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From a ministry for youth to a ministry of youth: aspects of Protestant youth ministry in Sydney, 1930-1959
No full textTheoretical thesis."Department of Ancient History, Centre for the History of Christian Thought and Experience, Macquarie University" -- title page.Bibliography: pages 234-244.Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. Youth ministry in Australia before 1930 -- Chapter 3. Protestant youth ministry at university and the formation of the Evangelical Union -- Chapter 4. Protestant youth ministry in schools -- Chapter 5. Denominational youth ministry in the 1930s : the fellowships -- Chapter 6. Challenges to the new methodology: heterodox theology and World War II -- Chapter 7. Post-war 1945-1959 ; witness and mission -- Chapter 8. Epilogue: The Billy Graham Crusade 1959 -- Conclusion -- Bibliography.In this history of Protestant youth ministry in Sydney, the years 1930-1959 are shown to be a time when significant changes occurred in the way that ministry to youth was conducted.There was a new methodology, a change from a ministry for youth to a ministry of youth. The change came about because of the impact of war and depression, the development of secondary education, the resurgence of Conservative Evangelical theology, the creation of new institutions and the influence of key individuals.This new methodology had certain characteristics which can be seen in ministries in the university, schools and local parishes. It nurtured the leadership of young people and gave them agency. It formed peer groups where young people constructed a robust Christian identity and every member was encouraged to be active in fellowship and witness. It moved towards a co-educational model that fostered a partnership between young men and women. This thesis identifies two different streams of youth ministry, Conservative Evangelical and Liberal Evangelical. The streams used the same methodology, but had different ultimate goals.The Conservative goal was revival through evangelism, and the Liberal was the nurture of Christian character and the Christianisation of civilisation. After the war, the Conservative stream came to predominate.This new model of youth ministry, especially in the Conservative stream, was effective in surviving the challenges of war and heterodox theology. After the war, it flourished, and in the Billy Graham Crusade the fruit of the model is evidenced by the extensive engagement of youth and the many young people who made ‘decisions’ to commit their lives to Christ and the church. The success of this model may help to explain why, despite the challenge of secularisation in the mid-1960s, youth ministry in Sydney is still vibrant today.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (254 pages
Self-knowledge and its anomalies
No full textTheoretical thesis.Bibliography: pages 223-232.Chapter 1. Moran's account -- Chapter 2. Rational agency -- Chapter 3. Transparency -- Chapter 4. How can we know and not know what we believe? -- Chapter 5. Self-deception -- Chapter 6. Akrasia -- Thesis conclusion -- References.My thesis is that the practical irrationalities that we call anomalies are failures of the rational agent to know her own mind in situations where what she believes or intends or desires seems not to be rationally connected with how she acts. I take Richard Moran’s 2001 account of self-knowledge as the basis for my argument that self-deception and akrasia, in particular, are better explained this way than as irrationalities unconnected with self-knowledge. Moran’s account is written from the first-person perspective of the active agent, conceived as asymmetric with the third-person perspective. It sets out authority and estrangement as conceptual opposites. Estrangement, Moran argues, is usually caused by our ‘burying’ some thought that we find unacceptable: that is, by rendering it in some way unconscious. We can also be estranged from our attitude when we can think about it consciously, on Moran’s account, by knowing it only theoretically, rather than immediately, for ourselves. Because she is estranged in some way from her real reason for her belief or intention, the subject suffers an unavoidable lack in her wholehearted knowledge of why she has the attitude, causing her to act with a degree of passivity concerning it. The passivity reduces her capacity actively to control her decision to believe that p or to do a on the basis of reasons. The consequence is that her self-ascription, although agential, is not fully self-determined. In both cases it has only third-person authority; she has failed to achieve normal, first-person authority over it.Having defended Moran’s account against deflationary objections, I then argue that estrangement renders all self-deceived self-ascriptions, all serious akratic self-ascriptions, and many everyday akratic self-ascriptions necessarily less than fully self-determined; that the relevant acts that follow are therefore necessarily to some degree psychologically unfree and thus that they have third-person rather than first-person authority.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (x, 232 pages
