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Dynamic Portfolios of Parental Mediation Strategies for Internet Usage by Saudi Arabian Children
No full textIn the modern digital era, from a very young age children are increasingly using online media in everyday lives. This trend has led to parents' concern about their children's safety due to potential exposure to harmful materials associated with Internet usage. Hence, the question arises as to how parents can moderate or mediate their children's Internet usage. This study, therefore, explores the parental mediation strategy of Internet usage in the context of Saudi Arabian children. The people of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) have widespread access to all kinds of online devices and systems. The issue is crucial as Saudi Arabian parents are eager to provide opportunities for their children to keep up with the rest of the world. At the same time, Saudi Arabian parents are also eager to prevent any detrimental effects of digital media on their children's development. The study focuses on parents' knowledge, perception, attitude to Internet use and familiarity with their children's screen usage and use of mediation strategies to regulate their children's Internet usage and ensure a safer cyber environment. The population under study was Saudi parental couples of school children aged 6 to 16 years who use devices with Internet access. A qualitative case study method was adopted in this study. Data was collected via face-to-face interviews with 26 parental couples (52 people), of which twenty parental couples (40 people) reside in Makkah Province, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (SA), and six Saudi parental couples (12 people) reside in Melbourne, Australia. The interview transcripts were analysed using grounded theory. Findings indicate that Saudi parents adopt three primary types of mediation strategies, which are (i) restrictive, (ii) monitoring, (iii) and training. The main drivers for parental mediation of children's Internet usage in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia were ensuring children were taught to adhere to social values including Islamic teachings, the security of children, and preventing children’s misinformation. An important finding of the study is that parental couples both in Saudi Arabia and in Australia used a dynamic portfolio of two or more mediation strategies aligned with their respective parenting styles. The findings strongly suggested that parents practised more mediation strategies on younger children's Internet use than teenagers. Saudi parental couples residing in Australia with their children were more likely to be successful with their mediation strategies and satisfied with their children's online behaviours compared to their Saudi Arabian counterparts. A theoretical model (Model of Parental Mediation of Children’s Internet Use in Saudi Arabia) describing the situation is proposed in this work.</p
An Inconvenient Curve: Unlearning Settler Colonial Representations of Birrarung
No full textBirrarung has been subjected to ongoing settler colonial violence. Since the beginning of settler occupation in Narrm in 1835, the river has been, and continues to be, engineered in various ways to further what Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls ‘white possession’. Settler colonial representations of the river and river corridor through photography and in policy also contribute to reinforcing white possessive logics by positioning Birrarung in relation to imperial narratives of progress, ownership and its value as an economic resource.
An Inconvenient Curve: Unlearning Settler Colonial Representations of Birrarung is a practice-led research project that examines the possessive logics underpinning the Port of Melbourne and its operations, which are responsible for diverting, dredging and (attempting to) erase Birrarung’s chosen course. In 1879, English civil engineer John Coode furthered the colonial project by recommending considerable and violent changes to the river to expand the port. He proposed what are now known as the Coode Canal, Victoria Dock and Victoria Harbour to allow access to larger ships and reduce travel time along the river. To justify the new canal, Coode noted that Birrarung’s course near its chosen confluence with the Maribyrnong River was an ‘inconvenient curve’.
