A brain inspired approach for multi-view patterns identification

Biologically human brain processes information in both uniimodal and multimodal approaches. In fact, information is progressively abstracted and seamlessly fused. Subsequently, the fusion of multimodal inputs allows a holistic understanding of a problem. The proliferation of technology has exponentially produced various sources of data, which could be likened to being the state of multimodality in human brain. Therefore, this is an inspiration to develop a methodology for exploring multimodal data and further identifying multi-view patterns. Specifically, we propose a brain inspired conceptual model that allows exploration and identification of patterns at different levels of granularity, different types of hierarchies and different types of modalities. A structurally adaptive neural network is deployed to implement the proposed model. Furthermore, the acquisition of multi-view patterns with the proposed model is
demonstrated and discussed with some experimental results.

You're too queer for the straights and now too queer for the gays!

In this piece, the author traces her history and objectives as an academic, author and activist with and in gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer/questioning (GLBTIQ) issues and communities in Australia, her border zone positioning in relation to internal debates and exclusions between gay/lesbian and bisexual rights and subcommunities and the various responses to her work on bisexuality from research participants, other GLBTIQ academics and activists. The author also discusses the pivotal role the Journal of Bisexuality has played in her development.

Clusters driven implementation of a brain inspired model for multi-view pattern identifications

The human brain processes information in both unimodal and multimodal fashion where information is progressively captured, accumulated, abstracted and seamlessly fused. Subsequently, the fusion of multimodal inputs allows a holistic understanding of a problem. The proliferation of technology has produced various sources of electronic data and continues to do so exponentially. Finding patterns from such multi-source and multimodal data could be compared to the multimodal and multidimensional information processing in the human brain. Therefore, such brain functionality could be taken as an inspiration to develop a methodology for exploring multimodal and multi-source electronic data and further identifying multi-view patterns. In this paper, we first propose a brain inspired conceptual model that allows exploration and identification of patterns at different levels of granularity, different types of hierarchies and different types of modalities. Secondly, we present a cluster driven approach for the implementation of the proposed brain inspired model. Particularly, the Growing Self Organising Maps (GSOM) based cross-clustering approach is discussed. Furthermore, the acquisition of multi-view patterns with clusters driven implementation is demonstrated with experimental results.

Classifying and learning cricket shots using camera motion

This paper presents a method to classify and learn cricket shots. The procedure begins by extracting the camera motion parameters from the shots. Then the camera parameter values are converted to symbolic form and combined to generate a symbolic description that defines the trajectory of the cricket bell. The description generated is used to classify the cricket shot and to dynamically expand or update the system's knowledge of shots. The first novel aspect of this approach is that by using the camera motion parameters, a complex and difficult process of low level image segmenting of either the batsman or the cricket ball from video images is avoided. Also the method does not require high resolution images. Another novel aspect of this work is the use of a new incremental learning algorithm that enables the system to improve and update its knowledge base. Unlike previously developed algorithms which store training instances and have simple method to prime their concept hierarchies, the incremental learning algorithm used in this work generates compact concept hierarchies and uses evidence based forgetting. The results show that the system performs well in the task of classifying four types of cricket shots.

The case of children's literature : colonial or anti-colonial?

Since Jacqueline Rose published The Case of Peter Pan in 1984, scholars in the field of children’s literature have taken up a rhetorical stance which treats child readers as colonised, and children’s books as a colonising site. This article takes issue with Rose’s rhetoric of colonisation and its deployment by scholars, arguing that it is tainted by logical and ethical flaws. Rather, children’s literature can be a site of decolonisation which revisions the hierarchies of value promoted through colonisation and its aftermath by adopting what Bill Ashcroft refers to as tactics of interpolation. To illustrate how decolonising strategies work in children’s texts, the article considers several alphabet books by Indigenous author-illustrators from Canada and Australia, arguing that these texts for very young children interpolate colonial discourses by valorising minority languages and by attributing to English words meanings produced within Indigenous cultures.

