'Becoming a supervisor' : the impact of doctoral supervision on supervisors' learning

The doctorate is an educative process for students but what is its impact on supervisors' learning about the practice of doctoral supervision? Internationally, there is an increased emphasis on formal training, monitoring and accountability of doctoral supervisors. Yet there is a striking silence about what doctoral supervisors learn through supervising doctoral students, and how the impacts on supervisors might be theorised. The aim of this article is to begin to address this gap in the doctoral education literature, based on a thematic analysis of two complementary interview studies of a cross-disciplinary sample of experienced doctoral supervisors. The analysis illustrates the significant impact of doctoral supervision on the learning and knowledge of doctoral supervisors, particularly in relation to how supervisors engage with/in the social and political context of their university, understand themselves and their students, and how the contemporary context of supervision affects the sort of pedagogical relationships supervisors establish with their doctoral students. Regardless of supervisors' discipline, position in the academic hierarchy or supervisory experience, the analysis indicates that supervisors' learning experiences shape their subjectivities and identities, and that supervision is an ongoing ontological process of ‘becoming a supervisor’. The importance of integrating a theory of ‘becoming a supervisor’ into supervisor professional development is proposed.

Writing/reading a life : the rhetorical practice of autobiography

This essay examines how the introduction/preface to a non-fiction text is constructed as autobiographical practice – a sort of ‘introduction-as-memoir’. The use and autobiographical effects of rhetorical tropes (stake inoculation, metaphor and binary oppositions) are examined in the introduction that prefaces Massacre myth (Moran, 1999), a polemic account of the 1926 police massacre of Aborigines that was the catalyst for Australia’s ‘History Wars’. Using the analytical methods of deconstruction, I tease out how language, structure and a (seemingly) objective account of historical virtues are recruited to the project of autobiography, and illuminate the role of language in the construction of the authorial subject (and Others), and show how these are entangled with broader social, political and epistemological issues. The analysis underlines the dialogic relationship between text, reader and society, and the instability of truth claims and the authorial subject of autobiography.

Issues in Australian foreign policy : July to December 2010

Two unforseen developments impeded the Labor government’s capacity to pursue its foreign policy objectives in the period under review. Firstly, Labor’s precarious standing in the parliament tilted the government’s policy agenda in favour of issues that the Greens prioritised. Gillard addressed some of these issues, for instance by holding the parliamentary debate on Afghanistan and by pursuing Japan over whaling in the Southern Ocean, but not to the degree that the Greens demanded. Immigration was emblematic of the government’s travails. The Greens advocated an increase in the refugee intake, but the Coalition favoured the resumption of offshore processing. Just when Labor’s proposed Timorese solution was becoming a realistic possibility, the High Court’s decision devalued the entire notion of offshore processing. The only consolation for the government was that the court had reduced the options available to all political parties.

Secondly, the Wikileaks saga revealed that Rudd may no longer be — and perhaps never was — Labor’s trump card in the realm of foreign policy. American assessments of the foreign minister’s character and judgment were in parts scathing. The Obama administration, nonetheless, appeared to readily and usefully absorb his analysis of Chinese politics. Quite how revelations of Rudd’s conversations with Clinton will affect his relations with the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party is another matter. It may well be that Rudd’s influence on Chinese leaders was always wildly overestimated, but in any case it seemed likely that the foreign minister would spend some time rebuilding ties with Beijing in 2011.

A third development — which hitherto had applied more in the realm of perception than reality — similarly threatened to limit the options open to future Australian governments of all stripes: the intensifying debate over alliance management that Hugh White’s essay instigated. Judgments about what sort of region — and what sort of China — Australia will face were imprinted in issues such as the rare earths find and the AUSMIN meeting. By the end of 2010, few issues could be discussed without reference to the China factor.

Multimodal synthesis and the voice of the multimedia author in a Japanese EFL context

This paper examines a powerful potential of multimodal design: meaning that transcends the total semiotic contribution of a text's constituent parts. With reference to data drawn from the digital storytelling practices of Japanese university students, the author argues and demonstrates that in the current semiotic climate, characterised by the increasing availability and complexity of communication tools and ready appropriation of available designs, practices of multimedia authorship truly can evince expression that is authentically multiplicative. However, this sort of meaning making does not automatically come about. Controlling the inherent polysemy of multimodal texts, in the author's view, is a matter of recognising points of semantic correspondence among co-deployed images, language, etc. and creating syntheses of potential meaning that cut across these semiotic modes. The author further argues that it is in this way that the voice of the multimodal author can most clearly be heard, particularly in cases in which a language learner–author integrates elements within a multimedia text that encode meaning in the L2.

