The state-of-the-art in personalized recommender systems for social networking

With the explosion of Web 2.0 application such as blogs, social and professional networks, and various other types of social media, the rich online information and various new sources of knowledge flood users and hence pose a great challenge in terms of information overload. It is critical to use intelligent agent software systems to assist users in finding the right information from an abundance of Web data. Recommender systems can help users deal with information overload problem efficiently by suggesting items (e.g., information and products) that match users’ personal interests. The recommender technology has been successfully employed in many applications such as recommending films, music, books, etc. The purpose of this report is to give an overview of existing technologies for building personalized recommender systems in social networking environment, to propose a research direction for addressing user profiling and cold start problems by exploiting user-generated content newly available in Web 2.0.

Alter/Asians : Asian-Australian Identities in Art, Media and Popular Culture

Exploration of how Australia and Asia are intertwined in everyday culture, and in the imagined worlds of Australians of all backgrounds. Investigates Asian cultural production of art, literature, media and performance that embody Asian social and cultural experiences. Includes endnotes, bibliography and index. Ang and Chalmers work in the School of Cultural Studies at University of Western Sydney. Law and Thomas are Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellows at Australian National University and the Research Centre in Inter-communal Studies respectively.

Yutori Kyoiku and the uncertainty of recent neo-liberal reforms in Japanese higher education

This paper draws upon the current situation within Japanese Higher Education. In particular the paper focuses on educational reforms and how they relate to the notions of Yutori Kyoiku which constituted a major attempt by Japanese education to develop individual student capacity. A clear subtext of the recent neo-liberal reform agenda is a desire to incorporated free-market ideals into the Japanese educational system. This paper raises several important problems connected to the reforms such as the decrease in classroom hours, changes to the contents of textbooks and a growing discrepancy in academic skills between students in different localities. These education reforms have impacted on notions of Yutori Kyoiku through the continuation of nationally standardized testing and changes directed at controlling the practices of classroom teachers. While acknowledging the current Japanese cabinet’s (DP) education policy has been inherited from an earlier LDP government, the paper points to similarities between the current reforms and the iconic Meiji era reforms of the late 1800s.

The power of art, the power of entertainment

The question of the relationship between culture and power continues to exercise researchers. In this paper I argue that it is useful to consider the differences between ‘art’ and ‘entertainment’ as systems of culture, each involving a distinct set of power relationships between producers and audiences. Art wants to change audiences; entertainment wants to be changed by audiences. From these different starting points a series of differences unfold in the power possessed by producers and audiences. Artists pride themselves in not involving the audience in the process of making art. By contrast, entertainment wants audiences to contribute to the making of texts. As to the question of who controls the range of what forms of culture are available, it seems that entertainment consumers – unlike art consumers – are ill-disciplined. Historical evidence demonstrates that if legal corporate providers do not offer the kinds of entertainment they want, they will turn to illegal sources. The different ways in which ‘art’ and ‘entertainment’ function as cultural systems suggest that we must rethink our positions on ‘media power’.

Pieces of a city : the art of making speculative cities, bodies, & texts

This practice-led doctorate involved the development of a collection – a bricolage – of interwoven fragments of literary texts and visual imagery explor-ing questions of speculative fiction, urban space and embodiment. As a sup-plement to the creative work, I also developed an exegesis, using a combina-tion of theoretical and contextual analysis combined with critical reflections on my creative process and outputs. An emphasis on issues of creative practice and a sustained investigation into an aesthetics of fragmentation and assem-blage is organised around the concept and methodology of bricolage, the eve-ryday art of ‘making do’. The exegesis also addresses my interest in the city and urban forms of subjectivity and embodiment through the use of a range of theorists, including Michel de Certeau and Elizabeth Grosz.

