Exploiting the cannibalistic traits of Reed-Solomon codes

In Reed-Solomon codes and all other maximum distance separable codes, there is an intrinsic relationship between the size of the symbols in a codeword and the length of the codeword. Increasing the number of symbols in a codeword to improve the efficiency of the coding system thus requires using a larger set of symbols. However, long Reed-Solomon codes are difficult to implement and many communications or storage systems cannot easily accommodate an increased symbol size, e.g., M-ary frequency shift keying (FSK) and photon-counting pulse-position modulation demand a fixed symbol size. A technique for sharing redundancy among many different Reed-Solomon codewords to achieve the efficiency attainable in long Reed-Solomon codes without increasing the symbol size is described. Techniques both for calculating the performance of these new codes and for determining their encoder and decoder complexities is presented. These complexities are usually found to be substantially lower than conventional Reed-Solomon codes of similar performance

The Telecommunications and Data Acquisition Report

Reports on developments in programs managed by JPL's Office of Telecommunications and Data Acquisition (TDA) are provided. In space communications, radio navigation, radio science, and ground-based radio and radar astronomy, it reports on activities of the Deep Space Network (DSN) in planning, supporting research and technology, implementation, and operations. Also included are standards activity at JPL for space data and information systems and reimbursable DSN work performed for other agencies through NASA

Networking subversion: a feminist analysis of the modernist salon

This thesis offers a feminist theorisation of a vital—yet understudied—cultural institution of modernism: the salon. Taking existing feminist scholarship on the 17th- and 18th-century salon as a point of departure, I analyse how the modernist salon—namely, its female host(s) and the body of work it inspired—problematises masculinist histories of modernism’s development and canon. To do this, I take three American women-led salons from the first half of the 20th century as case studies: Gertrude Stein’s salon at 27 rue de Fleurus; Natalie Clifford Barney’s salon at 20 rue Jacob; and Florine, Ettie, and Carrie Stettheimer’s salon in New York’s Upper West Side. With each case study, I combine archival research with literary and artistic analysis to: a) recreate the salon’s atmosphere and gender dynamics; b) analyse how the salonière(s)’s beliefs and goals influenced her salon’s format; and, c) assess the salon’s influence on its host(s)’s and habitués’ cultural output, examining how salon-inspired art and literary works subvert gendered codes of behaviour and appearance. In doing so, I argue that the modernist salon worked to deconstruct sexual and artistic hierarchical binaries—such as male/female, masculine/feminine, heterosexual/queer, ‘high’ art/’low’ art, and public/domestic—and advance a subversive feminist politics; yet, the form these politics adopted depended entirely upon the practices, goals, and values of the individual salonière. The thesis consists of five sections. The introduction situates the thesis within existing salon theory and modernist studies, highlighting its unique contribution to research (as a feminist theorisation of the modernist salon), and outlines the thesis’ theoretical underpinnings, methodology, and structure. The first chapter focuses on how Stein’s gender-segregated salon provided her with the tools for her own self-promotion and subversive word portraits. The second chapter analyses Barney’s women-centric salon and how its explicitly feminist mandate to build and empower a community of (mostly queer) women writers influenced (and derived from) Barney’s feminist pensées and memoirs and habitué Djuna Barnes’ Ladies Almanack. The third chapter examines the Stettheimer salon and how its three sister hosts designed their salon as the medium for establishing their feminist legacy through an expansive literary and artistic oeuvre. The conclusion highlights the stark contrast between the Stein, Barney, and Stettheimer salons in order to emphasise the role of the salonière in curating the salon’s feminist politics and proposes directions for further research

