Creativity and discourse

This paper will consider the relationship between discourse analysis and creativity and elucidate the ways in which a discourse analytical approach to creativity might be distinguished from the ‘language and creativity’ approaches which currently dominate applied linguistics and sociolinguistics. In the ‘discourse and creativity’ approach I will be describing, creativity is located not in language per se, but in the strategic ways people use language in concrete situations in order to stimulate social change. I will explore how aspects of this approach are reflected in work carried out within the paradigm of world Englishes.

Monodisperse lignin fractions as standards in size-exclusion analysis Comparison with polystyrene standards

The difficulty of preparing monodisperse lignin fractions on a large scale is a limiting factor in many applications. The present paper addresses this problem by examining the properties and size-exclusion behavior of lignin isolated by the acetosolv pulping process from post-extraction crushed sugarcane bagasse. The isolated lignin was subjected to a solvent pretreatment, followed by preparative gel permeation chromatography fractionation. The fractions were analyzed by high-performance size-exclusion chromatography (HPSEC) and these samples showed a great decrease in polydispersity, compared to the original acetosolv lignin. Several fractions of very low polydispersity, close to unity, were employed as calibration curve standards in HPSEC analysis. This original analytical approach allowed calibration with these lignin fractions to be compared with the polystyrene standards that are universally employed for lignin molecular mass determination. This led to a noteworthy result, namely that the lignin fractions and polystyrene standards showed very similar behavior over a large range of molecular masses in a typical HPSEC analysis of acetosolv lignin. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Adoption of the world wide web by traditional Australian media organisations

The aim of this paper is it to identify whether Australian media companies moved online with a clear business model in mind or in an ad-hoc manner. In-depth interviews were conducted with four Internet media managers from two large Australian media organisations. All four had been involved in Web publishing from its early stages and had extensive knowledge of the development of Web publishing in the industry. The interviews focused on the period around the mid 1990’s when the early development of the organisations’ websites took place. We also review an analytical approach of examining narratives from research interviews developed by Davidson (Davidson 1997) and Mishler (Mishler1986a, 1986b).

The tri-dimensional role of information security in E-business : a managerial perspective

The effective management of information and its associated infrastructure is critical in electronic business. Failure to exercise due diligence in information assurance and security may lead to lost revenue or business opportunities, brand and reputation erosion, adverse media publicity, scrutiny from consumer advocates and even lawsuits. Traditionally, information security was approached in terms of goals. Yet, the goalsoriented approach may be a flawed one. In this paper, we adopt a conceptual analytical approach and propose a tri-dimensional understanding of information security in electronic business. Our approach can help managers better understand and communicate the information security’s role in e-business and the inter-dependencies between business and legal requirements, for devising the goals, objectives and policies relevant to their organization.

Sudden drawdown and drainage of a horizontal aquifer

Drainage of a saturated horizontal aquifer following a sudden drawdown is reanalyzed using the Boussinesq equation. The effect of the finite length of the aquifer is considered in detail. An analytical approximation based on a superposition principle yields a very good estimate of the outflow when compared to accurate numerical solutions. An illustration of the new analytical approach to analyze basin-scale field data is used to demonstrate possible field applications of the new solution.

Traditional Australian media organisations adoption of the World Wide Web

The aim of this paper is it to identify whether Australian media companies moved online with a clear business model in mind or in an ad-hoc manner. In-depth interviews were conducted with four Interact media managers from two large Australian media organisations. All four had been involved in Web publishing from its early stages and had extensive knowledge of the development of Web publishing in the industry. The interviews focused on the period around the mid 1990's when the early development of the organisations' websites took place. We also review an analytical approach of examining narratives from research interviews developed by Davidson (Davidson 1997) and Mishler (Mishler1986a, 1986b).

Show me the money

In the rush to become part of the e-business revolution many companies are tossing aside conventional thinking when it comes to analyzing the return on their investment. Too often, however, ignoring formal justification of any investment is a recipe for disaster. With this in mind, a study on the justification processes used by companies when investing in e-business was conducted. The research identified several benefits gained from investing in e-business. Participants highlighted several e-business benefits including: opening up new markets, improving access to management information and reducing operating costs. The justification methods used in organizations could be easily classified into 4 groups: 1. a strategic approach, 2. the integrated approach, 3. an analytical approach, and 4. a financial approach.

