85000 research outputs found
Sort by
Single, Combined, and Multigenerational Toxicity Assessment of Selected Pharmaceuticals to Daphnia carinata
No full textChemical pollution in aquatic environments has been a long-standing issue. Wastewater treatment plants are not fully equipped to remove all chemicals, leading to growing concerns about pharmaceuticals and their potential toxic effects on aquatic organisms and ecosystems. These chemicals enter the environment through various sources, including faeces, urine, industrial, urban, and hospital effluents, and improper disposal. Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and anticancer drugs are among aquatic systems' most commonly found pharmaceuticals. Ibuprofen and naproxen are widely used NSAIDs, and their availability over the counter contributes to their overuse and environmental presence. Methotrexate and cyclophosphamide, widely used anticancer drugs, raise concerns due to their DNA-targeting mode of action, which could harm aquatic organisms.Despite ongoing concerns about the presence and effects of these pharmaceuticals in the environment, few studies have investigated how environmentally relevant concentrations impact aquatic life, both as individual compounds and in mixtures. Research into the interactions between pharmaceuticals and freshwater organisms remains scarce and not fully understood. This thesis addresses this knowledge gap by testing ibuprofen and naproxen in single environmentally relevant concentrations and binary mixtures, as well as methotrexate and cyclophosphamide in similar conditions, using a freshwater invertebrate. The Australian native freshwater crustacean Daphnia carinata, an essential primary consumer in freshwater ecosystems, was chosen as the test species. In this study, D. carinata was exposed to the four pharmaceuticals at environmentally relevant concentrations, with assessments made on reproductive and physiological parameters, mortality, and metabolic profiles.For ibuprofen and naproxen, reproductive and physiological effects were assessed by exposing D. carinata to concentrations ranging from 0 to 300 μg/L for 21 days. Both drugs significantly affected several endpoints at the lowest tested concentration (3.7 μg/L), including the total number of neonates per individual, the number of broods, and delayed egg production. Additional effects included growth inhibition in adult daphnids and the presence of males and ephippia. However, feeding and heart rate showed no significant differences from the control.The study also investigated the effects of ibuprofen and naproxen across multiple generations (F0–F3) in D. carinata, using concentrations ranging from 0 to 2.5 μg/L in single and binary mixtures. Both drugs significantly altered reproductive endpoints in all generations, reducing neonate numbers even at the lowest concentrations. Male individuals and ephippia were observed at all concentrations. To evaluate recovery, F3 neonates were transferred to a clean medium (no drugs) for one generation (F4). Although neonate numbers increased in F4 compared to F3, they remained lower than the control, suggesting that ibuprofen and naproxen can have long-lasting effects. Additionally, binary mixtures exhibited more severe toxic effects than single compounds.Experiments with methotrexate and cyclophosphamide at environmentally relevant concentrations (0–10 μg/L) were conducted over 21 days to determine their impact on D. carinata. Both drugs affected reproductive endpoints, delaying and reducing most of them. Additive effects on fecundity were primarily observed in binary mixtures, with occasional synergistic and antagonistic interactions. This suggests that when mixed in the environment, these drugs could amplify toxic effects on aquatic organisms, significantly impacting freshwater ecosystems.To explore potential metabolic disruptions, D. carinata was exposed to methotrexate and cyclophosphamide in single and binary mixtures (0–10 μg/L) for 10 days. Thirty-eight metabolites and key metabolic pathways related to amino acids and energy production were significantly affected. A specific binary mixture (10 μg/L MTX + 2 μg/L CYP) had the most substantial impact on the metabolic profile of D. carinata. Cyclophosphamide alone caused more prominent disruptions in metabolites compared to methotrexate.When evaluated in conjunction, the results of this thesis show that ibuprofen, naproxen, methotrexate, and cyclophosphamide can alter significant endpoints in the life cycle of D. carinata. This study effectively assessed the effects of the two NSAIDs and two anticancer drugs on different endpoints in the test organism, highlighting the importance of identifying and understanding the deleterious effects of pharmaceuticals in the environment, even at low concentrations, on aquatic biota. The results will inform the development of water quality guidelines for these chemicals to ensure accurate ecological risk assessments and safeguard freshwater ecosystems.</p
Galvanising criticality: Analysing trans health policy in a hostile political context
