Concerning the house museum and the picturesque landscape in the work of Sir John Soane : with raw hints for post-heritage museum space

The picturesque aesthetic in the work of Sir John Soane, architect and collector, resonates in the major work of his very personal practice – the development of his house museum, now the Soane Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London. Soane was actively involved with the debates, practices and proponents of picturesque and classical practices in architecture and landscape and his lectures reveal these influences in the making of The Soane, which was built to contain and present diverse collections of classical and contemporary art and architecture alongside scavenged curiosities. The Soane Museum has been described as a picturesque landscape, where a pictorial style, together with a carefully defined itinerary, has resulted in the ‘apotheosis of the Picturesque interior’. Soane also experimented with making mock ruinscapes within gardens, which led him to construct faux architectures alluding to archaeological practices based upon the ruin and the fragment. These ideas framed the making of interior landscapes expressed through spatial juxtapositions of room and corridor furnished with the collected object that characterise The Soane Museum. This paper is a personal journey through the Museum which describes and then reviews aspects of Soane’s work in the context of contemporary theories on ‘new’ museology. It describes the underpinning picturesque practices that Soane employed to exceed the boundaries between interior and exterior landscapes and the collection. It then applies particular picturesque principles drawn from visiting The Soane to a speculative project for a house/landscape museum for the Oratunga historic property in outback South Australia, where the often, normalising effects of conservation practices are reviewed using minimal architectural intervention through a celebration of ruinous states.

Bwembya Chikolwa quoted by Mike Taylor for Money Management 7th September 2009, Thaw for listed property

Australian property bond markets are starting to improve, but don’t expect a return to the buoyant days of the past any time soon.

Sir Neville Howse (VC), Private John Simpson Kirkpatrick and Private Martin O’Meara (VC) and their contributions to Australian military medicine

Medical personnel serving with the Defence Forces have contributed to the evolution of trauma treatment and the advancement of prehospital care within the military environment. This paper investigates the stories of an Australian Medical Officer, Sir Neville Howse, and two stretcher bearers, Private John Simpson (Kirkpatrick) and Private Martin O’Meara, In particular it describes the gruelling conditions under which they performed their roles, and reflects on the legacy that they have left behind in Australian society. While it is widely acknowledged that conflicts such as World War One should never have happened, as civilian and defence force paramedics, we should never forget the service and sacrifice of defence force medical personnel and their contribution to the body of knowledge on the treatment of trauma. These men and women bravely provided emergency care in the most harrowing conditions possible. However, men like Martin O’Meara may not have been given the same status in society today as Sir Neville Howse or Simpson and his donkey, due to the public’s lack of awareness and acceptance of war neurosis and conditions such as post traumatic stress disorder, reactive psychosis and somatoform disorders which were suffered by many soldiers during their wartime service and on their return home after fighting in war.

David Hicks and Cathie Holden (eds.) (2007). Teaching The Global Dimension. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 212 pages.

Teaching The Global Dimension (2007) is intended for primary and secondary teachers, pre-service teachers and educators interested in fostering global concerns in the education system. It aims at linking theory and practice and is structured as follows. Part 1, the global dimension, proposes an educational framework for understanding global concerns. Individual chapters in this section deal with some educational responses to global issues and the ways in which young people might become, in Hick’s terms, more “world-minded”. In the first two chapters, Hicks presents first, some educational responses to global issues that have emerged in recent decades, and second, an outline of the evolution of global education as a specific field. As with all the chapters in this book, most of the examples are drawn from the United Kingdom. Young people’s concerns, student teachers’ views and the teaching of controversial issues, comprise the other chapters in this section. Taken collectively, the chapters in Part 2 articulate the conceptual framework for developing, teaching and evaluating a global dimension across the curriculum. Individual chapters in this section, written by a range of authors, explore eight key concepts considered necessary to underpin appropriate learning experiences in the classroom. These are conflict, social justice, values and perceptions, sustainability, interdependence, human rights, diversity and citizenship. These chapters are engaging and well structured. Their common format consists of a succinct introduction, reference to positive action for change, and examples of recent effective classroom practice. Two chapters comprise the final section of this book and suggest different ways in which the global dimension can be achieved in the primary and the secondary classroom.

