

Does the South African law policy framework facilitate adolescent access to HIV prevention tools?

Master of Laws in Law and Management Studies. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2017.No abstract available

An angel's just appeared and Mary looks kind of worried: Children's interpretations of Christian artworks

Encounters with Christian visual artworks offer viewers opportunities to articulate religious understanding through interpreting representations of Christian scripture, beliefs and practice (Jensen, 2011; Ledbetter, 2001; McCarthy, 2010). To date, however, visual artworks are a largely unexplored resource in Australian Catholic primary school Religious Education, with research into children’s interpretation of visual art being primarily limited to aesthetic dimensions of understanding. This thesis, which arises from experience as a Catholic primary school educator, takes an interdisciplinary approach to exploring children’s interpretations of Christian artworks. It seeks to develop a more diverse knowledge of children’s understanding of Christian artworks. The study responds to two current concerns within the Australian Catholic education sector. One issue is the need to enhance students’ visual interpretation skills in response to the increasing role of images in society (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2013). The other concern is the need for effective strategies and resources to address falling levels of student religious literacy (Bishops of NSW and the ACT, 2007). The study investigates 13 children’s interpretations of a range of artworks depicting the biblical narrative of the Annunciation to Mary (Luke 1:26-38). The study is set in a Catholic primary school with participants ranging from six to eleven years of age. The Interpretivist framing of the study takes into account the particular religious perspective of the Catholic school setting, and the individual nature of children’s interpretations of visual artworks. The findings of the study show that children make sense of visual artworks through a range of cognitive, affective and sensory interactions. Their interpretations chiefly focus on the intelligibility of an artwork’s subject matter, where they generally endeavour to integrate pictorial elements into a cohesive narrative to explain an artwork. In addition, children often spontaneously embodied the emotions and interactions between figures depicted in artworks as part of their interpretations. The findings bring to light a fruitful correspondence between children’s characteristic aesthetic attention to an artwork’s subject matter, and the symbolism or iconography of Christian artworks. As children encounter Christian artworks they draw on traditional iconographic features such as symbolic colours, gestures, poses and settings that imbue these works with layers of meaning (Apostolos-Cappadona, 1995; Brown, 2008; McCarthy, 2011; Ratzinger, 2005). The participants’ engagement with various aspects of Christian iconography throughout their interpretations of these artworks provides valuable insight into children’s understanding of Christian scripture, beliefs and traditions. The study raises implications for the use of Christian artworks in primary school settings. These works are shown to be meaningful and developmentally appropriate resources for children, which support holistic and challenging learning. Encounters with Christian artworks offer effective interdisciplinary learning opportunities including the support of multimodal literacy, visual arts appreciation skills, and knowledge about Christian scriptures, teachings and traditions. Overall, the findings of this study provide valuable background for Catholic educators and offer several areas for further inquiry

Full State History Cooperative Localisation with Complete Information Sharing

This thesis presents a decentralised localisation method for multiple robots. We enable reduced bandwidth requirements whilst using local solutions that fuse information from other robots. This method does not specify a communication topology or require complex tracking of information. The methods for including shared data match standard elements of nonlinear optimisation algorithms. There are four contributions in this thesis. The first is a method to split the multiple vehicle problem into sections that can be iteratively transmitted in packets with bandwidth bounds. This is done through delayed elimination of external states, which are states involved in intervehicle observations. Observations are placed in subgraphs that accumulate between external states. Internal states, which are all states not involved in intervehicle observations, can then be eliminated from each subgraph and the joint probability of the start and end states is shared between vehicles and combined to yield the solution to the entire graph. The second contribution is usage of variable reordering within these packets to enable handling of delayed observations that target an existing state such as with visual loop closures. We identify the calculations required to give the conditional probability of the delayed historical state on the existing external states before and after. This reduces the recalculation to updating the factorisation of a single subgraph and is independent of the time since the observation was made. The third contribution is a method and conditions for insertion of states into existing packets that does not invalidate previously transmitted data. We derive the conditions that enable this method and our fourth contribution is two motion models that conform to the conditions. Together this permits handling of the general out of sequence case