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Surveying the diversity of Rubisco activase genes in Australian wild crop relatives
No full textEmpirical thesis.Bibliography: pages 63-73.1. Introduction --- 2. Objectives of the present study -- 3. Materials and methods -- 4. Results -- 5. Discussion -- References -- Supplementary material.Rubisco activase (RCA) is the regulatory partner of Rubisco – the enzyme that fixes CO2 into sugars. RCA removes inhibitory compounds from the active sites of Rubisco. Thus, RCA can reactivate Rubisco, increasing the efficiency of biomass accumulation in plants. Under heat stress the association between RCA and Rubisco breaks down and plant productivity declines. However,wild crop relatives that occur in hot environments have divergent RCA isoforms that can function during heat stress. Because average daily temperatures are increasing, RCA has garnered interest for transgenic studies.This study aimed to characterise the heat response of photosynthesis and RCA abundance, and the sequence diversity of RCA in domestic and wild species of cotton (Gossypium) and tobacco (Nicotiana) and three populations of kangaroo grass (Themeda triandra). I found that wild species’ photosynthetic rates demonstrate a range of responses to increased temperature. I identified four isoforms of RCA in both Gossypium and Nicotiana species, and one isoform in Themeda as well as three RCA mutant isoforms in Gossypium and one in Nicotiana. This study showed that while the total RCA content of each of these species did not change in response to heat, thermotolerant species of both genera demonstrated unique patterns of RCA accumulation, indicating the importance of RCA stoichiometry in thermotolerance. Finally, I report the occurrence of polymorphisms in RCA from Gossypium, Nicotiana, and T. triandra which may contribute to changes in RCA rigidity but which do not fit with current ideas about RCA thermostability.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (85 pages) diagrams, table
Felt knowing, tacit knowledge and creative practice: insights from architects and private developers in urban settings
No full textTheoretical thesis.Bibliography: pages 288-294.1. Introduction -- 2. A review of the literature -- 3. Methodological frame and research methods -- 4. Gestures and metaprocesses emerging from architectural practice -- 5. Gestures and metaprocesses emerging from private developer practice -- 6. Implications and significance of the models of practice for public planning -- References -- Appendices.This thesis looks closely at architectural design and private developer practice in relation to public sector urban planning practice. In particular, it focuses on experiential aspects of how practitioners from each of these distinct practice traditions, who work in similar contexts but under different conditions, do what they do. Analysis is undertaken at a particularly fine resolution, exploring the phenomenology of their practices using constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz 2006). This allows the thesis to build a grounded theory in the form of a partial model of practices used by the participants, as they transition back and forth between feeling, thinking and doing in their professional practices.The research delivers three main findings : (i) fine resolution practices described in different settings by Gendlin (1996), Petitmengin‐Peugeot (1999) and Walkerden (2005) are echoed in skilful architectural and property developer practice; (ii) elements of a family of gestures involving problem‐solving, designing and negotiating can usefully be delineated in the practices of private developers and architects; and (iii) there are resonances between the practices of private sector architects and developers, and public sector urban planners (including designers) which open up new possibilities for knowledge sharing and provoking creativity amongst practice traditions affecting urban futures.These findings are significant because they complement and contribute to recent work in communicative planning. Forester (1989) identified conversational practices that support an understanding of urban planning as communicative (building on the work of Habermas 1984), and identified the importance of conversation – dialogue, debate and deliberation – as a platform for ‘making sense together’. This research identifies more interiorly‐oriented practices that support creative responses to challenges of urban planning and private development and in integrative ways. The thesis concludes that better understanding how practice operates complements Forester’s emphasis on the social aspects of making sense, and also advances the emphasis on democratic process and social justice in communicative planning. Finally, the thesis considers how these findings open new opportunities for developing a teachable model of the microprocesses of practices identified in the mappings of modes of practice presented.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (vi, 305 pages
Chemical tools for isolation of endogenous claudins from carcinoma cells
No full textTheoretical thesis.Bibliography: pages 47-51.1. Introduction -- 2. Experimental methods -- 3. Results and discussion -- 4. Conclusion and future direction.Claudins are a family of tetraspan transmembrane proteins that regulate the barrier function and ion selective paracellular permeability of the tight junction. Claudins have diverse roles in normal tissues as well as different cancers, and it is necessary to understand the regulation of endogenous claudins in different cellular environments. As low-abundance and hydrophobic proteins, detection and analysis of claudins has been a major challenge. Here a chemical method for tagging and enriching endogenous surface claudins is investigated for analysis by mass spectrometry. Model human colorectal carcinoma, HCT-116 cells, were surface labelled with sulfo-NHS-S-S-biotin, followed by NeutrAvidin affinity purification and then LC/MS/MS analysis. Various cell-lysis, labelling and elution conditions for optimized recovery of claudins were examined by western-blot analysis. Following the optimized labeling and affinity pull-down protocol, the biotinylated elute fraction was analysed in 1D liquid LC/MS/MS analysis. A total of 389 unique protein groups were identified including 58 proteins found in ≥2 samples. Although peptides of claudins still remain to be detected, 19 plasma membrane proteins were identified with the optimized protocol. This sets the stage for a future advanced workflow that combines membrane fractionation with surface biotinylation for MS based proteome-wide analysis of claudins.1 online resource (vii, 51, vii pages : illustrations