Strengthening work integrated learning (WIL) experiences for rural education students : exploring community based partnerships

This paper investigates three areas of priority for rural teacher education: work integrated learning (WIL); attraction and retention of teachers to rural areas; and the potential challenges and benefits of community based partnerships to address these areas of need. The data on which this paper is based focuses on a Victorian project around six case studies that explored the research and scholarship of teaching graduates to be work ready for the needs of rural and regional communities. The project also aimed to explore how preservice teacher education can develop and better support pre-service teachers (PSTs) through rural and regional community-based WIL experiences.
The project investigated what sort of support PSTs undertaking WIL experiences in rural and regional communities need in order to develop positive attitudes and understandings in relation to working in a rural/regional community. Consideration was also given to how support from the university, school,
supervising teacher and broader local community enhances or detracts from the PST’s experience of WIL in rural and regional areas. In order to explore these issues in this paper the authors will outline some recommendations with regards to ways in which teacher education programs may enhance the experiences of stakeholders involved in rural and regional WIL experiences, including PSTs, supervising teachers, university teacher educators and community members.
The project’s underlying conceptual framework of place, productivity and partnerships will be explained in terms of its overlapping dimensions of community, creativity and capital in order to reconceptualise preservice teacher education in local, rural and regional and global contexts as adaptive community-based work integrated learning within a knowledge economy.
The final discussion will make recommendations on how universities and other identified stakeholders can better facilitate WIL and enhance stakeholder engagement in rural and regional areas in order to equip PSTs
and classroom teachers to work creatively together in productive partnerships to meet the future demands of local rural and global contexts of change in a knowledge economy.

Dielectrophoresis of micro/nano particles using curved microelectrodes

Dielectrophoresis, the induced motion of polarisable particles in non-homogenous electric field, has been proven as a versatile mechanism to transport, immobilise, sort and characterise micro/nano scale particle in microfluidic platforms. The performance of dielectrophoretic (DEP) systems depend on two parameters: the configuration of microelectrodes designed to produce the DEP force and the operating strategies devised to employ this force in such processes. This work summarises the unique features of curved microelectrodes for the DEP manipulation of target particles in microfluidic systems. The curved microelectrodes demonstrate exceptional capabilities including (i) creating strong electric fields over a large portion of their structure, (ii) minimising electro-thermal vortices and undesired disturbances at their tips, (iii) covering the entire width of the microchannel influencing all passing particles, and (iv) providing a large trapping area at their entrance region, as evidenced by extensive numerical and experimental analyses. These microelectrodes have been successfully applied for a variety of engineering and biomedical applications including (i) sorting and trapping model polystyrene particles based on their dimensions, (ii) patterning carbon nanotubes to trap low-conductive particles, (iii) sorting live and dead cells based on their dielectric properties, (iv) real-time analysis of drug-induced cell death, and (v) interfacing tumour cells with environmental scanning electron microscopy to study their morphological properties. The DEP systems based on curved microelectrodes have a great potential to be integrated with the future lab-on-a-chip systems.

Landmark based corridor discrimination

For a mobile robot to perform some sort of useful function it usually must have some sort of global understanding of its environment. This is usually expressed in the form of map. Through real-world experiments, using a mobile robot inspired by insect visual guidance, we present results showing the performance of a mobile robot in recognising a previously encountered corridor environment and discriminating between various corridors. This is achieved through the building and refinement of maps based on the observation of simple landmarks en route.

Must Dewey and Kierkegaard’s inquiry for world peace be violent?

Amongst the many aims of education, surely the pursuit of global peace must be one of the most significant.The mandate of UNESCO is to pursue world peace through education by primarily promoting collaboration.The sort of collaboration that UNESCO endorses involves democratic dialogue,where various persons from differing backgrounds can come together,listen,negotiate and discuss possible ways in which peace might be pursued.While this sort of democratic dialogue with its associated free intellectual inquiry is more readily acceptable for issues dealing with problems in the realm of physical nature, it is not so easily tolerated in the realm of ethics and values. Indeed inquiry into the realm of ethics by Kierkegaard has been described by Levinas to be a form of violence. Similarly John Dewey’s work has been included in a list of the ten most harmful books by some conservatives in the United States because he promoted inquiry into morals and religion. Dewey argued against the assumption that there are two-realms—one physical and one moral.He and Kierkegaard both encouraged democratic inquiry into ethics,which is the sort of collaboration recognised by UNESCO as being necessary if we are to pursue world peace.Yet such investigations can be considered by some to be violent and harmful. It is argued here that pursuing inquiries into ethics and aims of education,while appearing to challenge the status quo, should not be construed as being violent but rather should be understood as democratic and educative.

