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Katabasis in ekphrasis poetry: a study of memory, rhetoric and mind
No full textTheoretical thesis.Bibliography: pages 65-71.Introduction -- Chapter One. Ekphrasis, katabasis and the literary mind -- Chapter Two. The “Bog poems” by Seamus Heaney -- Chapter Three. Adrienne Rich : poetry as re-vision -- Conclusion -- Works cited.Over the last few decades, modern definitions of ekphrasis are typically limited to the verbal description of a visual work of art (real or imagined). Rarely is modern ekphrasis contextualised in the ancient rhetorical tradition as a function of mind, memory and imagination. This thesis—which focuses specifically on the literary genre of ekphrasis poetry—aims to illuminate ekphrasis strategies as articulations of memory and the function of imagination. Given the close associations of imagination with creativity, the function of imagination has become a rapidly growing area of research in cognitive literary studies. The thesis addresses imagination in terms of mental imaging (the formation of visual and other kinds of sensory images), and the recent research into the brain’s default mode network which relates imagination to memory, conceptual blending, prospection, mind wandering and navigation. The thesis explores the ancient literary genre of katabasis—typically defined as a journey of the living into the realm of the dead, underworld or place of psychic unconscious. Katabasis is also characterised as a descent into memory, involving a trial, confrontation and subsequent ascent into knowing or “seeing”. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the thesis reveals the rhetorical devices of katabasis and ekphrasis in poetry which share common strategies with cognitive theories on the function of imagination. A selection of poems written by Adrienne Rich and Seamus Heaney are examined for their techniques of ekphrasis and exploration of katabasis. The thesis aims to reframe the function of mind, memory and imagination—key to classical and medieval conceptions of ekphrasis and katabasis—into modern and contemporary ekphrasis criticism.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (v, 71 pages
Sustainability reports versus sustainability practices: impact of organised hypocrisy & organisational facades on sustainability behaviour of Australian mining companies
No full textTheoretical thesis.Bibliography: pages 58-65.Chapter One. Introduction -- Chapter Two. Literature review and theoretical framework -- Chapter Three. Methodology -- Chapter Four. Results-- Chapter 5. Research method -- Chapter Five. Conclusions, limitations and future research -- References -- Appendix.Using content analysis, this study aims to investigate the existence of any gaps between corporate talk, decisions and actions in the sustainability reporting of the Australian mining sector and provide explanations for the existence of these gaps (if any). Prior research on sustainability reporting has focused on the theoretical frameworks of legitimacy, stakeholder and institutional theories, while this study uses a more nuanced theoretical framework of organised hypocrisy and organisational facades to investigate the divergence between talk, decisions and actions relating to the sustainability behaviour of two large Australian mining companies over the period 2012-2017. It also investigates whether these companies create organisational facades to meet the conflicting demands of their different stakeholder groups. The findings suggest that there is a divergence between talk, decisions and actions and while these gaps are less evident within each facade, they become more obvious across facades. Moreover, the evaluation of the disclosures finds that companies meet the conflicting demands of their stakeholders by engaging in organised hypocrisy, i.e., satisfying some stakeholders with corporate talk and decisions and others with corporate actions. The findings will help stakeholders better evaluate the sustainability disclosures and enable a constructive dialogue between the organisations and their stakeholders to improve the quality of their sustainability reporting.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (85 pages) diagrams, table
Perceiving sociosexuality: how is it done?
