Copyright (c) 2009 University of Wollongong All rights reserved. http://ro.uow.edu.au Recent documents in Research Online en-us Fri, 06 Nov 2009 05:28:58 PST 3600 http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/3027 http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/3027 Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:38:15 PST This research describes and develops Knowledge Libraries, idealised systems for organising and presenting information. By providing a mathematical basis, the definition of information space establishes a formal foundation for Knowledge Libraries. The definition of information space builds on the new definitions of L-collections, which generalise sets by allowing a real valued grade to be associated with each element, and set space, which generalises metric space to better model the relationships between information units.The multiple search tree method improves existing metric space range query algorithms. These algorithms are also generalised to work over set space. The sequential-hybrid algorithm enables efficient range queries over multi-dimensional spaces. Eric Rayner http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/3026 http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/3026 Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:23:32 PST This thesis explores the ways in which English writer A. S. (Antonia) Byatt's veneration of both realism and writing informs her use of ekphrasis, investigating the prominence of the still life in her fictional output to 2009. In doing so it distinguishes between visual still lifes (descriptions of real or imagined artworks) and what are termed for the purposes of the study 'verbal still lifes' (scenes such as laid tables, rooms and market stalls). This is the first full-length examination of Byatt's adoption of the Barthesian concept of textual pleasure, demonstrating how her ekphrastic descriptions involve consumption and take time to unfold for the reader, thereby elevating domesticity and highlighting the limitations of painting. In locating what may be termed a 'Byattian' aesthetic, this study combines several areas of scholarship, particularly literary criticism of Byatt and others, food writing, and feminist and postmodernist criticism. It investigates the ways in which Byatt's still lifes demonstrate her debt to both French writer Marcel Proust and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of nineteenth-century Britain. The study also shows how, in her depictions of paintings by artists such as Henri Matisse, Byatt subtly engages with the issue of female representation. Further, it explores similarities between her writing and that of English modernist author Virginia Woolf. The study reads a number of Byatt's verbal still lifes as semiotic markers of her characters, particularly with regard to economic status and class. Further, it reveals how her descriptions uniting food and sexuality are part of her overall representation of pleasure. Finally, it discusses Byatt's use of vanitas iconography in her portrayals of death, and shows how her fiction's recurring motif of Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" teases out the still life's inherent tension between living passion and 'cold' artwork. Elizabeth Hicks http://ro.uow.edu.au/scipapers/171 http://ro.uow.edu.au/scipapers/171 Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:43:18 PST We report a meta-analysis of data from 34 field studies into the effects of UV-B radiation on Arctic and Antarctic bryophytes and angiosperms. The studies measured plant responses to decreases in UV-B radiation under screens, natural fluctuations in UV-B irradiance, or increases in UV-B radiation applied from fluorescent UV lamps. Exposure to UV-B radiation was found to increase the concentrations of UV-B absorbing compounds in leaves or thalli by 7% and 25% (expressed on a mass or area basis, respectively). UV-B exposure also reduced aboveground biomass and plant height by 15% and 10%, respectively, and increased DNA damage by 90%. No effects of UV-B exposure were found on carotenoid or chlorophyll concentrations, net photosynthesis, Fv/Fm or ΦPSII, belowground or total biomass, leaf mass, leaf area or specific leaf area (SLA). The methodology adopted influenced the concentration of UV-B absorbing compounds, with screens and natural fluctuations promoting significant changes in the concentrations of these pigments, but lamps failing to elicit a response. Greater reductions in leaf area and SLA, and greater increases in concentrations of carotenoids, were found in experiments based in Antarctica than in those in the Arctic. Bryophytes typically responded in the same way as angiosperms to UV-B exposure. Regression analyses indicated that the percentage difference in UV-B dose between treatment and control plots was positively associated with concentrations of UV-B absorbing compounds and carotenoids, and negatively so with aboveground biomass and leaf area. We conclude that, despite being dominated by bryophytes, the vegetation of polar regions responds to UV-B exposure in a similar way to higher plant-dominated vegetation at lower latitudes. In broad terms, the exposure of plants in these regions to UV-B radiation elicits the synthesis of UV-B absorbing compounds, reduces aboveground biomass and height, and increases DNA damage. K. K. Newsham http://ro.uow.edu.au/tide/vol4/iss1/1 http://ro.uow.edu.au/tide/vol4/iss1/1 Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:25:09 PST http://ro.uow.edu.au/tide/vol3/iss1/1 http://ro.uow.edu.au/tide/vol3/iss1/1 Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:22:58 PST http://ro.uow.edu.au/tide/vol2/iss1/1 http://ro.uow.edu.au/tide/vol2/iss1/1 Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:19:39 PST http://ro.uow.edu.au/tide/vol1/iss1/1 http://ro.uow.edu.au/tide/vol1/iss1/1 Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:19:38 PST http://ro.uow.edu.au/infopapers/737 http://ro.uow.edu.au/infopapers/737 Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:11:50 PST The analysis of vulnerabilities in large complex spaces is fundamentally problematic. The lack of capacity to generate a threat assessment merely exacerbates this problem. Lacking as well, in current literature is a developed methodology. To overcome this problem, we propose an approach using multi-agent modelling, which is also melded with three dimensional (3D) tactical understandings. Our approach builds on a microsimulation decision support tool, which was developed for a behavioural simulation of CBRN events. Microsimulation is based on the individual; who as an individual has a number of attributes, and which are stochastic (when repeated within an attribute). This approach is then enveloped. The