609 research outputs found
Replacement of Cakile edentula with Cakile maritima in New South Wales and on Lord Howe Island
No full textTwo species of Cakile (Brassicaceae) have been introduced to Australia and the genus has been a common feature on the beaches of NSW for over 130 years; Cakile edentula has been present for at least 148 years (in NSW since about 1870), while Cakile maritima arrived approximately 114 years ago, (in NSW since about 1969). Collections at CANB and NSW confirm that since around 1970 plants more like Cakile maritima have almost entirely replaced Cakile edentula along the NSW coast. A similar phenomenon is reported for Lord Howe Island
'Pilings of Thought Under Spoken': The Poetry of Susan Howe, 1974-1993.
No full textPhDThis thesis discusses the poetry published by contemporary American poet Susan
Howe over a period of almost two decades. The dissertation is chiefly concerned with
articulating the relationship between poetic form, history, and authority in this body
of' work. Howe's poetry dredges the past for the linguistic effects of patriarchy,
colonialism and war. My reading of the work is an exploration of the ways in which a
disjunctive poetics can address such historical trauma. The poems, rather than
attempting to reinstate voices lifted from what Howe has called "the dark side of
history", are a means of reflecting the resistance that the past offers to contemporary
investigation. It is the effacement, and not the recovery, of history's victims, that is
discernible in the contours of these highly opaque texts. Notions of authority are most
often addressed in the poetry through the figure of paternal absence, which has a
threefold function in the work, serving to represent social authority, an aporetic
conception of divinity and an autobiographical narrative. Alongside the antiauthoritarian
currents in the writing - critiques, for example, of the doctrine of
Manifest Destiny or of scapegoating versions of femininity - my thesis stresses Howe's
engagement with negative theology and with a strain of American Protestant
enthusiasm that has its roots in 17th century New England. The dissertation explores
the dissonance caused by the co-existence in the poetry of elements of political dissent
and religious mysticism. Finally, I consider Howe's engagement with literary history
and authors such as Shakespeare, Swift, Thoreau and Melville. The manner in which
Howe deploys the words of others in her work, I argue, allows for a mixture of textual
polyphony and a more conventional notion of authorial 'voice'
Curriculum, Teaching and Learning Within the Context of Comparative, International and Development Education
No full textCurriculum, teaching and learning should include a component of Comparative, International and Development Education. It is increasingly important for teachers to foster global citizenship, international cooperation and cross-cultural understanding, within the dialectic of the global and the local. By reaching beyond the four walls of classrooms, teachers can gain broader, international perspectives and a deeper sociocultural understanding of curriculum, teaching and learning. Thus, enriching student experience and substantially improving teacher professional development. While there are many potentially significant cross-cultural lessons in teaching pedagogy, teachers have few opportunities. However, through educational exchanges and shared experience, teachers can become introduced to alternative forms of schooling and can learn to think more critically about traditional approaches to education. In this paper, I propose using Comparative, International and Development Education to enhance teacher education and situate my own cross-cultural experiences in curriculum, teaching and learning in Canada and Japan within this context.Not peer reviewedThe published version in the this article is available: Howe, E. R. (2003). Curriculum studies within the context of comparative, international and development education. Canadian and International Education Journal, 32(2), 1–14.CanadaJapancomparative educationteacher educationteacher educatio
Directed plateau search for MAX-k-SAT
No full textLocal search algorithms for MAX-k-SAT must often explore large regions of mutually connected equal moves, or plateaus, typically by taking random walks through the region. In this paper, we develop a surrogate plateau “gradient” function using aWalsh transform of the objective function. This function gives the mean value of the objective function over localized volumes of the search space. This information can be used to direct search through plateaus more quickly. The focus of this paper is on demonstrating that formal analysis of search space structure can direct existing algorithms in a more principled manner than random walks. We show that embedding the gradient computation into a hill-climbing local search for MAX-k-SAT improves its convergence profile.Andrew M. Sutton, Adele E. Howe and L. Darrell Whitle
Curriculum, teaching and learning within the context of comparative, international and development education
