The Nazis’ use of ‘Sieg Heil’: a point of continuity with the Völkisch movement

This historical note briefly considers the history of the phrase ‘Sieg Heil,’ using excerpts from original sources. It argues that this phrase, and the swastika, marked points of continuity with the earlier völkisch movement.

The influence of point of identification on merchandise consumption

It has long been recognised that consumers can form bonds and identify strongly with the organisations with which they are involved. When the organisation in question is a professional sporting club, identification can be a complex issue. Sports fans can identify with the team as a whole, with individual players, or both. How this different point of identification affects behaviour such as merchandise consumption is the focus of this paper. The survey responses of 161 members of the Kangaroos Football (AFL) Club suggest that members can identify with both team and individual players in tandem. Far from being opposites, team and player identification were found to be distinct constructs, not significantly related to each other. The point of identification was related to the nature of merchandise consumed and the manner in which it was consumed. The results suggest both player and team identification should be encouraged and that merchandise should cater for both in an inclusive way.

An investigation on the risk perceptions of Australian property fund Managers

Recent empirical and analytical studies have demonstrated that downside risk appears as an intuitively appealing risk measure in which it is more consistent with investors’ behaviour. Conversely, qualitative studies into the behaviour of investors, particularly real estate investors, have been relatively limited. This study seeks to address this shortfall and aims to examine the perceptions of property fund managers towards risk. A survey was conducted to investigate the risk perceptions of property fund managers and determine whether they only require compensation for bearing with higher downside risk. The acceptance level of downside risk is also examined. The findings reveal that downside risk is more consistent with how investors individually perceive risk. However, there is also a gap between theoretical assertions and practice in which downside risk is not commonly used in the practice. The results give an insight into the knowledge base of property investors towards risk, particularly downside risk.

Behaviours of property investors: an investigation on the risk perceptions of Australian property fund managers

Recent finance and real estate empirical and analytical studies have demonstrated that downside risk appears as an intuitively appealing risk measure in which it is more consistent with investors' behaviours. Conversely, qualitative studies into the behaviours of investors, particularly real estate investors, have been relatively limited. This study seeks to address this shortfall and aims to examine the behaviours of property fund managers towards downside risk. A survey was conducted in order to investigate the risk perceptions of property fund managers and determine whether they only require compensation for bearing with higher downside risk. The acceptance level of downside risk in the property funds industry in Australia is also examined. The findings reveal that downside risk is more consistent with how investors individually perceive risk. However, there is also a gap between theoretical assertions and practice in which downside risk is not commonly used in the practice. The results give an insight into the knowledge base of property investors towards downside risk.

Downside beta and the cross-sectional determinants of listed property trust returns

This study examines the importance of downside beta when seeking to explain variations in listed property trust (LPT) returns in Australia between 1993 and 2005. The results reveal that downside beta outperforms conventional beta and provides higher explanatory power to the cross-sectional LPT return variations. The results also indicate that investors only require a premium for downside risk. However, the explanatory power of downside beta has diminished once the co-kurtosis of LPTs is controlled. Interestingly, the results also reveal that by itself downside beta is unable to fully explain returns in line with strong evidence for momentum and book-to-market ratio. The findings provide additional insights for investors and real estate analysts into the pricing of LPTs.

Second person : a point of view? The function of the second person pronoun in narrative prose fiction

