Program behaviour modelling with flexible logical entity abstraction
- Authors: Andrews, David
- Date: 2006
- Type: Text , Thesis , PhD
- Full Text:
- Description: "This study extends the use of abstration in program behaviour modelling, and provides a flexible abstraction technique that allows modelling in terms of the logical abstract concepts with which a program operates. This technique is called a Logical Entity Abstracted Program Behaviour Modelling (LEAPBM)."--leaf [ii]
- Description: Doctor of Philosophy
Program evaluation : Issues related to planning, implementing and evaluating ethically responsible and clinically required research
- Authors: Scott, Wayne
- Date: 2006
- Type: Text , Thesis , PhD
- Full Text: false
- Description: Doctor of Psychology (Clinical)
Secret suburbia : An anthology of concepts relating to house and home
- Authors: Mears, Paul
- Date: 2006
- Type: Text , Thesis , Masters
- Full Text: false
- Description: The aim of this research project has been to merge components of ideas relating to House and Home that have been formed by the inherently sensitive autobiographical nature of my own experience whilst growing up in a suburban environment. Naturally, these symbols or metaphors of the mundane reveal much more than what superficial impressions allow. They invite the viewer into an inner world of dream /memory and hypothesis that hopefully invokes within the viewer a desire to reach beyond their own perceptions of the everyday, and to re-examine the source of their own identity, thereby bringing some new emphasis to their own significant journey.
- Description: Master of Arts (Visual Arts)
Space : Contemplating the voids
- Authors: Zuccolo, Michelle
- Date: 2006
- Type: Text , Thesis , Masters
- Full Text:
- Description: This research project into the manipulation of spatial concepts by artists on the two-dimensional surface plane, has involved a selected study into cultural and aesthetic evolution from early civilization through to the present era. I have cast a line of inquiry into eastern, western and primitive art practices, observing the journey of chance accelerated by developments in technology. Traditionally artists utilized modes of spatial convention and techniques according to the specific cultural traditions of the time and place of their production. By contrast, contemporary artists know no such boundaries, and are able to select from a range of spatial options relevant both to current forms of expression and to a personal visual language. My own art practice has been enriched and extended, increasing my ability to challenge the notion of still life composition by reversing the traditional hierarchy of form and space through the application of a series of experiments brought about by extensive research into this spatial evolution. The research project has further assisted this development in my art practice by engaging me in a new level of understanding of the topic, informing my perceptions and increasing my ability to translate a combination of forms in space with heightened emotion and personal meaning.
- Description: Master of Arts (Visual Arts)
The Body as Fiction / Fiction as a Way of Thinking: On Writing A Short (Personal) History of the Bra and its Contents
- Authors: Spencer, Beth
- Date: 2006
- Type: Text , Thesis , PhD
- Full Text:
- Description: This thesis uses fiction as a research technology for investigating and thinking about issues to do with bodies and knowledge at the cusp of the 20th and 21st centuries. It includes sample material from a novel in progress -- A Short (Personal) History of the Bra and its Contents -- to illustrate some of the unique outcomes of this approach to exploring cultural history and writing cultural criticism. One of the advantages of fiction is that it allows me to create a discursive field in which it is possible for the very wide range of issues raised by my topic to coexist, work off each other and cross-fertilise. These include ideas regarding gender, sexuality, nurture and subjectivity; issues to do with the implants controversy, the cancer industry and the corporatisation of medicine (and hence various current debates within science and medicine); as well as movements in fashion history and popular culture -- all of which contribute to making up the datasphere in which and through which we continually reproduce ourselves as subjects. [...]
- Description: Doctor of Philosophy
The floristic composition and regeneration characteristics of Buloke (Allocasuarina luehmannii) woodland of the Wimmera, Victoria
- Authors: Macaulay, Lisa Ann
- Date: 2006
- Type: Text , Thesis , Masters
- Full Text:
- Description: "The pre-settlement distribution and character of Wimmera Buloke woodlands are described based on historical data including early parish plans. It is suggested the open structure of these woodlands was maintained by relatively frequent fire. The floristic composition of the most intact Wimmera Buloke woodland remnants was intensively surveyed. Five floristic communities are described based on computer-based analysis of species presence data. Eight 'pre-settlement Buloke woodland types' are described based on surface soil texture categories and average annual rainfall zones. Native daisies, chenopods and shrubs are components of the understory that differentiate the 'pre-settlement Buloke woodland types'. [...] A series of experiments was undertaken with the aim of determinig the factors responsible for the paucity of Allocasuarina luehmannii regeneration in remnant Wimmera bushland." Digital file does not include CD with Appendix and fold-out map on back cover see print version.