The politics and poetics of coexistence : experiments at the intersection of art and environmental engineering

This research project explores how interdisciplinary art practices can provide ways for questioning and envisaging alternative modes of coexistence between humans and the non-humans who together, make up the environment. As a practiceled project, it combines a body of creative work (50%) and this exegesis (50%). My interdisciplinary artistic practice appropriates methods and processes from science and engineering and merges them into artistic contexts for critical and poetic ends. By blending pseudo-scientific experimentation with creative strategies like visual fiction, humour, absurd public performance and scripted audience participation, my work engages with a range of debates around ecology. This exegesis details the interplay between critical theory relating to these debates, the work of other creative practitioners and my own evolving artistic practice. Through utilising methods and processes drawn from my prior career in water engineering, I present an interdisciplinary synthesis that seeks to promote improved understandings of the causes and consequences of our ecological actions and inactions.

Automatic object segmentation of unstructured scenes using colour and depth maps

This study presents a segmentation pipeline that fuses colour and depth information to automatically separate objects of interest in video sequences captured from a quadcopter. Many approaches assume that cameras are static with known position, a condition which cannot be preserved in most outdoor robotic applications. In this study, the authors compute depth information and camera positions from a monocular video sequence using structure from motion and use this information as an additional cue to colour for accurate segmentation. The authors model the problem similarly to standard segmentation routines as a Markov random field and perform the segmentation using graph cuts optimisation. Manual intervention is minimised and is only required to determine pixel seeds in the first frame which are then automatically reprojected into the remaining frames of the sequence. The authors also describe an automated method to adjust the relative weights for colour and depth according to their discriminative properties in each frame. Experimental results are presented for two video sequences captured using a quadcopter. The quality of the segmentation is compared to a ground truth and other state-of-the-art methods with consistently accurate results.

Habituated objects : everyday tangibles that foster the independent living of an elderly woman

The boundaries between 'the digital' and our everyday physical world are dissolving as we develop more physical ways of interacting with computing. This forum presents some of the topics discussed in the colorful multidisciplinary field of tangible and embodied interaction

Carbon dioxide reforming of methane to produce synthesis gas over metal-supported catalysts: State of the art

Carbon dioxide reforming of methane produces synthesis gas with a low hydrogen to carbon monoxide ratio, which is desirable for many industrial synthesis processes. This reaction also has very important environmental implications since both methane and carbon dioxide contribute to the greenhouse effect. Converting these gases into a valuable feedstock may significantly reduce the atmospheric emissions of CO2 and CH4. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review on the thermodynamics, catalyst selection and activity, reaction mechanism, and kinetics of this important reaction. Recently, research has centered on the development of catalysts and the feasible applications of this reaction in industry. Group VIII metals supported on oxides are found to be effective for this reason. However, carbon deposition causing catalyst deactivation is the major problem inhibiting the industrial application of the CO2/CH4 reaction. Ni-based catalysts impregnated on certain supports show carbon-free operation and thus attract much attention. To develop an effective catalyst for CO2 reforming of CH4 and accelerate the commercial application of the reaction, the following are identified to be the most important areas for future work: (1) selection of metal and support and studying the effect of their interaction on catalyst activity; (2) the effect of different promoter on catalyst activity; (3) the reaction mechanism and kinetics; and (4) pilot reactor performance and scale-up operation.

Something’s coming, something good: Identifying TPACK competence in pre-service teachers’ analyses of learning objects

There is a song at the beginning of the musical, West Side Story, where the character Tony sings that “something’s coming, something good.” The song is an anthem of optimism, brimming with promise. This paper is about the long-held promise of information and communication technology (ICT) to transform teaching and learning, to modernise the learning environment of the classroom, and to create a new digital pedagogy. But much of our experience to date in the schooling sector tells more of resistance and reaction than revolution, of more of the same but with a computer in the corner and of ICT activities as unwelcome time-fillers/time-wasters. Recently, a group of pre-service teachers in a postgraduate primary education degree in an Australian university were introduced to learning objects in an ICT immersion program. Their analyses and related responses, as recorded in online journals, have here been interpreted in terms of TPACK (Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge). Against contemporary observation, these students generally displayed high levels of competence and highly positive dispositions of students to the integration of ICT in their future classrooms. In short, they displayed the same optimism and confidence as the fictional “Tony” in believing that something good was coming.

