Traversing the international rainbow of academia and architectural practice

In the context of contemporary tertiary education immersed as such in internationalisation strategies and internationalised curricula, the cultivation and promotion of international awareness in Australian graduates can be expected to lead to desirable lifelong attributes. Consideration of the need to be prepared for a globalised professional and cultural climate is integral to sustaining and growing the future and the fortunes of many. For the architectural community, the combined phenomena of globalisation and internationalisation strategies herald implications for the education and professional preparation of architects which traverse academia and architectural practice. This paper presents the case for exploring potential benefits of establishing closer links between academia and architecture practice, discusses the relevance of international student practice experience for the twenty first century and looks at its role within an intemationalised curriculum in preparing graduates for the future. Analysis of a survey of work experience as a component of Australian architecture courses is used to gauge the extent of current programs that seek to integrate the academic curriculum with practice experience, and the Deakin study (a work in progress) of architecture students in international practice contexts is presented as a vehicle for exploring the degree to which the combination of professional practice education and cultural experience may be beneficial to architecture students, academia and the profession more generally.

Transparent and autonomic rollback-recovery in cluster systems

Cluster systems provide an excellent environment to run computation hungry applications. However, due to being created using commodity components they are prone to failures. To overcome these failures we propose to use rollback-recovery, which consists of the checkpointing and recovery facilities. Checkpointing facilities have been the focus of many previous studies; however, the recovery facilities have been overlooked. This paper focuses on the requirements, concept and architecture of recovery facilities. The synthesized fault tolerant system was implemented in the GENESIS system and evaluated. The results show that the synthesized system is efficient and scalable.

Giorgio de Chirico and the idea of enigmatic imagery : the innocence of becoming

My paintings emerge from within a context best explained by reference to Nietzsche's perspectivism. That is an intellectual attitude that deprivileges rationalism and accommodates scepticism or unknowing as an acceptable starting point From this standpoint art/language can be seen as being in a state of becoming rather than as representing a state of being. This thesis aims to demonstrate, not only by a philosophical encounter with Giorgio de Chirico's work: ie. his use of myth, his Nietzschean perspectivism and his enigmatic interpretation of figuration, that the most helpful context and understanding of my work can be realied. De Chirico's art, like Nietzsche's philosophy seeks in its processes to explore the possible unity of Dionysian aesthetic force with the Apollonian. Neither Nietzsche nor de Chirico considered within a post-Socratic world that this unity was realizable. Nevertheless they both share in their respective art forms a need to represent the relentless struggle to enact the disjunction of the two aesthetic forces in a secular world. The artist’s enigmatic imagery is characterized by a consideration of appearance and reality and it is for this reason that the work was selected as a model for investigating the nature of enigma. His use of seemingly straightforward, ordinary images suggests a sense of accessibility, yet at the same time they are irreducible to knowing and my own image-making was greatly expanded by investigating these concerns. I am not arguing that de Chirico was influenced by Nietzsche but instead that Nietzsche's philosophical point of view and his use of poetic language to express these views lay in discovering the qualities and substance of the Dionysian spirit As well as working within a Nietzschean world-view set out in The Birth of Tragedy, de Chirico has also drawn on the Italian unification, specifically the Risorgimento and the lineage of these political and mythical figures were endemic to his art and they interface the with his use of the Apollonian-Dionysian disunity first explored by Nietzsche. The focus of the exegesis will be to present the poetic and philosophical use made of the latter in de Chirico’s art It is anticipated that this philosophical encounter with the aesthetic, social and political world of de Chirico will, not only assist in interpreting his life's work anew, but will also provide a context in which my paintings of enigma might be interpreted.

Meteorological influences on coastal sea levels west of Port Phillip and their engineering significance

This report presents the results of an analysis of three years of tide and meteorological data aimed at delineating the influences of atmospheric pressure, waves, onshore winds and longshore winds on coastal sea levels West of Port Phillip Bay, Victoria« The data was used to develop predictive and hindcasting techniques for meteorological tides on the Otway Coast, using statistical methods, an empirical method and a mathematical model. The nature and magnitude of contributions of the various components of the meteorological tide, and the general variability of monthly and seasonal variations were also studied. It was found that meteorological tides on the Otway Coast can account for significant sea level changes, with the main factors being wind and atmospheric pressure. The wind component of the meteorological tide was found to be approximately twice the pressure component, and longshore winds were found to be more significant than onshore winds for wind setup on the Otway Coast. The meteorological tide models developed enable estimates of wind setup and atmospheric pressure setup on the Otway Coast to be readily computed using data from synoptic charts. The wave setup component could not be separated from the meteorological tide and is included in the wind setup component. The results of the investigation are relevant to the design and maintenance of coastal engineering works, and point to the need for the establishment and operation of coastal management schemes on the Otway Coast.

