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Growth, characterisation and probing the novel magnetic character of rare earth nitride (HoN, DyN & DyₓHoₓ-1N) thin films
No full textEmpirical thesis.Bibliography: pages 232-248.1. Introduction -- 2. Experimental procedures -- 3. Optimising the growth of HoN thin films -- 4. Mixed REN thin films DyₓHo1-ₓN -- 5. Magnetic study on REN films -- 6. Conclusion -- Appendices -- References.The rare earth nitride (REN) series area has attracted considerable research interest because of the coexistence of semiconducting and ferromagnetic properties. A major goal of this research has been to improve understanding of these materials. Thus, an in-depth study on the growth of holmium nitride (HoN) thin films is presented.The other major goal of this research has been to understand the magnetic structure of REN thin films. HoN thin films were grown via ion-assisted deposition (IAD). A systematic study was performed investigating the effect substrate temperature, nitrogen partial pressure, nitrogen ionisation state, deposition rate and sample thickness have on the sample quality.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (x, 248 pages) colour illustration
Charity and the letters of Barsanuphius and John of Gaza
No full textTheoretical thesis.Bibliography: pages 206-228Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. The City of Gaza in Late Antiquity -- Chapter 3. Gazan monasticism and the Letters -- Chapter 4. Giving gifts in the Letters -- Chapter 5. Entertaining the stranger in the Letters -- Chapter 6. Caring for the sick in the Letters -- Chapter 7-Conclusion.This dissertation examines the Letters of Barsanuphius and John in order to analyse their view of charity (giving gifts, welcoming strangers and caring for the sick), as well as the relationship between the Gazan advisors, wealth and benefactors. First of all, we investigate the Gazan holy men's attitude towards giving gifts to the poor. They primarily advise their lay interlocutors to get involved in giving gifts by mentioning the spiritual rewards available. However, they do impose some limitations on monastic giving; they suggest only mature monks participate in such giving in order to protect the younger monastic disciples from distractions that might interrupt their ascetic lives. Episcopal leaders are also expected to protect their congregations from outside officials, performing their role as guides and protectors. With regard to entertaining strangers, the respected Gazan elders place a great deal of emphasis on hospitality within the scope of one's own personal ability. Furthermore, they recommend different levels of hospitality in proportion to the status of recipients, as well as charity with discernment. They suggest that their interlocutors do what they can to help the destitute, taking into consideration their physical, material and psychological needs. However, just as with the giving of charity, the main focus of John and Barsanuphius is not the poor themselves, but rather the care of their own lay and monastic followers. The last charitable activity which we investigate in this thesis is caring for the sick. Both Barsanuphius and John generally encourage their lay patients to seek cures for their illnesses with contemporary medical care and practices. However, they do take a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards monastic patients. While they permit some sick monks to use vii medical facilities and nursing care to cure their illnesses, they also encourage others to endure bodily suffering in order to obtain spiritual profit.Overall, Barsanuphius and John require their lay and monastic disciples to perform charity in different ways. While they do consider the beneficiaries, their spiritual direction is basically concentrated on the benefactors, in particular, their spiritual and ascetic wellbeing. This spiritual direction is related to their self-understanding as spiritual fathers, meditators and intercessors as well as defenders.1 online resource (228 pages
Novel fluorescent natural products for biotechnology
No full textTheoretical thesis.Bibliography: pages 35-591 Introduction -- 2 Experimental -- 3 Results and discussion -- 4 Conclusion -- 5 References -- 6 Supplementary Materials.Fluorescent natural products are becoming of interest in the fields of medicine, biotechnology and environmental science. However, while nature is a souce of a vast number of bioactive compounds very few fluorescent probes have been discovered from natural products. This research is addressing the discovery of new fluorescent pigments and to expand its application into a new domain. A fungus, Epicoccum nigrum, was chosen for this project. E. nigrum is the sole member of the genus Epicoccum (family Pleosporaceae) and gets its name from its dark colour. The colour is produced by red, blue and purple pigments, one of them ( epicocconone) has been commercialised as a total protein stain for proteomics (Deep Purple; GE Healthcare), a fluorescent stain for live cell imaging (LavaCell; Fluorotechnics) and a protein quantification solution (Fluoroprofile; Sigma-Aldrich). This project aims to isolate new pigments from this fungus through the optimisation of growth conditions on agar plates and moving to medium scale fermentation, extraction, purification and structure elucidation of other pigments.1 online resource ( vii, 52 pages pages
What language games capabilities are required by members of boards to ensure effective governance and ethical decision making?: A study of the lived experience of a Greenpeace director from the perspective of the philosophy of Richard Rorty
