Training and Learning Bonus for Postgraduate Scholarship Holders

As part Australian Government’s Household Stimulus Package, postgraduate scholarship holders are now also eligible for a one off payment of $950. More information can be found through centerlink:
http://www.centrelink.gov.au/internet/internet.nsf/individuals/hsp_postgrad.htm

Since scholarships are tax free, many students missed out on the regular $900 package as no tax was paid during the 2007-2008 fiancial year. Hoorah PhD friends, you can now get $950 ($50 more than regular folk)! Only catch that's made some fellow PhD colleagues ineligible yet again is the $20,427 lower bound on other/non APA/non APAI/non NHMRC scholarships. The Melbourne University Scholarships Office is emailing/has emailed letters of proof to scholarship recipients.

As for me, I received my $900 a couple of weeks ago; I worked for 4 months at Google during the 2007-2008 financial year, bumping me into the range where I was eligible for the regular stimulus incentive. I don't think I can receive two packages. Although, it doesn't explicitly exclude me as I am quite sure I did not receive a Training and Learning Bonus or a Back to School Bonus payment. I tried calling centrelink but the English lines are constantly busy and it felt like I was put on hold indefinitely on the multilingual/Chinese language lines.

Recognition of Authorship at Melbourne University

What constitutes a substantial contribution sufficient to warrant recognition as an author/co-author?

Minimum requirement for authorship should be in accord with the 'Vancouver Protocol'. Authorship is substantial participation, where the following conditions are met:

1. conception and design, or analysis and interpretation of data; and
   
2. drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and
   
3. final approval of the version to be published.
   

Participation solely in the acquisition of funding or the collection of data does not justify authorship.

From Student FAQ in relation to research at The University of Melbourne.

Approximation Algorithm vs Heuristic

Approximation algorithm: identifies approximate solutions to problems (mostly often NP-complete and NP-hard problems) to a certain bound. Or maybe provide optimality in only certain situations.

Heuristic: A computational method that uses trial and error methods to approximate a solution for computationally difficult problems. It does not aim to find the optimal solution, sacrificing optimality for improved runtime.

NP complexities

As an extension to the work that I have completed in January for my last paper submission, I wish to show the problem itself is NP-hard. But first is first, I have to learn what this NP business is and analyse some proofs. So I am currently reading about NP problems. I borrowed a very old looking book by Johnson from the library that looks like it will be very useful. In the decomposition of my A matrix into B and C, we would like to show that the problem itself is NP-Hard. To do so would be very good because we can quit using algorithms to solve it and work on heuristics.

In order to show the problem is NP-Hard, there are two steps that need to be performed:

1. Show Problem X is NP
   
2. Reduce an existing NP-Complete problem to it.
   

Task 1 is often simple. To accomplish task two, an arbitrary instance of a NP-Complete problem needs to be transformed into an instance of X such that the answer in the NP-Complete problem is positive if and only if the answer to the corresponding X is positive.

This is where the Johnson book comes in, to find a problem to reduce.