Minerva Elements Records
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 10 of 942
-
ItemReevaluating the Land Use Impact of a Li-ion Battery Related Mining Project: A Case Study of Greenbushes Mine(Elsevier BV, 2024)The mining industry plays a pivotal role in the global transition towards clean energy, driven by the escalating demand for critical elements like lithium. However, this growth raises profound environmental concerns, particularly regarding land use, global warming potential, water consumption, acidification, eutrophication, and toxicity. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has historically relied on approximations and theoretical methods, resulting in systematic underestimations of these impacts. This study begins to address part of this discrepancy by leveraging remote sensing technologies to gather empirical evidence. Focusing on the Greenbushes mining site in Australia, a comprehensive investigation was conducted to quantitatively evaluate the direct land use impact from satellite imagery over the life of the project. Comparative analyses were performed against various mid-point Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) methods. The findings unequivocally reveal a substantial under-reporting of the land use impact, highlighting the critical need for more accurate assessments in the context of mining activities. This research underscores the importance of empirical data in refining our understanding of the environmental footprint associated with mining operations, particularly in the critical context of clean energy transition. The study emphasises the imperative to reevaluate and adjust existing approaches to accurately account for the full scope of environmental impacts associated with mining operations.
-
ItemAn exploration of public perceptions of place character in the Pathuriaghata neighborhood of Kolkata, India(AMPS (Architecture, Media, Politics, Society), 2023)People living in one location for a considerable period of time often form what has been termed ‘place attachments’ to those locations and their associated features. In historic cities continuously inhabited by generations of people, long-time residents interact with the landscape settings, associating meanings, uses, and values to different landscape features to form person-place bonds, such that these features in the landscape become integral to their own sense of personal identity― Proshanky has termed this as ‘person-place identity’ since it conveys the person’s own aspect of individual identity that gets mediated by the physical environment and the meanings and values associated with particular places and associated features to which they have become attached. In this way certain features in the landscape can serve as perceptual cues that remind residents of where they belong and who they are and can become ingrained as their ‘place-memory’. As early as 1925 it was suggested by Maurice Halbwachs that landscape features in a place are not remembered in isolation, but together as ‘collective memory’ of a landscape setting. Groups of people residing in one place for long periods of time can share similar memories and person-place bonds that give rise to ‘cultural memories’ allowing the ‘concretion of identity’ of a place to occur. This is experienced as the distinctive ‘feel’ or ‘character’ of a place as expressed by its landscape and associated place features, people, history, and ways of life. In the case of any historic city, historical urban patinas collage together conveying place identity through cultural memory that is often of heritage value and an important resource for sustaining good quality of life. Natural and cultural (tangible and intangible) heritages support the livability of residents through providing sustainable local economies, traditional livelihoods, use of local resources in traditional arts and crafts, and environment-friendly methods of construction. According to the ICOMOS Burra Charter 1999 “places of cultural significance enrich people’s lives, often providing a deep and inspirational sense of connection to community and landscape, to the past and to lived experiences”; this charter further suggests that changes to such places should entail “as little as possible so that its cultural significance is retained.”
-
ItemExploring residents' definition and use of neighbourhood leftover spaces in Colombo, Sri Lanka(Amps (Architecture, Media, Politics, Society), 2023)Urban leftover spaces are the residual spaces or cracks in cities that form due to rapid urban development. "urban voids" These types of spaces have also been referred to as "lost spaces", "loose spaces", They are typically vacant, neglected, or underutilized spaces within highly urbanized areas and can be permanent or temporary. They are often considered urban spaces awaiting future use. and "informal urban green spaces". These types of spaces have been studied for over five decades, with much of that research aimed at understanding their characteristics and potential uses in urban environments. The specific socio-economic and environmental context in which the spaces occur often influences the results. While these spaces occur at different urban scales and land use zones, their presence at the neighbourhood level has often been overlooked. Furthermore, although interest in these spaces has dramatically increased in recent years, their specific uses and definitions are often unclear due to the various ways they are interpreted and perceived.
