Spelling instruction through etymology: A method of developing spelling lists for older students

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether an approach to developing word lists centred on etymological roots would improve the spelling performance of older primary school students. Participants were 46 students in the last year of primary school in south-east Queensland (31 girls and 15 boys) across three classes, with two classes being assigned to control conditions. Students were evaluated pre- and post-intervention on three dependent measures: British Spelling Test Series spelling, spelling in writing and writing. The results of this intervention revealed improvements in spelling for girls but not for boys. The implications for improved teaching methods are discussed

Creativity, Productivity, Aging: The Case of Benjamin Britten

British composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) died at the age of only six- ty-three, but ill health in his last years parachuted him into what he himself saw as older age and its consequences. His story of challenge and adaptation allows us to examine the particular impact of illness and impairment on the role of productivity in definitions of creativity. Composing was the life blood of this prolific artist, known for his work ethic and professionalism. Though he completed only nine independent works after his operation, the last works stand as some of his best creations. Britten’s sense of selfhood depended to a large extent upon this self-iden- tification as an active working composer. While he retained this to the end, his other life narrative had to be abandoned with his sudden entry into older age: that of being ever youthful. His self-fashioning as youthful and his tastes— in food, humor, habits—were formed in boyhood and never changed. Yet, through his letters and creative work, Britten reconstructed in the face of the challenges of aging that evolving life narrative of himself as the professional “working composer” that enabled his continuing creativity

Novel methods to predict solid-state material properties

Solid-state materials find ubiquitous use in modern technology - from semiconductors in electronics to steel in buildings and superconductors in MRI machines. Theoretical understanding of the atomic-scale behaviour of these materials can be leveraged to design new materials with desirable properties. In this thesis, we investigate the challenges that arise when this is attempted in practice. Accurate and inexpensive methods to tackle the atomic-scale problem are a prerequisite for materials discovery. We begin with a description of existing methods. This is followed by the development of a Monte Carlo method to calculate expectation values from the many-body picture without the need for a trial wavefunction, which is both a fundamental, and practical, limitation in existing techniques. Having explored first-principles methods, we turn to their use in understanding materials, beginning with an investigation of the structure of Lithium. Structure searching calculations result in a mixed-phase model at low temperatures, in good agreement with previous experimental and theoretical results. The quasi-harmonic treatment of finite-temperature thermodynamics is extended to include anharmonic nuclear vibrations, which are shown to not alter the phase diagram despite the small mass of the Li atoms. Focus then shifts towards leveraging these same methods to discover novel superconductors. This begins with an investigation of the LaH$_{10}$ and YH$_{10}$ compounds, where a new hexagonal phase of LaH$_{10}$ provides an explanation for recent experimental measurements. Machine-learning techniques and novel screening methods are then employed to discover hydrides of Rb and Cs that exhibit superconductivity at significantly lower pressures than LaH$_{10}$. Optimizations to, and automation of, the workflow then enables the discovery of superconductors on an unprecedented scale, leading to hundreds of new high-temperature superconductors. Throughout the thesis, the importance of structures that are saddle-points of the energy landscape becomes apparent. The thesis closes with the development of a new algorithm to locate saddle-points that requires no additional information beyond that used by the cheapest existing methods. This thesis demonstrates that there is progress to be made at every stage of the first-principles materials discovery process and highlights that improving the workflow itself is a non-trivial, but fruitful, pursuit

The Post Always Rings Twice: The Postmodern and the Postcolonial

It is now a truism of cultural theory that, while the terms postmodern and postcolonial obvi-ously share more than their prefatory posts, the broad cultural enterprises which they have come to designate are by no means conflatable. This detailed critical examination of one controversial case study — the Royal Ontario Museum's 1989-90 Into the Heart of Africa exhibit—and of its aftermath attempts to open up to debate the conflictual space not only between the postmodern and the postcolonial (and therefore between modernity and empire), but also the space between curatorial/designer intention and actual realization in a particular institution, between individual interpretation and community response, between representation as critique and representation as either appropriation or endorsement, and — in the end — between the discursive politics of irony and what Cornel West calls the "cultural politics of difference. Résumé Il s'agit désormais d'une vérité de la théorie culturelle : si les termes postmodemisme et postcolonialisme ont évidemment plus en commun que leur préfixe, les grandes entités culturelles qu'ils en sont venus à désigner ne sont aucunement identiques. Cette analyse critique détaillée d'un cas qui a donné lieu à une polémique -l'exposition Into the Heart of Africa de 1989-1990 au Musée royal de l'Ontario - s'efforce de lancer le débat sur l'espace conflictuel, non seulement entre les époques postmodeme et postcoloniale (donc entre le modernisme et l'empire), mais aussi entre les intentions de la conservatrice ou de la per-sonne responsable de la conception et l'exposition proprement dite, dans un établissement particulier, entre l'interprétation personnelle et la réaction de la collectivité, entre la représentation en tant que critique et la représentation en tant qu'appropriation ou sanction et, finalement, entre la politique discursive de l'ironie et ce que Cornel West appelle la politique culturelle de la différence