Modelling multi-criteria decision analysis for benchmarking management practices in project management

The link between management practices and worker’s motivations impacting construction productivity is being considered as significant among the research community. This research aimed to identify and analyse the underlying attributes impacting construction productivity from the site management perspective. This research presents a framework designed to analyse and quantify the relative relevance of different drivers in the determination of productivity levels and the degree of effectiveness of potential opportunities for improving performance of overall projects. Owing to the complexity of construction projects and underlying conflicting drivers influencing higher worker’s productivity, the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) is employed to deal with interdependent relationships within a multi-criteria decision-making model. In the analytical approach, the large unstructured decision parameters are identified first and then are broken down into the manageable and measurable components using a top down hierarchical structure. This paper demonstrates an example to illustrate how to empirically analyse and prioritise a set of influencing parameters as selection criteria in devising appropriate management practices to ensure higher productivity vis-à-vis optimum performance of projects.

Community school teacher education and the construction of pedagogical discourse in Papua New Guinea

Pedagogical discourse in Papua New Guinea (PNG) community schooling is mediated by a western styles education. The daily administration and organisation of school activity, graded teaching and learning, subject selection, content boundaries, teaching and assessment methods are all patterned after western schooling. This educational settlement is part of a legacy of German, British and Australian government and non-government colonialism that officially came to an end in 1975. Given the colonial heritage of schooling in PNG, this study is interested in exploring particular aspects of the degree of mutuality between local discourses and the discourses of a western styled pedagogy in post-colonial times, for the purpose of better informing community school teacher education practices. This research takes place at and in the vicinity of Madang Teachers College, a pre-service community school teachers college on the north coast of Papua New Guinea. The research was carried out in the context of the researcher’s employment as a contract lecturer in the English language Department between 1991-1993. As an in-situ study it was influenced by the roles of different participants and the circumstances in which data was gathered and constituted, data which was compatible with participants commitments to community school teacher education and community school teaching and learning. In the exploration of specific pedagogic practices different qualitative research approaches and perspectives were brought to bear in ways best suited to the circumstances of the practice. In this way analytical foci were more dictated by circumstances rather by design. The analytical approach is both a hermeneutic one where participants’ activities are ‘read like texts’, where what is said or written is interpreted against the background of other informing contexts and texts, to better understand how understandings and meanings are produced and circulated; and also a phenomenological one where participants’ perspectives are sought to better understand how pedagogical discursive formations are assimilated with the ‘self’. The effect of shifting between these approaches throughout the study is to build up a sense of co-authorship between researcher and participants in relation to particular aspects of the research. The research explores particular sites where pedagogic discourse is produced, re-produced, distributed, articulated, consumed and contested, and in doing so seeks to better understand what counts as pedagogical discourse. These are sites that are largely unexplored in these terms, in the academic literature on teacher education and community schooling in PNG. As such, they represent gaps in what is documented and understood about the nature of post-colonial pedagogy and teacher training. The first site is a grade two community school class involved in the teaching and early learning of English as the ‘official’ language of instruction. Here local discourses of solidarity and agreement are seen to be mobilised to make meaningful, what are for the teacher and children moments in their construction as post-colonial subjects. What in instructional terms may be seen as an English language lesson becomes, in the light of the research perspectives used, an exercise in the structuring of new social identities, relations and knowings, problematising autonomous views of teaching and learning. The second site explores this issue of autonomous (decontextualised) teaching and learning through an investigation of student teachers’ epistemological contextualisations of knowledge, teaching and learning. What is examined is the way such orientations are constructed in terms of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ epistemological and pedagogical alignments, and, in terms of differently conceived notions of community, in a problematisation of the notion of community schooling. The third and fourth sites examine reflective accounts of student teachers’ pedagogic practices, understandings and subjectivities as they confront the moral and political economies and cultural politics of schooling in School Experiences and Practicum contexts, and show how dominant behaviourist and ‘rational/autonomous’ conceptions of what counts as teaching and learning are problematised in the way some students teachers draw upon wider social discourses to construct a dialogue with learners. The final site is a return to the community school where the discourse of school reports through which teachers, children and parents are constructed as particular subjects of schooling, are explored. Here teachers report children’s progress over a four year period and parents write back in conforming, confronting and contesting ways, in the midst of the ongoing enculturation of their children. In this milieu, schooling is shown to be a provider of differentiated social qualifications rather than a socially just and relevant education. Each of the above-mentioned studies form part of a research and pedagogic interest in understanding the ‘disciplining’ effects of schooling upon teacher education, the particular consequences of those effects, what is embraces, resisted and hidden. Each of the above sites is informed by various ‘intertexts’. The use of intertexts is designed to provide a multiplicity of views, actions and voices while enhancing the process of cross-cultural reading through contextualising the studies in ways that reveal knowledges and practices which are often excluded in more conventional accounts of teaching and learning. This research represents a journey, but not an aimless one. It is one which reads the ideological messages of coherence, impartiality and moral soundness of western pedagogical discourse against the school experiences of student-teachers, teachers, children and parents, in post-colonial Papua New Guinea, and finds them lacking.

