Number of adaptive steps to a local fitness peak

We consider a population of genotype sequences evolving on a rugged fitness landscape with many local fitness peaks. The population walks uphill until it encounters a local fitness maximum. We find that the statistical properties of the walk length depend on whether the underlying fitness distribution has a finite mean. If the mean is finite, all the walk length cumulants grow with the sequence length but approach a constant otherwise. Experimental implications of our analytical results are also discussed

News of the Day: Open Schoolhouses Building the Future of New South Wales, 1880-1896

It is claimed that 'architectural history is the stepping stone into various ways of interpreting and understanding the past' because of its broad, inter-disciplinary nature. A relationship exists between architecture, economics and the social functioning of human society. Old buildings are relics of an epoch, reflecting the ethos of the society that built and used them. Thus the modest school buildings designed by William Edmund Kemp, New South Wales Architect for Public Schools between 1880-1896, represent the achievement of the introduction of public education and are expressions of the hopes and aspirations of the Colony of New South Wales in the final decades of the Nineteenth Century. The challenge for anyone attempting to construe the history and significance of Kemps vast oeuvre of school buildings is to overcome the very limited evidentiary field on which an historical analysis might rest. This paper draws upon primary material found in the newspaper reports of 72 schoolhouse openings. It examines the discourse of the policy-makersthe politicians, community leaders and newspaper editors of the dayto reveal the intersections between public issues and personal views and uncover the ideological function of Kemps schools. The schoolhouse, around which the ceremony revolved, provided a venue for civic engagement, symbolised progress, generated pride and exposed people to the broader interests of the state. The schoolrooms were to mould future citizens with the moral virtues and literacy necessary to advance the nation-Colony. Kemps school buildings were an outcome of societal aspirations and, in turn, played an active role in shaping the social and political progress of New South Wales

'The old bark school is gone ... There's a brick school on the flat': Reflections on the Fitness for Purpose of William E. Kemp's School Buildings

This paper considers the fitness for purpose of the school buildings designed by William E. Kemp (1880-1896). It discusses the influence of their built form on the teaching, learning and activities that took place within them and the symbolic role of the buildings in representing political objectives, social values and economic progress. In addition to the obvious functional requirement of facilitating a system for the education and moulding of a generation of children, the buildings also gave physical form to the culture of the colony of New South Wales in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Their ubiquity, civic prominence and role in social reform in a time of rapid change mark them as culturally significant. The surviving primary evidence provided by Kemp is limited and does not extend to his thoughts about the ideological function of his schools. Thus theresearch supporting this paper has attempted to gain insights by examining other material from the era. This has involved searching for the scarce recorded experiences of those inhabiting the schoolrooms - the pupils (and their parents), the teachers and the district inspectors - hidden amongst the pages of school histories, archived school files, miscellaneous photographs and newspaper reports. These recorded experiences have been placed in the context of the dominant ideologies pertaining to education in the colony in the late nineteenth century: Britishness, colonial progress, patriotism, discipline and public hygiene. They have been evaluated alongside reports commissioned by the NSW Government on public education - one in 1880, looking towards the future on the eve of the Public Instruction Act, and the other in 1903, looking backwards after Kemp's retirement

Women Exhibitors at the First Australian International Exhibitions

In 1879 the British colony of New South Wales hosted the first international exhibition in the Southern Hemisphere. Never before had an international exhibition been held so far from the cultural and commercial centres of Europe. Exhibits and visitors from all the great nations of the world made the daunting sea journey to the remote and little-known colony that, less than forty years before, had been the destination mainly of convicts and their keepers. The Sydney International Exhibition was immediately followed by the Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880 in the neighbouring colony of Victoria, approximately six hundred miles to the south. The success of these exhibitions inspired the Melbourne Centennial International Exhibition, held in 1888 to celebrate one hundred years of white settlement in Australia. All 3 exhibitions were magnificent events to which almost everyone was welcome. These were events where visitors surveyed the greatest achievements of the age and participated enthusiastically in the festivities, the pomp and the ceremony. This article examines new empirical data on the participation of colonial women as exhibitors at the Australian international exhibitions and the nature and extent of the items they exhibited. It compares the participation rate with data compiled by Paul Greenhalgh for the Paris Expositions Universelles (1855, 1867, 1878, 1889, 1900) and reveals that women in the Australian colonies participated as exhibitors at a significantly higher rate than their European and American sisters. Colonial women were living in settler societies, striving to maintain a spirit of Englishness and subscribing to the ideology of middle class gentility, with its principle of distinct gendered spheres of work, that was a common feature of the English-speaking middle classes throughout the British Empire. In this context, and supported by their previous experiences at intercolonial exhibitions, they were motivated to participate as exhibitors by a desire to take part in public life, to be recognised for their contributions to colonial progress and to promote women's work. The article garners specific examples of exhibited items from the exhibition catalogues to provide an insight into the nature and extent of women's contributions. Although the Australian international exhibitions primarily exposed colonial women to gendered views of productive work, they also provided independent and collective experiences that assisted women in the following decade to engage in social and political roles outside the home. There is an intriguing correspondence between the high participation rate of colonial women at the exhibitions and the fact that Australian women were among the first to achieve female suffrage