The art of interpretation: Tracing logics of evaluation in Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing (2000) and Andrew Ruhemann and Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing (2010)

Celebration (and the celebritisation) of the Australian-ness of children’s authors who enjoy critical or commercial international success, and especially of those who win international prizes speaks to a desire to partake in both national and international cultural spheres. Prizing is often presumed to both guarantee and emerge from a creator's reputation at home and abroad. Australian artist and writer Shaun Tan has received a wide array of cultural and literary prizes, ranging from Australian book awards, to an Academy Award, to the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Prize. This paper considers logics of evaluation and interpretation as they can be traced in the intratextual, intertextual, and extratextual codes of Shaun Tan’s picture book, The Lost Thing (2000), the animated film adaptation of The Lost Thing (2010). It further considers the ways in which the desire for a global audience may necessitate an erasure of the national culture which is traded on in a global market.

Electrospraying of polymers with therapeutic molecules : state of the art

The encapsulation and release of bioactive molecules from polymeric vehicles represents the holy grail of drug and growth factor delivery therapies, whereby sustained and controlled release is crucial in eliciting a positive therapeutic effect. To this end, electrospraying is rapidly emerging as a popular technology for the production of polymeric particles containing bioactive molecules. Compared with traditional emulsion fabrication techniques, electrospraying has the potential to reduce denaturation of protein drugs and affords tighter regulation over particle size distribution and morphology. In this article, we review the importance of the electrospraying parameters that enable reproducible tailoring of the particles' physical and in vitro drug release characteristics, along with discussion of existing in vivo data. Controlled morphology and monodispersity of particles can be achieved with electrospraying, with high encapsulation efficiencies and without unfavorable denaturation of bioactive molecules throughout the process. Finally, the combination of electrospraying with electrospun scaffolds, with an emphasis on tissue regeneration is reviewed, depicting a technique in its relative infancy but holding great promise for the future of regenerative medicine.

Autistic artists give clues to cognition

Certain autistic children whose linguistic ability is virtually nonexistent can draw natural scenes from memory with astonishing accuracy. In particular their drawings display convincing perspective. In contrast, normal children of the same preschool age group and even untrained adults draw primitive schematics or symbols of objects which they can verbally identify. These are usually conceptual outlines devoid of detail. It is argued that the difference between autistic child artists and normal individuals is that autistic artists make no assumptions about what is to be seen in their environment. They have not formed mental representations of what is significant and consequently perceive all details as equally important. Equivalently, they do not impose visual or linguistic schema -- a process necessary for rapid conceptualisation in a dynamic existence, especially when the information presented to the eye is incomplete.

Dislocations of desire : the transnational movement of gifts within the Vietnamese diaspora

Gifts have intrigued and challenged scholars ever since interest in the subject was piqued by Marcel Mauss who, in 1925, wrote the book The gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. Although ethnographic studies of giftgiving have been mostly confined to small-scale communities, scholars have more recently turned their attention to industrial societies, with studies of Christmas giving, Japanese gift-giving, etc. Now, as studies of consumption are entering a phase of efflorescence, it is time to re-evaluate gift-giving. The recent rapid expansion in the transnational flow of people, objects and ideas has had an impact on the social conditions associated with new global patterns of consumption. In this atmosphere of overlapping cultural, economic and political worlds, there is a need to look again at the objects that pass between us as gifts...

Constructing the shitting citizen : the promise of scatological art as environmental and social activism

Art activism uses visual and performance art to promote social and environmental agendas. In this paper, I explore attempts to raise awareness of sanitation issues at the global, local and personal level using scatological art. I focus on the successes of the open-air public art exhibition set up in the Brisbane (Queensland, Australia) central business district to celebrate World Toilet Day in 2008. The art in this exhibition featured included one hundred toilets decorated to raise awareness of global sanitation issues and the distribution of promotional materials featuring scatological images including postcards and stickers. Given the subject matter and intent, the toilet art and promotional materials presented at the One Hundred Toilet exhibition can be seen as an example of scatological art employed for the purposes of social and environmental activism. Through the One Hundred Toilet exhibition, I consider the political aims and activist potential of using scatological art to progress social and environmental agendas and consider how this kind of ‘shit on show’ approach can contribute to the construction of the shitting citizen; one who is simultaneously responsible for and responsive to managing the waste that they produce and recognising and responding to broader sanitation issues.