simulations approach is intended for simulation of global and social controls and is designed to deal effectively with separate population groups. Each group has rules based on the group's behaviour and attributes, and complex scenarios can be built very simply. This therefore, enables analysis of emergent group behaviours and patterns. Our approach is akin to chemical or fire spread quantification. It views particle spread analysis as synonymous with complex movement (or stationary location) of many active agents within a complex 3D environment. This approach, we believe is needed to 'solve' the counter terrorism problem presented by scenarios such as the 2007 Haymarket attack; such as, how to analyse such events, as well as develop effective interdiction. A discrete behaviour model approach is suggested. This approach through repeated simulation (within the same parameters) should build up a statistical pattern of domain behaviour. As well, information on the outcome of changing behaviour can also be logged. Therefore, individual outcomes can be matched against real-time data to give best prediction of eventual outcomes, and the range of future strategies based on closest approach to reality. Taking this approach, potential targets could then be given random attributes including movement, size, speed, destination, and degree of deception being used in behaviour. Superimposing targets from known information and still building in random attributes about what is not known, will allow forward prediction with back-correction over time as information becomes more available. As well, failure rates and other assumptions could also be gradually relaxed, and this will allow for continuous assessment of assumptions as real data becomes available. A. R. Green http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/3025 http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/3025 Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:17:15 PST This thesis explores the implications of colonial whiteness in the actions of communities supporting the struggles of First Peoples in Australia and Canada. Exploring how whiteness manifests itself, how it permeates as epistemic blank spots into the actions of those promoting respect and recognition, is used as a basis to reflect on social justice in contemporary society.The emerging field of critical whiteness studies provides a solid foundation to engage with whiteness. Scholarship on the hegemony of technological discourse is drawn from to extend on this foundation. The notion of human history as a history of progress and the associated scientific hierarchisation of knowledges is rooted in relations of power|knowledge that perpetuate culturally inappropriate colonial relationships.1 Gene Sharp's work on consent theories of power and Jacques Ellul's engagement with Technological Society are engaged with to explore how such hierarchisation of knowledges is maintained. The pervasiveness of this relation is explored in three case studies to reflect on the implications.Engagement with white interpretations of the 1966 walk-out of Aboriginal stockworkers and their families at Wave Hill provides an historical grounding of contemporary whiteness. Interpretations of the walk-out as a strike that later shifted in focus, counter to oral historical accounts, are used as a basis to consider how manifestations of whiteness in Australia have shifted in the last 40 years. The 2001 formation of the Community Picket at Sandon Point, as a means to oppose a residential proposal, provides a focus for reflecting on whiteness in contemporary Australia. The Picket was established to offer support to the Sandon Point Aboriginal Tent Embassy (SPATE) and promote a progressive variant of 'practical reconciliation'. Friends of the Red Hill Valley's support for Haudenosaunee Treaty rights, in opposing an expressway proposal for the valley, is comparatively engaged with to reflect on contextual variations in how whiteness manifests itself in Australia and Canada. Exposing the actions of white supporters as counter-hegemonic and a challenge to aspects of whiteness whilst unintentionally maintaining unjust colonial relationships at the same time locates some of the challenges for both scholarship and action in the area of social justice. 1 Nikolas Rose, following Foucault and focussing on (self) governance and freedom, refers to the study of such changes as a genealogy (1999: 65-6). Colin Salter http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/3024 http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/3024 Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:23:57 PDT This work is the first comprehensive investigation of potential changes in the radiobiological effectiveness of clinical photon beams caused by a redistribution of electrons in a magnetic field. It is also a fundamental study of both the influence of magnetic fields on the peak-to-valley dose ratio of microbeams and the accuracy of theoretical modelling for dose planning in Microbeam Radiation Therapy (MRT).The application of a strong transverse magnetic field to a volume undergoing irradiation by a photon beam can produce localised regions of dose enhancement and dose reduction. Results from Monte Carlo PENELOPE simulation show regions of enhancement and reduction of as much as 111% and 77% respectively for magnetic fields of 1 to 100 T applied to Co60, 6, 10, 15, and 24 MV photon beams. The dose redistribution is shown to occur predominantly through an alteration in the lower energy electron population, which may correspond to a change in the relative biological effectiveness. In MRT, an experimental and theoretical investigation of the influence of transverse and longitudinal magnetic fields on the lateral dose profile and peak-to-valley dose ratio (PVDR) of microbeams is presented. Results show that longitudinal magnetic fields greater than 10 T are needed to produce an effect. Strong transverse magnetic fields, on the other hand, have no influence on microbeam profiles. The radiation response of the edge-on MOSFET and its ability to measure dose profiles of monoenergetic and polyenergetic microbeams are also investigated.Simulations investigating the dependence of microbeam dose profiles on the accuracy of beamline modelling (i.e. synchrotron source, multislit collimator, and beam divergence) are also presented. Results show the asymmetric collimator construction is responsible for a 10% variation in the full-width at half-maximum of microbeams which affects the PVDR. Modelling the distributed source and beam divergence increases the penumbral dose by almost 30%. The influence of the collimator alignment, interaction medium, and the height of scoring regions on the PVDR are also investigated. Heidi Nettelbeck