‘Beijing bling’: creative details and consumer choices in contemporary China : an interview with Hung Huang

This edited interview with Hung Huang, CEO of China Interactive Media Group (CIMG), was conducted by Lucy Montgomery in Beijing on 12 August 2005. It was done as part of the ARC Discovery research project, Internationalising Creative Industries: China, the WTO and the Knowledge Economy, led by John Hartley. That project is investigating the development of creative industries in China by focusing on a number of creative services including fashion magazines. Huang’s group publishes five fashion magazines in China, including i-Look, Youth International (Qingnian Yizu), which is the Chinese edition of Seventeen (originally founded by TV-Guide mogul Walter Annenberg), and the Beijing and Shanghai versions of London’s Time Out. It also produces TV programs under the same media brands. The company is based in the stylish Bauhaus-designed former factory 798-Space in the district of Dashanzi, Beijing (see www.798space.com). Huang went to school in Greenwich Village and graduated from Vassar College in New York. She is the daughter of Zhang Hanzhi, who was Mao Zedong’s personal English teacher, and stepdaughter of Qiao Guanhua, Foreign Minister of China during the 1970s at the time of the Nixon visit. Her book My Abnormal Life sold 200,000 copies in China.

Model Based Estimating System for Civil Concrete Structures

An earlier CRC-CI project on ‘automatic estimating’ (AE) has shown the key benefit of model-based design methodologies in building design and construction to be the provision of timely quantitative cost evaluations. Furthermore, using AE during design improves design options, and results in improved design turn-around times, better design quality and/or lower costs. However, AEs for civil engineering structures do not exist; and research partners in the CRC-CI expressed interest in exploring the development of such a process. This document reports on these investigations. The central objective of the study was to evaluate the benefits and costs of developing an AE for concrete civil engineering works. By studying existing documents and through interviews with design engineers, contractors and estimators, we have established that current civil engineering practices (mainly roads/bridges) do not use model-based planning/design. Drawings are executed in 2D and only completed at the end of lengthy planning/design project management lifecycle stages. We have also determined that estimating plays two important, but different roles. The first is part of project management (which we have called macro level estimating). Estimating in this domain sets project budgets, controls quality delivery and contains costs. The second role is estimating during planning/design (micro level estimating). The difference between the two roles is that the former is performed at the end of various lifecycle stages, whereas the latter is performed at any suitable time during planning/design.

Multiple-choice versus short-response items: Differences in omit behavior

The overall rate of omission of items for 28,331 17 year old Australian students on a high stakes test of achievement in the common elements or cognitive skills of the senior school curriculum is reported for a subtest in multiple choice format and a subtest in short response format. For the former, the omit rates were minuscule and there was no significant difference by gender or by type of school attended. For the latter, where an item can be 'worth' up to five times that of a single multiple choice item, the omit rates were between 10 and 20 times that for multiple choice and the difference between male and female omit rate was significant as was the difference between students from government and non-government schools. For both formats, females from single sex schools omitted significantly fewer items than did females from co-educational schools. Some possible explanations of omit behaviour are alluded to.

Forecasting trends in the Brisbane central business district office market

The Queensland Department of Public Works (DPW) holds a significant interest in the Brisbane Central Business District (CBD) in controlling approximately 20 percent of the office space within its confines. This comprises a total of 333,903 square metres of space, of which 170,111 square metres is owned and 163,792 square metres is leased from the private sector. The department’s nominal ownership extends to several enduring, landmark buildings as well as several modern office towers. The portfolio includes the oldest building in the CBD, being the former Commissariat Stores building and one of the newest, a 15,000 square metre office tower under construction at 33 Charlotte Street.

Gardens le grande

The gardens of Versailles are a prime example of the beauty that can be attained where art and horticulture meld on a truly grand scale. Carrying on that tradition in the former veggie garden of the French palace is one of the world's most prestigious landscape architecture schools. Julian Raxworthy, a senior lecturer in landscape architecture at Queensland University of Technology recently taught a workshop at the Versailles school. As he explains, the concepts that underlie the school's teaching and the formal grandeur of the gardens of Versailles continue to be as innovative and relevant today as they were in the 17th century.

