Doing justice : young people’s representations of the Murray-Darling Basin

The business of helping children to grow up as ‘custodians’, or ‘future managers’ of the Murray-Darling Basin is not simple, and that single sources of information and ways of seeing the environment are not enough. Children (and adults) need to be able to relate individually, emotionally and aesthetically to their places if they are to learn to love them. However, they also need access to a variety of ways of thinking and seeing those same places if they are to be able to take action to sustain them – action that inevitably involves forms of communication with their fellow citizens. This chapter documents the writing and art program Special Forever, with its focus on communications, as an important intervention into promoting eco-social sustainability.

Reliable representations for association rules

Association rule mining has contributed to many advances in the area of knowledge discovery. However, the quality of the discovered association rules is a big concern and has drawn more and more attention recently. One problem with the quality of the discovered association rules is the huge size of the extracted rule set. Often for a dataset, a huge number of rules can be extracted, but many of them can be redundant to other rules and thus useless in practice. Mining non-redundant rules is a promising approach to solve this problem. In this paper, we first propose a definition for redundancy, then propose a concise representation, called a Reliable basis, for representing non-redundant association rules. The Reliable basis contains a set of non-redundant rules which are derived using frequent closed itemsets and their generators instead of using frequent itemsets that are usually used by traditional association rule mining approaches. An important contribution of this paper is that we propose to use the certainty factor as the criterion to measure the strength of the discovered association rules. Using this criterion, we can ensure the elimination of as many redundant rules as possible without reducing the inference capacity of the remaining extracted non-redundant rules. We prove that the redundancy elimination, based on the proposed Reliable basis, does not reduce the strength of belief in the extracted rules. We also prove that all association rules, their supports and confidences, can be retrieved from the Reliable basis without accessing the dataset. Therefore the Reliable basis is a lossless representation of association rules. Experimental results show that the proposed Reliable basis can significantly reduce the number of extracted rules. We also conduct experiments on the application of association rules to the area of product recommendation. The experimental results show that the non-redundant association rules extracted using the proposed method retain the same inference capacity as the entire rule set. This result indicates that using non-redundant rules only is sufficient to solve real problems needless using the entire rule set.

Australian queer student activists' media representations of queer

Queer student activists are a visible aspect of Australian tertiary communities. Institutionally there are a number of organisations and tools representing and serving gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex and ‘otherwise queer identifying’ (GLBTIQ) students. ‘Queer’ is a contentious term with meanings ranging from a complex deconstructive academic theory to a term for ‘gay’. Despite the institutional applications, the definition remains unclear and under debate. In this thesis I examine queer student activists’ production of print media, a previously under-researched area. In queer communities, print media provides crucial grounding for a model of queer. Central to identity formation and activism, this media is a site of textuality for the construction and circulation of discourses of queer student media. Thus, I investigate the various ways Australian queer student activists construct queer, queer identity, and queer activism in their print media. I use discourse analysis, participant observation and semi-structured interviews to enable a thorough investigation of both the process and the products of queer student media. My findings demonstrate that queer student activists’ politics are grounded in a range of ideologies drawing from Marxism, Feminism, Gay Liberation, Anti-assimilation and Queer Theory. Grounded in queer theoretical perspectives of performativity this research makes relatively new links between Queer Theory and Media Studies in its study of the production contexts of queer student media. In doing so, I show how the university context informs student articulations of queer, proving the necessity to locate research within its social-cultural setting. My research reveals that, much like Queer Theory, these representations of queer are rich with paradox. I argue that queer student activists are actually theorising queer. I call for a reconceptualisation of Queer Theory and question the current barriers between who is considered a ‘theorist’ of queer and who is an ‘activist’. If we can think about ‘theory’ as encompassing the work of activists, what implications might this have for politics and analysis?

Flagging spaces : exploring representations of ownership on the Australian beach

The Australian beach is a significant element of our national identity. Since the majority of the population lives on the coastlines of the continent, the beach (rather than the Bush) plays an important role to many Australians. Yet the beach can also be a complex setting because of the often complicated concepts of ownership that surround it. ‘Flagging Spaces’ examines the layers of complexity surrounding textual representations of ownership of the beach space. In particular, this paper explores the Indigenous representation on the beach moving through to the role of multiculturalism on the beach space in the wake of the 2005 Cronulla riots, using specific textual examples such as Sacred Cows (Heiss 1996), Australia (dir. Baz Luhrmann 2008), Heaven (dir. Tracey Moffatt 1997), Radiance (dir. Rachel Perkins 1998), Butterfly Song (Jenkins 2005), and Bra Boys (dir. Sonny Abberton 2006).

