Developing the Pattern and Structure Assessment (PASA) interview to inform early mathematics learning

The Pattern and Structure Mathematical Awareness Program(PASMAP) stems from a 2-year longitudinal study on students’ early mathematical development. The paper outlines the interview assessment the Pattern and Structure Assessment(PASA) designed to describe students’ awareness of mathematical pattern and structure across a range of concepts. An overview of students’ performance across items and descriptions of their structural development are described.

The motivation and structure of corrupt police networks : theorising the dark side of the ‘thin blue line’

In recent times considerable research attention has been directed to understanding dark networks, especially criminal and terrorist networks. Dark networks are those in which member motivations are self rather than public interested, achievements come at the cost of other individuals, groups or societies and, in addition, their activities are both ‘covert and illegal’ (Raab & Milward, 2003: 415). This ‘darkness’ has implications for the way in which these networks are structured, the strategies adopted and their recruitment methods. Such entities exhibit distinctive operating characteristics including most notably the tension between creating an efficient network structure while retaining the ability to hide from public view while avoiding catastrophic collapse should one member cooperate with authorities (Bouchard 2007). While theoretical emphasis has been on criminal and terrorist networks, recent work has demonstrated that corrupt police networks exhibit some distinctive characteristics. In particular, these entities operate within the shadows of a host organisation - the Police Force and distort the functioning of the ‘Thin Blue Line’ as the interface between the law abiding citizenry and the criminal society. Drawing on data derived from the Queensland Fitzgerald Commission of Enquiry into Police Misconduct and related documents, this paper examines the motivations, structural properties and operational practices of corrupt police networks and compares and contrasts these with other dark networks with ‘bright’ public service networks. The paper confirms the structural differences between dark corrupt police networks and bright networks and suggests. However, structural embeddedness alone is found to be an insufficient theoretical explanation for member involvement in networks and that a set of elements combine to impact decision-making. Although offering important insights into network participation, the paper’s findings are especially pertinent in identifying additional points of intervention for police corruption networks.

From liberation to appropriation : corsets and eroticism in Australian film

The corset, with its laces and stays, appears to the modern eyes little more than a stylish torture device. However, the corset enjoyed a reputation among the most fashionable women of the nineteenth century. Since small waists were the primary measure of corporeal beauty, corsets were nearly universal among Western women of the middle class upwards. Wearing a corset was also a marker of decency; only lower classes and women of dubious reputation did not wear corsets. From instrument of torture and symbol of submission to its appropriation by women as a marker of sexual liberation, the corset has gone under a sartorial and symbolic transformation remaining the most erotic element of women’s dress. This paper discusses the corset in two Australian films, Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1974) and Moulin Rouge (Baz Luhrman, 2001), arguing that the corset provides a counterpoint in each film signifying the tension between beauty and respectability, on the one hand, and desire and transgression, on the other. We argue that the corset is the primary prop around which the narrative revolves as well as the key signifying hook for the audience. The fact that erotic motifs are so rare in Australian films makes the centrality of the corset in these films even more powerful as a discursive trope

The effect of various pH, ionic strength and temperature on papain hydrolysis of salivary film

Stimulated human whole saliva (WS) was used to study the dynamics of papain hydrolysis at defined pH, ionic strength and temperature with the view of reducing an acquired pellicle. A quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation (QCM-D) was used to monitor the changes in frequency due to enzyme hydrolysis of WS films and the hydrolytic parameters were calculated using an empirical model. The morphological and conformational changes of the salivary films before and after enzymatic hydrolysis were characterized by atomic force microscopy (AFM) imaging and grazing angle infrared spectroscopy (GA-FTIR) spectra, respectively. The characteristics of papain hydrolysis of WS films were pH-, ionic strength- and temperature-dependent. The WS films were partially removed by the action of enzyme, resulting thinner and smoother surfaces. The IR data suggested that hydrolysis-induced deformation did not occur onto the remnants salivary films. The processes of papain hydrolysis of WS films can be controlled by properly regulating pH, ionic strength and temperature.

