Chimaeric HIV-1 subtype C Gag molecules with large in-frame C-terminal polypeptide fusions form virus-like particles

HIV-1 Pr55 Gag virus-like particles (VLPs) are strong immunogens with potential as candidate HIV vaccines. VLP immunogenicity can be broadened by making chimaeric Gag molecules: however, VLPs incorporating polypeptides longer than 200 aa fused in frame with Gag have not yet been reported. We constructed a range of gag-derived genes encoding in-frame C-terminal fusions of myristoylation-competent native Pr55Gag and p6-truncated Gag (Pr50Gag) to test the effects of polypeptide length and sequence on VLP formation and morphology, in an insect cell expression system. Fused sequences included a modified reverse transcriptase-Tat-Nef fusion polypeptide (RTTN, 778 aa), and truncated versions of RTTN ranging from 113 aa to 450 aa. Baculovirus-expressed chimaeric proteins were examined by western blot and electron microscopy. All chimaeras formed VLPs which could be purified by sucrose gradient centrifugation. VLP diameter increased with protein MW, from ∼100 nm for Pr55Gag to ∼250 nm for GagRTTN. The presence or absence of the Gag p6 region did not obviously affect VLP formation or appearance. GagRT chimaeric particles were successfully used in mice to boost T-cell responses to Gag and RT that were elicited by a DNA vaccine encoding a GagRTTN polypeptide, indicating the potential of such chimaeras to be used as candidate HIV vaccines. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Children's Literature Digital Resource (CLDR)

Children’s Literature Digital Resources incorporates primary texts published from white settlement to 1945, including children’s and young adult fiction, poetry, short stories, and picture books. This collection is supported by selected secondary material. The objective is to provide a centralised access point for information about Australian children's literature and writers and a growing body of full-text primary resources. Four key aims are: * To establish an important digital facility for research, teaching, and information provision around Australian children’s literature; * To provide access to a wide range of high-quality full-text data, both primary and secondary resources; * To provide access to essential library and research information infrastructure and facilities for established and emerging researchers in the fields of Humanities and Education; To enable research while preserving important heritage material. The collection contains texts digitised for AustLit through cooperation with various Australian libraries. The collection includes children’s and young adult fiction, poetry, picture books, short stories, and critical articles relating to relevant primary texts. Authors of primary sources include Irene Cheyne, E. W. Cole, Richard Rowe, Lillian M. Pyke, and Dorothy Wall. Secondary sources include critical works by Clare Bradford, Heather Scutter, Kerry White, Sharyn Pearce, and Marcie Muir. These full-text materials are keyword searchable (both within individual texts and across the CLDR corpus) and can be downloaded for research purposes. As well as digitising primary and secondary material, the project locates and provides pathways to existing online resources or internet publications to enhance AustLit's Children's Literature subset. These resources include both primary and secondary texts.

Asian-Australian Children’s Literature and Publishing (AACLAP)

Led by Queensland University of Technology, the Asian-Australian Children’s Literature and Publishing (AACLAP)research project investigates and records details of Australian children’s literature that is set in Asia and/or that represents Asian-Australian cultures and experiences and literature that is published in selected Asian languages. This includes East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Bay of Bengal. The AACLAP dataset is a comprehensive collection of agent and work records related to ’Asia’, including, but not limited to, autobiography, fiction, criticism, poetry, drama, short stories, and picture books, published during a forty-year period from 1970 to 2010. The dataset provide valuable primary and secondary sources that are important for developing literature-focused educational programs in line with the national government’s push for Asia Literacy. AACLAP is a subset of AustLit, the virtual research environment and information resource for Australian literary, print, and narrative culture scholars, students, and the public.

The other side of the threshold : Strindberg's experiments in creative dissection

A 1500-word review of Strindberg: A Life by Sue Prideaux (Yale UP, 2012). One way of classifying biographies is to divide them into those that apply their own interpretative framework – be it psychoanalytic, gender-based, socio-historical, and so on – to a given subject and those that aim to meet the subject, on their own terms, or at least in terms that the subject would recognise...