The emperor has no clothes on: repoliticising diversity management through an understanding of the effects of racism on Australian muslims
No full textTheoretical thesis.Bibliography: pages 121-130.Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. The Australian socio-political context and the Muslim community -- Chapter 3. Reproduction of race by the media -- Chapter 4. Race and organisation : a theoretical review and analysis of Australian organisations -- Chapter 5. Repoliticising diversity management through race -- Chapter 6. Towards a conclusion -- Appendices -- References.This thesis is a multidisciplinary theoretical study of the ways in which the socio-political nature of racism affects Muslims in Australia. Inspired by Nkomo’s ‘The emperor has no clothes : Rewriting race in organisations’ (1992) study of the erosion of the notion of race in organisations, the socio-political context and its role in understanding racism in Australia is explored. The imperative of racism perpetuated by socio-political context and its impact on diversity management is paramount to demonstrate how race is diluted in studies of diversity which lacks nuanced political consideration rather than promoting the business case (Tomlinson & Schwabenland, 2010).The role of the media in perpetuating inequalities, influencing perceptions and opinions and ultimately, creating racism is acknowledged. The new racism is multifaceted and complex (Essed, 1991) intertwined with everyday social interactions. The notion of racism without racists (Bonilla-Silva, 2003) demonstrates the intricacy of modern racism as imbedded structures in social behavior contributing to colour-blindness (Bonilla-Silva, 2006) and main stream’s proclamations of benevolence. Minorities, therefore, are frowned upon and considered unappreciative when raising issues of discrimination. By politicising diversity management through an analysis of socio-politics, racism, media and organisation, it is evident that there is a void in management theory and practice of discourses of Islamophobia and its management in organisations. Organisations by producing masquerade of diversity practices tend to obscure racism and commodify differences as a marketing tool to protect their inherent whiteness (Ahmed, 2012). Discussion of the socio-politics and specifically Islamophobia are camouflaged by organisational management through a conspiracy of silence and diversity practices which are non-performative blue prints with no real outcome of change. Diversity initiatives are myopic practices concerned about portraying organisational happy façade (Ahmed, 2009) rather than making real change. Critical diversity studies compartmentalise individuals as having preconceived identities with no ‘socially constructed nature’ (Zanoni, Janssens, Benschop & Nkomo, 2010). They furthermore, use parochial views of the mainstream, ignore power disparities between groups and lack contextual implications.This thesis concludes by presenting a future research agenda which addresses how academics, diversity practitioners and corporate Australia can foster transparent dialogue. This dialogue requires developing an engagement between corporate diversity management initiatives and social justice in light of evidenced racism in multicultural Australia. The role of emotion and compassion at individual level and its link to moral reasoning and equality (Brewis, 2017) is an emergent area of research in diversity management discourse. Compassion for the other can play a vital role in alleviating the pressures of over-individualistic and competitive neo-liberal societies.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (130 pages
Least change view-updating for functorial view-gets with left adjoints
No full textEmpirical thesis.Bibliography: pages 61-63.1. Introduction -- 2. Preliminary concepts in relational database theory -- 3. The sketch data model -- 4. View updating for view-gets with left adjoints -- 5. Special topics -- 6. Related work -- 7. Conclusion -- References.Given a database, a view of it is a simplified version of that database, derived from some of its data, possibly through the output of query language expressions. This thesis is concerned with a category theoretic treatment of the View Update Problem, which is the problem of how to propagate a view update to an update of the original database. The basic Category Theoretic setting of interest to this thesis is that a database has an associated category S whose objects are valid states that the database can be in and some choice of valid updates as morphisms. A view of the database corresponding to S has its own state space V and a functor G : S - V, referred to as the view-get. So called least change view-update propagations have been studied in the categorical setting in papers stemming from, requiring that view-update propagations satisfy certain universal properties. This thesis studies the use of cartesian or opcartesian lifts as least change solutions to view-update problems. Moreover, the main contribution of this thesis are a pair of theorems pertaining to the existence of cartesian and opcartesian lifts respectively. The setting of these theorems involves G having a left adjoint L - G such that GL = idV.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (iv, 63 pages) : diagram
