The 2 Rs – respect and responsibility: the case of Australian Muslim girls

The citizenship debate involves respect and responsibility, and these can be achieved through collective action. Though many members of disadvantaged groups sympathise with the goals of social movements fighting injustice against their in-group (own community) or out-group (wider society) often only a small percentage of them actually participate in collective activities staged to realise these goals. In this paper I discuss the case of Australian Muslims girls who in their home environment respect the family values and carry out certain responsibilities assigned to them. By family values, I mean respect for elders, performing religious duties, for example, offering prayers, and fasting during the month of Ramadan, helping mother in the kitchen and looking after their siblings. In the wider society, Muslim girls attend schools, do part-time jobs and obey Australian values of fair-go, tolerance and multiculturalism ceremoniousl. However, I question in this paper, whether their family and the wider society are working collectively to fulfil their responsibility towards these girls. I discuss the interview responses of 39 Muslim girls (15-18 years) living in Sydney and Perth. I examine pertinent cases within the framework of relevant academic literature, and argue within the social, religious and cultural context. The issues within the family domain are inter-twined within Islamic religious-cultural arguments, whereas the issues in the public domain are argued on cultural conflict between the Muslims and the wider society. With both arguments I show how some Muslim girls negotiate their identity, and suggest their bicultural identity is assisting them to keep a positive attitude in their everyday life. Finally, I advocate that collective action from both the Muslim and the wider community is vital for the well-being of these girls.   Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal, Vol.1, No.3, 200

Australia Day: a day for healing and gratitude

The Order of Australia Association invited me to their Australia Day Multi-Faith Celebration at Elder Hall, University of Adelaide on 26 January 2013. I was humbled and delightfully accepted the invitation. His Excellency Rear Admiral Kevin Scarce, Governor of South Australia, and Mrs Liz Scarce, Mr Hieu Van Le, Chairman of South Australian Multicultural and Ethnic Affairs Commission, and leaders of the ethnic and religious communities amongst others attended the event. The heart-rending event was laced with speeches, music, religious symbols and scriptures. His Excellency Governor Kevin Scarce gave a speech on the theme of the event, ‘Australians Together: Giving and Forgiving’. Indigenous Kaurna Elder, Uncle Lewis O’Brien, offered a coolamon of eucalyptus leaves as an expression of friendship between the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains and the people of South Australia. Indigenous Australians have used eucalyptus leaves to heal physical wounds. In his speech Mr Hieu Van Lee stated, ‘In this hall we have representatives of the first people of Australia, whose history and love for this land stretch back at least 40,000 years’. Mr Lee also mentioned that over the last two centuries people from almost every part of the world have migrated to Australia. The Australia Day event reminded the audience that there can be differences among people but the ability to live together is the strength of Australian society. The event also reminded the audience that hurting other people can be human nature but forgiving is a conscious step towards reconciliation. Yet the Australia Day event was also a time for me to reflect on how the original owners of the land felt when British setters arrived in 1788, and later how they felt when Aboriginal children were forcibly taken away from their parents and moved to reserves under the ‘civilising task’ of the Australian federal and state governments and church missions. • Dr Nahid Afrose Kabir is a Senior Research Fellow at the International Centre for Muslim and non-Muslim Understanding, University of South Australia

Anzac Day 2013: lest we forget

Australians and New Zealanders commemorated Anzac Day on 25 April 2013, paying tribute to diggers (soldiers) who lost their lives at the Turkish front 98 years ago. The tribute commenced with dawn services and marches across Australia and New Zealand. Those who lost their lives in subsequent wars were also remembered. A resident of the Blue Mountains, Sydney, Michael Adams, said, ‘My father was in World War II in New Guinea and my great grandfather was killed over in France in 1917 so I come here every year to honour them, as well as remember those who have been left behind.’ South Australian Veterans director Bill Denny said that about 300,000 Australians have died in 51 conflicts from 1863 to the present day. Tim Barrett, Commander Australian Fleet, remembered the 3000 veterans who are ‘currently serving with great distinction overseas from South Sudan, Egypt to the Middle East, Afghanistan, in the Southeast Asian region and the South Pacific’. Overseas, at Anzac Cove in Gallipoli, Turkey, many Australians also gathered (as they do every year on Anzac Day) to pay their respects to their lost loved ones. As I reflected on the Anzac Day commemorations, I envisaged the complexities of war. I returned to my previous research, which has touched on three relevant dimensions of Australian history: Australian soldiers’ sacrifice for their country; the question of enemy subjects; and the loyal voices of minorities. • Dr Nahid Afrose Kabir is a Senior Research Fellow in the International Centre for Muslim and non- Muslim Understanding, University of South Australia