No full textEmpirical thesis.Bibliography: pages 63-71.Perceiving sociosexuality: how is it done? -- Study One -- Study Two -- General discussion -- Appendices.People make judgements about personal characteristics (including age, sex, attractiveness, health and personality) from strangers' face and body appearance, and from small snippets of behaviour. These perceptions are thought to be somewhat accurate. Previous research has suggested that people are able to accurately perceive sociosexuality (SOI) at zero acquaintance, however it is not clear what cues people are using to make these accurate judgements. Further research has established a link between body morphology (2D:4D ratio) and SOI score, but it is not known whether facial morphology, which is also influenced by in utero hormones, is associated with SOI. Thus, the focus of this study was to examine whether: a) SOI is reflected in facial morphology, and b) whether observers can accurately perceive SOI from these facial cues. In Study One, 123 participants (63 female) completed a version of the SOI and had facial photographs taken under standardized conditions. Geometric morphometric methodology was used to statistically quantify the variation in face shape of each participant. This produced a significant model producing self-reported SOI scores from facial shape in male, but not female, faces, suggesting that SOI is reflected in men's, but not women's facial morphology. In Study Two, 65 participants (45 female) rated the SOI of participants photographed in Study One and a series of composites. Geometric morphometric modelling provided a statistical model that significantly predicted perceived SOI from the facial morphology of males but not females. Significant correlations between perceived SOI and self-reported SOI, and between self-reported SOI scores and perceived SOI scores predicted by the statistical model, were found in male faces but not female faces. Female participants appear to be able to accurately perceive the SOI of men using facial shape. Future studies should investigate other potential cues to SOI, such as colour or texture.1 online resource (vii, 71 pages : illustrations
Supervised machine learning for extractive query based summarisation of biomedical data
No full textEmpirical thesis.Bibliography: pages 48-53.1. Introduction -- 2. Literature review -- 3. Summarisation corpus and evaluation -- 4. Research methods -- 5. Experimental results and discussions -- 6. Conclusion and future work -- References.Automation of text summarisation is a pressing need due to the plethora of textual information available online. Motivated by the success of machine learning in this domain, this research explores several supervised machine learning approaches for extracting summaries in response to queries. The first objective of this research is to compare the quality of classification and regression approaches for query-based multi-document extractive summarisation. To enable the comparison, we use a common extractive summarisation framework which attempts to identify salient sentences by scoring them based on a common set of features. Our experiments are performed on biomedical data provided by the BioASQ challenges. The second objective is to address the important issue of converting the sample summaries available in the training data into annotations that can be used to train statistical classifiers for extractive summarisation. We conduct different trials of data annotation and assess their impact in the results. On the basis of our investigations for the specific dataset used in this research, we show that the classification scheme performed better than the regression and results presented by different annotation techniques reveal that annotation with threshold 0.1 outperforms the other techniques.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (53 pages) graphs, table
Considering teacher cognition and motivation in teacher research engagement: a mixed-methods study involving English language teachers at Vietnamese public universities
No full textEmpirical thesis.Bibliography: pages 323-346.Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. Review of the relevant literature -- Chapter 3. Theoretical considerations -- Chapter 4. Context of the study -- Chapter 5. Methodological considerations -- Chapter 6. Teacher engagement in research -- Chapter 7. Teachers' conceptions of research -- Chapter 8. Teachers’ research self-efficacy, attitudes toward research, context beliefs about doing research, and their impacts on teachers’ level of research engagement -- Chapter 9. Teachers' motivation towards research -- Chapter 10. Discussion -- Chapter 11. Conclusion -- References -- Appendices.Teacher research has been recommended as a powerful and transformative model of teacher professional development, but remains a minority activity among the general population of teachers worldwide, including those who teach English as a foreign language (EFL). Since available empirical research into this situation in the field of the language teaching is scant and demonstrates several thematic and methodological limitations, this study seeks insights into the current status of research engagement among Vietnamese public university English language teachers, and the role their cognition and motivation play in the found scenario. Guided overall by Korthagen‘s (2004) Onion Model of Levels of Changes, the study explicitly investigates the research engagement practices reported by