Showing items 1 - 20 of 11775

Is there a conflict between teaching and research? the views of engineering academics in Europe

- Aarrevaara, Timo, Dobson, Ian

  • Authors: Aarrevaara, Timo , Dobson, Ian
  • Date: 2013
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Global Journal of Engineering Education Vol. 15, no. 2 (2013), p. 75-81
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  • Description: This article presents an analysis of data from the international Changing Academic Profession (CAP) and the Academic Profession in Europe: Response to Societal Changes (EUROAC) surveys to compare engineering academics that prefer teaching over research, and vice versa. It also highlights the attitudes of each of these groups to teaching and research, the two major academic activities. There has long been debate about whether research and teaching are mutual activities or in competition with each other. According to the survey results, the majority stated a leaning towards research, but this preference was stronger in some countries than in others. In fact, data from the CAP survey reveal that 30% of engineering academics from the 12 participating European countries believe that teaching and research are hardly compatible with each other, but opinions from different countries vary considerably. Even though much higher proportions of academics agree that their research reinforces teaching, even on this measure, there are considerable gaps between countries. © WIETE 2013.
  • Description: 2003011212

Publishing and presenting: A cross-national analysis of engineering academics in Europe

- Aarrevaara, Timo, Dobson, Ian

  • Authors: Aarrevaara, Timo , Dobson, Ian
  • Date: 2013
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Global Journal of Engineering Education Vol. 15, no. 3 (2013), p. 148-154
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  • Description: The international Changing Academic Profession (CAP) survey was used to compare several measures of research output in participating European countries. When looking at the output of books, articles, reports and conference presentations, results indicated variations between countries and between the engineering field of education and other fields of education. European university engineering academics produced relatively more research reports/monographs written for a funded project, but tended to produce at lower rates than academics overall in the other three forms of written research output. © WIETE 2013.

Changing employment and working conditions

- Aarrevaara, Timo, Dobson, Ian, Wikström, Janne

  • Authors: Aarrevaara, Timo , Dobson, Ian , Wikström, Janne
  • Date: 2015
  • Type: Text , Book chapter
  • Relation: Academic Work and Careers in Europe : Trends, Challenges, Perspectives p. 95-115
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  • Description: This chapter considers the academic working environment in eight European countries and reports on academics' impressions of the changes that environment has undergone in recent years. We focus on the extent to which the content of academic work in these countries is similar or different; the nature of academics' working conditions and how they have changed; and what academics' affiliations are. The analysis also considers differences according to seniority. Based on interviews with European academics, we consider how changes in working conditions, employment and modes of operation have affected scholarly work and related activities, and the impact change has had on academic freedom. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.

Time is on my side : How do engineering academics spend their days - an international study

- Aarrevaara, Timo, Dobson, Ian

  • Authors: Aarrevaara, Timo , Dobson, Ian
  • Date: 2012
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: World Transactions on Engineering and Technology Education Vol. 10, no. 3 (2012), p. 184-191
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  • Description: This article uses empirical data from the international Changing Academic Profession (CAP) survey to establish similarities and differences in work patterns among the world's academic engineers. Overall working hours and the distribution of work between teaching, research and other activities are examined. Summary results indicate that in periods when classes are in session, engineering academics from South Korea and Hong Kong reported a longer working week than equivalent staff from other countries. Engineering academics from Mexico and South Africa spent the highest proportion of their time on teaching, whereas those from Argentina, China and Italy spent the highest proportion on research. The most likely reason for international differences in the length of the working week is that national systems (such as higher education) have been constructed from the individual histories and cultures in each country. © 2012 WIETE.
  • Description: 2003010832

Academics under pressure : Fear and loathing in finnish universities?

