Television’s greatest hits : compiling a television studies canon

You’ve got a thirteen week course to take students through the most important programs in television history. The programs should be the most popular, the most successful, the most important, giving students a sense of what audiences like, what is possible in the medium, and what counts more generally as a successful television program. The course is based around screenings of the programs. Which programs are you going to choose?

Discussions in space

In-place digital augmentation enhances the experience of physical spaces through digital technologies that are directly accessible within that space. This can take place in many forms and ways, e.g., through location-aware applications running on the individuals’ portable devices, such as smart phones, or through large static devices, such as public displays, which are located within the augmented space and accessible by everyone. The hypothesis of this study is that in-place digital augmentation, in the context of civic participation, where citizens collaboratively aim at making their community or city a better place, offers significant new benefits, because it allows access to services or information that are currently inaccessible to urban dwellers where and when they are needed: in place. This paper describes our work in progress deploying a public screen to promote civic issues in public, urban spaces, and to encourage public feedback and discourse via mobile phones.

Whither culture? Australian horror films and the limitations of cultural policy

Cultural policy that attempts to foster the Australian film industry’s growth and development in an era of globalisation is coming under increasing pressure. Throughout the 2000s, there has been a substantial boom in Australian horror films led by ‘runaway’ horror film Saw (2004), Wolf Creek (2005), and Undead (2003), achieving varying levels of popularity and commercial success worldwide. However, emerging within a national cinema driven by public subsidy and valuing ‘quality’ and ‘cultural content’ over ‘entertainment’ and ‘commercialism’, horror films have generally been antithetical to these objectives. Consequently, the recent boom in horror films has occurred largely outside the purview and subvention of cultural policy. This paper argues that global forces and emerging production and distribution models are challenging the ‘narrowness’ of cultural policy – a narrowness that mandates a particular film culture, circumscribes certain notions of value and limits the variety of films produced domestically. Despite their low-culture status, horror films have been well suited to the Australian film industry’s financial limitations, they are a growth strategy for producers, and a training ground for emerging filmmakers.

The reliability and validity of the Severity of Dependence Scale for detecting cannabis dependence in psychosis.

Aims: To determine the reliability and validity of the Severity of Dependence Scale (SDS) for detecting cannabis dependence in a large sample of in-patients with a schizophrenia spectrum disorder. Design: Cross-sectional study. Participants: Participants were 153 in-patients with a schizophrenia spectrum disorder in Brisbane, Australia. Measurements: Participants were administered the SDS for cannabis dependence in the past 12 months. The presence of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Version-IV (DSM-IV) cannabis dependence in the previous 12 months was assessed using the Comprehensive International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI). Findings: The SDS had high levels of internal consistency and strong construct and concurrent validity. Individuals with a score of ≥2 on the SDS were nearly 30 times more likely to have DSM-IV cannabis dependence. The SDS was the strongest predictor of DSM-IV cannabis dependence after controlling for other predictor variables. Conclusions: The SDS is a brief, valid and reliable screen for cannabis dependence among people with psychosis

Rates of change : digital distribution as a disruptive technology in the film industry

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The new lows : representing Asian-Australians on television

This project utilises creative practice as research, and involves writing and discussing four sample episodes of a proposed six-part dramatic, black-comedy1 television mini-series titled The New Lows. Combined, the creative project and accompanying exegesis seeks to illuminate and interrogate some of the inherent concerns, pitfalls and politics encountered in writing original Asian-Australian characters for television. Moreover, this thesis seeks to develop and deliberate on characters that would expand, shift and extend concepts of stereotyping and authenticity as they are used in creative writing for television. The protagonists of The New Lows are the contemporary and dysfunctional Asian-Australian Lo family: the Hong Kong immigrants John and Dorothy, and their Australian-born children Wendy, Simon and Tommy. Collectively, they struggle to manage the family business: a decaying suburban Chinese restaurant called Sunny Days, which is stumbling towards imminent commercial death. At the same time, each of the characters must negotiate their own personal catastrophes, which they hide from fellow family members out of shame and fear. Although there is a narrative arc to the series, I have also endeavoured to write each episode as a selfcontained story. Written alongside the creative works is an exegetical component. Through the paradigm of Asian-Australian studies, the exegesis examines the writing process and narrative content of The New Lows, alongside previous representations of Asians on Australian and international television and screen. Concepts discussed include stereotype, ethnicity, otherness, hybridity and authenticity. However, the exegesis also seeks to question the dominant cultural paradigms through which these issues are predominantly discussed. These investigations are particularly relevant, since The New Lows draws upon a suite of characters commonly considered to be stereotypical in Asian-Australian representations.

