Mitigating Democracy and 'A Question on Reason'

This book details the early political philosophy of Jean-Paul Gagnon. It deals with the ideas of democracy as something endemic to human nature; with practical methods for the improvement of democracy; and a mix of other political concepts. The book also has a response to the Russian Federation's development of the 'mother of all bombs' which leads Gagnon to question reason itself in humanity's progress.

Violence Profiles on International TV News

Journalism has achieved a crucial importance as a social institution linked with the notion of the public interest. It is still doing so but is nevertheless increasingly challenged by getting networked with the interested publics. This becomes more apparent in times when the media repertoires and audiences as such are changing, when the public relies on more than one news source for the transmission and formulation of world events, but when the importance of TV news nevertheless remains relatively stable. Against this backdrop we may ask what publics contribute to or take away from the new plethora of images and stories saturating the media? This article gives an approximate answer by drawing on a comparative analysis of the present-day presentations of violence on British, German, and Russian television news. Violence in the media is not a new phenomenon, as age-old literary masterpieces like Homer’s Odyssey show, but it is still a very popular one, especially in the news. This article highlights trans-national and national elements in the reporting of violence in three different news cultures. At first glance, both the substantial cross-national violence news flow and the cross-national visual violence flow (key visuals) may be interpreted as distinctly trans-national elements. Event-related textual analysis, however, reveals how the historical rootedness of nations and their specific symbols of power are still very much manifested in respective television mediations of violence. In conclusion, this study recommends the pursuit of conscientious comparisons in journalist research and practice in order to understand what violence news convey in the different arenas of present-day newsmaking.

Calculating shades of meaning in semantic spaces

This thesis introduces the problem of conceptual ambiguity, or Shades of Meaning (SoM) that can exist around a term or entity. As an example consider President Ronald Reagan the ex-president of the USA, there are many aspects to him that are captured in text; the Russian missile deal, the Iran-contra deal and others. Simply finding documents with the word “Reagan” in them is going to return results that cover many different shades of meaning related to "Reagan". Instead it may be desirable to retrieve results around a specific shade of meaning of "Reagan", e.g., all documents relating to the Iran-contra scandal. This thesis investigates computational methods for identifying shades of meaning around a word, or concept. This problem is related to word sense ambiguity, but is more subtle and based less on the particular syntactic structures associated with or around an instance of the term and more with the semantic contexts around it. A particularly noteworthy difference from typical word sense disambiguation is that shades of a concept are not known in advance. It is up to the algorithm itself to ascertain these subtleties. It is the key hypothesis of this thesis that reducing the number of dimensions in the representation of concepts is a key part of reducing sparseness and thus also crucial in discovering their SoMwithin a given corpus.

Embedding 'philosophy in the classroom' in pre-service teacher education

The holistic conception of the troika, as described in the first chapter, centres on the relationship between the implicit and explicit teaching of values the nurturing of the specific dimensions of quality teaching and the opportunity to ‘walk the talk’ of the values education program through aspects such as practical citizenship (Lovat, Toomey, Clement, Crotty & Nielsen, 2009). It is proposed in this chapter that the conception can be realized through the embedding of Philosophy in the Classroom within pre-service teaching programs. The troika, a Russian sleigh with three horses, only function well when there is complete synergy and balance between all Classroom is a scaffold for ensuring that all three elements of the troika, namely, quality teaching, values education and service learning in the form of education for citizenship, exist within the classroom to achieve an optimal learning, growth and wellbeing for all students. For this to be more widely accomplished Philosophy in the Classroom and discusses how it constitutes a successful synergy and balance of the troika for effective teaching. It then proposes how it might be embedded into pre-service teacher education.