- Aarrevaara, Timo, Dobson, Ian

  • Authors: Aarrevaara, Timo , Dobson, Ian
  • Date: 2015
  • Type: Text , Book chapter
  • Relation: Forming, Recruiting and Managing the Academic Profession p. 211-223
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  • Description: This chapter presents an examination of Finnish university academics and the pressures they encounter in the rapidly changing academic milieu. In addition to the evolution all societies are subject to, staff in Finnish universities has had to adjust to a Universities Act that came into force from 2010, and this ushered in fundamental changes in governance arrangements and confirmed a pattern of increasing managerialism. Evidence indicates that many academics feel little capacity to influence decision making, and some are trapped in a cycle of precarious employment by oft-renegotiated short contracts. In addition, universities find themselves in competition with other labour market segments for highly qualified knowledge workers, a factor which has the capacity to have an impact on universities and their academic workforce. Using quantitative data from the Changing Academic Profession survey and augmenting this with qualitative data from the EUROAC project, this chapter examines Finnish university academics perceptions of academic life in the twenty-first century. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.
  • Description: This chapter presents an examination of Finnish university academics and the pressures they encounter in the rapidly changing academic milieu. In addition to the evolution all societies are subject to, staff in Finnish universities has had to adjust to a Universities Act that came into force from 2010, and this ushered in fundamental changes in governance arrangements and confirmed a pattern of increasing managerialism. Evidence indicates that many academics feel little capacity to influence decision making, and some are trapped in a cycle of precarious employment by oft-renegotiated short contracts. In addition, universities find themselves in competition with other labour market segments for highly qualified knowledge workers, a factor which has the capacity to have an impact on universities and their academic workforce. Using quantitative data from the Changing Academic Profession survey and augmenting this with qualitative data from the EUROAC project, this chapter examines Finnish university academics’ perceptions of academic life in the twenty-first century. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.

Classification systems based on combinatorial semigroups

- Abawajy, Jemal, Kelarev, Andrei

  • Authors: Abawajy, Jemal , Kelarev, Andrei
  • Date: 2013
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Semigroup Forum Vol. 86, no. 3 (2013), p. 603-612
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  • Description: The present article continues the investigation of constructions essential for applications of combinatorial semigroups to the design of multiple classification systems in data mining. Our main theorem gives a complete description of all optimal classification systems defined by one-sided ideals in a construction based on combinatorial Rees matrix semigroups. It strengthens and generalizes previous results, which handled the more narrow case of two-sided ideals. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media New York.
  • Description: 2003011021

Empirical investigation of multi-tier ensembles for the detection of cardiac autonomic neuropathy using subsets of the Ewing features

- Abawajy, Jemal, Kelarev, Andrei, Stranieri, Andrew, Jelinek, Herbert

  • Authors: Abawajy, Jemal , Kelarev, Andrei , Stranieri, Andrew , Jelinek, Herbert
  • Date: 2012
  • Type: Text , Conference proceedings
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  • Description: This article is devoted to an empirical investigation of performance of several new large multi-tier ensembles for the detection of cardiac autonomic neuropathy (CAN) in diabetes patients using sub-sets of the Ewing features. We used new data collected by the diabetes screening research initiative (DiScRi) project, which is more than ten times larger than the data set originally used by Ewing in the investigation of CAN. The results show that new multi-tier ensembles achieved better performance compared with the outcomes published in the literature previously. The best accuracy 97.74% of the detection of CAN has been achieved by the novel multi-tier combination of AdaBoost and Bagging, where AdaBoost is used at the top tier and Bagging is used at the middle tier, for the set consisting of the following four Ewing features: the deep breathing heart rate change, the Valsalva manoeuvre heart rate change, the hand grip blood pressure change and the lying to standing blood pressure change.