Vignette 6 Pluridisciplinary learning and assessment : reflections on practice

While designing group assessment for student learning outcomes is always difficult, the task is made more challenging in an interdisciplinary context. How much focus should be placed on assessment of discipline-specific knowledge, how much on the interdisciplinary knowledge that emerges as students work together in a non-linear, co-rational design and how much on the group dynamic (generic capabilities) being developed? While additional learning outcomes can be expected from the activities in which students engage in an interdisciplinary context, there is also an expectation, particularly for disciplines such as accounting, engineering and architecture where courses are professionally accredited, that discipline-specific learning outcomes are not compromised. This vignette presents some of the complexities that surfaced during the implementation of a pilot course designed as an experiential real world of work challenge for student.

Perspectives on culture : meeting points and divergences

In a post-modern world of diversity, difference and melting social, political, economic and cultural boundaries, there is a fundamental tension between the preservation of cultural identity and the cultural homogenisation that defines a globalised world.

This paper reports on a collaborative, international study between researchers in Thailand, Japan and Australia which examines perceptions of conceptual differences and meeting points in the cultural views of their three communities of teachers. In doing so, it attempts to move beyond post-modernism and the reality of globalism by proposing a new methodology for facilitating intercultural understanding.

Abandoned cubby huts: a site of dreaming and decay

The Cubby Hut is a powerful symbolic structure, an archetypal structure, and a place of imagination, dreams, refuge and adventure. The Cubby is ephemeral and passes from our childhood exploration of the world and into the dreams and memories of adulthood. These cubby huts are primarily built from and located in the landscape and are intrinsically linked to this context; they are landscape as architecture and architecture as landscape and in construction they articulate a connection between the imagination and landscape and decay as they return to the land and the psyche.

Between theory and practice : Rudolf Steiner as philosopher and architect

The philosophy and architecture of Rudolf Steiner both aim to give formal expression to his esoteric worldview, however, the means of articulating this worldview fundamentally differ within each discipline. Philosophy and architecture are separated by both process and product, and while an interdisciplinary reading of Steiner’s work does make certain connections between them evident, the incorporeal nature of thinking and the physical reality of building inevitably require different skills of their author, as well as different standards by which to assess them. Although he had no formal training as an architect, Steiner believed that his system of Anthroposophy provided a conceptual framework that would inspire a new style of modern architecture imbued with a spiritual dimension. As such, architecture provided Steiner with a means of visually expressing what words could not, and was therefore a necessary and important part of his philosophical pursuit. This paper explores the tension that exists between Steiner’s philosophy and architecture in its translation from theoretical ideas into built form. Steiner’s approach to architectural design was less concerned with the methods and techniques of the craft than with achieving what he saw as architecture’s true purpose - namely to give voice to the inner spiritual content of the work. However, in order to achieve this ultimate goal, a certain level of architectural competence is required. Therefore, Steiner’s ability as an architect to articulate such lofty ideals will also be assessed. Conceived on the edge of theory and practice, Steiner’s work serves to demonstrate the richness and depth that such an approach has to offer the field of architecture.

Thought and feeling in Giedion's mechanization takes command

An internal crisis within architecture and the way historiography both presents and conceals it, can be seen most strikingly in the contrast between two publications by the architectural historian Sigfried Giedion, Space Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, published in 1941, and Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History, published in 1948. These two publications take us back to the scene of World War Two, the former during the war and after Giedion's affair with America, and the latter after the war. At the time of publication Giedion's former book, Space, Time and Architecture, was seen as a "blockbuster" by the architectural community (especially in the USA). The latter publication, Mechanization, did not receive a favourable response by the same professional community. Their contrasting historiography suggests that the internal crisis of architecture is in a constant struggle with architecture's exterior, in this case, war. Giedion's Mechanization can be seen as the shadow text of the progressive myth of the former. With a focus on Mechanization, the paper aims to open its discursive approach to history. The post-war city is where Giedion's publications and my studies on "a gap of history" coincide and intersect. Giedion is fascinated with psychic factors shown in the recurring theme of the split between thought and feeling and exemplified in the dialectic between image and text. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory I argue that this functions as a mirror-stage in relation to a discourse on architecture and to architecture's disciplinary boundaries where the subject of architecture lacks the ideality and unity that is represented in the former publication.