Improving the radial velocity precision of the HERMES spectrograph to enable exoplanet detection
No full textTheoretical thesis.Bibliography: pages 149-158.1. Introduction -- 2. High-resolution spectrographs -- 3. Data collection -- 4. Data reduction -- 5. Radial velocity results -- 6. Conclusions -- Appendices.The evolution of modern astronomical instruments and their capacity to produce useful data has advanced in tandem with, and benefited from, the development of software to optimally analyse those data. In particular, recent developments in the analysis of high resolution spectroscopic data have yielded unique insights on a wide range of astronomical phenomena. As we develop instruments capable of achieving higher spectral resolution and greater wavelength stability, the techniques necessary to produce successful measurements become increasingly challenging. The goal of this thesis is to develop a wavelength solution with an aim to maximise the instrumental performance. For that purpose, we developed a complete reduction pipeline and demonstrate the improvement that it achieves. We show how it produces results that enable new range of scientific goals that were not achievable using the previous methods. We initially investigated the possibility of modelling instrumental wavelength calibration from physical principles, an effort which we applied to the small high-resolution spectrograph RHEA.However we found that a model based only on optical principles was unable to generate a wavelength solution superior to a purely mathematical approach. Taking the lessons learned from RHEA, we then set out to develop a precision radial velocity pipeline for the high-resolution HERMES spectrograph recently commissioned at the 3.9m Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT). First we characterised the behaviour of the spectrograph PSF across all four channels. Then we undertook a series of observations of stellar targets - some with known radial velocity variability, others as yet unstudied in the time domain-in order to test the radial velocity precision achievable with HERMES. We found that 2dfdr, the standard spectroscopic data reduction package provided by the AAO, was unable to reduce the uncertainty in radial velocity measurements below 400ms−1, due to a combination of PSF effects and the wavelength solution applied by the software. Tests indicated that the extraction method employed by 2dfdr prevented a significant reduction in radial velocity measurement uncertainties; this fundamental limitation led us to develop HARPY, a new radial velocity determination software package that can independently reduce the data produced by HERMES. It calculates a wavelength solution that is stable across observations and performs radial velocity calculations from extracted, calibrated spectra. The final version of HARPY, presented in this thesis,shows radial velocity uncertainties on the order of 70ms−1 with HERMES data. Applying HARPY to our observations, we demonstrate its capabilities on both a binary star and a hot Jupiter system. Proving that HERMES can reach such radial velocity precision, opens a large range of scientific projects to investigation, previously unable to be considered. Its highly multiplexed capability and wide field of view, in combination with its 4 cameras, can be used for large exoplanet surveys, once the lessons learned from this study are adapted to both observing and reduction procedures.1 online resource (xxii, 158 pages : illustrations
Optimal asset allocation for pension funds in the Republic of Korea (ROK ): risk-adjusted analysis
No full textEmpirical thesis.Bibliography: pages 63-66.Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. Motivations -- Chapter 3. Literature review -- Chapter 4. Empirical analysis -- Chapter 5. Ex-post analysis (out-of-sample test) -- Chapter 6. Conclusion -- References -- Appendices.This thesis examines various asset allocation schemes for retirement pension funds in the Republic of Korea (ROK), particularly constrained and risk-adjusted asset allocation schemes and so-called ‘target risk’ and ‘target return’ schemes. This thesis shows that different asset allocation techniques have a significant impact on the optimal weights of different asset classes such as growth and defensive assets for optimal pension portfolios. The thesis also demonstrates that the proposed optimal asset allocation typically deviates significantly from the actual allocation of the ROK’s pension funds. The thesis also examines the performance of different asset allocation schemes in the presence of skewness and excess kurtosis for returns as well as non-linear dependence across different asset classes. Thus, this thesis considers the entire distribution of the returns that enables us to conduct a risk-adjusted performance analysis. Finally, the author relates the results to recent regulatory changes in the ROK with regards to the asset allocation for pension funds.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (viii, 72 pages) graphs, table
