Conceptual Richardson

Book Abstract: The preoccupations of eighteenth-century novelist Samuel Richardson—the inequities of gender and sexuality; race and white femininity; masculinity, sadism, and control; religion and selfhood; authorship and artistic form—continue to resonate with contemporary readers. This fresh collection reconsiders his oeuvre, expanding and significantly updating critical debate on its meaning and importance. In these lively and engaging essays, contributors examine historically overlooked works, provide new readings of his best-known novels Pamela and Clarissa, and stake a serious claim for the importance of his final novel, Sir Charles Grandison. Diverse, inventive, and provocative, these essays demonstrate the complexity, relevance, and surprising legacies of Richardson’s novels and characters—finding traces in post-conceptual poetry, detective fiction, and in the fantasies of historical romance. Revisiting Richardson reflects on a decade of scholarship while delivering innovative perspectives on an author whose work continues to be indispensable for understanding the history of the novel.Peer-reviewe

Navigating the Embodied Agent: Design and Optimisation of Object-Goal Visual Navigation System

Embodied Artificial Intelligence (Embodied AI) represents a significant shift from traditional static computations to dynamic interactions with the environment, interactions that not only respond to but also actively shape the physical world. Within this paradigm, Object-Goal Visual Navigation (ObjNav) is pivotal, as it equips robots with the capability to navigate and pinpoint specific target objects, an essential function that underpins the operational framework of Embodied AI systems. A typical reinforcement learning based ObjNav system comprises two primary components:(i) a visual perception module that interprets the scene by extracting navigation cues, such as the target's location and its spatial relationships with surrounding elements; and (ii) a navigation policy module that processes both the current visual inputs and historical navigation data to determine the optimal action. This ensures that the ObjNav system not only recognises its targets but also formulates effective navigation strategies, thereby enabling robust and adaptable performance in dynamic real-world environments. This thesis investigates Object-goal Visual Navigation systems, focusing on both visual perception and navigation policy. We enhance visual perception by leveraging object relationships within scenes. Meanwhile, we first concentrate on preventing the navigation policy from predicting actions that often lead to failure. Then, we shift our focus to prioritising information most relevant to the current navigational step. We achieve this through three key contributions: In Chapter 3, we enhance object-driven visual navigation using object relation graphs (ORG), trial-driven imitation learning (IL), and a memory-augmented tentative policy network (TPN). ORG improves visual understanding by modelling object relationships. IL and TPN help create robust navigation policies, guiding the agent away from unproductive actions and promoting efficient navigation. In Chapter 4, we introduce VTNet, a Visual Transformer Network for learning informative visual representations. VTNet emphasises spatial locations and object relationships, using attention mechanisms to create informative visual information for navigation decisions. A pre-training scheme aligns these representations with navigation signals for effective policy learning. In Chapter 5, we address the impact of navigation states on effectiveness and efficiency by introducing the History-inspired Navigation Policy Learning (HiNL) framework. HiNL uses historical navigation data to improve current decision-making. It incorporates a History-aware State Estimation (HaSE) module to reduce the influence of past states and a History-based State Regularisation (HbSR) technique to minimise correlations among states during training. This enables the agent to adapt to changing environments and make informed decisions. In Chapter 6, we introduce the Experience-aware Action Cogitator (ExAC), a framework that utilises the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) to elevate decision-making in ObjNav. By integrating insights derived from both expert-informed and trial-and-error experiences, ExAC refines the LLM's decision framework. Consequently, the model not only predicts effective navigation actions with remarkable intuition but also articulates the reasoning behind its choices, thereby enhancing the transparency and reliability of navigation in complex indoor settings. In conclusion, this thesis has tackled multiple open challenges in Embodied AI, especially in the area of Object-goal Navigation, showing improvements in both navigation effectiveness and efficiency in unseen environments. Through this work, we aim to foster conversations among academics in the Embodied AI space while also motivating future efforts and collaborations that would push the field toward more challenging real-world problems

Flirting with Autocracy in Indonesia:

