What is the Value of Home? NOT FOR SALE - West End Interventions

Many Australians today are image consumers. We fail to question the importance of lifestyle imagery created and promoted by Real Estate Agencies whom have no actual part in the physical creation of house, or indeed the intimate making of "home" through our experiences of place. Real Estate Markets dictate how, where, when and what we buy. Re-sale values, profit-making, and value-adding interfere with the crafting of a home over time as a tangible, individual, collaborative, and rich lived experience of dwelling. The "NOT FOR SALE" project is a response and critique of the dominance of real estate forces in West End within the context and unshakable presence of a booming inner-city property market. This proposal originated from an experimental dwelling in Avebury St., West End. This project has been fashioned over a period of several years primarily from recycled local materials, interconnected with the changing needs and spatial requirements of the occupants and project participants. The influence of property markets is of little concern in this home "making". The "NOT FOR SALE" project attempts to question and critique the purely financial value that we as a society place upon our homes. By appropriating and re-coding the Real Estate Signage typologies, we aim to provoke social commentary on the dominance of real estate forces in the West End suburb. There is a strong and rich tradition of anti-consumerist activist graffiti in West End. Activists re-code signs and property with political commentary and critique. The "NOT FOR SALE" project draws upon this tradition through our RRESign (Recodified Real Estate Signs): we aim to redress the dominant commercial forces associated with the single house/property. Collectively, at the scale of the street, these RRESigns will reflect a critique of street scale, amenity, and character. Finally, at the scale of the suburb, the network of RRESigns will reflect a critique of the idea of place making. Collectively, the aim of the "NOT FOR SALE" RRESign interventions is to highlight the idea of making and the material characteristics of dwelling that challenges the cultural value of commodified property, re-defining and prioritising the idea of "home". Conventional Real Estate signs use images and text to sell an idea of home: our proposed interventions sell nothing, and are rather celebrations of the joy of making tactile, handcrafted objects, and by extension, the making and crafting of home. The intimate and experiential understanding of home will be harnessed through the engagement of local residents. Community groups within West End such as Local Push can further disseminate the RRESign interventions. The signs will be constructed West End-specific materials (old signs purchased from inexpensive second-hand material merchant Reverse Garbage in Montague Rd.): turning post-consumer waste into objects of material beauty and social critique. Residents and community groups will be encouraged to place their RRESigns outside their properties and adjacent real estate signs, frustrating and recoding the existing For-Sale signs that currently dominate the West End street scape. The project is dependent on the support of the local residents, extending from a few signs in Avebury St. to a network of RRESigns throughout West End. A commentary on people's responses to the project will be linked to the www.apbv.com.au website. What is the value of home

Band gap reduction in GaNSb alloys due to the anion mismatch

The structural and optoelectronic properties in GaNxSb1–x alloys (0<=x<0.02) grown by molecular-beam epitaxy on both GaSb substrates and AlSb buffer layers on GaAs substrates are investigated. High-resolution x-ray diffraction (XRD) and reciprocal space mapping indicate that the GaNxSb1–x epilayers are of high crystalline quality and the alloy composition is found to be independent of substrate, for identical growth conditions. The band gap of the GaNSb alloys is found to decrease with increasing nitrogen content from absorption spectroscopy. Strain-induced band-gap shifts, Moss-Burstein effects, and band renormalization were ruled out by XRD and Hall measurements. The band-gap reduction is solely due to the substitution of dilute amounts of highly electronegative nitrogen for antimony, and is greater than observed in GaNAs with the same N content

Long-term optical variability of PKS 2155-304

Aims: The optical variability of the blazar PKS 2155-304 is investigated to characterise the red noise behaviour at largely different time scales from 20 days to O(>10 yrs). Methods: The long-term optical light curve of PKS 2155-304 is assembled from archival data as well as from so-far unpublished observations mostly carried out with the ROTSE-III and the ASAS robotic telescopes. A forward folding technique is used to determine the best-fit parameters for a model of a power law with a break in the power spectral density function (PSD). The best-fit parameters are estimated using a maximum-likelihood method with simulated light curves in conjunction with the Lomb Scargle Periodogram (LSP) and the first-order Structure Function (SF). In addition, a new approach based upon the so-called Multiple Fragments Variance Function (MFVF) is introduced and compared to the other methods. Simulated light curves have been used to confirm the reliability of these methods as well as to estimate the uncertainties of the best-fit parameters. Results: The light curve is consistent with the assumed broken power-law PSD. All three methods agree within the estimated uncertainties with the MFVF providing the most accurate results. The red-noise behaviour of the PSD in frequency f follows a power law with f^-{\beta}, {\beta}=1.8 +0.1/-0.2 and a break towards f^0 at frequencies lower than f_min=(2.7 +2.2/-1.6 yrs)^-1.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, the ROTSE-light curve can be downloaded from http://vizier.cfa.harvard.edu/viz-bin/VizieR?-source=J/A+A/531/A12

