Architecture, Building and Planning - Research Publications
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ItemArchitectures of the Pacific Carceral Archipelago: Second World War Internment and Prisoner of War Camps(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2016)Characterisations of the Pacific Basin as a tropical archipelago essentialise its geocultural diversity as an alternative way of envisioning the region and its politics. This paper offers a darker projection of this archipelagic imagination as one forged by imperial competition and wartime violence. It traces its genesis across the history of the Second World War internment and prisoner of war camps. Their spatial proliferation as a carceral geography produces a variety of temporary environments where civil and legal rights are suspended. The roles adopted by captors in their treatment of prisoners reflect the social prejudices of the period, the politics of imperialism and the specific responses of warring nations during various stages of the conflict. This paper asks how architectural scholarship might address this imperial history. It draws together diverse models of incarceration related to the Pacific War, acknowledging the different treatment of racially different colonial and national subjects and tracing their passage through multiple spatial configurations of camps. The camps in Australia are contextualised in their wider Pacific geography with special attention to Victoria’s Tatura Group.
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ItemChangi: A Penal Genealogy across the Pacific War(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2016-01-02)Anglophone scholarship on the Pacific War in Singapore is largely focused on records and memoirs of captive allied forces, extending imperial histories of that period. The punitive environments that incarcerated soldiers and civilians are examined through that lens. This essay approaches the Pacific War as an interregnum in a longer penal genealogy and a historical border to political decolonisation. It reviews this literature as significant for understanding the evolution of the colonial prison and its wartime transformation into a Prisoner of War (POW) camp environment posing questions about incarceration, citizenship and penal labour. It asks how residential carceral facilities such as the prison, the POW camp and the home are adapted and transformed. The main foci of this paper and its genealogy are the Changi Prison and the Changi POW Camp.
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ItemA corpus of potentially contradictory research claims from cardiovascular research abstracts(BMC, 2016-06-07)BACKGROUND: Research literature in biomedicine and related fields contains a huge number of claims, such as the effectiveness of treatments. These claims are not always consistent and may even contradict each other. Being able to identify contradictory claims is important for those who rely on the biomedical literature. Automated methods to identify and resolve them are required to cope with the amount of information available. However, research in this area has been hampered by a lack of suitable resources. We describe a methodology to develop a corpus which addresses this gap by providing examples of potentially contradictory claims and demonstrate how it can be applied to identify these claims from Medline abstracts related to the topic of cardiovascular disease. METHODS: A set of systematic reviews concerned with four topics in cardiovascular disease were identified from Medline and analysed to determine whether the abstracts they reviewed contained contradictory research claims. For each review, annotators were asked to analyse these abstracts to identify claims within them that answered the question addressed in the review. The annotators were also asked to indicate how the claim related to that question and the type of the claim. RESULTS: A total of 259 abstracts associated with 24 systematic reviews were used to form the corpus. Agreement between the annotators was high, suggesting that the information they provided is reliable. CONCLUSIONS: The paper describes a methodology for constructing a corpus containing contradictory research claims from the biomedical literature. The corpus is made available to enable further research into this area and support the development of automated approaches to contradiction identification.