No full textINTRODUCTION: Pathologisation has long provided the architecture for governing access to gender-affirming medical care. An explicit orientation towards human rights in the latest revision of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s (WPATH) Standards of Care is an important success in achieving trans depathologisation. This development is the result of sustained efforts by trans activists who have been dismantling pathologising structures and practices in the face of intensifying opposition and vitriolic attacks. METHODS: I present findings from the comparison of approaches to depathologisation in the WPATH Standards for Care, version 7 (SOC-7), and an alternative best-practices guide created by the Spanish Network for Depathologisation of Trans Identities (the Guide) using the What’s the Problem Represented to be? (WPR) approach to policy analysis. This WPR analysis is informed by trans and First Nations policy workers, scholars, and activists. This methodological–conceptual approach is used to explore uncertainties about the limits of a liberal rights model in the Guide. FINDINGS: Situating rights in the broader field of governing logics indicates that, although this approach seeks to replace harmful practices, it does little to address underlying colonial mechanisms. Noticing uncertainty supported consideration of the dynamic ways that medicalisation and rights, liberalism and neoliberalism, and colonial power are sustained in trans health policy. CONCLUSION: In an increasingly hostile context, when uncertainty about the transformative capacity of human rights necessarily shifts focus, returning to trans analytics provides solid ground for deepening interrogation of the colonial conditions of care to enable full depathologisation to unfold.</p
Advancing Wheat Quality Assessment through Spectroscopy and Machine Learning
No full textFood quality assessment is a complex issue that involves considering multiple biochemical and physiological attributes. Foods rich in carbohydrates, such as wheat-based breads and other processed grain and cereal products, greatly depend on the quality of species harvested, as well as any storage and treatments that they might have gone through before being processed into food items. Therefore, evaluating the physicochemical and chemical composition characteristics of raw grains at the time of harvest, as well as during the food production cycle, is crucial for both farmers and the food industry given that wheat is the primary grain crop consumed worldwide. Locally, Australia produces 25 million tonnes of wheat per year, accounting for 3.5 % of annual global production, thus the development of a technology that can analyse the quality of cereal grain at the point of harvest and during the food production process is a highly desirable goal.Traditional quality control measures for wheat and other grains involve many manual steps, mostly utilising specialist laboratory equipment that is operated by well-trained personnel, making it slow, costly, and impractical for many farmers and mill operators to readily access. Spectroscopy-based technologies offer to provide on-the-spot grain characterisation and have started to be used within the industry due to their relatively low cost and near instant response. Combined with automated computer analysis, spectroscopy-based techniques have the potential to identify the origin and quality of a sample and can potentially be used to either complement or completely replace traditional grain analysis techniques based on food chemistry procedures. Attempts to couple near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy techniques with chemometric and multivariate methods such as principal component analysis (PCA) have already been shown to provide important characterisation data and have been used to help classify the quality of the harvested grains. However, techniques employing PCA tend to fall short when dealing with non-linear relationships in multidimensional complex datasets, and the technique becomes impractical for predicting complex parameters such as protein content without the addition of prior knowledge and the input and oversight of a trained technician. Machine learning (ML) methods, on the other hand, are applicable even without prior domain expertise, offering a data-driven approach for classification and can be extended to regression- based models that are suitable for predicting parameters such as protein content. Employing ML algorithms for spectroscopic data analysis applications has shown great promise for automated grain characterisation as they learn from existing data to achieve high accuracy for predicting future patterns. Currently, established spectroscopic techniques for grain characterisation within the sector have been limited to near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy. However, the NIR region (12500 to 4000 cm−1) only offers limited capabilities for analysing chemical structures, whereas a more advanced technique based on Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) is significantly more sensitive to identifying individual chemical bonds due to it operating in the mid-infrared ranging (4000 to 400 cm-1). Compared to NIR, the FTIR provides far richer chemical fingerprint information and can be used to extract detailed chemical structure and functional group information that can then be used to identify the origin and chemical composition of the sample with relatively greater detail.This work is aimed at combining ML techniques with FTIR data to develop a tool that can assess the chemical composition of wheat samples to overcome the limitation of traditional PCA analysis or the need for complex food chemistry techniques. The research is divided into three different phases. The first phase focuses on combining FTIR with supervised ML approach to classify wheat flour from other flour samples made from barley, rye, oats, and durum. The second phase of work employs the same approach to demonstrate that it is possible to accurately classify flour that was milled from different wheat varieties, including wheat grown in the same year and from two consecutive years. Finally, the last contribution of the work investigates the use of regression-based ML