Australian travel writing on the Pacific Islands c.1880-1941

From the 1880s onwards, the Pacific Islands became increasingly accessible to the average Australian with improvements in transportation and the growth of trade and business, Christian outreach, and colonial administration in the region. Economic prosperity and social mobility in Australia facilitated their movement abroad, and the development of publishing and literacy encouraged the circulation of texts which generated excitement about travel and exotic foreign destinations. The varied experiences and impressions of Australians travelling to, and through, the Pacific Islands filled diaries, letters, books, magazines, memoirs and travelogues, many of which found a receptive Australian audience. This thesis explores this corpus of Australian travel writing on the Pacific Islands from c.1880 to 1941. In doing so, it examines how representations of the Pacific Islands within travel accounts reflected and contributed to Australian knowledge of the region. By contextualising these sources and their authors, this thesis explores the nuances and complexities of the individual Australian travel experience, whilst also situating them within the broader corpus of Australian travel literature. I discuss several themes which are prevalent in Australian travel writing of this period: the experience of seaboard travel and tourism, commerce and profit, romantic and utopian ideals, gender roles, ideas of nation and empire, theories of race and science, and notions of the 'savage' and 'civilised.' It explores how individual Australians negotiated these concepts whilst abroad in the Pacific Islands, and how their encounters and their texts highlight a diverse set of reactions, at times confirming, challenging or rejecting previous assumptions and expectations. This historical study of a previously neglected body of literature deepens our understanding of the historical engagement and exchange between Australians and Pacific Islanders. This was a relationship that reached beyond the political and economic interests of a select few - it permeated popular literature and public debate. Though European stereotypes of the Pacific Islands persisted well into the twentieth century, travel writing was crucial in familiarising and informing Australians about their close neighbours. These accounts also show that this engagement was not one-sided. The Pacific Islands played an important role in shaping the growth of the Australian nation too, and Australian travel writers recorded much about themselves as they did the exotic 'other' when placed in unfamiliar surroundings. This thesis argues that the diversity of travel writing challenges stereotypes of Australian travellers and readers, at the same time as it undermines stereotypes of the 'South Seas.

The making of monsters : has the medieval monster been reassembled as the unbounded body of medical science and environmental horror?

This investigation examines perceptions of the monster as an unbounded body. Bodily containment is clearly disregarded in the fearsome physical abnormality of the medieval monster. Their hybrid physiologies and the emphasis on bodily orifices are reminiscent of those horrors described in Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. My research argues that the monster continues to retain its impact as a metaphor for fear and horror of unforeseen dangers in contemporary secular circumstances. My studio practice addresses the unbounded body of the monster as a metaphor for environmental horror. An accompanying exegesis documents the methodology, experimentation and ideas that drove this practical research. In the resultant works the monster is presented as an elusive entity embedded within abstracted land forms and in small assemblages of found objects. My dissertation provides theoretical and historical links to my studio practice. It clarifies the significance of the tradition of medieval mapmaking in addressing the fears and horrors of the unknown by ordering connections between nature, theology and the workings of the cosmos. More specifically, the dissertation contrasts the shift from the monsters of medieval religion to their reconfiguration as an increasingly scientific/medical phenomenon culminating in the genetically altered bodies of today's biotechnologies. Recollecting the body/earth metaphor of the medieval Hereford mappa mundi, ten digital images record my journey through drought-stricken landscapes where the earth is conceptualised as a fragile body, vulnerable to environmental disaster. The medieval need to confine the monster to its rightful place in the mapped schema of God's 'plan of creation' is also reflected in the series of assemblages of found objects - bones, feathers, fur, mummified frogs, small lizards, cicadas, pig, goat, kangaroo and wombat skulls, metal objects and silk constructions - that are skewered on ancient medical, optical and mathematical instruments. The making or transforming of monsters and the containment of these unbounded bodies is alluded to by safely confining each little assemblage within a miniature glass tower. Grouped together, they recall the eclectic wonderment of the 'cabinet of curiosities' or Kunstkammer and Wunderkammer that encapsulated the emerging ethos of medical and scientific enquiry of Enlightenment Europe. Technically, I contribute to new knowledge in art practice by layering elements of my drawings and scanned found objects in Photoshop to create a painterly abstraction and in the employment of the new technologies of direct digital print to transfer these images onto silk fabric and archival papers. By further embellishing the silk prints with beads and stitching, I demonstrate the interaction of handmaking with digital processes: a multilayered method akin to collage and assemblage. This process of assemblage links the landscape pieces to the small glass towers. My investigations found that, although its appearance may differ from that of the medieval grotesque, the monster is undiminished as a metaphor for the unbounded body of medical science and environmental horror. The resulting body of work is to be exhibited at the ANU School of Art Gallery from 16 March to 1 April, 2011

