Commercialisation of precision agriculture technologies in the macadamia industry

A prototype vision-based yield monitor has been developed for the macadamia industry. The system estimates yield for individual trees by detecting nuts and their harvested location. The technology was developed by the National Centre for Engineering in Agriculture, University of Southern Queensland for the purpose of reducing labour and costs in varietal assessment trials where yield for individual trees are required to be measured to indicate tree performance. The project was commissioned by Horticulture Australia Limited

Nathan Roscoe Pound and the Nazis

When Roscoe Pound, Dean of Harvard Law School, accepted an honorary degree from a leading German university in 1934, it was interpreted as a gesture of support for the Nazi Party. Was this a naïve misstep, or something more sinister? This Article addresses that question. It highlights previously unknown encounters between Pound and senior Nazi figures at the time, and an unusual relationship between Pound and a suspected Nazi agent that lasted throughout the Second World War, and beyond. These revelations necessarily bring into question Pound’s personal ethics and his professional responsibilities as a lawyer

The nomos of citizenship: migrant rights, law and the possibility of justice

Superficially, citizenship appears relatively simple: a legal status denoting political membership. However, critical citizenship studies scholars suggest that citizenship is first and foremost a political practice. When non-citizens, such as irregularised migrants, constitute themselves as citizens through their actions, irrespective of legal status, these practices of citizenship have transformational potential because they are extra-legal. Yet, there is an ambivalence here: rights-claiming migrants tend to frame their key demands within the terms of the law often by calling for the regularisation of their status. This article addresses this ambivalence by adopting a ‘deconstructive method’ to investigate the legal dimensions of citizenship as sites of theoretical and political intervention. It is argued that practices of rights-claiming by irregularised migrants are important to grasp because they mobilise the paradoxes inherent to the fact that universal rights are enshrined in the constitutional texts of modern citizenship in order to generate new legal meanings and horizons of justice. This hypothesis is explored through a series of illustrative examples of rights-claiming taking place within and beyond the formal confines of legal orders. In so doing, the article sets out a novel conceptual framework for analysing how migrants’ claims to justice strategically negotiate citizenship in its legal form

Shocked by GRB 970228: the afterglow of a cosmological fireball

The location accuracy of the BeppoSAX Wide Field Cameras and acute ground-based followup have led to the detection of a decaying afterglow in X rays and optical light following the classical gamma-ray burst GRB 970228. The afterglow in X rays and optical light fades as a power law at all wavelengths. This behaviour was predicted for a relativistic blast wave that radiates its energy when it decelerates by ploughing into the surrounding medium. Because the afterglow has continued with unchanged behaviour for more than a month, its total energy must be of order 10**51 erg, placing it firmly at a redshift of order 1. Further tests of the model are discussed, some of which can be done with available data, and implications for future observing strategies are pointed out. We discuss how the afterglow can provide a probe for the nature of the burst sources.Comment: 6 pages LaTeX, 1 postscript figure; minor edits, slightly more data on light curve, MNRAS, IN PRESS (mid June/early July

Citizenship as Method: A post-foundational approach to the problem of rightlessness

This thesis addresses the aporetic relationship between universal rights and citizenship by proposing a new framework for analysis: citizenship as method. The problem is that, despite being universal, rights are only granted to those belonging to particular political communities (citizenship), meaning that in a contemporary context many irregular migrants with an insecure legal and political status experience forms of rightlessness. Citizenship as method addresses rightlessness by rethinking citizenship. It navigates between two poles: accounts of citizenship that are over-determined by its legal and institutional form and contemporary critical citizenship studies which fail to explain how radical practices of citizenship encounter and transform institutions. Citizenship as method is a deconstructive approach to citizenship that utilises contemporary post-foundational political theory to rethink the relationship between citizenship and universal rights in non-oppositional terms. Because citizenship makes rights possible and these same rights call it into question then: a) there can be no rigid opposition between universal rights and citizenship; b) citizenship is structured by a constitutive aporia; c) this aporia can be mobilised by a political practice of rights-claiming through which citizenship is displaced according to its own logic. Drawing upon a range of illustrative examples of struggles over citizenship by irregular migrants, I develop an ethico-political approach to rights-claiming. I then analyse how practices of rights-claiming by irregular migrants function in relation to modern citizenship’s two primary institutional features: law and democracy. Citizenship as method is a conceptual framework for analysing the constitution, contestation and re-articulation of citizenship in ways that meaningfully attenuate the problem of rightlessness. This study provides a dynamic, post-foundational, theorisation of citizenship and a set of resources for negotiating it: a new rights-claiming analytic and a novel and integrated account of the sites of transformational citizenship which can be deployed in new contexts for further analysis