The Early Prevention of Obesity in CHildren (EPOCH) collaboration : an individual patient data prospective meta-analysis

Background: Efforts to prevent the development of overweight and obesity have increasingly focused early in the life course as we recognise that both metabolic and behavioural patterns are often established within the first few years of life. Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of interventions are even more powerful when, with forethought, they are synthesised into an individual patient data (IPD) prospective meta-analysis (PMA). An IPD PMA is a unique research design where several trials are identified for inclusion in an analysis before any of the individual trial results become known and the data are provided for each randomised patient. This methodology minimises the publication and selection bias often associated with a retrospective meta-analysis by allowing hypotheses, analysis methods and selection criteria to be specified a priori. Methods/Design: The Early Prevention of Obesity in CHildren (EPOCH) Collaboration was formed in 2009. The main objective of the EPOCH Collaboration is to determine if early intervention for childhood obesity impacts on body mass index (BMI) z scores at age 18-24 months. Additional research questions will focus on whether early intervention has an impact on children’s dietary quality, TV viewing time, duration of breastfeeding and parenting styles. This protocol includes the hypotheses, inclusion criteria and outcome measures to be used in the IPD PMA. The sample size of the combined dataset at final outcome assessment (approximately 1800 infants) will allow greater precision when exploring differences in the effect of early intervention with respect to pre-specified participant- and intervention-level characteristics. Discussion: Finalisation of the data collection procedures and analysis plans will be complete by the end of 2010. Data collection and analysis will occur during 2011-2012 and results should be available by 2013. Trial registration number: ACTRN12610000789066

Numerical solution to the Saffman-Taylor finger problem with kinetic undercooling regularisation

The Saffman-Taylor finger problem is to predict the shape and,in particular, width of a finger of fluid travelling in a Hele-Shaw cell filled with a different, more viscous fluid. In experiments the width is dependent on the speed of propagation of the finger, tending to half the total cell width as the speed increases. To predict this result mathematically, nonlinear effects on the fluid interface must be considered; usually surface tension is included for this purpose. This makes the mathematical problem suffciently diffcult that asymptotic or numerical methods must be used. In this paper we adapt numerical methods used to solve the Saffman-Taylor finger problem with surface tension to instead include the effect of kinetic undercooling, a regularisation effect important in Stefan melting-freezing problems, for which Hele-Shaw flow serves as a leading order approximation when the specific heat of a substance is much smaller than its latent heat. We find the existence of a solution branch where the finger width tends to zero as the propagation speed increases, disagreeing with some aspects of the asymptotic analysis of the same problem. We also find a second solution branch, supporting the idea of a countably infinite number of branches as with the surface tension problem.

Selection of solar energy for green building using superiority and inferiority multi-criteria ranking (SIR) method

Green energy is one of the key factors, driving down electricity bill and zero carbon emission generating electricity to green building. However, the climate change and environmental policies are accelerating people to use renewable energy instead of coal-fired (convention type) energy for green building that energy is not environmental friendly. Therefore, solar energy is one of the clean energy solving environmental impact and paying less in electricity fee. The method of solar energy is collecting sun from solar array and saves in battery from which provides necessary electricity to whole house with zero carbon emission. However, in the market a lot of solar arrays suppliers, the aims of this paper attempted to use superiority and inferiority multi-criteria ranking (SIR) method with 13 constraints establishing I-flows and S-flows matrices to evaluate four alternatives solar energies and determining which alternative is the best, providing power to sustainable building. Furthermore, SIR is well-known structured approach of multi-criteria decision support tools and gradually used in construction and building. The outcome of this paper significantly gives an indication to user selecting solar energy.

The aesthetic system of entertainment

Entertainment Industries is the first book to map entertainment as a cultural system. Including work from world-renowned analysts such as Henry Jenkins and Jonathan Gray, this innovative collection explains what entertainment is and how it works. Entertainment is audience-centred culture. The Entertainment Industries are a uniquely interdisciplinary collection of evolving businesses that openly monitor evolving cultural trends and work within them. The producers of entertainment – central to that practice– are the new artists. They understand audiences and combine creative, business and legal skills in order to produce cultural products that cater to them. Entertainment Industries describes the characteristics of entertainment, the systems that produce it, and the role of producers and audiences in its development, as well as explaining the importance of this area of study, and how it might be better integrated into Universities.