Translating practice

Translatability and translation, the possibility and act of conveying some thing between people, objects, languages, cultures, times, spaces and media, have become increasingly important elements of creative practice and works of art. My research explores this proposition. To contextualise this concept of translation as an artistic and critical method mediating the relationship of the seeable to the sayable I retrace an under-mined vein of translation that grew from the Enlightenment, the Early (Jena) Romantic response to it and its subsequent development through Walter Benjamin to other modern theorists. I suggest that this tradition of translation has developed into a creative method that assumes a pre-existent given from which it evolves in order to destabilise, re-appropriate and make-new. The thesis argues that art has come to occupy the space of translation and proposes that an interpretative mode is ultimately antithetical to a form of thought engaged with in the creative process. This relies on the understanding of a qualitative distinction between acts of translation as presentational and of interpretation as representational. The distinction is not clear-cut since these two forms of mediation operate on a continuum. The probable root of “interpret” in English is “between prices” and derives from trade. This etymology stresses the transactional, hermeneutic role of the interpreter as a responsive agent that negotiates between distinct value systems to ensure equivalence during the process of exchange. While Interpretation operates primarily within the symbolic aspect of language translation retains a relationship to metaphor, which acknowledges that during transfer something becomes something that it literally is not. It must therefore also account for Aporia, or what fails to cross over and for a-signifying, singular aspects that affect or alter the symbolic during this process. In contrast to interpretation, translation’s relation to subjectivity, its resistance to schematisation and reduction to the accurate, objective and rational transfer of information provides a prophylaxis of doubt and generates heterogeneity. The thesis triangulates my practices as artist, translator and critic using translation to destabilise and re-calibrate the relationship of theory to practice. In relation to theory, rather than use this to explain, interpret, or categorize art, it advocates the translational practice of placing in parallel so that lines of thought may be drawn from one to the other, responding to and setting up points of intersection, divergence and congruence to encourage a non-hierarchical associative-dissociative dismantling. Translation informs the research method, structure and content of the thesis, which occupies an inter-theoretical, inter-disciplinary or matrixial space. As such, it is edified through a process that derives from and displays the translational method and diverse sources that constitute it. Four case studies bring together practices employing a translational method from different periods, cultures, creative practices and theoretical sources: Bernard Leach and Ezra Pound’s modernist projects; Jorge Luis Borges’ theory of translation and Briony Fer’s re-presentation of Eva Hesse’s studio work; the Brazilian poets Haroldo and Agosto De Campos’ theory of Cannibalistic translation and painter Adriana Varejao’s work with tiles; and ceramicist Alison Britton in light of Donald Winnicott’s concept of transitional spaces

Retelling Grimm Girlhood: Representations of Girlhood in the Contemporary Fairy Tale Film Adaptation Cycle

Working within the filmic fairy tale adaptation cycle that emerged between 2005 and 2015, this thesis investigates how girlhood is cinematically constructed through the lens of fantasy, in relation to gendered representation in media. The relationship between femininity and fairy tales is well-established. By reading contemporary filmic adaptations of the tales, the thesis deconstructs gendered myth-making and reveals the extent to which fairy tale imagery and plot continue to inform cultural constructions of girlhood. It argues that by centring upon young female protagonists and often targeting a young female audience, this cycle constitutes a newly emerging young woman’s cinema.Working within the filmic fairy tale adaptation cycle that emerged between 2005 and 2015, this thesis investigates how girlhood is cinematically constructed through the lens of fantasy, in relation to gendered representation in media. The relationship between femininity and fairy tales is well-established. By reading contemporary filmic adaptations of the tales, the thesis deconstructs gendered myth-making and reveals the extent to which fairy tale imagery and plot continue to inform cultural constructions of girlhood. It argues that by centring upon young female protagonists and often targeting a young female audience, this cycle constitutes a newly emerging young woman’s cinema. In doing so, the thesis relates the contemporary fairy tale adaptation cycle back to gendered histories of media and genres traditionally associated with female audiences (such as the Female Gothic, the Melodrama, the Costume Drama and so on). The thesis analyses their similar narrative strategies of using iconographical objects, haunted spaces and evocative settings. The cycle’s cultural denigration is critiqued for its association with mainstream and primarily female audiences. The act of adapting fairy tales to construct girlhood through fantasy thus necessitates exploring the ideological implications of gendered genres, their narrative strategies as well as complex processes of adaptation, from tale to screen. How these films, by centralising girlhood, explore female fantasies and desires, trauma, gendered violence and coming of age, is explored throughout. The thesis argues that a highly specific mode of girlhood comes to the fore in this cycle, within particular cultural (social, racial and narrative) parameters. This mode of fairy tale girlhood is imperilled, spectacular and exclusionary, generating disturbing implications of how young women are represented and addressed in popular media. As in women’s films of previous eras in film history, however, the fairy tale adaptation cycle both reinforces and challenges the rigid parameters in which girlhood is cinematically imagined.The Arts and Humanities Research Counci