A multi-tier ensemble construction of classifiers for phishing email detection and filtering

- Abawajy, Jemal, Kelarev, Andrei

  • Authors: Abawajy, Jemal , Kelarev, Andrei
  • Date: 2012
  • Type: Text , Conference paper
  • Relation: 4th International Symposium on Cyberspace Safety and Security, CSS 2012 Vol. 7672 LNCS, p. 48-56
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  • Description: This paper is devoted to multi-tier ensemble classifiers for the detection and filtering of phishing emails. We introduce a new construction of ensemble classifiers, based on the well known and productive multi-tier approach. Our experiments evaluate their performance for the detection and filtering of phishing emails. The multi-tier constructions are well known and have been used to design effective classifiers for email classification and other applications previously. We investigate new multi-tier ensemble classifiers, where diverse ensemble methods are combined in a unified system by incorporating different ensembles at a lower tier as an integral part of another ensemble at the top tier. Our novel contribution is to investigate the possibility and effectiveness of combining diverse ensemble methods into one large multi-tier ensemble for the example of detection and filtering of phishing emails. Our study handled a few essential ensemble methods and more recent approaches incorporated into a combined multi-tier ensemble classifier. The results show that new large multi-tier ensemble classifiers achieved better performance compared with the outcomes of the base classifiers and ensemble classifiers incorporated in the multi-tier system. This demonstrates that the new method of combining diverse ensembles into one unified multi-tier ensemble can be applied to increase the performance of classifiers if diverse ensembles are incorporated in the system. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.
  • Description: 2003010675

Performance evaluation of multi-tier ensemble classifiers for phishing websites

- Abawajy, Jemal, Beliakov, Gleb, Kelarev, Andrei, Yearwood, John

  • Authors: Abawajy, Jemal , Beliakov, Gleb , Kelarev, Andrei , Yearwood, John
  • Date: 2012
  • Type: Text , Conference proceedings
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  • Description: This article is devoted to large multi-tier ensemble classifiers generated as ensembles of ensembles and applied to phishing websites. Our new ensemble construction is a special case of the general and productive multi-tier approach well known in information security. Many efficient multi-tier classifiers have been considered in the literature. Our new contribution is in generating new large systems as ensembles of ensembles by linking a top-tier ensemble to another middletier ensemble instead of a base classifier so that the toptier ensemble can generate the whole system. This automatic generation capability includes many large ensemble classifiers in two tiers simultaneously and automatically combines them into one hierarchical unified system so that one ensemble is an integral part of another one. This new construction makes it easy to set up and run such large systems. The present article concentrates on the investigation of performance of these new multi-tier ensembles for the example of detection of phishing websites. We carried out systematic experiments evaluating several essential ensemble techniques as well as more recent approaches and studying their performance as parts of multi-level ensembles with three tiers. The results presented here demonstrate that new three-tier ensemble classifiers performed better than the base classifiers and standard ensembles included in the system. This example of application to the classification of phishing websites shows that the new method of combining diverse ensemble techniques into a unified hierarchical three-tier ensemble can be applied to increase the performance of classifiers in situations where data can be processed on a large computer.

Predicting cardiac autonomic neuropathy category for diabetic data with missing values

- Abawajy, Jemal, Kelarev, Andrei, Chowdhury, Morshed, Stranieri, Andrew, Jelinek, Herbert

  • Authors: Abawajy, Jemal , Kelarev, Andrei , Chowdhury, Morshed , Stranieri, Andrew , Jelinek, Herbert
  • Date: 2013
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Computers in Biology and Medicine Vol. 43, no. 10 (2013), p. 1328-1333
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  • Description: Cardiovascular autonomic neuropathy (CAN) is a serious and well known complication of diabetes. Previous articles circumvented the problem of missing values in CAN data by deleting all records and fields with missing values and applying classifiers trained on different sets of features that were complete. Most of them also added alternative features to compensate for the deleted ones. Here we introduce and investigate a new method for classifying CAN data with missing values. In contrast to all previous papers, our new method does not delete attributes with missing values, does not use classifiers, and does not add features. Instead it is based on regression and meta-regression combined with the Ewing formula for identifying the classes of CAN. This is the first article using the Ewing formula and regression to classify CAN. We carried out extensive experiments to determine the best combination of regression and meta-regression techniques for classifying CAN data with missing values. The best outcomes have been obtained by the additive regression meta-learner based on M5Rules and combined with the Ewing formula. It has achieved the best accuracy of 99.78% for two classes of CAN, and 98.98% for three classes of CAN. These outcomes are substantially better than previous results obtained in the literature by deleting all missing attributes and applying traditional classifiers to different sets of features without regression. Another advantage of our method is that it does not require practitioners to perform more tests collecting additional alternative features. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd.
  • Description: C1