methods to predict the moisture and protein content in wheat samples using models that were developed using up to 15 different batches of wheat.Machine learning algorithms such as linear discriminant analysis (LDA), k-nearest neighbour (KNN), naïve Bayes (NB), support vector machine (SVM), and random forest (RF) are investigated to classify and determine the important functional groups responsible for classifying the grain samples. The results obtained for the initial phase of the research demonstrated that FTIR with LDA, and SVM have the potential to classify the flour of five different grain species with 100 % accuracy using the raw and unprocessed spectra acquired straight from the FTIR machine. Due to the success of the initial work, a significant amount of work was invested in acquiring and building an FTIR dataset of 15 separate wheat batches, resulting in an overall dataset size of 6228 individual wheat sample spectra. When the ML algorithms were applied on the dataset, it resulted in over 99 % accuracy when classifying wheat batches in models containing either 5, 10, or 15 different wheat sample batches. The dataset included spectra of Australian hard, Australian soft, weather damaged Australian hard and Australian prime wheat varieties with different moisture and protein contents. As a final contribution, a regression-based ML method was developed to predict the moisture and protein content of samples derived from 15 different wheat batches. Significantly, the regression-based ML method is shown to predict the moisture and protein content of each sample with an accuracy of 95.99 % and 96.11 %, respectively, where the predicted value falls within the 2- standard deviation labelled value of each batch. The coefficient of determination (R2) of the models was 0.85 and 0.98, respectively, which indicates the reliability in the model's prediction performance.This work clearly demonstrates that ML-based methods together with FTIR spectroscopy can provide a practical, fast, and efficient technique to analyse samples and eliminate human-based errors over traditional food chemistry and PCA analysis methodologies. Furthermore, the results produced by the developed technique resulting from this work have the potential to significantly reduce the costs of wheat and grain analysis practices, whilst also enabling complex analysis to be taken in the field or at the farm gate rather than limiting it to the laboratory.</p
Using ChatGPT to Learn Vocabulary in Context – The Case of In-Service Teachers Learning Vietnamese
No full textIn our research, we aim to refine the use of ChatGPT for independent language learning through action research and a cyclical design that involves continuous feedback and improvement. In the first cycle, five learners (in-service non-Vietnamese teachers at RMIT University Vietnam) studied a set of prompts pre-designed by the researchers. They experimented with a 30-minute Vietnamese-learning chatting session with ChatGPT about a topic of their choice. The provided set included prompts asking ChatGPT to generate topic-specific vocabulary, reading passages, word definitions, and language tests. After the chat sessions, the researchers gathered learners’ reflections about what they had learned and aimed to evaluate the student’s learning through the chat session. Their responses were coded and analysed thematically to identify their attitudes towards using the tool. The primary results suggested that the prompts could be used for vocabulary-in-context learning and have potential for use in language teaching. However, some limitations of ChatGPT have been observed, shedding light on future research on using ChatGPT and similar tools for independent language learning.</p
Accounting and Accountability in Resource Risk Management Control Systems: What Can Public Health Care Environments Learn From the COVID-19 Pandemic?
No full textThe COVID-19 pandemic presented unprecedented global challenges, significantly affecting healthcare sectors worldwide and raising profound concerns about preparedness for future crises. The outbreak placed substantial strain on health systems, often revealing critical inadequacies in resources, governance and existing management control and accountability mechanisms, leading to service disruptions and exacerbating societal inequalities. This highlighted the complexity of managing resources and risks during systemic health emergencies and underscored the urgent need for more resilient, equitable and accountable approaches within global health governance. This thesis critically examines the interplay of resource allocation mechanisms, risk management control systems (RMCS) and accountability mechanisms within major international health organisations (IHOs) and associated public health systems during the 2019–2024 pandemic period. Employing a critical realist philosophical stance, the research utilises qualitative content analysis of 620 publicly available documents from ten key IHOs. The research identifies critical resource risks, evaluates management strategies and examines the role and limitations of specific non-financial and financial accounting and control tools employed within RMCS during the pandemic response. Contingency theory and resource dependence theory serve as primary analytical lenses for the interpretation of the context-dependency of system effectiveness and the management of crucial external resource dependencies. The research finds that traditional RMCS and accounting frameworks—often siloed, reactive and focused primarily on financial controls—proved insufficient for the systemic, interconnected and dynamic nature of the pandemic crisis. The central argument derived from the synthesised findings is that achieving effective pandemic resilience demands a fundamental paradigm shift towards RMCS and associated management accounting systems and control practices that are simultaneously anticipatory—embedding equity considerations and systemic risk analysis into pre-crisis planning—and dynamically adaptive—enabling transparent, accountable and stakeholder-responsive decision-making during crises to mitigate fragmentation and injustice. This study contributes an empirically grounded, theoretically informed analysis of the complex interplay between risks, strategies and control tools in global health emergencies. It offers critical insights for the development of more integrated, adaptive and equitable RMCS for future pandemic preparedness and response.</p