Detection and defense of application-layer DDoS attacks in backbone web traffic

Web servers are usually located in a well-organized data center where these servers connect with the outside Internet directly through backbones. Meanwhile, the application-layer distributed denials of service (AL-DDoS) attacks are critical threats to the Internet, particularly to those business web servers. Currently, there are some methods designed to handle the AL-DDoS attacks, but most of them cannot be used in heavy backbones. In this paper, we propose a new method to detect AL-DDoS attacks. Our work distinguishes itself from previous methods by considering AL-DDoS attack detection in heavy backbone traffic. Besides, the detection of AL-DDoS attacks is easily misled by flash crowd traffic. In order to overcome this problem, our proposed method constructs a Real-time Frequency Vector (RFV) and real-timely characterizes the traffic as a set of models. By examining the entropy of AL-DDoS attacks and flash crowds, these models can be used to recognize the real AL-DDoS attacks. We integrate the above detection principles into a modularized defense architecture, which consists of a head-end sensor, a detection module and a traffic filter. With a swift AL-DDoS detection speed, the filter is capable of letting the legitimate requests through but the attack traffic is stopped. In the experiment, we adopt certain episodes of real traffic from Sina and Taobao to evaluate our AL-DDoS detection method and architecture. Compared with previous methods, the results show that our approach is very effective in defending AL-DDoS attacks at backbones. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Self-organised nanoarchitecture of titanium surfaces influences the attachment of Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria

The surface nanotopography and architecture of medical implant devices are important factors that can control the extent of bacterial attachment. The ability to prevent bacterial attachment substantially reduces the possibility of a patient receiving an implant contracting an implant-borne infection. We now demonstrated that two bacterial strains, Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, exhibited different attachment affinities towards two types of molecularly smooth titanium surfaces each possessing a different nanoarchitecture. It was found that the attachment of S. aureus cells was not restricted on surfaces that had an average roughness (S a) less than 0.5 nm. In contrast, P. aeruginosa cells were found to be unable to colonise surfaces possessing an average roughness below 1 nm, unless sharp nanoprotrusions of approximately 20 nm in size and spaced 35.0 nm apart were present. It is postulated that the enhanced attachment of P. aeruginosa onto the surfaces possessing these nanoprotrusions was facilitated by the ability of the cell membrane to stretch over the tips of the nanoprotrusions as confirmed through computer simulation, together with a concomitant increase in the level of extracellular polymeric substance (EPS) being produced by the bacterial cells.

The Catuspatha pattern in Balinese palace: architectural conservation and challenges

Balinese architecture was established prior to European colonization and significantly enhances traditional Balinese values that are woven into the predominant Hindu religion. Palaces are integral to the architectural heritage of Bali and were dated back to the Majapahit Empire. Balinese palaceswere constructed for non-ritualistic activities in this historical cultural landscape. Palaces were often located on road corners called catuspatha1andthey possess sacred values embodied in the concept of pempatanagung.Although Bali Province is today governed as one governance unit, these palaces still reflect their own multiple regal associations which arestill respected by Balinese society. The representations and architecture of these palaces andthe communicative symbols of a heyday era of Bali are raising questions as to how they can be accommodated within the over-arching tourism development and globalization of culture that Bali is experiencing. Therefore, this paper reviews pre-colonial Balinese palaces, their architecture, the catuspatha concept, and considers the traditional values of these ancient monuments as to conservation of palaces and their associated cultural heritage. An extensive literature review, surveys and observational inventories were undertaken at several palaces to obtain results that raise new questions about how these complexes can withstand globalization challenges whilst respecting traditional Balinese culture and society.

Persian gardens: meanings, symbolism, and design

Culture and identity in a society can be represented in the architecture and the meanings intertwined with it. In this sense, the architecture and design are the interface for transferring meaning and identity to the nation and future generations. Persian gardens have been evolved through the history of Persian Empire in regard to the culture and beliefs of the society. This paper aims to investigate the patterns of design and architecture in Persian gardens and the meanings intertwined with their patterns and significant elements such as water and trees. Persian gardens are not only about geometries and shapes; but also manifest different design elements, each representing a specific symbol and its significance among the society. This paper seeks to explore Persian gardens in terms of their geometric structure, irrigation system, network construction and pavilions alongside design qualities such as hierarchy, symmetry, centrality, rhythm and harmony. In the second stage, the paper investigates the fundamental symbols and their philosophy in the creation of Persian gardens and in relation to the architecture and design.