This thesis looks at the functions and effects of the ‘second-person’ pronoun in narrative prose fiction, with particular focus on the fluidity and ambiguity of the mode that I will call Protean-'you.' It is a mode in which it is unclear whether the ‘you’ is a character, the narrator, a reader/narratee, or no-one in particular—or a combination of these—so that readers find ‘second-person’ utterances at once familiar and deeply strange. I regard the ‘second person’ as a special case of narrative ‘person’ that, at its most fluid, can produce an experience of reading quite unlike that of reading traditional ‘first-‘ and ‘third-person’ narrative. Essentially, this unique experience comes about because Protean-‘you’ neglects to constitute the stable modes of subjectivity that readers expect to find within narrative textuality. These stable modes of subjectivity, modelled on what I will refer to as Cartesianism’s hegemonic notion of the self, have been thoroughly formalised and naturalised within the practices of ‘first-‘ and ‘third-person’ narrative. The Protean-‘you’ form of ‘second-person’ narrative, conversely, is a mode of narrative discourse that puts readers in a place of doubt and uncertainty, its unsettling equivocations forcefully disrupting accustomed, mimetic explanations of narrative and denying us access to the foundational, authorising subject of classical Cartesian thought. Rather than founding a notion of ‘second-person’ narrative and narrative ‘person’ generally on Cartesianism's ‘self-ish’ logic of unified, privatised identity, I turn to C.S, Peirce's notion of the semiotic self and to developments in post-structuralist thought. Essentially, the conception of subjectivity underpinning my arguments is Peirce's proposition that the self is to be conceived of not as a cogito, but as a sign by which the conscious entity knows itself. It is a sign, moreover, that is constantly being re-read, reinterpreted, so that identity is never self-complete. This reconception of subjectivity is necessary because 1 will argue that the effects of Protean-‘you’ arise in some part from a tension between Cartesianism's hegemony and what philosophical pragmatism and post-structuralism glimpse as the actual condition of the human subject—the subject as dispersed and contingent rather than unified and authoritative. Most discussions of ‘second-person’ narrative conceive of the mode in terms of implicit communicative relations, in some measure instituting Cartesianism's notion of the intentionalist self at the centre of literary meaning. I contrast the paradigmatic address model that arises from this conception against a model that approaches the analysis of ‘second-person’ narrative modality in terms of a referential function, that is, in terms of the object or objects referred to deictically by the ‘second-person’ pronoun. Two principal functions of ‘second-person’ textuality are identified and discussed at length. The first is generalisation, which is rarely dissipated altogether, a situation that contributes to the ambiguities of the pronoun's reference in much ‘second-person’ fiction. The second principal function is that of address, that is, the allocutionary function. Clearly, although stories that continually refer to a ‘you’ can seem quite baffling and unnatural, not all ‘second-person’ narratives unsettle the reader. In order to make the ‘second person's’ outlandish narratives knowable and stable, we bring to bear on them in our habits of reading whatever hermeneutic frames, whatever interpretive keys, come to hand, including a large number of unexceptional forms of literary and ‘natural’ discourse that employ the ‘second-person’ pronoun. These forms include letter writing and internal dialogue (i.e., talking to one's self), the language of the courtroom, the travelogue, the maxim, and so on. In looking at the ways in which the radicalising potentials of ‘second-person’ discourse are contained or recuperated, I focus on issues of vraisemblance and mimesis. Vraisemblance can be described as the ‘system of conventions and expectations which rests on/reinforces that more general system of ‘mutual knowledge’ produced within a community for the realisation and maintenance of a whole social world’. All of the forms of the vraisemblable are already instituted within social, cultural relations, so that what vraisemblance describes is the way we fit the inscriptions we read-that is, the way in which we naturalise what we read-into those given cultural and social forms. I also look at the conventionalising and naturalising work done by notions of mimesis in explaining relations between the world, our being in it, and texts, proposing that mimesis provides a principle buttress by which the good standing of the metaphor of ‘person’ is preserved in traditional and pre-critical modes of analysis. Indeed, the critic’s recourse to ‘person’ is in some measure always an engagement with mimesis. Any discussion that maintains that mimesis is in some way productive of meaning-which this thesis in fact does-must identify mimesis as a merely conventional category within practices of reading and semiosis more generally, and at the very least remove that term from its traditional position of transparent primacy and authority. Some of the most interesting and insightful arguments about ‘second-person’ narrative propose that the ‘second person’s’ most striking effects derive from the constitution of an ‘intersubjective’ experience of reading in which the subject positions of the ‘you’-protagonist, reader-narratee and narrator are combined into a fluid and indeterminate multiple subjectivity. Notions of intersubjectivity