No full textTheoretical thesis.Bibliography: pages 66-68Section 1 Introduction -- Section 2 Autoethnographic introduction: raising the question of the thesis in the context of practice -- Section 3 Literature review -- Section 4 Rorty's pragmatism -- Section 5 Section 5 - Director responsibilities, the moral dimension -- Section 6 Director capabilities -- Section 7 Application of capabilities to personal experienceThis paper has been inspired by a series of events related to my directorship of Greenpeace Australia Pacific. The paper will explore the role of language games at a board level and will draw on Richard Rorty's notion of the role of re-description and irony in working across different language games. Organisations are composed of multiple language games. Whilst there has been much academic research on organisational language games, they have not been explored in detail at the board of directors level. There is also a moral dimension to director duties and the broader community will judge the behaviour of an organisation against a set of externally established language games. I have argued that, in a modern liberal democracy like Australia, directors need to accept that the organisations they direct are moral agents and the actions of these organisations need to be justified to all stakeholders impacted in terms that these stakeholders will accept. My claim is that to meet their responsibilities to stakeholders and the broader community, all directors on a board require first, a well-developed moral intuition with an appreciation of the moral perspectives of various stakeholders impacted by the actions of the organisation they direct. Second, directors need to understand the language games used by other relevant stakeholders and be able to re-describe justifications in ways that all stakeholders would understand and accept. I am using the anti-foundationalist philosophy of Richard Rorty because he recognises that individuals view the world through their personal final vocabularies. Rorty provides the tools to understand how to move between language games, and also, how organisations as moral agents can create new vocabularies that can pave the way for a better world. Rorty provides us with a framework within which to map out a set of language game competencies for members of boards.1 online resource (68 pages
Defining and evaluating an operational definition of potentially preventable hospital readmission
No full textTheoretical thesis.Bibliography: pages 62-72.1. Introduction -- 2. Current performance indicators of unplanned hospital readmission -- 3. Definition of potentially preventable hospital readmissions -- 4. Implementation and results -- 5. Conclusion.Readmissions to hospital are a globally recognised problem. Currently no standardized validated definition for potentially preventable hospital readmissions exists. Instead,various forms of unplanned hospital readmission rates are used as indicators of the quality of care received in hospitals. This reduces the reliability of current readmission measures that is expected from high-quality indicators of care.The aim of this research project was to develop, operationalise, and validate a definition of potentially preventable readmission that can be used as part of a readmission performance indicator. An algorithm was used to determine preventability from hospital administrative data. This definition was validated using an audit of readmissions in the Northern NSW Local Health District. Preventability due to hospital factors was accurately determined by the algorithm. Patient, transition to community care and community care factors could not be properly identified from hospital administrative data.1 online resource (72 pages
iMAP-CampUS: a theoretical framework to measure user's behavioural intention in augmented reality
No full textEmpirical thesis.Bibliography: pages 1-6.Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. Literature review -- Chapter 3. iMAP_CampUS -- Chapter 4. Methodology -- Chapter 5. Data analysis, results and discussion -- Chapter 6. Conclusion -- References -- Appendices.As technology penetrates into our lives, the vital need for institutions to provide rapid access to information has grown. Recently, Augmented Reality (AR) has emerged as a technology for educational institutions to enhance users' experience by overlaying computational information into their reality. iMAP_CampUS is a mobile AR application showing campus-related information superimposed on a map of Macquarie University. Using iMAP_CampUS app, our goal is to investigate the factors influencing the acceptance of a typical mobile AR system. The thesis proposes a theoretical framework with 14 research hypotheses based on UTAUT, IS success factors and Motivation theory. This framework is empirically examined using web-based survey data from a sample of 86 users. We use Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and Partial Least Squares (PLS) to evaluate the acceptance and behavioural intention to use iMAP-CampUS app. The results indicate that ten research hypotheses have been significantly supported, while four have been rejected. The findings state that perceived enjoyment and user's satisfaction are important determinants for the use of iMap-CampUS. However, performance expectancy has not demonstrated any significant impacts on behavioural intention to use the app. We believe this research has both practical and theoretical implications on the design of future mobile AR apps.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (x, 31, 6, 14 pages) diagrams, graphs, table
Adaptive process model matching: improving the effectiveness of label-based matching through automated configuration and expert feedback
