As Below So Above: Reconstructing the Neo-Babylonian Worldview

To add to our knowledge about a Near Eastern culture, this project examines through textual evidence how the early first millennium BCE Neo-Babylonians thought, reasoned, and wrote in order to partially reconstruct the shared, generally held worldview of the Neo-Babylonian people using the transdisciplinary approach of worldview analysis. Worldviews are what we use to think with, not what we think about. Underlying surficial cultural behaviors are deeper levels of cognition regarding how to reason, perceive the world, prioritize values, prescribe behavior, and explain all of life. Specifically, this work examines the language and logic reflected in the textual archive, believing that this is the foundational level of any worldview. I argue that one finds two related components: (1) that they were linguistically programmed to be attuned to the full context over particularities, verbal actions over agential subjects, the continuity of substances over discrete objects, the standard use of maleness over femaleness, and the affective power of spoken or written words, and (2) that they were logically programmed to prefer gradations over distinctions, functional properties over inherent attributes, radials and/or rhizomes over linearity, and relationships and/or comparisons over abstractions and algorithms. By addressing this underlying, implicit cognitive software the Neo-Babylonians used, one is better able to understand the society’s more observable and obvious religious, ethical, legal, political, and social features. This has the potential to present a more contextualized view of Neo-Babylonian civilization. Reconstructing the ancient Neo-Babylonian worldview allows scholars to compare and contrast the linguistic and logical features to other ancient nearby cultures in order to understand continuities and differences and what accounts for them. One can open a dialogue between these ancient societies at a deeper level. It demonstrates the uniqueness of Neo-Babylonia. And it provides a basis for understanding how Neo-Babylonians contributed to the roots of Western civilization and thought. Most current worldview analysis examines modern or postmodern worldviews. By examining an ancient worldview, one can begin to more clearly understand any common aspects which exist for all worldviews and any elements that exist in ancient ones which are missing from cataloging more modern worldviews. Thus, the cataloging of an ancient worldview helps to open new vistas within worldview studies. This study invites similar ones within ancient Near Eastern studies and within ancient studies in general

Applying Transformational Music Theory to Dynamic Music Composition for Game Soundtracks: A practice-based investigation

Dynamic music systems are often found in video games for interactively altering music as a result of player input and game events. Real-time recomposition of music is a ``holy grail'' of dynamic soundtracks. However, common approaches based on managing multi-track audio and sequenced segments face challenges in responding musically to events. Audio tracks are limited due to a lack of granularity and sequenced content is unwieldy due to the complexity of relationships. Many of these limitations can be addressed, in part, by the representation used for the musical material. In this thesis I engage with generative sequencing for dynamic soundtracks through application of algorithmic composition to manage complexity. In this practice, I utilise a novel representational model to situate musical material in spatial relationships, drawing on concepts from transformational music theory. I have implemented this model as a new software library, ScaleVec, which is also explained in detail in this research. This alternate approach to dynamic soundtracks addresses shortcomings in the granularity of contemporary stem-based approaches by generating and rendering a soundtrack in real-time. Furthermore, the spatial representation facilitates a path-based model which manages complex relationships by mapping out where the soundtrack has been, where it is planning to go and where it may diverge in response to events. Through a practice-led enquiry, I evaluate the quality of this approach by considering dynamic music for games according to four categories of adaptive behaviours: immediate (short-timescale), game-state (mid-timescale), plot (long-timescale) and variation (steady-state). These four timescales are applied as a conceptual framework for the contextualisation and discussion of two prototype soundtracks, Spaceship and Submarine. These two works utilise ScaleVec to control the musical output of the generative processes, presenting a parametric interface for the dynamic behaviours of the soundtrack. The reflection and discussion of my practice examines the perceived affordances, musical quality and the nature of my compositional process. The capacity for real-time recomposition through generative scoring, by managing musical spaces with ScaleVec, represents a paradigmatic shift which allows for deeper engagement with the interactive facets of video game music composition, thereby embracing the emergent nature of gameplay as an integral part of the soundtrack

Evidence-based eLearning Design: Develop and Trial a Prototype Software Instrument for Evaluating the Quality of eLearning Design Within a Framework of Cognitive Load Theory