Classification systems based on combinatorial semigroups

- Abawajy, Jemal, Kelarev, Andrei

  • Authors: Abawajy, Jemal , Kelarev, Andrei
  • Date: 2013
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Semigroup forum Vol. 86, no. 3 (2013), p. 603-612
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  • Description: The present article continues the investigation of constructions essential for applications of combinatorial semigroups to the design of multiple classification systems in data mining. Our main theorem gives a complete description of all optimal classification systems defined by one-sided ideals in a construction based on combinatorial Rees matrix semigroups. It strengthens and generalizes previous results, which handled the more narrow case of two-sided ideals.

A data mining application of the incidence semirings

- Abawajy, Jemal, Kelarev, Andrei, Yearwood, John, Turville, Christopher

  • Authors: Abawajy, Jemal , Kelarev, Andrei , Yearwood, John , Turville, Christopher
  • Date: 2013
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Houston Journal of Mathematics Vol. 39, no. 4 (2013), p. 1083-1093
  • Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/LP0990908
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  • Description: This paper is devoted to a combinatorial problem for incidence semirings, which can be viewed as sets of polynomials over graphs, where the edges are the unknowns and the coefficients are taken from a semiring. The construction of incidence rings is very well known and has many useful applications. The present article is devoted to a novel application of the more general incidence semirings. Recent research on data mining has motivated the investigation of the sets of centroids that have largest weights in semiring constructions. These sets are valuable for the design of centroid-based classification systems, or classifiers, as well as for the design of multiple classifiers combining several individual classifiers. Our article gives a complete description of all sets of centroids with the largest weight in incidence semirings.

The discrete gradient evolutionary strategy method for global optimization

- Abbas, Hussein, Bagirov, Adil, Zhang, Jiapu

  • Authors: Abbas, Hussein , Bagirov, Adil , Zhang, Jiapu
  • Date: 2003
  • Type: Text , Conference paper
  • Relation: Paper presented at the Congress on Evolutionary Computation CEC 2003, Canberra : 8th December, 2003
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  • Description: Global optimization problems continue to be a challenge in computational mathematics. The field is progressing in two streams: deterministic and heuristic approaches. In this paper, we present a hybrid method that uses the discrete gradient method, which is a derivative free local search method, and evolutionary strategies. We show that the hybridization of the two methods is better than each of them in isolation.
  • Description: E1
  • Description: 2003000440

A cluster randomised trial of an internet-based intervention program for tinnitus distress in an industrial setting

- Abbott, Jo-Anne, Kaldo, Viktor, Klein, Britt, Austin, David, Hamilton, Catherine, Piterman, Leon, Williams, Ben, Andersson, Gerhard

  • Authors: Abbott, Jo-Anne , Kaldo, Viktor , Klein, Britt , Austin, David , Hamilton, Catherine , Piterman, Leon , Williams, Ben , Andersson, Gerhard
  • Date: 2009
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Cognitive Behaviour Therapy Vol. 38, no. 3 (2009), p. 162-173
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  • Description: The effectiveness of a therapist-supported Internet intervention program for tinnitus distress in an industrial setting was evaluated using a cluster randomised design. Fifty-six Australian employees of two industrial organisations were randomly assigned, based on their work site (18 work sites from BP Australia and five from BHP Billiton), to either a cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) program or an information-only control program. Participants were assessed at pre- and postprogram, measuring tinnitus distress, depression, anxiety, stress, quality of life, and occupational health. The CBT program was not found to be superior to the information program for treating tinnitus distress. A high attrition rate and small sample size limit the generalisability of the findings, and further developments of the program and assessment process are needed to enhance engagement and compliance. © 2009 Taylor & Francis.