- Description: Master of Applied Science
- Description: "The pre-settlement distribution and character of Wimmera Buloke woodlands are described based on historical data including early parish plans. It is suggested the open structure of these woodlands was maintained by relatively frequent fire. The floristic composition of the most intact Wimmera Buloke woodland remnants was intensively surveyed. Five floristic communities are described based on computer-based analysis of species presence data. Eight 'pre-settlement Buloke woodland types' are described based on surface soil texture categories and average annual rainfall zones. Native daisies, chenopods and shrubs are components of the understory that differentiate the 'pre-settlement Buloke woodland types'. [...] A series of experiments was undertaken with the aim of determinig the factors responsible for the paucity of Allocasuarina luehmannii regeneration in remnant Wimmera bushland."
Too close for comfort? : personal and professional role boundaries in rural health and welfare practice
- Authors: Gregory, Raeleene
- Date: 2006
- Type: Text , Thesis , PhD
- Full Text:
- Description: "'Too close for comfort?' explores the challenges of working and living in Australian rural communities for a group of health and welfare professionals. Personal and professional role overlap is a key concern particularly as it has implications for ethical practice. This project [...] used a qualitative grounded theory approach to develop a theory about the adoption and management of professional role boundaries within ethical service delivery. "
- Description: Doctor of Philosophy
"That fella paints like me" : exploring the relationship between Abstract art and Aboriginal art in Australia
- Authors: Brooks, Terri
- Date: 2005
- Type: Text , Thesis , Masters
- Full Text:
- Description: "This research project explores the possibility of a relationship between Abstract art and Aboriginal art in Australia from the mid twentieth century to present. [...] The investigation commences with background information on the history and origins of Abstraction, including the influence of 'primitive art' upon leading practitioners in this field during the movement's formation, before moving to Australia and focussing on two Australian painters. [...] The text also reflects on the rise of the perception of Aboriginal art from being seen as cultural curios in the mid 20th century to its current status as an internationally recognised art movement."--p. 2.
- Description: Master of Arts (Visual Arts)
(Re)creating spaces within rural general practice : Women as agents of change at the organisational and practitioner levels
- Authors: Schwarz, Imogen
- Date: 2005
- Type: Text , Thesis , PhD
- Full Text:
- Description: This thesis examines how women, as agents of change, contest the male-dominated structures at the organisational and practitioner levels of rural medicine in Australia. The premises for this study are that females now outnumber males as medical graduates and general practice trainees, yet women are significantly less likely than men to occupy rural and remote practice positions in Australia. Furthermore, the organisation of medicine remains strongly patriarchal. A feminist qualitative design underpins this empirical study involving: in-depth interviews with seventeen women activists and thirteen rural women general practitioners; grounded theory analysis of transcribed interviews; and interpretation of findings through a feminist poststructural lens. Findings uncover the gendered organisational and practitioner environment through which change is negotiated. At the organisational level, male exclusionary practices – played out through the ‘male as norm’ and the ‘problem is women’ discourses – position women in highly contradictory ways and marginalise their voices. Yet simultaneously, activists are challenging entrenched interests through individual and collective strategies of change which include: initiating gender-awareness projects; claiming legitimacy by using male-centred tactics and women-defined discourses; developing female-friendly initiatives; and mentoring of and building alliances between women. At the practitioner level, results reveal how women’s everyday lives as rural general practitioners are shaped by oppositional tensions. However, beyond the struggle of ‘fitting in’, women are altering rural medicine by (re)shaping meanings and (re)constructing work practices. Furthermore, their narratives suggest that rural spaces are integral to ways women carve out women-defined practice. A key innovation of this thesis is analysis of change at dual levels, both organisational and practitioner. This thesis marks a significant advancement upon the usual themes that attend only to the marginalisation of women and rural areas. It highlights the transformative process through which women (re)create the discursive spaces of rural general practice.