Not for profit income tax exemption : is there a hole in the bucket, dear Henry?

Australia’s Future Tax System Review, headed by the then head of the Australian Treasury, and the Productivity Commission’s Research Report on the not for profit sector, both examined the state of tax concessions to Australia’s not for profit sector in the light of the High Court’s decision in Commissioner of Taxation v Word Investments Ltd. Despite being unable to quantify with any certainty the pre- or post-Word Investments cost of the tax concessions, both Reports indicated their support for continuation of the income tax exemption. However, the government acted in the 2011 Budget to target the not for profit income tax concessions more precisely, mainly on competitive neutrality grounds. This article examines the income tax exemption by applying the five taxation design principles, proposed in the Australia’s Future Tax System Review, for assessing tax expenditure. The conclusion is that the exemptions can be justified and, further, that a rationale for the exemption can be consistent with the reasoning in the Word Investments case.

Twitter as a technology for audiencing and fandom : the #Eurovision phenomenon

Amongst the most prominent uses of Twitter at present is its role in the discussion of widely televised events: Twitter’s own statistics for 2011, for example, list major entertainment spectacles (the MTV Music Awards, the BET Awards) and sports matches (the UEFA Champions League final, the FIFA Women’s World Cup final) amongst the events generating the most tweets per second during the year (Twitter, 2011). User activities during such televised events constitute a specific, unique category of Twitter use, which differs clearly from the other major events which generate a high rate of tweets per second (such as crises and breaking news, from the Japanese earthquake and tsunami to the death of Steve Jobs), as preliminary research has shown. During such major media events, by contrast, Twitter is used most predominantly as a technology of fandom instead: it serves in the first place as a backchannel to television and other streaming audiovisual media, enabling users offer their own running commentary on the universally shared media text of the event broadcast as it unfolds live. Centrally, this communion of fans around the shared text is facilitated by the use of Twitter hashtags – unifying textual markers which are now often promoted to prospective audiences by the broadcasters well in advance of the live event itself. This paper examines the use of Twitter as a technology for the expression of shared fandom in the context of a major, internationally televised annual media event: the Eurovision Song Contest. It constitutes a highly publicised, highly choreographed media spectacle whose eventual outcomes are unknown ahead of time and attracts a diverse international audience. Our analysis draws on comprehensive datasets for the ‘official’ event hashtags, #eurovision, #esc, and #sbseurovision. Using innovative methods which combine qualitative and quantitative approaches to the analysis of Twitter datasets containing several hundreds of thousands, we examine overall patterns of participation to discover how audiences express their fandom throughout the event. Minute-by-minute tracking of Twitter activity during the live broadcasts enables us to identify the most resonant moments during each event; we also examine the networks of interaction between participants to detect thematically or geographically determined clusters of interaction, and to identify the most visible and influential participants in each network. Such analysis is able to provide a unique insight into the use of Twitter as a technology for fandom and for what in cultural studies research is called ‘audiencing’: the public performance of belonging to the distributed audience for a shared media event. Our work thus contributes to the examination of fandom practices led by Henry Jenkins (2006) and other scholars, and points to Twitter as an important new medium facilitating the connection and communion of such fans.

A review of "The Peace In Between : Post-war violence and peacebuilding", edited by Astri Suhrke and Mats Berdal, Routledge, 2012

The term post-war violence has been with us for much of the twentieth century but the issue itself has existed for centuries. The study of violence in post-war societies has been explored by philosophers (Erasmus), statesmen (Sir Thomas More) and sociologists (Emile Durkheim). In many cases the cessation of war and the signing of peace accords do not always mean an end to the violence. This book examines in considerable detail the causes and purposes of post-conflict violence and argues that features which constrain or encourage violence accumulate in such a manner as to create distinct and different types of post-war environments...