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Economic historians researching other countries, Australian economic historians employed outside Australia (but retaining links with home), and well-known non-Australian economic historians, who spent some of their careers in Australia, are afforded comparatively little attention. I Australian Economic History i is very much an appeal to universities and policy-makers - not to mention historians and economists - to recognise the role that economic history can play in solving the big challenges of our time. A somewhat peculiar dimension of Wright's account is its emphasis on Australian-based economic historians working primarily on Australian economic history. [Extracted from the article]

Australia's most recent White Papers on foreign and defence policy and the 2020 Defence Strategic Update demonstrate the determination of Australian policy planners to do what it takes to strengthen American resolve in the Indo-Pacific. Cuffe pushes back against claims that Australia's Asia-Pacific policy reflected "naive loyalty or toadying to Britain and the US" (201). Too often, as Cuffe says, strategy and diplomacy are viewed as 'high politics and the true work of foreign policy while trade and economic policy are considered "low politics"'(6-7). [Extracted from the article]

Black, White and Exempt: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Lives under Exemption: Edited by Lucinda Aberdeen and Jennifer Jones. The racism ingrained in Australian popular consciousness often denied exempted Aboriginal people rental properties, a seat at the pub and participation in many other aspects of social life, despite gaining a legal right of access. Leonie Stevens' chapter documents how the Northern Territory exemption system emerged and evolved in response to political action by Aboriginal people in Darwin, supported by communists and trade unionists. [Extracted from the article]

This paper applies the theory of change model (Kotter in Harv Bus Rev 2:59–67, 1995; Moore et al. in Viet Nam J Public Health 1(1):66–75, 2013) to describe the pathway that lead to Australia's first pill testing/drug checking services in Canberra, in the Australian Capital Territory. The paper takes each step of the model and illustrates the key activities that largely occurred over an approximately 24 month period resulting in the service being operational on 29 April 2018. The paper demonstrates that leadership, advocacy and activism are key components, alongside evidence, to bringing about public policy change. It provides a unique insight to the extensive efforts undertaken to achieving the first legally sanctioned pill testing at festivals in Australia and provides a positive case study for those seeking to introduce contested harm reduction services in the drug and alcohol field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Canberra was built in harmony with its landscape setting, creating a legacy of urban form well-connected to the natural environment. Its urban design and planning not only amplified the surrounding natural landscape such as forested hills and mountains but also created a human-made green urban character. However, plans for future development as a compact city pose a challenge to conserving the city's green spaces. A green infrastructure plan is necessary to consider the city's green space design heritage and the linked socio-ecological values while minimising the urban footprint. The paper employs a historical literature review to understand the factors and characteristics that shaped Canberra's green character and the socio-ecological values of its green spaces. The research found the influence of historical and modern design and planning concepts in consolidating green infrastructure and creating ecological corridors and social infrastructure. One of the essential conditions for maintaining the unique character of Canberra is the preservation of the socio-ecological values of its existing green spaces. A trade-off study must be conducted to balance green infrastructure planning while considering these values, in light of development changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores human, soil, compost and food waste interactions in a community composting initiative in Australia. Drawing on an ethnographic study in 2 Australian cities – Sydney and Canberra, this paper identifies the emergence of a “composting ethic” among participants that is animated by three forms of learning and doing: (1) noticing and attending, (2) embodying and (3) experimentation. Fieldwork analysis is contextualised in relation to literature from the environmental humanities, discard studies and learnings from First Nations Australians and their ontologies. By bringing these empirics, key literature and ontologies together, this paper aims to deepen understanding of the opportunities and challenges of community composting to reduce negative environmental impacts and support anti-colonial practices of discard. It does this by identifying the characteristics of a composting ethic and the contexts and skills capable of nurturing its emergence. Attention is also paid to what may limit realisation of such an ethic. Overall, this paper aims to generate further applied academic understanding about the unique role – and possibilities – of efforts to revitalise and grow city soils and advance anti-colonial food waste management through community composting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the hydrological imperative and engineering capacity for change, concrete storm water infrastructure remains obdurate in the urban waterscape. This obduracy manifests both as an unwillingness to remove existing infrastructure and the continuing construction of new infrastructure in locations previously free of these systems. This paper identifies four critical socio-political values underlying the obduracy of concrete storm water infrastructure and the resultant urban stream syndrome. Following a brief critique of reactive storm water management frameworks to manage this syndrome, this paper articulates four common values of Indigenous science(s) that are well placed can contribute to improve storm water management. Supporting this argument is an example of Indigenous science(s) changing the form and function of a reach of an extant concrete storm water channel in Canberra, Australia. While these interventions will be assessed primarily from water quality perspectives, they contribute to a greater range of environmental processes than purely hydrological. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rockbursts are hazardous phenomena of sudden and violent rock failure in deep underground excavations under high geostress conditions, which poses a serious threat to geotechnical engineering. The occurrence of rockbursts is influenced by a combination of factors. Therefore, it is necessary to find an efficient method to assess rockburst grades. In this paper, we propose a novel method that enhances the VIKOR method using a novel combination of weight and generalized weighted Mahalanobis distance. The combination weights of the evaluation indicators were calculated using game theory by combining subjective experience and objective data statistical characteristics. By introducing the generalized weighted Mahalanobis distance, the VIKOR method is improved to address the issues of inconsistent dimensions, different importance, and inconsistent correlation among indicators. The proposed method can deal with the complexity of the impact factors of rockburst evaluation and classify the rockburst intensity level. The results show that the accuracy of the improved VIKOR method with the distance formula is higher than that of the unimproved VIKOR method; the evaluation accuracy of the improved VIKOR method with the generalized weighted Mahalanobis distance is 91.67%, which outperforms the improved VIKOR methods with the Euclidean and Canberra distances. This assessment method can be easily implemented and does not depend on the discussion of the rockburst occurrence mechanism, making it widely applicable for engineering rockburst evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines word-initial engma deletion in Bininj Kunwok. Loss of initial consonants is a well-documented historical process in many Australian languages (Blevins, Juliette. 2001. Where have all the onsets gone? Initial consonant loss in Australian Aboriginal languages. In Jane Simpson, David Nash, Mary Laughren, Peter Austin & Barry Alpher (eds.), Forty years on: Ken Hale and Australian languages, 481–492. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics), but there has been no systematic analysis of initial consonant loss as a synchronic variable (Fletcher, Janet & Andrew Butcher 2014. Sound patterns of Australian languages. In Harold Koch & Rachel Nordlinger (eds.), The languages and linguistics of Australia, 91–138. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton). In the case of Kunwok, word-initial velar nasal deletion (e.g. nganabbarru ∼ anabbarru 'buffalo') has been described as having regional distribution and is a prominent feature of speakers from the western and southern peripheries of the dialect chain, but variable in speakers from the central region (Evans, Nicholas. 2003. Bininj Kunwok: A pan-dialectal grammar of Mayali, Kunwinjku and Kune. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics). This study tests the distribution of the word-initial engma for both linguistic conditioning and sociolinguistic factors, and arrives at three conclusions. First, that preceding environment is a contributing factor. Second, that morphological class is a categorical conditioning factor. And third, that the phenomenon is spreading and there is evidence of language change in progress. This paper also takes into consideration community perspectives, noting that the sound change in progress is accompanied by a change in perceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Localization Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) inside the human small intestine is a hard issue for a decade. This is due to long, curly, and compact structure small intestine. Some of the techniques as Radio Frequency (RF), Vision based and Magnetic type have been proposed. To be more important, any one of the techniques as RF, Vision or Magnetic shows that the poor performance in terms of localization error and accuracy. To address these issues, in this paper a hybrid RF with Vision aware Fusion scheme (RF-VaF) is proposed under multisensor. In RF based approach, Time of Flight and Received Signal Strength Indicator are presented. In vision based approach, Siamese CapsNet is proposed for frames registration, correlation maps generation, and pixel based matching point's prediction. A multi-feature extraction (color, edge, intensity and texture) is executed by Spatial Transformer Network for consecutive frames. In particular, this will be fed into the Siamese CapsNet. Similarly, Canberra distance is computed in the softmax layer for localization. The results from RF and Vision are fused into find the accurate position. In this step, hydrological cycle optimization algorithm is proposed. With this step, WCE can be accurately predicted at the end. One of the novel steps here is adjusting the Receiver's Position by Positioning Metric. Finally, the performance is computed by using Matlab R2019b. From the results, it is proved that the RF-VaF is outperforms than the previous works by following metrics as Average Localization Error [5.41], Root Mean Square Error [6.76], Normalized Error [6.775], Localization Accuracy [96.43%], Localization Error [5.14%], Sensitivity [96.6%] and also Specificity [96.5%]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of the studies on rainwater harvesting analysis present the outcomes for particular cities, representing a single set of results for a specific city. However, in reality, significant spatial and weather variabilities may exist, due to which presenting only one set of results for a particular city would be misleading. This paper presents the potential weather and spatial variabilities on the expected water savings and supply reliability through the domestic rainwater tank for an inland city. An earlier-developed daily water balance model, eTank, was used for the calculations of annual water savings and reliability. An Australian inland city, Canberra, was selected as a case study and relevant daily rainfall data were collected from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology website. For the analysis of spatial variation, two rain gauge stations within the city of Canberra were selected. For each station, from the historical data, three years were selected as dry, average and wet years. For each weather condition, annual water savings and reliabilities were calculated for different demands with different tank sizes up to 10,000 L connected with different roof sizes. Then, variations in annual water savings and reliabilities among different weather conditions, as well as among different stations, were evaluated. It was found that, with regard to annual water savings, a maximum variation of 68.6% can be expected between dry and wet weather; however, only a 15.4% maximum spatial variation is expected among the selected stations. Regarding reliability, a maximum variation of 123% is expected between dry and wet weather. Whereas, only a 17% spatial variation is expected among the selected stations. Such a study will provide valuable insights for rainwater tank users and stakeholders on potential variabilities due to weather and spatial differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context: Opportunity exists to expand serradella (Ornithopus spp.) use onto heavier, duplex soil types in permanent pasture environments of south-eastern Australia. This requires cultivars with appropriate flowering times and flowering-date stability (i.e. flowering at the same date in spring regardless of timing of the autumn break). Aim: This work examined evidence of variation in flowering date and flowering-date stability in the NSW southern tablelands for a widely-used French serradella (O. sativus) cv. Margurita. Methods: Seed (sourced from a commercial supplier) was sown 21 March 2019 (Canberra, ACT) and 231 individual plants were monitored for time to first flower. A subset of plants exhibiting 'early' or 'late' flowering were identified and their seeds collected. In 