The compositor of the farce of dustiny : Lacan reading, and being read by, Joyce

"We have learnt to see Joyce as Lacan's own symptom," writes Jean-Michel Rabate, "and as the sinthome par excellence" (2006, 26). This duality of Joyce as an unreadable text permeated with enjoyment and at the same time as an enigma that Lacan wants to decipher supplies the key to an understanding of Seminar XXIII. Lacan's addition to the triad of the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary of a fourth term, the Sigma (or sinthome) firms up his late shift from the speakingbeing (parletre, the Lacanian neologism that indicates the insertion of the human being into the signifying chain) to MAN (LOM, a Lacanian play on l'homme). Instead of the human being as inserted into the Symbolic Order, Seminar XXIII presents Joyce as inserting himself into language, tying the signifier to the body in a special, unique way. For Lacan, the sinthome is eccentric to the registers of the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary, yet it paradoxically links them when the Name-of- the-Father fails. The implication is carried in the concept of "nomination" that the Name-of-the-Father (or its structural equivalents, such as "Woman," "God" and "Joyce") makes language possible for the individual.

The architectural edifice and the phantoms of history

Starting with the literal and physical role of the "ground," this article attempts to bring this "ground" into a discursive arena. In particular, the author is thinking about the period at the end of a war, the period in between destruction and reconstruction, exemplified in some classic postwar films in which the architecture of the city is in a state of ruin—deformed, eroded, and dark—but there is no further destruction. The article calls this period "a gap of history" and its investigation is set against a claim that architecture is a reconstructive practice, that it is enlightening and aspiring. History, on the other hand, is captured by scenes of the battlefield and dominated by a narrative of war and destruction. The article makes reference to the real and fantasy desire for destruction (war and history) and reconstruction (architecture), and how through the connecting plane of the ground architecture is entangled in war and history of destruction as it figures in reconstruction. Architecture is contingent on history as discursive—history that is not unified, fixed, or evolutionary but rather contested and rewritten within a conflictual battlefield.

Leading as emotional management work in high risk times: the counterintuitive impulses of performativity and passion

This paper explores, through a case study of educational restructuring in Victoria, Australia, how school leaders in a public education system in Australia mediate reform discourses emphasizing managerial and market accountability and the emotional and messy work of teaching and leading. These accountability exercises were often seen by teachers and principals to be distractions; more about reporting and recording, rather than addressing substantive educational issues. They simultaneously distanced teachers and leaders from the 'real' and 'passionate' work of education while appropriating and commodifying teachers' and leaders' emotions and desires to do well. School leaders were expected to manage the emotional performances of their students, parents and colleagues as well as themselves. They also managed the emotions arising from the dissonance between teachers' professional and personal commitment to making a difference for all students based on principles of equity and the performativity requirements based on efficiency and narrowly defined and predetermined criteria of effectiveness and success that often undermined improvement for many students. In that sense performativity ('being seen to be good') and passion (for 'doing good') often produced counterintuitive impulses.

Home, school, community and their role in the provision of music education

The Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST), is supporting under the Australian Government Quality Outcomes Programme, a National Review of School Music Education. The review, which is intended to submit its report in mid 2005, is interested in investigating the current quality of teaching and learning of music in both primary and secondary schools. It aims to provide examples of best practice of teaching and learning of music, along with a set of recommendations for the development of future approaches and directions to improve the quality of music education offerings in Australian schools. This paper puts forward some proposals for consideration that will be forwarded to the Review and aims to generate debate about future approaches to the delivery of music education in Australian primary schools.
It argues that the home, school and community all have an important part to play in the music education of children, but that at present these three entities are insufficiently connected on a number of fronts, not least being an understanding about the purpose of young people’s engagement with music. There is no doubt that interest in the arts amongst Australians generally is high. A recent Australia Council report revealed that 85 per cent of its respondents agreed the arts are and should be an important part of the education of every young Australian and that what was needed was better arts education and opportunities for all young people. However, the opportunities need not be confined to those offered by the school sector. Engagement with out-of-school music includes both music encountered in the home, which may be affected by family influence, and music provided by the diversity of community organizations, which serve a real and complimentary role to classroom learning and achieve learning outcomes that schools often do not have the resources to foster. A number of proposals for action are suggested for consideration by those involved in education as a means of progressing the discussion. It asserts that there is much valuable activity occurring within the three locales of school, home and community, but a firmer relationship could be forged across all three to ensure young people’s on-going, life-long enjoyable engagement with music.

