Developing social impact assessment guidelines in a pre-existing policy context

Few jurisdictions have translated internationally agreed social impact assessment (SIA) principles into statutory provisions. Governments and regulatory bodies tend to provide developers with high-level frameworks, or require that social impacts be ‘considered’, without specifying how this is to be done. In Australia, this lack of clarity leaves all parties uncertain about requirements for SIA. The New South Wales (NSW) Government’s 2017 release of the SIA guideline for State-significant mining, petroleum and extractive industry development represents an attempt to clarify requirements and provide guidance. In this paper, we describe the process of bringing this guideline to fruition from the perspective of being directly involved in its development, and highlight the challenges involved in integrating leading-practice principles into the state’s pre-existing policy framework. While the guideline represents a significant advance in policy-based SIA guidance, some aspects leave room for improvement. The real test of the guideline’s impact will lie in its influence on SIA practice in NSW, and ultimately in social outcomes for communities affected by resources projects.     

When Teachers' and Parents' Values Differ: Teachers' Ratings of Academic Competence in Children From Low-Income Families.

The authors examined predictors of teachers' ratings of academic competence of 105 kindergarten children from low-income families. Teachers rated target children's expected competence in literacy and math and completed questions about their perceptions of congruence-dissonance between themselves and the child's parents regarding education-related values. Independent examiners assessed children's literacy and math skills. Teachers' instructional styles were observed and rated along dimensions of curriculum-centered and student-centered practices. Controlling for children's skills and socioeconomic status, teachers rated children as less competent when they perceived value differences with parents. These patterns were stronger for teachers who exhibited curriculum-centered, rather than student-centered, practices. The findings suggest a mechanism by which some children from low-income families enter a path of diminished expectations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The use of damage concepts in component life assessment

The damage concepts introduced by Kachanov several decades ago have rarely been used in practical application, in spite of their simplicity. Because there are no alternatives of note to Kachanov's ideas, this paper re-examines the basic premises involved in damage concepts, with a view to deriving results which will be credible to those responsible for component life management. This has led to possible schemes for economical data acquisition as well as to simplified life assessment procedures which are described in the paper.

For metallurgically stable materials, long term creep strain and rupture data can be described simply in terms of two material constants and the results from short term tests for initial creep rates and strength. These data are all bounded by a single term β which depends on the stress level in relation to the short term strength. Examples are given for stiffness and strength reductions caused by damage. A simple relationship between current strain rate and remaining life should be of use in routine plant measurements.     

Generalization in multi-layer networks of Sigma-pi units

This paper investigates a method for predicting the generalization error that a multi-layer network of Sigma-pi units will, on average, exhibit. Theoretical values are compared with those obtained by the computer simulation of small networks learning parity and contiguity functions.     

Automatic and Efficient Human Pose Estimation for Sign Language Videos

We present a fully automatic arm and hand tracker that detects joint positions over continuous sign language video sequences of more than an hour in length. To achieve this, we make contributions in four areas: (i) we show that the overlaid signer can be separated from the background TV broadcast using co-segmentation over all frames with a layered model; (ii) we show that joint positions (shoulders, elbows, wrists) can be predicted per-frame using a random forest regressor given only this segmentation and a colour model; (iii) we show that the random forest can be trained from an existing semi-automatic, but computationally expensive, tracker; and, (iv) introduce an evaluator to assess whether the predicted joint positions are correct for each frame. The method is applied to 20 signing footage videos with changing background, challenging imaging conditions, and for different signers. Our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art long term tracker by Buehler et al. (International Journal of Computer Vision 95:180–197, 2011), does not require the manual annotation of that work, and, after automatic initialisation, performs tracking in real-time. We also achieve superior joint localisation results to those obtained using the pose estimation method of Yang and Ramanan  (Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition, 2011).     

Dietary stearic acid and risk of cardiovascular disease: Intake,sources, digestion,and absorption

Individual FA have diverse biological effects, some of which affect the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD). In the context of food-based dietary guidance designed to reduce CVD risk, fat and FA recommendations focus on reducing saturated FA (SFA) and trans FA (TFA), and ensuring an adequate intake of unsaturated FA. Because stearic acid shares many physical properties with the other long-chain SFA but has different physiological effects, it is being evaluated as a substitute for TFA in food manufacturing. For stearic acid to become the primary replacement for TFA, it is essential that its physical properties and biological effects be well understood.     

Preparation of zeolite NaA for CO2 capture from nickel laterite residue

Zeolite NaA was successfully prepared from nickel laterite residue for the first time via a fusion-hydrothermal procedure. The structure and morphology of the as-synthesized zeolite NaA were characterized with a range of experimental techniques, such as X-ray diffraction, scanning electronic microscopy, and infrared spectroscopy. It was revealed that the structures of the produced zeolites were dependent on the molar ratios of the reactants and hydrothermal reaction conditions, so the synthesis conditions were optimized to obtain pure zeolite NaA. Adsorption of nitrogen and carbon dioxide on the prepared zeolite NaA was also measured and analyzed. The results showed that zeolite NaA could be prepared with reasonable purity, it had physicochemical properties comparable with zeolite NaA made from other methods, and it had excellent gas adsorption properties, thus demonstrating that zeolite NaA could be prepared from nickel laterite residue.