Best practices in online therapy

- Abbott, Jo-Anne, Klein, Britt, Ciechomski, Lisa

  • Authors: Abbott, Jo-Anne , Klein, Britt , Ciechomski, Lisa
  • Date: 2008
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Journal of Technology in Human Services Vol. 26, no. 2-4 (2008), p. 360-375
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  • Description: This article discusses important issues in delivery of best practice Internet-based therapy (etherapy). Etherapy is first defined as the interaction between a consumer and a therapist via the Internet (commonly via e-mail) in association with the use of a structured web-based clinical treatment program. A summary of the professional and ethical issues is provided, along with illustrated examples of best-practice principles experienced in clinical and research work by members of the Swinburne University of Technology Etherapy Unit (formerly the Etherapy Research, Education, and Training Unit in the Department of General Practice at Monash University). Etherapy has been found to be effective in treating a range of psychological disorders. Future research investigating methods of enhancing consumers' ability to engage in etherapy should further increase the effectiveness of this type of therapy. © 2008 by The Haworth Press. All rights reserved.

Out & Online effectiveness of a tailored online multi-symptom mental health and wellbeing program for same-sex attracted young adults: Study protocol for a randomised controlled trial

- Abbott, Jo-Anne, Klein, Britt, McLaren, Suzanne, Austin, David, Molloy, Mari, Meyer, Denny, McLeod, Bronte

  • Authors: Abbott, Jo-Anne , Klein, Britt , McLaren, Suzanne , Austin, David , Molloy, Mari , Meyer, Denny , McLeod, Bronte
  • Date: 2014
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Trials Vol. 15, no. 1 (2014), p. 1-19
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  • Description: Background: Same-sex attracted young adults have been found to experience higher rates of mental health problems and greater difficulties in accessing specialist mental health care services compared to their heterosexual peers. Internet-based mental health interventions have the potential to be more engaging and accessible to young adults compared to those delivered face-to-face. However, they are rarely inclusive of lesbian women and gay men. Thus, the current study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of an online mental health and wellbeing program, Out & Online (http://www.outandonline.org.au), in comparison to a wait-list control group, for reducing anxiety and depressive symptoms in same-sex attracted young adults aged between 18 and 25 years. Methods/Design: We are recruiting, through media and community organisations, 200 same-sex attracted young adults with anxiety and/or depressive symptoms and mild to moderate psychological distress (Kessler-10 score between 16 to 21). Participants will be randomly allocated to the intervention (the online program) or the wait-list control group based on a permuted blocked randomisation method to allow for stratification by gender. Participants in the intervention group will receive a tailored program for up to three types of mental health difficulties simultaneously. The primary outcome of anxiety and/or depressive symptoms, and secondary outcomes related to psychological distress, wellbeing and health behaviour will be measured at pre-intervention (0 week), post-intervention (8 weeks) and at a 3-month follow-up (20 weeks). Discussion: This online mental health and wellbeing program will be one of the first online interventions to be designed specifically to be relevant for same-sex attracted individuals. If the program is found to be effective it will improve access to specialist same-sex attracted-relevant mental health services for young adults and will facilitate wellbeing outcomes for these individuals. This program will also be a significant development in the delivery of tailored interventions that target multiple types of mental health conditions simultaneously. © 2014 Abbott et al.

Evaluating SafeClub : Can risk management training improve the safety activities of community soccer clubs?

