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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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

[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]