Teaching and live performances : applied theatre in universities and schools

This article compares the classroom process of school teachers and university lecturers to the activity of theatrical performance. In doing so, it probes the potential of live performance as an educational instrument. It concludes by tracing some of the history of applications of theatre to education, from the time of Brecht to the present day.

A cultural battlefront in the total war : theatre in Australian internment camps

In 1943, at the Berlin Sportspalast, Joseph Goebbels made his infamous speech on 'total war', appealing to the crowd to represent Germany as a nation and asking them whether they wanted a war 'more total and radical' than had been previously imagined. In Australia in 1944, the idea of this 'total war' struck a resonance with German civilians interned in Tatura, Victoria. Writing to protest a planned release of internees, these Camp 3 internees claimed an involvement in the 'total war', arguing that any release from the camp would necessitate working towards the 'total destruction of the political, economical and cultural existence of the German Reich and the German nation.' A curious, and important, part of their argument was that such a release would mean that their 'cultural life would be endangered.' It is precisely this 'cultural life' within internment that I wish to examine in this paper.

Coming soon (to a theatre near you) : the temporality of global film distribution to Australia

This article explores the changing contexts of international film exhibition in Australia over a 20-year period (1989–2009) by examining in some empirical detail Australia’s position in the global flow of films during this time. It argues that, at the most abstract level, distributors are engaged in the management and mediation of time and space in the field of global communications. It is proposed that distributors, through the organisation of temporal differentiation, are explicitly active in the creation of both cultural and commodity value. This is particularly apparent as film distributors explore and engage new methodologies of film release, which emphasise overlapping, intersecting and contradictory temporalities in the cinema experience.

Experiences gained from building a services-based distributed operating system

The goal of this paper is to present the experiences gained over 15 years of research into the design and development of a services-based distributed operating system. The lessons learnt over this period, we hope, will be of value to researchers involved in the design and development of operating systems that wish to harness the collective resources of ever-expanding distributed systems.

e-learning through digital theatre : breaking down the tyranny of distance and limits of location

In this article, we report on a cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural digital exchange project between Australian Drama and Education students and Dutch English Language and Culture students, and examine the impact of the place-independent, technology-mediated communications and collaboration on their learning trajectories. The intensive, intercultural collaboration between the two groups of students resulted in a 50-minute group-devised, digital theatre play entitled Quarter Acre Dreaming. This play, performed through live interactive media by both Dutch and Australian students, traced the historical development of the Australian suburb, while integrating scenes of Dutch immigration into Australia. In the creative process, the students on either side of the globe interacted through Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), and used videoconferencing and Skype for live rehearsals and discussions to advance their learning of English, their performance repertoire and cross-cultural understanding.

Multi-media and real fiction theatre making

Visual images, in the process of both the imagination and conception of a theatre production, are central to contemporary practice in drama-making. The use of multi-media in theatre is not only a fruitful way to represent the visual component of a particular experience, it but also constitutes a way of speaking the unspoken. Visual language expresses through multi-media and allows broaching taboo subjects, speaking directly to the audience in spite of the indirect form and drawing subtle connections with the live action so as to make meaning. The tension between live action and any form of visual art blurs the lines between imagination and reality. The multi-media theatre is a metaphor for the human mind exposed to social reality. It consists of interruptions, half-finished conversations and ideological aspersions including its primary function of meta-representation.

Effect of operating parameters and cleaning on the performance of ceramic membranes treating partially clarified sugar cane juice

The performance of ceramic membranes with pore sizes of 0.05 and 0.10 mm in purifying limed and partially clarified sugar cane juice was investigated under different operating conditions. From various operating conditions and strategies, switching off the permeate for 5 seconds for every 5 minutes (S5sT5 m) by an automated control valve provided higher flux. From the three pH experiments conducted on the 0.05 mm membrane, the best performance was observed at a pH of 7.5. Amongst the four fouling models tested, the cake filtration model fitted the performance of both membranes with higher accuracy at a transmembrane pressure of 0.5 bar. Filtering the cane juice through the membrane reduced the turbidity by 99.7%, color by 15%, and the starch concentration by 80% as well as increased the purity by 1.4%. The effective cleaning chemical composition from experimental results showed that 1% NaOH and 3000 ppm NaOCl solution performed the best but only for the experiments that were treating limed and partially clarified juice at pH 7.5.

The digital contamination of dramatic theatre : subject technology in exception

Drawing on Derrida’s analysis of the metaphysics of presence, this paper examines the centrality of presence in much theatre commentary, arguing that such a privileging demonises projected media as a form of contamination. Through a close look at a hybrid work that integrates live performers with avatars from Second Life, I seek a way to move forward between conditions of possibility and impossibility.

SAS macros for point and interval estimation of area under the receiver operating characteristic curve for non-proportional and proportional hazards Weibull models

Aims and objectives  For prediction of risk of cardiovascular end points using survival models the proportional hazards assumption is often not met. Thus, non-proportional hazards models are more appropriate for developing risk prediction equations in such situations. However, computer program for evaluating the prediction performance of such models has been rarely addressed. We therefore developed SAS macro programs for evaluating the discriminative ability of a non-proportional hazards Weibull model developed by Anderson (1991) and that of a proportional hazards Weibull model using the area under receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve.

Method  Two SAS macro programs for non-proportional hazards Weibull model using Proc NLIN and Proc NLP respectively and model validation using area under ROC curve (with its confidence limits) were written with SAS IML language. A similar SAS macro for proportional hazards Weibull model was also written.

Results  The computer program was applied to data on coronary heart disease incidence for a Framingham population cohort. The five risk factors considered were current smoking, age, blood pressure, cholesterol and obesity. The predictive ability of the non-proportional hazard Weibull model was slightly higher than that of its proportional hazard counterpart. An advantage of SAS Proc NLP in terms of the example provided here is that it provides significance level for the parameter estimates whereas Proc NLIN does not.

Conclusion  The program is very useful for evaluating the predictive performance of non-proportional and proportional hazards Weibull models.