Making sense of an everyday science text : linguistic, visual and spatial design

In this article, we take a close look at the literacy demands of one task from the ‘Marvellous Micro-organisms Stage 3 Life and Living’ Primary Connections unit (Australian Academy of Science, 2005). One lesson from the unit, ‘Exploring Bread’, (pp 4-8) asks students to ‘use bread labels to locate ingredient information and synthesise understanding of bread ingredients’. We draw upon a framework offered by the New London Group (2000), that of linguistic, visual and spatial design, to consider in more detail three bread wrappers and from there the complex literacies that students need to interrelate to undertake the required task. Our findings are that although bread wrappers are an example of an everyday science text, their linguistic, visual and spatial designs and their interrelationship are not trivial. We conclude by reinforcing the need for teachers of science to also consider how the complex design elements of everyday science texts and their interrelated literacies are made visible through instructional practice.

Promoting sustainable urban development in fast growing city-regions : practices from Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong

The Asia‐Pacific region is characterised by rapid population growth and urbanisation. These trends often result in an increasing consumption of land, which in turn lead to spatially expansive and discontinuous urban development. As a consequence, local communities and the environment face strong pressures. Many cities in the region have developed policies to tackle the issue of rapid growth and its associated consequences, for example climate change. The broad aim of this paper is to identify the nature, trends and strategies of growth management in major Asia‐Pacific city‐regions, and their implications for natural resource management and infrastructure provision. More specifically, this research seeks to provide insights on sustainable urban development practice, particularly on the promotion of compact urbanisation within the Asia‐Pacific’s fastest growing regions. The methodology of the paper includes a detailed literature review and a comparative analysis of existing strategies and policies. The literature review focuses on the key concepts related to sustainable urban growth management. It also includes existing applications of urban growth management approaches and planning information system in managing growth. Following the literature review, the paper undertakes a comparative analysis of the strategies of major Asia‐Pacific city‐regions of Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong in terms of their approaches to sustainable urban development. The findings of the paper provide a clear understanding of the necessity of sustainable urban development practices. It contributes to the development of a substantial base for further research. Ultimately, this research aims to shed light on sustainable urban development by providing insights on the management of growth, natural resources and urban infrastructures.

Fallen Awake

Photo from process: David Megarrity, albury 2007 - example of convergence of writing/design/perfomance/video RESEARCH COMPONENT Fallen Awake was a practice-led research process that opened the development process to the influence of collaborative authorship across artforms. The project focused on of how multiple artforms and artists converge their vision into a singular text, in the context of collaborative authorship. The work also uncovered new questions relating to the dream-life of children. The stimulus for the work was a selection of verbal statements by three-year-olds, raising complex ethical questions as the project progressed about the child’s voice, mediated by the adult artist, for the eventual presentation to a child audience. With the text emergent and open to influence, this project raised other questions related to the lived experience of children, dreaming, creative play and the development of consciousness. It pushed the creative process to experiment with associative, rather then causal narratives, and to negotiate the challenges this raises for traditional story structures and the development processes that usually shape them. It led to the consideration of each artforms and artist as equal contributors in the development of story: traditionally the province of the sole author. The outcomes appeared in various artforms, none of which was live-performance based. An ‘artist’s book’ by the designer, a ‘video treatment’ - a DVD capturing the approach to the performance and a script for an innovative large-scale performance. Fallen Awake was developed with the assistance of Strut & Fret Production House, Arts Queensland, and HotHouse Theatre, Albury Wodonga, through their ‘Month in the Country’ initiative.

Cooperation using a robotic ad hoc network made from Bluetooth, JXTA, OSGi and other commercial off the shelf (COTS) products