“Under my own care”: motherhood and poverty in New South Wales and Gloucestershire 1820–1834
No full textTheoretical thesis.Bibliography: pages 98-121.Introduction -- Chapter One. Authority -- Chapter Two. Support -- Chapter Three. Emotion -- Conclusion -- Bibliography.Since the 1960s, scholars have passionately debated whether mothers from the middle ages to the nineteenth century loved their children. Yet historians have only superficially examined the emotional relationships between women and their offspring. Building on this debate, this thesis aims to contribute to our understanding of motherhood and poverty in three ways. First, it probes the complexities of poor mothers’ emotional interactions with their children. Second, it examines some of the different ways that women expressed their moral and financial connections with their offspring. Finally, it brings a new lens to the study of motherhood and poverty by comparing mother-child relationships in Gloucestershire and New South Wales. Taking letters that mothers wrote to the parish in Gloucestershire, and petitions to admit children to, and withdraw children from, the Sydney Orphan Schools, this thesis compares how women’s relationships with their children are revealed in these different contexts between 1820 and 1834. It argues that poor mothers expressed or described instances of care for children in order to claim authority over them. In doing so, this research advances the work of historians who have revealed the agency of the poor, by suggesting that in this process, poor mothers also claimed authority.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (vii, 121 pages
Australian neo-Pentecostal churches: incorporating late-modernity in a new religious form
No full textTheoretical thesis.Bibliography: pages 223-254.Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. The advent of neo-Pentecostalism in Australia -- Chapter 3. Situating neo-Pentecostalism in Australian late-modernity -- Chapter 4. Australian neo-Pentecostalism and consumer capitalism -- Chapter 5. Globalisation and Australian neo-Pentecostal churches : ensuring international success -- Chapter 6. Individualism as the key identity marker of the idealised Australian neo-Pentecostal self -- Chapter 7. Conclusion -- References.Sociologists of religion have found significant and sustained global growth amongst Pentecostal and Charismatic forms of Christianity. From this research, neo-Pentecostalism has emerged as a fruitful site for scholars to examine developments in Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianities. Despite acknowledgement of the successful global expansion of Hillsong Church, and denominational studies of COC/inc and Australian Christian Churches (formerly Australian Assemblies of God), sociologists of religion have not examined incarnations of other internationally-recognised Australian-based neo-Pentecostal churches. The present study contributes to both international and Australian Pentecostal studies through an analysis of the theology and operations of five such churches: Hillsong Church, C3 Church, Citipointe Church, Planetshakers and Influencers Church. The thesis seeks to answer the question: what are the features of theology and organisational practice that assist these churches in growing on both a local and international scale? Using a critical religious studies framework to examine materials produced by the five churches, the thesis situates the continued expansion of Australian-based expressions of neo-Pentecostalism in historical, economic, social, and cultural context.The thesis argues that Australian neo-Pentecostal churches have expanded into organisations with international reputations by responding to the conditions of late-modernity. The thesis assesses the impact of several characteristics of late-modernity—neoliberal governance, marketisation and branding, mass-communication strategies, globalisation, celebration of entrepreneurial abilities, and individualised patterns of consumerism—as significant dynamics for facilitating the global expansion of Australian-based expressions of neo-Pentecostalism. The research finds that Australian neo-Pentecostal churches actively incorporate aspects of late-modernity—specifically, consumer capitalism, globalisation, and individualism as a curated self that realises modern understandings of personal freedom—in justifying and supporting their theological underpinnings and church-branded activities. The thesis advances Australian religious studies by developing an analysis of the emergence of neo-Pentecostalism in Australia and contributes to an international body of literature that seeks to position neo-Pentecostalism within conditions of late-modernity.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (254 pages