Immanuel Kant on toleration
No full textTheoretical thesis.Bibliography: pages 65-71Chapter 1: Introduction -- Chapter 2: Kant & the German Terminology of Toleration -- Chapter 3: Toleration-Like Concepts in Kant -- Chapter 4: Evaluating the Secondary Literature on Kant’s View of Toleration -- Chapter 5: ConclusionThis thesis provides an account of Kant’s views on toleration, derived from the exegesis of relevant sections of his corpus. It begins by systematically surveying all direct examples of toleration-language in Kant’s works, and analysing these with a view to articulating Kant’s understanding of toleration as it relates to both the moral and political spheres. The thesis then turns to consider how ideas of toleration are used more broadly in his work, in selected texts where explicit toleration-language does not appear but where toleration does figure conceptually or indirectly. Other contemporary readings of Kant on toleration are then evaluated in light of the conclusions reached. Although it is a study of toleration-terminology and related conceptual thinking across all of Kant’s corpus, the thesis primarily concentrates on works produced within the context of the political turmoil in the aftermath of the French Revolution, specifically Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, The Metaphysics of Morals, and Toward Perpetual Peace, alongside with his earlier (1784) essay What is Enlightenment? The thesis argues that it is possible to identify in Kant a constructive concept of toleration, while proposing that any reading of Kant on toleration should be the result of a more systematic and comprehensive study of toleration in his works than some other recent reconstructions in the contemporary literature. It will be suggested that for Kant toleration functions to support and facilitate both personal-moral and political progress along Kantian lines, even though Kant’s conception of toleration contains significant limitations. These conclusions emerge more clearly from some of the works studied than others, but nonetheless are argued to be present in a number of Kant’s writings of the 1780s and 1790s in relation to a variety of moral and political questions.1 online resource (71 pages
Analytics-assisted triage of psychological workers’ compensation claims
No full textEmpirical thesis.Bibliography: pages 63-69.1. Introduction -- 2. Literature review -- 3. Data -- 4. Method -- 5. Results -- 6. Discussion -- 7. Conclusion -- References -- Appendices.Workers’ compensation is a form of insurance for employers providing income replacement, medical benefits and rehabilitation support to eligible workers suffering a work-related injury or illness. The cost of work-related injuries and illnesses is significant in Australia, amounting to 4.1 percent of GDP in terms of total economic cost. Among all injuries, psychological injury is the most expensive form of workers’ compensation claim due to its typically long duration. Despite the importance and cost of work-related psychological injury, the factors associated with prolonged claim duration are still not well understood. Using data provided by the workers’ compensation agency in South Australia, this research identifies factors associated with the duration of workers’ compensation claims for psychological injuries (psychological claims), and develops a practical and informative business model to aid the management of such claims by using modern analytics techniques including classification tree and association rule learning. We find that the factor most associated with duration of psychological claims is occupation, followed by bodily location of the most recent prior claim and age of injured worker. It is found that, among psychological claims, those made by claimants in high socio-economic occupations are at higher risk of prolonged claim duration. We finally develop a triage model that uses these factors to segment claims according to risk of prolonged duration. The model enables the focusing of efforts and resources on high-risk claims, thereby reducing the economic and societal burden of work-related injury.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (xv, 107 pages) diagrams, graphs, table
How does the interactive use of budgets affect employees' role clarity and creativity?
No full textTheoretical thesis.Bibliography: pages 81-91.Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. Literature review and hypothesis development -- Chapter 3. Research method -- Chapter 4. Data analysis and results -- Chapter 5. Discussion and conclusion -- References -- Appendices.The success of organisations in the current global market is largely dependent on employees’ creativity. Interactive use of budgets is likely to play an important role in encouraging employees’ creativity. This study examines whether the interactive use of budgets is associated with managers’ creativity directly or indirectly through role clarity. The Partial Least Squares (PLS) technique was used to analyse the mail survey data collected from 88 middle-level managers in publicly-listed Indonesian companies. The findings of this study indicate that interactive use of budgets has a significant impact on managers’ creativity through role clarity. However, there is no evidence that interactive use of budgets has a direct association with managers’ creativity. Based on an additional analysis, the study also finds that while the relationship between the goal clarity dimension of role clarity and managers’ creativity is positive and significant, there is no evidence in support of the association between the process clarity dimension of role clarity and managers’ creativity. This study contributes to the management accounting literature and sheds some light on practical implications.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (v, 100 pages) table
Dynamics of housing affordability: a new perspective from the LGA level