2020, seed from ~15 plants from each selection was sown in Canberra in late March and early May to represent an 'early' and a 'later' break of season (n = 3). Key results: In the early-sown treatment, 'early-flowering' selections typically reached the median date of first flower (50%-flowering) from mid- to late August, while 'late-flowering' selections reached 50%-flowering early- to mid-September. When sown later, the 'early-flowering' selections began flowering from mid- to late September, while the 'late-flowering' selections flowered mid-September to early October. The 'early' selections exhibited greater flowering-date instability than 'late' selections and flowered particularly early when sown early. This indicated diversity within cv. Margurita for flowering-time control (e.g. vernalisation and/or photoperiod requirements). Implications: Evaluating cultivars of serradellas for flowering date and flowering date stability in their target environment(s) is essential to ensure cultivars are suitably adapted to these environments. Serradellas (Ornithopus spp.) are a novel legume option for the permanent pasture environments of south-eastern Australia. This paper investigated evidence of variation in flowering time characteristics within a widely used cultivar of French serradella. We recommend that new cultivars of serradellas be evaluated for flowering time characteristics in their target environment(s) to assess whether the cultivars are suitably adapted to these environments. This is essential to maximise production, feeding value and facilitate effective grazing management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perceived threats to sovereignty stemming from trade exposure to China have led to calls for the Australian government to embrace the concept of 'trusted trade'. This involves using policy levers to drive trade towards markets that have capitals more geopolitically aligned with Canberra and finds practical expression in forms such as 'friend-shored' supply chains. A theme of 'trusted trade' advocacy is the conscription of existing security-oriented partnerships, including the ANZUS alliance, the Quad grouping and the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing arrangement, to take on economic dimensions. While holding superficial appeal, this paper details why pursuing this policy path would be to learn the wrong lessons from Beijing's campaign of trade disruption that began in May 2020, and make Australia both poorer and less secure. Three key data points are highlighted that collectively support an assessment that the Australian government's traditional trade policy approach, emphasising open regionalism, remains overwhelmingly fit for purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's world different data sets are available on which regression or classification algorithms of machine learning are applied. One of the classification algorithms is k-nearest neighbor (kNN) which computes distance amongst various rows in a dataset. The performance of kNN is evaluated based on K -value and distance metric used, where K is the total count of neighboring elements. Many different distance metrics have been used by researchers in literature, one of them is Canberra distance metric. In this paper the performance of kNN based on Canberra distance metric is measured on different datasets, further the proposed Canberra distance metric, namely, Modified Euclidean-Canberra Blend Distance (MECBD) metric has been applied to the kNN algorithm which led to improvement of class prediction efficiency on the same datasets measured in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score for different values of k. Further, this study depicts that MECBD metric use led to improvement in accuracy value 80.4% to 90.3%, 80.6% to 85.4% and 70.0% to 77.0% for various data sets used. Also, implementation of ROC curves and auc for k = 5 is done to show the improvement is kNN model prediction which showed increase in auc values for different data sets, for instance increase in auc values from 0.873 to 0.958 for Spine (2 Classes) dataset, 0.857 to 0.940, 0.983 to 0.983 (no change), 0.910 to 0.957 for DH, SL and NO class for Spine (3 Classes) data set and 0.651 to 0.742 for Haberman's data set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of a firestorm, many survivors will spend time with the ruins of their homes, fossicking through the rubble or simply being present with the transformed space. Through a series of oral history interviews with survivors of the 2003 Canberra firestorm in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), this paper investigates ruined homes as spaces imbued with memory – of the fire itself, of life before the fires, and of a once imagined future. By examining the first hours and days after the firestorm, we explore the complex temporalities and spatial meanings at play in spaces that are simultaneously understood as both home and ruins. We argue that the unmaking of home by fire is a gradual process. In resistance to the rapid destruction of fire, and before the clearing of ruins by demolition crews, many firestorm survivors enact a slow and embodied process of unmaking. This enactment allows both a coming to terms with the fire's material impacts and a careful engagement with the space's mnemonic resonances. It provides important lessons for a 21st century where more frequent and intense disasters will continue to result in engagement with home-in-ruins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An overview of the submission provided by the Defence Reserves Association (DRA) to the Defence team conducting the Defence Strategic Review (DSR) into Australian Defence Force (ADF) is described in this paper. The DRA has long advocated for a better resourced and more integrated Reserve component to boost ADF capacity, both in current and contingency operational tasks. The effectiveness of the Reserve in recent regional deployments and in domestic disaster relief operations has often been acknowledged and praised, but no one would contend that resourcing of the Reserve or integrated planning for their optimisation has been a priority at the strategic centre in Canberra. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Shading is one of the cases that has effectivity on the household energy consumption. Shadings can be used either in horizontal or vertical form adjacent to the building's window in order to control the sunlight. In this paper, a multi‐objective optimization is conducted to simultaneously reduce the annual electricity consumption and augment the electricity production with the application of photovoltaic shadings installed over the building window. To initiate the multi‐objective optimization, four design variables based on the positioning and geometry of photovoltaic shading are selected and test samples are simulated through EnergyPlus software. The model is three‐floor building located in Tehran, Iran. Next, the Morris sensitivity analysis (MSA) is implemented to calculate the extent to which each design variable affects the objective functions. Afterwards, the relation between the design variables and objective functions is extracted through the regression modeling using GMDH type‐ANN and the equations extracted are then utilized as inputs for genetic algorithm to conduct a Pareto‐based optimization. The results demonstrate that the maximum sunlight reception is attributed to the PV shading in southern direction of the building and its optimal tilt angle is 19.6 considering an annual period. There are slight changes to the tilt angle while seasonal period is considered for the calculations. The results also show that the use of solar shadings can reduce electricity consumption by approximately 4 to 11, 1 to 4, and 10 to 22% for an annual period, winter and summer season, respectively. At the end, the numerical data for the city of Tehran is compared to the cities of Canberra and Macapa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the Australian capital city of Canberra's representation through official, government-sponsored, Australian documentary films made between 1900 and 1945. Through a small sample of selected films, that are well preserved and held in the national film archives, we discuss their filmic intention, form, technical production and reception. In these forty plus years which end prior to the advent of technicolour, there was a progression in technical sophistication of the genre from silent to sound, and from newsreel-style reportage of pomp and ceremony towards more informal, aspirational pictures that attempt to conjure how everyday lives could be lived in the fledgling city of Canberra. We suggest that these kinds of films, that might be dismissed as mere propaganda, are useful in adding to our understanding of how documentaries became a tool in the representation and communication of a rapidly shifting national identity, that was advanced concurrently through the planning and building of a new capital city and the evolution of documentary films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recognizing cars is a highly difficult task due to the wide variety in the appearance of cars from the same car manufacturer. Therefore, the car logo is the most prominent indicator of the car manufacturer. The captured logo image suffers from several problems, such as a complex background, differences in size and shape, the appearance of noise, and lighting circumstances. To solve these problems, this paper presents an effective technique for extracting and recognizing a logo that identifies a car. Our proposed method includes four stages: First, we apply the kmedoids clustering method to extract the logo and remove the background and noise. Secondly, the logo image is converted to grayscale and also converted to a binary image using Otsu's method. Thirdly, the Daubechies wavelet with DCT transforms is applied to extract a feature vector for each image. Finally, the Canberra distance is used to match the tested image's feature vector to all feature vectors in the database. The test results indicate the highest CRR, accuracy, and precision at 99.37%, 99.39%, and 99.80%, respectively. This system is applicable to intelligent surveillance systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The outsourcing of Electronic Health Records (EHR) on cloud infrastructures has enabled medical data sharing among several healthcare applications. The blockchain offers security by authenticating users with encryption methods. The collaboration with the cloud provides better management but poses threats to the privacy of the patient. This paper devises a novel blockchain-assisted framework for effective data sharing and retrieval using cloud platforms. Here, the data protection model is devised in EHR application for secure transmission. The entities in the cloud platform include data user, data owner, smart agreement, transactional blockchain, and Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS). Here, the data owner includes a data protection model to secure EHR in which secured EHR is transferred to IPFS before sharing with the data user. The data protection is done by preserving data privacy using Tracy-Singh product and proposed Conditional Autoregressive Value at risk (CAViaR)-based Bird swarm algorithm (CAViaR-based BSA) combination of BSA and CAViaR for generating optimal privacy-preserving coefficients. The objective function is newly devised considering privacy and utility. The proposed CAViaR-based BSA outperformed other methods with minimal responsiveness of 251.339 s, maximal genuine user detection of 32.451%, maximal privacy of 96.5%, and minimal information loss of 3.5%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Biometric-based recognition is a method of verification that relies on the biological characteristics of each individual. It is processed based on its additional properties of being identical, portable and difficult to reproduce. The paper presents a palmprint recognition system based on texture features using wavelet transformation, for keeping personnel entry records in large enterprises. Using simple approaches--Discrete Wavelet Transformation (DWT) and Standard Deviation (δ)--the study extracts some texture characteristics from the ROI images which are then matched using Canberra, Euclidean and Manhattan distance methods. Among all captured images of datasets, K images per user are used to create the training set, with K ranging from 1 to 4. In image recognition mode, they are compared with the remaining images. The true acceptance rate is used to represent the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1969 and 1983 the lab of Kevin Lafferty in Canberra developed the concept of the T‐cell "costimulator," an essential second signal for activation. A great deal of the work appeared in this journal before it was known as Immunology & Cell Biology (ICB). As part of the 100‐year anniversary of the journal, I offer a personal reflection on Kevin's legacy and impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The residential building sector & transportation sector has received significant attention in recent years due to carbon emissions affecting the livelihoods of humans. Electric vehicles (EVs) are poised to play a vital role in reducing dependency on non-renewable fuels and the transportation sector's environmental implications. Building integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV), on the other hand, will be able to cut down the energy requirements and contribute to building sustainability. This paper evaluates the energy, economic, and environmental performances of BIPV with EV charging system systems for a building in Canberra, Australia. BIPV with EV charging can assist in fulfilling building energy needs, charging electric vehicles, and reducing grid reliance. Different load scenarios were studied to optimize system size. Different panel layouts with orientation have been studied for the 5.0kWp BIPV system, each module rating 355kWp. The annual energy output of the BIPV system was found to vary between 8.56 MWh for layout one and 7.08MWh for layout 3. It was found that the payback back of the proposed BIPV system is 4.46 years, LCOE of 0.074AUD/kWh and EV charging cost of 0.95AUD/100 km. The BIPV with EV charging system could save approximately 160,198 kgCO 2 e in GHG emissions over its lifespan. • The estimated annual energy for the BIPV system with Layout 1 is 8.56MWh. • The energy supplied to the grid was found to be positive in the BIPV system. • The performance ratio of the proposed layouts for the BIPV system is 81.7 %. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects our journey of implementing and refining our practice of Structured Word Inquiry across two schools in Canberra, Australia as recipients of a 2021 ALEA Research Grant award. Using a wide range of data and recursive analysis we examined the impact of implementing a Structured Word Inquiry pedagogical approach on student writing with a particular focus on spelling and vocabulary. Our driving motivation was to support our students to become expert language users through an inquiry approach. Results demonstrate a significant improvement in student spelling and vocabulary manifested in student writing across contexts. These skills will transfer well to building further literacy in secondary school learning. We are passionate about sharing with other educators the benefit of explicitly teaching English orthography in primary school classes, combining morphology, etymology and phonology to provide effective tools to harness student enthusiasm and engagement to improve writing quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feature enhancement is important in mechanical equipment fault diagnosis. A limited set of characteristic parameters is insufficient for diagnosing bearing signals with multiple fault types. The presence of noise increases the difficulty of extracting fault features from images. To address the challenge of diagnosing rolling bearing faults in complex environments, this study presents an enhanced weighted image fusion framework aimed at enhancing fault features within the images, which enables accurate diagnosis of bearing faults using a limited number of features. The proposed method encompasses four distinct stages. In the first stage, a symmetrized dot pattern method is employed to transform one-dimensional time-series data into two-dimensional images, visualizing the signal in a 2D format. In the second stage, image binarization and an improved weighted fusion method are utilized to simplify subsequent processing and enhance the image features. The third stage involves extracting the image's contrast and maximum singular value to improve the Canberra distance calculation. Finally, the enhanced Canberra distance is used for classifying bearing faults. Performance testing of the image feature enhancement is conducted on various datasets containing rolling bearings. Comparative experiments with alternative enhancement methods demonstrate the superiority of the proposed improved weighted image fusion framework. Comparative experiments with the original Canberra distance validate the effectiveness of the enhanced Canberra distance. Additionally, experiments conducted in noisy environments confirm the robustness of the proposed approach. Furthermore, the image feature enhancement method is applied to other bearing datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate its effectiveness in enhancing fault feature representation and achieving accurate diagnosis of rolling bearings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Facial identification for surgical and non-surgical datasets is getting popular. The reason behind this popularity is the growing need of a robust facial recognition system which is consistent to occlusion, spoofing attacks and last but most important plastic surgery effects. Plastic therapies are undertaken by individuals to beautify their external appearance but it is also undertaken by impostors to commit crimes and falsify their true identities. This research work aims at developing a facial recognition system which can identify genuine and impostor pairs. The projected methodology optimizes face detection via Back-Propagation Neural Network (BPNN) and dimensionality reduction by means of Speeded Up Robust Features followed by Multi-K-Nearest-Neighbor technique. The novelty is the production of an innovative-fangled T-Database which trains the BPNN. Thus, BPNN converges faster and achieves higher recognition. The proposed scheme is not applied till date on a medically altered dataset. We have applied five distance metrics and integrated them to acquire T-Dataset, which is fed to the BPNN. This scheme is tested on surgical and non-surgical datasets and it is deduced that higher recognition is achieved with non-surgical databases as compared to surgical ones. For both surgical and non-surgical datasets, the computational cost attained is the modest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "Birding in Cyberspace, Canberra Style" discusses various topics related to birding and binoculars. It mentions an article from Bintel, a Sydney-based optics retailer, that provides tips on rejuvenating old binoculars. The article also highlights the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's informative material on binoculars, including a free guide for beginners. Additionally, the article mentions a review of compact binoculars and emphasizes the importance of citizen science, particularly eBird, in contributing to scientific research. The author encourages investment in open access research infrastructure to support the scientific value of citizen science globally. [Extracted from the article]

This paper evaluates Integrated-Demand Responsive Transport (I-DRT) as a solution to the challenges faced by traditional public transport (PT) systems in low-demand urban areas. The study investigates the implications of replacing local PT with I-DRT in low-demand urban areas. A multi-objective model, incorporating operational cost, environmental impact, passengers' travel time, and inequity is used to simulate the I-DRT performance. The analysis compares the performance of I-DRT and existing local bus lines in Belconnen, Canberra, Australia, based on number of utilised vehicles, operational cost, fuel consumption, average travel time, individual passenger travel time, delay, and inequity in delay distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Message sticks are wooden objects once widely used in Indigenous Australia for facilitating important long-distance communications. Within this tradition an individual wishing to send a message would carve a stick and apply conventional symbols to its surface. The stick was entrusted to a messenger who carried the object into the territory of another community together with a memorised oral statement. Between the 1880s and the 1910s, settlers and international scholars took great interest in message sticks and this was reflected in efforts to document, collect and store them in museums worldwide. However, by this period, the practice was already undergoing profound changes, having been abandoned in many parts of the continent and transformed in others. While message sticks were still being used in a traditional way in Western Arnhem Land up until at least the late 1970s, today they feature in public interactions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous organisations, in art production and in oral narrations. Accordingly many questions concerning the history, pragmatics and global significance of message stick communication remain