-
ItemCommunity-perceptions of place-character and associated meanings in the context of a contemporary cultural landscape: the case of the historic neighbourhood of Pathuriaghata in Kolkata, India(AMPS (Architecture, Media, Politics, Society), 2023)In 1925, Carl Sauer defined a cultural landscape as the “union of physical and cultural elements of the landscape” wherein “cultures … grow with original vigor out of the lap of a maternal natural landscape, to which each is bound in the whole course of its existence.” In 1992, for the first time, UNESCO considered cultural landscapes as holding Outstanding Universal Values (OUV) based on heritage values and promoted the idea of the necessity of protecting such landscapes. Cultural landscapes are shaped through the interaction between humans and the natural geography of places wherein different features in these settings become associated with human activities, memories, and histories over time, thereby accruing meanings and values. Such human-nature interactions contribute to specific settings' place identities. Place identity represents that part of people’s self-identity is defined by elements within their everyday environment to which they are affiliated. Communities living in a particular cultural landscape for a considerable period often share similar perceptions with others inhabiting the same landscape setting. They form emotional bonds, or place attachments, with key features in the landscape that others can also share in the same environment. As places and their societies evolve, new meanings and values concerning the landscape emerge, adding new features to urban landscapes, often transforming valuable heritage settings to ones of global uniformity devoid of deep meanings. Over time, important features in the landscape develop patinas and coexist as collective memories that convey meanings and values from different periods referred to this as the collective historic urban fabric composing a ‘collage city’, suggesting that places with distinctive identities can transform over time the image of a city, within cultural landscapes. Rowe and Koetter over generations, to attain heritage value for society. thereby defining ‘cultural identities’ Identifying the tangible and intangible cultural and heritage value associated with landscape features can provide clues as to what is most important to be conserved to maintain the distinctive character of the place into the future and, conversely, what might be able to be sacrificed for newer development.
-
ItemStrategy Extraction in Single-Agent Games(AAMAS, 2023)The ability to continuously learn and adapt to new situations is one where humans are far superior compared to AI agents. We propose an approach to knowledge transfer using behavioural strategies as a form of transferable knowledge influenced by the human cognitive ability to develop strategies. A strategy is defined as a partial sequence of events – where an event is both the result of an agent’s action and changes in state – to reach some predefined event of interest. This information acts as guidance or a partial solution that an agent can generalise and use to make predictions about how to handle unknown observed phenomena. As a first step toward this goal, we develop a method for extracting strategies from an agent’s existing knowledge that can be applied in multiple contexts. Our method combines observed event frequency information with local sequence alignment techniques to find patterns of significance that form a strategy. We show that our method can identify plausible strategies in three environments: Pacman, Bank Heist and a dungeon-crawling video game. Our evaluation serves as a promising first step toward extracting knowledge for generalisation and, ultimately, transfer learning.
-
ItemContinuing Professional Development programmes through the lens of Habermas’ Knowledge-Constitutive Interests: a novel approach to evaluating and (re)designing CPD(AMEE, 2024)Background: Clinician-educators are usually experienced clinicians seeking information and strategies to improve their teaching. Continuing Professional Development (CPD) programmes can address a range of learning requirements for clinician-educators if they can respond to the particular educational and contextual needs of participants. A critical review of a one-day postgraduate course was conducted. It focused on how the course was tailored to the learning needs and interests of participants and drew on the early work of Jürgen Habermas and his Knowledge-Constitutive Interests schema in its analysis. Habermas describes technical, practical and emancipatory interests. For clinician-educator CPD, ‘teaching tips that work’ align with the technical interest, while learning why certain teaching techniques suit specific situations or learners is a practical interest. Understanding the material so attendees can flexibly apply it in their context aligns with the emancipatory interest in autonomy. Summary of Work: Examination of the course through the lens of Habermas' interests was conducted by asking: What type of interest does each session target? How does it do this? How could the teaching method shift from fostering technical or practical knowledge towards meeting the participants' emancipatory interests?
-
ItemMeeting Halfway: Engaging Clinician-Educators(ANZAHPE, 2024)Introduction/Background: Clinician-educators form a significant component of the health professional education workforce and deliver a substantial amount of teaching and supervision, especially in placement sites. There are many challenges clinician-educators face in contributing to educational activities such as programme development, evaluation and educational research and scholarship, yet experience in these areas can be critical to their professional development. Are health professional education programmes doing enough to encourage the contribution of their clinician-educator workforce? Methods: In this PeArLS, I will briefly introduce the issue outlined in the Introduction and then engage the participants in a discussion across several questions listed below in ‘Issues or questions for exploration’. These questions will explore the experience of participants in working with clinician-educators outside of their usual teaching or supervisory activity and the ways in which those educators might best be utilised to enhance the programmes into which they teach. Strategies for engaging clinician-educators will form an important part of this discussion and will focus on ways in which participants have successfully overcome barriers to clinician-educator contribution. Results/Evaluation: This session will be a success if both the presenters and participants identify ways to engage their clinician-educator staff in broader participation in their educational programmes. These could be in areas such as programme design, evaluation, faculty development or scholarship. Insights from participants who have successfully developed professional development programmes or scholarly collaborations with their clinician-educator workforce will be particularly valuable. Discussion: Opportunities for shared understanding and problem-solving are critical to the ongoing development of health professional education programmes and practitioners. Greater involvement of clinician-educators in the academic programmes to which they contribute will be of benefit to all health professional education practitioners.