Acting alone to act together: diversifying approaches to North Korea

Strategic discussions about North Korea’s proliferation comprise a number of dimensions. The core assumption underlying this article is that the ideational aspects of North Korea’s decision making are important and give rise to a range of strategic considerations. This is not to underplay the strategic, materialist elements in North Korea’s provocative and at times belligerent behaviour. Rather, it is to argue that Australia is well placed to concentrate on the social dimensions of strategic discussions. As a less important middle power, a regional player, yet geographically distant from the threat, Australia is in a position to provide a point of differentiation from other, more entrenched players such as the United States or the Republic of Korea (ROK). A good starting point for developing this sort of engagement is to enhance non-state, track two cooperation between the two countries, which has been stalled since the early 2000s. In this article I will first canvass the ongoing debate taking place in Australian academic and policy circles regarding Australia’s place in the world. Of particular concern, is the question how Australia should balance its most important strategic relationship – that with the United States – with geographic and economic realities. I then sketch some of the limitations of current thinking, concentrating particularly on discourse that portrays North Korea as a rogue state and finish with a discussion of how non-state activity can act as a helpful precursor to more constructive relationships between states, and the types of creative engagement strategies currently taking place in the United States, despite the volatile political environment.

Parallel bucket sorting on graphics processing units based on convex optimization

We found an interesting relation between convex optimization and sorting problem. We present a parallel algorithm to compute multiple order statistics of the data by minimizing a number of related convex functions. The computed order statistics serve as splitters that group the data into buckets suitable for parallel bitonic sorting. This led us to a parallel bucket sort algorithm, which we implemented for many-core architecture of graphics processing units (GPUs). The proposed sorting method is competitive to the state-of-the-art GPU sorting algorithms and is superior to most of them for long sorting keys.

Cross-artform creative practice as still-life recovery: Chinese-Western materialisms of time, writing and death

As argued by Norman Bryson, the still-life genre is sorely neglected by theorists and critics, largely because its concern with ‘low-plane reality’ (everyday items and acts) has obscured its genuine relevance to material thinking. By reappraising rather than abandoning the genre’s traditional themes of death and time—using a cross-cultural, Chinese-Western approach—it is possible to re-energise materialisms of time, writing and death within still life. Such a move depends above all on a re-evaluation of still life as ‘Vanitas’—the term which to date has unified, and more to the point limited, traditional still-life understandings of death and time. This article tracks a more explosive and creative materialism of still life simultaneously through the specifically Chinese approach to death (which includes the ‘Yin Yang’ 阴阳 as a sort of author of time) and via Gilles Deleuze’s cinematic philosophy of the time-image; what connects these is the very Deleuzean notion of time that subtends Chinese engagements with death. In this way, the still-life genre may be recovered from its current critical and theoretical malaise. Reconnecting with practice is a crucial aspect of this recovery, and so in its early stages this article analyses an example of still-life, creative non-fiction (authored by Cher Coad), and it concludes by establishing the value of this potentially ‘new chapter of the “still life” genre’ (in Matilde Marcolli’s terms) for the cross-artform analysis of the short story ‘Nhill’ (authored by Patrick West). Analysis, though, is only half the picture: a fully recovered still-life genre would see theory and practice endlessly circulating through each other, spurring on practice and impelling theory. Coad’s and West’s literary examples are introduced in the hope that they might trigger fresh theoretical and practice-based, still-life discoveries in prose and also in poetry.

Mining mechanism of top-k influential nodes based on voting algorithm in mobile social networks

In recent years, evaluating the influence of nodes and finding top-k influential nodes in social networks, has drawn a wide attention and has become a hot-pot research issue. Considering the characteristics of social networks, we present a novel mechanism to mine the top-k influential nodes in mobile social networks. The proposed mechanism is based on the behaviors analysis of SMS/MMS (simple messaging service / multimedia messaging service) communication between mobile users. We introduce the complex network theory to build a social relation graph, which is used to reveal the relationship among people's social contacts and messages sending. Moreover, intimacy degree is also introduced to characterize social frequency among nodes. Election mechanism is hired to find the most influential node, and then a heap sorting algorithm is used to sort the voting results to find the k most influential nodes. The experimental results show that the mechanism can finds out the most influential top-k nodes efficiently and effectively. © 2013 IEEE.

Responsible management of motor vehicle drivers with dementia

When Bridget Driscoll, a 44-year-old mother of two died after being struck by a motor vehicle, considered to be the first motor vehicle fatality in UK and possibly the world, the coroner stated 'I trust this sort of nonsense will never happen again'.1 Sadly, the coroner, medical practitioners and general public would be deeply and repeatedly disappointed. It was 1896. Motor vehicles were a curiosity. Drivers did not undergo any form of testing, be it medical fitness, driving ability or otherwise, and there were no licensing regulatory agencies. By 2010, road injury was the ninth most common cause of death globally (1.3 million deaths per annum) and dementia the fourth most common in high income countries.2 By 2030 the number of all licensed UK drivers who are 65 years or older will increase by almost 50% to almost one in every four drivers.3 If the juxtaposition of driving with dementia in an ageing population is not already a contentious social, political and medical issue, it certainly will become so.