After ruling Indonesia for a decade, Joko Widodo (or popularly called "Jokowi") left the presidency in 2024 amid a heated debate over his democratic record. While his high approval ratings indicated support in the broader population, pro-democracy activists were scathing. Indeed, under his presidency, many democratic achievements of previous periods eroded. Yet democracy, however damaged, survived Jokowi’s rule. This article adds to scholarship on this outcome of a harmed but enduring Indonesian democracy. It looks at how Jokowi’s majoritarian thinking led him to undermine democracy when he felt he had the majority’s support for his actions. Believing that democracy is doing what the majority wants, approves, or tolerates, he used polls to identify segments of democracy he could attack. At the same time, his majoritarianism also set him limits: if a majority was opposed, he retreated. This left Indonesia with a declining democracy, but one that did not cross over into fully authoritarian territory.The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Australian Research Council (grant number DP150104277).Peer-reviewe

Elite Collusion in Indonesia

After a largely successful post­authoritarian transition, Indonesia has experienced democratic backsliding since the 2010s. this backsliding accelerated under the presidency of Joko Widodo (2014­2024), but it has not yet pushed the Indonesian polity into a full­blown autocracy. I argue that Indonesia’s specific pathway to democratic backsliding prefigured this outcome. While elites have colluded to share power and allow the president to engage in executive aggrandizement, they have set limits to the latter’s potential authoritar­ ian ambitions. For example, they rejected Widodo’s attempt to extend his time in power beyond the con­ stitutionally allowed two terms. thus, elites have both produced executive aggrandizement and contained its scope. this pattern has protected Indonesian democ­ racy from a full collapse, but it has produced a gradual decline, reducing the chances of democratic revitali­ zation through formal or contentious politics.Peer-reviewe

Administration of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Protectorate

Presented to both Houses of Parliament by Command of His Majesty. November 1908

Voting Methods and Their Distribution in Papua New Guinea

In this Discussion Paper, we propose a systematic classification of polling practices in Papua New Guinean national elections, using data gathered by election observers in 2022. Our classification permits a more careful examination of electoral inequality in Papua New Guinea, its geographical distribution and, with the use of data from previous elections, its change over time. It does so by focusing on the mechanical process of voting (or more generally, producing and destroying completed ballots). While there are important limitations both to this data and the proposed classification, they provide a valuable perspective on the geography of subnational political inequality and have a number of important applications in the analysis of Papua New Guinean politics and electoral administration.Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trad

An Intraspecific Negative Correlation Between the Repair Capacity of Photoinhibition of Cold Acclimated Plants and the Habitat Temperature

Both the activity of photosynthesis and the repair of damaged photosystems decline in cold environments, which may increase the extent of the damage of photosynthetic machinery by light, namely photoinhibition. We hypothesized that plants in colder habitats may possess greater tolerance to photoinhibition, especially in low-temperature conditions.We measured the rate of photoinhibition, rate of photoinhibition repair and other thylakoid activities in cold environments using 298 Arabidopsis thaliana ecotypes and studied the relationships among the indicators of photoinhibition tolerance and climatic data of the habitat of each ecotype. The plants acclimated to cold conditions (12 degrees C) for 3 days showed a negative correlation between the rate of photoinhibition repair at 5 degrees C and the mean annual temperature of habitats, although we could not see this correlation with the control plants grown at 22 degrees C. This result would indicate that the acclimation capacity of photoinhibition tolerance in cold conditions can affect the distribution of plants, especially in colder regions.The present study was supported by JSPS Grants\u2010in\u2010Aid for Scientific Research (KAKENHI) Grant Number 17KK0142 (Fund for the Promotion of Joint International Research) and its original project Grant Number JP16K18614 (General). Authors appreciate the help of Dr. Rhys Wyber and Dr. Zbigniew Kolber for setting up LIFT instruments. Authors also thank Dr. Mengmeng Zhang, Lukas Bender, Jenny Rath and Christine Larsen for their assistance in growing plants and conducting experiments, Prof. Ichiro Terashima for discussing the meaning of photochemical results and Prof. Takashi Tsuchimatsu for discussing the selection of ecotypes. We thank Prof. Sharon Robinson, University of Wollongong NSW 2522, for access to the LIFT and ASRM instruments. Arabidopsis The present study was supported by JSPS Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (KAKENHI) Grant Number 17KK0142 (Fund for the Promotion of Joint International Research) and its original project Grant Number JP16K18614 (General). Authors appreciate the help of Dr. Rhys Wyber and Dr. Zbigniew Kolber for setting up LIFT instruments. Authors also thank Dr. Mengmeng Zhang, Lukas Bender, Jenny Rath and Christine Larsen for their assistance in growing plants and conducting experiments, Prof. Ichiro Terashima for discussing the meaning of photochemical results and Prof. Takashi Tsuchimatsu for discussing the selection of Arabidopsis ecotypes. We thank Prof. Sharon Robinson, University of Wollongong NSW 2522, for access to the LIFT and ASRM instruments.Peer-reviewe