This doctoral project attempts to unsettle the straight lines imposed on Birrarung and highlight its curves, contributing another way of thinking about the river beyond extractive terms. It proposes creative practice as a generative site for unlearning Birrarung as a white possession. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s concept of the ‘double turn’, it aims to develop a framework for collective unlearning that contests the settler colonial history of the river and offers a model that can be used by others. The artworks featured in the final exhibition at the Library at the Dock Gallery combine photographs, video, archival material and unlearning essays, and are accompanied by this contextual dissertation, which critically examines the relationship between photography and the river as a living entity.</p
The Unbearable Whiteness of Being Asian Australian: Confronting Assimilation Through Autoethnographic Reflection
No full textThis dissertation and collection of creative work constitute a postmodern ethnography in which I present a multi-modal autoethnographic account of assimilation in Australia as a Singapore-born Chinese migrant, which I then interpret to extract new knowledge for the advancement of cultural studies and autoethnographic methodologies. I begin by outlining a research problem formed by my personal discomfort with early iterations of this research project and its attempt to explore postcolonial non-fiction audio storytelling. I illustrate how this discomfort led to a point of crisis that required the implementation of autoethnographic methods to examine and learn from this discomfort, rather than continue to push against it, and how these methods revealed assimilation as a key focus of my research. I then interpret the material produced through this autoethnographic work – a combination of fieldnotes and creative works in audio and written forms – through the lens of Kuan-Hsing Chen’s Asia as Method (2010). These interpretations illuminate an understanding of my initial research as assimilative and self-marginalising for its underlying desire to use decolonial media creations to appease a settler colonial Australian media industry. This insight opens a new understanding of assimilation, in Chen’s terms, as the result of a stunted, inhibited, or repressed process of deimperialisation through which imperial aspirations and desire prevail. They also highlight a synergy between autoethnography and Asia as Method that invites its continued implementation in future research. In sum, this research project advances and recommends the implementation of autoethnography for creatives and researchers engaged in decolonial work to help uncover the ways we may contradict the views we espouse, reinforce structures we oppose, and further marginalise those we hope to represent, including ourselves.</p
Emotional Information
No full textEmotional Information is a creative project that examines digital data from my perspective as a diarist media maker. I propose that data is endued with a trace of the self and develop a creative practice that looks to understand, respond to and express my experiences of the self in data. As a practitioner who has always drawn extensively from my filmed archives, I feel a kinship between my personal practice of recording and the meticulous recording of my devices, which catalogue me in the form of personal data. Personal data provides a relatively new kind of personal archive, and an extensively more exhaustive one than I would ever be able to gather with a camera or by other means.
In this research, I develop a creative practice that responds to the ubiquity, scale and materiality of personal data. In doing so, I ask two entangled and unfolding questions about my experience of personal data as a diarist practitioner. Primarily, this research asks how the self is represented, mediated and experienced in the digital traces generated by our use of digital technology. As I encounter traces of myself in data, a secondary question emerges. How can I express the sensations of the self in data through diarist practice? To answer these questions, I develop a methodology of diarist making, an experimental and intuitive form of making that aims to express and translate the ephemeral entanglement of practice and research. I produce a series of autobiographical creative projects made from the data gathered about me by digital devices.
This research identifies modes of spectatorship that emerge from the digital when considered alongside and as a part of cinematic perception. This research contributes a new critical and creative understanding of data as a sensory material that bridges the computational and the personal. In this entanglement, the digital and the analogue, the old and the new intermingle, a strange sensation emerging. On one hand, the ever-growing volume of data generated by our actions online records the self at a scale so unrecognisably vast that the sublime is evoked. On the other, the strangeness of recognising our familiar selves amongst data triggers the uncomfortable feelings of the uncanny. I argue that an encounter with the self in data produces a simultaneous experience of the uncanny and the sublime. Together, these questions explore the phenomenology of the digital self as it is recorded in fragments of personal data.</p
Engineering Nanostructured Materials for Photocatalytic Conversion of CO2
No full textAnthropogenic CO2 emissions have resulted in global warming, and subsequently severe weather events. Fossil fuel burning is the largest source of CO2 emissions, and currently the primary source of global energy. The most abundant renewable energy source on Earth is sunlight, and hence offers a means to alleviate the reliance on fossil fuels. Inspired by biological photosynthesis, inorganic semiconductors can be applied to harvest light energy and thereby drive the photocatalytic conversion of CO2 and water to hydrocarbons.
