This thesis is about the way memory and identity are continually reconstituted and how they shape and impinge upon each other. I use my own experience of growing up in Italian and Anglo Australian cultures as a primary source to examine the changing nature of memory affects and to consider they ways in which events of the past have formed and transformed my cultural identity. I also explore the intermingling of personal and collective memory and how ethnic groups negotiate community identity within national identity formations. Concepts of Deleuze and Guattari, particularly those of the rhizome, the refrain and territorialisation, are keys to understanding practices associated with memory and identity and I apply them throughout the thesis. Nostalgia and loss are emotions often tangled up with memory and identity and I use the work of Barthes, Stewart and Woodward in discussing these. I use other diverse theories to look at the ways memory is embedded in the body ?? manifested in gestures, performance and everyday practices ?? and mediated in rituals, film, photographs, documents and objects. The style of writing does not adhere to the conventions of academic discourse and diverts intermittently from scholarly argumentation. It assembles disparate memory events ?? both personal and collective ?? along with factual information, fragments of biography and autobiography, and reflection and analysis. It is written this way in part to resemble the process of thinking and remembering which is never a smooth, logically flowing stream of intelligence.

Carbon nanotube (CNT) polymer composites have attracted much attention since the extraordinary electrical and mechanical properties of CNTs were realised. However research into biomedical applications of CNT/polymer composites has received little attention. The aim of this thesis was to fabricate an electrically conductive, biocompatible polymer based on a poly(ether)urethane (PEU) with multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWNTs) as the conductive filler. Paramount to achieving this was to obtain good dispersion and integration of MWNTs within the host polymer matrix. A number of different strategies were investigated including high energy mixing of MWNTs in PEU and covalent functionalisation of MWNTs with long chain hydrocarbons, poly(tetramethylene oxide) (PTMO) and poly(acrylic acid) (pAA) for enhanced miscibility with PEU. The impact of these strategies was assessed by testing the tensile properties, electrical conductivity as well as cytotoxicity of resulting MWNT/PEU composites. It was found that high energy mixing in the presence of MWNTs caused severe degradation of PEU, resulting in significant cytotoxicity and reductions in composite tensile strength. Covalent functionalisation of MWNTs was achieved by utilising defect group chemistry to attach a range of molecules. PTMO covalently attached to MWNTs was found to cause significant nanotube aggregation in PEU composites. Long chain hydrocarbons covalently attached to MWNTs exhibited enhanced dispersability in PEU with increasing molecular weight, attributed to disrupting intertube Van der Waals forces and providing favourable hydrophobic interactions with PEU. Additionally these composites exhibited increased conductivity and decreased cytotoxicity with increasing hydrocarbon length. However increasing long chain hydrocarbon molecular weight also caused significant reductions in MWNT conductivity. MWNTs surface modified with carboxylic acid groups exhibited favourable hydrophilic interactions with PEU but did not retain tensile properties at nanotube loadings where electrical conductivity was significant. Successful polymerisation of acrylic acid monomer initiated from MWNTs using a reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer polymerisation was demonstrated. Resulting pAA-MWNTs exhibited enhanced dispersability in water but not in PEU composites, resulting in severe degradation in composite tensile properties. PAA-MWNTs also exhibited decreased conductivity with increasing pAA molecular weight. Incorporating MWNTs in PEU composites has been demonstrated to impart multi-functionality to existing biomaterials for potential uses in a range of biomedical applications.

In this research, we look at the problem of detecting complex situations arising in Electronic Markets or e-markets. E-markets have been growing in size rapidly over the past few years. Large amounts of transactions are being generated from e-markets everyday so data analysis tools are required for several business processes such as market strategy evaluation or illegal trading activity detection. However, our literature review shows existing tools available today still cannot overcome all the main challenges such as dealing with a large amount of incoming real-time data from multiple market feeds and providing a user with no programming skills the ability to extract data efficiently. This thesis proposes to address this problem using the Event Processing concept. We model an e-market as a distributed event-driven system. Therefore, we can refer to e-market transactions as events and use an Event Processing System (EPS) as a data analysis tool. To implement our solution, we propose a new EPS architecture that allows the integration of several existing EPSs (called slave EPSs) under a unified domain-specific user interface and execution environment. Since different EPSs rely on different data models and event pattern models, our proposal also includes a unified e-market data model and event pattern framework for defining, composing and executing event patterns. Selected common event patterns used for financial market surveillance in several stock exchanges have been used to evaluate the proposed work. The proposed event pattern framework has proved that it has the capability of expressing event patterns of varying complexities. In terms of the proposed EPS architecture, a system prototype has been successfully developed using two sophisticated commercial systems, Coral8 and SMARTS, as slave EPSs. The experiments performed involve the execution of selected event patterns against real historical data from the Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET). Our solution is cost-efficient and provides a number of benefits that can be used in practice. The proposed data model and event pattern framework can be used during the requirement gathering phase. The proposed EPS architecture provides users a unified interface with no programming skills for application development and the ability to customise and execute event patterns for different existing EPSs. Moreover, it can be used to facilitate the suitable EPS selection to achieve a more efficient event pattern detection process.

