Engaging educated islands: an examination of the collaborative process of creating the 2009 Venice Biennale art education resource for Australian school students

This paper describes the process of creating an electronic national art education resource based on the 2009 Venice Biennale for K-12 students throughout Australia. Australian artists have been consistently represented for over thirty years at the Venice Biennale with the support of the Australia Council, the Australian Government's premier art and advisory body. The collaborative process of creating the national art education resource is based on Community Cultural Development (CCD) practices advocated by the Australia Council. This process has brought together a range of people from the field of art education under the CCD guiding principles of: self-determination, sustainability, access, diversity and cultural democracy. This paper will describe the journey of three researchers involved in the process of creating the resource and how they experienced and engaged with the guiding principles of community cultural development. In addition it will examine the aims of this resource in providing young people with electronic access to a diverse range of Australian artists and their practices and in the process creating a site for critical and reflective engagement concerning a range of contemporary issues such as increased awareness of environmental issues

Carbonisation of biomass-derived chars and the thermal reduction of a graphene oxide sample studied using Raman spectroscopy

Chars and carbonised chars were produced from three different oxygen-rich precursors (Pinus radiata wood, Phormium tenax leaf fibres, and sucrose crystals). These non-graphitisable carbons were analysed with Raman spectroscopy in order to study the nanostructural development which occurs with increasingly severe heat treatments up to approximately 1000 °C. The thermal reduction of a graphene oxide sample was similarly studied, as this is considered to involve the development of nanometre-scale graphene-like domains within a different oxygen-rich precursor. Increasing the heat treatment temperatures used in the charring and carbonisation processes, led to significant changes in a number of parameters measured in the Raman spectra. Correlations based on these parameter changes could have future applications in evaluating various char samples and estimating the heat treatment temperatures employed during their manufacture. After production heat treatment temperatures exceeded 700 °C, the Raman spectra of the carbonised chars appeared to be largely precursor independent. The spectra of these carbonised chars were similar to the spectra obtained from thermally-reduced graphene oxides, especially when compared to a wide range of other carbonaceous materials analysed using this particular methodology. Partial reduction of a graphene oxide sample due to reasonably mild laser exposures during Raman analysis was also observed

BREEDING BIRD UTILIZATION OF SHELTERWOOD-CUT OAK STANDS IN BUCKINGHAM COUNTY, VIRGINIA

Breeding bird populations on three shelterwood cut oak stands in Buckingham County, Virginia were studied using Breeding Bird Census (BBC) techniques. The stands were cut partly or entirely during the year prior to the 1997 breeding season, when the BBCs were conducted. The plots were established as part of a study of oak regeneration following controlled bums in the Virginia piedmont. Canopy cover on the plots averaged 66.8% after the cuts and total basal area averaged 41915 cm2/acre. At least 23 species of birds had territories partly or entirely on at least one of the plots, and at least nine species bred on all three plots. Of these nine, all but one were birds characteristic of forest habitats. This supports the.idea that forest species will continue to breed on shelterwood cuts similar to those studied, at least for the first year after cuts are made, though perhaps at lower densities than in uncut hardwood forests. Birds of open habitats were not very common in the BBC plots studied

Studying carbonisation with raman spectroscopy

Raman spectroscopy can provide fast and non-destructive analysis of carbonaceous materials. As it is able to detect nanometre-sized structural features, Raman spectroscopy is widely used in the study of carbon nanotubes, fullerenes, graphenes, and many other carbon-rich materials. Raman analysis has previously shown potential for estimating the heat treatment temperatures (HTT) employed in the preparation of Japanese cedar charcoals which suggested future usefulness in quality control . In the current work, Raman spectroscopy was used to investigate the nanostructural development which had occurred within various chars prepared and carbonised at a range of heat treatment temperatures between ≈ 340°C and 1000°C. Chars were produced from sucrose sugar as standard precursor of high purity and two sources of biomass common in New Zealand (Radiata pine wood and Harakeke leaf fibres). In chars produced at lower HTTs, signals could be detected which were interpreted as representing hydrogen-rich amorphous carbon structures. In contrast, the Raman spectra of well-carbonised chars produced at higher HTTs featured signals consistent with graphene-like structures with coherent domains limited in size to below a few nanometres across. Measurement of such signals provides the ability to evaluate the extent of nanostructural development, identify char samples which are ‘undercooked’ when compared to other char samples, and estimate effective HTTs used in the production of a given char sample. More detailed Raman analysis of Radiata-derived chars was carried out, including analysis of chars produced from carbonising pyrolysis tars. Results of Raman analysis were correlated to H/C atom ratios obtained through elemental analysis for these chars produced from Radiata pine

Minimally Parametric Power Spectrum Reconstruction from the Lyman-alpha Forest

Current results from the Lyman alpha forest assume that the primordial power spectrum of density perturbations follows a simple power law form, with running. We present the first analysis of Lyman alpha data to study the effect of relaxing this strong assumption on primordial and astrophysical constraints. We perform a large suite of numerical simulations, using them to calibrate a minimally parametric framework for describing the power spectrum. Combined with cross-validation, a statistical technique which prevents over-fitting of the data, this framework allows us to reconstruct the power spectrum shape without strong prior assumptions. We find no evidence for deviation from scale-invariance; our analysis also shows that current Lyman alpha data do not have sufficient statistical power to robustly probe the shape of the power spectrum at these scales. In contrast, the ongoing Baryon Oscillation Sky Survey (BOSS) will be able to do so with high precision. Furthermore, this near-future data will be able to break degeneracies between the power spectrum shape and astrophysical parameters.Comment: 11 pages plus appendices, 8 figures. v2: matches version published in MNRAS. Some clarifications to discussion and exposition, updated reference

Bias, redshift space distortions and primordial nongaussianity of nonlinear transformations: application to Lyman alpha forest

On large scales a nonlinear transformation of matter density field can be viewed as a biased tracer of the density field itself. A nonlinear transformation also modifies the redshift space distortions in the same limit, giving rise to a velocity bias. In models with primordial nongaussianity a nonlinear transformation generates a scale dependent bias on large scales. We derive analytic expressions for these for a general nonlinear transformation. These biases can be expressed entirely in terms of the one point distribution function (PDF) of the final field and the parameters of the transformation. Our analysis allows one to devise nonlinear transformations with nearly arbitrary bias properties, which can be used to increase the signal in the large scale clustering limit. We apply the results to the ionizing equilibrium model of Lyman-alpha forest, in which Lyman-alpha flux F is related to the density perturbation delta via a nonlinear transformation. Velocity bias can be expressed as an average over the Lyman-alpha flux PDF. At z=2.4 we predict the velocity bias of -0.1, compared to the observed value of -0.13 +/- 0.03. Bias and primordial nongaussianity bias depend on the parameters of the transformation. Measurements of bias can thus be used to constrain these parameters, and for reasonable values of the ionizing background intensity we can match the predictions to observations. Matching to the observed values we predict the ratio of primordial nongaussianity bias to bias to have the opposite sign and lower magnitude than the corresponding values for the highly biased galaxies, but this depends on the model parameters and can also vanish or change the sign.Comment: 18 pages, 1 figur