Entanglement and the modern Australian rhythm method: Lantana's lessons in policing sexuality and gender

Film in Australia, as with many other nations, is often seen as an important cultural medium where national stories about belonging and identity can be (re)produced in pleasurable and, at times, complicated ways. One such film is Ray Lawrence’s Lantana. Although striking a chord in Australia as a good film about ‘ basically good people’, people that rang ‘brilliantly’ true (Lantana DVD 2002), this paper argues that, at the same time as it produces a fantasy of a ‘good’ Australia, the film also conducts a regulation of what constitutes Australianness. In many ways the imaginary of Australia offered in this film, to its contemporary, urban, professional and intellectual elite audience, still draws on and (re)produces a vision of an Australian community that uses the same narrative frameworks of protection and control as the cruder discourses of ‘white Australia’ offered to an earlier generation of cinema-goers. This film’s central motif of the lantana bush, the out of control weed, that is known as both foreign and local is here emblematic of tensions about belonging, place and otherness. Yet while, within the film’s knowingly reflexive purview any remaining potential for racism is understood and itself under control – we know how to be good mutliculturalists –it is the trope of sexuality in Lantana that provides the real sense of edginess and anxiety about belonging. It is in this arena that the film sets up an idea of danger and –less self-consciously, and in the end more aggressively – marks out who is and who is not part of the community. In this context the motif of lantana signals an ambivalence about difference and the exotic. Lantana is both desirable because of the difference in its attractive Latin looks and repulsive or feared because of other qualities inherent within its difference: a refusal to behave and a propensity to get out-of control, spread and potentially take over. The film here explores desire for a taste of the other (a gay man, a newly separated woman, a Latin dance teacher). However, these fantasies are in the end emphatically shut down as the film ends by producing a vision of subtly normalised hetero, mono, familial (though not necessarily happy) forms of desiring, loving and reproducing in contemporary Australia

A Neural Model of Visually Guided Steering, Obstacle Avoidance, and Route Selection

A neural model is developed to explain how humans can approach a goal object on foot while steering around obstacles to avoid collisions in a cluttered environment. The model uses optic flow from a 3D virtual reality environment to determine the position of objects based on motion discotinuities, and computes heading direction, or the direction of self-motion, from global optic flow. The cortical representation of heading interacts with the representations of a goal and obstacles such that the goal acts as an attractor of heading, while obstacles act as repellers. In addition the model maintains fixation on the goal object by generating smooth pursuit eye movements. Eye rotations can distort the optic flow field, complicating heading perception, and the model uses extraretinal signals to correct for this distortion and accurately represent heading. The model explains how motion processing mechanisms in cortical areas MT, MST, and VIP can be used to guide steering. The model quantitatively simulates human psychophysical data about visually-guided steering, obstacle avoidance, and route selection.Air Force Office of Scientific Research (F4960-01-1-0397); National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NMA201-01-1-2016); National Science Foundation (NSF SBE-0354378); Office of Naval Research (N00014-01-1-0624

Morphological instability, evolution, and scaling in strained epitaxial films: An amplitude equation analysis of the phase field crystal model

Morphological properties of strained epitaxial films are examined through a mesoscopic approach developed to incorporate both the film crystalline structure and standard continuum theory. Film surface profiles and properties, such as surface energy, liquid-solid miscibility gap and interface thickness, are determined as a function of misfit strains and film elastic modulus. We analyze the stress-driven instability of film surface morphology that leads to the formation of strained islands. We find a universal scaling relationship between the island size and misfit strain which shows a crossover from the well-known continuum elasticity result at the weak strain to a behavior governed by a "perfect" lattice relaxation condition. The strain at which the crossover occurs is shown to be a function of liquid-solid interfacial thickness, and an asymmetry between tensile and compressive strains is observed. The film instability is found to be accompanied by mode coupling of the complex amplitudes of the surface morphological profile, a factor associated with the crystalline nature of the strained film but absent in conventional continuum theory.Comment: 16 pages, 10 figures; to be published in Phys. Rev.