Monumental Amnesia: Reading the Spatial Narratives Written by Contemporary Urban Landscapes This thesis analyses the spatial stories inscribed into urban landscapes by monuments. Differentiating between officially sanctioned, symbolic, and everyday monuments, this thesis theorises the narratological space composed by these objects: static, imagined and transitional, respectively. It argues that monumental sites are spaces of forgetting, rather than remembering, characterised through invisibility, opacity and mystification. Infused with paradox, monuments simultaneously reveal and conceal the histories and urban memories they are expected to commemorate. The discussion then turns to contemporary art, in particular memory installations, as a practice that counters the mystification inherent within urban space, actively exposing alternative pasts and memories. The thesis is divided into three chapters. The first analyses the contemporary, officially sanctioned monuments of Vilnius, Lithuania that celebrate an ancient nationalism, alongside two neighboring sculpture parks that display retired Soviet icons, with a particular focus on Gintaris Karosas?? sculpture Infotree LNK. The second chapter theorises symbolic monuments, and focuses on the Japanese theme park Tobu World Square as a curiosity cabinet where the contemporary spatial practice, identified by Anthony Giddens, of ??disembedding?? is performed in miniature. It concludes with a discussion of Susan Norrie??s DVD installation of the park ENOLA. The third chapter examines everyday monuments, focusing on the industrial ruins of Manchester to unravel the archival aspects of these monuments and their gentrification. It closes with a study of Cornelia Parker??s installation Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View. Through these urban case studies and accompanying memory installations, the thesis explores how urban monuments disguise certain histories and memories of a city, and how art can reclaim alternative stories and memories from urban amnesia.

Statistics computation over data streams is often required by many applications, including processing of relational type queries, data mining and high speed network management. Among various s tatistics, order statistics computation is one of the most challenging, and is employed in many real applications, such as web ranking aggregation and log mining, sensor data analysis, trends and fleeting opportunities detection in stock markets and load balanced data partitioning for distributed computation. In this thesis, we investige three important problems in computing order statistics over data streams: 1. Computing rank queries over data streams with relative error guarantee. 2. Computing rank queries over data streams with duplication. 3. Computing top-k ranked queries on the sliding window. We first consider the problem of continuously maintaining order sketches over data streams with a relative rank error guarantee ε. Two space-efficient and onescan randomised algorithms are developed. And they are immediately applicable to approximately compute quantiles over data stream with relative error guarantee ε and significantly improve the space bound of previous work. In many real applications including data streams, data elements may be observed and recorded multiple times. Without uniqueness assumption on observed data elements, many conventional statistics computation problems need to be reinvestigated. To address the problem of order statistics computation against data streams with duplicate, we develop a novel, space-efficient one scan theoretical framework, based on an existing technique for counting distinct elements, to continuously maintain sketches so that rank-based queries can be approximately processed with a relative error guarantee ε. Moreover, we also propose two timeefficient algorithms. Finally, we study the problem of computing top-k ranked queries over the sliding window. Based on the observation that the K-Skyband of the elements is the minimal candidate set for the top-k ranked queries with arbitrary monotone preference functions where k ≤ K, we develop novel algorithms to continuously maintain the K-Skyband over the sliding window. Efficient query algorithm is presented to support the massive top-k ranked queries in real time.

