Bleaching and dyeing of superfine wool powder/polypropylene blend film

Fibers based regenerated protein draw much attention for recycling discarded protein resources and can produce biodegradable and environmental friendly polymers. In this study, superfine wool powder is blended with polypropylene (PP) to produce wool powder/PP blend film through extrusion and hot-pressing. Hydrogen peroxide is used to bleach the black colored surface of the blend films. The effects of peroxide concentration, bleaching time and powder content on the final whiteness and mechanical properties of the blend films are investigated.

The bleached films are dyed with acid red dyes and the dyed color is evaluated using a Computer Color Matching System. Color characters of dyed films, such as L*, a*, b*, ΔE*ab, C*ab and K/S values are measured and analyzed. The study not only reuses discarded wool resources into organic powder, widens the application of superfine wool powder on polymers, but also improves the dyeing properties of PP through the addition of protein content.

Capitalism's new handmaiden : the biotechnical world negotiated through children's fiction

In an era when the merger between capitalism and science becomes an accepted norm, new questions need to be asked about the ethical implications of scientific practices. One such practice is organ transplantation. However, potent debates surround the just distribution and ethical implications of organ transplantation. This paper examines the ways in which children are socialised through children’s literature to accept or challenge the dominant ideologies underpinning organ transplantation. It argues that how subjectivity is constructed informs understandings of agency, and this in turn can deliver new approaches to concerns about scientific practices.

Degradation of VOCs using non-film titania in a hybrid process

This study reports the preparation and characterization of titanium dioxide (TiO2)-based non-film catalysts, reactor design and their utilization in a hybrid dynamic degradation of acetone and toluene. The behaviours of deactivation and regeneration of catalysts are explored as well. The regression equations of conversion rate in differing operating modes are concluded.

Representation and judgement : 'privileged' Jews in Holocaust writing and film

This thesis analyses the ways in which moral judgements of so-called privileged Jews are constructed in Holocaust representations. ‘Privileged’ Jews include those prisoners in the camps and ghettos who held positions which gave them access to material and other benefits. Subject to extreme levels of coercion, these victims were compelled to act in ways that have often been judged as both self-serving and harmful to fellow inmates. Such controversial figures constitute an intrinsically important, frequently misunderstood and hastily judged facet of the Holocaust. Scholars have neglected the problem of judgement in relation to ‘privileged’ Jews; nonetheless, Holocaust texts frequently portray these liminal figures.

Of crucial importance to the thesis is Primo Levi’s paradigmatic essay entitled ‘The Grey Zone,’ which directly engages with the complex and sensitive issue of ‘privileged’ Jews. Levi argues that due to the extreme ethical dilemmas that ‘privileged’ Jews confronted, any judgement of these victims needs to be suspended. However, if, as Levi suggests, judgement is at times impossible, the thesis challenges Levi’s assumption by contending that representations of ‘privileged’ Jews inevitably take a moral position. In this way, the thesis conceptualises judgement as a ‘limit’ of representation. Indeed, it is shown that Levi himself cannot abstain from judging those for whom he argues judgement should be suspended.

The thesis takes Levi’s concept of the ‘grey zone’ as a point of departure in order to examine the problems of judgement and representation in relation to ‘privileged’ Jews. Analysis focuses on Raul Hilberg’s influential historical work and examples of documentary and fiction films. The thesis examines how Hilberg and several filmmakers employ conventions as a means of conveying judgement. It is argued that self-reflexive representations of ‘privileged’ Jews in film, particularly fictional dramatisation, have the potential to provide a nuanced representation of ‘privileged’ Jews, which engages with Levi’s ideas by questioning the possibility of judgement.

Horror film genre typing and scene labeling via audio analysis

We examine localised sound energy patterns, or events, that we associate with high level affect experienced with films. The study of sound energy events in conjunction with their intended affect enable the analysis of film at a higher conceptual level, such as genre. The various affect/emotional responses we investigate in this paper are brought about by well established patterns of sound energy dynamics employed in audio tracks of horror films. This allows the examination of the thematic content of the films in relation to horror elements. We analyse the frequency of sound energy and affect events at a film level as well as at a scene level, and propose measures indicative of the film genre and scene content. Using 4 horror, and 2 non-horror movies as experimental data we establish a correlation between the sound energy event types and horrific thematic content within film, thus enabling an automated mechanism for genre typing and scene content labeling in film.

Identifying film takes for cinematic analysis

In this paper, we focus on the ‘reverse editing’ problem in movie analysis, i.e., the extraction of film takes, original camera shots that a film editor extracts and arranges to produce a finished scene. The ability to disassemble final scenes and shots into takes is essential for nonlinear browsing, content annotation and the extraction of higher order cinematic constructs from film. In this work, we investigate agglomerative hierachical clustering methods along with different similarity metrics and group distances for this task, and demonstrate our findings with 10 movies.

Automated film rhythm extraction for scene analysis

This paper examines film rhythm, an important expressive element in motion pictures, based on our ongoing study to exploit film grammar as a broad computational framework for the task of automated film and video understanding. Of the many, more or less elusive, narrative devices contributing to film rhythm, this paper discusses motion characteristics that form the basis of our analysis, and presents novel computational models for extracting rhythmic patterns induced through a perception of motion. In our rhythm model, motion behaviour is classified as being either nonexistent, fluid or staccato for a given shot. Shot neighbourhoods in movies are then grouped by proportional makeup of these motion behavioural classes to yield seven high-level rhythmic arrangements that prove to be adept at indicating likely scene content (e.g. dialogue or chase sequence) in our experiments. Underlying causes for this level of codification in our approach are postulated from film grammar, and are accompanied by detailed demonstration from real movies for the purposes of clarification.

