Homework : a situated practice

This paper will present a speculative account of homework as a situated and embodied practice, uniquely shaped by the pedagogical spaces created within homes by families as homework is completed. The paper will argue that these domestic spaces generate 'lines of flight' which are less readily captured than those of the classroom. Brief case studies of interactions between parents and children around homework will be presented and used to explore parallels between the situated, embodied learning experiences of 'doing homework' and participation in the multiple forms of pedagogical exchange possible through an internationalised doctoral program.

Bamboo fibres and their unique properties

This paper collates the different properties of bamboo fibres as claimed by bamboo fibre and product manufacturers. The available information suggests that bamboo fibres have unique properties such as excellent appearance and feel, natural antibacterial, UV-shielding and moisture-controlling characteristics. Hence bamboo fibres provide a very promising alternative to other natural fibres by virtue of their novel properties. However, those properties may largely depend on the manufacturing process, which is not widely disclosed. Moreover, common manufacturing process may require the use of a large amount of chemicals and hence further process development may be required in order to make the product truly eco-friendly. It is identified that the data of those unique properties rarely appear in scientific journals and the validity of those claims can be speculative. Therefore, there is a strong need for non-biased scientific research and evaluation on the unique properties of bamboo fibres.

Leading lights : the promotion of garden suburb plans and planners in interwar Australia

This thesis explores interwar town planning in Australia, focusing on the period of large-scale urban expansion in the 1920’s. It problematises aspects of Australia’s urban planning history, particularly the 1920s ‘garden suburb. It also investigates the question of the use of international planning ideas in Australia, and the assertion or creation of authority by the Australian planning movement. The thesis additionally investigates the use of authoritative planning rhetoric for commercial or creative advantage. The thesis argues that the majority of innovative planning projects in the interwar years took place in the formation and foundation of the garden suburb. It shows that the garden suburb – assumed in much planning history to be an inferior form of Ebenezer Howard’s ‘garden city’ ideal – has, in fact, a number of precedents in 19th century Australian suburbia, some of which were retained in 20th century commercial estate design. Much of the Australian town planner’s authority at this time required recognition and awareness of the interests and needs of the general public, as negotiated through land vendors. As Australians looked to the future, and to the US for guidance, they were invited to invest in speculative real estate development modelled on this vision. The thesis concentrates primarily on the lives, careers and work of the British-Australian architect-planner Sir John Sulman; the Chicagoan architect-planners Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin; and the Australian surveyor-planner Saxil Tuxen. These individuals were among the most prominent planners in Australia in the interwar years. All designed Australian garden suburbs, and combined advocacy with practice in private and public spheres. The thesis examines images and personas, both generic and individual, of the planner and the vendor. It shows that the formulation of the garden suburb and design practices, and the incorporation of international elements into Australian planning, are important in the creation of planning practice and forms. It also outlines the way these continue to have significant impact, in diverse and important ways, on both the contemporary built environment and planning history itself.

An agent architecture for managing data resources in a grid environment

The agent paradigm has been successfully used in a large number of research areas. MAPFS, a parallel file system, constitutes one successful application of agents to the I/O field, providing a multiagent I/O architecture. The use of a multiagent system implies coordination and cooperation among its agents. MAPFS is oriented to clusters of workstations, where agents are applied in order to provide features such as caching or prefetching. The adaptation of MAPFS to a grid environment is named MAPFS-Grid. Agents can help to increase the performance of data-intensive applications running on top of the grid.

This paper describes the conceptual agent framework and the communication model used in MAPFS-Grid, which provides the management of data resources in a grid environment. The evaluation of our proposal shows the advantages of using agents in a data grid.