The majority of inorganic semiconductor photocatalysts for CO2 photoreduction exhibit poor quantum efficiencies of less than 1%, almost 10 times lower than biological photosynthesis. Biological photosynthesis is a highly complex process, incorporating multiple pigments that maximize absorbance of sunlight, intricate enzymes for charge transport and separate oxidation and reduction sites. Similarly, a sophisticated photocatalyst design is required that can facilitate the conversion of thermodynamically stable CO2 into hydrocarbons. Key factors to consider include its microstructure and morphology that govern its light absorbance capability, the availability of active sites on the surface, and electronic properties.
Presently, the use of 2D materials as a standalone photocatalyst and in nanocomposites has been a popular choice due to their superior electron mobility and rich active sites towards CO2 photoreduction. Therefore, in Chapter 3, promising 2D LDHs were examined for their textural, optical and electronic properties. Cobalt aluminium layered double hydroxides (CoAl LDHs) were synthesized via a modified alkali free coprecipitation and hydrothermal methods to produce visible light photocatalysts. Physicochemical and optical properties of CoAl LDHs were tuned by tailoring the Co:Al molar ratio. A modified alkali-free coprecipitation method produced pristine CoAl LDHs with 6 times greater surface area and CO2 adsorption capacity than hydrothermal CoAl LDHs, reaching 120 m2/g and 61 µmol/g respectively. High Co loadings induced defects and vacancies in the hydroxide layer due to CoOOH formation observed from XPS. Increasing Co:Al ratio from 1.3 to 3.2 lowered the band gap from 2.1 to 1.3 eV, extending light absorbance range from visible to near infrared absorbance. Increase in Co:Al ratio also resulted in linearly proportional decrease in PL intensity, suggesting the formation of defects and vacancies in the LDH sheets that act as charge trap sites. However, due to the narrow band gap and band gap position of the LDHs, coprecipitated LDHs exhibited no photocatalytic activity by itself.
Therefore, to generate charge carriers with sufficient energy, UV light active TiO2 nanostructures were investigated in Chapter 4 and introduced to form a nanocomposite with CoAl LDH in Chapter 5. Nanostructured TiO2 phase, exposed facet, size and shape influence its optical, electronic and photocatalytic properties. Hence, in chapter 4, microstructural engineering of TiO¬2 was conducted. TiO2 nanoparticles, nanotubes, nanorods and nanoprisms were characterized and examined for CO2 photoreduction. It was found that CH4 selectivity of 55% was achieved by nanotubes calcined at 300°C, consisting of 65/35 wt% TiO2(B)/anatase ratio with a quantum efficiency of 0.0511%. It is believed this composition increased the active contact sites that facilitated effective electron transport from TiO2 (B) to anatase valence band for CO2 photoreduction to CH4, in a Direct Z-scheme. Calcined nanotubes displayed the highest selectivity and yield of CH4 amongst the TiO2 nanostructures due to the superior charge transfer kinetics.
Research efforts have focused on semiconductor-semiconductor composite materials, in which semiconductors with different band gaps are brought in contact that form a heterojunction at the interface. This strategy can improve charge transfer and, in some cases, spatially separates the redox sites, resulting in enhanced quantum efficiencies compared to a single semiconductor catalyst. Therefore, TiO2/CoAl LDH nanocomposites were synthesized to couple UV-visible light semiconductors. Thus harnessing a wider solar spectrum, and further improve charge separation via heterojunction formation [2]. CO2 photoreduction performance of TiO2/CoAl LDHs composites, exceeded that of pristine TiO2 and CoAl LDH. It was found that low loadings of LDH onto TiO2 nanoparticles and nanoprisms boosted their selectivity towards CH4 by as far as twice the pristine counterparts. This finding was ascribed to the successful construction of a nanocomposite material, offering high surface area, basicity, and formation of an effective Z-scheme heterojunctions with complimentary band gaps. TiO2 nanoprism/LDH (referred to as 97 wt% Nprism/LDH) exhibited the highest selectivity switch towards CH4 compared to the pristine nanoprism by 45%. Fine-tuning TiO2 wt% with CoAl LDH, for heterojunction formation is a promising route to an effective CO2 photoreduction system.