Damage function for historic paper. Part I: Fitness for use

Background In heritage science literature and in preventive conservation practice, damage functions are used to model material behaviour and specifically damage (unacceptable change), as a result of the presence of a stressor over time. For such functions to be of use in the context of collection management, it is important to define a range of parameters, such as who the stakeholders are (e.g. the public, curators, researchers), the mode of use (e.g. display, storage, manual handling), the long-term planning horizon (i.e. when in the future it is deemed acceptable for an item to become damaged or unfit for use), and what the threshold of damage is, i.e. extent of physical change assessed as damage. Results In this paper, we explore the threshold of fitness for use for archival and library paper documents used for display or reading in the context of access in reading rooms by the general public. Change is considered in the context of discolouration and mechanical deterioration such as tears and missing pieces: forms of physical deterioration that accumulate with time in libraries and archives. We also explore whether the threshold fitness for use is defined differently for objects perceived to be of different value, and for different modes of use. The data were collected in a series of fitness-for-use workshops carried out with readers/visitors in heritage institutions using principles of Design of Experiments. Conclusions The results show that when no particular value is pre-assigned to an archival or library document, missing pieces influenced readers/visitors’ subjective judgements of fitness-for-use to a greater extent than did discolouration and tears (which had little or no influence). This finding was most apparent in the display context in comparison to the reading room context. The finding also best applied when readers/visitors were not given a value scenario (in comparison to when they were asked to think about the document having personal or historic value). It can be estimated that, in general, items become unfit when text is evidently missing. However, if the visitor/reader is prompted to think of a document in terms of its historic value, then change in a document has little impact on fitness for use

The ROTSE-III Robotic Telescope System

The observation of a prompt optical flash from GRB990123 convincingly demonstrated the value of autonomous robotic telescope systems. Pursuing a program of rapid follow-up observations of gamma-ray bursts, the Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment (ROTSE) has developed a next-generation instrument, ROTSE-III, that will continue the search for fast optical transients. The entire system was designed as an economical robotic facility to be installed at remote sites throughout the world. There are seven major system components: optics, optical tube assembly, CCD camera, telescope mount, enclosure, environmental sensing & protection and data acquisition. Each is described in turn in the hope that the techniques developed here will be useful in similar contexts elsewhere.Comment: 19 pages, including 4 figures. To be published in PASP in January, 2003. PASP Number IP02-11

Band anticrossing in GaNxSb1–x

Fourier transform infrared absorption measurements are presented from the dilute nitride semiconductor GaNSb with nitrogen incorporations between 0.2% and 1.0%. The divergence of transitions from the valence band to E– and E+ can be seen with increasing nitrogen incorporation, consistent with theoretical predictions. The GaNSb band structure has been modeled using a five-band k·p Hamiltonian and a band anticrossing fitting has been obtained using a nitrogen level of 0.78 eV above the valence band maximum and a coupling parameter of 2.6 eV

Systematic Condition in a NCAA-I Collegiate Soccer Player

Objective: The purpose of this case study is to inform athletic trainers of a systematic disease not common in our patient population. Background: The athlete, a twenty-one YO, 160 lb, 69 inch female NCAA-I collegiate soccer goalie presented with complaint of bilateral elbow and knee joint pain and stiffness along with tender red itchy bumps on the anterior aspect of her shins. The athlete had flu-like symptoms and a URI prior to this complaint. The athlete has a history of anemia, mononucleosis, and streptococcal. Differential Diagnosis: Rheumatoid arthritis, lymphoma, HIV/aids, erythema nodosum, lupus, Lyme disease. Treatment: The athlete sought out multiple medical evaluations to treat the condition; including the ER. Multiple tests were run to rule out strep among other things. The athlete received various prescriptions to treat fatigue, infection, inflammation, and pain. Uniqueness: Erythema nodosum is a rare disorder that affects approximately 1-5 per 100,000 people per year. Typically seen in the female 25-40 year old population, the cause is usually idiopathic; however, the most common cause is streptococcal pharyngitis.1-6 Conclusion: This case demonstrates the awareness of a systematic condition that could be present within the athletic population. With this information, clinicians can better diagnose and treat erythema nodosum along with awareness of etiologies causing the condition

Cervical radiofrequency Neurotomy reduces psychological features in individuals with chronic whiplash symptoms

Background: Individuals with chronic whiplash associated disorder (WAD) demonstrate various psychological features. It has previously been demonstrated that cervical radiofrequency neurotomy (cRFN) resolves psychological distress and anxiety. It is unknown if cRFN also improves or reduces a broader spectrum of psychological substrates now commonly identified in chronic whiplash, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and pain catastrophizing