Poesis in diegesis : real-time interactive dance performance

This paper describes the processes of creating a hybrid experience of live performance and virtual imagery in 1 + x: Mid-range Projections, a dance work that uses real-time processing of live feed video to create a duet between dancers and their virtual images. 1 + x is about creating experiences of interiority and intimacy, ironically, through the juxtaposition of virtual images of performers with their real selves. This paper examines how the ideal of reinserting intimacy, humanity and 'presence' into a technologically generated image space, in the case of 1 + x, depends on the precise and delicate manipulation of live-feed video in collaboration with the audience's experience of interactivity. The result is a performance work that creates a poesis of 'presence', through a diegesis that melds real and virtual images on the same screen and the same conceptual and spatial plane - a 'becoming virtual'.

A dimensionality reduction algorithm and its application for interactive visualization

Visualization is one of the most effective methods for analyzing how high-dimensional data are distributed. Dimensionality reduction techniques, such as PCA, can be used to map high dimensional data to a two- or three-dimensional space. In this paper, we propose an algorithm called HyperMap that can be effectively applied to visualization. Our algorithm can be seen as a generalization of FastMap. It preserves its linear computation complexity, and overcomes several main shortcomings, especially in visualization. Since there are more than two pivot objects in each axis of a target space, more distance information needs to be preserved in each dimension. Then in visualization, the number of pivot objects can go beyond the limitation of six (2-pivot objects × 3-dimensions). Our HyperMap algorithm also gives more flexibility to the target space, such that the data distribution can be observed from various viewpoints. Its effectiveness is confirmed by empirical evaluations on both real and synthetic datasets.

Including teachers as 'real' partners in child protection

Simultaneous downsizing of child protection services and increasing numbers of child abuse notifications often result in many notifications remaining un-investigated. One possible solution to this problem is to extend the capacity of the child protection system by delegating some of the tasks commonly undertaken by child protection workers to allied professionals. One such group of allied professionals is teachers. In the past, teachers have been recognised for their unique role in notifying suspicions of abuse, however, education professionals are often overlooked for their potential to contribute more than they currently do to child protection. In this paper we suggest that teachers can be included as 'real' and credible partners in the child protection process in a way not previously considered possible.

Interactive dance performance : movement data and the 'materiality' of the system

This paper describes a recent performance work I made using dance and live feed video
processing, 1 + x: mid-range projections, commissioned by the Seoul Contemporary Dance
Company and first performed in Melbourne in July 2005. This work forms a basis for discussing
my interest in creating performance images that reveal 'interiority'. I am interested in how you
embed the 'feel' of the human systematically in an interactive structure, and how that process
can produce a poetic that arises from the detailed and nuanced play between real and virtual
images on the same screen. How do you abstract and play with a performer's movement, play
with it in real and virtual time, so that it gives the work an emotional charge? Its like playing with
the process of 'becoming virtual' - and I'm being deliberately Deleuzian about that - how do you
'become virtual' in the sense of melding performer and image so that the meaning exists
between - in the connection between the two?

This quest to get the energy, the 'lived', 'felt' quality of the movement into the imagery gives rise
to research questions about how 'presence' is perceived in movement. What elements of the
raw movement data do you need to keep and what can you throwaway, and still keep the
personality, the emotion, the 'life' of that movement? How do you make a virtual, interactive
performance system that has its own 'materiality'?

Visions of the virtual : the role of computers and artificial intelligence in a selection of Australian young adult fiction

Advances in computer technology over the last twenty years have resulted in a number of different visions of what it means to be real, and of what it means to be human. This paper will explore how computers and artificial intelligence are used as major themes in four Australian novels written for young adults: Gillian Rubinstein’s Space Demons trilogy — comprising Space Demons, Skymaze and Shinkei — and Michael Pryor’s The Mask of Caliban. In so doing, the paper will look at how these texts explore the relationship between increasingly developed technology and visions of a better world. By comparing a series of oppositions that occur in all four books, this paper will look at how the theme of technology is used to privilege particular values and to advocate particular beliefs.

Second Life and the role of educators as regulators

Regulation, governance and harms stemming from the use of virtual worlds and other Massive Multi Media Online Role Playing Games (MMMORPGs) in higher education, are poorly understood and under-researched issues. Second Life, developed by Linden Labs, provides users with a series of generic ‘terms of service’ and codes of conduct, yet place the bulk of responsibility on individual users or groups to report misbehaviour or develop their own behavioural codes, enforcement procedures and punishments suited to their particular needs. There is no guidebook to assist users in the processes of risk identification and management. As such, the various benefits of MMMORPG technologies could be offset by the risks to users and user-groups from a range of possible harms, including the impact of actual or perceived violence within teaching and learning settings.

While cautioning against the direct translation of real-world regulatory principles into the governance of virtual worlds, this paper suggests theoretical and practical guidance on these issues can be taken from recent criminological developments. Using Lawrence Lessig’s (1999) landmark work on cyber-regulation as a starting point, this paper examines the literature on video-game violence to illustrate the need for educators show awareness of both real and perceived risks in virtual worlds as a core element of an emerging educational pedagogy. We identify how the multiple roles of the virtual-world educator become useful in framing this pedagogy to improve student learning, to dispel myths about the risks of immersive technologies and advocate for their adoption and acceptance in the educational community.

