Res Communis? A critical legal geography of outer space, Antarctica, and the deep seabed

This chapter provides a critical legal geography of outer Space, charting the topography of the debates and struggles around its definition, management, and possession. As the emerging field of critical legal geography demonstrates, law is not a neutral organiser of space, but is instead a powerful cultural technology of spatial production. Drawing on legal documents such as the Outer Space Treaty and the Moon Treaty, as well as on the analogous and precedent-setting legal geographies of Antarctica and the deep seabed, the chapter addresses key questions about the legal geography of outer Space, questions which are of growing importance as Space’s available satellite spaces in the geostationary orbit diminish, Space weapons and mining become increasingly viable, Space colonisation and tourism emerge, and questions about Space’s legal status grow in intensity. Who owns outer Space? Who, and whose rules, govern what may or may not (literally) take place there? Is the geostationary orbit the sovereign property of the equatorial states it supertends, as these states argued in the 1970s? Or is it a part of the res communis, or common property of humanity, which currently legally characterises outer Space? Does Space belong to no one, or to everyone? As challenges to the existing legal spatiality of outer Space emerge from spacefaring states, companies, and non-spacefaring states, it is particularly critical that the current spatiality of Space is understood and considered.

Dance teacher education in the 21st century : Linking cultural and aesthetic practice

This paper describes the implementation of the recommendations of a series of research projects, within an undergraduate dance teacher-training course, into the training of collaborative, empathetic, ethical and creative dance teachers. Banks’s Dimensions for Multicultural Education (Banks, 1993) was used as a lens to analyze the design and delivery of cultural dance activities within a university dance-teaching unit, implemented in Australia and Timor Leste, and to reflect on the adaptability of the Performance in Context Model (Stevens & Huddy, in press) across different cultural contexts. Content and contextual knowledge, transformational learning pedagogy, teaching for equity and empathy development were explored through a culturally responsive teaching and learning unit, supported by critical analysis and reflection. This analysis identified a number of key understandings in relation to the design and delivery of cultural dance activities.

Building teachers' pedagogy practices in reasoning, to improve students' dispositions towards mathematics

Drawing on participatory action research, this study identifies the pedagogies necessary to advance reasoning, which is one of the proficiencies from the Australian Curriculum Mathematics, and explores how reasoning leads to greater productive disposition. With the current emphasis on STEM in schools, this research is timely. This thesis makes an original and substantive contribution to the understanding of why and how teachers can most effectively advance student proficiency in reasoning through targeted instructional strategies and style of instruction. The study explores the ways in which teacher practices, when focused on reasoning, enhance the disposition of students towards greater mathematical proficiency.

On-line Dynamic Security Assessment: Determination of Critical Transmission Lines

The main objective of on-line dynamic security assessment is to take preventive action if required or decide remedial action if a contingency actually occurs. Stability limits are obtained for different contingencies. The mode of instability is one of the outputs of dynamic security analysis. When a power system becomes unstable, it splits initially into two groups of generators, and there is a unique cutset in the transmission network known as critical cutset across which the angles become unbounded. The knowledge of critical cutset is additional information obtained from dynamic security assessment, which can be used for initiating preventive control actions, deciding emergency control actions, and adaptive out-of-step relaying. In this article, an analytical technique for the fast prediction of the critical cutset by system simulation for a short duration is presented. Case studies on the New England ten-generator system are presented. The article also suggests the applications of the identification of critical cutsets.