No full textEmpirical thesis.Bibliography: pages 261-300.1. Introducing the subject -- 2. Modeling business processes -- 3. Matching business process models -- 4. Comparing activity labels -- 5. Analyzing structure and behavior -- 6. Learning from expert feedback -- 7. Discussing the results -- Identified literature -- Acronyms -- Symbols -- Bibliography.Process model matchers automate the detection of activities that represent similar functionality in different models. Thus, they provide support for various tasks related to the management of business processes including model collection management and process design. Yet, prior research primarily demonstrated the matchers' effectiveness, i.e., the accuracy and the completeness of the results. In this context, all data is used for the matcher development and the validity of the design decisions is not studied. A result of these shortcomings is that existing matchers yield a varying and typically low effectiveness when applied to different datasets.With that in mind, the thesis studies the effectiveness of matchers by separating development from evaluation data and by empirically analyzing the validity and the limitations of design decisions. In more detail, the thesis develops matching techniques that rely on different sources of information. First, the activity labels are considered as natural-language descriptions and the Bag-of-Words Technique is introduced. In comparison to the state of the art it achieves a high effectiveness. However, its effectiveness depends on the degree to which the underlying knowledge sources reflect the domain characteristics of the models. Moreover, it needs to be configured for each model collection which can require a huge manual effort. Second, the Order Preserving Bag-of-Words Technique analyzes control flow dependencies between activities in order to automatically configure the Bag-of-Words Technique and to maximize its effectiveness. Thus, it relieves experts from manually configuring the matchers. Third, expert feedback is used to adapt the matchers to the domain characteristics of process model collections and to further improve the effectiveness. Here, the Adaptive Bag-of-Words Technique is introduced. It analyzes expert feedback in order to continuously adjust the matching process and yields a strongly improved effectiveness. Consequently, it outperforms state-of-the-art matchers as well as the other matchers from this thesis.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (xxii, 300 pages) diagrams, graphs, table
Rendering of cultural references: a case study of the films 300 and Gladiator : a thesis in audiovisual translation
No full textTheoretical thesis.Bibliography: pages 70-74.Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. Review of related literature -- Chapter 3. Methodology and proposed translation strategies for cultural references -- Chapter 4. Data analysis, discussion and findings -- Chapter 5. Conclusions -- References.Language and culture have always been two sides of the same coin. In the field of translation, many studies have been conducted to illustrate the complex relationship between language and culture, as they bond tightly together and are deemed inseparable. However, with the proliferation of advanced technology such as the Internet, mass media, DVDs and satellite channels, people have become more exposed to other cultures. Therefore, it has become evident that Audiovisual Translation (AVT) is essential to bridge the communication gap between cultures. Subtitling is one of the dominant modes of AVT in the Middle East, yet only a few studies have been conducted in this domain. The main aims of this thesis are to identify the most common cultural references that occur in two American feature films, namely 300 and Gladiator; to detect the most dominant translation strategies applied by subtitlers in rendering these cultural references from English into Arabic; to determine the orientation of translation towards foreignisation or domestication in terms of loyalty to the source or target culture; and to verify the main factors which motivated subtitlers to opt for a certain strategy over another. The findings indicate that source language (SL)-oriented translation strategies are most common, and borrowing and direct translation are the most used strategies among other translation strategies. The genre of period dramas, and in particular sword-and-sandal films, transculturality and co-text have been the chief factors in the decision to favour one strategy over another. Finally, the selection of solutions in tackling cultural references has not been motivated by agency, but has been left to the arbitrary choices of subtitlers.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (xi, 74 pages
Modeling topics and knowledge bases with vector representations
No full textEmpirical thesis.Bibliography: pages 119-145.1. Introduction -- 2. Background -- 3. Improving topic models with word representations -- 4. STransE: a novel embedding model of entities and relationships -- 5. Neighborhood mixture model for knowledge base completion -- 6. Conclusion -- Bibliography.Motivated by the recent success of utilizing latent feature vector representations (i.e. embeddings) in various natural language processing tasks, this thesis investigates how latent feature vector representations can help build better topic models and improve link prediction models for knowledge base completion. The first objective of this thesis is to incorporate latent feature word representations that contain external information from a large corpus in order to improve topic inference in a small corpus. The second objective is to develop new embedding models for predicting missing relationships between entities in knowledge bases. In particular, the major contributions of this thesis are summarized as follows:We propose two latent feature topic models which integrate word representations trained on large external corpora into two Dirichlet multinomial topic models: a Latent Dirichlet Allocation model and a one-topic-per-document Dirichlet Multinomial Mixture model.We introduce a triple-based embedding model named STransE to improve complex relationship prediction in knowledge bases. In addition, we also describe a new embedding approach, which combines the Latent Dirichlet Allocation model and the STransE model, to improve search personalization.We present a neighborhood mixture model where we formalize an entity representation as a mixture of its neighborhood in the knowledge base.Extensive experiments show that our proposed models and approach obtain better performance than well-established baselines in a wide range of evaluation tasks.