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

Canonical and Microcanonical Distributions for Fermi Systems

Recursion relations are presented that allow exact calculation of canonical and microcanonical partition functions of degenerate Fermi systems, assuming no explicit two-body interactions. Calculations of the level density, sorted by angular momentum, are presented for Ni-56 are presented. The issue of treating unbound states is also addressed.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure

N terminus is key to the dominant negative suppression of CaV2 calcium channels: implications for episodic ataxia type 2

Expression of the calcium channels CaV2.1 and CaV2.2 is markedly suppressed by co-expression with truncated constructs containing Domain I. This is the basis for the phenomenon of dominant negative suppression observed for many of the episodic ataxia type 2 mutations in CaV2.1 that predict truncated channels. The process of dominant negative suppression has been shown previously to stem from interaction between the full-length and truncated channels and to result in downstream consequences of the unfolded protein response and endoplasmic reticulum-associated protein degradation. We have now identified the specific domain that triggers this effect. For both CaV2.1 and CaV2.2, the minimum construct producing suppression was the cytoplasmic N terminus. Suppression was enhanced by tethering the N terminus to the membrane with a CAAX motif. The 11-amino acid motif (including Arg52 and Arg54) within the N terminus, which we have previously shown to be required for G protein modulation, is also essential for dominant negative suppression. Suppression is prevented by addition of an N-terminal tag (XFP) to the full-length and truncated constructs. We further show that suppression of CaV2.2 currents by the N terminus-CAAX construct is accompanied by a reduction in CaV2.2 protein level, and this is also prevented by mutation of Arg52 and Arg54 to Ala in the truncated construct. Taken together, our evidence indicates that both the extreme N terminus and the Arg52, Arg54 motif are involved in the processes underlying dominant negative suppression

Isospin Fluctuations from a Thermally Equilibrated Hadron Gas

Partition functions, multiplicity distributions, and isospin fluctuations are calculated for canonical ensembles in which additive quantum numbers as well as total isospin are strictly conserved. When properly accounting for Bose-Einstein symmetrization, the multiplicity distributions of neutral pions in a pion gas are significantly broader as compared to the non-degenerate case. Inclusion of resonances compensates for this broadening effect. Recursion relations are derived which allow calculation of exact results with modest computer time.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure

Digital Availability of Product Information for Collaborative Engineering of Spacecraft

In this paper, we introduce a system to collect product information from manufacturers and make it available in tools that are used for concurrent design of spacecraft. The planning of a spacecraft needs experts from different disciplines, like propulsion, power, and thermal. Since these different disciplines rely on each other there is a high need for communication between them, which is often realized by a Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) process and corresponding tools. We show by comparison that the product information provided by manufacturers often does not match the information needed by MBSE tools on a syntactic or semantic level. The information from manufacturers is also currently not available in machine-readable formats. Afterwards, we present a prototype of a system that makes product information from manufacturers directly available in MBSE tools, in a machine-readable way.Comment: accepted at CDVE201

The Quark-Gluon Plasma in a Finite Volume

The statistical mechanics of quarks and gluons are investigated within the context of the canonical ensemble. Recursive techniques are developed which enforce the exact conservation of baryon number, total isospin, electric charge, strangeness, and color. Bose and Fermi-Dirac statistics are also accounted for to all orders. The energy, entropy and particle number densities are shown to be significantly reduced for volumes less than 5 cubic fm.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure

Transform processing and coding of images Final report

Transform processing and image codin

Advanced analog television study final report, 4 nov. - 19 dec. 1963

Information bandwidth reduction for analog television signals - Description of multiple interlace syste

Structural tailoring of engine blades (STAEBL)

A mathematical optimization procedure was developed for the structural tailoring of engine blades and was used to structurally tailor two engine fan blades constructed of composite materials without midspan shrouds. The first was a solid blade made from superhybrid composites, and the second was a hollow blade with metal matrix composite inlays. Three major computerized functions were needed to complete the procedure: approximate analysis with the established input variables, optimization of an objective function, and refined analysis for design verification

Probable Gravitational Microlensing towards the Galatic Bulge

The MACHO project carries out regular photometric monitoring of millions of stars in the Magellanic Clouds and Galactic Bulge, to search for very rare gravitational microlensing events due to compact objects in the galactic halo and disk. A preliminary analysis of one field in the Galactic Bulge, containing {$\sim430,000$} stars observed for 190 days, reveals four stars which show clear evidence for brightenings which are time-symmetric, achromatic in our two passbands, and have shapes consistent with gravitational microlensing. This is significantly higher than the $\sim 1$ event expected from microlensing by known stars in the disk. If all four events are due to microlensing, a 95\% confidence lower limit on the optical depth towards our bulge field is $1.3 \times 10^{-6}$, and a ``best fit" value is $\tau \approx 1.6 \times 10^{-6}/\epsilon$,where $\epsilon$ is the detection efficiency of the experiment, and $\epsilon < 0.4$. If the true optical depth is close to the ``best fit" value, possible explanations include a ``maximal" disk which accounts for most of the galactic circular velocity at the solar radius, a halo which is centrally concentrated, or bulge-bulge microlensing.Comment: submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters, 10 pages text as uuencoded compressed PostScript, 5 figures and paper also available via anonymous ftp from merlin.anu.edu.au in /pub/kcf/mach