Institutional problems of the emerging scientific community in Iran

This article attempts to explore the concept of scientific community at the macro-national level in the context of Iran. Institutionalisation of science and its professional growth has been constrained by several factors. The article first conceptualises the notion of science community as found in the literature in the context of Iran, and attempts to map through some indicators. The main focus, however, lies in mapping some institutional problems through empirical research. This was undertaken in 2002–04 in order to analyse the structure of the scientific community in Iran in the ‘exact sciences’ (mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and earth sciences). The empirical work was done in two complementary perspectives: through a questionnaire and statistical analysis of it, and through semistructured interviews with the researchers. There are number of problems confronting scientists in Iran. Facilities provided by institutions is one of the major problems of research. Another is the tenuous cooperation among scientists. This is reported by most of the researchers, who deplore the lack of cooperation among their group. Relationships are mostly with the Ph.D. students and only marginally with colleagues. Our research shows that the more brilliant the scientists, the more frustrated they are from scientific institutions in Iran. Medium-range researchers seem to be much happier about the scientific institution to which they belong than the brighter scholars. The scientific institutions in Iran seem to be built for the needs of the former rather than the latter. These institutions seem not to play a positive role in the case of the best scientists. On the whole, many ingredients of the scientific community, at least at its inception, are present among Iranian scientists: the strong desire for scientific achievement in spite of personal, institutional and economic problems.

The relationship of loneliness and social anxiety with children’s and adolescents’ online communication

Children and adolescents now communicate online to form and/or maintain relationships with friends, family, and strangers. Relationships in “real life” are important for children’s and adolescents’ psychosocial development; however, they can be difficult for those who experience feelings of loneliness and/or social anxiety. The aim of this study was to investigate differences in usage of online communication patterns between children and adolescents with and without self-reported loneliness and social anxiety. Six hundred and twenty-six students aged between 10-16 years completed a survey on the amount of time they spent communicating online, the topics they discussed, the partners they engaged with, and their purposes for communicating over the Internet. Participants were administered a shortened version of the UCLA Loneliness Scale and an abbreviated sub-scale of the Social Anxiety Scale for Adolescents (SAS-A). Additionally, age and gender differences in usage of the aforementioned online communication patterns were examined across the entire sample. Findings revealed that children and adolescents who self-reported being lonely communicated online significantly more frequently about personal things and intimate topics than did those who did not self-report being lonely. The former were motivated to use online communication significantly more frequently to compensate for their weaker social skills to meet new people. Results suggest that Internet usage allows them to fulfill critical needs of social interactions, self-disclosure, and identity exploration. Future research, however, should explore whether or not the benefits derived from online communication may also facilitate lonely children’s and adolescents’ offline social relationships.