Impact of Solvent on Crystal Structure of Nucleic Acid Encapsulated Polymorphic Zeolitic Imidazole Framework and Bioactivity
No full textMetal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are a group of porous materials formed through coordination chemistry. Their beneficial properties can be utilised in many different fields, including sensors and therapeutics. Their unique physicochemical properties make them attractive candidates for the delivery of therapeutic biomolecules. Their metal-ligand coordination disintegrates in acidic conditions, making them ideal candidates for the delivery of cancer therapy drugs. ZIF-8 is one of the most studied molecular objects capable of protecting drugs, enzymes, and nucleic acids. While some progress has been made in the field of MOF-based nucleic acid delivery, preliminary studies have only focused on the capability of MOFs as non-viral delivery vectors. Phase transitions and polymorphism of ZIFs may have a significant impact on the behaviour of materials under varying conditions. Therefore, understanding the crystal phases of ZIF-8 is essential to tailor and control the physical, chemical, and mechanical properties of ZIF-8 for biomolecule encapsulation and delivery. For biomedical applications, it is crucial to find the best candidate for gene delivery with maximum therapeutic cargo and on-demand release potential. Finding a potential solution for cancer therapy has been an ongoing challenge for several decades. Therefore, materials sciences bring hope in making new candidates for cancer therapy. As cancerous cells possess unique physiological and biochemical properties, they can become resistant to traditional chemotherapy agents. The factors that influence the properties of ZIF agents and their ability to deliver nucleic acids to mammalian cancer cells are yet to be explored. The principal aim of this thesis is to optimise methods for making phase-dependent ZIF biocomposites, to screen optimal phases for gene delivery and cellular uptake, to understand their stability and DNA encapsulation efficiency, to investigate the effects of solvents on phase transformation, and to develop methods to reduce the size of these biocomposites for retaining bioactivity and efficient delivery. The results of this project suggest that the mass fraction of precursors affects ZIF crystal topology, while washing solvent regulates the biocomposite crystal phase and stability. The interaction between ZIF biocomposites and serum protein is influenced by crystal topology, with porous sod ZIF showing greater interaction than non-porous carbonated ZIF-C. The project also explores the role of the tertiary amine in the biomimetic mineralisation of nucleic acid encapsulated ZIF, finding that low concentrations of amine reduce particle size and alter crystal phase while maintaining loading content integrity. Overall, these findings highlight the optimal ZIF phase for nucleic acid encapsulation and delivery, with potential benefit for gene therapy and biomedical applications.</p
Towards identifying barriers of floodwall infrastructure developments – a systematic review
No full textThis paper presents a systematic literature review that identifies and categorises barriers to floodwall infrastructure development, with a focus on the transition from Traditional Floodwall Design (TFD) to Climate-Adaptive Floodwall Design (CAFD). Using thematic analysis, the study synthesises key environmental, technical, institutional, and socio-political challenges impacting flood resilience. The findings contribute to the development of future adaptive frameworks by highlighting the critical need for integrated, stakeholder-driven, and climate-resilient design practices. The research was conducted in accordance with academic ethical standards, with no primary data collection involved.</p
“Cheerful Young Phonies”: Humour and Hegemony in Glam Metal Music
No full textThis thesis examines how humour has been used in texts produced by and about 1980s metal musicians to variously maintain and resist hegemony. During this period, metal reached its widest audience via the accessibility of the glam metal subgenre and the commercial channels of Music Television (MTV) and studio comedy films which together codified the ‘headbanger’ aesthetic, idiolect, and humour. Through close analyses of several types of texts produced by bands (lyrics, album artwork, music videos, interview appearances) and about them (documentaries, comedy films, album reviews, stand-up comedy ‘bits’), I consider how humour can be mobilised for and against hegemony. Antonio Gramsci’s neo-Marxist concept of hegemony remains a fruitful way of understanding the contestation of power in society, as certain ideologies predominate by their normative propagation as ‘common sense’ by hegemonic institutions such as governments, schools, and the media.