Regressive logistic and proportional hazards disease models for within-family analyses of measured genotypes, with application to a CYP17 polymorphism and breast cancer

Various statistical methods have been proposed to evaluate associations between measured genetic variants and disease, including some using family designs. For breast cancer and rare variants, we applied a modified segregation analysis method that uses the population cancer incidence and population-based case families in which a mutation is known to be segregating. Here we extend the method to a common polymorphism, and use a regressive logistic approach to model familial aggregation by conditioning each individual on their mother's breast cancer history. We considered three models: 1) class A regressive logistic model; 2) age-of-onset regressive logistic model; and 3) proportional hazards familial model. Maximum likelihood estimates were calculated using the software MENDEL. We applied these methods to data from the Australian Breast Cancer Family Study on the CYP17 5UTR TC MspA1 polymorphism measured for 1,447 case probands, 787 controls, and 213 relatives of case probands found to have the CC genotype. Breast cancer data for first- and second-degree relatives of case probands were used. The three methods gave consistent estimates. The best-fitting model involved a recessive inheritance, with homozygotes being at an increased risk of 47% (95% CI, 28-68%). The cumulative risk of the disease up to age 70 years was estimated to be 10% or 22% for a CYP17 homozygote whose mother was unaffected or affected, respectively. This analytical approach is well-suited to the data that arise from population-based case-control-family studies, in which cases, controls and relatives are studied, and genotype is measured for some but not all subjects.

Complicating hetero-femininities : young women, sexualities and girl power at school

This paper is concerned with expanding knowledge of how femininity/sexuality intersections are constituted in secondary schools. Existing studies have drawn upon Judith Butler’s notion of a ‘heterosexual matrix’ in order to understand how intersections of femininity/sexuality are produced in schools through normative discourses of heterosexuality and gender. Drawing on ‘after-queer’ theoretical resources from within cultural studies that focus on the deployment of notions of sexuality within constructions of intelligible citizenship, I explore how the femininity/sexuality intersection within secondary schools might be complicated, when the significance of discourses of ‘girl power’, linked with successful neoliberal citizenship, is considered. I analyse young women’s discussions of key ‘girl power’ icons in popular culture, generated through fieldwork in an elite girls’ school in Australia. Throughout the analysis I explore how understanding intersections of femininity/sexuality in secondary schools requires an analytical framework that can attend to both familiar notions of heterosexuality and gender – and their ongoing currency – as well as how notions of sexuality are mobilized in the production of successful neoliberal girl citizens. I propose that this analytical approach is useful in terms of avoiding the reinscription of sexuality identity categories in education research.