A major research direction within higher education in Australia and internationally is the evaluation of learning design quality and the extent to which the design–teaching–learning–evaluation cycle is evidence based. The quest for increased evidence-based learning design, which has been influenced by evidence-based medical research standards, is driven by its link to improved learning outcomes, higher learner engagement levels and lower attrition rates. Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) has risen to prominence over the past three decades as an evidence-based framework for informing instructional design in traditional, blended and multimedia learning environments. CLT approaches learning from the perspective of engaging specific strategies to manage the loads imposed on a limited working memory in order to form and automate long-term memory schemas. CLT operates on the premise that optimal learning conditions may be obtained by aligning pedagogical strategies with the structure and functions of human cognitive architecture and the individual learner’s prior knowledge. CLT has contributed a suite of strategies derived from a unified model of human cognitive architecture and validated through randomised controlled trial (RCT) experiments as exerting strengthening effects on learning, thus suiting the CLT framework for use as an evidence-based standard in this study. Up to this point, a single digital system has not yet been developed for managing, monitoring and evaluating the implementation and impact of CLT strategies at scale. The key contribution of this study is a new prototype software instrument called Cognitive Load Evaluation Management System (CLEMS) that addresses this issue and also provides a model for its implementation. CLEMS is underpinned by a personalised model of teacher–learner interactions defined as mediative–adaptive in nature that includes diagnostic conversations (DCs) for identifying barriers to learning, interventions called Nodes of Expertise (NOEs) for advancing learners to new levels of understanding of complex knowledge, and validation conversations (VCs) for evaluating learner progress. In addition, the heutagogical or self-directed learning capability of learners, including motivation, has been brought to the fore as a significant factor contributing to schema automation. A qualitative Design-based Research (DBR) methodological approach was used to develop CLEMS, which emerged over three research iterations through the synthesis of literature review findings and empirical data from expert focus groups. Emergent data was continuously triangulated between research iterations and ongoing literature reviews to refine the design and development of CLEMS from a theoretical model to an operational digital prototype. The conceptual framework of the study has been derived from Critical Realism (CR) which posits an ontological–epistemological view of reality that is stratified and multi-mechanistic, thus aligning with the complex nature of authentic learning environments as well as the multi-faceted model of human cognitive architecture contributed by CLT. The implications of the study have been discussed with reference to stakeholders including teachers, learners and educational institutions. Recommendations for future research include the ongoing development of CLEMS for the systematic implementation of CLT strategies at scale.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Education, 202

Testing terrain: exploring the computational design of natural systems in landscape architecture

While the use of computational design methods in landscape architecture is not uncommon, they are rarely used to develop performance-driven design strategies. Throughout this thesis, I argue that this shortfall stems from disciplinary differences in the design process and designed medium that are not reflected in common computational design tools. The scope for better reconciling these disjuncts is broad, but especially acute when employing design strategies that consider the performance of complex natural systems. Here, the overlap between disciplinary intent and computational capability is significant as natural systems have unique representational, scalar, and temporal complexities and their design forms a core concern of landscape architecture. Computation offers new approaches to managing these complexities, but also introduces new challenges. I investigate these using a design research methodology that foregrounds the tool development as a reflective practice that can span across specific design contexts and general disciplinary concepts. In discursive terms, I identify that the aims of computational design broadly align with those emphasised in contemporary landscape architectural theory: to pursue dynamism through generative systems. This seeming similarity masks a difference whereby the agency of computational design systems acts within the design process while the agency of landscapes systems acts within the world. Using the generative techniques of the former to help design the generative effects of the latter creates representations that posses a novel capacity for explicit precision and projection alongside a corresponding increase in implicit uncertainty. As a result, I suggest that traversing the solution space of these models requires a distinct design strategy that emphasises tendency and feedback over convergence. Framing the use of computational design methods in this manner highlights their value and purpose when modelling complex natural systems. In technical terms, I identify that current computational design platforms tend to employ geometry as the locus of design resolution and data propagation. In doing so they marginalise many informal or aformal landscape conditions and thus limit the scope of modelling. I explore alternatives through a process of tool-making that tests how to create interoperable procedures that each represent different aspects of landscape systems. In many cases, the encapsulation of computational procedures — as both machinic instructions and interface affordances — can enact existing landscape architectural theories of representation, ecology, and emergence. This form of instrumentality offers a distinct, valuable, and under-developed form of disciplinary praxis. However, as I highlight, its execution requires successfully negotiating between two modes of abstraction: the representation of computational procedures as software and the representation of landscape architectural design intent as computational procedures. The strategies I develop to align these two forms of representation help create more accessible and flexible computational methods for modelling complex natural systems

Proceedings of the Seventh Congress of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education

International audienceThis volume contains the Proceedings of the Seventh Congress of the European Society for Research in Mathematics Education (ERME), which took place 9-13 February 2011, at Rzeszñw in Poland

“Jazz Steel”: An Ethnography of Race, Sound, and Technology in Spaces of Live Performance