Abstract - Mobile devices in the near future will need to collaborate to fulfill their function. Collaboration will be done by communication. We use a real world example of robotic soccer to come up with the necessary structures required for robotic communication. A review of related work is done and it is found no examples come close to providing a RANET. The robotic ad hoc network (RANET) we suggest uses existing structures pulled from the areas of wireless networks, peer to peer and software life-cycle management. Gaps are found in the existing structures so we describe how to extend some structures to satisfy the design. The RANET design supports robot cooperation by exchanging messages, discovering needed skills that other robots on the network may possess and the transfer of these skills. The network is built on top of a Bluetooth wireless network and uses JXTA to communicate and transfer skills. OSGi bundles form the skills that can be transferred. To test the nal design a reference implementation is done. Deficiencies in some third party software is found, specifically JXTA and JamVM and GNU Classpath. Lastly we look at how to fix the deciencies by porting the JXTA C implementation to the target robotic platform and potentially eliminating the TCP/IP layer, using UDP instead of TCP or using an adaptive TCP/IP stack. We also propose a future areas of investigation; how to seed the configuration for the Personal area network (PAN) Bluetooth protocol extension so a Bluetooth TCP/IP link is more quickly formed and using the STP to allow multi-hop messaging and transfer of skills.

Crop

Solo exhibition of sculptural works that use the portrait bust as a vehicle for problematising notions of subjectivity, authority and representation. The exhibition comprised three life-sized figurative busts, each portraits of the artist, sparsely positioned throughout the gallery space to convey a sense of isolation and abandonment. By emphasising the fragmented nature of the bust format by removal of all supports (ie. Socle, plinth or alcove) the works sought to address the vulnerability that frmes this apparently authoritative Enlightenment portrait format. In so doing the exhibition aimed to offer, by example, a new way of seeing and interpreting the portrait bust in history. The exhibition was exhibited at the Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane) and the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. Works fro the exhibition were included in group shows at Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery. Work from the exhibition was purchased for the collection of MONA, Hobart.The exhibition received favourable reviews in Eyeline, Art and Australia and Machine magazines.

Protocol engineering for protection against denial-of-service attacks

Denial-of-service attacks (DoS) and distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) attempt to temporarily disrupt users or computer resources to cause service un- availability to legitimate users in the internetworking system. The most common type of DoS attack occurs when adversaries °ood a large amount of bogus data to interfere or disrupt the service on the server. The attack can be either a single-source attack, which originates at only one host, or a multi-source attack, in which multiple hosts coordinate to °ood a large number of packets to the server. Cryptographic mechanisms in authentication schemes are an example ap- proach to help the server to validate malicious tra±c. Since authentication in key establishment protocols requires the veri¯er to spend some resources before successfully detecting the bogus messages, adversaries might be able to exploit this °aw to mount an attack to overwhelm the server resources. The attacker is able to perform this kind of attack because many key establishment protocols incorporate strong authentication at the beginning phase before they can iden- tify the attacks. This is an example of DoS threats in most key establishment protocols because they have been implemented to support con¯dentiality and data integrity, but do not carefully consider other security objectives, such as availability. The main objective of this research is to design denial-of-service resistant mechanisms in key establishment protocols. In particular, we focus on the design of cryptographic protocols related to key establishment protocols that implement client puzzles to protect the server against resource exhaustion attacks. Another objective is to extend formal analysis techniques to include DoS- resistance. Basically, the formal analysis approach is used not only to analyse and verify the security of a cryptographic scheme carefully but also to help in the design stage of new protocols with a high level of security guarantee. In this research, we focus on an analysis technique of Meadows' cost-based framework, and we implement DoS-resistant model using Coloured Petri Nets. Meadows' cost-based framework is directly proposed to assess denial-of-service vulnerabil- ities in the cryptographic protocols using mathematical proof, while Coloured Petri Nets is used to model and verify the communication protocols using inter- active simulations. In addition, Coloured Petri Nets are able to help the protocol designer to clarify and reduce some inconsistency of the protocol speci¯cation. Therefore, the second objective of this research is to explore vulnerabilities in existing DoS-resistant protocols, as well as extend a formal analysis approach to our new framework for improving DoS-resistance and evaluating the performance of the new proposed mechanism. In summary, the speci¯c outcomes of this research include following results; 1. A taxonomy of denial-of-service resistant strategies and techniques used in key establishment protocols; 2. A critical analysis of existing DoS-resistant key exchange and key estab- lishment protocols; 3. An implementation of Meadows's cost-based framework using Coloured Petri Nets for modelling and evaluating DoS-resistant protocols; and 4. A development of new e±cient and practical DoS-resistant mechanisms to improve the resistance to denial-of-service attacks in key establishment protocols.