unanswered. To address this we have compiled the Australian Message Stick Database, a new resource hosted at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, and The Australian National University, Canberra. It contains images and data for over 1500 individual message sticks sourced from museums, and supplemented with information derived from published and unpublished manuscripts, private collections, and from field recordings involving contemporary Indigenous consultants. For the first time, knowledge about Australian message sticks can be evaluated as a single set allowing scholars and Traditional Owners to explore previously intractable questions about their histories, meanings and purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • Bifacial solar modules on rooftops offer up to 22.6% energy yield gains. • Rooftop reflectivity plays a crucial role in maximizing the bifacial potential. • Higher optimal tilt angles for bifacial modules, influenced by rooftop reflectivity. • Parallel intra-module interconnection supports achieving high bifacial yield gains. • Module-level optimizers enhance bifacial energy generation potential by up to 1.4% Bifacial solar modules have emerged as a promising technology in utility-scale photovoltaic systems, experiencing significant growth and capturing a substantial market share worldwide, as reported by the International Technology Roadmap for Photovoltaic (ITRPV) 2023. Despite this progress, the potential of bifacial modules in rooftop applications remains largely unexplored. This paper aims to address this knowledge gap by conducting a comprehensive study utilizing Monte Carlo Ray Tracing techniques coupled with detailed electrical modelling. The primary objective of this study is to investigate the viability of implementing bifacial solar modules on rooftops by examining the potential energy yield gains. By conducting a detailed analysis on a representative rooftop in Canberra, Australia, real-world conditions, and variations are incorporated, providing a more accurate assessment of the energy yield gains achievable in such settings. The simulation results reveal that the implementation of bifacial solar modules on rooftops within Australia can result in energy yield gains of up to 22.6%. These findings demonstrate the considerable potential of bifacial technology in maximizing solar energy production in rooftop applications. The analysis shows significant implications of module and system design on the potential gain. For example, electrical optimisation of individual modules in a system accounted for 1.4% of the bifacial gain. The analysis considers full annual time-step simulation, typical mechanical mounting components, installation orientations and module characteristics, ensuring practical relevance and reliability of the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biomineralised remains of trilobites provide important insight into the evolutionary history of a diverse, extinct group of arthropods. Their exoskeletons are also ideal for recording malformations, including evidence of post-injury repair. Re-examination of historic collections and the study of new specimens is important for enhancing knowledge on trilobite malformations across this diverse clade. To expand the records of these abnormalities and present explanations for their formation, we document eight malformed trilobite specimens, as well as one carcass, housed within the Commonwealth Palaeontological Collection at Geoscience Australia in Canberra. We present examples of Asthenopsis, Burminresia, Centropleura, Coronocephalus, Dolicholeptus, Galahetes, Papyriaspis, and Xystridura from Cambrian, Ordovician, and Silurian deposits of Australia. Most of the malformed specimens show W-, U-, or L-shaped indentations that reflect injuries from either failed predation or complications during moulting, and a mangled carcass is ascribed to either successful predation or post-mortem scavenging. We also uncover examples of teratologies, such as bifurcated pygidial ribs and pygidial asymmetry, in addition to evidence of abnormal recovery (i.e., fusion of thoracic segments) from a traumatic incident. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Review of the most commonly used distance measures in machine learning • Analysis of their main properties, applications and key aspects to consider • The similarity analysis shows a high degree of correlation between all the measures • Evaluation of classification and clustering performance, noise tolerance and runtime • Canberra distance shows the best overall performance and the highest tolerance to noise Many machine learning and data mining tasks are based on distance measures, so a large amount of literature addresses this aspect somehow. Due to the broad scope of the topic, this paper aims to provide an overview of the use of these measures in the most common machine learning problems, pointing out those aspects to consider to choose the most appropriate measure for a particular task. For this purpose, the most recent works addressing the subject were reviewed and seven of the most commonly used measures were analyzed, investigating in detail their main properties and applications. Different experiments were carried out to study their relationships and compare their performance. The degradation of the results in the presence of noise was also considered, as well as the execution time required by each measure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT), network advancement has significantly influenced the increasing number of devices and advanced enhancements linked with it. Indeed the increasing number prevalence and sophistication of emerging cyber-attacks have highlighted the necessity for designing robust security application. In this paper, the Remora-based Deep Maxout Network model is Proposed. Here, the input data is acquired and forwarded to the pre-processing phase, wherein the missing value imputation approach is employed for creating a complete dataset. Later, the pre-processed data is then subjected to dimension transformation from the transformed data; the Convolutional Neural Network features are extracted, followed by feature selection based on Canberra distance. Here, detection is carried out using a Deep Maxout Network whose weights and training parameters are modified using the Remora Optimization Algorithm. However, the proposed model has delivered superior results with a high testing accuracy of 0.945 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For almost two decades, Canberra hedged its economic and security bets between China – its most significant economic partner – and the United States – its core security ally – rather successfully, with Australian policymakers announcing that the country would not have to choose between the two great powers and that there are ways to maintain a tight alliance with the US while enhancing friendship and cooperation with China. However, Australia-China relations started to deteriorate in the mid-2010s, with Canberra effectively giving up on hedging by signing in 2021 the AUKUS (Australia-UK-US) security pact and undertaking other steps that have been widely received as unequivocally joining the US's effort to contain