Framing local stories for community consumption facilitation and evaluation in narrative driven arts-based projects

Cyclone Yasi struck the Cassowary Coast of Queensland in the early hours of Feb 3, 2011, destroying many homes sand property, including the destruction of the Cardwell and district historical society’s premises. With their own homes flattened, many were forced to live in mobile accommodation, with extended family, or leave altogether. The historical society members however were more devastated by their flattened foreshore museum and loss of their collection material. A call for assistance was made through the OHAA Qld branch, who along with QUT sponsored a trip to somehow plan how they could start to pick up the pieces to start again. This presentation highlights the need for communities to gather, preserve and present their own stories, in a way that is sustainable and meaningful to them, but that good advice and support along the way is important. Two 2 day workshops were held in March and then September, augmented by plenty of email correspondence and phone calls in between. Participants learnt that if they could conduct quality oral history interviews, they could later use these in many exhibitable ways including: documentary pieces; digital stories; photographic collections; creative short stories; audio segments –while also drawing closely together a suffering community. This story is not only about the people who were interviewed about the night Yasi struck, but the amazing women (all over 50) of the historical society who were willing to try and leap the digital divide that faces older Australians, especially those in rural Australia, so that their older local stories would not be lost and so that new stories could also be remembered.

Yasi : Digital stories and oral histories collection

"The second of the Oral History Workshops conducted by Associate Professor Helen Klaebe and the Oral History team from the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, was conducted in El Arish on the last weekend in September 2011. The first workshop was held in Cardwell in March 2011. Historical Society members and other researchers from both the Cardwell and El Arish areas combined to organise and fund the workshops, which have produced a growing collection of recordings of personal stories from people with a wide variety of experiences during and after cyclone Yasi. Aside from being productive in documenting history, the workshops have offered a greatly appreciated educational opportunity for many people, most of whom have never before had access to such benefits. Not only were they able to learn history gathering methodologies and the relevant technical skills, but they also gained new experience in the use of computers to apply these skills. These far northern oral history workshops took the form of a shortened version of the 5 series workshops being presented at QUT in Brisbane this year. The agenda was aligned to the wishes and requirements of the participants who attended from the Cassowary Coast and Tableland regions."

Preparation and thermal energy storage properties of paraffin/calcined diatomite composites as form-stable phase change materials

A composite paraffin-based phase change material (PCM) was prepared by blending composite paraffin and calcined diatomite through the fusion adsorption method. In this study, raw diatomite was purified by thermal treatment in order to improve the adsorption capacity of diatomite, which acted as a carrier material to prepare shape-stabilized PCMs. Two forms of paraffin (paraffin waxes and liquid paraffin) with different melting points were blended together by the fusion method, and the optimum mixed proportion with a suitable phase-transition temperature was obtained through differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) analysis. Then the prepared composite paraffin was adsorbed in calcined diatomite. The prepared paraffin/calcined diatomite composites were characterized by the scanning electron microscope (SEM) and Fourier transformation infrared (FT-IR) analysis techniques. Thermal energy storage properties of the composite PCMs were determined by DSC method. DSC results showed that there was an optimum adsorption ratio between composite paraffin and calcined diatomite and the phase-transition temperature and the latent heat of the composite PCMs were 33.04 ◦C and 89.54 J/g, respectively. Thermal cycling test of composite PCMs showed that the prepared material is thermally reliable and chemically stable. The obtained paraffin/calcined diatomite composites have proper latent heat and melting temperatures, and show practical significance and good potential application value.

Faster Than Words

This practice-led research contextualises and advances the novel as a form within the fiction of football (commonly referred to as soccer in Australia). This is a field which has undergone very little academic scrutiny. Through adapting and developing a distant reading model of abstraction and using it in conjunction with closer textual analyses, this research develops the first historiography of football fiction. The model is used to realise a set of broad conventions, map relationships across the body of work and identify growth areas. The thesis argues that football fiction exhibits qualities which warrant the works being described collectively as a genre. A comparison of young adult and adult football fictions will highlight the similarities and differences that occur in literary technique in texts aimed at these readerships, as they appear to be distinct to football fiction. The generic conventions and identified divergences are used to inform and are reflected in an original novel-length work of young adult fantasy football fiction, entitled Blaming David Beckham. The objectives of this novel, as an extension to the research, are to explore and demonstrate the findings and advance the understanding of the generic elements of football fiction.

The naturally imperfect form : investigations of the application of digital sculpting methods - extracted art : incorporating and translating ‘found art’ into the medium of digital sculpture

This dissertation analyses how physical objects are translated into digital artworks using techniques which can lead to ‘imperfections’ in the resulting digital artwork that are typically removed to arrive at a ‘perfect’ final representation. The dissertation discusses the adaptation of existing techniques into an artistic workflow that acknowledges and incorporates the imperfections of translation into the final pieces. It presents an exploration of the relationship between physical and digital artefacts and the processes used to move between the two. The work explores the 'craft' of digital sculpting and the technology used in producing what the artist terms ‘a naturally imperfect form’, incorporating knowledge of traditional sculpture, an understanding of anatomy and an interest in the study of bones (Osteology). The outcomes of the research are presented as a series of digital sculptural works, exhibited as a collection of curiosities in multiple mediums, including interactive game spaces, augmented reality (AR), rapid prototype prints (RP) and video displays.

