Cultures in contact over a considerable period influence intellectual traditions, practices and habits relating to musical expression and the manner of teaching it. This study investigates the effects of different cultural contacts on Vietnamese student pianists, especially from Russian-style piano pedagogy and associated educational ideas and methods in music conservatoires. The purpose of this study was to compare various teaching approaches and learning styles, and the reactions of Vietnamese students to three different sources of training of piano teachers: Russia, Vietnam and England. Different sources of training affected piano pedagogy, and different musical traditions affected expression in piano performance, especially where students are from a cultural background different from that of their teacher. Observations of actual piano lessons were undertaken, and data were also obtained from interviews and questionnaires and analysed statistically. Results are reported and discussed in relation to four prominent features of the Russian piano school: achieving a powerful and substantial sound; the requirement for ???singing??? quality on the piano; the solid technical training which requires an enormous amount of practice time; and the necessity to play from memory. These are four prominent features of the Russian piano schooling. In addition, Vietnamese students??? problems regarding rhythmic accuracy highlight an inherent difference between the Vietnamese and Russian piano school. Major differences and similarities in teaching styles between Russian teachers and those from the UK and Vietnam were described and commented on under the following headings: use of mental practice; the role of listening; teacher demonstration; freedom for students in learning and making decisions (choice of repertoire; performance opportunities for students; students??? emotional reactions); the more liberal approach of the UK teachers; and the piano teaching styles at the Hanoi Conservatory that have been strongly influenced by the Russian piano school through Russian graduates??? teaching in Vietnam. These findings have important pedagogical implications. The more teachers control there was in lessons, the less a student would contribute to lessons actively. More liberal or less authoritarian approaches to teaching do not necessarily inculcate the discipline required for high achievement technically and expressively. There needs to be a balance between liberal approaches and encouraging the student to become autonomous in their efforts, and ensuring that they realize the importance of being disciplined in their practice habits.

This is a study against essentialist generalisations. Empirically, the study has been conducted to understand the food related practices among the Bengali-Muslim migrants in Sydney based on the dichotomy of Halal (permitted in Islam) and Haram (prohibited in Islam). Instead of evaluating Islam and Muslim communities as monolithic and undifferentiated this study reveals the localised actualisation of Islam which serves as a conditioning factor for these Bengali-Muslim migrants. Adopting a naturalistic methodological approach a number of ethnographic tools have been used to reveal the complex multifaceted processes through which Sydney???s Bengali-Muslim migrants negotiate the situational convergence and divergence between their ethnic identity as Bengali and their religious identity as Muslim. As a significant site of this interplay this study discovers from their food related practices that the Bengali-Muslim migrants in Sydney construct the notion of Halal-Haram food rules and regulations through the dialectics of their Bengali-informed Islam. The Bengali version of Islam poses considerable challenge to the modernist opposition between secularism and religion which is quite inadequate to understand the way the Bengali-Muslims historically negotiate both of these in the form of overlapping consensus. The findings of the study exhibit that this situationally shifting emphasis on their secular Bengali identity at one point of time and on their religious Muslim identity at another determines their decisive practices regarding food consumption in a Western cultural milieu. The Bengali-Muslim migrant participants of this study tend to perceive the notion of Halal-Haram in multiple ways so as to fit the pragmatic realities of their migrant life, which eventually leads them to reconstruct, renegotiate or even discard the scriptural/theological/authoritative discourse. Such underlying properties of food practices vindicate the argument that any stereotypically standardised notion of ???Islam??? is inadequate to understand varied Muslim migrant communities across the globe. Rather specific Muslim migrant community should be studied along with a profound understanding of their very contextual nature and historical formations.

This study is a comprehensive account of Indonesian foreign policy. It analyses the perceptions of the country???s foreign policy elite about other states and the manner in which these shape the decision-making process and determine policy outcomes. It demonstrates that the dynamics of Indonesian foreign relations in the reformasi period can be understood in terms of elite perceptions. Policy-makers??? perceptions are as important as realities, insofar as they shape their real actions. The balance-of-threat theory is the principal analytical tool used to examine elite perceptions. The study argues that the key realist balance-of-power theory lacks the power to explain past dynamics or to predict future direction of Indonesian foreign relations. The balance-of-threat theory is employed here as a predictor about how Indonesia will behave and whether it will implement policies intended to prevent other countries from endangering Indonesia???s national interests and security. The combined qualitative and quantitative research strategy is based on, but by no means limited to, archival study, content analysis of literature and official statements of relevant Indonesian policy-makers and the survey data. The latter approach draws on a series of 45 in-depth interviews with members of the Indonesian foreign policy elite. Indonesian relations with the United States and China are the highest concern of the elite. The leaders believe that, in the future, Indonesia will increasingly have to manoeuvre between the two rival powers. While the United States is currently seen as the main security threat to Indonesia, China is considered the main malign factor in the long run with power capabilities that need to be constrained and counter-balanced. The ambiguity, dichotomy and haphazardness that have characterized Indonesian foreign policy in the reformasi period are caused by four factors: first, the existence of a plurality of disparate views and attitudes among the contemporary Indonesian elite; second, the perceived complex security challenges on all fronts that are both internal and external in origins and traditional and non-traditional in nature; third, a low level of elite consensus about how to rank the external threats according to their urgency; and, fourth, a significant disparity between the elite???s present threat assessment and its long-term threat assessment.