China. This article explores Australia's foreign policy transformation by conceptualising it as a transition from hedging to balancing against China. It develops a theoretical argument about why an essential middle power might decide to give up on hedging and start balancing. It argues that the end of hedging in Australia's China policy is a result of disappearing structural uncertainty and systemic permissiveness on which hedging, as a pattern of smaller power behaviour, is premised. As such, the article contributes to the knowledge about hedging by highlighting the limitations of smaller power hedging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has deeply influenced the economy of all nations, and Mexico is no exception. This effect is distinct for different groups of the population, with variable socio-economic and demographic characteristics, that live in regions of contrasting features. An efficient apparatus for measuring expenditure variations and tendency is the National Household Income and Expenditure Survey performed by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography in accordance with the international standardization established at the Canberra Conference; the latter permits, every two years, for different surveys to be comparable in time and space. Hence, in Mexico, there are three surveys for 2018, 2020, and 2022. The results of the comparison indicate that different groups of the Mexican population have experienced the pandemic with multiple impacts, apparently without large proportional variation regarding expenditure but with greater variation in time-use conditions. Moreover, it became apparent that even though the lower strata of Mexico's population have fewer proportional variations concerning income after the COVID-19 outburst, they must incorporate more family members into working activities to achieve a survival line; the latter results in the abandonment of school from various young household members that will negatively impact the quality of their lives in the long term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 pandemic was reported to modify people's behaviour in using public spaces and accessing services. This fact has become a critical input related to future city development strategies, space arrangements, and the implementation of smart city. Therefore, this study aims to 1) Identify efforts in several cities during COVID-19 pandemic, specifically concerning the use of public spaces and services, and 2) Compile the outlines of future urban planning strategies after the pandemic. The aspects related to the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), space arrangement, and urban environment are discussed. The analysis is based on case studies in four capital cities, namely Jakarta, Paris, Bucharest, and Canberra. Furthermore, field observations and in-depth interviews are used to emphasize changes in the function and use of public spaces and services during and after the pandemic. The result shows that differences and common elements configure the transformations of urban spaces since changes in the use of public spaces are closely connected to efforts to combat the pandemic. Meanwhile, in public services, changes are associated with the increasing use of ICT and Internet of Things (IoT). In the future, cities need to show their visions according to the local conditions supporting better spatial arrangement and management of urban environment due to ICT and IoT prominence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australian housing markets experienced widespread and, in some cases, extraordinary growth in prices between 2020 and 2023. Using recently developed methodology that accounts for fundamental economic drivers, we assess the existence and degree of speculative behaviour, as well as the timing of exuberance and downturns in these markets. Our findings indicate that speculative behaviour was indeed present in six of the eight capital cities at some time over the period studied. The sequence of events in this nation‐wide housing bubble began in the Brisbane market and concluded in Melbourne, Canberra, and Hobart following the interest rate rise implemented by the Reserve Bank of Australia in May 2022. As of March 2023, the housing markets in Sydney, Canberra and Hobart had broadly regained stability, while Melbourne's return to its normal state is more gradual. In addition, over‐corrections against fundamentals are evident in the housing markets of Brisbane, Adelaide, Darwin and Perth. For regular updates on the housing markets, readers may visit the authors' website at https://www.housing-fever.com. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the national Australian Association for the Teaching of English conference, discussing its structure and themes, including the rotational hosting by state English Teacher Association and Australian Literacy Educators' Association, with particular attention to the 2023 conference in Canberra. Topics include the conference theme "ACTion to impACT: English and Literacy that Empowers," sessions attended by the author, and reflections on the conference experience.

Context: There is interest in using serradella (Ornithopus spp.) in permanent pastures of the high rainfall zone of south-eastern Australia. However, there is little information concerning levels of hardseededness or patterns of seed softening in these environments. Aim: This study quantified seed softening of serradella species in comparison with subterranean clover (Trifolium subterraneum L.) in the Southern Tablelands and Central Slopes districts of eastern Australia. Methods: Mature seeds were placed in mesh pouches on the soil surface and were retrieved periodically to assess residual hard seed proportions throughout the growing season(s) in four experiments conducted over 2018 and 2019. Key results: Patterns of seed softening among adapted cultivars of subterranean clover were consistent: initially high proportions of hard seed, followed by rapid softening from mid-summer to the end of autumn with the remnant portion of seeds remaining hard. In contrast, diverse patterns of seed softening were observed among serradella cultivars, ranging from highly soft-seeded through to high initial hard seed portions that either softened rapidly or softened over a lengthy period. Rates of seed softening were faster in the warmer/drier environment of Cowra compared to the wetter/cooler environment of Canberra. Conclusions: The study revealed seed softening patterns among serradellas to be diverse and different to subterranean clover. This will affect management and suitability of serradella cultivars for permanent pastures. Implications: In permanent pastures, serradellas that soften slowly over several years are likely to have limited regeneration in the year after pasture establishment with a high potential for weed invasion. Serradella has many advantages as a pasture legume, however persistence and productivity in permanent pastures can be inadequate. This study quantified seed softening of serradella species in comparison with subterranean clover in the Southern Tablelands and Central Slopes districts of eastern Australia. Diverse patterns of seed softening were observed among serradella