Complex acoustic environments: concepts, methods and auditory perception
No full textThesis by publication.Bibliography: pages 191-215.1. Introduction -- 2. The ambisonic recordings of typical environments (ARTE) database -- 3. Conversational speech levels and signal-to-noise ratios in realistic conditions -- 4. Complex acoustic environments: review, framework and subjective model -- 5. Exploring the ability of listeners to identify events in realistic environments -- 6. General discussion and conclusions -- Appendices.In everyday life, the ears constantly receive information from the environment that is carried by sound waves. Despite the uncontrolled nature of this information, normal hearing listeners can make sense of the unstructured sounds. In contrast, hearing has mostly been studied using acoustic stimuli that are rigidly controlled. The difference between understanding such artificial stimuli and real-world hearing has produced the distinction of ’complex acoustic environments‘ (CAEs) – a catch-all term for everything that the laboratory-based stimuli are not. However, an exact definition has been elusive, despite growing use in hearing research – especially in research focusing on hearing-impaired individuals, who struggle communicating in cocktail-party like scenarios. In this work, several aspects of CAEs were studied with the intention to understand where the complexity lies. The work consists of four main parts in manuscript form. The first paper presents the Ambisonic Recordings of Typical Environments (ARTE) database, which contains 3D recordings of everyday scenarios. These were the primary stimuli used in all subsequent parts of this work. In the second paper, the speech and noise levels of real conversations were measured at two distances between talkers. The third paper reviews the origins and uses of the CAE concept in literature and presents a framework that summarizes and defines the characteristics that can drive complexity in a given environment. A subset of these characteristics were tested by 65 listeners who listened to the ARTE scenes (also with target speech), while answering a three-stage questionnaire. The analysis revealed that listeners’ perceived complexity is associated with both the loudness and the variability of the scenes. The final paper analyzes the responses of listeners to an open-ended auditory scene analysis task using ARTE, and the observed limitations are discussed. A concluding discussion dissects how the auditory system deals with realistic amounts of acoustic information.1 online resource (xix, 215 pages : illustrations
The mediating role of work engagement: a case study of managers in a large multi-national telecoms company in Pakistan
No full textTheoretical thesis.Bibliography: pages 69-72.Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. Literature review -- Chapter 3. Research methodology and data collection -- Chapter 4. Results -- Chapter 5. Conclusion and recommendations.Organisations in the current business environment are grappling with managerial challenges and issues as they strive to remain profitable and competitive. The challenges of heightened performance, financial turbulence, new technology, globalisation and increasingly diverse workforces affect organisations’ effectiveness and performance. Managers and leaders in organisations are concluding that innovative and unique competitive edges reside within human resources. For organisations to remain competitive, they must increase the motivation and talent of all employees to meet business objectives. Current efforts to enhance organisational competency or performance have started to focus on positive emotions and the positive organisational behaviour concepts of work engagement, trust and optimism.Work engagement has emerged as a significant organisational concept in the past decade that encourages organisations to reduce employee turnover through improved job satisfaction, organisational commitment and organisational citizenship behaviour. The practical interest and application in work engagement has surpassed the recently available studies. Challenges such as the importance of work engagement, why and how work engagement benefits organisations, managers and individuals and how work engagement can be improved still need to be addressed. Research suggests that there is a considerable difference between the roles and responsibilities of managers and employees. Managers play a pivotal role in employee engagement by fostering an environment conducive to providing employees with a sense of recognition and growth at work.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (ix, 81 pages) diagrams, table