A framework for analyzing system intelligence of the building control system : a study of the integrated building management system

The lack of satisfactory consensus for characterizing the system intelligence and structured analytical decision models has inhibited the developers and practitioners to understand and configure optimum intelligent building systems in a fully informed manner. So far, little research has been conducted in this aspect. This research is designed to identify the key intelligent indicators, and develop analytical models for computing the system intelligence score of smart building system in the intelligent building. The integrated building management system (IBMS) was used as an illustrative example to present a framework. The models presented in this study applied the system intelligence theory, and the conceptual analytical framework. A total of 16 key intelligent indicators were first identified from a general survey. Then, two multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) approaches, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and analytic network process (ANP), were employed to develop the system intelligence analytical models. Top intelligence indicators of IBMS include: self-diagnostic of operation deviations; adaptive limiting control algorithm; and, year-round time schedule performance. The developed conceptual framework was then transformed to the practical model. The effectiveness of the practical model was evaluated by means of expert validation. The main contribution of this research is to promote understanding of the intelligent indicators, and to set the foundation for a systemic framework that provide developers and building stakeholders a consolidated inclusive tool for the system intelligence evaluation of the proposed components design configurations.

Chasing reporters : Infotainment, intertextuality and media satire

The Chaser’s War on Everything is a night time entertainment program which screened on Australia’s public broadcaster, the ABC in 2006 and 2007. This enormously successful comedy show managed to generate a lot of controversy in its short lifespan (see, for example, Dennehy, 2007; Dubecki, 2007; McLean, 2007; Wright, 2007), but also drew much praise for its satirising of, and commentary on, topical issues. Through interviews with the program’s producers, qualitative audience research and textual analysis, this paper will focus on this show’s media satire, and the segment ‘What Have We Learned From Current Affairs This Week?’ in particular. Viewed as a form of ‘Critical Intertextuality’ (Gray, 2006), this segment (which offered a humorous critique of the ways in which news and current affairs are presented elsewhere on television) may equip citizens with a better understanding of the new genre’s production methods, thus producing a higher level of public media literacy. This paper argues that through its media satire, The Chaser acts not as a traditional news program would in informing the public with new information, but as a text which can inform and shape our understanding of news that already exists within the public sphere. Humorous analyses and critiques of the media (like those analysed in this paper), are in fact very important forms of infotainment, because they can provide “other, ‘improper,’ and yet more media literate and savvy interpretations” (Gray, 2006, p. 4) of the news.

Manufacturing challenges with fabrication of large size mechanical harmonic drives

In truck manufacturing, the exhaust and air inlet pipes are specialized equipment that requires highly skilled, heavy machinery and small batch production methods. This paper describes a project to develop the computer numerically controlled (CNC) pipe bending process for a truck component manufacturer. The company supplies a huge range of heavy duty truck parts to the domestic market and is a significant supplier in Australia. The company has been using traditional methods of machine assisted manual pipe bending techniques. In a drive of continuous improvement, the company has acquired a pre-owned CNC bending machine capable of bending pipes automatically up to 25 bends. However, due to process mismatch, this machine is only used for single bending operation. The researchers studied the bending system and changed the manufacturing process. Using an example exhaust pipe as the benchmark, a significant drop of manufacturing lead time from 70 minutes to 40 minutes for each pipe was demonstrated. There was also a decrease of material cost due to the multiple bends part in one piece without cutting excessive materials for each single bend like it used to be.

Manufacturing challenges with fabrication of large size mechanical harmonic drives

Mechanical harmonic transmissions are relatively new kind of drives having several unusual features. For example, they can provide reduction ratio up to 500:1 in one stage, have very small teeth module compared to conventional drives and very large number of teeth (up to 1000) on a flexible gear. If for conventional drives manufacturing methods are well-developed, fabrication of large size harmonic drives presents a challenge. For example, how to fabricate a thin shell of 1.7m in diameter and wall thickness of 30mm having high precision external teeth at one end and internal splines at the other end? It is so flexible that conventional fabrication methods become unsuitable. In this paper special fabrication methods are discussed that can be used for manufacturing of large size harmonic drive components. They include electro-slag welding and refining, the use of special expandable devices to locate and hold a flexible gear, welding peripheral parts of disks with wear resistant materials with subsequent machining and others. These fabrication methods proved to be effective and harmonic drives built with the use of these innovative technologies have been installed on heavy metallurgical equipment and successfully tested.