Professional identity and pedagogical space : negotiating difference in teacher workplaces

This paper explores "spatial struggle" in the formation of professional identities of overseas-born teachers. The basis of this struggle arises from a limited number of subject positions available for them in pedagogical spaces of the Australian system of education. We argue that relations of power/professional knowledge in teacher workplaces as well as the binary strategy of "us" and "them" generate marginal locations for overseas-born teachers within schools. This construction of marginality is informed not only by discourses of what counts as being a professional but also by the conception of workplace as a monocultural, pre-given and bounded entity. By rethinking workplaces as relational, as locations that are connected to other socioculturally produced places through spaces of semiotic flows, we can also rethink the professional becoming of overseas-born teachers. This involves a critical understanding of their situationality, which can be conceptualised as a struggle for professional recognition, voice and place within the real and imagined communities of teachers.

The dialectic of Bangsa and Minzu and nation-building in Malaysia 1900-1990

Examines the evolution of the terms "bangsa" and "minzu", the reforms and adjustments made to define Malay and Chinese ethnic boundaries and the forms that resistance took in response to real and perceived threats to each community's rights vis-a-vis the other. Linked is the related issue of how these dialectical differences have hindered the process of nation-building in Peninsular Malaysia especially from 1957 until 1990.

Dielectric properties of conducting polymer

The dielectric properties of conducting polymer composites containing polypyrrole (PPy) crushed films, PPy powder, polyaniline (PAn) base and acid powders as the dispersants and silicone rubber and vinyl ester as matrix materials have been investigated in the frequency range 2-18 GHz. The dielectric parameters such as the real part, epsiprime, and imaginary part, epsiPrime, of the permittivity and loss tangent, tandelta, increase with increasing conductivity and concentration of the dispersant. The geometrical shape of the dispersant governs the ability of conductive network formation which is indicated by a large drop in the resistivity of the composite. Also, dispersant/matrix interactions and physical properties of the matrix influence the agglomeration of the dispersant phase which, in turn, affects the dielectric properties of the composites. Flakes of PPy obtained by crushing highly conductive films and large PAn powder aggregates were unable to form a conducting network. The composites without a network of dispersant exhibit low dielectric parameters. On the other hand, high values of tan delta ranging from 0.7–1.1 were achieved for the PPy powder (15 parts)/silicone rubber composites where a conducting network was observed.

Student attitudes and aspirations towards science

Research on student attitudes and aspirations towards science has been an increasing focus of concern in the past decade. Much of this is driven by a growing concern about students’ lack of interest in the further study of science in advanced societies. Because attitude to science is a multifaceted construct, the chapter first reviews research into attitudes in order to develop principles for its meaningful measurement. We then explore the main features of student responses to science and examine the common assertion that there is a negative downward trend as many have suggested. Recent research clearly shows a negative correlation between a country’s developmental index and student attitudes to science. The effects of gender, teacher quality and pre-adolescent experience on student attitudes and aspirations towards science are examined in some detail, as well as a number of other factors in attempting to understand the complex pathways and choices that students make throughout their schooling about the study of STEM subjects. The construct of identity is used to make sense of the variety of attitudes and aspirations of students towards science, with particular emphasis on gender and youth in post-industrial societies. Finally, the role of enrichment experiences in science is examined, as a real and potential influence on student engagement with science.

Stochastic models of road geometry and wind condition for vehicle energy management and control

Modeling and simulation is commonly used to improve vehicle performance, to optimize vehicle system design, and to reduce vehicle development time. Vehicle performances can be affected by environmental conditions and driver behavior factors, which are often uncertain and immeasurable. To incorporate the role of environmental conditions in the modeling and simulation of vehicle systems, both real and artificial data are used. Often, real data are unavailable or inadequate for extensive investigations. Hence, it is important to be able to construct artificial environmental data whose characteristics resemble those of the real data for modeling and simulation purposes. However, to produce credible vehicle simulation results, the simulated environment must be realistic and validated using accepted practices. This paper proposes a stochastic model that is capable of creating artificial environmental factors such as road geometry and wind conditions. In addition, road geometric design principles are employed to modify the created road data, making it consistent with the real-road geometry. Two sets of real-road geometry and wind condition data are employed to propose probability models. To justify the distribution goodness of fit, Pearson's chi-square and correlation statistics have been used. Finally, the stochastic models of road geometry and wind conditions (SMRWs) are developed to produce realistic road and wind data. SMRW can be used to predict vehicle performance, energy management, and control strategies over multiple driving cycles and to assist in developing fuel-efficient vehicles.