No full textTheoretical thesis.Bibliography: pages 188-197.1. Introduction and motivation -- 2. Literature review on housing affordability -- 3. Ideas and measures of housing affordability -- 4. Descriptive analysis of the Sydney housing market -- 5. A model of housing affordability in Sydney -- 6. Policy implications, limitations and review.This study highlights the importance of housing affordability at the Sydney Local Government Areas level by providing a descriptive analysis of factors affecting housing affordability and examining housing affordability for homeowners and renters using the ‘ratio approach’ from 2001 to 2016. It is observed that housing affordability deteriorates over the observed period for homeowners, partly because the percentage increase in income cannot catch up with the percentage increase in dwelling prices. However, an improvement in housing affordability for renters is shown after 2011. Housing affordability for homeowners is also examined using the user cost approach. The analysis is conducted separately for existing homeowners and first home buyers to capture the housing stress differences between the two. Housing affordability improvement is found for both groups of homeowners after 2011. Nevertheless, first home owners are observed to be more prone to suffering from housing stress compared to existing homeowners. Therefore, measures can be taken to help potential first home owners gain home ownership. With reference to geographical differences on the issue of housing affordability in 2016, it is observed that Western Sydney is considered more affordable than the Eastern side. This situation is due to the NSW government’s intention of developing the north-western part of Sydney. As a result, more dwellings are expected to be built there at a lower price compared to those located in the inner ring of Sydney. To conclude, this study provides an updated picture on housing affordability situations at the Sydney Local Government Area level and gives policy implications on housing affordability accordingly.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (1 online resource (197 pages : maps
Disfluency detection using a noisy channel model and deep neural language model
No full textTheoretical thesis.Bibliography: pages 43-46.1. Introduction -- 2. Literature review -- 3. LSTM noisy channel model -- 4. Experiments and results -- 5. Summary and conclusions.Although speech recognition technology has improved considerably in recent years, current systems still output simply a sequence of words without any useful information about the location of disfluencies. On the other hand, such information is necessary for improving the readability of speech transcripts. In fact, speech transcripts containing a lot of disfluencies are difficult to understand, so removing disfluent words can make speech transcripts more readable. Moreover, many tasks including dialogue systems input spontaneous speech. Such systems are usually trained on fluent, clean corpora, so inputting disfluent data would decrease their performance. This thesis aims at introducing a model for automatic disfluency detection in spontaneous speech transcripts called LSTM Noisy Channel Model. The model uses a Noisy Channel Model (NCM) to find "rough copies" that are likely to indicate disfluencies and generate n-best candidate disfluency analyses. Then, the underlying fluent sentences of each candidate analysis are scored using a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) language model. The LSTM language model scores, along with other features, are used in a reranker to identify the most plausible analysis. We show that using LSTM language model scores as features to rerank the analyses generated by an NCM improves the state of-the-art in disfluency detection.1 online resource (ix, 46 pages
Let Me and My Metadata Alone: Australia's Compliance with Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
No full textTheoretical thesis.Bibliography: pages 60-67.I. Introduction -- II. Privact : Three waves of development -- III. Privacy, metadata retention and Solove's taxonomy -- IV. Privacy in international law -- V. Metadata retention in Australia -- VI. Conclusion -- VII. References.In 2015, Australia enacted legislation to require telecommunications service providers to retain user and subscriber metadata for a period of two years. The retention of metadata, classified under legislation as personal information, raises concerns of the potential of unlawful privacy intrusions into the private lives of individuals by state and non-state actors. The aim of this research is to evaluate whether the legislation is consistent with Australia's obligations under article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. This paper explores the development of the concept of privacy as a human right and illustrates that privacy concerns closely followed with advances in technology, capable of being delineated into three waves of privacy discourse. Daniel Solove's taxonomy of privacy is used to analyse threats to privacy engendered by metadata retention. Using international legal instruments, this research offers a set of requirements that must be satisfied for privacy intrusions to be deemed legitimate, necessary and proportionate. Upon applying the international legal requirements to the metadata retention legislation, this research concludes that Australia does not meet its international legal obligations to protect individual privacy against unlawful or arbitrary interference.1 online resource ([1], 72 pages
A preliminary thermochemical model of the Australian lithospere
No full textTheoretical thesis.Bibliography: pages 47-52.1. Introduction -- 2. Methodology -- 3. Application to Australia -- 4. Discussion -- 5. Conclusions and future work.The Australian continent is composed of an assemblage of lithospheric blocks that can be broadly grouped into the Precambrian western and central cratonic zones and the Phanerozoic eastern province. The fusion of lithospheric domains, an active accretionary margin, and a sequence of subduction complexes throughout Australia's geological history have created a complex assemblage of lithospheric domains. In this thesis, I map the thermal, physical and compositional structure of this complex lithosphere and sub-lithospheric mantle using a well-developed multi-observable probabilistic inversion method (Afonso et al., 2013a,b).Geophysical observables used in this study include Rayleigh wave dispersion data, absolute elevation, geoid height, surface heat flow, and a priori crustal information (e.g. Mohodepth, crustal layers, seismic velocity and density). These data sets are jointly inverted using a 1D column-by-column approach with a Bayesian framework, combining prior geophysical knowledge with measured data.The results from this research include estimates of depth to the lithosphere-asthenosphere boundary, temperature variations and chemical structure in the lithosphere and sub-lithospheric mantle and temperature profiles beneath continental Australia.1 online resource (xviii, 52 pages : maps