Sparse temporal representations for facial expression recognition

In automatic facial expression recognition, an increasing number of techniques had been proposed for in the literature that exploits the temporal nature of facial expressions. As all facial expressions are known to evolve over time, it is crucially important for a classifier to be capable of modelling their dynamics. We establish that the method of sparse representation (SR) classifiers proves to be a suitable candidate for this purpose, and subsequently propose a framework for expression dynamics to be efficiently incorporated into its current formulation. We additionally show that for the SR method to be applied effectively, then a certain threshold on image dimensionality must be enforced (unlike in facial recognition problems). Thirdly, we determined that recognition rates may be significantly influenced by the size of the projection matrix \Phi. To demonstrate these, a battery of experiments had been conducted on the CK+ dataset for the recognition of the seven prototypic expressions - anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise - and comparisons have been made between the proposed temporal-SR against the static-SR framework and state-of-the-art support vector machine.

Modelling word meaning using efficient tensor representations

Models of word meaning, built from a corpus of text, have demonstrated success in emulating human performance on a number of cognitive tasks. Many of these models use geometric representations of words to store semantic associations between words. Often word order information is not captured in these models. The lack of structural information used by these models has been raised as a weakness when performing cognitive tasks. This paper presents an efficient tensor based approach to modelling word meaning that builds on recent attempts to encode word order information, while providing flexible methods for extracting task specific semantic information.

Sh-h-h-h : representations of perpetrators of sexual child abuse in picturebooks

Children’s picturebooks dealing with the topic of child sexual abuse first appeared in the early 1980s with the aim of addressing the need for age-appropriate texts to teach sexual abuse prevention concepts and to provide support for young children who may be at risk of or have already experienced sexual abuse. Despite the apparent potential of children’s picturebooks to convey child sexual abuse prevention concepts, very few studies have addressed the topic of child sexual abuse in children’s literature. Based on a larger study of 60 picturebooks about sexual child abuse published over the past 25 years, this paper critically examines eight picturebook representations of the perpetrators of sexual child abuse as a way to understand how potentially dangerous adults are explained to the young readers of these texts.

A Study of XML models for data mining : representations, methods, and issues

With the increasing number of XML documents in varied domains, it has become essential to identify ways of finding interesting information from these documents. Data mining techniques were used to derive this interesting information. Mining on XML documents is impacted by its model due to the semi-structured nature of these documents. Hence, in this chapter we present an overview of the various models of XML documents, how these models were used for mining and some of the issues and challenges in these models. In addition, this chapter also provides some insights into the future models of XML documents for effectively capturing the two important features namely structure and content of XML documents for mining.

Symbolic number : the integration of magnitude and spatial representations in children aged 6 to 8 years

The process of learning symbolic Arabic digits in early childhood requires that magnitude and spatial information integrates with the concept of symbolic digits. Previous research has separately investigated the development of automatic access to magnitude and spatial information from symbolic digits. However, developmental trajectories of symbolic number knowledge cannot be fully understood when considering components in isolation. In view of this, we have synthesized the existing lines of research and tested the use of both magnitude and spatial information with the same sample of British children in Years 1, 2 and 3 (6-8 years of age). The physical judgment task of the numerical Stroop paradigm (NSP) demonstrated that automatic access to magnitude was present from Year 1 and the distance effect signaled that a refined processing of numerical information had developed. Additionally, a parity judgment task showed that the onset of the Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes (SNARC) effect occurs in Year 2. These findings uncover the developmental timeline of how magnitude and spatial representations integrate with symbolic number knowledge during early learning of Arabic digits and resolve inconsistencies between previous developmental and experimental research lines.