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ItemThe effect of word sense disambiguation accuracy on literature based discovery(BMC, 2016-07-18)BACKGROUND: The volume of research published in the biomedical domain has increasingly lead to researchers focussing on specific areas of interest and connections between findings being missed. Literature based discovery (LBD) attempts to address this problem by searching for previously unnoticed connections between published information (also known as "hidden knowledge"). A common approach is to identify hidden knowledge via shared linking terms. However, biomedical documents are highly ambiguous which can lead LBD systems to over generate hidden knowledge by hypothesising connections through different meanings of linking terms. Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) aims to resolve ambiguities in text by identifying the meaning of ambiguous terms. This study explores the effect of WSD accuracy on LBD performance. METHODS: An existing LBD system is employed and four approaches to WSD of biomedical documents integrated with it. The accuracy of each WSD approach is determined by comparing its output against a standard benchmark. Evaluation of the LBD output is carried out using timeslicing approach, where hidden knowledge is generated from articles published prior to a certain cutoff date and a gold standard extracted from publications after the cutoff date. RESULTS: WSD accuracy varies depending on the approach used. The connection between the performance of the LBD and WSD systems are analysed to reveal a correlation between WSD accuracy and LBD performance. CONCLUSION: This study reveals that LBD performance is sensitive to WSD accuracy. It is therefore concluded that WSD has the potential to improve the output of LBD systems by reducing the amount of spurious hidden knowledge that is generated. It is also suggested that further improvements in WSD accuracy have the potential to improve LBD accuracy.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableEvaluating Access and Mobility within a New Model of Supported Housing for People with Neurotrauma: A Pilot Study(CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS, 2016-03)Objectives: (1) Evaluate the features of purpose-built apartment living on access, environmental control, and home and community mobility of people living with neurotrauma and (2) Examine tenant perceptions of those features. Research design: Observational case series pilot study.Setting:Three apartments within a residential development in Melbourne, Australia.Participants:Three males (aged 30–55 years) with traumatic brain and/or spinal cord injury living in the three separate apartments. Method and procedures:Measures:Two-published measures of user experience of built and technology environments, coupled with customised interdisciplinary post-occupancy evaluation (POE) methods and GPS-enabled mobility tracking.Analysis:Measures completed per manual guidelines and data reported descriptively. Customised measured drawings produced to represent tenants’ physical access and mobility. GPS community mobility data plotted on Google Earth. Results: Built design features which enabled access and mobility included linear paths of travel, well-located furnishings, and joinery design that allowed approach from either side using a wheelchair. Personal home furnishing choices posed barriers to physical access. Home automation technologies positively influenced participants’ sense of control and independence, but posed learning challenges. Close proximity of housing to accessible public transport and services enabled community travel options. Conclusion: Findings from this pilot study indicate the combination of housing location, design and technologies used, together with availability of local community services, provides an acceptable level of environmental control, access, mobility and tenant experience. Further research is required to determine validity of the novel measures used, and deliver rigorous research design to evaluate those features most important in achieving optimal outcomes.
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ItemDirectionally selective shading control in maritime sub-tropical and temperate climates: Life cycle energy implications for office buildings(Elsevier, 2016)Scheduling directionally selective shading devices to increase or decrease their level of occlusion relative to the total incoming solar radiation has the benefit of controlling solar heat gain during a variety of sky conditions and allowing more constant illuminance levels to be achieved within a building. In this study, hourly sky condition and annual solar angles were used to describe the tilt of the slats of an external directionally selective shading control for an external venetian blind on an office building in Melbourne and Brisbane, Australia. The life cycle energy demand associated with this shading control was compared to a static base case with an external overhang and internal venetians. The analysis was extended to the HVAC system which was sized to account for the effect of the shading on solar gain and the artificial lighting requirement. It was found that the embodied energy of the HVAC and shading components accounted for between 21.7% and 25.5% of the total life cycle energy of these systems over 25 years. There was a reduction in embodied and operational energy requirements over a 25 year life cycle for the external venetian blind control of 24.9% for Melbourne and 24.0% for Brisbane relative to the static base case. Based on the simulation results, office buildings with equator facing facades located in similar climates and latitudes may have the potential for equivalent life cycle energy reductions when external directionally selective shading controls are employed to moderate overheating and daylighting.