Underpricing, risk management, hot issue and crowding out effects : evidence from the Australian resources sector initial public offerings

The main purpose of this paper is to explore the role of risk management, speculative industry competition effect and hot issue markets. We used a sample of 260 initial public offerings (IPOs) in the Australian resource sector for the 1994–2004 period to test the underpricing effect. We do not find any evidence that risk management can reduce the uncertainty relating to the new issue and hence alleviate the extent of underpricing. A plausible explanation for this lack of evidence is the poor information content of publicly available disclosures regarding risk management activities of IPO firms. We further provide evidence that the underpricing returns for resources IPOs are not impacted upon by the strength of alternative speculative IPO markets. We also show that the degree of underpricing adjusts to both market return in the preceding three months and the average underpricing of resources IPOs in the 12 month period leading to the float which offers an explanation to the hot issue effect observed in the IPO market.

Birch pollen rupture and the release of aerosols of respirable allergens

Backgound Birch pollen allergens have been implicated as asthma triggers; however, pollen grains are too large to reach the lower airways where asthmatic reactions occur. Respirable-sized particles containing birch pollen allergens have been detected in air filters, especially after rainfall but the source of these particles has remained speculative.

Objective To determine the processes by which birch pollen allergens become airborne particles of respirable size with the potential to contribute to airways inflammation.

Methods Branches with attached male catkins were harvested and placed in a controlled emission chamber. Filtered dry air was passed through the chamber until the anthers opened, then they were humidified for 5 h and air-dried again. Flowers were disturbed by wind generated from a small electric fan. Released particles were counted, measured and collected for immuno-labelling and high-resolution microscopy.

Results Birch pollen remains on the dehisced anther and can rupture in high humidity and moisture. Fresh pollen takes as long as 3 h to rupture in water. Drying winds released an aerosol of particles from catkins. These were fragments of pollen cytoplasm that ranged in size from 30 nm to 4 μm and contained Bet v 1 allergens.

Conclusion When highly allergenic birch trees are flowering and exposed to moisture followed by drying winds they can produce particulate aerosols containing pollen allergens. These particles are small enough to deposit in the peripheral airways and have the potential to induce an inflammatory response.

Student equity in higher education : what to do when the queue is not long or diverse enough

In this paper I outline three broad propositions about or challenges to access and participation in Australian higher education, resulting from the Australian Government’s 20/40 targets for the sector and their attendant requirements for universities, such as the performance indicators for teaching and learning. While some of my analysis could be seen as speculative, in the sense that it represents our best guesses about the future, in aking these arguments I draw on publically available statistics on Australian schooling, vocational education and training (VET) and the higher education sector, as well as on recent research on outreach programs by universities in schools.

Challenging Australian higher education : three places to begin

I want to begin by thanking Professor Johnson for this opportunity to rehearse and indeed expand on the comments I made earlier this year at the Universities Australia meeting of Vice‐Chancellors in Brisbane. My comments then and now are in part speculative, given that they comment on what might be, although they are also cognizant of what we already know about student equity issues in Australian higher education and of the research data currently available, including research undertaken by the National Centre but also research available more widely, nationally and internationally. Informed by this work, the central thesis that I want to put to you today and to open up to discussion is that if the Australian higher education sector is to take seriously the federal government’s 20/40 targets, then there are three main challenges that need to be confronted.

First, that expansion of higher education provision and of a particular mix, will need to be done in the context of limited excess student demand, certainly compared with previous periods of expansion by the sector. Second, that the 20/40 targets have brought into sharp relief the problems with our current set of definitions and measurements of students: of equity groups (including socioeconomic status) but also student achievement and aspiration. And third, that universities will need to confront the teaching and learning that is higher education. This is the very thing – or at least one of them – for which we would hope school students would aspire.

Monumental vision : a confrontation with the image of the Eternal Return

"Monumental Vision” is a nuanced summary of Nietzschean nihilism and the Eternal Return as rite of passage for free subjects and as condensed image of speculative intelligence proper. Utilizing Gerhard Richter’s “Sheet 692” from Atlas, a series of photographs of the mountains and lake at Sils Maria, Switzerland, as summary judgment of the limit imposed by this condition on all systems of representation, this form of vision discloses the chiasmus embedded in consciousness itself. In constantly revisiting Sils, the very location where Nietzsche “suffered” the vision of the Eternal Return, Richter has engaged repeatedly this origin for what has come into his work via Nietzsche – that is, an elective veil that refuses all compromises with transcendence until such is merged with immanence.