Touch, as it is conventionally conceived, appears to be lacking in Japanese intimate relationships. Physical or visible forms of intimate touch are generally relegated to particular body practices or contexts such as co-bathing and co-sleeping, and are usually uncharacteristic of everyday experiences of intimacy. Instead, Japanese relationships are commonly defined in terms of subtle forms of communication, such as ishin denshin (heart-to-heart communication) and ittaikan (feelings of oneness), where feelings are expected to be inferred. However, it is unclear as to how such forms manifest feelings of closeness in the first place. This study opens up these feelings of closeness through exploring the embodied experience and tangible connection in the intimate spaces of the Japanese family. It describes a relational experience of space, depth and touch that is beyond the scope of conventional theories of the body. Drawing on Japanese sociologies of the body as well as other sociological tools that are relevant to everyday Japanese experiences, this study also offers universal contributions to the understandings of how touch can exist as a manifestation of intimacy. The first part of the thesis introduces the reader to the critical concepts and theories driving the study. The key ideas and understandings of Japanese relationships are also considered, leading to the suggestion that a conceptual understanding of embodiment will add to such literature. Part One concludes with a specific investigation of my field research on intimacy in Japan. The second part of the thesis explores how skinship (intimacy through touch) exists and feels in Japanese parent-child and marital relationships. A theory of touch is developed, via Japanese relationships, which is not restricted to physical or visible forms of touch. Described as touching at depth, this theory explores alternative ways of understanding experiences of intimacy that are not necessarily linked to tactile feeling or spatial closeness. Although bodily forms of touch exist in some relationships, other relational states become significant to feelings of connectedness, particularly as the child grows older. The third part of the thesis explores this shift, along with how the Japanese child adapts to the world, when their initial ways of touching no longer exist. Emphasis here is not just on primary 'home‘ relationships, but also on teacher-child relationships, and the way familial relationships shift as the child moves back and forth between the home and world. It becomes clear in Part Three that touch becomes felt differently as the child grows older and feels their significance and connection with the world in more encompassing ways.

The Quaternary megafauna of Southeast Asia are among the world’s poorest known. Throughout the Pleistocene, continental collisions, active volcanic systems and fluctuations in sea level have had dramatic effects on the region's geography, from southern China to Indonesia. Many Southeast Asian megafauna experienced geographical range reduction or complete extinction during that interval. This thesis explores the relative influence of environmental change and human interaction in these extinctions. There is currently no direct evidence to suggest that humans had a negative impact on Southeast Asian megafauna until the Holocene. Rather, extinctions and geographical range reduction experienced by megafauna are likely to have resulted from of loss of suitable habitats, in particular the loss of more open habitats. Environmental change throughout the Pleistocene of Southeast Asia is reconstructed on the basis of discriminant functions analysis of megafauna from twenty-seven Southeast Asian Quaternary sites, as well as Gongwangling, an early Pleistocene hominin site previously interpreted as paleoarctic. The discriminant functions were defined on the basis of species lists drawn from modern Asian nature reserves and national parks, and were analysed using both taxonomic and phylogeny-free variables. Biases present in these species lists were mitigated against using a range of multivariate techniques. The reconstructions show that Pleistocene environments in Southeast Asia varied from open (e.g. savannah), mixed (woodland) and closed (e.g. rainforest) habitats. Changes in habitats through time are likely to have been driven, at least in part, by changes in sea-level, in turn related to oscillations between glacial and interglacial conditions. The environmental changes associated with these oscillations are likely to have adversely affected many of Southeast Asia’s megafauna. The Toba super-eruption (~74kya) is unlikely to have been responsible for any of the megafauna extinctions of the Late Pleistocene.

This thesis is broadly concerned with the representation of the environment of a mobile robot and the modelling of its motion. An attempt has been made to address some issues of the laser scan matching for global self-localization and map building. Different methods for the interpretation of sensor information have been investigated. Mobile robots have many applications in transportation, surveillance, health care and mining etc. For a successful navigation, the representation of the environment is crucial. The robot environment interaction is very complex in practice. Many factors contribute to this complexity, such as the electromechanical hardware structure and complex controlling and navigational programming modules. Above all however, it is the environment itself which is usually very complex. The perception model is the most important component of the navigation system of a mobile robot, at the core of which is the representation of the environment. Environment parameters are difficult to model and simplistic models are used in various position estimation techniques. However, for true autonomous navigation, the environment should be represented in a more dense fashion and the interpretation should be straightforward. The robot interacts with its environment using sensors. The sensory information provides clues about the location of the robot but the interpretion of this information is very challenging. Some type of model or a mathematical description of the environment is required for any meaningful interpretation and for making critical navigational decisions when a new observation arrives. The second key component of a navigation system is a motion model. Due to structural and software complexity the behaviour of a robot is rarely repeatable under the same motion commands. This can be attributed to many factors such as slippage, wear and tear of wheels at different rates, floor conditions or obstacle negotiation strategies. This means that motion commands have an associated uncertainty and need statistical treatment. Similarly the processing of raw laser data, although highly desirable, is computationally very expensive and therefore we usually need to make a trade off and extract some features from this data, despite losing some of the information. In this thesis we investigated three core issues of motion modelling, perception (or observation) modelling and scan correlation. Some auxiliary issues have also been addressed, such as the extraction of features from laser data and a broader classification of the environment suitable for certain situations. In regard to environment representation, we used the geometrical form of representation and tried to extract some statistical formulation. This method suggests to capture the environment model in a statistical form before the start of navigation when the map is known. The detailed parametric representation of the environment is obtained along with a proposal for a laser scan matching method based on geometrical line and corner features. The geometrical representation is based on some features extracted from raw laser data. This is considered a compact and easily implementable form, which was one of the objectives of our research, however utilisation of all the sensory information is still desirable and we have also investigated this issue. The models have been tested thoroughly on simulations and with real data in laboratory and office-like indoor environments. Laser scan matching is a technique of position estimation based on matching two laser scans taken at the initial and final positions of the robot. We also presented a method to find out the degree of match between two laser scans. At the end of the thesis, the scan correlation has been used to find the most reliable landmarks in the environment. This approach filters out the nuisance landmarks which increase the size of matrices in Simultaneous Localization and Mapping algorithms. An improved computational efficiency was of primary concern and a main focus of this research. All the methods proposed in this thesis, such as feature extraction, broader classification, parametric formulation, line segment based scan matching and the scan matching for measurement updates address the computational issues in a fundamental way by using an appropriate formulation of the problem.

