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Emperor Decius' 249 CE edict commanding sacrifice to the gods
No full textTheoretical thesis.Bibliography: pages 85-90.Introduction -- Chapter 1. What the Romans thought about Christians -- Chapter 2. The crisis of Empire -- Chapter 3. Events, evidence and assessment A -- Chapter 4. Evidence and assessment B -- Chapter 5. Evidence and assessment C -- Chapter 6. Conclusion.A terrible choice faced Christi an Romans in 249 C.E: offer sacrifice to the gods, considered an anathema, or be martyred , as some were, but many more succumbed and sacrificed. Decius has left us no record of his reasons. The only extant sources are either Christian or sympathetic, and they say that he was directly targeting Christians because he hated his predecessor Philip, who was believed to have been a Christian . Historians have challenge d this view over the last hundred years . Since the 1923 initial publication of 41 papyrus libelli (certificates of sacrifice) , academia has debated this topic and shed new light on Decius' possible reasons. This was a watershed in the history of anti - Christian persecution . Prior to Decius' Edict, religion in the empire was based on local cults which were no w weakened . T he certificate that was required as proof of sacrifice was an innovation , moreover the Egyptian papyri are dated to five months after the first arrests elsewhere. After assessing the authenticity of the extant sources , comparing these with the libelli and with what can be deduced about Decius himself , from history and coinage, I trace the arguments from modern scholarship to arrive at four assessable hypotheses The edict was: a) anti - Christian persecution; b) sacrifices to avert danger; c) sacrifices for Decius' accession as Emperor; or d) A re - celebration of Rome's Millenium. I concluded that it is most likely that Decius' edict was a stipulation of the correct way for his subjects to pray to the gods to ensure safety and security for his dynasty and the empire. It was a grand Accession Ceremony. It is also possible that Decius was motivated to include a re - celebration of Rome's Millennium in the face of fearful portents. I t was much less likely that Decius was focussed on the Christians at all. However, the recalcitrance of disobedient Christian s under Decius probably contributed to the later fiercer persecutions of Valerian and Diocletian.1 online resource (90 pages
An empirical investigation of privacy via obfuscation in social networks
No full textTheoretical thesis.Bibliography: pages 53-56.1. Introduction -- 2. Literature review -- 3. Replicating foundation -- 4. Social network awareness -- 5. Imbalanced classes -- 6. Conclusion.Large quantities of personal profile information are available on online social networks like Facebook. This profile information can be used by an attacker to uncover a user's private attributes; in response to this, previous researchers have demonstrated how to obfuscate user profiles to reduce this attack vector. However, existing research has not yet examined the combination of network structure with profile information in this context, and the effectiveness of obfuscation techniques against that. Moreover, previous work examined the case of balanced private attribute classes like gender; inference of imbalanced classes - such as sexual orientation, which has been examined in the literature - poses additional challenges. This thesis examines these issues. We found that previous obfuscation methods were less effective in reducing inference accu- racy and in some cases not effective at all when an attacker used a combination of profile and network vectors. Extending obfuscation strategies to network structure could reduce the accuracy significantly, with just 20% obfuscation resulting in a drop in accuracy from 80% to 35%. Unlike for balanced private attribute classes, the accuracy metric produces misleading results for imbalanced classes such as sexual orientation, where the F1 measure is more suitable. We show that there is a slightly higher risk of profile- plus network-based inference in this case and that network info is particularly useful here, in line with previous work, and show that obfuscation is required on both the network and profile side to reduce F1 for the positive class by half.1 online resource (iv, 56 pages) colour illustration
Methods for taking semantic graphs apart and putting them back together again
No full textEmpirical thesis."PhD thesis developed at the Philosophische Fakultät, Saarland university and the Department of Computing at Macquarie University" -- title page.Bibliography: pages 223-230.1. Introduction -- 2. Background : semantic graphs, and building them piece by piece -- 3. Background : semantic parsing -- 4. S-graph decompisotion -- 5. The AM algebra -- 6. AM dependency parsing -- 7. Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Appendices.This thesis develops the AM dependency parser, a semantic parser for Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR, Banarescu et al. (2013)) that owes its strong performance to its effective combination of neural and compositional methods. Neural networks have proven to be enormously effective machine learning tools for natural language processing. Compositionality as a linguistic principle it has a strong tradition in semantic construction. However, both approaches have distinct challenges. Pure neural models are data hungry, since they have no prior knowledge of the inherent structure in language. Compositional approaches have robustness issues and suffer from the ambiguity of latent structural information in the training data.This thesis combines the strengths of both worlds to address these challenges. The AM dependency parser drops the restrictive syntactic constraints of classic compositional approaches, instead relying only on semantic types and meaningful semantic operations as structural guides. The ability of neural networks to encode contextual information allows the parser to make correct decisions in the absence of hard syntactic constraints.Consequently, the thesis focuses on terms for semantic representations, which are algebraic `building instructions'. The thesis frst examines the suitability of the HR algebra (a general tool for building graphs, Courcelle and Engelfriet (2012)) for this purpose. It then develops the linguistically motivated AM algebra, that proves much better suited for the purpose. Representing the terms over the AM algebra as dependency trees further simplifies the semantic construction. In particular, the move from the HR algebra to the AM algebra and then to AM dependency trees drastically removes the ambiguity of latent structural information required for training the model.In conclusion, the AM dependency trees yield a simple semantic parser, where neural tagging and dependency models predict interpretable, meaningful operations that construct the AMR.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (xviii, 244 pages) diagrams, graphs, table
Characterising the Impact of systematic flat-fielding errors In Huntsman telescope data
No full textEmpirical thesis.Bibliography: pages 61-64.1. Introduction -- 2. Methods -- 3. Flat-fielding expectations, strategy and quality control -- 4. Flat-field data characterisation -- 5. Discussion and conclusions -- Appendix -- References.The Huntsman Telescope is a new facility being commissioned at Siding Spring Observatory in Australia. It consists of an array of Canon telephoto lenses. In order to circumvent the systematic errors known to affect mirror based instruments, the Canon lenses act together as a single refracting telescope. They reduce the scattering of light within the optical path,which allows fainter limiting surface brightness levels to be reached. However, at these low surface brightness levels other sources of systematic error must be carefully investigated and scrutinised. In this thesis I will investigate one of the primary sources of systematic error in low surface brightness imaging, flat fielding uncertainties, and how it impacts the Huntsman Telescope.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (xii, 64 pages) colour illustration
Gene expression profiling of peripheral blood in sporadic and C9orf72-associated amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
No full textEmpirical thesis.Bibliography: pages 161-189.1. Introduction -- 2. Subjects and materials-- 3. Methods -- 4. Results -- 5. Discussion -- Appendix -- List of symbols -- References.Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a fatal neuro-degenerative disease characterised by the progressive loss of motor neurons. Progressive paralysis leads to death within 2-5 years of symptom onset. Currently there is no effective treatment for ALS as there is a lack of understanding regarding the cellular mechanisms of disease pathogenesis and progression. Approximately 10% of ALS patients have a family history of ALS (fALS), 90% of cases occur sporadically (sALS) and have an unknown disease aetiology. Causal ALS gene mutations only account for a small proportion of cases. Two individual projects were completed as part of this study.The first project sought to elucidate the altered molecular pathways that occur in ALS using unbiased transcriptome-wide analysis of a blood-derived RNA-Seq dataset, comprising 95 sALS patients and 69 controls. There was differential expression of 1,151 between sALS cases and controls. Functional analysis identified up-regulation of antiviral pathways in early-onset sALS. Targeted analysis found that three ALS-associated genes were significantly differentially expressed in sALS. Statistical analysis of clinical traits amongst sALS cases, uncovered that early-onset cases had slower disease progression than late-onset cases (p<0.001). The finding that antiviral activation occurs in asubset of sALS cases indicates that gene expression profiling of peripheral blood samples from large sALS cohorts will be essential for understanding disease pathogenesis and directing the targeted development of therapeutics for ALS.The second project sought to determine if expression of mRNA transcripts is altered in carriers of the ALS gene, C9orf72, compared to non-carriers. A hexanucleotide repeat expansion in the C9orf72 gene is the most frequent ALS-associated gene mutation. Haploinsufficiency of C9orf72, due to presence of the repeat expansion, may be a mechanism of pathogenesis. A previous (unpublished) DNA methylation study, within our group, has identified that the upstream C9orf72 promoter is significantly more methylated in carriers of the C9orf72 pathogenic repeat compared to non-carriers. RT-qPCR was conducted to determine the relative abundance of C9orf72 mRNA transcripts between carriers of the C9orf72 expansion (n=11) and age/sex matched controls (n=11). C9orf72 transcript 1 (NM 145005) was significantly reduced in C9orf72 repeat carriers compared to controls.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (xxiv, 189 pages) diagrams, graphs, table