As situated amidst modernist “ideology as intellection”, and subsequent nascent forms of anti-modernism, the Eternal Return as image also signals the return of the Kantian “aesthetic-teleological” synthesis in non-discursive or purely visual agency. As an elective form of aesthetic vision, and as image of time insofar as it registers an overwhelming externality (Other) that nominally swallows and empowers the subject at once, this excoriating sense of universal praxis underwrites artistic and architectural production of the highest order, renegotiating concepts of the paradigmatic.

Utilizing Georg Simmel’s late work on Rembrandt (1916) and his encounter with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (1907), the essay suggests that by the 1920s the avant-garde premises of modernism had already come under attack by an ahistorical and synoptic vision here denoted “monumental vision,” which also contains the imprint of eschatological time (invoking a schism present in rationality as such). The two readings of this image perpetrated by Karl Löwith in Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same (Nietzsches Philosophie der ewigen Wiederkehr des Gleichen, 1935), or the cosmological and the ethical, while considered irreconcilable by Löwith, have since the 1960s been recalibrated through the figure of the event to pose possible scenarios out of the stalemate of the confrontation between Self and Other (ipseity and alterity) buried within this image as limit. In this manner, the image of the Eternal Return stands at the boundary between two forms of time (or two worlds) and signals the irreducible confrontation present in speculative thought and the necessity of closure through an aesthetic vision that produces a unitary field for all creative acts.

Notably, Nietzsche’s startling vision from Zarathustra suggests that the limit imposed by the Eternal Return is also a mask for an austere condition within subjectivity closely resembling the conundrum of Fichte’s I facing I, or thought turned toward thought itself (absolute subjectivity as cipher for Being). In Alenka Zupančič’s reading, in The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two (2003), the Eternal Return effectively contains a secret formal function that grinds all “error” to dust – a highly suggestive interpretation that also neutralizes the schism introduced by Löwith between the cosmological and the ethical.

Can we civilize the Aborigines without killing them? : Florence Nightingale's influence on Bishop Salvado

In 1859 English public health nurse Florence Nightingale decided to conduct a study of the mortality rates in ‘native schools’ in Britain’s colonies. Since the 1837 publication of the House of Commons Report on the impact of British settlement on native people’s, there had been a speculative discourse about the decline of the Aboriginal populations in the colonies; concerns about Aboriginal health and welfare were debated frequently. New Norcia was included in Nightingale’s study and played a big part in Nightingale’s conclusions.
This paper will discuss the study and New Norcia’s participation in it, with particular attention to the correspondence, questionnaires and reports that travelled between Salvado and Nightingale. This unique archive reveals not only Nightingale’s concern about the relationship between civilizing and Aboriginal ill-health in the colonies, but also shed’s light on Salvado’s remarkable insight into this delicate and fraught relationship. By analysing Salvado’s statistical collections and reports for Nightingale’s study on New Norcia’s Aboriginal residents, it is possible to understand that Salvado evaluated and repudiated the influential theory that the Aborigines were inevitably a dying race.

Incorrigible and undisciplined lines in visual social research : ways of ‘writing’ and ‘drawing’ at the interstices

In this paper the author traces the possibilities afforded by engaging with the aesthetic, historic and socio-political nature of shodo (Japanese calligraphy) as an intersectional space. Shodo literally translated as 'the way of writing' is an artistic practice bringing together ink, brush and paper. It is simultaneously a juncture between studied discipline and an ongoing mediation of subjectivities. The calligrapher/writer/drawer communicates to the reader through the bold or subtle brush strokes, the pressure and movement at the completion of each stroke. The calligrapher/writer/drawer draws across the boundaries of text and image to meet the reader blurring the lines between subject and object. This discussion re-examines the hierarchical binaries of writing/drawing, text/image, self/Other as they play out from vanishing lines of distinction between truth and conjecture. Crossing these binaries opens up opportunity for decentring and questioning representational practice by enabling other possible meanings and practices to emerge (Lather, 2007). I work from a stance of theoretical promiscuity in order to disrupt constitutive discourses and restore the liminal in social research. Drawing across the fragments of research projects I illustrate the generative and speculative space of visualising pedascapes in educational research.

