The People Inside

Our collection begins with an example of computer vision that cuts through time and bureaucratic opacity to help us meet real people from the past. Buried in thousands of files in the National Archives of Australia is evidence of the exclusionary “White Australia” policies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which were intended to limit and discourage immigration by non-Europeans. Tim Sherratt and Kate Bagnall decided to see what would happen if they used a form of face-detection software made ubiquitous by modern surveillance systems and applied it to a security system of a century ago. What we get is a new way to see the government documents, not as a source of statistics but, Sherratt and Bagnall argue, as powerful evidence of the people affected by racism

National Astronomy Meeting 2019 Abstract Book

The National Astronomy Meeting 2019 Abstract Book. Abstracts accepted and presented, including both oral and poster presentations, at the Royal Astronomical Society's NAM2019 conference, held at Lancaster University between 30 June and 4 July 2019

Basketmaker II Warfare and Fending Sticks in the North American Southwest

Direct physical evidence and rock art, including head skin trophies, indicate that violence linked to warfare was prevalent among the preceramic farmers of the North American Southwest known as Basketmakers. The degree of intergroup conflict indicates that Basketmakers may have needed defense against atlatl darts. In the early 1900s archaeologists suggested that distinctive wooden artifacts served this purpose. Despite resembling Puebloan rabbit sticks, the first to report these S-shaped and flattened sticks with longitudinal facial grooves thought that hunting was not their purpose. Yet the sticks appear singularly inadequate for the task of atlatl dart defense. I evaluate the suggested function of these artifacts and their relationship to warfare in Basketmaker II society. I consider multiple lines of evidence to analyze stick function: ethnography, experiments, use-wear, bioarchaeological markers of violence, and prehistoric art. I conducted a detailed analysis of almost 500 prehistoric flat curved sticks and radiocarbon dated 63 of them. Some of the documented variation in this artifact class is geographically patterned, likely based on learning networks, but dating reveals that much of it is linked to an evident shift in tool function. The sticks become more like ethnographic rabbit sticks through time and exhibit a corresponding increase in traces of such a use. Yet, there are those with damage that seems indicative of atlatl dart defense. My experiments showed that a defender can knock aside atlatl darts from close range with these sticks. Some tribes in South America perform a similar feat in a duel-like context and Diego de Landa may have observed an analogous ritual in the 1500s among the Yucatec Maya. The fending hypothesis is most logical in a duel. Many of the analyzed prehistoric sticks come from a known Puebloan war god shrine in central New Mexico, where an informant identified one as symbol of membership in a warrior society. In addition to prowess as a man killer, war society membership in the distant past might have involved atlatl duels where dart defense with a stick displayed great skill and courage. Basketmakers may have considered S-shaped sticks as an ancient symbol of warrior status

Advanced Automation for Space Missions

The feasibility of using machine intelligence, including automation and robotics, in future space missions was studied

Astronomical tests of general relativity

This thesis is an in depth investigation of the history of the acceptance of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity by scientists and by the public through the media. It emphasises the key role that Australia played in that acceptance and in the verification of General Relativity. This contribution came from the 1922 total solar eclipse across the continent as well as the discovery in 2003 at Parkes Radio Telescope of the first, and to this date only, pair of pulsars in mutual orbit. This system provides a unique opportunity to plumb the theory in a much stronger gravitational field regime than previously. This historical scrutiny provides an insight into scientific revolutions in general. The examination of this particular development may then act as a template for the study of other scientific revolutions. One of the key findings is that the Theory of General Relativity was prematurely accepted. The main argument of the thesis is for 1928 being the year when sufficient evidence existed for scientists to begin accepting the theory based on gravitational deflection of light instead of the commonly accepted date of 1919. Emphasis is given to the explorations of the 1922 eclipse parties in Australia and the activities of the eight groups measuring light deflection at this eclipse. This work is gathered together here for the first time. The upshot is that it was 1928 before the results were published in full and a conclusion could be drawn. It is also established that the situation for Mercury needed a much longer time period to near the end of the twentieth century before a decisive verdict could be made. Similar to the situation for light deflection, it is found that 1928 is also the year in which spectroscopic data from spectral line frequency shifts of the Sun and white dwarfs had accumulated sufficiently so that a strong conclusion on the third of the classical tests of General Relativity could be made. From the late 1960s the radio region of the spectrum was employed more frequently to investigate gravitational deflection. As a result of a subsequent extension of this application to interferometry, the increased precision of experiments provided a greater level of testing. No astronomical test yet has refuted General Relativity and agreement has been reached at the 0.05% level with one parameter involving the double pulsar. In line with the emphasis of the 1922 eclipse in Australia, the Australian newspapers were gleaned up to 1928 to see how the 1919 British total solar eclipse results were regarded by the media and the public and to ascertain how the media explained the purpose for those 1922 expeditions in Australia. It is found surprisingly that the newspapers performed admirably in explaining difficult concepts in simple terms for the public during this time. This work provides an historical account of the astronomical tests of General Relativity. More broadly, this thesis demonstrates how the acceptance of a scientific revolution depends on the constant accumulation of data by many scientists and the communication of those results to the wider community. A century after it began, Einstein’s revolution in thinking provides a suitable model for space and time in the Universe