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Recent developments in microwire‐structured intracortical electrode arrays for brain–machine interfaces
No full textBrain–machine interfaces (BMIs) have experienced remarkable advancements in recent years, marked by multiple companies initiating human trials. Consequently, the interface between the brain and electrodes has become more critical than ever, requiring implanted electrodes to be not only biocompatible and minimally invasive but also capable of remaining functioning in the brain for a lifetime. While significant progress has been made in the manufacturing of intracortical electrodes, challenges persist in ensuring longevity and minimizing tissue damage. Additionally, the reliance on manual labor in fabrication techniques poses obstacles to large-scale production for commercialization. In this review, we explore recent breakthroughs and obstacles in the fabrication of microwire-structured electrode arrays, wherein single wires are arranged in an xy matrix for cortical penetration. We discuss the impact of various fabrication strategies and materials on implant longevity, as well as the remaining challenges in this field.</p
Social Factors in Cultural Participation: Factsheet 3: Reading for Pleasure
No full textAustralian survey data shows there is a distinct ‘reading class’, that is, an elite group that is
characterised by higher incomes and education levels, living in metropolitan areas.3 It is also well
established that women are more likely to read for pleasure than men.4 However, recent changes
in book culture may be increasing the diversity of people who read for pleasure.5 These changes
include increased accessibility (eg, ebooks) and genre diversity (eg, graphic novels, popular fiction),
as well as greater educational focus on developing positive reading identities in childhood and
adolescence, especially among boys and socially disadvantaged groups
In this factsheet, we examine how gender intersects with age, education, and self-identified class
to influence reading for pleasure among Australians. We then explore links between reading for
pleasure and social attitudes in Australia. Specifically, we examine how readers and non-readers
differ in their levels of social trust, concern for social inequality, and social mobility.</p
Governance mechanism for financial markets: fund concentration and risk-taking in tournament
No full textThis thesis investigates an important but rarely studied area on how fund managers’ asset under management (AUM)-linked motivation may influence fund manager’s risk-taking behaviour in his pursuit to maximize compensation in tournament. This study will investigate a form of risk-taking that has so far been neglected in the literature. By focusing on fund concentration changes as a risk-taking strategy, this study also provides a directly observable metrics that differs from the indirect proxies commonly used in the tournament literature. Using a survivorship free-biased dataset of 216 Chinese equity funds between December 2013 and June 2020, the study documents an intentional risk-taking behaviour of fund managers in the form of increasing the level of fund concentration. The midyear winners in the annual tournament are found to be more likely to take higher risk in the following six months. My evidence also shows that such risk taking in tournament competition is more significant for longer tenure-fund managers, funds in larger FMC size, better macroeconomic conditions, and larger industry size. The thesis documents that raising fund concentration does generate greater net fund inflows. However, the thesis shows that fund concentration reduces fund returns in long terms, thus harming fund investor interests.
This thesis contributes to the literature on fund manager risk behaviour by providing an alternative analytical approach incorporating a newly identified form of risk taking and unique data to shed new light for better understanding how the influence of AUM-linked compensation incentives leads managers to adopt fund concentration strategy to maximize their benefits. This thesis also extends the scope and depth of investigation on how a concentration investment strategy in actively managed funds in the in-house fund governance may perform and what factors are responsible for the performance outcomes. Apart from the contribution to the literature, better understanding and new knowledge will provide valuable insights for fund investors, fund managers and regulators to help make functioning of the fund market more efficient in playing a vital part of a country’s important financial system.</p
Vibration dynamics of automotive suspension models with tire-road separation
No full textThis research looks into the ride comfort of vehicle vibrations from a rather innovative attitude by making use of a consideration namely the loss of tire-road contact. The assumption is currently becoming more relevant to the vehicle dynamics as the high ride quality is getting a more common type and a prerequisite requirement in automobile designs. The focus of this study is on vibration behaviours of passenger vehicles travelling with possible tire-road separation condition, the separation phenomenon refers to the limitation where the tire cannot keep touching the ground. The condition depends on various factors, such as the coefficient of friction, lateral force, vertical load, structure of the tire, and inflation pressure. It is well-observed in practical situations consisting of cornering manoeuvres, high-speed moving, hitting large bumps, which narrows down the ultimate goal of this work to those excitation and suspension characteristics. The
simulation results provide the analysis and guidelines on how the vibration behaviour changes with different road excitations when the tire starts breaking the contact.
