Who speaks on footballers and sexual assault? A gender analysis of sports reporting

The recent spate of sexual assault allegations made against Australian Football League (AFL) players has generated intense media scrutiny and public concern. Following from similar highly publicised allegations directed at the National Rugby League, these incidents have engendered significant debates around sexism and football culture in the popular press. It is the media’s response to allegations of sexual assault made against AFL footballers that will be analysed here. This study offers a content analysis of articles from the sport sections of two major Australian newspapers, The Age and the Herald-Sun, with the aim of assessing the prevalence of women’s perspectives on the issue of player misconduct and whether the gender of the reporter has any bearing on gender stereotyping in sport reporting. By assessing how the phenomenon of player misconduct has been covered in sport news, this paper evaluates the media’s role in changing dominant attitudes and perceptions of gender relations in Australian society.

Intelligent financial news digest system

We present an agent-based system Intelligent Financial News Digest System (IFNDS) for analyzing online financial news articles and associated material. The system can abstract, synthesize, digest, and classify the contents, and assesses whether the report is favorable to any company discussed in the reports. It integrates artificial intelligence technologies including traditional information retrieval and extraction techniques for the news analysis. It makes use of keyword statistics and backpropagation training data to identify companies named in reportage whether it is, evaluatively speaking, positive, negative or neutral. The system would be of use to media such as clipping services, media management, advertising, public relations, public interest, and e-commerce professionals and government non-governmental bodies interested in monitoring the media profiles of corporations, products, and issues.

On the margins : a study of the representation of the arts in the news pages of the newspaper

The principal objective of this paper is to investigate how the arts are represented in the Australian print media. The research is conducted by means of textual analysis focusing on a number of case studies where arts stories appeared in the news pages of an Australian daily broadsheet newspaper. This paper argues that in these case studies the arts are represented in terms of a limited range of rhetorical frameworks. These frameworks help constitute public knowledge about the arts and their marginalised status in Australia. This paper offers a critique of current arts policy which fails to recognise the role of the media in reinforcing the marginalisation of the arts.

Fixers and foreign correspondents : news production and autonomy

The television foreign correspondent's licence to roam and generate news is increasingly under threat. This paper concentrates on the micro production processes of today s correspondent as he or she goes about the job of newsgathering 'on the road', and considers the changing nature of the correspondent's autonomy. It inserts the missing character in foreign newsgathering - the locally hired fixer - and explores how this person affects the correspondent's autonomy. An analysis of interviews with 20 foreign correspondents and five fixers leads to the conclusion that the foreign correspondent is rarely the sole editorial figure on the road but is instead the main actor representing the creative interplay of a succession of fixers or 'local producers'. This deconstruction of the ways in which a correspondent builds an ad-hoc newsgathering team each time he or she lands in d new place allows for a deeper understanding of the modus operandi of reporters.

Visual tracking of vehicles using multiresolution analysis and neural network

This paper describes the procedure for detection and tracking of a vehicle from an on-road image sequence taken by a monocular video capturing device in real time. The main objective of such a visual tracking system is to closely follow objects in each frame of a video stream, such that the object position as well as other geometric information are always known. In the tracking system described, the video capturing device is also moving. It is a challenge to detect and track a moving vehicle under a constantly changing environment coupled to real time video processing. The system suggested is robust to implement under different illuminating conditions by using the monocular video capturing device. The vehicle tracking algorithm is one of the most important modules in an autonomous vehicle system, not only it should be very accurate but also must have the safety of other vehicles, pedestrians, and the moving vehicle itself. In order to achieve this an algorithm of multi resolution technique based on Haar basis functions were used for the wavelet transform, where a combination of classification was carried out with the multilayer feed forward neural network. The classification is done in a reduced dimensional space, where principle component analysis (PCA) dimensional reduction technique has been applied to make the classification process much more efficient. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.

Experimental stress analysis of a steel light truck wheel

The development of a new automotive wheel requires extensive testing and possible design changes. The wheel investigated had three major changes during development. These three designs were subjected to a stress analysis, by experimental methods, to allow a comparison to be made between each design. The experimental program tested the wheels under conditions designed to simulate the loading of the front wheels whilst cornering. A loading frame was built for this purpose and all testing was performed statically by multiple loading for different directions of bending moment. Brittle lacquer coatings were used on each wheel to highlight high strain areas and indicate optimum locations for the placement of strain gauges. The strain gauges were then used to evaluate the strains. Wheel stud loads were also monitored via strain gauges applied to two of the wheel studs. All data was stored on magnetic tapes and the stress analysis performed by means of a minicomputer. The results of the stress analysis showed quantitatively the improvement in design from the first to the third wheel design. The analysis of the stud loads and their variation during loading indicated the optimum wheel mounting face geometry to ensure nut loosening would not occur in service.

(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.