- Description: Doctor of Philosophy
A critical ethnographic study of older people participating in their health care in acute hospital environments
- Authors: Penney, Wendy
- Date: 2005
- Type: Text , Thesis , PhD
- Full Text:
- Description: "While consumer participation is the focus of 21st century health policy, little is known about this concept from the perspectives of people who require acute hospital services. [...]This project set out to explore older people's perspective of participating in their care. Adopting critical ethnographic method, field work included observation of the inpatient experience. Following discharge home people were interviewed about their experiences including what helped and what hindered participation in their care. Similarly nurses involved in [...] a hospital experience were invited to be involved in individual and focus group discussions aimed at defining how they believed they facilitated people to participate as well as barriers that prevent this style of care."
- Description: Doctor of Philosophy
A psychoanalytical interpretation of the novels of Stephen Donaldson
- Authors: Simons, Kate
- Date: 2005
- Type: Text , Thesis , PhD
- Full Text: false
- Description: "This thesis proposes a Kristevan reading of the fantasy novels of Stephen Donaldson, with particular attention given to Kristeva's concepts of the symbolic order, the semiotic 'chora', abjection, the imaginery father and the thetic. It also identifies and comments on shortcomings in Kristevan theory. Donaldson's fantasies are dominated by male protagonists, one of whom is a leper while the others are rapists or murderers or else engaged in some form of violence or sexual perversion. This thesis not only offers an interpretation for this representation of disease and gross physical abuse, but also looks to the implication such corporeality brings to bear on the amatory relationships that the novels attempt to establish. "The thesis is organized into three broad sections. The first considers the ways in which the concept of the mother manifests in Donaldson's text and how the male protagonists respond to the maternal dynamic established in these books. [...] The second section of the thesis examines the role played by Donaldson's father figures. [...] The third section of [the] thesis examines the consequences of this male vulnerability with regard to its central characters who oscillate between symbolic standing and semiotic sprawl."
- Description: Doctor of Philosophy
Application of nonsmooth optimisation to data analysis
- Authors: Ugon, Julien
- Date: 2005
- Type: Text , Thesis , PhD
- Full Text:
- Description: The research presented in this thesis is two-fold: on the one hand, major data mining problems are reformulated as mathematical programming problems. These problems should be carefully designed, since from their formulation depends the efficiency, perhaps the existence, of the solvers. On the other hand, optimisation methods are adapted to solve these problems, most of which are nonsmooth and nonconvex. This part is delicate, as the solution is often required to be good and obtained fast. Numerical experiments on real-world datasets are presented and analysed.
- Description: Doctor of Philosophy
Approximations for some classes of optimal control problems with state constraints and repetitive control systems
- Authors: Dymkou, Siarhei
- Date: 2005
- Type: Text , Thesis , Masters
- Full Text: false
- Description: This report presents the investigation on the research work "Approximations for some classes of optimal control problems with state constraints and repetitive control systems". This report mainly gives the theoretical part of the research which is based on the numerical methods that are developed. It is conjectured that the corresponding algorithms will be realized as computer programs after which they can be used in practical work.
- Description: Master of Information Technology
Ballarat and its benevolent asylum : A nineteenth-century model of Christian duty, civic progress and social reform
- Authors: Kinloch, Helen
- Date: 2005
- Type: Text , Thesis , PhD
- Full Text:
- Description: "This study of Ballarat and its Asylum covers the period between the 1850s and the early 1900s when an old-age pension was introduced in Victoria. It is essentially a case study. It argues that Ballarat's Asylum progressively developed and expanded upon a model of organised poor relief practiced among the industrial classes in England, in consequence of the perceived need for rapid capital expansion in Australia, and knowledge of the dangers associated with mining, building construction, and other manual work. The introduction of a secular education system in Victoria, together with enthusiasm among producers for technological innovation and skill development, led to changes in the nature and conditions of paid work, as well as to a push among workers and their sympathizers for greater appreciation of past contributions by older workers and the needs of the ill and/or incapacitated. This push was only partially addressed by the Victorian government in 1901 when it introduced the old-age pension."