Fashion, the body and technology : tracing early 20th century techno-utopian ideas, aesthetics and impulses in 21st century wearable technology

‘Wearable technology’, or the use of specialist technology in garments, is promoted by the electronics industry as the next frontier of fashion. However the story of wearable technology’s relationship with fashion begins neither with the development of miniaturised computers in the 1970s nor with sophisticated ‘smart textiles’ of the twenty-first century, despite what much of the rhetoric suggests. This study examines wearable technology against a longer history of fashion, highlighted by the influential techno-sartorial experiments of a group of early twentieth century avant-gardes including Italian Futurists Giacomo Balla and F.T. Marinetti, Russian Constructivists Varvara Stepanova and Liubov Popova, and Paris-based Cubist, Sonia Delaunay. Through the interdisciplinary framework of fashion studies, the thesis provides a fuller picture of wearable technology framed by the idea of utopia. Using comparative analysis, and applying the theoretical formulations of Fredric Jameson, Louis Marin and Michael Carter, the thesis traces the appearance of three techno-utopian themes from their origins in the machine age experiments of Balla, Marinetti, Stepanova, Popova and Delaunay to their twenty-first century reappearance in a dozen wearable technology projects. By exploring the central thesis that contemporary wearable technology resurrects the techno-utopian ideas and expressions of the early twentieth century, the study concludes that the abiding utopian impetus to embed technology in the aesthetics (prints, silhouettes, and fabrication) and functionality of fashion is to unify subject, society and environment under a totalising technological order.

The development of a virtual reality environment to model the experience of schizophrenia

Virtual Reality (VR) techniques are increasingly being used for education about and in the treatment of certain types of mental illness. Research indicates that VR is delivering on its promised potential to provide enhanced training and treatment outcomes through incorporation of this high-end technology. Schizophrenia is a mental disorder affecting 1-2% of the population, and it is estimated 12-16% of hospital beds in Australia are occupied by patients with psychosis. Tragically, there is also an increased risk of suicide associated with this diagnosis. A significant research project being undertaken across the University of Queensland faculties of Health Sciences and EPSA (Engineering, Physical Sciences and Architecture) has constructed a number of virtual environments that reproduce the phenomena experienced by patients who have psychosis. Symptoms of psychosis include delusions, hallucinations and thought disorder. The VR environment will allow behavioral, exposure therapies to be conducted with exactly controlled exposure stimuli and an expected reduction in risk of harm. This paper reports on the current work of the project, previous stages of software development and the final goal to introduce VR to medical consulting rooms.

The fragmentation pathways of protonated Amiton in the gas phase : towards the structural characterisation of organophosphorus chemical warfare agents by electrospray ionisation tandem mass spectrometry

Amiton (O,O-diethyl-S-[2-(diethylamino)ethyl]phosphorothiolate), otherwise known as VG, is listed in schedule 2 of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and has a structure closely related to VX (O-ethyl-S-(2-diisopropylamino)ethylmethylphosphonothiolate). Fragmentation of protonated VG in the gas phase was performed using electrospray ionisation ion trap mass spectrometry (ESI-ITMS) and revealed several characteristic product ions. Quantum chemical calculations provide the most probable structures for these ions as well as the likely unimolecular mechanisms by which they are formed. The decomposition pathways predicted by computation are consistent with deuterium-labeling studies. The combination of experimental and theoretical data suggests that the fragmentation pathways of VG and analogous organophosphorus nerve agents, such as VX and Russian VX, are predictable and thus ESI tandem mass spectrometry is a powerful tool for the verification of unknown compounds listed in the CWC. Copyright (c) 2006 Commonwealth of Australia. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Cybercrime attribution : an Eastern European case study

Phishing and related cybercrime is responsible for billions of dollars in losses annually. Gartner reported more than 5 million U.S. consumers lost money to phishing attacks in the 12 months ending in September 2008 (Gartner 2009). This paper asks whether the majority of organised phishing and related cybercrime originates in Eastern Europe rather than elsewhere such as China or the USA. The Russian “Mafiya” in particular has been popularised by the media and entertainment industries to the point where it can be hard to separate fact from fiction but we have endeavoured to look critically at the information available on this area to produce a survey. We take a particular focus on cybercrime from an Australian perspective, as Australia was one of the first places where Phishing attacks against Internet banks were seen. It is suspected these attacks came from Ukrainian spammers. The survey is built from case studies both where individuals from Eastern Europe have been charged with related crimes or unsolved cases where there is some nexus to Eastern Europe. It also uses some earlier work done looking at those early Phishing attacks, archival analysis of Phishing attacks in July 2006 and new work looking at correlation between the Corruption Perception Index, Internet penetration and tertiary education in Russia and the Ukraine. The value of this work is to inform and educate those charged with responding to cybercrime where a large part of the problem originates and try to understand why.