The politics of 'sustainability': a critical discourse analysis of Victorian Government policy discourse, 1999-2006

Since its emergence during the 1980s the idea of sustainability has come to provide the dominant frame within which environmental policy is debated. Thus, for many ‘sustainability’ represents the best way to address the economic, social and environmental effects of the myriad of environmental issues facing human societies, including biodiversity loss, soil erosion, pollution of waterways, ozone depletion and climate change. There are however, widely divergent views advocated as to what sustainability means, which has important implications for how serious environmental issues are understood to be, why they are important, what has caused them, and what needs to be done to address them. Given the diversity of such views, the consequences for policy making, and the likelihood of effective responses being developed, are self evident. Within this context, this thesis investigates the politics of sustainability, focussing particularly on the way in which it is defined, because of the implications this has for the way in which environmental issues are understood and addressed. Following a review of various approaches to analysing environmental policy (traditional, mainstream, ecopolitical and discursive), Norman Fairclough’s approach to discourse analysis (Critical Discourse Analysis) was identified as having particular merit. Fairclough’s approach avoids the assumption that policy issues exist independently of the way they are framed and offers a perspective on discourse that links the social theoretical concerns of Foucault with the micro level concerns of linguistics. It also provides a means for taking environmental policy analysis in directions that that have attracted relatively limited attraction, namely the detailed analysis of the ideological effects of language on environmental policy. In this thesis Fairclough’s approach is used to explore how three storylines of sustainability (sustainable development, environmentally sustainable growth and transforming society) and their associated discourses shaped environmental policy making in Victoria, Australia, between 1999 and 2006. In undertaking this analysis, I examined the political and institutional context informing policy making (social practice); the contested process of text production (discourse practice), and; the detailed wording of a policy text (textual analysis). A major policy statement on environmental sustainability released by the Victorian Government in 2005 is subjected to detailed analysis. Based on the analysis undertaken, the substantive finding from this research is that rather than moving beyond neoliberalism, the Victorian Government embraced an approach to sustainability that was informed by neoliberalism and (weak) ecological modernisation, which constructs sustainability in ways that limit its importance and constrain the types of responses that could be advocated. In doing so, it drew heavily on notions of natural assets and ecosystems services as ways to make sense of the environment and why it is important. The Victorian Government also highlighted that environmental issues are caused by the cumulative effects of individual choices, and emphasized the importance of individual choice and behavioural change as central features of sustainability, while restricting opportunities for more transformative ideas to be heard. The broader conclusion arising from this research is that approaches to environmental policy that rely on neoliberal and (weak) ecological modern discourses are flawed, because, in commodifying nature, limiting the nature and magnitude of change required, and placing responsibility onto individuals they offer a constrained understanding of the challenge of sustainability and what needs to be done about it. The overall contribution made by this research is an improved understanding of the discursive nature of the politics of sustainability and the influence of neoliberalism and ecological modernisation, the use of a methodology that has attracted relatively limited attention within environmental policy (despite its widespread use in other areas of policy) and the documentation of a period of significant environmental policy reform in Victoria.

Analysis of the cost performance of structural building frames in Australia

The significance of this research is that it is the first comprehensive analysis of cost performance across Australia. It is well known that measuring cost performance is not an easy task; comparisons of building projects on a `like-for-like’ basis are uncommon, and rarely occur in the real world. However, this paper analyses 120 different structural frame models that represent various; structural designs, construction methods, grid spans, and locations.

The research produced price models that were representative of structural frames used in medium-rise non-residential buildings. It is based on pricing a number of standard building frame designs in five Australian cities. The results represent the cost of producing the same building in different locations, using similar building construction techniques. By utilizing a standard model, project variables like building quality, ground conditions and access were eradicated, thereby facilitating an unbiased comparison of cost performance. I addition, the results are an indicator of building productivity based on costs per square metre of various construction types.

This research provides the Australian industry with robust data about the relative cost performance of various structural building frames. In addition, this research has wider implications because the models may also become useful data for the measuring relative cost performance in other countries.

Tracking-as-recognition for articulated full-body human motion analysis

This paper addresses the problem of markerless tracking of a human in full 3D with a high-dimensional (29D) body model Most work in this area has been focused on achieving accurate tracking in order to replace marker-based motion capture, but do so at the cost of relying on relatively clean observing conditions. This paper takes a different perspective, proposing a body-tracking model that is explicitly designed to handle real-world conditions such as occlusions by scene objects, failure recovery, long-term tracking, auto-initialisation, generalisation to different people and integration with action recognition. To achieve these goals, an action's motions are modelled with a variant of the hierarchical hidden Markov model The model is quantitatively evaluated with several tests, including comparison to the annealed particle filter, tracking different people and tracking with a reduced resolution and frame rate.

