The rising sun of Australian Japan bashing? Racism, American cultural imperialism and Australian popular images of Asia

Review and consideration of the implications of the Australian response to the film 'Rising Sun'

A soldier’s perspective on serving in Iraq and Afghanistan

This chapter examines the Australian soldiers’ experience of military service in the war on terror in the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Soldiers traverse unsettled barriers and zones of expectation between war and peace, and cross different zones of experience. The zones of experience are explored through the description of a typical military deployment in the Middle East. The experience of a national culture and family memories can have an impact on the contemporary soldiers’ experience, and this is discussed with reference to the significance of commemorative days such as the Australian tradition of Anzac Day, which serves to provide support for the military veteran and their family. There is a particular focus on experience of the part-time army reservist experience of transitioning from full-time military duty in a war zone, to the different demands of the civilian employment in peacetime

The people next door: understanding Indonesia [Book review]

While our engagement with Asia is not viewed in the same light that it once was, Asia is still of immense importance to Australia, and of all the states that make up the (possibly non existent but often debated) construct that is Asia, Indonesia is, for a variety of reasons, extremely important. The People Next Door consists of former award winning journalist Duncan Graham's personal experiences of, and observations in Indonesia. These are a study of the evolving relationship between two very close and two very different neighbours, moving from analysis of Javanese spirit worship and religion to the Indonesian predilection for zany uniforms. Graham's fondness for, and familiarity with the East Javanese city of Surabaya is clearly apparent and his warm descriptions of a region he is deeply attached to is especially effective

Disarming proposals: controlling nuclear, biological and chemical weapons by Andy Butfoy [Book review]

Review of Andrew Butfoy, Disarming Proposals: Controlling Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Weapons. Apart from the centrality of terrorism and the 2003 Iraq War (not to mention the question of North Korea), disarmament is of great interest to the wider community as well as practitioners of strategic studies and international relations. Butfoy provides a survey of the three types of weapons, nuclear, biological and chemical, enumerating the basic differences between them. The easy availability of biological compounds such as anthrax is balanced against the difficulty in successfully disseminating them as weapons, and the author makes his concerns with misinformation on this issue evident. Indeed, the vagaries of United States policy towards WMD are covered in their own chapter in which the conditions of American exceptionalism are outlined. His assessment gives the United States a mixed score card, with much criticism but some clear praise

Entertaining Australian troops at war in Afghanistan and Iraq

This article examines the Australian Defence Force concert tours during the War on Terror in the Middle East area of operations. From 2001 members of the Australian Defence Force were deployed to the Middle East for service in Afghanistan and later in Iraq. Following the tradition established in earlier conflicts both by Australian and American performers, Australian artists entertained troops in a series of live concert performances. Despite the prevalence of alternatives such as easily accessible online forms of entertainment and DVDs, the practice of military concert tour entertainment has survived and appears to show little sign of redundancy. For the troops, the experience could provide a break from routine, stress, and boredom, as well as the opportunity to reconnect with the world they had left behind. However, these tours were far more significant for the civilian entertainers. Performing in the Middle East could be an exhilarating and in some cases a life changing event. Apart from being physically dangerous, participation could potentially harm or enhance an entertainer's reputation at home due to the highly politicised responses to the conflict. Most significantly, touring entertainers briefly experienced something unfamiliar to most people in contemporary developed societies—the experience of being in a war

Unfamiliar allies: Australian cross-cultural communication in Afghanistan and Iraq during the war on terror

This chapter explores the social history of Australian military communication with their United States and Dutch allies in Afghanistan and Iraq. In spite of a long history of military association with the United States, challenges emerged both from the management of American expectations and from everyday Australian interactions in an ultra-patriotic American military culture. As subordinate partner Australians understood American military language and communication, frequently adopting lexical aspects of the American military, but despite some differences cross-cultural communication problems were overcome. Australians in Afghanistan worked with the Dutch, a relatively unfamiliar ally with no recent history of shared military cooperation. The open and progressive social culture of the Netherlands was reflected in aspects of Netherlands military communication and practice, and it became apparent that Dutch liberal social values and consensus based military culture differed from Australian military expectations. Despite military cooperation in war and the high levels of English spoken by talented Dutch soldiers, a degree of distance remained between the Dutch and Australian military. Understanding the ways in which ordinary members of the military understand cross-cultural communication with allies will do much to advance understanding and shape future experience

Small x Resummation with Quarks: Deep-Inelastic Scattering

We extend our previous results on small-x resummation in the pure Yang--Mills theory to full QCD with nf quark flavours, with a resummed two-by-two matrix of resummed quark and gluon splitting functions. We also construct the corresponding deep-inelastic coefficient functions, and show how these can be combined with parton densities to give fully resummed deep-inelastic structure functions F_2 and F_L at the next-to-leading logarithmic level. We discuss how this resummation can be performed in different factorization schemes, including the commonly used MSbar scheme. We study the importance of the resummation effects by comparison with fixed-order perturbative results, and we discuss the corresponding renormalization and factorization scale variation uncertainties. We find that for x below 0.01 the resummation effects are comparable in size to the fixed order NNLO corrections, but differ in shape. We finally discuss the phenomenological impact of the small-x resummation, specifically in the extraction of parton distribution from present day experiments and their extrapolation to the kinematics relevant for future colliders such as the LHCComment: 45 pages, 16 figures, plain TeX with harvma

A first unbiased global NLO determination of parton distributions and their uncertainties

We present a determination of the parton distributions of the nucleon from a global set of hard scattering data using the NNPDF methodology: NNPDF2.0. Experimental data include deep-inelastic scattering with the combined HERA-I dataset, fixed target Drell-Yan production, collider weak boson production and inclusive jet production. Next-to-leading order QCD is used throughout without resorting to K-factors. We present and utilize an improved fast algorithm for the solution of evolution equations and the computation of general hadronic processes. We introduce improved techniques for the training of the neural networks which are used as parton parametrization, and we use a novel approach for the proper treatment of normalization uncertainties. We assess quantitatively the impact of individual datasets on PDFs. We find very good consistency of all datasets with each other and with NLO QCD, with no evidence of tension between datasets. Some PDF combinations relevant for LHC observables turn out to be determined rather more accurately than in any other parton fit.Comment: 86 pages, 41 figures. PDF sets available from http://sophia.ecm.ub.es/nnpdf/nnpdf_pdfsets.htm and from LHAPDF. Final version to be published in Nucl. Phys. B. Various typos corrected and small clarifications added, fig. 4 added, extended discussion of data consistency especially in sect 5.1 and 5.

Determination of the Bjorken Sum and Strong Coupling from Polarized Structure Functions

We present a NLO perturbative analysis of all available data on the polarized structure function g_1(x,Q^2) with the aim of making a quantitative test of the validity of the Bjorken sum rule, of measuring \alpha_s, and of deriving helicity fractions. We take particular care over the small x extrapolation, since it is now known that Regge behaviour is unreliable at perturbative scales. For fixed \alpha_s we find that if all the most recent data are included g_A=1.18\pm0.09, confirming the Bjorken sum rule at the 8% level. We further show that the value of \alpha_s is now reasonably well constrained by scaling violations in the structure function data, despite the fact that it cannot yet be reliably fixed by the value of the Bjorken sum: our final result is \alpha_s(m_Z) = 0.120+0.010-0.008. We also confirm earlier indications of a sizeable positive gluon polarization in the nucleon.Comment: 24 pages, 9 figures, plain LaTeX with epsfig. Final version, to be published in Nucl. Phys. B. Several typos correcte