cultivars, in contrast to subterranean clover. Implications for pasture establishment of serradella in high rainfall zone permanent pastures is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The urban densification agenda for the Australian Capital Territory announced in 2012 as well as the climate-related impacts (such as flood and rising temperature) have made the role of green infrastructure in this city more critical than at any other time. The Living Infrastructure Plan for Canberra was proposed by the local government in 2019 and it is currently being developed. However, there is a lack of understanding of the variety of urban green infrastructure characters, associated urban green space types, and their contributions to the green infrastructure plan. Therefore, this research aims to study the existing types of urban green infrastructure and green spaces in Canberra and investigate their potential sociocultural and ecological contributions that need to be considered in developing green infrastructure plans. To achieve this, we employed a socioecological approach and a mix of methods including a literature review, a review of policy documents, semi-structured interviews with experts, geospatial data, and field observation. Ten main urban green infrastructures were identified in Canberra and associated green spaces and their ecosystem services were discussed. Finally, a framework was delineated to suggest recommendations for the identified urban green infrastructure types with the aim of improving the green infrastructure planning practice by enhancing, preserving, and reinforcing green spaces. The findings provide a foundation for coordinating green infrastructure decision making and suggest a framework for designing high-quality and multifunctional green spaces. The study concludes that further investigation is required to comprehend the diversity of urban green infrastructures and their ecosystem services, co-benefits, synergies, and trade-offs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The K-shell characteristic X-ray intensity ratios of nickel (II) oxide thin films generated by chemical spraying with 1-6 percent boron doping were studied. An americium-241 radioisotope source generated 59.543 kilo-electron volt gamma rays at 50 mili Curie intensity for these samples. The distinctive X-rays of the samples were calculated using a Canberra ultra-low energy germanium detector (with a resolution of 150 electron volts at 5.96 keV). The results were interpreted based on the amount of boron doped in nickel (II) oxide thin films, and it was discovered that, with the exception of boron doping quantities of 5 percent and 6 percent, K-shell X-ray intensity ratios rose as boron doping amounts increased. The findings are given and compared to those of the previous study. The obtained results are provided and compared in the table to the other researchers' theoretical and experimental results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent days, social media is termed a major source for several people residing over the world because of less cost, simpler accessibility, and quick dissemination. However, it comes with dubious trustworthiness and is of high risk in exposing fake news. Hence, the automated discovery of fake news is an essential task. An innovative model is provided to identify fake news considering social media. Here, the BERT model is utilized to perform tokenization in order to produce tokens. Multiple features linked with the data are analyzed for detecting the behavior using the deep model. The features, like Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF), SentiWordNet scores, and sentence level features are obtained to automatically learn the features. Automatic discovery of fake news is done with Aquila Feedback Artificial tree-based Deep Residual Network (AFAT-based DRN). The optimum weight tuning of DRN is executed with AFAT and the AFAT is the fusion of Aquila optimizer (AO) and Feedback artificial tree (FAT). The impact detection of fake news is done with AFAT-based DRN, which helps to detect how many of them shared the fake news. The AFAT-based DRN offered high competence with utmost sensitivity of 92.3%, testing accuracy of 91.6%, and specificity of 91.9%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we analyze a signal segmentation-specific pain duration transfer task by applying knowledge transfer from short-term (phasic) pain stimuli to long-term (tonic) pain stimuli. To this end, we focus on the physiological signals of the X-ITE Pain Database. We evaluate different distance-based segment selection approaches with the aim of identifying individual segments of the corresponding tonic stimuli that lead to the best classification performance. The phasic domain is used to train the classification model. In the first main step, we compute class-specific prototypes for the phasic domain. In the second main step, we compute the distances between all segments of the tonic samples and each prototype. The segment with the lowest distance to the prototypes is then fed to the classifier. Our analysis includes the evaluation of a variety of distance metrics, namely the Euclidean, Bray–Curtis, Canberra, Chebyshev, City-Block and Wasserstein distances. Our results show that in combination with most of the metrics used, the distance-based selection of one individual segment outperforms the naive approach in which the tonic stimuli are fed to the phasic domain-based classification model without any adaptation. Moreover, most of the evaluated distance-based segment selection approaches lead to outcomes that are close to the classification performance, which is obtained by focusing on the respective best segments. For instance, for the trapezius (TRA) signal, in combination with the electric pain domain, we obtained an averaged accuracy of 68.0%, while the naive approach led to 66.0%. For the thermal pain domain, in combination with the electrodermal activity (EDA) signal, we obtained an averaged accuracy of 59.6%, outperforming the naive approach, which led to 53.2%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Australian and Italian policies on irregular maritime migration are widely debated, they have seldom been examined together, a gap in the literature that this article addresses with a comprehensive comparative analysis. Informed by theories on irregular migrants' reception, it traces the two countries' policies between 2000 and early 2022, and examines their many convergences and few discrepancies through a framework comprising (i) domestic pressures, (ii) international pressures, and (iii) the choice between the moral imperative and national interest. It finds that contrasting socio-political characteristics domestically explain why Canberra and Rome have at times adopted opposite policies, whereas comparable international pressures clarify the implementation of similar ones. It also sheds light on the contradiction in Australia's middle power identity and 'good international citizenship', and on Italy's torn posture betwixt great power politics and humanitarian efforts. In 2020–2022, their policy continuity amidst the COVID-19 pandemic is worthy of notice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]