Conclusion : the promises and challenges of the Arab revolutions

This concluding chapter analyses the various promises and challenges that were embodied in the Arab revolutions and face the region as it moves forward. It concludes by noting that if those who participated in these popular movements are patient, engage and invest in this period of change to make their own authentic and democratic future, then there is real hope for the region. It is up to the people of the MENA to decide whether the spark ignited in the many ‘Tahrir’ squares is snuffed out or burns brightly.

Knowledge, desire and power in global politics : western representations of China's rise

How is the rise of China perceived in the West? Why is it often labelled as ‘threat’ and/or ‘opportunity’? What are the implications of these China imageries for global politics?

Taking up these important questions, this ground-breaking book argues that the dominant Western perceptions of China’s rise tell us less about China and more about Western self-imagination and its desire for certainty. Chengxin Pan expertly illustrates how this desire, masked as China ‘knowledge’, is bound up with the political economy of fears and fantasies, thereby both informing and complicating foreign policy practice in Sino-Western relations. Insofar as this vital relationship is shaped not only by China’s rise, but also by the way we conceptualise its rise, this book makes a compelling case for critical reflection on China watching.

Knowledge, Desire and Power in Global Politics is the first systematic and deconstructive analysis of contemporary Western representation of China’s rise. Setting itself apart from the mainstream empiricist literature, its critical interpretative approach and unconventional and innovative perspective will not only strongly appeal to academics, students and the broader reading public, but also likely spark debate in the field of Chinese international relations.

Literature as activism: interrogating the 21st century demise of the Arendtian political public sphere

This article explores Don DeLillo's literary activism through Arendtian perspectives to investigate what the demise of literature's relevance, specifically in a political context, may mean in the current era of an increasingly complex and conflicting 'web of human relationships'.  In that it is accepted that narrative has a particular ability to reveal insights as prelinguistic elements that are distinct from all we are able to access through our limited human perceptions, it remarks the Lacanian paradox that if being is in excess of language, then language is the medium by which this is accessed in the world. For DeLillo, writers may be under threat in a dynamic but destabilizing era, their art superceded by technology and fundamentalist terrorism, however, as suggested in Mao II, this renders the writer all the more necessary.  It is at the point at which the writer has nothing to say or is under duress to say noting, that a human crisis is reached. I ask, do current forms of political pressure to censure literature constitute a further diminishing of the Arendtian political public domain in which speech as action has primacy?

Designing an e-portfolio for assurance of learning focusing on adoptability and learning analytics

The Assurance of Learning for Graduate Employability framework is a quality assurance model for curriculum enhancement for graduate employability, enabling graduates to achieve "the skills, understandings and personal attributes that make [them] more likely to secure employment and be successful in their chosen occupations to the benefit of themselves, the workforce, the community and the economy" (Yorke, 2006). Of particular note is the framework's dependence on three foundations, including easy access to integrated and accessible tools for staff and student self-management. In other words, this approach to curriculum quality depends on staff and student access to tools that enable them to self-manage their learning. This paper examines two aspects which informed the design of a student e-portfolio system, iPortfolio, intended for students' self-management of their learning, particularly recording evidence of their achievement of capabilities. The paper focuses on two particular considerations in the design of the iPortfolio: adoptability and learning analytics. Adoptability means the phase preceding adoption, whether students have the devices, platforms and technology skills to be able to use such an innovation. The iPortfolio also facilitates learning analytics: it has the capability to gather data related to learning indicators for course quality assurance purposes. Both adoptability and analytics are very dynamic fields: new devices, platforms and applications constantly spark changes in user habits, and policy changes mean institutions need to be able to provide new data, often at short notice. In the conclusion, the paper suggests how tools such as the iPortfolio can be designed for 'future proofing' and sustainability.

Conversation pieces

This exhibition presented works by Australian artists Agatha Gothe-Snape, Alex Martinis Roe and Hannah Raisin and collaborative works by Catherine or Kate (Catherine Sagin and Kate Woodcroft), Scott Ferguson (Erika Scott and Brooke Ferguson) and Courtney Coombs and Caitlin Franzmann. These artists engage with ideas of contemporary feminism through processes of dialogue and exchange, exploring subjectivity, humour and intimacy in performance and installation artworks. These works are generated by physical, verbal or textual dialogues between collaborators, participants or the artist and audience; and spark a conversation about feminist art practice today.

Improving chlamydia knowledge should lead to increased chlamydia testing among Australian general practitioners: a cross-sectional study of chlamydia testing uptake in general practice

Female general practitioners (GPs) have higher chlamydia testing rates than male GPs, yet it is unclear whether this is due to lack of knowledge among male GPs or because female GPs consult and test more female patients.