these teachers, their conceptions of research, self-efficacy beliefs, attitudes, context beliefs, and motivations surrounding the ―research concept, and the relationship between these factors and teachers‘ reported level of research engagement. Teachers‘ initial motivations and how they are sustained or eroded in the research engagement process is also qualitatively examined. Following the sequential explanatory mixed-methods design, the study employs a mixture of survey questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, and documents of both public and personal types to collect relevant data from a randomly-selected sample of 568 EFL teachers and 27 leaders of English departments from 31 public universities in Vietnam. Quantitative data, which were analysed with descriptive and inferential statistics, were explained, extended, and deepened by, or triangulated with qualitative data, which were analysed on a thematic basis, to fulfil the research objectives.The results show a modest level of research engagement reported by the sample, who also described their research experience as mostly small-scale, practice-driven, and formally, domestically published. Data on the sample‘s demographics, cognition and motivation uncover many distinct features of the group as well as several unusual relationships between these factors and the frequencies of doing research the sample reported. For instance, instead of exhibiting a technical view towards research as commonly found among the participants of previous studies, Vietnamese tertiary EFL teachers demonstrated diverse views of research without any clear common tendency. Their experience of research mirrors the practice-driven, qualitative-oriented patterns shown in the teacher research manual literature, but does not bear significant relationships with certain aspects of research self-efficacy, motivations, teacher attitudes and context beliefs about doing research as normally predicted and previously found in the existing literature.The findings of this study help add Vietnamese teachers‘ voices to the global picture of language teacher research engagement, and hopefully will be of practical and theoretical use for various stakeholders.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (xv, 373 pages) table
Support seeking in early and middle adolescent girls: an exploratory study of online support seeking and mental health
No full textEmpirical thesis.Bibliography: pages 189-210.1. Introduction -- 2. Adolescent stress and coping -- 3. Online social support -- 4. The current study -- 5. Methods -- 6. Relationships between online support seeking and other ways of coping -- 7. Relationships between ways of coping and mental health -- 8. Adolescents’ perspectives on the affordances and limitations of online support seeking -- 9. General discussion and conclusion -- 10. References -- Appendices.Many adolescents interact with their friends online, and report gaining social support through online communication. While research has focused on adolescents’ use of formal online support, less is known about adolescent girls’ use of informal online support. This study aimed to investigate the use of informal online support seeking, and assess the relationship between online support seeking and adolescent mental health. The study assessed adolescents’ motivation for and beliefs about seeking support online, with the aim of identifying developmental affordances or limitations of this form of support seeking.Early and middle adolescent girls (N = 186) completed a self-report survey measuring their intended use of support seeking from parents, friends, peers, and online, as well as isolation in response to academic and social stressor vignettes. Mental health was assessed with a measure of depression, anxiety, and stress. Semi-structured interviews (n = 31) addressed motivation and beliefs about online support seeking.In-person support seeking from parents and friends was the most preferred form of support. Online support was more likely to be used by middle adolescents and more likely for academic stressors rather than social stressors. Girls who sought less support from parents and more support from friends reported seeking more support online. Seeking support online for both academic and social stressors was significantly related to higher levels of depression and anxiety. The use of isolation moderated the relationship between online support seeking and anxiety in response to academic stressors.Interviews revealed that most girls used online support seeking to access emotional and academic support from their friends. Girls identified potential developmental limitations to the use of online support seeking, such as using online support seeking to avoid emotion. This study provides an important contribution to our understanding of the use of online support seeking by adolescent girls.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (viii, 225 pages) graphs, table
Assessing the impact of employee involvement in decision-making and management prerogative in the Australian mining sector through legislative lens