Humanistic science education : moves from within and challenges from without

For a number of years now it has been evident that the major issue facing science educators in the more developed countries of the world is the quantitative decline in enrolments in the senior secondary sciences, particularly the physical sciences, and in the number of higher achieving students applying for places in universities to undertake further studies in science. The deep malaise in school science to which these quantitative measures point has been elucidated by more qualitative studies of the students’ experience of studying science in secondary school in several of these countries (Sweden, Lindahl (2003); England, Simon and Osborne (2002); and Australia, Lyons (2005)). Remarkably concordant descriptions of these experiences can be summarized as: School science is: • transmission of knowledge from the teacher or the textbook to the students. • about content that is irrelevant and boring to our lives. • difficult to learn in comparison with other subjects Incidentally, the Australian study only involved consistently high achieving students; but even so, most of them found science more difficult than other more interesting subjects, and concluded that further science studies should be avoided unless they were needed for some career purpose. Other more representative confirmations of negative evaluations of the science curricula across Australia (and in particular states) are now available in Australia, from the large scale reviews of Goodrum, Hackling and Rennie (2001) and from the TIMSS (2002). The former reported that well under half of secondary students find the science at school relevant to my future, useful ion everyday life, deals with things I am concerned with and helps me make decisions about my health.. TIMSS found that 62 and 65 % of females and males in Year 4 agree with I like learning science, but by Year 8 only 26 and 33 % still agree. Students in Japan have been doubly notably because of (a) their high performance in international measures of science achievement like TIMSS and PISA and (b) their very low response to items in these studies which relate to interest in science. Ogura (2003) reported an intra-national study of students across Years 6-9 (upper primary through Junior High); interest in a range of their subjects (including science) that make up that country’s national curriculum. There was a steady decline in interest in all these subjects which might have indicated an adolescent reaction against schooling generally. However, this study went on to ask the students a further question that is very meaningful in the Japanese context, If you discount the importance of this subject for university entrance, is it worth studying? Science and mathematics remained in decline while all the other subjects were seen more positively. It is thus ironic, at a time when some innovations in curriculum and other research-based findings are suggesting ways that these failures of school science might be corrected, to find school science under a new demands that come from quite outside science education, and which certainly do not have the correction of this malaise as a priority. The positive curricular and research findings can be characterized as moves from within science education, whereas the new demands are moves that come from without science education. In this paper I set out these two rather contrary challenges to the teaching of science as it is currently practised, and go on to suggest a way forward that could fruitfully combine the two.

A news story as big as a doctoral thesis? : deploying journalistic methodology in academic research

The purpose of this paper is to identify and recommend the emergence of an academic research methodology for Journalism the academic discipline, through reviewing various journalistic methods of research – those making up a key element in such methodology. Its focus is on journalistic styles of work employed in academic contexts especially research on mass media issues. It proposes that channelling such activity into disciplined academic forms will enhance both: allowing the former to provide more durable and deeper outcomes, injecting additional energy and intensity of purpose into the latter. It will briefly consider characteristics of research methodologies and methods, generally; characteristics of the Journalism discipline, and its relationship with mass media industries and professions. The model of journalism used here is the Western liberal stream. A proposition is made, that teaching and research in universities focused on professional preparation of journalists, has developed so that it is a mature academic discipline. Its adherents are for the most part academics with background in journalistic practice, and so able to deploy intellectual skills of journalists, while also accredited with Higher Degrees principally in humanities. Research produced in this discipline area stands to show two characteristics: (a) it employs practices used generally in academic research, e.g. qualitative research methods such as ethnographic studies or participant observation, or review of documents including archived media products, and (b) within such contexts it may use more specifically journalistic techniques, e.g. interviewing styles, reflection on practice of journalism, and in creative practice research, journalistic forms of writing – highlighting journalistic / practitioner capabilities of the author. So the Journalism discipline, as a discipline closely allied to a working profession, is described as one where individual professional skills and background preparation for media work will be applicable to academic research. In this connection the core modus operandi will be the directly research-related practices of: insistent establishment of facts, adept crafting of reportage, and economising well with time. Prospective fields for continuing research are described:- work in new media; closer investigation of relations among media producers and audiences; journalism as creative practice, and general publishing by journalists, e.g. writing histories.

Historical and Personal Perspectives on the Fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989: address to 20th anniversary forums.

The story of the fall of the Berlin Wall was an aspect of the “imagination gap” that we had to wrestle with as journalists covering the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in Europe. It was scarcely possible to believe what you found yourself reporting, and that work became a two-track process. On one hand a mass social movement was dictating the pace and direction of events; on the other, the institutional business of politics as usual, to provide a framework for all the change that was happening, had to be managed – and reported on. In later analyseds we could see, that crisis in the Soviet Union led to the crisis over the Berlin Wall; and from the fall of the Wall, came Germany’s reunification, and with that also, formation of the European Union as it is today. The government of the Federal Republic of Germany convinced its neighbours that a reunited Germany, within an expanded EU, would be a very acceptable “European Germany” -- not the leader of a “German Europe”. It committed itself financially, supporting the new Euro currency. The former communist states of Eastern Europe demanded to join and expand the EU; in order to remove themselves from the Soviet Union, enjoy human rights, and share in Western prosperity. So today, following on from the events of 1989, the European Union is an amalgam of 27 member countries, with close to 500 million citizens and accounting for 30 % of world Gross National Product.