frequently position themselves as liberating the reader from Cartesianism's fixed, authoritative modes of subjectivity, Frequently, however, they tend implicitly to reinstate Cartesianism's notion of the self at the centre of textual practice and subjectivity. I look at Daniel Gunn's novel ‘Almost You’, at length in this context, illustrating the constant overdetermination of the ‘you’ and the novel's narrating voice, and demonstrating that this overdetermination leaves the origin of the narrative discourse, the identity of the narrator, and the ontological nature of both principal protagonists utterly ambiguous. The fluidity and ambiguity of Protean-‘you’ in ‘Almost You’ is discussed in terms of ‘second-person’ intersubjectivity, but with a view to demonstrating the indebtedness by the notion of intersubjectivity to Cartesianism's hegemony of ‘person’. I then turn to a discussion of what might be a more ‘old fashioned’ if perhaps ultimately more far-reaching approach to the ‘second person’s’ often startling ambiguities. This is Keats's notion of negative capability, a capacity or quality in which a person ‘is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ I suggest that Protean-‘you’ texts will license all of the readings of ambiguity and fluidity proposed in my discussion of ‘Almost You’, but conclude that the instances of indeterminacy illustrate no more than that: the fluidity and deep ambiguity, and thus, finally, the lack of coherence, of Protean-‘you’ discourse. This has particular implications for how we are to consider readers’ experiences of narrative texts. More fundamentally, it has implications for how we are to consider readers as subjects. I suggest that unstable, ambiguous instances of ‘second-person’ narrative can tear the complex and systematic embroidery of ideological suture that unifies Cretinism’s experience or sense of subjectivity, leaving the reader in a condition of epistemological and ontological havoc. I go on to argue that much of the deeply unsettling effect of Protean-‘you’ discourse anises because its utterances explicitly gesture towards Cretinism’s notion of self. Protean-‘you’ involves a sense of address that is much more pronounced than we are accustomed to facing when reading literary narrative, alerting us to the presence of inscribed anthropomorphic subjects. At the very same time, protean-‘you’ leaves its inscribed subjects indeterminate, ambiguous. This conflict generates a tension between the anticipation of the emergence of speaking and listening selves and our inability to find them. I go on to propose that Protean-‘you’ narrative's lack of coherence is also to be understood as the condition of narrative actuality generally, but a condition that is vigorously mediated against by dominant practices of reading and writing, hocusing my discussion in this respect on the issue of narrative ‘person,’ I argue that narrative ‘person’ is constituted within texts as an apparent unity, but that it is in fact, produced as unitary solely within the practice of making sense, that is, Within our habits of reading, and so is never finally unified. I propose that this is the case for ‘first-‘ and ‘third-person’ modes no less than for the ‘second.’ Where ‘second-person’ narrative at its most radical and Protean differs from conventional ‘first-‘ and ‘third-person’ narratives is the degree to which each has been circumscribed by practices of tantalization, containment and limit, and, in particular, Cretinism’s hegemony of ‘person.’ It may be that the most significant insights ‘second-person’ narrative has to offer are to be found within its capacity to reveal to the engaged reader the underlying condition of narrative discourse, and more generally, its capacity to reveal the actual condition of the human subject-a condition in which, exactly like its textual corollary of narrative ‘person,’ the self is glimpsed as thoroughly dispersed and contingent.

Effect of structure-property relationships on fatigue failure in natural fibres

The fatigue behaviour of natural fibres is important for fibre processing efficiency as well as the properties and performance of products made from these fibres. This chapter presents some fibre fatigue results obtained from various experimental methods and testing conditions. It demonstrates that many factors, including fibre structure and chemical treatments, affect the fatigue failure in natural fibres. Examples of controlling fibre fatigue life for different purposes are also presented. Knowledge of the fatigue behaviour of natural fibres will help product design and care.

The role of entrepreneurship education in the commercialization of intellectual property at Canadian universities

In this research paper, we explore the relationship between the commercialization of intellectual property created within Canadian universities and academic entrepreneurship education programs. The steady growth and importance of both these activities over the last twenty years highlights the value of empirically examining the linkages that may exist between them. This paper will endeavor to add to the limited research in these areas and provide both empirical evidence and theoretical support to improve definition and distinction of the roles of these two seemingly interrelated activities. The data tested suggest that the main driver of commercialization intensity is derived from the creation of an environment rich in IP. However, further study is required to enhance understanding. In particular, we need to know more about the impact that the development of entrepreneurial capacity within an institution may have upon the spin-out process.