Restriction presheaves and restriction colimits
No full textEmpirical thesis.Bibliography: pages 95-96.1. Introduction -- 2. Cocompletion of restriction categories -- 3. Free cocompletion of locally small restriction categories -- 4. Restriction presheaves -- 5. Cocompletion of join restriction categories -- 6. Join restriction presheaves -- 7. Restriction colimits -- 8. Atlases and their gluings -- 9. Restriction profunctors and other restriction definitions -- References.Restriction categories, as defined by Cockett and Lack, are an abstraction of the notion of partial functions between sets, and therefore, are important in furthering our understanding of what it means to be partial. This thesis builds upon the work of Cockett and Lack, by providing restriction analogues of notions from ordinary category theory. One such notion is that of free cocompletion. We show that every restriction category may be freely completed to a cocomplete restriction category, and that this free cocompletion can be described in terms of a restriction category of restriction presheaves. Indeed, a restriction presheaf is defined precisely so that this is the case. We then generalise free cocompletion to join restriction categories, which are categories whose compatible maps may be combined in some way. To do this, we introduce the notion of join restriction presheaf, and show that for any join restriction category, its join restriction category of join restriction presheaves is its free cocompletion.The second half of this thesis explores the notion of restriction colimit. More precisely,we define the restriction colimit of a restriction functor weighted by a restriction presheaf. We also show that cocomplete restriction categories may be characterised as those having all such restriction colimits. Finally, we give applications of restriction colimits. Some examples of restriction colimits are gluings of atlases in a restriction category, and composition o frestriction profunctors. We conclude this thesis with notions in category theory that have no analogue in the restriction setting.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (viii, 96 page
Worn out: exploring the phenomenon of mental health wearable devices
No full textTheoretical thesis.Includes bibliographical references.Introduction -- Literature review -- Chapter 1. Producing artefacts of emotion : the production and regulation of mental health wearable devices -- Chapter 2. Embodied emotion and mood engineering -- Chapter 3. I measure; therefore, I am : regulating the quantified self -- Conclusion -- References -- Appendix.“Worn out : Exploring the Phenomenon of Mental Health Wearable Devices” is a dissertation based on qualitative research that seeks to understand how the contemporary western understanding of mental well-being and mental ill health is forged through the use of technological interventions such as wearable devices. I attempt to untangle the complex interactions between researchers, device creators, devices, multi-national corporations, mental health practitioners and device users who inhabit a posthuman cyborg world where devices serve as prostheses for supposedly dysfunctional minds. I examine how users ascribe meaning to the physiological artefacts of emotion captured by wearable devices, to construct a sense of self, mediate a sense of control, agency and normativity based on their interaction with these devices. I also explore the influencing factors that drive the creation of algorithms that attempt to determine hitherto elusive objective baselines for states of being that were previously considered subjective and variable. Is the seeming reductionism of a range of meanings of the physiological signs of distress read by devices a cause for concern? Does the use of these devices prove therapeutic or are they being used as another means of socialization? These are the questions I seek to answer through the examination of the phenomenon of individual and corporate mental health wearable devices.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (unpaged
A study of the correlation between a speaker’s appearance and people’s perception of their accent
No full textTheoretical thesis.Bibliography: pages 85-90.Introduction -- Methodology -- Study 1 - test of the experiment material's validity -- Study 2 - observation of participants’ responses to the stimulus -- Conclusion -- References -- Appendices.There is a plethora of research focusing on accent discrimination and its effect on migrants, but few research projects discuss the correlation between accents and stereotypical perceptions. Audiences have different emotional reactions toward the same content when it is delivered by different patterns and volumes. Sociolinguistic research shows that accent as a part of an individual’s identity is being associated with cultural habitus and reflective of ethnic or racial background. My research project examines whether speakers’ physical appearance can influence people’s perceptions of their accents and focuses on the correlation between prototypicality and the connotations of accents. Two experiments have been carried out: In Study 1, an audio soundtrack has been recorded by a male of Asian physical appearance who is a native speaker of Australian English (AusE). 