Firstly, a tire-road separation analysis is performed by utilizing a quarter-car model and the critical behaviours of the vehicle suspension are achieved. The separation phenomena begin with analyzing the dimension for transient and steady-state responses under step and harmonic excitations. To deal with comprehensive investigations as separation frequency and boundary, an effective method is proposed based on nondimensionalization in which a set of nonlinear equations of the system has been formulated to minimize the number of variables and generalize the analysis to all vehicles. To compare the quality of different suspensions in reducing the unpleasant no-contact conditions, the separation time fraction in a period is also studied in detail. To capture the pitch dynamics, the separation process is investigated for a bicycle-car model in a flat-ride mode and generalized cases. The model is used to calculate numerically the dynamic separation of both tires with all separation possibilities. An observation of frequency responses involving a combination of vertical and pitch mode, a domain of contact-free duration has been examined. This becomes fundamentals to determine which values of suspension structures can postpone the occurrence of contactless occurance, which leads to eradicating the potentially undesirable vibration and improving the efficiency of suspension quality. Deeply, the effect of mass ratio on separation behaviour is then analyzed to clarify engineering design directions.
In the next stage, the wheel-road separation dynamics are compared to engineering applications. The dynamic responses of the models are examined to evaluate their vibration with and without the separation consideration. Comparative results prove such an assumption enables studying the suspension system more accurately, other than the tire-road continuity that was reported by previous researchers. More specifically, the analytical results of quarter-car and bicycle-car systems were also validated using the multi-body dynamic software. The validation of vertical and pitch motions are carried out through different road inputs in the ADAMS environment using input data from corresponding practical models.
Finally, an actuator is introduced to the vehicle suspensions in parallel with the mainspring and damper. Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm is employed to properly tune a proportional-integral-derivative controller for the active suspension system. Comparing with simulation results of a passive suspension system, the controlled result illustrates the design achieves a more comfortable ride with a significant decrease of the separation time. General remarks on using the tire-road separation that affected vibration dynamics are stated.</p
Unraveling Green Marketing and Greenwashing: A Systematic Review in the Context of the Fashion and Textiles Industry
No full textGreenwashing is a prevalent issue in the fashion and textile industry, a sector known as one of the largest industrial polluters worldwide. The multi-trillion-dollar industry’s trend-driven, low-cost production models and the availability of numerous distribution options have led to mass consumption, significantly impacting consumer behavior. The aim of this review is to document and analyze the direct and indirect practices of greenwashing in the fashion industry and its impact on consumers. It also seeks to highlight the existence of greenwashing in the industry’s supply and consumption chain. A Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) methodology was employed to examine the complex implications of greenwashing within the fashion industry. Relevant studies from the past decade were identified through comprehensive searches on Elsevier Science Direct, Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Scopus. This review found that some companies resort to greenwashing by promoting a green image without making substantial environmental or social changes. It also revealed varied interpretations and misinterpretations of green-related terms by consumers. The findings underscore the need for transparency and honesty in the fashion industry’s green marketing strategies. They also highlight the importance of consumer education to prevent misinterpretation of green-related terms and to promote sustainable consumption practices.</p
Forms for Encounter and Exchange: World Centred Education for Photography, Art and Social Practice
No full textExploring the opportunities of world-centred education1 in university photography and art, we reflect
on Forms for Encounter & Exchange: the Collingwood Studio — a community-partnered course
embedded in a local neighbourhood on Wurundjeri Country in Melbourne, Australia. We teach this
interdisciplinary studio course as a ‘collaborative 14-week artist residency’ to undergraduate photography,
art, and media students. The course challenges western art school pedagogies of individualism,
competition, and transactional engagement with publics through nurturing long-term relationships in
the local community sector. We write from our position as white settlers on stolen First Peoples’ lands in Australia; and therefore, we understand our perspectives and experiences of place and community to be incomplete and partial. Recognising the limits of our positionality, we begin this paper by diagnosing our own critiques of western university art education. We then conceptualise our pedagogic approach at the intersection of our respective disciplines of documentary photography and socially engaged art before discussing practical examples of student community-partnered creative projects. Finally, we share a collection of ethical questions posed by students and partners that serve to deepen our approach to teaching beyond the curriculum.</p