This dissertation uses multi-sited ethnography to explore how the technological manipulation of sound in live jazz performance conditions the meanings, feelings, and politics of racial difference. Situated primarily in two multi-room jazz venues, Jazz at Lincoln Center (JALC) and the Montreux Jazz Festival, I analyze three years of participant observation with musicians, audio technicians, acousticians, and sound system designers. I analyze four main categories of technology: (1) physical acoustics; (2) sound isolation, (3) sound reinforcement (amplification); and (4) digital measurement, prediction, and manipulation technologies. My overarching goal is to provide new ways to understand live performance with more attention to the technologies, architectural designs, and human labor crucial to any sonic event. I show not only how the built physical spaces and technologies I observed are inscribed with human judgments about music and sound, but how the spaces themselves exhibit their own agentive force in conditioning social behavior. I thus rethink live performance as a dynamic network of materials, technologies, and human and nonhuman practices and meanings. My second intervention uses the figure of jazz—and, more specifically, the sound of jazz—to investigate how the intersection of technology and sound exposes new ways to think through questions of human difference. Focusing primarily on race, I show how ideals of scientific objectivity and “pure and clean” aesthetics challenge racial tropes of Black sound as “noisy” or disordered while complicating jazz’s political force as an agent of oppositional energy and Black cultural distinctiveness. Chapter one, “‘Some Rooms Make You Shout’: Physical Acoustics and the Sound of Jazz,” shows how the designers of JALC’s Rose Theater, a prestigious 1,300-seat concert hall, acoustically encoded musical and social values into the physical materials of the room and the building that surrounds it. Namely, I show how particular aspects of the hall’s physical acoustics reveal overlapping investments in western aesthetic values and Afro-diasporic priorities, including call and response, participatory interaction, and heterogenous timbral palettes. Chapter two, “‘Some Rooms Make You Whisper’: The Art of Isolation and the Racial Politics of Quiet,” focuses on Rose Theater’s acoustic isolation, accomplished through a rare and expensive “box-in-box” construction that physically disconnects the hall from any vibratory connection with the outside world. This unique architecture fosters an uncannily quiet, sequestered aural environment that counters a range of histories of racist white listening that associate Blackness, Black bodies, and Black spaces with various forms of “noisy” sonic excess. The hall’s extraordinary quietness also reinforces a culture of attentive listening that enmeshes the sound of jazz with western ontologies of aesthetic musical autonomy. Relatedly, chapter three, “‘Make Yourselves Invisible’: Transparency, Fidelity, and the Illusion of Natural Sound,” demonstrates how ideals of fidelity and transparency are embedded within electroacoustic sound systems, and how my interlocutors design and operate such systems to foster a “pure and clean” aural environment. I show how my interlocutors aspire to an illusion of a “natural,” technology-free sonic experience but deploy an array of technological systems to do it. My analysis challenges traditional notions of fidelity—and sonic mediation itself—by revealing musical experience as a constellation of vibrant interactions between acoustic vibrations, amplified sound energy, and physical human bodies. Chapter four, “Tuning the Room: On the ‘Arts’ and ‘Sciences’ of Sound and Space,” analyzes how my interlocutors design and calibrate sound systems using state-of-the-art digital equipment to foster what they call a neutral, “colorless” sonic environment with “the same sound everywhere.” This process of “tuning the room” conjures novel ontologies of sound and space as objects of detached observation and technoscientific manipulation. In chapter five, “Black Boxes, Pink Noise, and White Listening: Rationalizing Race, Gender and Jazz,” I demonstrate how the objectification of sound and space is entangled with raced and gendered epistemologies of scientific knowledge production. I further analyze these approaches to sound and space for their underlying entanglements with what Lipsitz calls a “white spatial imaginary”: an ostensibly neutral environment conducive to discriminatory systems of capital accumulation. These and other entanglements complicate the oppositional, counter-hegemonic potential of jazz and other forms of Black performance

A Qualitative IPA of the Motivations of Retirees’ Transitions to ‘Retirement’ Social Identities and the Consequences on Retirement Adjustment Satisfaction

Retirement is a relatively new phenomenon in relation toshifting from being a privilege for the few to becoming anormative ‘third age’ of the life course. However, retirementrepresents one of the major life course transitions in late adultlife and associated with this transition is the question of howwell people adjust to retirement and the consequences of howwell people negotiate this adjustment on their sense of worthand well-being can be either negative or positive. This paperpresents a qualitative approach through Social Identity Theoryand Self-determination Theory to explore the underpinningmotivational processes of retirees in their transition to‘retirement’ social identities and the consequences onsatisfaction in retirement. Semi-structured interviews wereconducted with four white British participants includingthree males and one female ranging in age from sixty-fourto sixty-nine and having retired between fifteen months andfour years. An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis ofthe transcribed interviews led to five main themes emerging,namely Strength of identity with working life; Significanceof non-work-related aspects of life; Psychologically preparingfor retirement; Process of shifting/adjusting to retirement;Meeting expectations of retirement. The study found thatretirement is not a formulaic process but people experienceadjusting to retirement differently based on their individualmotivations and resources for preparing for and facilitatingthe transition. The findings from the study has implicationsin relation to the provision of intervention in supportingindividuals psychologically preparing for retirement beyondfinancial planning along with those experiencing negativeconsequences in transitioning to retirement