From Masterchef to the Arab spring via Wikileaks : social media and political change

This comparison between Bahrain and Australia shows how the main impact of social and mobile media has been in the form of facilitators of rapid political mobilization, as well as tools for everyday socializing and entertainment. Social media are both contributors to, and symptomatic of, a blurring of the boundaries between politics and entertainment, and public and private spheres, whether their users are in Australia or Bahrain, but they are not in themselves the makers of material sites of democracy or even agency.

A class of optimal fault tolerant Jacobian for minimal redundant manipulators based on symmetric geometries

Design of locally optimal fault tolerant manipulators has been recently addressed via using the constraints of the desired null space for the Jacobian matrix of the manipulators. In the present paper the Jacobian matrices for optimal fault tolerance are presented based on geometric properties of column vectors instead of the null space. They are equally fault tolerant to a single joint failure from the worst-case relative manipulability and worst-case dexterity points of view. The optimality is achieved through a symmetric distribution of points on spheres.

Sensing and using social context

We present online algorithms to extract social context: Social spheres are labeled locations of significance, represented as convex hulls extracted from GPS traces. Colocation is determined from Bluetooth and GPS to extract social rhythms, patterns in time, duration, place, and people corresponding to real-world activities. Social ties are formulated from proximity and shared spheres and rhythms. Quantitative evaluation is performed for 10+ million samples over 45 man-months. Applications are presented with assessment of perceived utility: Socio-Graph, a video and photo browser with filters for social metadata, and Jive, a blog browser that uses rhythms to discover similarity between entries automatically.

Photoreactive azido-containing silica nanoparticle/polycation multilayers : durable superhydrophobic coating on cotton fabrics

In this study, we report the functionalization of silica nanoparticles with highly photoreactive phenyl azido groups and their utility as a negatively charged building block for layer-by-layer (LbL) electrostatic assembly to produce a stable silica nanoparticle coating. Azido-terminated silica nanoparticles were prepared by the functionalization of bare silica nanoparticles with 3-aminopropyltrimethoxysilane followed by the reaction with 4-azidobenzoic acid. The azido functionalization was confirmed by FTIR and XPS. Poly(allylamine hydrochloride) was also grafted with phenyl azido groups and used as photoreactive polycations for LbL assembly. For the photoreactive silica nanoparticle/polycation multilayers, UV irradiation can induce the covalent cross-linking within the multilayers as well as the anchoring of the multilayer film onto the organic substrate, through azido photochemical reactions including C–H insertion/abstraction reactions with surrounding molecules and dimerization of azido groups. Our results show that the stability of the silica nanoparticle/polycation multilayer film was greatly improved after UV irradiation. Combined with a fluoroalkylsilane post-treatment, the photoreactive LbL multilayers were used as a coating for superhydrophobic modification of cotton fabrics. Herein the LbL assembly method enables us to tailor the number of the coated silica nanoparticles through the assembly cycles. The superhydrophobicity of cotton fabrics was durable against acids, bases, and organic solvents, as well as repeated machine wash. Because of the unique azido photochemistry, the approach used here to anchor silica nanoparticles is applicable to almost any organic substrate.

The maternity journey in an organisational context : a case study

The transition to motherhood is a significant life event impacting on all spheres of a woman's life. In an organisational context, changes to women's relationships with their employer and to their social identity occur as they adjust to their new role. A case study was undertaken to describe and compare the workplace experiences of three female employees from one health organisation who were either preparing to commence, currently on or recently returned to work from maternity leave. At all stages of the maternity journey, women expected flexibility from their employer in negotiating their return to work and managing parenting responsibilities. Women's obligations to their employer included being open about their capacity to work and parenting situations which may interfere with their work, as well as maintaining their work performance. Within a supportive work environment that included a shared identity with managers who were also mothers, women's social identity as a worker was not significantly threatened and did not change. Social identity change may be most apparent during the transition to first-time motherhood.

Feminist geography 30 years on : they came, they saw but did they conquer?

Feminist geography emerged in Australia in the 1980s, spurred on by the local Women’s Liberation Movement and inspired by the academic activism emanating from England, Canada and the United States. Producing critical evaluations of male-dominated geography departments, curriculum and journals, feminist geographers proceeded to stake claims in each of these spheres while also substantially revising the content of geographical research. There were significant interventions into urban, social, cultural and economic geography, in environmental discourses as well as into the gendered research process. Having arrived, identified and addressed these issues, the discipline was critiqued and transformed over the 1980s and 1990s. Crucial to the strength of this critique were key individuals, the Gender and Geography Group within the Institute of Australian Geographers and the role played by journals such as Geographical Research and the Australian Geographer in providing spaces for feminist work. However, as the new century dawned, the agenda changed and the anger and urgency dissipated as the broader and university contexts altered. It was a period of consolidation, as feminist insights and approaches were focused on key subject areas – such as the home, identity and sexuality – and became more mainstream. But is this work and the presence of women in the academy an indication of success or of co-option? This paper will trace these various shifts – from the arrival to the mainstreaming of feminist geography - and analyse what might be read as a retreat from feminist politics and practice within the discipline in Australia. I will conclude by re-stating the case to advance a new feminist agenda in the face of continuing gender inequality within the academy, in Australia and across the globe.