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (xx, 145 pages
High performance hardware implementation of elliptic curve cryptography
No full textEmpirical thesis.Bibliography: pages 339-362.1. Introduction -- 2. Background -- 3. Efficient hardware implementation of finite field arithmetic for elliptic curve cryptography -- 4. High performance FPGA implementation of elliptic curve cryptography processor over binary field GF (2 163) -- 5. High-speed area-efficient FGPA-based elliptic curve cryptographic processor over NIST binary fields -- 6. Parallel point-multiplication architecture using combined group operations for high-speed cryptographic applications -- 7. Efficient hardware implementation of elliptic curve cryptography processor over NIST binary fields -- 8. FPGA-based efficient modular multiplication for elliptic curve cryptography -- 9. High performance FPGA implementation of modular inversion over F256 for elliptic curve cryptography -- 10. High performance elliptic curve cryptography processor over NIST prime fields -- 11. Energy efficient ASIC-based elliptic curve cryptography processor -- 12. Conclusions and future work -- appendices -- Bibliography.Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), a public-key cryptography (PKC) encryption technique, has gained much interest among cryptography researchers because of its advantages over other commonly used PKC algorithms, such as the Rivest,Shamir and Adleman (RSA) cryptosystem. It offers equivalent security to RSA,but with significantly shorter key lengths. This attractive feature makes ECC very popular for resource-constrained applications such as smart cards, creditcards, pagers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and cellular phones. ECC is considered to be more efficient in terms of speed, area, and power consumption.This dissertation introduces several hardware implementations of an efficient ECC cryptosystem both on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and on an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) using VHDL. The first half of this dissertation discusses the high-performance hardware implementation of an ECC over the binary field F2m and the second half describes an efficient implementation of an ECC over the prime field Fp. These are implemented both in affine and Jacobian coordinates using the binary method (i.e. the double-and-add method) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recommended standard. The performance or efficiency of an ECC processor (ECP) is based on elliptic curve scalar (or point) multiplication (ECSM or ECPM) which is the most time and resource consuming operation in either a binary field or a prime field.The aim of this dissertation is to implement an efficient ECPM with a tradeoff between speed, energy, and area complexities, required for modern security applications. Various techniques are introduced to improve the performance of the ECPM, such as parallelisation, pre-computations, algorithm or architectural optimisation, and improved finite-field (or modular) arithmetic architectures. Although there is a substantial amount of work on separate point doubling (PD) and point addition (PA) implementations to compute elliptic curve group operations, essential for an ECPM, not much work is focused on a combined hardware architecture for group operations. In this research work, both modular arithmetic and group operations are optimised to improve the performance of ECPM. A combined PDPA architecture is designed which performs the PD and PA operations together in each iteration. Consequently, a uniform power consumption profile may be measured throughout the PDPA hardware, hence the point multiplication computation. Therefore, the proposed ECPM hardware implementation is secure against timing attacks and simple power analysis (SPA) attacks.In this dissertation, the parallel ECPM architecture supports two Koblitz and random curves for the key sizes 163 and 233 bits and the ECP using a bit-serial multiplier supports all five NIST curves for the key sizes from 163 to 571 bits. The delay of a 233-bit parallel point multiplication is only 3.05 μs in a Xilinx Virtex-7FPGA and 0.81 μs in an ASIC 65-nm technology. In addition, an energy-efficient ECP implementation over F2m is achieved in which the Area x Time x Energy value is lower in an ASIC platform than in all comparable work in the literature. On the other hand, an ASIC-based implementation of an ECP over prime fields supports three prime fields of the five NIST-recommended primes p, with sizes 192, 224, and 256 bits. The delay for ASIC-based ECP over Fp is between 0.207 and 0.366 ms. To the best of the author’s knowledge, these are the fastest hardware implementation result reported in the literature to date. Moreover, the energy dissipation is only about 0.3% of that of other similar designs.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (xl, 362 pages) diagrams, table