Chapter 2: Welfare comparisons between funded and pay-as-you-go (PAYG) or unfunded pension systems are often made using the Aaron condition (Aaron, 1966). However, the Aaron condition as usually stated is not precise enough about the exact form of the PAYG pension system. PAYG pension systems can be either of the defined benefit or defined contribution variety. They can also differ with regard to intra-generational redistribution, for example pension benefits can be flat or earnings related. Here, four alternative PAYG pension systems are considered. It is shown that each system generates its own Aaron condition. In addition, the standard Aaron condition assumes that the wage rate and labour participation rate does not vary across individuals. These assumptions are also relaxed. Using US data covering the period 1933-2001, it is shown that the results of welfare comparisons are highly sensitive to different specifications of PAYG systems. Chapter 3: The sustainability of a defined benefit pay-as-you-go (DBPAYG) pension system is investigated in the context of an overlapping-generations model of endogenous fertility. The model places particular emphasis on the time costs of child rearing. It illustrates the mechanism by which such a pension system can increase the opportunity cost of having children and hence sow the seeds of its own destruction. The model is then extended to allow for fertility-based payments. Such a system is more likely to be sustainable. These models highlight a number of issues that are of considerable relevance to a number of OECD countries that have generous DBPAYG pension systems and falling fertility rates. Chapter 4: The previous chapter focused on transition dynamics, while this chapter investigates steady state outcomes of fertility based defined benefit pay-as-you-go (DB-PAYG) pension systems in the context of an overlapping-generations model with endogenous fertility and heterogeneous agents. Special attention is paid to the impact on fertility, utility, taxation, and per capita saving. Chapter 5: A two-stage bargaining model is developed to describe how fertility decisions are made in a strategic family setting. Given the assumption that family contracts are incomplete and cannot be used to enforce optimal behaviour, it is shown that investments in children (i.e. the fertility rate) may be sub-optimal. This is because the woman may find it in her interest to invest too little in children in stage 1 of the model in order to protect her bargaining status in stage 2. The chapter then considers in the context of this model the impact on fertility rates of changes in child custody rules (in the case of divorce), the wage rate, and the male-female wage differential. It concludes by exploring how the introduction of child subsidies can change the results.

This study is situated within the contested fields of architectural education and sustainable development. It seeks to identify ideological positions within discourses related to these fields in order to explain documented resistance to the integration of sustainable design curricula in architectural education. To understand resistance to such integration we must go beyond identifying the problem. To affect curriculum change it is necessary not only to have a design for a desired state, but also to gain the power to implement it. This assumption demands both an understanding of the power relations that support the status quo and an acceptance of curriculum development as a process of ideological struggle. Hence, efforts to reform architectural education need to be informed by an understanding of the hegemonic struggles which shape architectural curricula. Existing research in the field of sustainable design education has not focussed on such issues. International studies have not considered curricula as manifestations of a history of ideological struggle. Nor have detailed studies of sustainable design education in schools of architecture been conducted in Australia. This study has addressed these knowledge gaps by investigating histories of ideas in architectural and sustainability education. A critical discourse analysis was conducted of the handbook descriptions of architectural courses in Sydney over the last thirty years, and of courses offered in 2007 by all Australian schools of architecture. This analysis was supported by curriculum mapping to reveal the power relations inherent in architectural curricula. The research has identified strategies of hegemonic struggle which affect the hegemony of ideologies in Australian architectural education and the positioning of sustainable design curricula within this contested field. I have found that sustainable design curricula are marginalised in Australian architecture courses and that this marginalisation has been historically constructed. I have also exposed hegemonic strategies that reproduce such marginalisation within curricula.

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.

???Sing at the Moon: the contextual narrative of isolation and grief in Australia women???s writing??? comprises two complementary elements of a single thesis: a novel and a critical essay. My novel takes as its starting point the impact of unsolved murders on small regional communities and uses this to explore the effects of isolation and grief on subjectivities, particularly women???s. The novel represents an original contribution to that strand of contemporary Australian fiction, especially as written by women, which deals with the Australian bush myth and the effects on women of the masculinism of Australian national identity. The critical component of my thesis examines Thea Astley???s Drylands and Dorothy Hewett???s Neap Tide in terms of how each novel engages with Australian literary traditions and offers an explicit critique of Australian masculinist culture. I focus on the ways the novels represent violence against women and show how this violence works to underpin the masculinist myth of mateship - to reveal a more sinister underbelly of Australian culture. Their critique of Australian masculinist culture also works at the level of form where both writers subvert a traditional ???realist??? form for political as well as aesthetic purposes. I see myself primarily as a writer and feminist who uses theory and criticism as a way of reflecting on my own creative practice in the light of writing as social responsibility. My approach both to my own novel and to Drylands and Neap Tide is shaped by Susan Lever???s proposal that ???writing and reading lie at the heart of feminism; they are the means by which women can explore and communicate the deepest aspects of their condition??? (2000,132). In my essay I am interested in providing a critical context for the novel by exploring feminist theories of subjectivity and the ways these can be represented in fiction. As a result I will analyse some of the narrative conventions employed in Hewett???s and Astley???s novels. I will show that the work of both writers operates in the context of an Australian literary tradition ??? both past and present ??? and informs and negotiates new ways that accommodate feminist concerns with fictional practice.

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.

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.