Intangible Cultural Heritage as Co‑Creation: Challenges, Pathways and Conditions

Since the 1970s, global heritage discourse—particularly within UNESCO—has increasingly recognised the importance of cultural diversity, leading to concepts like Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) that challenge Eurocentric definitions of heritage. While the 2003 UNESCO Convention promotes community-based approaches, implementing these ideals in practice remains fraught with challenges. ICH initiatives often fall short of inclusivity, inadvertently reinforcing social hierarchies and exclusion. This chapter explores the potential of co-creation as a pathway to more equitable and sustainable ICH practices. Drawing on international case studies and an analytical framework, we highlight the conditions necessary for co-creation to move beyond policy rhetoric and foster genuine cultural participation. Our contribution lies in offering practical tools and critical insights for integrating co-creation into ICH governance, with particular relevance for researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of heritage and community engagement.Peer-reviewe

Transfer matrix approach for topological edge states

We suggest and develop an approach for describing the topological properties of a periodic system purely from the transfer matrix associated with a unit cell. Our approach uses the Iwasawa decomposition to parametrize the transfer matrix uniquely in terms of three real numbers. This allows us to obtain simple conditions for the existence of topologically protected edge states and to provide a visual illustration of all possible solutions. In order to demonstrate our method in action, we apply it to study some generalizations of the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model, such as the tetramer SSH4 model and a dimerized one-dimensional photonic crystal. Finally, we also obtained a simple pictorial proof of the Zak phase bulk-edge correspondence for any one-dimensional system using this approach.This work was supported by the Australian National University and the Australian Research Council (Grants No. DP200101168 and No. DP210101292). Y.K. thanks A. Khanikaev, A. Slobozhanyuk, and D. Zhirikhin for useful comments. This work was supported by the Australian National University and the Australian Research Council (Grants No. DP200101168 and No. DP210101292).Peer-reviewe

Multiple Group Membership and Trust Protect Against Distress in the Context of Unwanted Sexual Experiences at a Youth Mass Gathering

Research suggests that belonging to multiple groups and trust separately mitigate psychological distress in response to adversity. However, their combined influence, particularly over time, in the context of unwanted sexual experiences during mass gatherings has not been fully explored. To advance our understanding, we investigated whether multiple group membership prior to a youth mass gathering was associated with lower psychological distress, and if trust in friends at the mass gathering (i.e., ingroup trust) explained this relationship among young people who either reported or did not report an unwanted sexual experience. Drawing on data from a longitudinal field study of young people attending a mass gathering, Schoolies (N = 97), we assessed participants’ multiple group memberships prior to the mass gathering (T1) and measured ingroup trust and psychological distress during the mass gathering (T2). Our findings revealed that 64.9% of participants reported unwanted sexual experiences at the mass gathering. Among those who reported unwanted sexual experiences, moderated mediation analysis indicated that belonging to multiple groups at T1 was associated with greater ingroup trust at T2, which in turn was linked to lower psychological distress at T2. This study provides evidence that multiple group membership may provide important psychological resources necessary for protecting against psychological distress following unwanted sexual experiences. Further, it highlights how group memberships might be thought of as latent psychological resources in the context of adverse experiences.The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article: Data collection for the Schoolies project was supported by the Queensland Government Department of Environment and Science, Safer Schoolies Initiative Unit. Dr. Aoife-Marie Foran has received funding from the European Union\u2019s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sk\u0142odowska-Curie grant agreement number 101034345. Prof. Tegan Cruwys is supported by an NHMRC Fellowship (1173270). Dr. Laura Ferris has received funding from the UQKx&T grant scheme (#029039).Peer-reviewe