Contagious Metaphor

The metaphor of contagion pervades critical discourse across the humanities, the medical sciences, and the social sciences. It appears in such terms as ‘social contagion’ in psychology, ‘financial contagion’ in economics, ‘viral marketing’ in business, and even ‘cultural contagion’ in anthropology. In the twenty-first century, contagion, or ‘thought contagion’ has become a byword for creativity and a fundamental process by which knowledge and ideas are communicated and taken up, and resonates with André Siegfried’s observation that ‘there is a striking parallel between the spreading of germs and the spreading of ideas’. Contagious Metaphor offers an innovative, interdisciplinary study of the metaphor of contagion and its relationship to the workings of language. Examining both metaphors of contagion and metaphor as contagion, Contagious Metaphor suggests a framework through which the emergence and often epidemic-like reproduction of metaphor can be better understood.

Imaginative cinematic geographies of Australia : the mapped view in Charles Chauvel's Jedda and Baz Luhrmann's Australia

Cinema is central to the mediation of history and the construction of imaginative geographies that offer a politicized view of the land and its people. This article investigates cinematic representations of landscape and analyses the ways in which maps and journeys in Charles Chauvel’s film Jedda (1955) and Baz Luhrmann’s Australia (2008)—both set in the far North of Australia—articulate conceptions of “Australianness” in relationship to Indigeneity and the land. We argue the exotic tropics and arid outback regions of northern Australia function metonymically as representative of the nation in these films, working to naturalize ideological values and affirm dominant narratives of history, identity, and entitlement.

Towards the development of 1-to-n human machine interfaces for unmanned aerial vehicles

Multi-touch interfaces across a wide range of hardware platforms are becoming pervasive. This is due to the adoption of smart phones and tablets in both the consumer and corporate market place. This paper proposes a human-machine interface to interact with unmanned aerial systems based on the philosophy of multi-touch hardware-independent high-level interaction with multiple systems simultaneously. Our approach incorporates emerging development methods for multi-touch interfaces on mobile platforms. A framework is defined for supporting multiple protocols. An open source solution is presented that demonstrates: architecture supporting different communications hardware; an extensible approach for supporting multiple protocols; and the ability to monitor and interact with multiple UAVs from multiple clients simultaneously. Validation tests were conducted to assess the performance, scalability and impact on packet latency under different client configurations.