Learning between schools and hospitals – young people and a curriculum of (dis)connection

As noted in other papers in this volume, a group of health and education researchers and practitioners came together to further develop their understanding of the situation of young people, who were clients of The Royal Children's Hospital Education Institute in 2007 in Melbourne, Australia. The resultant research project, funded by the Australian Research Council Linkage Grant, aimed to understand young people's perspectives on who they are and what matters to them in relation to education connectedness, identity, social relationships, and experiences with professionals. The project team was aware of the persisting patterns of relationships between the hospital, schools, young people, and their families. They were also cognizant of the heavy emphasis in the research and professional literature on evidence from relevant family adults and from health and education professionals. The intention of this project was to put the young people at the centre a study with the stories they told through word and image. Identity issues and school connections framed the analytical work. Thirty-one adolescents dealing with chronic illness participated in this longitudinal qualitative study for a 3-year period of their lives. Given the apparently active role of teachers and health professionals in the lives of these young people, the researchers wanted to include the various relevant adults to see what coherence or lack of coherence existed in the categories, emphases, and values they expressed compared with those of the young people. The researchers have had to determinedly keep their focus on the data from the young people and not be seduced by the familiar and readily accessible data from these professionals. Nonetheless, this data set does provide a ‘curriculum conversation’, which is profitably read behind the stories of the young people and in the foreground of new pathways of curriculum construction. It is this data which informs the work reported in this paper and which has led the researchers to resist the rhetoric of currently held story lines in this field, to see beyond the present hierarchies of power over relevant ‘knowledges’, to maintain a dual focus with the young people at centre stage and the professionals as ‘walk ons /extras’ and to argue for a ‘curriculum of connection’ between young people and the relevant education and health professionals. These issues are readily engaged in arguments for change through the interweaving of larger discourses of inclusivity, curriculum, and policy. This paper works those intersections in the everyday positionings of professionals and young people.

Where has class gone? The pervasiveness of class in girls' physical activity in a rural town

This paper seeks to animate discussion around how social class operates with adolescent girls from low socio-economic status backgrounds to shape and inform their decisions about participation in physical activity (PA) inside and outside of school. Examining the instance of girls in a single secondary school in an Australian regional town, the paper questions the impact of class and how the girls experience the obstacles, impediments and interferences to participation in PA. These girls are portrayed as living multiple, complex and embodied subjectivities that shape and are informed by the relational geographies in which they are located, as they interact ‘with’, ‘to’ and ‘between’ the social, emotional and classed hierarchies that require them to access familial and other resources in making decisions about participation in PA.

RGB Wattle Park chalet

New technologies have arguably displaced the hegemony of painting within the hierarchies of contemporary art. Projectors and other digital imaging technologies in particular continue to expand the contemporary artist’s aesthetic and conceptual possibilities beyond canvas, paper, and stone. Yet painting - the practice of smearing coloured mud about - far from being superseded, simply continues to cannibalise these powerful technologies extruding them into its own analogue processes. Whether intentionally or as an by-product of this cannibalisation, painting tends to create a critical distance in which the tacit aspects of these technologies – their representational language and ‘special effects’ - are made fully visible. Of course 'easel' painting practices persist not only to critique new technologies. Rather new technologies inevitably fold back into the now souped-up vocabularies of contemporary painting, expanding the medium’s physical boundaries, formal strategies, and modes of display.

YGR Fontainebleau

New technologies have arguably displaced the hegemony of painting in the hierarchies of contemporary art. Projectors and other digital imaging tools in particular continue to expand the artist’s aesthetic and conceptual possibilities beyond canvas, paper, and stone. Yet painting, (the practice of smearing coloured mud about) far from being marginalised, simply continues to cannibalise these new technologies extruding them into its own analogue processes. Whether intentionally or as a by-product of this cannibalisation, painting creates a critical distance in which the tacit aspects of these technologies – their representational language and ‘special effects’ - are made fully visible. Of course ‘traditional’ easel painting practices persist not just to critique new technologies. Digital imaging technologies inevitably feed back into the souped-up vocabularies of contemporary painting, expanding the medium’s physical boundaries, formal strategies, and modes of display. The work for this project explores the ways in which projection and virtual geographical mapping invite new configurations for the practice of landscape painting.

YGR Warrandyte

New technologies have arguably displaced the hegemony of painting in the hierarchies of contemporary art. Projectors and other digital imaging tools in particular continue to expand the artist’s aesthetic and conceptual possibilities beyond canvas, paper, and stone. Yet painting, (the practice of smearing coloured mud about) far from being marginalised, simply continues to cannibalise these new technologies extruding them into its own analogue processes. Whether intentionally or as an by-product of this cannibalisation, painting creates a critical distance in which the tacit aspects of these technologies – their representational language and ‘special effects’ - are made visible. Of course ‘traditional’ easel painting practices persist not just to critique new technologies. Digital imaging technologies inevitably feed back into the souped-up vocabularies of contemporary painting, expanding the medium’s physical boundaries, formal strategies, and modes of display. The work for this project explores the ways in which projection and virtual geographical mapping invite new configurations for the practice of landscape painting.