Bilingual education and the language of news

This paper presents evidence that shows for the first time that news media influence was a significant factor in the decision to dismantle the Northern Territory’s bilingual education policy in 2008. It identifies and discusses five media-related overlays that have affected public discussion and policymaking during the life of the policy. They include the media’s role in informing public understanding of the policy; media representation of Indigenous peoples and issues; the relationship between policymaking and journalism in general; neo-liberal discourses about education, especially literacy; and the reporting practices of journalists who have covered the issue. It draws on relevant literature, the history of the policy and interviews conducted for the Australian News Media and Indigenous Policymaking 1988-2008 ARC Discovery Project to interpret some of the connections and disconnections between these overlays and bilingual education policy. This analysis suggests that the news media exerted a complex and uneven range of influences on the 2008 decision to dismantle Australia’s first and most enduring policy of Indigenous self-determination.

The performing frame

This project explores the ways that creative practices—improvised movement, choreographed dance, and digital video—produce new knowledge about the sociability of public space. In other words, it uses various theoretical concepts and practical strategies to document and analyse the ways people inhabit and sometimes subvert public spaces — such as plazas, malls and piazzas — as part of their everyday experience. Drawing on concepts developed within the fields of performance theory, spatial history, cultural geography and social theory, the project will build a methodological toolbox for understanding the relationships between the diverse groups that use public spaces in Melbourne, Australia. This ‘toolbox’ will subsequently be used to understand analogous public spaces in other parts of the world to generate comparative data about spatial sociability. The research will enable an innovative way of mapping social, civic and political relations in space through a series of creative interventions, and will reveal the politics of everyday movement while exposing tensions between the spaces of public culture — those framed and legitimated by state institutions — and what Michael Warner calls ‘Counter-Publics.’ That is, those oppositional groups who actively seek to use public space in subversive or unauthorised ways.

This project documents a series of performative interventions designed to harness the untapped potential of various forms of street performance genres to function as tools that can produce new ways of understanding the politics of movement in public space. These ‘interventions’ will be generated through a series of practical performance and movement workshops that will draw on street theatre techniques, contact improvisation, Laban movement analysis and contemporary dance choreography. The project will focus on a series of dyadic relationships: self and other, inside and outside, centre and periphery that are relevant to human interaction in public space.
Street performers — musicians, acrobats, jugglers, magicians, mimes and so on — seek public spaces with high volumes of pedestrian traffic in order to maximise their ability to draw an audience and make a living. These performers who create temporary performance zones alter the flow and intensity of movement around them, thereby transforming the plazas, piazzas, town squares and subways favoured by buskers. Some of these performers interact with their audience more than others, and are potentially capable of telling us something about the politics of space. The practice of ‘shadowing’ the movements of passers-by is an increasingly popular form of public entertainment around the world.

Performance evaluation of multi-frame super-resolution algorithms

Multi-frame super-resolution algorithms aim to increase spatial resolution by fusing information from several low-resolution perspectives of a scene. While a wide array of super-resolution algorithms now exist, the comparative capability of these techniques in practical scenarios has not been adequately explored. In addition, a standard quantitative method for assessing the relative merit of super-resolution algorithms is required. This paper presents a comprehensive practical comparison of existing super-resolution techniques using a shared platform and 4 common greyscale reference images. In total, 13 different super-resolution algorithms are evaluated, and as accurate alignment is critical to the super-resolution process, 6 registration algorithms are also included in the analysis. Pixel-based visual information fidelity (VIFP) is selected from the 12 image quality metrics reviewed as the measure most suited to the appraisal of super-resolved images. Experimental results show that Bayesian super-resolution methods utilizing the simultaneous autoregressive (SAR) prior produce the highest quality images when combined with generalized stochastic Lucas-Kanade optical flow registration.

Managing news coverage around initial public offerings

We examine opportunistic behavior of initial public offering (IPO) firms in Taiwan where they are required to disclose their own earnings forecasts and are unrestricted in releasing news around the offerings. We find that prior to the offerings, IPO firms tend to report higher earnings, disclose inflated earnings forecasts, and manage more good news. News management, however, emerges as the most predominant factor in aftermarket stock prices. In particular, IPO firms have a strong preference for releasing good news related to strategy/policy that may simply provide a vision of a firm's future. Furthermore, the news releases are often forward-looking when they are positive about the firms but tend to be realized when they are negative. IPO firms also tend to engage in more window dressing activities before a larger sale of IPO shares from existing shareholders or a larger decline in insiders' holdings. Our analysis shows that managerial optimism cannot fully account for their behavior.

ABC news 24 and BBC world : a study of limited resources and challenging newsgathering

ABC Australia’s News 24 website proclaims: "ABC News 24 provides around the clock coverage of news events as they break at home and abroad. It’s news when you want it, on your platform - TV, mobile and online." In this article, the stations content is analysed across 24 hours of its programming and compared with the same 24 hours of programming from BBC World. The content is tested for four key values: range of stories; coverage of the big stories; competence in going live to breaking stories; and ability to add value through analysis, debate and context. The examination of the data against these four key values enables an analysis of the nature of the service and assists in assessing whether or not it is providing an enriched and different offering in a busy 24/7 media landscape.