Complexity, evolution, and the structure of demand

This chapter argues that evolutionary economics should be founded upon complex systems theory rather than neo-Darwinian analogies concerning natural selection, which focus on supply side considerations and competition amongst firms and technologies. It suggests that conceptions such as production and consumption functions should be replaced by network representations, in which the preferences or, more correctly, the aspirations of consumers are fundamental and, as such, the primary drivers of economic growth. Technological innovation is viewed as a process that is intermediate between these aspirational networks, and the organizational networks in which goods and services are produced. Consumer knowledge becomes at least as important as producer knowledge in determining how economic value is generated. It becomes clear that the stability afforded by connective systems of rules is essential for economic flexibility to exist, but that too many rules result in inert and structurally unstable states. In contrast, too few rules result in a more stable state, but at a low level of ordered complexity. Economic evolution from this perspective is explored using random and scale free network representations of complex systems.

Finitude (Mallee:Time)

An interactive installation with full body interface, digital projection, multi-touch sensitive screen surfaces, interactive 3D gaming software, motorised dioramas, 4.1 spatial sound & new furniture forms - investigating the cultural dimensions of sustainability through the lens of 'time'. “Time is change, time is finitude. Humans are a finite species. Every decision we make today brings that end closer, or alternatively pushes it further away. Nothing can be neutral”. Tony Fry DETAILS: Finitude (Mallee:Time) is a major new media/sculptural hybrid work premiered in 2011 in version 1 at the Ka-rama Motel for the Mildura Palimpsest #8 ('Collaborators and Saboteurs'). Each participant/viewer lies comfortably on their back on the double bed of Room 22. Directly above them, supported by a wooden structure, not unlike a house frame, is a semi-transparent Perspex screen that displays projected 3D imagery and is simultaneously sensitive to the lightest of finger touches. Depending upon the ever changing qualities of the projected image on this screen the participant can see through its surface to a series of physical dioramas suspended above, lit by subtle LED spotlighting. This diorama consists of a slowly rotating series of physical environments, which also include several animatronic components, allowing the realtime composition of whimsical ‘landscapes’ of both 'real' and 'virtual' media. Through subtle, non-didactic touch-sensitive interactivity the participant then has influence over both the 3D graphic imagery, the physical movements of the diorama and the 4.1 immersive soundscape, creating an uncanny blend of physical and virtual media. Five speakers positioned around the room deliver a rich interactive soundscape that responds both audibly and physically to interactions. VERSION 1, CONTEXT/THEORY: Finitude (Mallee: Time) is Version 1 of a series of presentations during 2012-14. This version has been inspired through a series of recent visits and residencies in the SW Victoria Mallee country. Further drawing on recent writings by post colonial author Paul Carter, the work is envisaged as an evolving ‘personal topography’ of place-discovery. By contrasting and melding readily available generalisations of the Mallee regions’ rational surfaces, climatic maps and ecological systems with what Carter calls “a fine capillary system of interconnected words, places, memories and sensations” generated through my own idiosyncratic research processes, Finitude (Mallee Time) invokes a “dark writing” of place through outside eyes - an approach that avoids concentration upon what 'everyone else knows', to instead imagine and develop a sense how things might be. This basis in re-imagining and re-invention becomes the vehicle for the work’s more fundamental intention - as a meditative re-imagination of 'time' (and region) as finite resources: Towards this end, every object, process and idea in the work is re-thought as having its own ‘time component’ or ‘residue’ that becomes deposited into our 'collective future'. Thought this way Finitude (Mallee Time) suggests the poverty of predominant images of time as ‘mechanism’ to instead envisage time as a plastic cyclical medium that we can each choose to ‘give to’ or ‘take away from’ our future. Put another way - time has become finitude.

Power relations and small and medium-sized enterprise strategies for capturing value in global production networks: visual effects (VFX) service firm in the Hollywood film industry

Power relations and small and medium-sized enterprise strategies for capturing value in global production networks: visual effects (VFX) service firms in the Hollywood film industry, Regional Studies. This paper provides insights into the way in which non-lead firms manoeuvre in global value chains in the pursuit of a larger share of revenue and how power relations affect these manoeuvres. It examines the nature of value capture and power relations in the global supply of visual effects (VFX) services and the range of strategies VFX firms adopt to capture higher value in the global value chain. The analysis is based on a total of thirty-six interviews with informants in the industry in Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada, and a database of VFX credits for 3323 visual products for 640 VFX firms.