It's time to be more serious about activating youngsters : lessons for childhood obesity

The epidemic of obesity is impacting an increasing proportion of children, adolescents and adults with a common feature being low levels of physical activity (PA). Despite having more knowledge than ever before about the benefits of PA for health and the growth and development of youngsters, we are only paying lip-service to the development of motor skills in children. Fun, enjoyment and basic skills are the essential underpinnings of meaningful participation in PA. A concurrent problem is the reported increase in sitting time with the most common sedentary behaviors being TV viewing and other screen-based games. Limitations of time have contributed to a displacement of active behaviors with inactive pursuits, which has contributed to reductions in activity energy expenditure. To redress the energy imbalance in overweight and obese children, we urgently need out-of-the-box multisectoral solutions. There is little to be gained from a shame and blame mentality where individuals, their parents, teachers and other groups are singled out as causes of the problem. Such an approach does little more than shift attention from the main game of prevention and management of the condition, which requires a concerted, whole-of-government approach (in each country). The failure to support and encourage all young people to participate in regular PA will increase the chance that our children will live shorter and less healthy lives than their parents. In short, we need novel environmental approaches to foster a systematic increase in PA. This paper provides examples of opportunities and challenges for PA strategies to prevent obesity with a particular emphasis on the school and home settings.

Generating Flash files of Your Lectures: Good Practice Strategies Helping Students Engage with Their Learning

Our students come from diverse backgrounds. They need flexibility in their learning. First year students tend to worry when they miss lectures or part of lectures. Having the lecture as an on line resource allows students to miss a lecture without stressing about it and to be more relaxed in the lecture, knowing that anything they may miss will be available later. The resource: The Windows based program from Blueberry Software (not Blackberry!) - BB Flashback - allows the simultaneous recording of the computer screen together with the audio, as well as Webcam recording. Editing capabilities include adding pause buttons, graphics and text to the file before exporting it in a flash file. Any diagrams drawn on the board or shown via visualiser can be photographed and easily incorporated. The audio from the file can be extracted if required to be posted as podcast. Exporting modes other than Flash are also available, allowing vodcasting if you wish. What you will need: - the recording software: it can be installed on the lecture hall computer just prior to lecture if needed - a computer: either the ones in lecture halls, especially if fitted with audio recording, or a laptop (I have used audio recording via Bluetooth for mobility). Feedback from students has been positive and will be presented on the poster.

A brush with the real world : the future of inertial motion capture in live performance

3D Motion capture is a medium that plots motion, typically human motion, converting it into a form that can be represented digitally. It is a fast evolving field and recent inertial technology may provide new artistic possibilities for its use in live performance. Although not often used in this context, motion capture has a combination of attributes that can provide unique forms of collaboration with performance arts. The inertial motion capture suit used for this study has orientation sensors placed at strategic points on the body to map body motion. Its portability, real-time performance, ease of use, and its immunity from line-of-sight problems inherent in optical systems suggest it would work well as a live performance technology. Many animation techniques can be used in real-time. This research examines a broad cross-section of these techniques using four practice-led cases to assess the suitability of inertial motion capture to live performance. Although each case explores different visual possibilities, all make use of the performativity of the medium, using either an improvisational format or interactivity among stage, audience and screen that would be difficult to emulate any other way. A real-time environment is not capable of reproducing the depth and sophistication of animation people have come to expect through media. These environments take many hours to render. In time the combination of what can be produced in real-time and the tools available in a 3D environment will no doubt create their own tree of aesthetic directions in live performance. The case study looks at the potential of interactivity that this technology offers.

Embedded engagements : the challenge of creative practice research to the humanities

This article explores the opportunities and challenges surrounding a viable cross-disciplinary engagement between the Humanities disciplines and the Creative Practice disciplines within the innovative context of the Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology. This will involve a charting of the intersection of the emerging field of creative practice-led research with various disciplines in the Humanities such as cultural studies. The potential for a reciprocal, transformative process in these creative fields will be addressed. Several examples of postgraduate students’ research will be foregrounded as case studies of the issues involved in fostering a genuine cultural critique both within and through creative practice. Some observers may argue that the research higher degree creative practitioner in effect looks outward from the symbolic material forms being created, in search of an interpretative paradigm, thereby trawling the Humanities for a theory. Several current debates within the postgraduate research arena regarding the balance between the theoretical exegesis and the creative work (e.g. performance, drama, dance, visual art, creative writing, film and screen production, music, interactive media etc) will also be critically examined.