A higher education pedagogy for settler listening with Alexis Wright's Carpentaria
No full textThis article focuses on a higher education pedagogy of reading the exemplary novel of Indigenous Australia, Carpentaria (2006) by Waanyi author, Alexis Wright. The multiply awarded and multiply translated novel gives an epic view of contemporary Aboriginal life. Its dramatisation of listening relations is profoundly insightful for the current historical moment in Australian Indigenous-settler relations. Our pedagogy of settler listening emerges from the invitation by the Indigenous signatories to The Uluru Statement from the Heart (2017) calling on all Australians to aim for a ‘better future’ for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Our pedagogy has even more relevance since the defeat of the 2023 ‘Voice’ referendum that symbolically and practically aimed to ensure that better future through a permanent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander advisory body to parliament. We describe our pedagogy through the scholarship in political listening studies and the ‘ethics of reading’ the combination of which engenders responsiveness and responsibility in a reader that is (trans)formative of relationality. We argue that when higher education curriculum is attentive to pedagogies of listening relations to marginalised voices, the conditions for settler listening are being achieved both within higher education and beyond.</p
An evaluation of the impact of the Black Rhinos Junior Basketball program
No full textAs will be examined in this report, African-Australian young people face multiple social complexities that create exclusion within their socio-ecological environment. These experiences create a need for responses that understand the context
and experiences of African-Australian young people, their families and communities. Afri-Aus Care and RMIT University’s collaboration, made possible by a VicHealth Research Impact Grant is one such response. This report describes the co-design, implementation, and evaluation of a sports-based youth development (SBYD) program for African-Australian young people and their families in southeast Melbourne. The co-design phase created opportunities for African-Australian community members in these local areas to lead the development and implementation of the Program.
This report demonstrates the Black Rhinos Junior Basketball Program has been a success, making a significant impact on the lives of young program participants, their families, teachers, and school communities. In particular, the Program
strengthened connections among young people with their community, culture, and family, promoting health and wellbeing, reducing isolation, and offering comprehensive support and care. The Program also clearly demonstrated a capacity to enhance young participants' engagement in learning inside and outside of the school environment. This report concludes with several recommendations including the need to sustain and expand the Black Rhinos Junior Basketball program. Sustaining the Program is important to ensure the positive impacts of the Program can continue for current and future young participants, their families, schools and community. Expansion of the Program to more locations
across Victoria, where communities are facing similar challenges, should also be considered. Sustaining and expanding the Program will require the commitment and support of government, community, and philanthropic funders.</p
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and nonbinary representation on Australian scripted television in the 2000s and 2010s
No full textOver the past few decades, there has been significant industry and scholarly interest in diversity, equity, and inclusion in television. Alongside this, attention has been paid to the politics of queer representation in screen and media contexts. Providing much-needed data on these issues, this article catalogues the representation of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and nonbinary characters in Australian scripted television since 2000. We highlight the inclusion of more queer characters onscreen and situate this in the context of two significant decades of change in the Australian television industry and the broader socio-political context. In teasing out recent trends around gender and sexually diverse representation, we identify shifts toward representing more complex and inclusive queer story worlds on Australian television. We also note significant tensions in these representations, highlighting how Australian television remains quite conservative in depicting queer sex, intersections between sexualities and gender identities, and bisexual identities.</p
Innovations in Spatial Response Assessment for Satellite Imagers
No full textAll satellite imaging sensors suffer from a fundamental limitation; the Digital Number (DN) recorded by a pixel does not only measure radiance originating from the area of the Earth’s surface represented by this pixel, but it also measures radiance originating from surrounding areas represented by adjacent pixels.
This adjacency effect impacts image processing algorithms that characterize the Earth’s surface on a per-pixel basis. These algorithms usually neglect the adjacency effect and assume an ideal pixel for which 100 % of its DN originates from the area represented by this pixel. This “ideal pixel” assumption is equivalent to stating that the spatial resolution of the image is equal to the ground pixel size or Ground Sampling Distance (GSD).