The Art of Studio Teaching

This project began in 2013, with the award of an internal QUT Teaching and Learning grant. The task we wished to undertake was to document and better understand the role of studio teaching practice in the Creative Industries Faculty. While it was well understood that the Faculty had long used studio pedagogies as a key part of its teaching approach, organizational and other changes made it productive and timely to consider how the various study areas within the Faculty were approaching studio teaching. Chief among these changes were innovations in the use of technology in teaching, and at an organizational level the merging of what were once two schools within different faculties into a newly-structured Creative Industries Faculty. The new faculty consists of two schools, Media, Entertainment and Creative Art (MECA) and Design. We hoped to discover more about how studio techniques were developing alongside an ever-increasing number of options for content delivery, assessment, and interaction with students. And naturally we wanted to understand such developments across the broad range of nineteen study areas now part of the Creative Industries Faculty. This e-book represents the first part of our project, which in the main consisted in observing the teaching practices used in eight units across the Faculty, and then interviews with the unit coordinators involved. In choosing units, we opted for a broad opening definition of ‘studio’ to include not only traditional studios but also workshops and tutorials in which we could identify a component of studio teaching as enumerated by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council’s Studio Teaching Project: • A culture, a creative community created by a group of students and studio teachers working together for periods of time • A mode of teaching and learning where students and studio teachers interact in a creative and reflective process • A program of projects and activities where content is structured to enable ‘learning in action’ • A physical space or constructed environment in which the teaching and learning can take place (Source: http://www.studioteaching.org/?page=what_is_studio) The units we chose to observe, and which we hoped would represent something of the diversity of our study areas, were: • Dance Project 1 • Furniture Studies • Wearable Architecture • Fashion Design 4 • Industrial Design 6 • Advanced Writing Practice 3 • Introduction to Creative Writing • Studio Art Practice 2 Over the course of two semesters in 2013, we attended classes, presentations, and studio time in these units, and then conducted interviews that we felt would give further insight into both individual and discipline-specific approaches to studio pedagogies. We asked the same questions in each of the interviews: • Could you describe the main focus and aims of your unit? • How do you use studio time to achieve those aims? • Can you give us an example of the kind of activities you use in your studio teaching? • What does/do these example(s) achieve in terms of learning outcomes? • What, if any, is the role of technology in your studio teaching practice? • What do you consider distinctive about your approach to studio teaching, or the approach taken in your discipline area? The unit coordinators’ responses to these questions form some of the most interesting and valuable material in this book, and point to both consistencies in approach and teaching philosophies, as well as areas of difference. We believe that both can help to raise our critical awareness of studio teaching, and provide points of comparison for the future development of studio pedagogy in the Creative Industries. In each of the following pages, the interviews are placed alongside written descriptions of the units, their aims and outcomes, assessment models, and where possible photographs and video footage, as well as additional resources that may be useful to others engaged in studio teaching.

Biomaterial templates for the culture and transplantation of retinal pigment epithelial cells: A critical review

The idea of retinal cell transplantation as a potential treatment for age-related retinal degeneration, a leading cause of blindness in the Western world, has been around for a number of decades. To date, however, it has not been entirely successful; one of the main reasons for this is the lack of an ideal substratum for the retinal cells, specifically for the growth of retinal pigment epithelial cells prior to transplantation. This chapter reviews the reasoning behind this potential treatment, the development of animal transplantation models for human trials, the prerequisites of an ideal substratum, the past and current research on substratum materials, and the potential for future developments in this area.