The relationship of loneliness and social anxiety with children's and adolescents' online communication

Children and adolescents are now using online communication to form and/or maintain relationships with strangers and/or friends. Relationships in real life are important for children and adolescents in identity formation and general development. However, social relationships can be difficult for those who experience feelings of loneliness and social anxiety. The current study aimed to replicate and extend research conducted by Valkenburg and Peter (2007b), by investigating differences in online communication patterns between children and adolescents with and without selfreported loneliness and social anxiety. Six hundred and twenty-six students aged 10-16 years completed a questionnaire survey about the amount of time they engaged in online communication, the topics they discussed, who they communicated with, and their purposes of online communication. Following Valkenburg and Peter (2007b), loneliness was measured with a shortened version of the UCLA Loneliness Scale (Version 3) developed by Russell (1996), whereas social anxiety was assessed with a sub-scale of the Social Anxiety Scale for Adolescents (La Greca & Lopez, 1998). The sample was divided into four groups of children and adolescents: 220 were “non-socially anxious and non-lonely”, 139 were “socially anxious but not lonely”, 107 were “lonely but not socially anxious”, and 159 were “lonely and socially anxious”. A one-way ANOVA and chi-square tests were conducted to evaluate the aforementioned differences between these groups. The results indicated that children and adolescents who reported being lonely used online communication differently from those who did not report being lonely. Essentially, the former communicated online more frequently about personal things and intimate topics, but also to compensate for their weak social skills and to meet new people. Further analyses on gender differences within lonely children and adolescents revealed that boys and girls communicated online more frequently with different partners. It was concluded that for these vulnerable individuals online communication may fulfil needs of self-disclosure, identity exploration, and social interactions. However, future longitudinal studies combining a quantitative with a qualitative approach would better address the relationship between Internet use and psychosocial well-being. The findings also suggested the need for further exploration of how such troubled children and adolescents can use the Internet beneficially.

Managing Process Model Complexity - Part I: Concrete Syntax

While Business Process Management (BPM) is an established discipline, the increased adoption of BPM technology in recent years has introduced new challenges. One challenge concerns dealing with process model complexity in order to improve the understanding of a process model by stakeholders and process analysts. Features for dealing with this complexity can be classified in two categories: 1) those that are solely concerned with the appearance of the model, and 2) those that in essence change the structure of the model. In this paper we focus on the former category and present a collection of patterns that generalize and conceptualize various existing features. The paper concludes with a detailed analysis of the degree of support of a number of state-of-the-art languages and language implementations for these patterns.

An effective model of using negative relevance feedback for information filtering

Over the years, people have often held the hypothesis that negative feedback should be very useful for largely improving the performance of information filtering systems; however, we have not obtained very effective models to support this hypothesis. This paper, proposes an effective model that use negative relevance feedback based on a pattern mining approach to improve extracted features. This study focuses on two main issues of using negative relevance feedback: the selection of constructive negative examples to reduce the space of negative examples; and the revision of existing features based on the selected negative examples. The former selects some offender documents, where offender documents are negative documents that are most likely to be classified in the positive group. The later groups the extracted features into three groups: the positive specific category, general category and negative specific category to easily update the weight. An iterative algorithm is also proposed to implement this approach on RCV1 data collections, and substantial experiments show that the proposed approach achieves encouraging performance.