Empire, Education and Nationalism: The School Architecture of William Edmund Kemp, 1880-1896

Fundamental to an examination of the school architecture of William Edmund Kemp (1831-1898) is an understanding of the man and the culture of the colonial society that shaped him. During his lifetime there was a changing imperial relationship between New South Wales and Britain, the introduction of self-government (1855) and a movement towards nationhood. As the nineteenth century progressed, the theories of empire and nation building that dominated the British worldview were modified by emerging ideas of colonial difference. There was a general recognition that British people living in the Australian environment had been changed and had developed their own distinctive character. The growing independence of the colony accelerated the development of education, culminating in the New South Wales Public Instruction Act of 1880. Kempâs position as Architect for Public Schools was established at this time â a position he occupied for sixteen years (1880-1896) during which he designed hundreds of new schools for the colony. In a previous article, I have documented the design of Kempâs school buildings within the context of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century standards of school design and the British-Australian system of pupil-teacher primary education. Here I also demonstrated that the style adopted by Kemp for his schools was derived from the Italianate style. The purpose of this article is a largely biographical one: to trace Kempâs development as a leading Sydney architect in conjunction with changing ideologies and practices in colonial society and architecture. Faced with the challenge of devising a new typology of school building to accommodate the introduction of free, compulsory and secular elementary education, Kemp was keenly aware that his schools should also express their purpose as symbols of colonial progress and civilisation

THINKING BEYOND THE SQUARE: INNOVATION THEORY AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER AS THEY APPLY TO THE BEIJING WATER CUBE

The Water Cube National Swimming Centre designed for the 2008 Beijing Olympics has been hailed as a highly innovative post-millennial sports facility. Conceptually, its architecture is a cube, carved from a random, organic and homogeneous cluster of foam bubbles. Structurally, it is a mathematically rigorous steel space frame, primarily of pentagonal and hexagonal cells. Materially, it is clad inside and out with ethylene-tetra-fluoro-ethylene (ETFE) cushions whose translucent skin captures and translates water’s natural transient and organic properties to a new context that is ancient, landlocked and manmade. The winning design consortium comprised the Australian architectural firm PTW, Arup (Australia) and China State Construction Engineering Corporation – Shenzhen Design Institute. This paper examines the success of the consortium in the light of innovation theory: it considers the drivers behind the collaborative effort, the structure and characteristics of the design team, and the role of technology transfer in the innovation process. Research shows that innovation in the construction industry is linked to a demand for radically new types of buildings and structures. The Beijing Games have provided such a demand as its purpose-built facilities strive to couple challenging programmatic requirements with cultural aspirations. The Water Cube is a unique coalescence of Chinese cultural traditions, favouring axial arrangements and rectilinearity in the built environment, with current Western trends towards asymmetric organic forms and structures derived from nature. It has been achieved by the transfer of digital technology to architecture and engineering and by the application of an emergent building material, ETFE. The dynamics of the teamwork approach to design provided rich multi-cultural perspectives and diverse technological know-how that allowed for technology transfer and innovation to take place

Nonlinear optical response in doped conjugated polymers

Exciton effects on conjugated polymers are investigated in soliton lattice states. We use the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model with long-range Coulomb interactions. The Hartree-Fock (HF) approximation and the single-excitation configuration- interaction (single-CI) method are used to obtain optical absorption spectra. The third-harmonic generation (THG) at off-resonant frequencies is calculated as functions of the soliton concentration and the chain length of the polymer. The magnitude of the THG at the 10 percent doping increases by the factor about 10^2 from that of the neutral system. This is owing to the accumulation of the oscillator strengths at the lowest exciton with increasing the soliton concentration. The increase by the order two is common for several choices of Coulomb interaction strengths.Comment: Accepted for publication in J. Phys.: Condens. Matte