Reading Africa into American Literature: Epics, Fables, and Gothic Tales

The literature often considered the most American is rooted not only in European and Western culture but also in African and American Creole cultures. Keith Cartwright places the literary texts of such noted authors as George Washington Cable, W.E.B. DuBois, Alex Haley, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Joel Chandler Harris, Herman Melville, Toni Morrison, and many others in the context of the history, spiritual traditions, folklore, music, linguistics, and politics out of which they were written. Cartwright grounds his study of American writings in texts from the Senegambian/Old Mali region of Africa. Reading epics, fables, and gothic tales from the crossroads of this region and the American South, he reveals that America’s foundational African presence, along with a complex set of reactions to it, is an integral but unacknowledged source of the national culture, identity, and literature. Keith Cartwright, assistant professor of English at Roanoke College in Roanoke, Virginia, was a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal. Cartwright\u27s purpose is simple-to show the importance of African culture in United States literature, and he succeeds in fulfilling the essential goal. In so doing, his insights are often surprising and almost invariably interesting. —College Literature No matter how obvious the political demand to acknowledge the unacknowledged is, we need the research, the scholarly guidance, and the close, comparative readings that Cartwright offers in order to make acknowledgement more than a half-informed political gesture, to make it fully appreciative. —Zoltan Abadi-Nagy, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studieshttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_american_literature/1006/thumbnail.jp

Missionaries, modernity and the moving image: Re-presenting the Melanesian Other to Christian communities in the West between the World Wars

This thesis considers conflicting representational strategies used by Christian missionaries in displaying Melanesian people to white audiences in the West with particular reference to films made during the period of colonial modernity between 1917 and 1935. Most scholarly work on Christian mission in the Pacific has focussed on the nineteenth century and on the effect of Christianisation on indigenous populations, rather than on the effect of mission propaganda on Western communities. This thesis repositions mission propaganda as an important alternative source of visual imagery of the Melanesian ‘Other’ available to white popular audiences. Within a broader commercial market that commodified Western notions of Melanesian ‘savagery’ via illustrated travelogue magazines and commercial multi-media shows, missionaries trod an uneasy knife-edge in how they transmitted indigenous imagery and mediated cultural difference for white consumers. Five case-studies consider missionary propaganda from four Christian denominations in disparate parts of Melanesia. They reveal a temporal trajectory in the conflicted but symbiotic relationship between, on one hand, missionary organisations interested in propagandising their work and, on the other, travelogue-adventurers operating with commercial motives. This trajectory follows missionaries as they move from facilitation of travelogue-adventurers, through passive commissioning of their services, then active collaboration, and finally to autonomous film-making in their own right. I consider how white missionaries played a pivotal role in both enabling and subverting the dominance of the prevailing commercial paradigm of the period: that Melanesians are by nature and definition ‘savages’ and ‘head-hunters’ residing in a thrilling, timeless, virtual place called ‘Cannibal-Land.’ These contradictory impulses, I contend, destabilised both Christian and ‘Cannibal-land’ stereotypes. This destabilising effect was not restricted to film, but I suggest that it was amplified by the use of the quintessentially modern medium of moving images. I argue that film – particularly film made by missionaries – posed an implicit challenge to the essentially literary trope of ‘Cannibal-land’. Moving images offered a more unruly medium within and around which indigenous Melanesians of the colonial era could sometimes display what I term a radical visibility that escaped and transcended both types of Western stereotype