Learning English in an English speaking world : examining opportunities for intercultural understandings and connectedness through representations of identities in English language textbooks

With the recognition that language both reflects and constructs culture and English now widely acknowledged as an international language, the cul-tural content of language teaching materials is now being problematised. Through a quantitative analysis, this chapter focuses on opportunities for intercultural understanding and connectedness through representations of the identities that appear in two leading English language textbooks. The analyses reveal that the textbooks orientate towards British and western identities with representations of people from non-European/non-Western backgrounds being notable for their absence, while others are hidden from view. Indeed there would appear to be a neocolonialist orientation in oper-ation in the textbooks, one that aligns English with the West. The chapter proposes arguments for the consideration of cultural diversity in English language teaching (ELT) textbook design, and promoting intercultural awareness and acknowledging the contexts in which English is now being used. It also offers ways that teachers can critically reflect on existing ELT materials and proposes arguments for including different varieties of Eng-lish in order to ensure a level of intercultural understanding and connect-edness.

Reading students’ representations

Students’ text, symbols, and graphics give teachers a glimpse into mathematical thinking associated with investigating the Peas problem.

Do you see what I mean? charting changing representations and receptions of the disabled body in contemporary and pop cultural performance

The meaning of the body emerges through acts of seeing, looking and staring in daily and dramatic performances. Acts that are, as Maike Bleeker argues1, bound up with the scopic rules, regimes and narratives that apply in specific cultures at specific times. In Western culture, the disabled body has been seen as a sign of defect, deficiency, fear, shame or stigma. Disabled artists – Mat Fraser, Bill Shannon, Aaron Williamson, Katherine Araniello, Liz Crow and Ju Gosling – have attempted, via performances that co-opt conventional images of the disabled body, to challenge dominant ways of representing and responding such bodies from within. In this paper, I consider what happens when non-disabled artists co-opt images of the disabled body to draw attention to, affirm, and even exoticise, eroticise or beautify, other modalities of or desires for difference. As Carrie Sandahl has noted2, the signs, symbols and somatic idiosyncrasies of the disabled body are, today, transported or translated into theatre, film and television as a metaphor or "master trope" for every body’s experience of difference. This happens in performance art (Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s use of a wheelchair in Chamber of Confessions), performance (Marie Chouinard's use of crutches, canes and walkers to represent dancers’ experience of becoming different or mutant during training in bODY rEMIX /gOLDBERG vARIATIONS), and pop culture (characters in wheelchairs in Glee or Oz). In this paper, I chart changing representations and receptions of the disabled body in such contexts. I use analysis of this cultural shift as a starting point for a re-consideration of questions about whether a face-toface encounter with a disabled body is in fact a privileged site for the emergence of a politics, and whether co-opting disability as a metaphor for a range of difference differences reduces its currency as a category around which a specific group might mobilise a politics.

They Say You are a Danger But You Are Not: Representations and Construction of the Moral Self in Narratives of 'Dangerous Individuals'

This article is based on an analysis of narratives of 26 offenders with mental health problems living in the United Kingdom. It explores the impact of an ascribed dangerous status and the construction of the self as moral and responsible in response to this label with reference to the literature on denial, deviance disavowal and other “techniques of neutralization” and Goffman's presentation of self. Two dominant strands are identified in relation to the construction of moral self-hood: “Not my fault” and “Good at heart” narratives. “Techniques of neutralization” are widely drawn on, particularly denial of responsibility in the “Not my fault” narratives that seek to explain anti-social behavior with reference to external forces such as a hostile environment inhibiting their ability to control their lives. In contrast, “Good at heart” narratives draw on the essentially good and moral nature of the inner-self. Both are used as evidence of sharing and adhering to moral norms in order to present an acceptable and credible self.

News media representations of homelessness : do economic news production pressures prevent journalists from adequately reporting complex social issues

This study used both content and frame analyses to test news-media representations of homelessness in The Courier-Mail newspaper for evidence of restricted journalism practice. Specifically, it sought signs of either direct manipulation of issue representation based on ideological grounds, and also evidence of news organisations prioritising low-cost news production over Public Sphere journalistic news values. The study found that news stories from the earlier parts of the longitudinal study showed stereotypical misrepresentations of homelessness for public deliberation which might be attributed to either, or both of the nominated restricting factors. However news stories from the latter part of the study saw a distinct change in the way the issue was represented, indicating a journalistic capacity to thoughtfully and sensitively represent a complex social issue to the public. Further study is recommended to ascertain how and why this change occurred, so that journalistic practice might be further improved.