Understanding science

Understanding Science is about breakdown of meaning, breakdown of relationship, trying to exist in that space between meaninglessness and understanding, at its cusp, its node, its no-man's land.. It is a melting pot of more than just fragments of images, there are clusters of things, ideas, sounds, words, that swim in and out of your attention. I wanted this film to be a dense multidimensional collage of automatic writing, sound poetry and abstracting strings of images.

Program notes: Scratch Film Festival. UWA. Perth 1997

Mapping the ill disciplined? Spatial analyses and historical change in the post-war film industry

As part of a broad disciplinary shift, from a focus on measuring the value and meaning of cultural artefacts to understanding the import of cultural flows, humanities researchers are increasingly turning to other disciplines and disciplinary practices to inform their research. For film scholars, rather than providing a reading of specific media texts and their qualities there is an increasing focus on the contextual events that shape and formulate cinema practice. This chapter is an example of how cross-disciplinary relationships, for example between Cinema Studies, Geospatial Science, Statistics and the Creative Arts can uncover new research questions and test methodologies across uncharted disciplinary terrain. It also offers an opportunity to reflect on some of the key assumptions around collaborative research, through its reorganization of academic spaces and “sites” of knowledge.

Who was Sarah Bernhardt? Negotiating fact and fiction

Review essay of : Robert Gottlieb's Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. pp. 233.

Unwinding the film spool: Hugo, Méliès, and our return to early film

Taking Martin Scorsese's Hugo (2011) as a case study, this article explains that early film is misleadingly framed in terms of a simple non-fiction/fiction binary. The author argues that early non-fiction Lumière film instead gives evidence of choreographed performance just as Méliès' magical works document the satiric and often critical humour of the French Incoherent movement. Rather than dismiss Hugo, however, the author suggests that these themes and critical concerns have been cleverly re-located and absorbed by Martin Scorsese into the choreography, performance and humour of Hugo itself.

Reflectance response of tapered optical fiber coated with graphene oxide nanostructured thin film for aqueous ethanol sensing

In this work, optical sensing performance of tapered multimode fiber tip coated with graphene oxide (GO) nanostructured thin film towards aqueous ethanol with different concentrations is investigated. The tapering process of the optical fiber is done by a glass processing machine. The multimode optical fiber tip is dip-coated with GO and annealed at 70 °C to enhance the binding of the nanomaterials to the silica fiber. FESEM, Raman microscopy and XRD analyses are performed to micro-characterize the GO thin films. The morphology of the GO is observed to be in sheets forms. The reflectance response of the GO coated fiber tip is compared with the uncoated tip. The measurements are taken using a spectrophotometer in the optical wavelength range of 550-720 nm. The reflectance response of the GO coated fiber tip reduced proportionally, upon exposure to ethanol with concentration range of 5-80%. The dynamic response of the developed sensor showed strong reversibility and repeatability when it is exposed to ethanol with concentrations of 5%, 20% and 40% in distilled water. At room temperature, the sensor shows fast response and recovery as low as 19 and 25 s, respectively. © 2014 Elsevier B.V.

Understanding water and ion transport behaviour and permeability through poly(amide) thin film composite membrane

Molecular dynamics (MD) together with the adaptive biasing force (ABF) and metadynamics free energy calculation methods was used to investigate the permeation properties of salt water through poly(amide) thin film composite reverse osmosis membranes. The thin films were generated by annealing an amorphous cell of poly(amide) chains through an MD method. The MD results showed they have typical structural properties of the active layer of thin film composite membranes and comparable water diffusivity (2.13×10^-5cm²/s for the film with a density of 1.06g/cm³) and permeability (9.27×10^-15cm³cm/cm²sPa) to experimental data. The simulations of water permeation through the films under different transmembrane pressures revealed the behaviours of water molecules in the thin films and the dynamic regimes of water permeation, including Brownian diffusion, flush and jump diffusion regimes. The intermolecular interactions of water and ions with poly(amide) chains showed a strong dependence on the local structure of films. The attraction between water and ploy(amide) molecules can be up to 8.5kcal/mol in dense polymer regions and 5kcal/mol in the pores of about 3nm. The ABF and metadynamics simulations produced the profiles of free energy potential of water and ions along the depth of the thin films, which provided important information for quantitatively determining the barrier energy required for water permeation and rejection of ions. The thin film with a density of 1.06g/cm³ and a thickness of 6nm offers a rejection to Na⁺ but a slight absorption of Cl^- (0.25kcal/mol) at 0.3-0.4nm distance to its surface. Water molecules must overcome 63kcal/mol energy to move to the centre of the film. The dependences of the barrier energy and the water-polymer interaction energy on the local free volume size in the thin film were analysed. The simulations of water permeation under high transmembrane pressures showed a nonlinear response of the concentration and distribution of water molecules in the film to the imposed pressure. Compaction of the film segments close to the porous substrate and water congestion in dense regions significantly influenced the water permeation when the membrane was operated under pressures of more than 3.0MPa.