Between rocks and hard places

A travel article about the Aland Islands, Finland, that discusses the mix of Swedish, Finnish, and Russian cultural influences in the area. On the map, Finland seems to end in fragments. The gods have stomped their heels on the southwestern corner, and between the cities of Helsinki and Turku it is jagged, rocky islands that form the final landmarks...

From selfies to climate change : the #G20 debate on Twitter

The G20 Summit that brought many of the world’s most important leaders to Brisbane last weekend was also a major Twitter event. Australian and international users expressed their concerns over the appearance of Russian warships off the Queensland coast, shared selfies from German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s impromptu visit to Brisbane’s Caxton St nightlife hub and called for action on issues ranging from Ebola to climate change...

The ultimate edge: The case for planning media for sustaining space communities

Governments and intergovernmental organisations have long recognised that space communities – the ultimate ‘settlements at the edge’ – will exist one day and have based their first plans for these on another region ‘at the edge’, the Antarctic. United States President Eisenhower proposed to the United Nations in 1960 that the principles of the Antarctic Treaty be applied to outer space and celestial bodies (State Department, n.d.). Three years later the UN adopted the Declaration of Legal Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space and in 1967 that became the Outer Space Treaty. According to the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, ‘the Treaty was opened for signature by the three depository Governments (the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States of America) in January 1967, and it entered into force in October 1967’ (Office for Outer Space Affairs, n.d). The status of the treaty (at time of writing) was 89 signatories and 102 parties (Office for Disarmament Affairs, n.d.). Other related instruments include the Rescue Agreement, the Liability Convention, the Registration Convention and the Moon Agreement (Office for Outer Space Affairs, n.d.-a). Jumping to the present, a newsagency reported in July 2014 (Reuters, 2014) that the British Government had shortlisted eight aerodromes in its search for a potential base for the UK’s first spaceplane flights which Ministers want to happen by 2018 (UK Space Agency, 2014). The United States already has a spaceport, in New Mexico (Cokley, Rankin, Heinrich, & McAuliffe, 2013)...

Empire, Tourism, Nostalgia: Joseph Brodsky and Travel Writing

Joseph Brodsky, one of the most influential Russian intellectuals of the late Soviet period, was born in Leningrad in 1940, emigrated to the United States in 1972, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987, and died in New York City in 1996. Brodsky was one of the leading public figures of Soviet emigration in the Cold War period, and his role as a model for the constructing of Russian cultural identities in the last years of the Soviet Union was, and still is, extremely important. One of Joseph Brodsky’s great contributions to Russian culture of the latter half of the twentieth century is the wide geographical scope of his poetic and prose works. Brodsky was not a travel writer, but he was a traveling writer who wrote a considerable number of poems and essays which relate to his trips and travels in the Soviet empire and outside it. Travel writing offered for Brodsky a discursive space for negotiating his own transculturation, while it also offered him a discursive space for making powerful statements about displacement, culture, history and geography, time and space—all major themes of his poetry. In this study of Joseph Brodsky’s travel writing I focus on his travel texts in poetry and prose, which relate to his post-1972 trips to Mexico, Brazil, Turkey, and Venice. Questions of empire, tourism, and nostalgia are foregrounded in one way or another in Brodsky’s travel writing performed in emigration. I explore these concepts through the study of tropes, strategies of identity construction, and the politics of representation. The theoretical premises of my work draw on the literary and cultural criticism which has evolved around the study of travel and travel writing in recent years. These approaches have gained much from the scholarly experience provided by postcolonial critique. Shifting the focus away from the concept of exile, the traditional framework for scholarly discussions of Brodsky’s works, I propose to review Brodsky’s travel poetry and prose as a response not only to his exilic condition but to the postmodern and postcolonial landscape, which initially shaped the writing of these texts. Discussing Brodsky’s travel writing in this context offers previously unexplored perspectives for analyzing the geopolitical, philosophical, and linguistic premises of his poetic imagination. By situating Brodsky’s travel writing in the geopolitical landscape of postcolonial postmodernity, I attempt to show how Brodsky’s engagement with his contemporary cultural practices in the West was incorporated into his Russian-language travel poetry and prose and how this engagement thus contributed to these texts’ status as exceptional and unique literary events within late Soviet Russian cultural practices.

