Digitization of the Australian Parliamentary Debates, 1998-2022.

Public knowledge of what is said in parliament is a tenet of democracy, and a critical resource for political science research. In Australia, following the British tradition, the written record of what is said in parliament is known as Hansard. While the Australian Hansard has always been publicly available, it has been difficult to use for the purpose of large-scale macro- and micro-level text analysis because it has only been available as PDFs or XMLs. Following the lead of the Linked Parliamentary Data project which achieved this for Canada, we provide a new, comprehensive, high-quality, rectangular database that captures proceedings of the Australian parliamentary debates from 1998 to 2022. The database is publicly available and can be linked to other datasets such as election results. The creation and accessibility of this database enables the exploration of new questions and serves as a valuable resource for both researchers and policymakers.

Reproducibility of COVID-19 pre-prints.

To examine the reproducibility of COVID-19 research, we create a dataset of pre-prints posted to arXiv, bioRxiv, and medRxiv between 28 January 2020 and 30 June 2021 that are related to COVID-19. We extract the text from these pre-prints and parse them looking for keyword markers signaling the availability of the data and code underpinning the pre-print. For the pre-prints that are in our sample, we are unable to find markers of either open data or open code for 75% of those on arXiv, 67% of those on bioRxiv, and 79% of those on medRxiv.

Study of the effect of excited state concentration on photodegradation of the p3ht polymer.

We have studied photoinduced reduction of absorption and emission in p3ht, a semiconducting polymer, and found that the rate of photodegradation (destruction of the constituent thiophene rings) does not correlate with the luminescence intensity and, correspondingly, does not depend on the excited state concentration. This conclusion rules out Purcell enhancement of radiative decay rate as a possible explanation of the recently discovered reduction of the p3ht photodegradation rate in the vicinity of metallic substrates and lamellar metal-dielectric metamaterials.

Improving petroleum contaminated land remediation decision-making through the MCA weighting process.

Internationally petroleum contamination is widespread, posing serious environmental risks including surface and groundwater contamination, thus remediation is essential. The implementation of remediation options is becoming more complex with the increasing influence of stakeholders on the outcome of decision-making processes. Acceptance of remediation schemes during implementation can be increased by involving stakeholders and the public in the decision-making stage. In petroleum remediation involving multiple stakeholders, Multicriteria Analysis has been employed due to its ability to incorporate the preferences of each stakeholder through weighting. The research focused on investigating ways to improve the weighting process. The study demonstrated the utility of SWING, and determined which type of participant and how many participants to include in the decision process, through the application of ELECTRE III and Weighted Summation. It was recommended that a mixture of stakeholders, the public and experts be involved. The total number of participants will be limited by the choice of participatory and weighting methods. The careful selection of participants, as well as the choice of participatory and weighting methods, can minimize the subjectivity involved in MCA weighting, thereby lending decisions in petroleum remediation greater legitimacy.