Folate is an important B vitamin in the daily diet. It is not known to what extent naturally occurring folates in the mixed diet is bioavailable. Knowledge on to what extent the natural folates are absorbed would be best studied in a population that is not exposed to any folate fortificant. The aim of the present study was to study the bioavailability of dietary 5-methyl tetrahydrofolate (5-MTHF) in a whole day??s mixed diet relative to supplemental 5-MTHF in a selected Indian population. A dietary survey (n=200) conducted in South India, revealed a mean total intake of folate of 277+ 92.3 μg/day (which is nearly 3 times higher than the current Indian Recommended Dietary Intake set to 100 μg/day) based on the actual analysis of foods collected from a typical diet using a trienzyme technique followed by the microbiological assay. Further, the individual folate forms present in the foods were also analysed using a newly developed Liquid Chromatography Tandem Mass Spectrometry LC-MS/MS). Quantification of folates was performed using internal standards. Good linearity was observed between 2-100 ng/Injection (Injection volume-100 μL, R2: 0.98) that was suitable for analysis of foods (cereal, pulse, vegetables, milk based preparations and fruit) and blood samples (serum folate and erythrocyte folate) for use in bioavailability study. The folate intakes were reported to be higher (429+ 68.7 μg/day) when the individual foods from the diet were analysed using the LC-MS/MS technique when compared to the values generated using microbiological assay. LC-MS/MS analysis revealed that the Indian diets were predominant in 5-MTHF and the important sources being cereals, pulses and vegetables. 22 human volunteers, aged 18-25 years were recruited in India to study the bioavailability of 5-MTHF. A randomized trial (12 weeks) was designed, where the subjects consumed 400 g 5-MTHF/day in the form of as supplemental drink or an experimental diet (400 g/day) consisting predominantly 5-MTHF (90%). Relative bioavailability of 5-MTHF was calculated by comparing the responses to food folate in relation to supplemental 5-MTHF, as indicated by the biomarkers. The relative bioavailability of food folate predominant in 5-MTHF was 41% based on serum folate indicator and 47% based on erythrocyte folate status. A mean increase of 60% was observed in the erythrocyte folate levels of the subjects consuming diets predominant in 5-MTHF in 12 weeks. Diets predominant in 5-MTHF have a good potential in improving the folate status of the population.

The Transplanted Bush: Dislocation, Desire and the Domestic takes as its theme the idea of the Australian bush and seeks new ways to represent it within the traditions of Australian figurative landscape painting. The research identifies ways to disrupt the bush brand, a paradigm that has played a significant and romantic role in the construction of Australian national identity, as a rallying point for nationalist sentiment and to sell Australia to the world as a unique tourist destination. The bush, as a space that is anti-city, an idea that generally relies on a British genealogy, and one that is constructed according to hetero-normative strategies, is significant in the creation of Australian identity because it is widely regarded as the real Australia. Real in this context has somehow become distorted to mean those parts of our nation that make us distinct from the rest of the world, while continuing to reflect the values and aspirations of a dominant culture and its heroic history of colonising and domesticating a strange land. The overriding focus of this investigation has been to determine to what extent it is possible to reconceptualize the bush brand so that it can accommodate new themes of identity, particularly in relation to gender and sexuality. This research adopts the position that the bush is an idea that has relied heavily upon myths, legends and mono-cultural perspectives for its construction and, as a result, is open to negotiation. Consequently, this investigation takes place at the very heart of the bush paradigm, within its grand master narratives, by engaging with its symbols and signifiers. It reviews the ideological and representational role played by the traditional model of Australian figurative landscape painting, and considered how it can be reinvested with new signs, symbols, motifs, colours and ideas. By developing and introducing a new vocabulary of signs and symbols that erodes the distinctions between the bush, the urban and the domestic, this research disrupts the internal logic and coherence of the bush brand.