Graph rigidity for near-coplanar structure from motion

Recent algorithms for monocular motion capture (MoCap) estimate weak-perspective camera matrices between images using a small subset of approximately-rigid points on the human body (i.e. the torso and hip). A problem with this approach, however, is that these points are often close to coplanar, causing canonical linear factorisation algorithms for rigid structure from motion (SFM) to become extremely sensitive to noise. In this paper, we propose an alternative solution to weak-perspective SFM based on a convex relaxation of graph rigidity. We demonstrate the success of our algorithm on both synthetic and real world data, allowing for much improved solutions to marker less MoCap problems on human bodies. Finally, we propose an approach to solve the two-fold ambiguity over bone direction using a k-nearest neighbour kernel density estimator.

Polymer self assembly on carbon nanotubes

This chapter analyses the poly(3-hexylthiophene) self-assembly on carbon nanotubes and the interaction between the two materials forming a new hybrid nanostructure. The chapter starts with a review of the several studies investigating polymers and biomolecules self-assembled on nanotubes. Then conducting polymers and polythiophenes are briefly introduced. Accordingly, carbon nanotube structure and properties are reported in Sect. 3. The experimental section starts with the bulk characterisation of polymer thin films with the inclusion of uniformly distributed carbon nanotubes. By using volume film analysis techniques (AFM, TEM, UV–Vis and Raman), we show how the polymer’s higher degree of order is a direct consequence of interaction with carbon nanotubes. Nevertheless, it is through the use of nanoscale analysis and molecular dynamic simulations that the self-assembly of the polymer on the nanotube surface can be clearly evidenced and characterised. In Sect. 6, the effect of the carbon templating structure on the P3HT organisation on the surface is investigated, showing the chirality-driven polymer assembly on the carbon nanotube surface. The interaction between P3HT and CNTs brings also to charge transfer, with the modification of physical properties for both species. In particular, the alteration of the polymer electronic properties and the modification of the nanotube mechanical structure are a direct consequence of the P3HT p-p stacking on the nanotube surface. Finally, some considerations based on molecular dynamics studies are reported in order to confirm and support the experimental results discussed.

Enriching XML documents clustering by using concise structure and content

With the growing number of XML documents on theWeb it becomes essential to effectively organise these XML documents in order to retrieve useful information from them. A possible solution is to apply clustering on the XML documents to discover knowledge that promotes effective data management, information retrieval and query processing. However, many issues arise in discovering knowledge from these types of semi-structured documents due to their heterogeneity and structural irregularity. Most of the existing research on clustering techniques focuses only on one feature of the XML documents, this being either their structure or their content due to scalability and complexity problems. The knowledge gained in the form of clusters based on the structure or the content is not suitable for reallife datasets. It therefore becomes essential to include both the structure and content of XML documents in order to improve the accuracy and meaning of the clustering solution. However, the inclusion of both these kinds of information in the clustering process results in a huge overhead for the underlying clustering algorithm because of the high dimensionality of the data. The overall objective of this thesis is to address these issues by: (1) proposing methods to utilise frequent pattern mining techniques to reduce the dimension; (2) developing models to effectively combine the structure and content of XML documents; and (3) utilising the proposed models in clustering. This research first determines the structural similarity in the form of frequent subtrees and then uses these frequent subtrees to represent the constrained content of the XML documents in order to determine the content similarity. A clustering framework with two types of models, implicit and explicit, is developed. The implicit model uses a Vector Space Model (VSM) to combine the structure and the content information. The explicit model uses a higher order model, namely a 3- order Tensor Space Model (TSM), to explicitly combine the structure and the content information. This thesis also proposes a novel incremental technique to decompose largesized tensor models to utilise the decomposed solution for clustering the XML documents. The proposed framework and its components were extensively evaluated on several real-life datasets exhibiting extreme characteristics to understand the usefulness of the proposed framework in real-life situations. Additionally, this research evaluates the outcome of the clustering process on the collection selection problem in the information retrieval on the Wikipedia dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed frequent pattern mining and clustering methods outperform the related state-of-the-art approaches. In particular, the proposed framework of utilising frequent structures for constraining the content shows an improvement in accuracy over content-only and structure-only clustering results. The scalability evaluation experiments conducted on large scaled datasets clearly show the strengths of the proposed methods over state-of-the-art methods. In particular, this thesis work contributes to effectively combining the structure and the content of XML documents for clustering, in order to improve the accuracy of the clustering solution. In addition, it also contributes by addressing the research gaps in frequent pattern mining to generate efficient and concise frequent subtrees with various node relationships that could be used in clustering.