No full textEmpirical thesis.Bibliography: pages 76-84.Chapter One. Introduction -- Chapter Two. Literature review -- Chapter Three. Research design -- Chapter Four. Research findings -- Chapter Five. Discussion and conclusion -- References -- Appendices.Employee involvement in decision making and its influence on management’s discretion is a prominent research issue in industrial relations. This study examines the scope of employee involvement in the legislative system and the impact of employee involvement in decision-making and management prerogative within mining sector in Australia.Employee involvement can be managed by two different mechanisms: right based and interest based driven by legislative and management respectively. Over the last two decades, right based employee involvement in Australia is governed by enterprise agreements; for this reason, enterprise agreements from the mining sector are selected as the data source and will be used to examine the research objectives. Based on the nature of the data, this research uses the qualitative research methodology and content analysis to examine and analyse the subjective data within the documents.Following legislative lens to examine the employee involvement enables a formal and indirect employee involvement approach. However, the findings illustrate that the existence of informal and direct employee involvement practices under enterprise agreement too. In addition, this study identifies the impact of employee involvement on decision making and management prerogative. Altogether, this study highlights the integrative practice of right based and interest based- approach of employee involvement under contemporary Australian IR legislation. Such an outcome contributes to the industrial relations (IR) literature as well as provides insight to the organisational management practice about developing constructive employment relationship through employee involvement mechanisms.1 online resource (x, 113 pages) diagrams, table
Towards a smart fall detection system using wearable sensors
No full textEmpirical thesis."A thesis submitted as part of a cotutelle programme in partial fulfilment of Coventry University’s and Macquarie University’s requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy" -- title page.Bibliography: pages 183-205.1. Introduction -- 2. Literature review -- 3. Falls and activities of daily living datasets -- 4. An analysis of fall-detection approaches -- 5. Event-triggered machine-learning approach (EvenT-ML) -- 6. Genetic-algorithm-based feature-selection technique for fall detection (GA-Fade) -- 7. Conclusions and future work -- References -- Appendices.A fall-detection system is employed in order to monitor an older person or infirm patient and alert their carer when a fall occurs. Some studies use wearable-sensor technologies to detect falls, as those technologies are getting smaller and cheaper. To date, wearable-sensor-based fall-detection approaches are categorised into threshold and machine-learning-based approaches. A high number of false alarms and a high computational cost are issues that are faced by the threshold- and machine-learning basedapproaches, respectively. The goal of this thesis is to address those issues by developing a novel low-computational-cost machine-learning-based approach for fall detection using accelerometer sensors.Toward this goal, existing fall-detection approaches (both threshold- and machine-learning-based) are explored and evaluated using publicly accessible datasets: Cogent, SisFall, and FARSEEING. Four machine-learning algorithms are implemented in this study: Classification and Regression Tree (CART), k-Nearest Neighbour (k-NN), Logistic Regression (LR), and Support Vector Machine (SVM). The experimental results show that using the correct size and type for the sliding window to segment the data stream can give the machine-learning-based approach a better detection rate than the threshold-based approach, though the difference between the threshold- and machine-learning-based approaches is not significant in some cases.To further improve the performance of the machine-learning-based approaches, fall stages (pre-impact, impact, and post-impact) are used as a basis for the feature extraction process. A novel approach called an event-triggered machine-learning approach for fall detection (EvenT-ML) is proposed, which can correctly align fall stages into a data segment and extract features based on those stages. Correctly aligning the stages to a data segment is difficult because of multiple high peaks, where a high peak usually indicates the impact stage, often occurring during the pre-impact stage. EvenT-ML significantly improves the detection rate and reduces the computational cost of existing machine-learning-based approaches, with an up to 97.6% F-score and a reduction in computational cost by a factor of up to 80 during feature extraction. Also, this technique can significantly outperform the threshold-based approach in all cases.Finally, to reduce the computational cost of EvenT-ML even further, the number of features needs to be reduced through a feature-selection process. A novel genetic-algorithm-based feature-selection technique (GA-Fade) is proposed, which uses multiple criteria to select features. GA-Fade considers the detection rate, the computational cost, and the number of sensors used as the selection criteria. GAFade is able to reduce the number of features by 60% on average, while achieving an F-score of up to 97.7%. The selected features also can give a significantly lower total computational cost than features that are selected by two single-criterion-based feature-selection techniques: SelectKBest and Recursive Feature Elimination.In summary, the techniques presented in this thesis significantly increase the detection rate of the machine-learning-based approach, so that a more reliable fall detection system can be achieved. Furthermore, as an additional advantage, these techniques can significantly reduce the computational cost of the machine-learning approach. This advantage indicates that the proposed machine-learning-based approach is more applicable to a small wearable device with limited resources (e.g., computing power and battery capacity) than the existing machine-learning-based approaches.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (xx, 211 pages) diagrams, graphs, table