Guest editorial : In Journal of networks, v.7 n.3

Networking of computing devices has been going through rapid evolution and thus continuing to be an ever expanding area of importance in recent years. New technologies, protocols, services and usage patterns have contributed to the major research interests in this area of computer science. The current special issue is an effort to bring forward some of these interesting developments that are being pursued by researchers at present in different parts of the globe. Our objective is to provide the readership with some insight into the latest innovations in computer networking through this. This Special Issue presents selected papers from the thirteenth conference of the series (ICCIT 2010) held during December 23-25, 2010 at the Ahsanullah University of Science and Technology. The first ICCIT was held in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 1998. Since then the conference has grown to be one of the largest computer and IT related research conferences in the South Asian region, with participation of academics and researchers from many countries around the world. Starting in 2008 the proceedings of ICCIT are included in IEEExplore. In 2010, a total of 410 full papers were submitted to the conference of which 136 were accepted after reviews conducted by an international program committee comprising 81 members from 16 countries. This was tantamount to an acceptance rate of 33%. From these 136 papers, 14 highly ranked manuscripts were invited for this Special Issue. The authors were advised to enhance their papers significantly and submit them to undergo review for suitability of inclusion into this publication. Of those, eight papers survived the review process and have been selected for inclusion in this Special Issue. The authors of these papers represent academic and/or research institutions from Australia, Bangladesh, Japan, Korea and USA. These papers address issues concerning different domains of networks namely, optical fiber communication, wireless and interconnection networks, issues related to networking hardware and software and network mobility. The paper titled “Virtualization in Wireless Sensor Network: Challenges and Opportunities” argues in favor of bringing in different heterogeneous sensors under a common virtual framework so that the issues like flexibility, diversity, management and security can be handled practically. The authors Md. Motaharul Islam and Eui-Num Huh propose an architecture for sensor virtualization. They also present the current status and the challenges and opportunities for further research on the topic. The manuscript “Effect of Polarization Mode Dispersion on the BER Performance of Optical CDMA” deals with impact of polarization mode dispersion on the bit error rate performance of direct sequence optical code division multiple access. The authors, Md. Jahedul Islam and Md. Rafiqul Islam present an analytical approach toward determining the impact of different performance parameters. The authors show that the bit error rate performance improves significantly by the third order polarization mode dispersion than its first or second order counterparts. The authors Md. Shohrab Hossain, Mohammed Atiquzzaman and William Ivancic of the paper “Cost and Efficiency Analysis of NEMO Protocol Entities” present an analytical model for estimating the cost incurred by major mobility entities of a NEMO. The authors define a new metric for cost calculation in the process. Both the newly developed metric and the analytical model are likely to be useful to network engineers in estimating the resource requirement at the key entities while designing such a network. The article titled “A Highly Flexible LDPC Decoder using Hierarchical Quasi-Cyclic Matrix with Layered Permutation” deals with Low Density Parity Check decoders. The authors, Vikram Arkalgud Chandrasetty and Syed Mahfuzul Aziz propose a novel multi-level structured hierarchical matrix approach for generating codes of different lengths flexibly depending upon the requirement of the application. The manuscript “Analysis of Performance Limitations in Fiber Bragg Grating Based Optical Add-Drop Multiplexer due to Crosstalk” has been contributed by M. Mahiuddin and M. S. Islam. The paper proposes a new method of handling crosstalk with a fiber Bragg grating based optical add drop multiplexer (OADM). The authors show with an analytical model that different parameters improve using their proposed OADM. The paper “High Performance Hierarchical Torus Network Under Adverse Traffic Patterns” addresses issues related to hierarchical torus network (HTN) under adverse traffic patterns. The authors, M.M. Hafizur Rahman, Yukinori Sato, and Yasushi Inoguchi observe that dynamic communication performance of an HTN under adverse traffic conditions has not yet been addressed. The authors evaluate the performance of HTN for comparison with some other relevant networks. It is interesting to see that HTN outperforms these counterparts in terms of throughput and data transfer under adverse traffic. The manuscript titled “Dynamic Communication Performance Enhancement in Hierarchical Torus Network by Selection Algorithm” has been contributed by M.M. Hafizur Rahman, Yukinori Sato, and Yasushi Inoguchi. The authors introduce three simple adapting routing algorithms for efficient use of physical links and virtual channels in hierarchical torus network. The authors show that their approaches yield better performance for such networks. The final title “An Optimization Technique for Improved VoIP Performance over Wireless LAN” has been contributed by five authors, namely, Tamal Chakraborty, Atri Mukhopadhyay, Suman Bhunia, Iti Saha Misra and Salil K. Sanyal. The authors propose an optimization technique for configuring the parameters of the access points. In addition, they come up with an optimization mechanism in order to tune the threshold of active queue management system appropriately. Put together, the mechanisms improve the VoIP performance significantly under congestion. Finally, the Guest Editors would like to express their sincere gratitude to the 15 reviewers besides the guest editors themselves (Khalid M. Awan, Mukaddim Pathan, Ben Townsend, Morshed Chowdhury, Iftekhar Ahmad, Gour Karmakar, Shivali Goel, Hairulnizam Mahdin, Abdullah A Yusuf, Kashif Sattar, A.K.M. Azad, F. Rahman, Bahman Javadi, Abdelrahman Desoky, Lenin Mehedy) from several countries (Australia, Bangladesh, Japan, Pakistan, UK and USA) who have given immensely to this process. They have responded to the Guest Editors in the shortest possible time and dedicated their valuable time to ensure that the Special Issue contains high-quality papers with significant novelty and contributions.