A Critical Evaluation of the MARS Treatment in Finland

The Molecular Adsorbent Recirculating System (MARS) is an extracorporeal albumin dialysis device which is used in the treatment of liver failure patients. This treatment was first utilized in Finland in 2001, and since then, over 200 patients have been treated. The aim of this thesis was to evaluate the impact of the MARS treatment on patient outcome, the clinical and biochemical variables, as well as on the psychological and economic aspects of the treatment in Finland. This thesis encompasses 195 MARS-treated patients (including patients with acute liver failure (ALF), acute-on-chronic liver failure (AOCLF) and graft failure), and a historical control group of 46 ALF patients who did not undergo MARS. All patients received a similar standard medical therapy at the same intensive care unit. The baseline data (demographics, laboratory and clinical variables) and MARS treatment-related and health-related quality-of-life data were recorded before and after treatment. The direct medical costs were determined for a period of 3.5 years.Additionally, the outcome of patients (survival, native liver recovery and need for liver transplantation) and survival predicting factors were investigated. In the outcome analysis, for the MARS-treated ALF patients, their 6-month survival (75% vs. 61%, P=0.07) and their native liver recovery rate (49% vs. 17%, P<0.001) were higher, and their need for transplantations was lower (29% vs. 57%, P= 0.001) than for the historical controls. However, the etiological distribution of the ALF patients referred to our unit has changed considerably over the past decade and the percentage of patients with a more favorable prognosis has increased. The etiology of liver failure was the most important predictor of the outcome. Other survival predicting factors in ALF included hepatic encephalopathy, the coagulation factors and the liver enzyme levels prior to MARS treatment. In terms of prognosis, the MARS treatment of the cirrhotic AOCLF patient seems meaningful only when the patient is eligible for transplantation. The MARS treatment appears to halt the progression of encephalopathy and reduce the blood concentration of neuroactive amino acids, albumin-bound and water-soluble toxins. In general, the effects of the MARS treatment seem to stabilize the patients, thus allowing additional time either for the native liver to recover, or for the patients to endure the prolonged waiting for transplantation. Furthermore, for the ALF patients, the MARS treatment appeared to be less costly and more cost-efficient than the standard medical therapy alone. In conclusion, the MARS treatment appears to have a beneficial effect on the patient outcome in ALF and in those AOCLF patients who can be bridged to transplantation.

Critical test for Altshuler-Aronov theory: Evolution of the density of states singularity in double perovskite Sr2FeMoO6 with controlled disorder

With high-resolution photoemission spectroscopy measurements, the density of states (DOS) near the Fermi level (E-F) of double perovskite Sr2FeMoO6 having different degrees of Fe/Mo antisite disorder has been investigated with varying temperature. The DOS near E-F showed a systematic depletion with increasing degree of disorder, and recovered with increasing temperature. Altshuler-Aronov (AA) theory of disordered metals well explains the dependences of the experimental results. Scaling analysis of the spectra provides experimental indication for the functional form of the AA DOS singularity.

Critical lattice size limit for synchronized chaotic state in one- and two-dimensional diffusively coupled map lattices

We consider diffusively coupled map lattices with P neighbors (where P is arbitrary) and study the stability of the synchronized state. We show that there exists a critical lattice size beyond which the synchronized state is unstable. This generalizes earlier results for nearest neighbor coupling. We confirm the analytical results by performing numerical simulations on coupled map lattices with logistic map at each node. The above analysis is also extended to two-dimensional P-neighbor diffusively coupled map lattices.

Dynamics after a sweep through a quantum critical point

The coherent quantum evolution of a one-dimensional many-particle system after slowly sweeping the Hamiltonian through a critical point is studied using a generalized quantum Ising model containing both integrable and nonintegrable regimes. It is known from previous work that universal power laws of the sweep rate appear in such quantities as the mean number of excitations created by the sweep. Several other phenomena are found that are not reflected by such averages: there are two different scaling behaviors of the entanglement entropy and a relaxation that is power law in time rather than exponential. The final state of evolution after the quench is not characterized by any effective temperature, and the Loschmidt echo converges algebraically for long times, with cusplike singularities in the integrable case that are dynamically broadened by nonintegrable perturbations.

The pedagogic prosthetic: Augmented learning as content-in-motion in hybrid educational spheres

This article draws on the design and implementation of three mobile learning projects introduced by Flanagan in 2011, 2012 and 2014 engaging a total of 206 participants. The latest of these projects is highlighted in this article. Two other projects provide additional examples of innovative strategies to engage mobile and cloud systems describing how electronic and mobile technology can help facilitate teaching and learning, assessment for learning and assessment as learning, and support communities of practice. The second section explains the theoretical premise supporting the implementation of technology and promulgates a hermeneutic phenomenological approach. The third section discusses mobility, both in terms of the exploration of wearable technology in the prototypes developed as a result of the projects, and the affordances of mobility within pedagogy. Finally the quantitative and qualitative methods in place to evaluate m-learning are explained.