‘Else-where’ : essays in art, architecture, and cultural production 2002-2011

“Else-where”: Essays in Art, Architecture, and Cultural Production 2002–2011 is a synoptic survey of the representational values given to art, architecture, and cultural production at the closing of the twentieth century and the opening of the twenty-first. Written primarily as a critique of what is suppressed in architecture and what is disclosed in art, the essays are informed by the passage out of post-structuralism and its disciplinary analogues toward the Real (denoted over the course of the studies as the “Real-Irreal,” or “Else-where”). The essays collected in “Else-where” cross various disciplines (inclusive of landscape architecture, architecture, and visual art) to develop a nuanced critique of a renascent formal regard and elective exit from nihilism in art and architecture that is also an invocation of the highest coordinates given to the arts – that is, formal ontology as speculative intelligence itself, or the return of the universal as utopian thought “here-and-now.”

Investor heterogeneity and the cross-sectional stock returns in China

We examine the relationship between divergence of opinion and the cross-sectional stock returns in Chinese A share market where short-selling of stocks is prohibited by law. Using a proxy for divergence of opinion among the entire investor base, we document a positive relationship between divergent beliefs and future stock returns. This is in sharp contrast to Miller's (1977) prediction of a negative relationship between the two. The result is likely to be driven by the dominance of individual investors and their speculative trading behaviors in China. Miller's prediction is confirmed when divergence of opinion is measured using data on mutual fund holdings. Our results are robust to a number of common return predictors. We also find a significantly negative relationship between the fraction of tradable shares in listed Chinese companies and future stock returns. Increase in the fraction of tradable shares tends to reduce the predictability of stock returns using divergence of opinion.

Not-I/Thou : the other subject of art and architecture

Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art and Architecture is a series of essays delineating the gray areas and black zones in present-day cultural production. Part One is an implicit critique of neoliberal capitalism and its assault on the humanities through the pseudo-scientific and pseudo-empirical biases of academic and professional disciplines, while Part Two returns to apparent lost causes in the historical development of modernity and post-modernity, particularly the recourse to artistic production as both a form of mnemonics and periodic (and renascent) avant-garde agitation. In-between these twin systems of taking the measure of things, Art and Architecture, as forms of speculative intellectual capital, emerge from the shadow-lands of half-conscious and half-unconscious forces to become gestures toward a type of knowledge that has no utilitarian or generic agency. Defying the tendencies of such discourses to fall prey to instrumental orders that effectively neuter the inherent radical agenda of both, Art and Architecture are represented in this series of essays as noetic apparatuses, operating at the edge of authorized systems of knowledge, quietly and secretly validating and valorizing the shadowy and recondite, collective and personal operations of intellect in service to no particular end.

Metabolic remodelling in obesity and type 2 diabetes: pathological or protective mechanisms in response to nutrient excess?

Altered metabolism in tissues such as the liver, skeletal muscle and adipose tissue is observed in metabolic diseases characterized by nutrient excess and energy imbalance, such as obesity and type 2 diabetes. These alterations in metabolism can include resistance to the hormone insulin, lipid accumulation, mitochondrial dysfunction and transcriptional remodelling of major metabolic pathways. The underlying assumption has been that these same alterations in metabolism are fundamental to the pathogenesis of metabolic diseases. An alternative view is that these alterations in metabolism occur to protect cell and tissue viability in the face of constant positive energy balance. This speculative review presents evidence that many of the metabolic adaptations that occur in metabolic diseases characterized by nutrient excess can be viewed as protective in nature, rather than pathogenic per se for disease progression. Finally, we also briefly discuss the usefulness and potential pitfalls of therapeutic approaches that attempt to correct these same metabolic defects when energy balance is not altered, and the potential links between metabolic survival responses and other chronic diseases such as cancer.