Reduced variance in monozygous twins for multiple MR parameters : implications for disease studies and the genetic basis of brain structure

Twin studies offer the opportunity to determine the relative contribution of genes versus environment in traits of interest. Here, we investigate the extent to which variance in brain structure is reduced in monozygous twins with identical genetic make-up. We investigate whether using twins as compared to a control population reduces variability in a number of common magnetic resonance (MR) structural measures, and we investigate the location of areas under major genetic influences. This is fundamental to understanding the benefit of using twins in studies where structure is the phenotype of interest. Twenty-three pairs of healthy MZ twins were compared to matched control pairs. Volume, T2 and diffusion MR imaging were performed as well as spectroscopy (MRS). Images were compared using (i) global measures of standard deviation and effect size, (ii) voxel-based analysis of similarity and (iii) intra-pair correlation. Global measures indicated a consistent increase in structural similarity in twins. The voxel-based and correlation analyses indicated a widespread pattern of increased similarity in twin pairs, particularly in frontal and temporal regions. The areas of increased similarity were most widespread for the diffusion trace and least widespread for T2. MRS showed consistent reduction in metabolite variation that was significant in the temporal lobe N-acetylaspartate (NAA). This study has shown the distribution and magnitude of reduced variability in brain volume, diffusion, T2 and metabolites in twins. The data suggest that evaluation of twins discordant for disease is indeed a valid way to attribute genetic or environmental influences to observed abnormalities in patients since evidence is provided for the underlying assumption of decreased variability in twins.

A phenomenological model for the structure-composition relationship of the high Tc cuprates based on simple chemical principles

A simple phenomenological model for the relationship between structure and composition of the high Tc cuprates is presented. The model is based on two simple crystal chemistry principles: unit cell doping and charge balance within unit cells. These principles are inspired by key experimental observations of how the materials accommodate large deviations from stoichiometry. Consistent explanations for significant HTSC properties can be explained without any additional assumptions while retaining valuable insight for geometric interpretation. Combining these two chemical principles with a review of Crystal Field Theory (CFT) or Ligand Field Theory (LFT), it becomes clear that the two oxidation states in the conduction planes (typically d8 and d9) belong to the most strongly divergent d-levels as a function of deformation from regular octahedral coordination. This observation offers a link to a range of coupling effects relating vibrations and spin waves through application of Hund’s rules. An indication of this model’s capacity to predict physical properties for HTSC is provided and will be elaborated in subsequent publications. Simple criteria for the relationship between structure and composition in HTSC systems may guide chemical syntheses within new material systems.

Molecular structure of the phosphate mineral brazilianite NaAl3(PO4)2(OH)4 : a semi precious jewel

The phosphate mineral brazilianite NaAl3(PO4)2(OH)4 is a semi precious jewel. There are almost no minerals apart from brazilianite which are used in jewellery. Vibrational spectroscopy was used to characterize the mol. structure of brazilianite. Brazilianite is composed of chains of edge-sharing Al-O octahedra linked by P-O tetrahedra, with Na located in cavities of the framework. An intense sharp Raman band at 1019 cm-1 is attributed to the PO43- sym. stretching mode. Raman bands at 973 and 988 cm-1 are assigned to the stretching vibrations of the HOPO33- units. The IR spectra compliment the Raman spectra but show greater complexity. Multiple Raman bands are obsd. in the PO43- and HOPO33- bending region. This observation implies that both phosphate and hydrogen phosphate units are involved in the structure. Raman OH stretching vibrations are found at 3249, 3417 and 3472 cm-1. These peaks show that the OH units are not equiv. in the brazilianite structure. Vibrational spectroscopy is useful for increasing the knowledge of the mol. structure of brazilianite.

Foundations for giving : why and how Australians structure their philanthropy

Philanthropic foundations in Australia have traditionally been labelled ‘icebergs’. Much of what they do and who they are is not apparent on the surface. Many are unknown and apart from an occasional biography, almost all are sparsely documented in terms of the very personal decisions behind establishing them. Practically and academically, scant data exist on the decision journeys people make into formalised philanthropy. This study seeks to fill that gap. It is believed to be the largest such study of foundation decision-making ever undertaken in this country. It is the latest in a series of ACPNS research into types of considered (versus spontaneous) giving in Australia. This research has been supported by the Perpetual Foundation, the EF and SL Gluyas Trust and the Edward Corbould Charitable Trust under the management of Perpetual Trustee Company Ltd.