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From the Director |
 We hope you enjoy our first electronic newsletter and find it informative. MASCOS is primarily a research organisation, but much of what we do can be applied to some of the most pressing concerns of modern society.
In this issue, we discuss our activities in the area of climate change. Professorial Fellow Ian Enting is currently working through a recently published book, which has been seized upon by the climate change deniers as vindicating their position. Enting points out the large number of factual errors that render invalid the author's conclusions.
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In Industry |
 Recent activities in MASCOS's industry outreach are highlighted in three current projects which relate to two broad and diverse industries; Transport and Mining.
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Heaven + Earth: Breakthrough or Beat-Up? |
 In his contribution to the ‘Key Thinkers’ seminar series at The University of Melbourne, MASCOS Professorial Fellow Ian Enting, spoke about the contested but majorly influential work of independent scientist, author, researcher, environmentalist, and futurist James Lovelock. Lovelock is the originator of the Gaia theory of earth as a kind of self-regulating superorganism.
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Indian Ocean causes Big Dry |
 MASCOS researchers have revealed the causes of south-eastern Australia's longest, most severe and most damaging drought, with the surprise finding that this originates far away in the Indian Ocean.
Dr. Caroline Ummenhofer, a MASCOS Postdoc Research Fellow, in collaboration with MASCOS Chief Investigator Matthew England and collaborators from CSIRO,
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High Performance Computing |
 Rapid calculations for applications such as image processing, or rendering graphics for high end computer games can be performed with the use of Graphic Processing Units (GPUs). For suitable applications, GPUs can perform calculations somewhere in the range of 5-50 times as fast as Central Processing Units (CPUs) - the 'brains' of modern computers.
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Maths Helps Cure Disease |
 A major contemporary application of mathematics and statistics is to the discovery of genetic variants that influence disease including various types of cancer. With the completion of the human genome project in 2005, and the resulting catalogue of approximately 20,000 to 25,000 genes on the human genome, it has been widely anticipated that significant improvements in medical treatment and diagnosis will result.
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MASCOS Researcher's Achievements Recognised |
 Four of MASCOS's Chief Investigators were recently honoured by The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) with the grade of Fellow - SIAM's highest honour, including Richard Brent (ANU), Tony Guttmann (MU), David Hill (ANU) and Ian Sloan (UNSW).
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