This work presented a bottom-up approach to design advanced, efficient nanocomposites for CO2 photoreduction. Insights are gained into band gap tuning, evaluating the role of crystal phase and nanostructure of the photocatalysts, as well as building effective semiconductor-semiconductor heterojunctions towards CH4 production.</p
A Geometry-Based Modelling Approach for the Line-of-Sight Probability in UAV Communications
No full textThis paper presents a geometry-based three-dimensional Probability of Line of Sight (PLoS) model for generic urban environments. The existing PLoS models are mostly empirical, based on measurements or ray-tracing simulations at specific environments. To enable Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) communication in various environments, it is urgently necessary to develop an analytical model with high parameter scalability. Through introducing the ITU model that describes a built-up environment with three parameters, we derive a closed-form PLoS model with the inputs of city built-up parameters, UAV altitude, elevation θ and azimuth φ angles between UAV and User Equipment (UE). Furthermore, we develop a geometry-based simulator to validate the proposed analytical model. The results show good agreements between the simulated results, analytical results, and 3GPP PLoS measurements. We demonstrate that the existing models provide less accurate results, which calls for re-evaluating the use cases and performance of UAV-mounted communication equipment in urban environments
Zenscape: Encouraging Microbreaks from Screen-based Work through a Tangible System
No full textRegular microbreaks from work positively contribute to one’s well-being, performance, and recovery, yet integrating them into work routine can be challenging. In response, we present Zenscape, a novel tangible system that encourages regular microbreaks through a subtle stirring water action and sound. Zenscape aims to improve the quality of the microbreaks by inviting user participation in creative micro activities that are inspired from Zen Garden philosophy. We conducted field deployments of Zenscape with seven participants who interacted with the system daily for at least 2 weeks. The study revealed that the physicality of the system brought discipline to participants’ work routine and interacting with the Zen Garden made microbreaks refreshing. Participants took frequent breaks with Zenscape, found themselves more productive and less tired at the end of the day. Based on study insights, we present three design considerations to guide the design of the future technologies for supporting regular microbreaks
Anecdotal evidence
No full textThis research investigates an anecdotal approach to architecture. Simply put, an anecdote is a short story, interesting in nature. I have realised that through being receptive to such stories, reframing stories, recalling past anecdotes or inventing new ones, I am able to find an impetus for architecture. How does this work in projects in practice? In the first instance to come into a project in a state of ‘not knowing’, so as to be receptive to what it has to say. For this to occur successfully, positioning is critical – posturing to become privy to things of interest that could come from anywhere. It results in the gradual build-up of anecdotes – to the point that they yield a kind of meta-anecdote – the most interesting short story of them all, and one that beautifully draws the others together, and offers a glimmer of architecture. This approach is latent in my personal history, way of working and body of work. Through this PhD it has been revealed and made conscious, realising a discernible shift in practice. It has been the basis of this dissertation and the presentation and exhibition, all of which are considered projects in their own right. It has been put to me that in my work I use – anecdote as a decision making armature, beyond the normalcy of decision making. Since working more explicitly in this way, I have noticed the emergence of three kinds of anecdotes. One is the use of anecdotes from the archive, another is real time anecdotes, and the third is the notion of the speculative anecdote. I do not have a preference for one over the others, and in fact, I have noticed that projects are often a mix of all three. There is also no preference for the type of meta-anecdote, and nor is it contingent on the types of anecdotes that facilitated it. Anecdotes from the archive are those brought back from memory, that have particular relevance to a project situation. Real time anecdotes are those that emerge from/about the project situation itself. They may be direct transcriptions, or the editorial of an ordinary story to render it with interest. Speculative anecdotes are those that extrapolate from a known or tangible position, actualities re-cast to give impetus to a future possibility. I have come to realise the cut through of anecdotes. The way that committing to anecdote an occurrence, can make it an occasion, committing to anecdote the inanimate can make it animate, committing to anecdote the ordinary can make it