A shameful spectacle

The linguistics of violence in film and on television is a hotly debated topic, especially whenever outrageously violent crimes are committed in the community. The debate tends to proceed thus: was the perpetrator addicted to watching violent films and videos, and if so, did the language of mediated violence translate into the language of everyday action, blurring the boundaries between fantasy and reality? The cause—effect relationship between fantasies enacted on screen and horrific real-life crimes has never been proven scientifically, despite endless governmental inquiries and many attempts by academics to discover a causation formula. I will not be looking so much at the vexed question of the relationship between stylized violence on celluloid and real violence in a community. Rather, I wish to explore the nature of a particular form of mediated, gendered violence through an analysis of the language of several key films made in the past decade focusing on the violent crime of rape: Hollywood films The Accused (1988), Casualties of War (1989), Thelma and Louise (1991), Strange Days (1996), and the Australian films Shame (1988) and The Boys (1998). In this way, I wish to show how rape is depicted linguistically in film, and how such films may actually give solutions to this abhorrent kind of violence rather than thrill the viewer vicariously, or, in a worst case scenario, stimulate people to further violence.

Peripheral ocular monochromatic aberrations

Aberrations affect image quality of the eye away from the line of sight as well as along it. High amounts of lower order aberrations are found in the peripheral visual field and higher order aberrations change away from the centre of the visual field. Peripheral resolution is poorer than that in central vision, but peripheral vision is important for movement and detection tasks (for example driving) which are adversely affected by poor peripheral image quality. Any physiological process or intervention that affects axial image quality will affect peripheral image quality as well. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of accommodation, myopia, age, and refractive interventions of orthokeratology, laser in situ keratomileusis and intraocular lens implantation on the peripheral aberrations of the eye. This is the first systematic investigation of peripheral aberrations in a variety of subject groups. Peripheral aberrations can be measured either by rotating a measuring instrument relative to the eye or rotating the eye relative to the instrument. I used the latter as it is much easier to do. To rule out effects of eye rotation on peripheral aberrations, I investigated the effects of eye rotation on axial and peripheral cycloplegic refraction using an open field autorefractor. For axial refraction, the subjects fixated at a target straight ahead, while their heads were rotated by ±30º with a compensatory eye rotation to view the target. For peripheral refraction, the subjects rotated their eyes to fixate on targets out to ±34° along the horizontal visual field, followed by measurements in which they rotated their heads such that the eyes stayed in the primary position relative to the head while fixating at the peripheral targets. Oblique viewing did not affect axial or peripheral refraction. Therefore it is not critical, within the range of viewing angles studied, if axial and peripheral refractions are measured with rotation of the eye relative to the instrument or rotation of the instrument relative to the eye. Peripheral aberrations were measured using a commercial Hartmann-Shack aberrometer. A number of hardware and software changes were made. The 1.4 mm range limiting aperture was replaced by a larger aperture (2.5 mm) to ensure all the light from peripheral parts of the pupil reached the instrument detector even when aberrations were high such as those occur in peripheral vision. The power of the super luminescent diode source was increased to improve detection of spots passing through the peripheral pupil. A beam splitter was placed between the subjects and the aberrometer, through which they viewed an array of targets on a wall or projected on a screen in a 6 row x 7 column matrix of points covering a visual field of 42 x 32. In peripheral vision, the pupil of the eye appears elliptical rather than circular; data were analysed off-line using custom software to determine peripheral aberrations. All analyses in the study were conducted for 5.0 mm pupils. Influence of accommodation on peripheral aberrations was investigated in young emmetropic subjects by presenting fixation targets at 25 cm and 3 m (4.0 D and 0.3 D accommodative demands, respectively). Increase in accommodation did not affect the patterns of any aberrations across the field, but there was overall negative shift in spherical aberration across the visual field of 0.10 ± 0.01m. Subsequent studies were conducted with the targets at a 1.2 m distance. Young emmetropes, young myopes and older emmetropes exhibited similar patterns of astigmatism and coma across the visual field. However, the rate of change of coma across the field was higher in young myopes than young emmetropes and was highest in older emmetropes amongst the three groups. Spherical aberration showed an overall decrease in myopes and increase in older emmetropes across the field, as compared to young emmetropes. Orthokeratology, spherical IOL implantation and LASIK altered peripheral higher order aberrations considerably, especially spherical aberration. Spherical IOL implantation resulted in an overall increase in spherical aberration across the field. Orthokeratology and LASIK reversed the direction of change in coma across the field. Orthokeratology corrected peripheral relative hypermetropia through correcting myopia in the central visual field. Theoretical ray tracing demonstrated that changes in aberrations due to orthokeratology and LASIK can be explained by the induced changes in radius of curvature and asphericity of the cornea. This investigation has shown that peripheral aberrations can be measured with reasonable accuracy with eye rotation relative to the instrument. Peripheral aberrations are affected by accommodation, myopia, age, orthokeratology, spherical intraocular lens implantation and laser in situ keratomileusis. These factors affect the magnitudes and patterns of most aberrations considerably (especially coma and spherical aberration) across the studied visual field. The changes in aberrations across the field may influence peripheral detection and motion perception. However, further research is required to investigate how the changes in aberrations influence peripheral detection and motion perception and consequently peripheral vision task performance.