Reading : From Turning the Page to Touching the Screen

This chapter considers the ways in which contemporary children’s literature depicts reading in changing times, with a particular eye on the cultural definitions of ‘reading’ being offered to young people in the age of the tablet computer. A number of picture books, in codex and app form, speak to changing times for reading by their emphasis on the value of books and reading as technologies of literature and of the self. Attending to valuations of literacy and literature within children’s texts provides insight into anxieties about books in the electronic age.

The artful life story : the oral history interview as fiction

This practice-led PhD project consists of two parts. The first is an exegesis documenting how a fiction writer can enter a dialogue with the oral history project in Australia. I identify two philosophical mandates of the oral history project in Australia that have shaped my creative practice: an emphasis on the analysis of the interviewee’s subjective experience as a means of understanding the past, and the desire to engage a wide audience in order to promote empathy towards the subject. The discussion around fiction in the oral history project is in its infancy. In order to deepen the debate, I draw on the more mature discussion in ethnographic fiction. I rely on literary theorists Steven Greenblatt, Dorrit Cohn and Gerard Genette to develop a clear understanding of the distinct narrative qualities of fiction, in order to explore how fiction can re-present and explore an interviewee’s subjective experience, and engage a wide readership. I document my own methodology for producing a work of fiction that is enriched by oral history methodology and theory, and responds to the mandates of the project. I demonstrate the means by which fiction and the oral history project can enter a dialogue in the truest sense of the word: a two-way conversation that enriches and augments practice in both fields. The second part of the PhD is a novel, set in Brisbane and based on oral history interviews and archival material I gathered over the course of the project. The novel centres on Brisbane artist Evelyn, who has been given an impossible task: a derelict old house is about to be demolished, and she must capture its history in a sculpture that will be built on the site. Evelyn struggles to come up with ideas and create the sculpture, realising that she has no way to discover who inhabited the house. What follows is a series of stories, each set in a different era in Brisbane’s history, which take the reader backwards through the house’s history. Hidden Objects is a novel about the impossibility of grasping the past and the powerful pull of storytelling. The novel is an experiment in a hybrid form and is accompanied by an appendix that identifies the historically accurate sources informing the fiction. The decisions about the aesthetics of the novel were a direct result of my engagement with the mandates of the oral history project in Australia. The novel was shortlisted in the 2012 Queensland Literary Awards, unpublished manuscript category.

Form prevailing over substance?

The decision of the Court of Appeal in Kellas-Sharpe v PSAL Ltd [2012] QCA 371 considered a not unusual provision in a loan agreement, being a provision whereby a lender agrees to accept a lower or concessional rate of interest in circumstances of prompt payment by the borrower. The loan agreement in question provided for the borrower to pay a standard rate of interest of 7.5% per month. However, if the borrower was not in default, the lender agreed to accept interest at a concessional rate of interest of 4% per month. The issue for determination by the Court of Appeal (McMurdo P, Gotterson JA and Fryberg J) was whether the clause was subject to the equitable jurisdiction to relieve against penalties, and, if so, if the interest rate provision should be treated as a penalty making the interest rate provision void. In mounting this argument, the borrower was seeking to overturn a long line of authority which has repeatedly upheld the semantic distinction between an increase in the rate of interest (which attracts the doctrine concerning penalties) and an incentive to the borrower by way of a reduction in the interest rate for prompt payment (which does not attract the doctrine)...

Contemporary Australian masculinities and De Certeau’s concept of la perruqe in Christos Tsiolkas’ novel The Slap (2008)

This paper will focus on how Christos Tsiolkas the author of The Slap (2008) invites us to view the complex range of private lives of his male characters living in suburban Melbourne through their daily routines, conversations and innermost thoughts. On the surface most appear to be participating in and achieving a certain level of success in their lives. However, this novel reveals when we agitate and dig below the “practices of everyday life” there is often a disquiet simmering away under the facade of family harmony, male bravado and contentment. This paper will argue that as a result of dissatisfaction with the established order of their lives, each man has managed to create another level of meaning for himself, his own form of la perruque (De Certeau 2011: 29),the concept of living proposed by Michel De Certeau. A treatment of the characters in this article draws on, and is used to illustrate the paradigm.