extraordinary………... Importantly, these are not generally anecdotes about architecture, they are anecdotes about anything except architecture – but they offer a glimmer of architecture – and then they become architecture. From this, I now have faith in submission – submitting myself both to the project situation in which I find myself, and to the process I have described. I realise that when things are not clarifying, it’s usually because I need to go further outside of myself. I have likened my approach to building up a case based on anecdotal evidence in a legal sense - a series of anecdotes that corroborate one another, in search of a meta anecdote – a conviction that needs to be reached. The dissertation is a project – it too is a collection of anecdotes, that concoct my conviction – my way in to architecture. It includes anecdotes that describe a personal history, a way of working and a body of work. It is intentionally structured in anecdotal fashion. Each anecdote is just that – an interesting short story. In the way of great stories the anecdotes are illustrated – the text and the illustration offering mutual support, as in my project work. The exhibit and examination was structured similarly – a series of anecdotes, that provided a construct for the occasion, about which architecture was formed. I have come to realise that in my work, anecdotes allow me to go places. They open up possibilities that other processes do not. I have also realised that anecdotes start conversations, conversations form relationships, and relationships make architecture. This is true of both my approach within and external to the practice.I have realised an affinity with a range of architects whom I consider to be ‘deferential’. And because I am situated in that realm, I am less obsessed with the other architects who occupy it, than in the situations in which I find myself. This approach, formed by my personal history, has yielded a way of working, resulting in an idiosyncratic body of work.</p
SCONE-GAN: Semantic Contrastive Learning-Based Generative Adversarial Network for an End-to-End Image Translation
No full textSCONE-GAN presents an end-to-end image translation, which is shown to be effective for learning to generate realistic and diverse scenery images. Most current image-to-image translation approaches are devised as two mappings: a translation from the source to target domain and another to represent its inverse. While successful in many applications, these approaches may suffer from generating trivial solutions with limited diversity. That is because these methods learn more frequent associations rather than the scene structures. To mitigate the problem, we propose SCONE-GAN that utilises graph convolutional networks to learn the objects dependencies, maintain the image structure and preserve its semantics while transferring images into the target domain. For more realistic and diverse image generation we introduce style reference image. We enforce the model to maximize the mutual information between the style image and output. The proposed method explicitly maximizes the mutual information between the related patches, thus encouraging the generator to produce more diverse images. We validate the proposed algorithm for image-to-image translation and stylizing outdoor images. Both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on four dataset
An exploratory study on the benefits of transit orientated development (TOD) to rail infrastructure projects
No full textPurpose – The purpose of this study was to explore and critique the benefits and disbenefits that transport
orientated development (TOD) brings to neighbourhoods in proximity to public transport hubs.
Design/methodology/approach – This is an exploratory study that may also be described as a rapid review
that aims to provide coverage of the available literature in a systematic process that is simplified to produce
information in a timely manner. Due to the relatively small number of available studies from peer-reviewed
sources, the variety of methods and data used and the constrained time available for this study, the study did
not immediately lend itself to a more thorough systematic literature review.
Findings – The literature shows the discourse on TOD upholds its promise to create a high-density mixed-use
walkable neighbourhood supported by transport infrastructure, increasing accessibility, minimising vehicle
dependency, reducing traffic congestion, moderating urban sprawl and reducing pollution. There are few
articles on the negative aspects of TOD, particularly concerning social exclusion, crime, sustainability and
concerns about gentrification of neighbourhoods.
Research limitations/implications – The study did not immediately lend itself to a more thorough
systematic literature review due to the relatively small number of available studies, the variety of methods and
data used and the constrained time available for this study.
Originality/value – This study allows social investigators, policymakers and developers understand the
benefits and disbenefits of TOD including policy implications regarding potential criminogenic factors