Media gets its mojo on

People everywhere have the means to create and publish mobile content, but as mainstream media begins its catch up the possibilities of a mobile led communications revolutions has never been greater. This articel discusse a new form of creating user genereted stories (UGS) using mobiles. Whether it's in remote communities or being used by frontline journalists, mojo is an accessible technology and skill set that closes the  gap between the three major spheres of communication: community, education and professional media.

A hybrid approach for multiple particle tracking microrheology

Geometric object detection has many applications, such as in tracking. Particle tracking microrheology is a technique for studying mechanical properties by accurately tracking the motion of the immersed particles undergoing Brownian motion. Since particles are carried along by these random undulations of the medium, they can move in and out of the microscope's depth of focus, which results in halos (lower intensity). Two-point particle tracking microrheology (TPM) uses a threshold to find those particles with peak, which leads to the broken trajectory of the particles. The halos of those particles which are out of focus are circles and the centres can be accurately tracked in most cases. When the particles are sparse, TPM will lose certain useful information. Thus, it may cause inaccurate microrheology. An efficient algorithm to detect the centre of those particles will increase the accuracy of the Brownian motion. In this paper, a hybrid approach is proposed which combines the steps of TPM for particles in focus with a circle detection step using circular Hough transform for particles with halos. As a consequence, it not only detects more particles in each frame but also dramatically extends the trajectories with satisfactory accuracy. Experiments over a video microscope data set of polystyrene spheres suspended in water undergoing Brownian motion confirmed the efficiency of the algorithm.

Nanofibrillar micelles and entrapped vesicles from biodegradable block copolymer/polyelectrolyte complexes in aqueous media

Here we report a viable route to fibrillar micelles and entrapped vesicles in aqueous solutions. Nanofibrillar micelles and entrapped vesicles were prepared from complexes of a biodegradable block copolymer poly(ethylene oxide)-block-poly(lactide) (PEO-b-PLA) and a polyelectrolyte poly(acrylic acid) (PAA) in aqueous media and directly visualized using cryogenic transmission electron microscopy (cryo-TEM). The self-assembly and the morphological changes in the complexes were induced by the addition of PAA/water solution into the PEO-b-PLA in tetrahydrofuran followed by dialysis against water. A variety of morphologies including spherical wormlike and fibrillar micelles, and both unilamellar and entrapped vesicles, were observed, depending on the composition, complementary binding sites of PAA and PEO, and the change in the interfacial energy. Increasing the water content in each [AA]/[EO] ratio led to a morphological transition from spheres to vesicles, displaying both the composition- and dilution-dependent micellar-to-vesicular morphological transitions.

Integrating the human factor into the holistic understanding of sustainability

Using a number of literary sources with sustainable design and architectural phenomenology as their foundation, this paper uses Integral theory, drawing on the writings of Ken Wilber and Mark DeKay to justify the importance of human architectural experience in the holistic view of sustainable design. The literature critiques modern practices and ideas of sustainability and identifies factors that contribute towards the success of sustainable building. It explores the implications for an Integral approach to sustainable design and then uses it to analyse the relationships that exist between the objective and the subjective value spheres of Integral theory.

General synthesis of two-dimensional patterned conducting polymer-nanobowl sheet via chemical polymerization

A general method for the generation of two-dimensional (2D) ordered, large-area, and liftable conducting polymer-nanobowl sheet has been demonstrated via chemical polymerization for the first time. The sheet is made using the monolayer self-assembled from polystyrene (PS) spheres at the aqueous/air interface as template, followed by depositing conducting polymer on the part of PS monolayer submerging in the aqueous phase via chemical polymerization, and core extraction. During the process of polymerization, no substrate is required, which caused the as-prepared patterned conducting polymer sheet can be easily lifted-off and deposited, in full size, on any flat substrate. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectrum were used to characterize the products

[Al4(OH)2(OCH3)4(H2N-bdc)3]⋅x H2O: A 12-connected porous metal–organic framework with an unprecedented aluminum-containing brick

A new stable aluminum aminoterephthalate system contains octameric building blocks that are connected by organic linkers to form a 12-connected net (see picture). The structure adopts a cubic centered packing motive in which octameric units replace individual atoms, thus forming distorted octahedral (red sphere) and tetrahedral cages (green spheres) with effective accessible diameters of 1 and 0.45 nm, respectively