The connotative language and performativity of humour transforms the groups of metal musicians, their fans, music critics and commentators, and stand-up comedians who both evoke and invoke metal (‘rock comics’) into overlapping discursive (and metalinguistic) communities. This thesis interrogates the ways such communities maintain hegemony (for example, encouraging through ‘jeer pressure’ the uncritical, consenting laughter towards sexist jokes, thus maintaining the state of hegemonic masculinity) and, conversely, challenge it (by mocking and satirising groups perceived to preside over them, from parents and teachers to record executives).
Throughout a critical discourse analysis—a methodological approach to texts which shares the political impetus of Gramsci’s hegemony thesis—I make several contributions to the metal scholarship. First, I historicise glam metal humourists as a pastiche of pre-existing roles in American media and folk culture, including stand-up comedians, variety show hosts, pantomime dames, and Western cowboys. Second, I establish irony as a technique glam metal musicians use to pre-emptively deflect criticisms of their poor behaviour, and satire as a means of appealing to young fans by lampooning the conservative conventions of the adult world. Third, I re-evaluate the documentaries and comedy films which were responsible for proliferating the metal subculture around the world by parodying the ‘headbanger’ archetype. Finally, I consider the current state of glam metal humour through a case study of the anachronistic and provocative spoof band Steel Panther. The analyses draw on previous literature while also asserting original interpretations of myriad texts, throughout which hegemony is foregrounded as a useful theoretical framework for appreciating the dual capacity of humour for both maintaining and challenging power.</p
Critical theory and audible feedback systems: a textual construction of acoustic space
No full textIn this project I set out to devise a series of object specific audible feedback investigations founded in Derridean deconstructive terminology. The parameters for this study were drawn from terminology as it existed in the time period of mid to late 1960s, the era in which Jacques Derrida first published the texts that became the foundation for the theory known as deconstruction. I begin with specific elements within this theory defining my investigations into the physical objects. I then translate the findings from these examinations back into the theory via relevant science of the era from which the deconstructive texts were published, specifically advances within cybernetics that resulted in the new science of systems theory. I am then able to examine these physical objects in terms of their audibility and feedback processes, based in the structures from which the theory was extracted. I do this in order to bridge the gap between the physical investigations into the recording devices, and the theory that initially instigated the project. I link the objects - tape/reel-to-reel/minidisc and dat recorders – which also stem from advances within the natural sciences of the same time period, to draw parallels and connections from these aspects of science into a deconstructive context.</p
Uncanny Windhoek: mapping the spatial logic, urban imaginaries, and hauntings of an African capital city
No full textThis thesis explores Namibia's capital, Windhoek, by combining spatial and phenomenological data to develop a new contextual understanding of its lived experience and subjective qualities of place. Windhoek is used as a case study because it presents a particularly unsettling disconnect between the formal systems governing and producing the city and residents' socio-cultural backgrounds and everyday spatial practices. The city has been shaped by successive social engineering projects, from colonialism to apartheid to Namibia's current form of democracy. This spatial legacy continues to segregate residents by income in present-day Windhoek. I argue that this spatial legacy conditions residents' everyday spatial behaviours and notions of place and belonging in the city. I examine these issues through the concept of the postcolonial uncanny, which I develop as a conceptual framework to explore how historical power relations continue to resonate within Windhoek's contemporary urban environments.
This thesis uses the postcolonial uncanny as a conceptual and analytical framework that combines spatial, psychological, and behavioural dimensions. The concept introduces tension through the coexistence of seemingly contradictory phenomena, operating at the intersections of familiarity and disorientation, where things appear both recognisable and strange, ordinary and eerie. This thesis incrementally develops and tests hypotheses about how Windhoek is uncanny through different types of data using design-based analytical tools like mapping and spatial diagrams. These incremental understandings are then evaluated against data produced by non-expert participants. The data include visual artifacts such as mental maps, a psychogeographic survey of Windhoek, and photo elicitation, and interviews. Mapping is used as a tool for interpreting this data, illustrating the connections between how Windhoek is perceived and its spatial layout.
The dissertation explores Windhoek's postcolonial uncanny across three inter-related nested registers, from the macro to the micro scale, to better understand 1) how the historical origins and arrangement of the city's urban spaces continue to condition residents' notions of belonging in present-day Windhoek, 2) how the city's architectural and morphological aspects influence residents' everyday spatial behaviours and patterns, and finally 3) the latent residue of trauma and dislocation that haunts Windhoek's urban landscape and contrasts with its official memorial landscape. These registers are drawn on to consider residents' objective topological understandings of the city's spatial structure, their movement through it, and their subjective, qualitative social perceptions about place, value and belonging