Coping with extremes, creating comfort: user experiences of ‘low-energy’ homes in Australia.

Low- and zero-energy homes are core elements in transitioning the housing stock towards a more environmentally sustainable model that responds to concerns about climate change and the need for energy demand reduction. Whilst there is a growing body of work on the technical performance of these homes, less attention has been paid to the experiences of users, particularly in cooling-dominated climates. Drawing on interviews that utilise an oral history approach with householders in Lochiel Park Green Village in South Australia, this research situates experiences and energy practices within individual housing histories in order to better understand the relationship between the occupant, the building and the resultant energy use. Within the context of debates around adaptive comfort practices this innovative method reveals that, despite the expectations of some residents, moving to a ‘low-energy’ home has reduced rather than eliminated their active involvement in maintaining a thermally comfortable environment

Urban agriculture : evaluating informal and formal practices

Urban agriculture (UA) is a fast-increasing element in many settlements in the Global North. This paper reviews the diversity of UA activity, ranging from legal to illegal, formal to informal. Focusing particularly on current research on UA projects in England, including small-scale guerrilla gardening and large community projects supported by community and government funding, we look at the realities of UA. We suggest that it is under-theorised as previous research has focused on practicalities and activism. In particular, we highlight the problematic contribution of UA to food production, the wider value in terms of community development, health and wellbeing, and warn of the danger of the ‘local trap’

Modernity, Materiality and Domestic Technology: A Case Study of Cooling and Heating from South Australia

This paper uses oral history as an appropriate method to reveal how residents in the “green village” of Lochiel Park, South Australia, have changed their heating and cooling practises over their life courses. The analysis shows how concepts of modernity, largely drawn from Simmel, help analyze the narratives of the respondents and how these reveal both an increased reliance on technology in their life time and an increased involvement in the money economy. The narratives of the respondents at Lochiel Park express a paradox in which technological innovation has almost certainly enabled reduced energy use and reduced carbon emissions compared to the recent past, whilst also facilitating greater use of non-renewable energy sources compared to the period before the introduction of air conditioning. Based on the comments on residents, improved technology in building and in heating and cooling is likely to remain the most viable strategy towards sustainable thermal comfort

Workshop on Assessing the Impact of Fishing on Oceanic Carbon (WKFISHCARBON; outputs from 2023 meeting)

Rapports Scientifiques du CIEM. Volume 6, nº 12The Workshop on Assessing the Impact of Fishing on Oceanic Carbon (WKFISHCARBON) was set up to provide ICES and stakeholders with a summary of knowledge on the role of fishing in the process of carbon budgets, sequestration and footprint in the ocean. The workshop addressed the potential impact of fishing on the biological carbon pump (BCP), the possible impacts of bottom trawling on carbon stores in the seabed, as well as considering emissions from fishing vessels. The overall aim was to generate proposals on how to develop an ICES approach to fishing and its role in the ocean carbon budget, and to develop a roadmap for a way forward. The main findings were that knowledge of the BCP in the open ocean was reasonably well developed, but that key gaps existed. In particular, information on the biomass of mesopelagic fish and other biota, and of some of the key processes e.g. fluxes and fish bioenergetics. Knowledge is much weaker for the BCP in shelf seas, where the bulk of fishing occurs. In particular, while biomass of fish was often well quantified, unlike the open ocean, the understanding of the important processes was lacking, particularly for the fate of faecal pellets and deadfall at the seabed. There is extensive scientific knowledge of the impact of fishing on the seabed, but what is un-clear is what it means for seabed carbon storage. There have been numbers of studies, which give a very divided view on this. There has also been open controversy about this in the literature. Physical disturbance to the seabed from fishing can affect sediment transport and has the potential to facilitate remineralization, but precise impacts will depend on habitat, fishing métier, and other environmental factors. From this, it is clear that more research is needed to resolve the controversy, and to quantify the impacts from different fishing gears and on different substrates or habitats in terms of carbon storage. There has been much more research on minimizing fuel use by fishing vessels, and hence emissions, but this has mainly focused on fuel efficiency, fuel use per unit of landed catch, and less on the total emissions. Baselines for fuel use are available at the global level, but are lacking at the national and vessel level. There is a need for standardization of methodologies and protocols, and for improving the uptake of fuel conservation measures by industry, as well as for improving the uptake of existing and potential fuel conservation and efficiency measures by industry. Finally, a roadmap was proposed to develop research and synthesis, on the understandings of the processes involved, the metrics and how to translate this into possible advice for policy-makers. To that end, a further workshop was proposed in 2024.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

National review into model occupational health and safety laws

This is the second and final report of the National OHS Review and contains findings and makes recommendations on matters that were not covered in the review panel\u27s first report. These matters that are relevant to a model OHS Act address: * scope and coverage, including definitions; * workplace-based consultation, participation and representation provisions, including the appointment, powers and functions of health and safety representatives and/or committees; * enforcement and compliance, including the role and powers of OHS inspectors, and the application of enforcement tools including codes of practice; * regulation-making powers and administrative processes, including mechanisms for improving cross-jurisdictional cooperation and dispute resolution; * permits and licensing arrangements for those engaged in high risk work and the use of certain plant and hazardous substances; * the role of OHS regulatory agencies in providing education, advice and assistance to duty holders; and * other matters the review panel has identified as being important to health and safety that should be addressed in a model OHS Act

An Empirical Process for Building and Validating Software Engineering Parametric Models

Parametric modeling is a statistical technique whereby a dependent variable is estimated based on the values of and the relationships between the independent variable(s). The nature of the dependent variable can vary greatly based on one’s domain of interest. In software engineering, parametric models are often used to help predict a system’s development schedule, cost-to-build, and quality at various stages of the software lifecycle. In this paper, we discuss the use of parametric modeling in software engineering and present a nine-step parametric modeling process for creating, validating, and refining software engineering parametric models. We illustrate this process with three software engineering parametric models. Each of these models followed the nine-steps in different ways due to the research technique, the nature of the model, and the variability of the data. The three models have been shown to be effective estimators of their respective independent variables. This paper aims to assist other software engineers in creating parametric models by establishing important steps in the modeling process and by demonstrating three variations on following the nine-step process