The ideal pixel assumption generates moderate errors for satellite imagers in which the spatial response of the sensor is limited by the spatial response of its detector, but it generates gross errors for satellite imagers in which the spatial response of the imaging sensor is limited by the spatial response of its optical aperture.
Traditional large remote sensing satellites (few tons in weight) deployed by space agencies, such as Landsat, provide images that usually have a detector-limited response, whereas the more recent small CubeSat satellites (few kilograms in weight) deployed by commercial vendors, such as Planet’s SuperDove, provide images that usually have an optics limited response.
As demonstrated in the sixth chapter, in a Landsat image about 70 % of a pixel’s DN originates from the area represented by this pixel, and its average spatial resolution distance is about 1.5 times larger than its GSD. In a SuperDove image about 10 % of a pixel’s DN originates from the area represented by this pixel, and the average spatial resolution distance is about five times larger than its GSD.
The early satellite images had a detector-limited response, so the moderate errors of the ideal pixel assumption were almost unnoticeable, being mostly masked by image noise. The models (metrics, methods, and algorithms) associated with this assumption were adopted as axioms, and although some works warned about the errors involved in using these models to describe optics-limited images, these warnings went unnoticed by most of the remote sensing community.
The aim of this research is to advance the assessment of the spatial response of satellite images by developing four innovations applicable to detector-limited and optics-limited images: (1) a metric to gauge spatial resolution distance, (2) a method to assess spatial response models, (3) a model to estimate spatial response from edge measurements, and (4) a procedure to improve the spatial response of satellite images.
The first chapter of this thesis presents the genesis of the problem, introduces some key technical terms that will be used in the next chapters, and gives an overall view of our research.
The second chapter presents an upgraded taxonomy of spatial resolution metrics and develops a new metric that computes the spatial resolution distance as a function the image’s resolving contrast. This new metric allows current spatial resolution metrics to be assessed using an unbiased framework, showing that most current metrics are either incorrect or biased.
The third chapter shows that the current methodology to assess spatial response models is biased since it uses as a benchmark a specific sensor with a given spatial response, so the model’s assessment is only applicable to this specific spatial response. This chapter develops a new methodology that uses the optical design parameters - which define the spatial response - as independent variables, so the assessment is applicable to a wide variety of spatial responses. This methodology is applied to assess the two-edge Separable Point Spread Function (PSF) model that estimates the spatial response of a satellite image by measuring this response along two perpendicular edges. It is shown that this popular two-edge model is only applicable to low optical factors (detector-limited images) and that it gives incorrect results for the higher optical factors (optic-limited images) employed by most types of current satellite images.
The fourth chapter develops a new spatial response model that uses three edge measurements and that is applicable to the higher optical factors not covered by the Separable PSF model. This new three-edge model is developed and assessed with the same methodology developed in the third chapter, showing that it complements the two-edge model, so that both models together enable the estimation of the spatial response through edge measurement for all optical factors.
The adjacency errors of the ideal pixel assumption can be reduced by “restoration”, an image processing technique that approximates the actual image to the ideal image. The usual restoration technique deconvolves the raw image with a deconvolution kernel defined by the sensor’s spatial response. It has been shown that this usual kernel is not optimal and an empirical method to find the optimum kernel has been proposed, but this method is cumbersome and is not applicable to all satellite imagers. In response to this limitation, the fifth chapter develops a new alternative method to find the optimum kernel by using synthetic edge images. This new method is validated by showing that its predictions agree with the results of the previous empirical method. The new method is more accurate and simpler to apply, opening new research paths on image restoration.
The sixth chapter demonstrates the practical application of the metric developed in the second chapter, by computing the spatial resolution distance of the green channels’ images captured by SuperDove and Landsat 8 satellites, under three different conditions: (1) negligible atmospheric turbulence and moderate spacecraft jitter, (2) strong atmospheric turbulence and moderate spacecraft jitter, (3) negligible atmospheric turbulence and high spacecraft jitter. An original procedure is developed to estimate the spatial response model of the imaging channels, by using a combination of spatial response measurements, known sensor parameters, and unknown sensor parameters.
The seventh chapter synthetizes the results, illustrating new applications for the innovations presented in the previous chapters and giving examples how they can be used altogether as tools to improve the assessment and the quality of satellite images.</p