Primestoimenno-otnositel'nye konstrukcii v sovremennom russkom jazyke

Relative Constructions with Pronominal Heads in Contemporary Russian Chapter 1 introduces the distinctive syntactic and semantic properties of Russian relative constructions (RCs), which are then divided into two main classes according to the type of the head phrase. The study concentrates on RCs with pronominal heads, which are systematically compared with noun-headed RCs. Chapter 2 clarifies the categorization of pronouns in Russian. The conclusion is that Russian pronouns include only personal, reflexive and wh-pronouns. The remaining words that are traditionally seen as pronouns are actually functional equivalents of determiners. This idea leads to the suggestion that RCs with these determiner-like words as the only constituent of the head phrase are actually headed by zero pronouns. In the other type of RCs with pronominal heads, the head position is occupied by wh-pronouns with clitics expressing different types of indefiniteness and quantification. Comparison of the two types of pronoun-headed RCs shows that the wh-heads and zero-heads share a number of common properties with respect to the grammatical gender, number and person as well as to the semantic distinction between animates and inanimates. The rest of Chapter 2 gives an overview of various uses of wh-pronouns in Russian and an experimental analysis of RCs headed by pronominal adverbs. Chapter 3 discusses fundamental differences between RCs with noun and pronominal heads. One of the main findings is that the choice of the relative pronoun (kto 'who' and chto 'what' versus kotoryj 'which') is motivated by a tendency to reproduce maximally the essential grammatical and semantic properties of the antecedent. Chapter 4 gives a detailed description of the determiner-like words and wh-based heads used in the two types of RCs with pronominal heads. In addition, several issues related to the syntax and semantics of free relatives are discussed. The conclusion is that there is no need to establish a separate category of free relatives in Russian. Chapter 5 discusses the syntax and semantics of correlative and free concessive constructions. They share a number of properties with pronoun-headed RCs and the two are often confused in Russian linguistics. However, a detailed analysis shows that these constructions must be distinguished from RCs. The study combines the methods of functionally-oriented Russian structuralism with some insights from generative syntax.

Èto i to v povesti Staruha Daniila Harmsa

This dissertation focuses on the short story Starukha (The Old Woman), one of the last works of the Russian writer Daniil Kharms (1905-1942). The story, written in 1939, is analysed using the Kharmsian concepts èto and to (this and that) as a heuristic interpretative model. The first chapter gives a detailed analysis of this model, as well as a survey of the critical work done to date on Kharms and Starukha. In the second chapter the model is applied to study the different states of consciousness of the male protagonist. This is significant, because he is the "I" of the work, from whose point of view everything is being told. The third chapter takes a closer look at the reality of the world that exists independently of the consciousness of the protagonist. Physical objects can be said to bear - besides their everyday meaning - a hidden symbolic meaning. Similarly, the characters can be considered as representatives of everyday reality and otherworldliness. The fourth chapter deals with the narrative devices of Starukha. The problematics of the relation between fact and fiction plays an essential role in the story. Kharms's use of Ich-Erzählung and different tenses, which contributes to achieving a complicated elaboration of this kind of problematics, is examined in detail. The fifth chapter provides an intertextual reading of Starukha, based on its allusions to the Bible and the Christian tradition. As a result, the whole story can be seen as a kind of meditation on the Passion of Christ. The final chapter examines how the important Kharmsian concepts of the grotesque and the absurd manifest themselves in Starukha. The old woman represents in a grotesque way two opposite systems: the religious and the totalitarian. The absurdity of Starukha can be claimed to be illusory. Therefore, it is better to speak about paradoxicality. Starukha itself is a kind of paradox, in the sense that it tries to say something of the ultimate truth of reality, which inevitably remains ineffable.