-
ItemNo Preview AvailableMalignant pleural effusion management: An audit of current practice(Wiley, 2024)Introduction/Aim: Malignant pleural effusion (MPE) is a complication of advanced cancer that can result in limited life expectancy and significant morbidity. Recurrence of MPE is common and definitive management with either pleurodesis or indwelling pleural catheter (IPC) insertion is often required. This study aimed to review the management of MPE at two tertiary hospitals to identify potential areas for improvement with an emphasis on the hospital length of stay, frequency of non-definitive pleural procedures and frequency of unplanned pleural related admissions. Methods: Retrospective audit of all patients diagnosed with MPE at Western Health over a 3-year period. Results: Of 79 patients with MPE were identified during the time period (mean age 66.1 years, 59% female). 25 patients (13.1%) had a non-definitive pleural procedure following diagnosis, including 16 (38.1%) of the 42 patients who subsequently went on to have a definitive procedure. The median hospital length of stay for pleural effusion related hospitalisations was 9 days. 22 of the 42 pleural effusion-related admissions occurred after a presentation via the emergency department (ED). When compared with planned admissions, those who presented via ED had a higher rate of non-definitive procedures (77% vs 25%) and a longer length of stay (12 vs 7 days). Conclusion: The pleural effusion-related hospital length of stay was in line with previously published Australasian data. Despite this, our data suggests that there might still be scope for improvement. In particular, our data has suggested that interventions to reduce the number of unplanned admissions via ED might result in a reduced rate of non-definitive procedures and a reduced hospital length of stay. Future research could assess the impact of interventions such as the introduction of dedicated pleural clinic or a streamlined admissions pathway on these measures.
-
ItemFour Melbourne Architects (1979): The Creation of Contemporary Perceptions for Australian Architecture(SAHANZ, 2022)In 1979, Peter Corrigan conceived the idea for the ‘Four Melbourne Architects’ exhibition to be held at South Yarra’s Powell Street Gallery. Corrigan led the charge to draw a line between a new generation of architectural practitioners with a fresh design agenda and the conservative practices represented by the Royal Australian Institute of Architects (RAIA). This exhibition, along with the establishment of the Half Time Club and the launch of Transition Magazine, provided platforms for a lively and vigorous profession. The ‘Four Melbourne Architects’—Greg Burgess, Peter Crone, Norman Day and Edmond and Corrigan—were diverse in their approach to architectural design yet shared common concerns of the post-Whitlam generation. The research for this paper examines the documentation between the four architects as they prepared their exhibition, recording the projects exhibited, along with critical reviews of the exhibition. Interviews have been undertaken with the surviving architects involved and people who attended the exhibition. Four Melbourne Architects was the first of many exhibitions during that period, which became one of many vehicles for public engagement with early postmodernism and those creating it, where collaboration, inclusion, and connectivity informed designers. That process activated a search for a contemporary Australian identity leading to the development of the ‘Melbourne School’.
-
ItemIOQP: A simple Impact-Ordered Query Processor written in Rust(RWTH, Aachen University, 2023-01-01)Impact-ordered index organizations are suited to score-at-a-time query evaluation strategies. A key advantage of score-at-a-time processing is that query latency can be tightly controlled, leading to lower tail latency and less latency variance overall. While score-at-a-time evaluation strategies have been explored in the literature, there is currently only one notable system that promotes impact-ordered indexing and efficient score-at-a-time query processing. In this paper, we propose an alternative implementation of score-at-a-time retrieval over impact-ordered indexes in the Rust programming language. We detail the efficiency-effectiveness characteristics of our implementation through a range of experiments on two test collections. Our results demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed model in terms of both single-threaded latency, and multi-threaded throughput capability. We make our system publicly available to benefit the community and to promote further research in efficient impact-ordered query processing.