Improving behaviour classification consistency: a technique from biological taxonomy

Quantitative behaviour analysis requires the classification of behaviour to produce the basic data. In practice, much of this work will be performed by multiple observers, and maximising inter-observer consistency is of particular importance. Another discipline where consistency in classification is vital is biological taxonomy. A classification tool of great utility, the binary key, is designed to simplify the classification decision process and ensure consistent identification of proper categories. We show how this same decision-making tool - the binary key - can be used to promote consistency in the classification of behaviour. The construction of a binary key also ensures that the categories in which behaviour is classified are complete and non-overlapping. We discuss the general principles of design of binary keys, and illustrate their construction and use with a practical example from education research.

Media Studies: "Media, History and Society", and "Thinking Popular Culture".

“When cultural life is re-defined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk.” (Postman) The dire tones of Postman quoted in Janet Cramer’s Media, History, Society: A Cultural History of US Media introduce one view that she canvasses, in the debate of the moment, as to where popular culture is heading in the digital age. This is canvassed, less systematically, in Thinking Popular Culture: War Terrorism and Writing by Tara Brabazon, who for example refers to concerns about a “crisis of critical language” that is bothering professionals—journalists and academics or elsewhere—and deplores the advent of the Internet, as a “flattening of expertise in digital environments”.

Adolescence: A useful concept for this millennium

‘Adolescence’ has become increasingly recognised as a nebulous concept. Previous conceptualisations of adolescence have adopted a ‘deficit’ view, regarding teenagers as ‘unfinished’ adults. The deficit view of adolescence is highly problematic in an era where adulthood itself is difficult to define. The terms ‘kidult’ or ‘adultescent’ have emerged to describe adult-age people whose interests and priorities match those of their teenage counterparts. Rather than relying on ‘lock-step’ models of physical, cognitive and social growth put forward by developmental psychology, adolescence can be more usefully defined by looking at the common experiences of people in their teenage years. Common experiences arise at an institutional level; for example, all adolescents are treated as the same by legal and education systems. The transition from primary to secondary schooling is a milestone for all children, exposing them to a new type of educational environment. Shared experiences also arise from generational factors. Today’s adolescents belong to the millennial generation, characterised by technological competence, global perspectives, high susceptibility to media influence, individualisation and rapid interactions. This generation focuses on teamwork, achievement, modesty and good conduct, and has great potential for significant collective accomplishments. These generational factors challenge educators to provide relevant learning experiences for today’s students. Many classrooms still utilise textbook-based pedagogy more suited to previous generations, resulting in disengagement among millennial students. Curriculum content must also be tailored to generational needs. The rapid pace of change, as well as the fluidity of identity created by dissolving geographical and vocational boundaries, mean that the millennial generation will need more than a fixed set of skills and knowledge to enter adulthood. Teachers must enable their students to think like ‘expert novices’, adept at assimilating new concepts in depth and prepared to engage in lifelong learning.

The synthesis and application of novel profluorescent nitroxides as probes for polymer degradation