Keeping connected: a review of the research relationship

In this paper, some key findings of the Keeping Connected project are discussed in light of the methodological challenges of developing an analytical approach in a large-scale study, particularly in starting with open-ended, participant-selected, digital still visual images as part of 31 longitudinal case studies. The paper works to clarify the methodological and epistemological discussions of the visual data, an issue of great interest in qualitative research and visuality for researchers intent on developing understandings of participatory research methods in the field of youth studies.

Re-examining the "twin deficits" hypothesis: evidence from Australia

This paper re-examines the relationship between fiscal imbalances and net foreign borrowing. A general analytical approach is first developed which suggests that, other things equal, a rise (fall) in any advanced economy’s fiscal deficit should be fully matched by a rise (fall) in its net foreign borrowing, in accordance with the so-called twin deficits hypothesis. In the case of Australia, one of the world’s largest foreign borrower economies for its size, empirical estimation yields the novel result that Australia’s consolidated budget imbalance and its foreign borrowing were approximately twinned on the basis of quarterly data for 1983–2009, when Australia’s exchange rate floated and international capital mobility was high. This result is consistent with the conceptual framework and suggests that fiscal policy is likely to be ineffective as an instrument for influencing the real economy.

The role of infrequent and extraordinary deep dives in leatherback turtles (Dermochelys coriacea)

Infrequent and exceptional behaviours can provide insight into the ecology and physiology of a particular species. Here we examined extraordinarily deep (300–1250 m) and protracted (>1h) dives made by critically endangered leatherback turtles (Dermochelys coriacea) in the context of three previously suggested hypotheses: predator evasion, thermoregulation and exploration for gelatinous prey. Data were obtained via satellite relay data loggers attached to adult turtles at nesting beaches (N=11) and temperate foraging grounds (N=2), constituting a combined tracking period of 9.6 years (N=26,146 dives) and spanning the entire North Atlantic Ocean. Of the dives, 99.6% (N=26,051) were to depths <300 m with only 0.4% (N=95) extending to greater depths (subsequently termed `deep dives'). Analysis suggested that deep dives: (1) were normally distributed around midday; (2) may exceed the inferred aerobic dive limit for the species; (3) displayed slow vertical descent rates and protracted durations; (4) were much deeper than the thermocline; and (5) occurred predominantly during transit, yet ceased once seasonal residence on foraging grounds began. These findings support the hypothesis that deep dives are periodically employed to survey the water column for diurnally descending gelatinous prey. If a suitable patch is encountered then the turtle may cease transit and remain within that area, waiting for prey to approach the surface at night. If unsuccessful, then migration may continue until a more suitable site is encountered. Additional studies using a meta-analytical approach are nonetheless recommended to further resolve this matter.