A Neural Model of Visually Guided Steering, Obstacle Avoidance, and Route Selection

A neural model is developed to explain how humans can approach a goal object on foot while steering around obstacles to avoid collisions in a cluttered environment. The model uses optic flow from a 3D virtual reality environment to determine the position of objects based on motion discontinuities, and computes heading direction, or the direction of self-motion, from global optic flow. The cortical representation of heading interacts with the representations of a goal and obstacles such that the goal acts as an attractor of heading, while obstacles act as repellers. In addition the model maintains fixation on the goal object by generating smooth pursuit eye movements. Eye rotations can distort the optic flow field, complicating heading perception, and the model uses extraretinal signals to correct for this distortion and accurately represent heading. The model explains how motion processing mechanisms in cortical areas MT, MST, and posterior parietal cortex can be used to guide steering. The model quantitatively simulates human psychophysical data about visually-guided steering, obstacle avoidance, and route selection.Air Force Office of Scientific Research (F4960-01-1-0397); National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NMA201-01-1-2016); National Science Foundation (SBE-0354378); Office of Naval Research (N00014-01-1-0624

Does correction for guessing reduce students' performance on multiple-choice examinations? Yes? No? Sometimes?

Multiple-choice (MC) examinations are becoming increasingly popular in higher education because they can be used effectively to assess breadth of knowledge in large cohorts of students. This present research investigated Psychology students' performance on, and experiences of, MC examinations with and without correction for guessing. In Study 1, data were collected from two cohorts of students across three Psychology MC examinations. The results revealed that students scored higher, and left fewer questions unanswered, when there was no correction for guessing. Furthermore, when the correction for guessing was removed from the theory MC examination, students who were told there was no correction for guessing did better than those told there was a correction. In addition, there was limited evidence of gender differences, with female students performing significantly better on one MC examination than males. In Study 2, a further set of first-year Psychology students reported their experiences of correction for guessing on open-book and closed-book MC examinations. Students reported feeling less anxious and more confident on the open-book MC examination. The findings of both of these studies have implications for instructors deciding whether or not correction for guessing is appropriate, and for the advice to be given to students preparing for MC examinations

Phase field crystal dynamics for binary systems: Derivation from dynamical density functional theory, amplitude equation formalism, and applications to alloy heterostructures

The dynamics of phase field crystal (PFC) modeling is derived from dynamical density functional theory (DDFT), for both single-component and binary systems. The derivation is based on a truncation up to the three-point direct correlation functions in DDFT, and the lowest order approximation using scale analysis. The complete amplitude equation formalism for binary PFC is developed to describe the coupled dynamics of slowly varying complex amplitudes of structural profile, zeroth-mode average atomic density, and system concentration field. Effects of noise (corresponding to stochastic amplitude equations) and species-dependent atomic mobilities are also incorporated in this formalism. Results of a sample application to the study of surface segregation and interface intermixing in alloy heterostructures and strained layer growth are presented, showing the effects of different atomic sizes and mobilities of alloy components. A phenomenon of composition overshooting at the interface is found, which can be connected to the surface segregation and enrichment of one of the atomic components observed in recent experiments of alloying heterostructures.Comment: 26 pages, 5 figures; submitted to Phys. Rev.

Patterns theory and geodesic automatic structure for a class of groups

We introduce a theory of "patterns" in order to study geodesics in a certain class of group presentations. Using patterns we show that there does not exist a geodesic automatic structure for certain group presentations, and that certain group presentations are almost convex.Comment: Appeared in 2003. I am putting all my past papers on arxi

A short introduction to self-similar groups

Self-similar groups are a fascinating area of current research. Here we give a short, and hopefully accessible, introduction to them

Comment on: `Pipe Network Model for Scaling of Dynamic Interfaces in Porous Media'

We argue that a proposed exponent identity [Phys. Rev. Lett 85, 1238 (2000)] for interface roughening in spontaneous imbibition is wrong. It rests on the assumption that the fluctuations are controlled by a single time scale, but liquid conservation imposes two distinct time scales.Comment: 1 page, to appear in Phys. Rev. Let