Actor-Network Theory (ANT) based visualisation of socio-technical facets of RFID technology translation: an Australian hospital scenario

In the early 2000s, Information Systems researchers in Australia had begun to emphasise socio-technical approaches in innovation adoption of technologies. The ‘essentialist' approaches to adoption (for example, Innovation Diffusion or TAM), suggest an essence is largely responsible for rate of adoption (Tatnall, 2011) or a new technology introduced may spark innovation. The socio-technical factors in implementing an innovation are largely flouted by researchers and hospitals. Innovation Translation is an approach that purports that any innovation needs to be customised and translated in to context before it can be adopted. Equally, Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is an approach that embraces the differences in technical and human factors and socio-professional aspects in a non-deterministic manner. The research reported in this paper is an attempt to combined the two approaches in an effective manner, to visualise the socio-technical factors in RFID technology adoption in an Australian hospital. This research investigation demonstrates RFID technology translation in an Australian hospital using a case approach (Yin, 2009). Data was collected using a process of focus groups and interviews, analysed with document analysis and concept mapping techniques. The data was then reconstructed in a ‘movie script' format, with Acts and Scenes funnelled to ANT informed abstraction at the end of each Act. The information visualisation at the end of each Act using ANT informed Lens reveal the re-negotiation and improvement of network relationships between the people (factors) involved including nurses, patient care orderlies, management staff and non-human participants such as equipment and technology. The paper augments the current gaps in literature regarding socio-technical approaches in technology adoption within Australian healthcare context, which is transitioning from non-integrated nearly technophobic hospitals in the last decade to a tech-savvy integrated era. More importantly, the ANT visualisation addresses one of the criticisms of ANT i.e. its insufficiency to explain relationship formations between participants and over changes of events in relationship networks (Greenhalgh & Stones, 2010).

Synthesis of Al-doped Mg2Si1-xSnx compound using magnesium alloy for thermoelectric application

Abstract Mg2Si1-xSnx thermoelectric compounds were synthesized through a solid-state reaction at 700 °C between chips of Mg2Sn-Mg eutectic alloy and silicon fine powders. The Al dopants were introduced by employing AZ31 magnesium alloy that contains aluminum. The as-synthesized Mg2Si1-xSnx powders were consolidated by spark plasma sintering at 650-700 °C. X-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscopy revealed that the Mg2Si1-xSnx bulk materials were comprised of Si-rich and Sn-rich phases. Due to the complex microstructures, the electrical conductivities of Mg2Si1-xSnx are lower than Mg2Si. As a result, the average power factor of Al0.05Mg2Si0.73Sn0.27 is about 1.5 × 10^-3 W/mK² from room temperature to 850 K, being less than 2.5 × 10^-3 W/mK² for Al0.05Mg2Si. However, the thermal conductivity of Mg2Si1-xSnx was reduced significantly as compared to Al0.05Mg2Si, which enabled the ZT of Al0.05Mg2Si0.73Sn0.27 to be superior to Al0.05Mg2Si. Lastly, the electric power generation from one leg of Al0.05Mg2Si and Al0.05Mg2Si0.73Sn0.27 were evaluated on a newly developed instrument, with the peak output power of 15-20 mW at 300 °C hot-side temperature.

Simultaneous improvement in the strength and corrosion resistance of Al via high-energy ball milling and Cr alloying

The corrosion resistance and mechanical properties of nanocrystalline aluminium (Al) and Al-20. wt.%Cr alloys, synthesized by high-energy ball milling followed by spark plasma sintering, were investigated. Both alloys exhibited an excellent combination of corrosion resistance and compressive yield strength, which was attributed to the nanocrystalline structure, extended solubility, uniformly distributed fine particles, and homogenous microstructure induced by high-energy ball milling. This work demonstrates the possibilities of developing ultra-high strength Al alloys with excellent corrosion resistance, exploiting conventionally insoluble elements or alloying additions via suitable processing routes.

Scalable nonparametric Bayesian multilevel clustering

Multilevel clustering problems where the con-tent and contextual information are jointly clustered are ubiquitous in modern datasets. Existing works on this problem are limited to small datasets due to the use of the Gibbs sampler. We address the problem of scaling up multi-level clustering under a Bayesian nonparametric setting, extending the MC2 model proposed in (Nguyen et al., 2014). We ground our approach in structured mean-field and stochastic variational inference (SVI) and develop a tree-structured SVI algorithm that exploits the interplay between content and context modeling. Our new algorithm avoids the need to repeatedly go through the corpus as in Gibbs sampler. More crucially, our method is immediately amendable to parallelization, facilitating a scalable distributed implementation on the Apache Spark platform. We conduct extensive experiments in a variety of domains including text, images, and real-world user application activities. Direct comparison with the Gibbs-sampler demonstrates that our method is an order-of-magnitude faster without loss of model quality. Our Spark-based implementation gains an-other order-of-magnitude speedup and can scale to large real-world datasets containing millions of documents and groups.