- Abbott, Kristy, Klarenaar, Paul, Donaldson, Alex, Sherker, Shauna

  • Authors: Abbott, Kristy , Klarenaar, Paul , Donaldson, Alex , Sherker, Shauna
  • Date: 2008
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: British Journal of Sports Medicine Vol. 42, no. 6 (Jun 2008), p. 460-465
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  • Description: Objective: To evaluate a sports safety-focused risk-management training programme. Design: Controlled before and after test. Setting: Four community soccer associations in Sydney, Australia. Participants: 76 clubs (32 intervention, 44 control) at baseline, and 67 clubs (27 intervention, 40 control) at post-season and 12-month follow-ups. Intervention: SafeClub, a sports safety-focused risk-management training programme (362 hour sessions) based on adult-learning principles and injury-prevention concepts and models. Main outcome measures: Changes in mean policy, infrastructure and overall safety scores as measured using a modified version of the Sports Safety Audit Tool. Results: There was no significant difference in the mean policy, infrastructure and overall safety scores of intervention and control clubs at baseline. Intervention clubs achieved higher post-season mean policy (11.9 intervention vs 7.5 controls), infrastructure (15.2 vs 10.3) and overall safety (27.0 vs 17.8) scores than did controls. These differences were greater at the 12-month follow-up: policy (16.4 vs 7.6); infrastructure (24.7 vs 10.7); and overall safety (41.1 vs 18.3). General linear modelling indicated that intervention clubs achieved statistically significantly higher policy (p, 0.001), infrastructure (p, 0.001) and overall safety (p, 0.001) scores compared with control clubs at the post-season and 12-month follow-ups. There was also a significant linear interaction of time and group for all three scores: policy (p, 0.001), infrastructure (p, 0.001) and overall safety (p, 0.001). Conclusions: SafeClub effectively assisted community soccer clubs to improve their sports safety activities, particularly the foundations and processes for good risk-management practice, in a sustainable way.
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  • Description: 2003005630

Michael Fried and philosophy : Modernism, intention, and theatricality

- Abbott, Mathew

  • Authors: Abbott, Mathew
  • Date: 2018
  • Type: Text , Book
  • Relation: Routledge Research in Aesthetics series Vol. 1
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  • Description: This volume brings philosophers, art historians, intellectual historians, and literary scholars together to argue for the philosophical significance of Michael Fried’s art history and criticism. It demonstrates that Fried’s work on modernism, artistic intention, the ontology of art, theatricality, and anti-theatricality can throw new light on problems in and beyond philosophical aesthetics. Featuring an essay by Fried and articles from world-leading scholars, this collection engages with philosophical themes from Fried’s texts, and clarifies the relevance to his work of philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Morris Weitz, Elizabeth Anscombe, Arthur Danto, George Dickie, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, G. W. F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Denis Diderot, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Roland Barthes, Jacques Rancière, and Søren Kierkegaard. As it makes a case for the importance of Fried for philosophy, this volume contributes to current debates in analytic and continental aesthetics, philosophy of action, philosophy of history, political philosophy, modernism studies, literary studies, and art theory.

The problem of wild minds : Knowing animals in grizzly man and ming of harlem

- Abbott, Mathew

The figure of this world : Agamben and the question of political ontology

- Abbott, Mathew, Watkin, Christopher

  • Authors: Abbott, Mathew , Watkin, Christopher
  • Date: 2014
  • Type: Text , Book
  • Relation: Crosscurrents
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  • Description: A fundamental re-reading of Agamben that defends and develops his philosophy as post-Heideggerian political ontology. What if we've been wrong when reading Agamben? Mathew Abbott argues that Agamben's thought is misunderstood when read in terms of critical theory or traditional political philosophy. He shows instead that it engages in political ontology: studying the political stakes of the question of being. Abbott demonstrates the crucial influence of Martin Heidegger on Agamben's work, locating it in the post-Heideggerian tradition of the critique of metaphysics. He also positions it in relation to the thought of Benjamin, Nietzsche, Levinas, Nancy, and Wittgenstein. As he clarifies it, Abbott links Agamben's philosophy with Wittgenstein's picture theory and Heidegger's concept of the world-picture, showing the importance of this for understanding - and potentially overcoming - the forms of alienation characteristic of the society of the spectacle. © Mathew Abbott, 2014.