Investigating the magmatic drivers behind temporal variations in eruption frequency and style at Kelut volcano, Indonesia
No full textEmpirical thesis.Includes bibliograpical references.Chapter One. Introduction and motivation -- Chapter Two. Insights into eruption dynamics from the 2014 pyroclastic deposits of Kelut volcano, Java, Indonesia, and implications for future hazards -- Chapter Three. Eruption frequency, style and composition variations at Kelut volcano, Indonesia, based on 1500 years of tephra records -- Chapter Four. The pre-eruptive magma storage system of the 1990 and 2014 Plinian, and 2007-2008 effusive dome-forming eruptions at Kelut volcano, Indonesia : insights into cyclic transitions in eruptive style -- Chapter Five. Conclusions and future work -- Appendices.Stratigraphic, petrological, mineralogical and geochemical records of volcanism are vital to understanding and forecasting the magmatic processes governing the cyclic effusive-explosive eruptive styles and patterns. Understanding the full range of eruptive behaviour at a volcano is fundamental in helping to reduce the disastrous impacts of eruptions to nearby vulnerable populations. Java (Indonesia) contains a large concentration of historically active and deadly volcanoes. However, few of these have well-constrained stratigraphic records that allow the variety of eruption styles and the eruption frequency to be estimated. Kelut volcano is one of the more deadly volcanoes in Indonesia, yet its geological record is poorly known. This thesis aims to improve our knowledge of Kelut, by examining detailed records of Kelut’s pyroclastic deposits and geochemistry, including both the most recent eruption (2014) and a series of units emplaced over the last 1500 years.The dynamics and chronology of individual eruptions of Kelut are complex. From AD ~560 to1800’s, glass shard compositions reveal that magmatic processes are the first-order control on eruptive behaviour. Mafic recharge events triggered the most explosive episodes. The system was maintained by variable rates and volumes of mafic magma influxes. In the early record, recharges were small or infrequent, and enough time between eruptions allowed homogenised high-Si magmas to erupt. More frequent eruptions took place from AD 1000 and variability of magmas was greater. From AD 1920 to 1990, eruptions tapped a continuously evolving magma system.The homogeneity of compositions from recent effusive-explosive rocks suggested that regular, small injections of gas-rich magma allowed for efficient mixing, buffering the system for some time. During this phase, other processes were of greater influence on eruptive styles. In some cases the presence of a conduit-capping lava dome inhibited gas release, eventually leading to overpressure and triggering a more explosive eruption, e.g., 2014. In the 2014 eruption, there is also potential evidence of mafic intrusion before eruption. This sudden intrusion left little trace,except in feldspar-rim compositions. Since 1920, explosive eruptions occured every ~21 years at Kelut. If the alternate explosive/effusive cycle holds, the next eruption of Kelut is likely to be a period of lava dome effusion.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (172 pages) illustrations (some colour), colour map
Mesoporous carbon nitride based nanomaterials for solar fuel production
No full textTheoretical thesis.Bibliography: pages 47-56.Chapter 1. Introduction -- 2. Literature review -- 3. Experimental section -- 4. Results and discussion -- 5. Conclusions and future work.From economic and environmental aspects, the generation of hydrogen (H2) from renewable solar energy and water through photocatalytic water splitting is a promising route, but the development of an efficient catalyst remains a great challenge for its technological use on a large scale. Because of several features like being metal-free, nontoxic, low cost, and chemically stable, carbon nitride has attracted worldwide attention. Compared to bulk carbon nitride, mesoporous carbon nitride (MCN) possesses a higher surface area and plentiful accessible mesopores. For the first time, Co3O4/MCN nanocomposites were designed and synthesised for photocatalytic H2 evolution in this work. Co3O4,earth-abundant nanoparticles, were supported on MCN via an impregnation method. Complementary characterisation techniques were employed to understand the properties of the fabricated catalysts.The bare MCN prepared under optimum conditions showed high photocatalytic activity under visible light irradiation without using any co-catalyst. The Co3O4/MCN with a Co3O4 mass content of 5 wt% exhibited the optimum photocatalytic activity in H2 evolution, which was two times higher than that of the bare MCN. The improved photocatalytic performance may be attributed to the enhanced catalytic properties, visible-light harvesting and effective charge separation.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (ix, 56 pages) illustration