- Description: Doctor of Philosophy
Derivative-free hybrid methods in global optimization and their applications
- Authors: Zhang, Jiapu
- Date: 2005
- Type: Text , Thesis , PhD
- Full Text:
- Description: In recent years large-scale global optimization (GO) problems have drawn considerable attention. These problems have many applications, in particular in data mining and biochemistry. Numerical methods for GO are often very time consuming and could not be applied for high-dimensional non-convex and / or non-smooth optimization problems. The thesis explores reasons why we need to develop and study new algorithms for solving large-scale GO problems .... The thesis presents several derivative-free hybrid methods for large scale GO problems. These methods do not guarantee the calculation of a global solution; however, results of numerical experiments presented in this thesis demonstrate that they, as a rule, calculate a solution which is a global one or close to it. Their applications to data mining problems and the protein folding problem are demonstrated.
- Description: Doctor of Philosophy
Efficient conic decomposition and projection onto a cone in a Banach ordered space
- Authors: Baratov, Rishat
- Date: 2005
- Type: Text , Thesis , PhD
- Full Text:
- Description: The goal of this research is to study general cone decomposition.
- Description: Doctor of Philosophy
Electrokinetic remediation of arsenic contaminated soils
- Authors: Mewett, John
- Date: 2005
- Type: Text , Thesis , Masters
- Full Text:
- Description: "Arsenic is a common soil contaminant in Australia and worldwide. There is a need to find safe, effective and economic methods to deal with this problem. The soils used in this research were collected from central Victoria. They were contaminated with arsenic by historic gold mining activity or by past sheep dipping practices. This research investigated ten different leaching agents for their effects on three different arsenic contaminated soils. [...] Electrokinetic experiments were conducted on three arsenic contaminated soils. [...] The arsenic in these soils appears to be relatively stable and immobile under oxidising conditions. The soils had a high iron content which assists in the stabilisation of arsenic. This is beneficial with respect to the environmental impact of the arsenic contamination, however, it remains an obstacle to low cost electrokinetic remediation."
- Description: Masters of Applied Science
Incidence and aetiological factors in the development of medial tibial stress syndrome
- Authors: Diacogiorgis, Dimitri
- Date: 2005
- Type: Text , Thesis , Masters
- Full Text:
- Description: The aim of this 13 week prospective study was to investigate whether differences in hip, knee, ankle, subtalar, or first metatarsophalangeal joint (MPJ) range of motion and physical activity levels increase a person's likelihood of developing medial tibial stress syndrome (MTSS)." --p.2.
- Description: Master of Applied Science
Magic and antimagic labeling of graphs
- Authors: Sugeng, Kiki Ariyanti
- Date: 2005
- Type: Text , Thesis , PhD
- Full Text:
- Description: "A bijection mapping that assigns natural numbers to vertices and/or edges of a graph is called a labeling. In this thesis, we consider graph labelings that have weights associated with each edge and/or vertex. If all the vertex weights (respectively, edge weights) have the same value then the labeling is called magic. If the weight is different for every vertex (respectively, every edge) then we called the labeling antimagic. In this thesis we introduce some variations of magic and antimagic labelings and discuss their properties and provide corresponding labeling schemes. There are two main parts in this thesis. One main part is on vertex labeling and the other main part is on edge labeling."
- Description: Doctor of Philosophy
Non-linear analogues of Lagrange functions in constrained optimization
- Authors: Giri, Jason
- Date: 2005
- Type: Text , Thesis , PhD
- Full Text:
- Description: "This thesis investigates several non-linear analogues of Lagrange functions in the hope of answering the question 'Is it possible to generalise Lagrange functions such that they may be applied to a range of nonconvex objective problems?' The answer to this question is found to be yes for a particular class of optimization problems. Furthermore the thesis asserts that in derivative free optimization the general schema which is most theoretically and practically appealing involves the reformulation of both objective and constraint functions, whilst the least practically successful approach for everything but the most simple convex case is the augmented Lagrangian approach."
- Description: Doctor of Philosophy