50 Macquarie University students completed an online questionnaire and assessed the speaker’s accent. In Study 2, a focus group was recruited from the online study, watch a video recording of the same speech, subsequently discuss the speaker’s accent and then complete the same questionnaire again. The goal of this experiment is to find out if people’s perceptions regarding the same speaker’s accent change when the speaker presents more features and whether stereotypes can create cognitive biases towards people’s accent. The results support the hypophysis of my study. It seems that people’s recognition of accents is influenced by the speaker’s appearance. My argument and research design for my doctoral thesis will build on this result and further study the correlation between appearance and accent.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (128 pages) graph
Strategizing the future of massive open online courses
No full textTheoretical thesis.Bibliography: pages 72-89.Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. Trends disrupting higher education -- Chapter 3. MOOCS and historical evolution of higher education -- Chapter 4. Theoretical framework -- Chapter 5. Conceptual model -- References.Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have emerged as one of the most noticeable developments in higher education. MOOCs have generated hype, hope and excitement worldwide and, more recently, also increasing scepticism as early expectations have not been met. Some aspects of MOOCs, such as their economic dynamics, technological capability, systems design, pedagogy, and participant experiences have been the subject of research. However, few researchers analyze MOOCs from a strategy perspective in an attempt to understand them in a larger context with other technological developments in learning and higher education. The purpose of this thesis, therefore, is to examine MOOCs using two prominent theoretical frameworks in business strategy, namely, dynamic capabilities and disruptive innovation. Having analyzed the strategy literature in relation to MOOCs, the thesis will then develop a conceptual framework to enable university managers to answer questions about what role MOOCs should play, what global education markets they best apply to, and how they should be designed given other unique strategic concerns their universities face.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (vi, 89 pages) diagram
Parameter estimation for additive hazards model with partly interval-censored failure time data using a penalized likelihood approach
No full textTheroretical thesis.Bibliography: pages 161-171.1. Introduction -- 2. Literature review -- 3. MPL approach for right-censored data -- 4. MPL approach for interval censored data -- 5. Asymptotic properties -- 6. Simulation studies -- 7. Real data application -- 8. Conclusion and future work -- Appendix -- Bibliography.In the context of failure time data, interval censoring is a censoring type which has become increasingly prevalent in many areas, including medical, financial, actuarial and sociological studies. In interval-censored data, the actual failure time is neither exactly observed nor right-censored nor left-censored, but one can establish boundaries of an interval within which the survival event has occurred. The aim of this thesis is to develop a maximum penalized log-likelihood (MPL) method which estimates model parameters of the semiparametric additive hazards model with partly interval-censored failure time data. This data will contain exactly observed, left-censored, finite interval-censored and right-censored data. This MPL method estimates the regression coefficients and the underlying non-parametric baseline hazard function, simultaneously, by imposing non-negativity constraints on the baseline hazard and the overall hazard function. We approximate infinite dimensional baseline hazard from a finite number of non-negative basis functions.The chosen MPL method guarantees the smoothness of the baseline hazard estimates, which clearly depicted the trend of how the estimates changed over time. We adopted the augmented Lagrangian method to solve this constraint optimization problem, and the estimates were obtained simultaneously using the Newton and multiplicative iterative (Newton-MI) algorithm followed by line-search steps. The asymptotic properties of these derived constrained MPL estimators were studied when the number of basis functions was fixed and when it went to infinity. We investigated the performance of this proposed MPL method by conducting simulation studies for both right-censored data and partly interval-censored data. Both of the simulation studies demonstrated that our method worked well for small and large datasets as well as small and large censoring proportions. The derived asymptotic standard deviation formula was generally accurate in approximating the standard deviation of the constrained MPL estimates. In addition, we also made comparisons between our MPL method and existing parameter estimation methods developed by Aalen (1980) and Lin & Ying (1994). Results show that our MPL method provided better estimates. In a real data analysis, we applied our MPL method to fit the additive hazards model to a melanoma data set with all types of censoring, which was provided by the Melanoma Institute of Australia.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (xviii, 171 pages) graphs, table