Protein complementation assay as a display system for screening protein libraries in the intracellular environment

A wide range of screening strategies have been employed to isolate antibodies and other proteins with specific attributes, including binding affinity, specificity, stability and improved expression. However, there remains no high-throughput system to screen for target-binding proteins in a mammalian, intracellular environment. Such a system would allow binding reagents to be isolated against intracellular clinical targets such as cell signalling proteins associated with tumour formation (p53, ras, cyclin E), proteins associated with neurodegenerative disorders (huntingtin, betaamyloid precursor protein), and various proteins crucial to viral replication (e.g. HIV-1 proteins such as Tat, Rev and Vif-1), which are difficult to screen by phage, ribosome or cell-surface display. This study used the β-lactamase protein complementation assay (PCA) as the display and selection component of a system for screening a protein library in the cytoplasm of HEK 293T cells. The colicin E7 (ColE7) and Immunity protein 7 (Imm7) *Escherichia coli* proteins were used as model interaction partners for developing the system. These proteins drove effective β-lactamase complementation, resulting in a signal-to-noise ratio (9:1 – 13:1) comparable to that of other β-lactamase PCAs described in the literature. The model Imm7-ColE7 interaction was then used to validate protocols for library screening. Single positive cells that harboured the Imm7 and ColE7 binding partners were identified and isolated using flow cytometric cell sorting in combination with the fluorescent β-lactamase substrate, CCF2/AM. A single-cell PCR was then used to amplify the Imm7 coding sequence directly from each sorted cell. With the screening system validated, it was then used to screen a protein library based the Imm7 scaffold against a proof-of-principle target. The wild-type Imm7 sequence, as well as mutants with wild-type residues in the ColE7- binding loop were enriched from the library after a single round of selection, which is consistent with other eukaryotic screening systems such as yeast and mammalian cell-surface display. In summary, this thesis describes a new technology for screening protein libraries in a mammalian, intracellular environment. This system has the potential to complement existing screening technologies by allowing access to intracellular proteins and expanding the range of targets available to the pharmaceutical industry.

A gendered educational agenda : what's wrong with 10 Things I Hate About You?

Both William Shakespeare's play The Taming of the Shrew (1593) and the film 10 thing I hate About You (Gil Junger, 1999) contain tropes of gender and education and gendered education, and both represent and perform 'education'. That is, they depict characters undergoing a range of educational experiences and in turn educate their audience about what it means to be educated appropriately. It seems fitting then that these pairng of texts has been popular with high school teachers who, more often than not, use them as ways into teaching Shakespeare to contemporary adolescents. I suggest that the play-film pairing can be more productively introduced into the classroom as texts that offer critical readers the opportunity to contest the values of education and gender contatined within them, rather than as tools to reintroduce outdated notions of gendered agency and cultural authority. Indeed it is precisely because 10 Things is unequivocally a romantic comedy that aims to work within the audience's comfort zone that we must seriously interrogate the cultural politics of gender and education it promotes.