No full textCurriculum, teaching and learning should include a component of Comparative, International and Development Education. It is increasingly important for teachers to foster global citizenship, international cooperation and cross-cultural understanding, within the dialectic of the global and the local. By reaching beyond the four walls of classrooms, teachers can gain broader, international perspectives and a deeper sociocultural understanding of curriculum, teaching and learning. Thus, enriching student experience and substantially improving teacher professional development. While there are many potentially significant cross-cultural lessons in teaching pedagogy, teachers have few opportunities. However, through educational exchanges and shared experience, teachers can become introduced to alternative forms of schooling and can learn to think more critically about traditional approaches to education. In this paper, I propose using Comparative, International and Development Education to enhance teacher education and situate my own cross-cultural experiences in curriculum, teaching and learning in Canada and Japan within this context.Not peer reviewedThe published version in the this article is available: Howe, E. R. (2003). Curriculum studies within the context of comparative, international and development education. Canadian and International Education Journal, 32(2), 1–14.CanadaJapancomparative educationteacher educationteacher educatio
Mutation rates of the (1+1)-EA on pseudo-Boolean functions of bounded epistasis
No full textAndrew M. Sutton, L. Darrell Whitley, Adele E. How
Approximating the distribution of fitness over hamming regions
No full textAndrew M. Sutton, L. Darrell Whitley, Adele E. How
Estimating bounds on expected plateau size in MAXSAT problems
No full textAlso published as book chapter: Engineering Stochastic Local Search Algorithms. Designing, Implementing and Analyzing Effective Heuristics, 2009 / Thomas Stützle, Mauro Birattari, Holger H. Hoos (eds.), pp.31-45Stochastic local search algorithms can now successfully solve MAXSAT problems with thousands of variables or more. A key to this success is how effectively the search can navigate and escape plateau regions. Furthermore, the solubility of a problem depends on the size and exit density of plateaus, especially those closest to the optimal solution. In this paper we model the plateau phenomenon as a percolation process on hypercube graphs. We develop two models for estimating bounds on the size of plateaus and prove that one is a lower bound and the other an upper bound on the expected size of plateaus at a given level. The models’ accuracy is demonstrated on controlled random hypercube landscapes. We apply the models to MAXSAT through analogy to hypercube graphs and by introducing an approach to estimating, through sampling, a key parameter of the models. Using this approach, we assess the accuracy of our bound estimations on uniform random and structured benchmarks. Surprisingly, we find similar trends in accuracy across random and structured problem instances. Less surprisingly, we find a high accuracy on smaller plateaus with systematic divergence as plateaus increase in size.Andrew M. Sutton, Adele E. Howe, and L. Darrell Whitle
A theoretical analysis of the k-satisfiability search space
No full textAlso published as a book chapter: Engineering Stochastic Local Search Algorithms. Designing, Implementing and Analyzing Effective Heuristics, 2009 / Stützle, Thomas; Birattari, Mauro; Hoos, Holger H. (eds.), pp.46-60Local search algorithms perform surprisingly well on the k-satisfiability (k-SAT) problem. However, few theoretical analyses of the k-SAT search space exist. In this paper we study the search space of the k-SAT problem and show that it can be analyzed by a decomposition. In particular, we prove that the objective function can be represented as a superposition of exactly k elementary landscapes. We show that this decomposition allows us to immediately compute the expectation of the objective function evaluated across neighboring points. We use this result to prove previously unknown bounds for local maxima and plateau width in the 3-SAT search space. We compute these bounds numerically for a number of instances and show that they are non-trivial across a large set of benchmarks.Andrew M. Sutton, Adele E. Howe, and L. Darrell Whitle
Understanding elementary landscapes
No full textThe landscape formalism unites a finite candidate solution set to a neighborhood topology and an objective function. This construct can be used to model the behavior of local search on combinatorial optimization problems. A landscape is elementary when it possesses a unique property that results in a relative smoothness and decomposability to its structure. In this paper we explain elementary landscapes in terms of the expected value of solution components which are transformed in the process of moving from an incumbent solution to a neighboring solution. We introduce new results about the properties of elementary landscapes and discuss the practical implications for search algorithms.L. Darrell Whitley, Andrew M. Sutton, Adele E. How
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