A journey through places: politics of spatial location in the stories of South Asian diaspora in Australia

In this paper, I analyse the post-colonial and post-modern experiences in the light of questions and issues concerning the spatial identities or locations that the diasporans carry. By politics of spatial location, I mean a migrant's positions within power hierarchies created through geographic, historical, political, economic and other socially stratifying factors in the new homeland. This paper is mainly concerned with the theoretical ways in which a shift is accelerated in Australia's literary landscape by the South Asian diasporic writers who produce and cover the dynamics of politics of location in different contexts. It also focuses on South Asian diaspora's widely agreed ‘ability to recreate their cultures in diverse locations’. I conclude that these stories are not just of spaces but also of a promising future for the South Asian diaspora in Australia.

Sex in Japan's globalization, 1870-1930: prostitutes, emigration and nation building

Based on archival research undertaken in Japan and Britain, Mihalopoulos offers a new perspective on the relations between gender hierarchies and the political economy in a newly modernized Japan. The industrialization of Japan in the late nineteenth century coincided with attempts to establish new trade links abroad. The peasant class were sent overseas as ‘free labourers’ in a state-sponsored programme that also sought to maintain traditional codes of behaviour and morally acceptable forms of work. This study examines the particular impact of these restrictions on Japanese prostitutes abroad and reveals how the freedom offered to the poor by the state was limited and highly selective.

Mediating the good life: prostitution and the Japanese Woman's Christian Temperance Union, 1880s–1920s

This article examines how the Japanese Woman's Christian Temperance Union, in the name of promoting liberty and rights of women in their relations with men, constructed hierarchies to ascribe value to themselves through moral condemnation. The JWCTU used extramarital sex as a political issue to strengthen the position of the legal wife in the household as opposed to the concubine and prostitute. Their efforts to prohibit Japanese women from going abroad as prostitutes, while understood as an attempt to end a system of slavery that violated the inherent rights of Japanese womanhood, was actually a desire to regulate the behaviour of the poor. The JWCTU based its moral reform agenda on the importance of premarital chastity, strict monogamy and the obligation to work for the good of the nation. Its construction of prostitution as evil represents an important strand in the history of the relationship between prostitution and family as a socio-political issue in modern Japan.

Conversations on belonging: women of Indian heritage speak

In this Special Section we highlight existing and emerging scholarship on Belonging in countries with white majority cultures. We argue that ‘belonging’ is a familiar and well researched concept that continues to be relevant today because it is central to the joy and vitality of life that enables us to inhabit multiple worlds. Drawing on intellectual and personal journeys in USA, Canada and Australia, the contributors of ‘Indian’ heritage raise questions that urge us to unsettle hierarchies of belonging in western societies. They build on interdisciplinary theoretical and empirical insights by thinking about the potentialities of bodies for interdependence in a place we call home.

Mega-events and mega-profits: Unravelling the Vancouver 2010 security–development nexus

Academic and political commentators have commonly sought to understand the Olympics as a cultural dynamic, a "spectacle" that motivates certain actors to project their relative interests in localized spaces and as well on a global scale (Hiller 2006; Boyle and Haggerty 2009b ). Mega-events, as this argument goes, are monumental cultural events (Roche 2000) that rely on the audacity of spectacle to dramatize and condition the cultural, political, legal and economic landscape. Extending these insights into surveillance studies, Boyle and Haggerty (2009b: 259-260) position spectacle and the disciplinary mechanisms of anxieties associated with mega-events to explain the risk management practices of security planners. The dynamic social implications of the spectacle condition dramatic regimes of securitization and surveillance such that sovereign power emanates from the production and consumption of spectacle. In similar fashion Vida Bajc (2007: 1648) writes that security meta-rituals "demonstrate[s] that the process of transformation of [the] public space [of mega-events] from one of routine of daily life into a sterile area [that] has a ritual form [that] .... separates insiders from outsiders and brings about a new socio-political reality." Put another way, the "security-meta ritual" legitimates security and surveillance practices by normalizing the social hierarchies it imposes. Bajc focuses on the over-determination of dividing practices in mega-event security, but the signifying practices associated with capital are absent (perhaps due to her empirical focus on presidential addresses). Klauser (2008: 181) links commercialization and mechanisms of surveillance, but only by foregrounding the significance of "neutralized space" created by granting absolute commercial rights to event sponsors. Neoliberalprivatization and its articulation with security and surveillance, however, cannot be reduced to control over sponsorship rights and consumptive practices in particular urban "zones," nor can it be limited by the methodological temporality of the event itself.