Words Between Worlds: Portal Fantasy as Dialogic in Gaiman and Miéville

Step through the looking-glass and where do you go? Inherently, every text exposes the reader to other worlds. However, the fantastic, like no other mode, not only exposes, but explores, explains, and employs other worlds (and how we enter them) to question what is real and unreal, possible and impossible.Using Farah Mendelsohn’s (2008) examination of portal fantasy, this paper argues that when you step into another world you leave something behind and bring something back. This Bakhtinian dialogic will then frame an analysis of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (2001) and China Miéville’s The City and the City (2009) which explore notions of organic subjectivity, reader expectations, and if gaps actually exist between textual and extra-textual, real and unreal.These atypical, self- reflexive, satirical portal fantasies express how writers position readers (not unlike their protagonists) in alternative conceptual realms, disturbing the everyday, the commonplace realities we often take for granted. As such, both texts and the discursive strategies they use ask: what do we see, or, as may be the case, un-see? Significantly, this paper suggests that, via self-conscious world-building, portal fantasies allow reader and writer the opportunity to inhabit those spaces between textual, ideological, generic, metaphorical, irrational, fantastic worlds.

Stories from beyond the frame dilemas and contradictions of photojournalism in a digitized and globalized world

To engage in the practice of photojournalism is to occupy a position of privilege, because the practice involves entering, albeit for a short while, the lives of others. But with this privilege comes the burden of representation. In this sense I believe that photojournalism is currently in crisis. This crisis concerns the decontextualization of the image in media outlets and the relegation of the photojournalist to the role of merely a hunter/gatherer rather than a storyteller. In other words, photojournalists have become alienated from the process of re-presentation of their own stories. To some extent it has always been thus.

Through the frame & beyond the gaze

In Fiction in the Age of Photography[i], Nancy Armstrong examines the impact of photography on the way in which the nineteenth century novelists represented society. In particular she asks 'But what do we make of the fact that the novel's turn to pictorialism coincided with the sudden ubiquity of photographic images in the culture at large? Why did pictures begin to speak louder than words?

More than just a transaction: conceptualising industry-based networks for virtual trading communities

This paper addresses the questions of why failure in industry-based networks has been so persistent and whether it is possible to avoid failure and achieve success in internet based markets [iMarketplaces]. A better explanation of implementation failures is important for both improved empirical outcomes and theory building. We construct a theoretical framework based on Bijker’s technology frame (1995) and a contextualization typology developed by Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons (2001). The framework helps us understand how industry-based networks function, why they fail and how we can apply the framework to assist better empirical outcomes. In this paper we apply our framework to Food Connect Australia, a vertically integrated marketplace, representative of the first wave of B2B markets. Sponsors of these iMarketplaces were quick to see and exploit the opportunities online access offered to bring together large numbers of buyers and sellers in new ways. However a lack of understanding of firstly, what represented true value in these networks and secondly, how to achieve buy-in at sustainable levels, meant that many of these first wave sites failed. Application of our framework reveals why there has been a radical shift from the trading role originally envisioned for these sites to the information hub model of the iMarketplace that industry is now being urged to adopt (Berryman and Heck, 2001).

The portal as information broker

The term information broker is widely used in the area of library and information science to describe a middle agent who deals in information as a commodity, enabling customers to gain more efficient access to quality data. The role of this middle agent is described as “information retrieval and information organisation” (Rugge & Glossbrenner, 1995). The role of the broker is to bring additional organisation to the market by lowering search costs (Palmer & Lindemann, 2003).

Robustness in health research : do differences in health measures, techniques, and time frame matter?

Survey-based health research is in a boom phase following an increased amount of health spending in OECD countries and the interest in ageing. A general characteristic of survey-based health research is its diversity. Different studies are based on different health questions in different datasets; they use different statistical techniques; they differ in whether they approach health from an ordinal or cardinal perspective; and they differ in whether they measure short-term or long-term effects. The question in this paper is simple: do these differences matter for the findings? We investigate the effects of life-style choices (drinking, smoking, exercise) and income on six measures of health in the US Health and Retirement Study (HRS) between 1992 and 2002: (1) self-assessed general health status, (2) problems with undertaking daily tasks and chores, (3) mental health indicators, (4) BMI, (5) the presence of serious long-term health conditions, and (6) mortality. We compare ordinal models with cardinal models; we compare models with fixed effects to models without fixed-effects; and we compare short-term effects to long-term effects. We find considerable variation in the impact of different determinants on our chosen health outcome measures; we find that it matters whether ordinality or cardinality is assumed; we find substantial differences between estimates that account for fixed effects versus those that do not; and we find that short-run and long-run effects differ greatly. All this implies that health is an even more complicated notion than hitherto thought, defying generalizations from one measure to the others or one methodology to another.

(Post)colonial ambivalences : Christina Stead and Janet Frame

This thesis is an evaluative comparison of two significant writers, the Australian Christina Stead, and New Zealander Janet Frame. In a detailed analysis of the novels, the writerly ambivalences of each author are explored. Their writings are revealed to be creative of new possibilities for female (post)colonial agency.

Frame rate improvement for the VFX1 headset in virtual reality applications

Concentrates on reducing the processing time to enhance the visual component of the experience in virtual reality. Investigates the use of two co-processing cards, each with their own microprocessor providing parallel processing to the host computer. Concludes that the frame rates of a single computer running the virtual reality system could be improved by up to 35% by the use of parallel processing.

Web health portal to enhance patient safety in Australian healthcare systems

The use of a web Health Portal can be employed not only for reducing health costs but also to view patient's latest medical information (e.g. clinical tests, pathology and radiology results, discharge summaries, prescription renewals, referrals, appointments) in real-time and carry out physician messaging to enhance the information exchanged, managed and shared in the Australian healthcare sector. The Health Portal connects all stakeholders (such as patients and their families, health professionals, care providers, and health regulators) to establish coordination, collaboration and a shared care approach between them to improve overall patient care safety. The paper outlines a Health Portal model for designing a real-time health prevention system. An application of the architecture is described in the area of web Health Portal.