Launch disasters in Bangladesh: a geographical study

Bangladesh is a riverine country and communication by waterways is of great importance especially in the southern region of the country. From Chandpur southwards, waterway is the only means of transport and so a large number of people has to travel by motor launches in the coastal areas and inland. Since the early 1950's, motor launch services have become popular and in the period 1997-98 there were 1,853 registered launches operating 227 routes. But this important mode is ridden with tragic disasters every year, incurring a heavy toll of human lives. Since 1977, there were 248 motor launch accidents recorded by BIWTA (Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority) with a loss of 2,309 1ives, 374 persons injured and 208 persons missing. This paper attempts to roughly trace out the causes and the geographical distribution of the accidents through an analysis of a time series data covering the period between 1977 and 2000. It was found that the most frequent type or cause of launch accidents was collision, followed by foundering and overloading. The least frequent accident types were due to under-water currents, shoals, leaning electricity poles and country boats travelling without lights at night and manned by untrained operators, followed by cyclones. Interestingly, overcrowding did not seem to be the most typical of launch disasters in the countr

Adaptive Methods for Point Cloud and Mesh Processing

Point clouds and 3D meshes are widely used in numerous applications ranging from games to virtual reality to autonomous vehicles. This dissertation proposes several approaches for noise removal and calibration of noisy point cloud data and 3D mesh sharpening methods. Order statistic filters have been proven to be very successful in image processing and other domains as well. Different variations of order statistics filters originally proposed for image processing are extended to point cloud filtering in this dissertation. A brand-new adaptive vector median is proposed in this dissertation for removing noise and outliers from noisy point cloud data. The major contributions of this research lie in four aspects: 1) Four order statistic algorithms are extended, and one adaptive filtering method is proposed for the noisy point cloud with improved results such as preserving significant features. These methods are applied to standard models as well as synthetic models, and real scenes, 2) A hardware acceleration of the proposed method using Microsoft parallel pattern library for filtering point clouds is implemented using multicore processors, 3) A new method for aerial LIDAR data filtering is proposed. The objective is to develop a method to enable automatic extraction of ground points from aerial LIDAR data with minimal human intervention, and 4) A novel method for mesh color sharpening using the discrete Laplace-Beltrami operator is proposed. Median and order statistics-based filters are widely used in signal processing and image processing because they can easily remove outlier noise and preserve important features. This dissertation demonstrates a wide range of results with median filter, vector median filter, fuzzy vector median filter, adaptive mean, adaptive median, and adaptive vector median filter on point cloud data. The experiments show that large-scale noise is removed while preserving important features of the point cloud with reasonable computation time. Quantitative criteria (e.g., complexity, Hausdorff distance, and the root mean squared error (RMSE)), as well as qualitative criteria (e.g., the perceived visual quality of the processed point cloud), are employed to assess the performance of the filters in various cases corrupted by different noisy models. The adaptive vector median is further optimized for denoising or ground filtering aerial LIDAR data point cloud. The adaptive vector median is also accelerated on multi-core CPUs using Microsoft Parallel Patterns Library. In addition, this dissertation presents a new method for mesh color sharpening using the discrete Laplace-Beltrami operator, which is an approximation of second order derivatives on irregular 3D meshes. The one-ring neighborhood is utilized to compute the Laplace-Beltrami operator. The color for each vertex is updated by adding the Laplace-Beltrami operator of the vertex color weighted by a factor to its original value. Different discretizations of the Laplace-Beltrami operator have been proposed for geometrical processing of 3D meshes. This work utilizes several discretizations of the Laplace-Beltrami operator for sharpening 3D mesh colors and compares their performance. Experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms

The Role of the Recently Deorphanized G-Protein Coupled Receptor, GPR171, in Morphine Tolerance and Withdrawal

Opioid analgesics, such as morphine, represent the gold standard pain killer and the most frequently used drugs for the treatment of moderate to severe pain. Despite being a potent analgesic, morphine has unwanted and dangerous side effects with repeated use, such as tolerance and withdrawal. Tolerance is a state when a person no longer responds to a drug and a higher dose is required to achieve the same initial pain relief. Withdrawal is a set of undesirable psychological and physiological symptoms that occur after someone stops taking a drug or reduces the dose. Morphine tolerance and withdrawal play a vital role in the development of opioid addiction. One of the crucial goals to reduce opioid addiction is to develop pain therapeutics for chronic pain with high efficacy and reduced side effects. Despite centuries of extensive research, the existing treatments for chronic pain have met with limited success and developing better and alternative therapies are urgently needed. A novel G-protein coupled receptor, GPR171, is found to be highly expressed throughout the pain modulating regions of the brain. Our previous study found that activating this receptor with an agonist, enhances morphine’s pain relieving property in combination therapy during acute treatment in mice. In this study, we investigated the effects of activating this receptor during long-term morphine treatment to evaluate tolerance and withdrawal. Our results demonstrate that, activating this receptor reduces morphine induced tolerance in female mice (but not males) on a thermal pain test and it does not have any additional adverse effects on morphine tolerance and withdrawal syndrome. These results suggest the potentiality of GPR171 as a novel pain therapeutics in combination with morphine with enhanced efficacy and reduced tolerance and dependence for the treatment of chronic pain, especially for females