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ItemThe economic value of low-energy housing(Taylor and Francis, 2016-01-01)This paper explores a new perspective towards understanding barriers to ascertaining the economic value of low-energy housing. It examines why the economic value of low-energy housing is less transparent in active markets; this is investigated from the valuation principle perspectives of embodied energy and operational energy in residential dwellings. The focus is placed on the composition of energy consumption associated with the housing product life cycle. Low operational energy of a dwelling is linked to consumer preference by the inter-temporal value estimate of expected benefits. However, “low” embodied energy housing is an ecological construct and does not appear to be directly linked to short-term market value or an expected (intuitive) economic motive. This “gap/disconnect”, alongside some practical “barriers” in the market economy, has created a challenge in deriving the economic value of low-energy housing. The barrier to economic value of low-energy housing is methodological and by adopting a life cycle approach to assessing and measuring energy in a house that incorporates embodied energy and operational energy, greater clarity can be achieved which may lead to a better informed market, enhancing transparency and allowing consumer choice to direct and value the broader benefits of low-energy housing.
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ItemMotor Vehicle Crashes and Dementia: A Population-Based Study(WILEY-BLACKWELL, 2016-05)OBJECTIVES: To compare the frequency of motor vehicle crashes of drivers aged 50 and older with a diagnosis of dementia with that of a group without dementia in the 3 years before and 3 years after an index hospital admission using the Western Australian Data Linkage System (WADLS). DESIGN: Retrospective population-based study. SETTING: De-identified data were obtained from Western Australian Hospital Morbidity Data System and the Western Australian Death Registrations using the WADLS from 2004 to 2010. The Integrated Road Information System was used to identify individuals involved in a crash as the driver from 2001 to 2013. PARTICIPANTS: Individuals with dementia with an index hospital admission (n = 1,666, 34%) and individuals without dementia (n = 3,636, 66%) who had been involved in at least one motor vehicle crash as the driver from 2001 to 2013. MEASUREMENTS: Involvement in a police-reported crash as the driver. RESULTS: The occurrence of one or more crashes as the driver in the dementia group (43% had a crash as the driver) was higher in the 3 years before the index hospitalization than in the comparison group (30% had a crash as the driver). The risk of a crash was 93% less for those with dementia in the 3 years after an index hospital admission with dementia than for those without dementia (incidence rate ratio = 0.07, 95% confidence interval = 0.06-0.09) compared to the previous 3 years, after adjusting for relevant confounders. CONCLUSION: Although older drivers may give up driving after a diagnosis of dementia, they may be at greater risk of crashing before diagnosis or in the early stages of dementia. Better methods are needed to identify at-risk drivers with early dementia and prevent crashes.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableAn Update of a Simulation Study of Passively Heated Residential Buildings(VSB - Technical University of Ostrava, 2016-12-01)Abstract “A simulation study of passively heated residential buildings” published in Procedia Engineering 2015 showed how circulating 15-17°C water from a 50-m deep U-tube to a floor radiator and solar-heated water from a 30 evacuated tube solar collector and a 2-m3 indoor tank to a wall radiator could keep a 30-m2 Melbourne, Australia house thermally comfortable. This paper presents a summary of the ongoing review of publications together with three updates: - (1) Report on that water heated by a 100-metre deep U-tube is 22-24°C, i.e., 2-4 °C warmer than thermal comfort temperature. (2) May 2016 experimental validations of the simulated results which show that when the outdoors is below 10°C, the temperature of the floor radiator is 2-4°C less than the 15-17°C water heated by a 50-m deep U-tube and 25 W fish tank pumps could circulate the waters. (3) Simulations with the addition of phase change materials (PCM) to inside faces show that though a PCM halves the diurnal indoor temperature variations, it confirms that such PCM does not significantly increase the 20°C temperature in a 2-m3 storage tank at the end of winter. Therefore, the size of intersessional thermal storage would be a problem for family-sized houses. German Guidelines indicate that 1-2 boreholes could provide enough heat for family-sized houses. The heat extracted in winter can be replenished in summer. Thus the geothermal heat from about 100-m deep boreholes with 22-24°C bottom temperature could sustainably keep residential buildings in cool climates similar to Melbourne's cool temperate thermally comfortable.