Tendency toward crossover of the effective susceptibility exponent from its doubled Ising value to its doubled mean-field value near a double critical point

The critical behavior of osmotic susceptibility in an aqueous electrolyte mixture 1-propanol (1P)+water (W)+potassium chloride is reported. This mixture exhibits re-entrant phase transitions and has a nearly parabolic critical line with its apex representing a double critical point (DCP). The behavior of the susceptibility exponent is deduced from static light-scattering measurements, on approaching the lower critical solution temperatures (TL’s) along different experimental paths (by varying t) in the one-phase region. The light-scattering data analysis substantiates the existence of a nonmonotonic crossover behavior of the susceptibility exponent in this mixture. For the TL far away from the DCP, the effective susceptibility exponent γeff as a function of t displays a nonmonotonic crossover from its single limit three-dimensional (3D)-Ising value ( ∼ 1.24) toward its mean-field value with increase in t. While for that closest to the DCP, γeff displays a sharp, nonmonotonic crossover from its nearly doubled 3D-Ising value toward its nearly doubled mean-field value with increase in t. The renormalized Ising regime extends over a relatively larger t range for the TL closest to the DCP, and a trend toward shrinkage in the renormalized Ising regime is observed as TL shifts away from the DCP. Nevertheless, the crossover to the mean-field limit extends well beyond t>10−2 for the TL’s studied. The observed crossover behavior is attributed to the presence of strong ion-induced clustering in this mixture, as revealed by various structure probing techniques. As far as the critical behavior in complex or associating mixtures with special critical points (like the DCP) is concerned, our results indicate that the influence of the DCP on the critical behavior must be taken into account not only on the renormalization of the critical exponent but also on the range of the Ising regime, which can shrink with decrease in the influence of the DCP and with the extent of structuring in the system. The utility of the field variable tUL in analyzing re-entrant phase transitions is demonstrated. The effective susceptibility exponent as a function of tUL displays a nonmonotonic crossover from its asymptotic 3D-Ising value toward a value slightly lower than its nonasymptotic mean-field value of 1. This behavior in the nonasymptotic, high tUL region is interpreted in terms of the possibility of a nonmonotonic crossover to the mean-field value from lower values, as foreseen earlier in micellar systems.

Proteomic identification of putative microRNA394 target genes in Arabidopsis thaliana identifies MLP family members critical for normal development

Expression of the F-Box protein Leaf Curling Responsiveness (LCR) is regulated by microRNA, miR394, and alterations to this interplay in Arabidopsis thaliana produce defects in leaf polarity and shoot apical meristem (SAM) organisation. Although the miR394-LCR node has been documented in Arabidopsis, the identification of proteins targeted by LCR F-box itself has proven problematic. Here, a proteomic analysis of shoot apices from plants with altered LCR levels identified a member of the Major Latex Protein (MLP) family gene as a potential LCR F-box target. Bioinformatic and molecular analyses also suggested that other MLP family members are likely to be targets for this post-translational regulation. Direct interaction between LCR F-Box and MLP423 was validated. Additional MLP members had reduction in protein accumulation, in varying degrees, mediated by LCR F-Box. Transgenic Arabidopsis lines, in which MLP28 expression was reduced through an artificial miRNA technology, displayed severe developmental defects, including changes in leaf patterning and morphology, shoot apex defects, and eventual premature death. These phenotypic characteristics resemble those of Arabidopsis plants modified to over-express LCR. Taken together, the results demonstrate that MLPs are driven to degradation by LCR, and indicate that MLP gene family is target of miR394-LCR regulatory node, representing potential targets for directly post-translational regulation mediated by LCR F-Box. In addition, MLP28 family member is associated with the LCR regulation that is critical for normal Arabidopsis development.