Young American Muslims

What is it like to be a young Muslim in America? Many young Americans cherish an American dream, 'that all men are created equal. And the election of America’s first black President in 2008 has shown that America has moved forward. Yet since 9/11 Muslim Americans have faced renewed challenges, with their loyalty and sense of belonging being questioned. Nahid Kabir takes you on a journey into the ideas, outlooks and identity of young Muslims in Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York and Virginia. Based on around 400 in-depth interviews with young Muslims, discover the similarities and differences between ethnic and racial groups such as Iranians, Arab Americans and African Americans. Find out how they rate President Obama as a national and world leader, where they stand on the Israeli-Palestine issue and how the media impacts on them

Influence of Single and Multiple Histidine Residues and their Ionization Properties on Transmembrane Helix Dynamics, Orientations and Fraying

Since aromatic and charged residues are often present in various locations of transmembrane helices of integral membrane proteins, their impacts on the molecular properties of transmembrane proteins and their interactions with lipids are of particular interest in many studies. In this work, I used solid-state deuterium NMR spectroscopy in designed model peptide GWALP23 [GGALW(LA)6LWLAGA] with selective deuterium labels to addresses the pH dependence and influence of single and multiple “guest” histidine residues in the orientation and dynamic behaviors of transmembrane proteins. The mutations include Gly to His (G2/22 to H2/22), Trp to His (W5/19 to H5/19) and Leu to His (L8/16 to H8/16). For the glycine to histidine substitutions, either one or both, the peptides show similar biophysical properties to the host GWALP23 peptide, with modest motional averaging and tilted transmembrane orientations that scale with bilayer thicknesses. Yet, the dynamic motion about the average azimuthal rotation increases significantly when the helix carries only H22. However, when the tryptophan residues, W5 and/or W19 are replaced by histidines, the new histidine residues effectively anchor the transmembrane α-helix, providing similar transmembrane topology. A consistent ~30° shift in helix rotation is observed for Trp to His substitutions and found to be terminal-dependent. Modifying the core sequence of GWALP23 with His residues at positions 8 and 16 provides some interesting insights. The peptide is significantly tilted in DLPC, has multiple orientations in DMPC and surface bound in DPoPC and DOPC lipid bilayers, where the bilayer thicknesses increase consecutively from DLPC to DOPC. Further analysis for peptide with only H8 was performed. Results indicate multiple signal resonances, similar to -H8,16, but in a thicker lipid bilayer. Moreover, the helix with H8 alone significantly responds with pH in DLPC and DMPC lipids and two titration points for H8 was calculated. Finally, mutation of GWALP23 with two adjacent histidines at the N-terminal end (positions 4 and 5) causes a large increase in the motional averaging about helix azimuthal rotation, which in turn obscures the actual orientation and the peptide is found to adopt a very small tilt angle

DESIGN AND MICROFABRICATION OF EDGE-LIT OPTICAL LIGHT CURTAINS

Plastic optical light guides can be used for a variety of interior and exterior vehicle light curtains such as cabin illuminators and automotive tail lights. The edge-lit wave guide is an optically transparent substrate coupled with one or more energy efficient light emitting diodes (LEDs). The light rays from the source travel through the substrate based on the principle of total internal reflection. If a surface of the optical wave guide is patterned with optical microstructures then the light rays will scatter and refract throughout the medium, primarily exiting opposite to the patterned surface. Uniform illumination over this active surface region is a function of the individual optical microstructure\u27s shape and the spatial distribution of the microstructures. The goal of this research is to investigate the light dispersion characteristics in both smooth and micro-patterned optically transparent substrates, and utilize optical simulation software to develop viable design approaches for fabricating small and medium sized light curtains. The study first identifies an appropriate optical microstructure (i.e. cylindrical indentations) that can be reliably imprinted on the surface of an optically transparent polymethyl-methacrylate (PMMA) substrate using a multi-axis micromilling machine. The optical simulation software Light Tools is then used to determine the most appropriate microstructure radius and spatial positioning of elements for uniform light distribution. The key design and fabrication parameters for near optimal performance are summarized and used to establish the process plan for the high-speed precision micromilling operations. Experiments are performed on several 100 mm x 100 mm x 6 mm polymer light guide panels (LGPs) including a customized design with a hexagonal arrangement of microstructures. Both interior and boundary regions of the sample LGPs are investigated for intensity distribution, optical transmission efficiency, and light loss. Although the experiments involve relatively small flat PMMA LGPs, the optical design and microfabrication methods can be readily extended to larger surface areas or curved optically transparent polymer substrates for contoured light curtains

Young American Muslims

What is it like to be a young Muslim in America? Many young Americans cherish an American dream, 'that all men are created equal. And the election of America’s first black President in 2008 has shown that America has moved forward. Yet since 9/11 Muslim Americans have faced renewed challenges, with their loyalty and sense of belonging being questioned. Nahid Kabir takes you on a journey into the ideas, outlooks and identity of young Muslims in Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York and Virginia. Based on around 400 in-depth interviews with young Muslims, discover the similarities and differences between ethnic and racial groups such as Iranians, Arab Americans and African Americans. Find out how they rate President Obama as a national and world leader, where they stand on the Israeli-Palestine issue and how the media impacts on them