Metabolic syndrome and serum carotenoids : findings of a cross-sectional study in Queensland, Australia

Several components of the metabolic syndrome, particularly diabetes and cardiovascular disease, are known to be oxidative stress-related conditions and there is research to suggest that antioxidant nutrients may play a protective role in these conditions. Carotenoids are compounds derived primarily from plants and several have been shown to be potent antioxidant nutrients. The aim of this study was to examine the associations between metabolic syndrome status and major serum carotenoids in adult Australians. Data on the presence of the metabolic syndrome, based on International Diabetes Federation 2005 criteria, were collected from 1523 adults aged 25 years and over in six randomly selected urban centers in Queensland, Australia, using a cross-sectional study design. Weight, height, BMI, waist circumference, blood pressure, fasting and 2-hour blood glucose and lipids were determined, as well as five serum carotenoids. Mean serum alpha-carotene, beta-carotene and the sum of the five carotenoid concentrations were significantly lower (p<0.05) in persons with the metabolic syndrome (after adjusting for age, sex, education, BMI status, alcohol intake, smoking, physical activity status and vitamin/mineral use) than persons without the syndrome. Alpha, beta and total carotenoids also decreased significantly (p<0.05) with increased number of components of the metabolic syndrome, after adjusting for these confounders. These differences were significant among former smokers and non-smokers, but not in current smokers. Low concentrations of serum alpha-carotene, beta-carotene and the sum of five carotenoids appear to be associated with metabolic syndrome status. Additional research, particularly longitudinal studies, may help to determine if these associations are causally related to the metabolic syndrome, or are a result of the pathologies of the syndrome.

Printmaking as an expanding field in contemporary art practice : a case study of Japan, Australia and Thailand

This thesis proposes that contemporary printmaking, at its most significant, marks the present through reconstructing pasts and anticipating futures. It argues this through examples in the field, occurring in contexts beyond the Euramerican (Europe and North America). The arguments revolve around how the practice of a number of significant artists in Japan, Australia and Thailand has generated conceptual and formal innovations in printmaking that transcend local histories and conventions, whilst paradoxically, also building upon them and creating new meanings. The arguments do not portray the relations between contemporary and traditional art as necessarily antagonistic but rather, as productively dialectical. Furthermore, the case studies demonstrate that, in the 1980s and 1990s particularly, the studio practice of these printmakers was informed by other visual arts disciplines and reflected postmodern concerns. Departures from convention witnessed in these countries within the Asia-Pacific region shifted the field of the print into a heterogeneous and hybrid realm. The practitioners concerned (especially in Thailand) produced work that was more readily equated with performance and installation art than with printmaking per se. In Japan, the incursion of photography interrupted the decorative cast of printmaking and delivered it from a straightforward, craft-based aesthetic. In Australia, fixed notions of national identity were challenged by print practitioners through deliberate cultural rapprochements and technical contradictions (speaking across old and new languages).However time-honoured print methods were not jettisoned by any case study artists. Their re-alignment of the fundamental attributes of printmaking, in line with materialist formalism, is a core consideration of my arguments. The artists selected for in-depth analysis from these three countries are all innovators whose geographical circumstances and creative praxis drew on local traditions whilst absorbing international trends. In their radical revisionism, they acknowledged the specificity of history and place, conditions of contingency and forces of globalisation. The transformational nature of their work during the late twentieth century connects it to the postmodern ethos and to a broader artistic and cultural nexus than has hitherto been recognised in literature on the print. Emerging from former guild-based practices, they ambitiously conceived their work to be part of a continually evolving visual arts vocabulary. I argue in this thesis that artists from the Asia-Pacific region have historically broken with the hermetic and Euramerican focus that has generally characterised the field. Inadequate documentation and access to print activity outside the dominant centres of critical discourse imply that readings of postmodernism have been too limited in their scope of inquiry. Other locations offer complexities of artistic practice where re-alignments of customary boundaries are often the norm. By addressing innovative activity in Japan, Australia and Thailand, this thesis exposes the need for a more inclusive theoretical framework and wider global reach than currently exists for ‘printmaking’.