This PhD project has expanded the knowledge in the area of profluorescent nitroxides with regard to the synthesis and characterisations of novel profluorescent nitroxide probes as well as physical characterisation of the probe molecules in various polymer/physical environments. The synthesis of the first example of an azaphenalene-based fused aromatic nitroxide TMAO, [1,1,3,3-tetramethyl-2,3-dihydro-2-azaphenalen-2-yloxyl, was described. This novel nitroxide possesses some of the structural rigidity of the isoindoline class of nitroxides, as well as some properties akin to TEMPO nitroxides. Additionally, the integral aromatic ring imparts fluorescence that is switched on by radical scavenging reactions of the nitroxide, which makes it a sensitive probe for polymer degradation. In addition to the parent TMAO, 5 other azaphenalene derivatives were successfully synthesised. This new class of nitroxide was expected to have interesting redox properties when the structure was investigated by high-level ab initio molecular orbitals theory. This was expected to have implications with biological relevance as the calculated redox potentials for the azaphenalene ring class would make them potent antioxidant compounds. The redox potentials of 25 cyclic nitroxides from four different structural classes (pyrroline, piperidine, isoindoline and azaphenalene) were determined by cyclic voltammetry in acetonitrile. It was shown that potentials related to the one electron processes of the nitroxide were influenced by the type of ring system, ring substituents or groups surrounding the moiety. Favourable comparisons were found between theoretical and experimental potentials for pyrroline, piperidine and isoindoline ring classes. Substitution of these ring classes, were correctly calculated to have a small yet predictable effect on the potentials. The redox potentials of the azaphenalene ring class were underestimated by the calculations in all cases by at least a factor of two. This is believed to be due to another process influencing the redox potentials of the azaphenalene ring class which is not taken into account by the theoretical model. It was also possible to demonstrate the use of both azaphenalene and isoindoline nitroxides as additives for monitoring radical mediated damage that occurs in polypropylene as well as in more commercially relevant polyester resins. Polymer sample doped with nitroxide were exposed to both thermo-and photo-oxidative conditions with all nitroxides showing a protective effect. It was found that isoindoline nitroxides were able to indicate radical formation in polypropylene aged at elevated temperatures via fluorescence build-up. The azaphenalene nitroxide TMAO showed no such build-up of fluorescence. This was believed to be due to the more labile bond between the nitroxide and macromolecule and the protection may occur through a classical Denisov cycle, as is expected for commercially available HAS units. Finally, A new profluorescent dinitroxide, BTMIOA (9,10-bis(1,1,3,3- tetramethylisoindolin-2-yloxyl-5-yl)anthracene), was synthesised and shown to be a powerful probe for detecting changes during the initial stages of thermo-oxidative degradation of polypropylene. This probe, which contains a 9,10-diphenylanthracene core linked to two nitroxides, possesses strongly suppressed fluorescence due to quenching by the two nitroxide groups. This molecule also showed the greatest protective effect on thermo-oxidativly aged polypropylene. Most importantly, BTMIOA was found to be a valuable tool for imaging and mapping free-radical generation in polypropylene using fluorescence microscopy.

Peer to peer English/Chinese cross-language information retrieval

Peer to peer systems have been widely used in the internet. However, most of the peer to peer information systems are still missing some of the important features, for example cross-language IR (Information Retrieval) and collection selection / fusion features. Cross-language IR is the state-of-art research area in IR research community. It has not been used in any real world IR systems yet. Cross-language IR has the ability to issue a query in one language and receive documents in other languages. In typical peer to peer environment, users are from multiple countries. Their collections are definitely in multiple languages. Cross-language IR can help users to find documents more easily. E.g. many Chinese researchers will search research papers in both Chinese and English. With Cross-language IR, they can do one query in Chinese and get documents in two languages. The Out Of Vocabulary (OOV) problem is one of the key research areas in crosslanguage information retrieval. In recent years, web mining was shown to be one of the effective approaches to solving this problem. However, how to extract Multiword Lexical Units (MLUs) from the web content and how to select the correct translations from the extracted candidate MLUs are still two difficult problems in web mining based automated translation approaches. Discovering resource descriptions and merging results obtained from remote search engines are two key issues in distributed information retrieval studies. In uncooperative environments, query-based sampling and normalized-score based merging strategies are well-known approaches to solve such problems. However, such approaches only consider the content of the remote database but do not consider the retrieval performance of the remote search engine. This thesis presents research on building a peer to peer IR system with crosslanguage IR and advance collection profiling technique for fusion features. Particularly, this thesis first presents a new Chinese term measurement and new Chinese MLU extraction process that works well on small corpora. An approach to selection of MLUs in a more accurate manner is also presented. After that, this thesis proposes a collection profiling strategy which can discover not only collection content but also retrieval performance of the remote search engine. Based on collection profiling, a web-based query classification method and two collection fusion approaches are developed and presented in this thesis. Our experiments show that the proposed strategies are effective in merging results in uncooperative peer to peer environments. Here, an uncooperative environment is defined as each peer in the system is autonomous. Peer like to share documents but they do not share collection statistics. This environment is a typical peer to peer IR environment. Finally, all those approaches are grouped together to build up a secure peer to peer multilingual IR system that cooperates through X.509 and email system.