‘Arab Castaways’/’French Escapees’: Mobilities, Border Protection and White Australia

In 1901, the year of Australian Federation and the implementation of the White Australia Policy, a small boatload of suspicious, brown, Muslim men landed ‘illegally’ on the Far North Queensland coast. The reaction to their arrival on the part of locals and the authorities highlights the collision of ideologies in a space where established practices of Indigenous and non-white mobilities and openness to outsiders arriving by sea were being challenged by a new national framework that revolved around the policing of coastal borders and the restriction of movements. This article discusses the men’s gendered identities and the ways in which they were racialised and criminalised by the authorities and the press before being rejected as undesirables. In this early Federation coastal drama, we recognise the exclusionary discourses that have characterised Australia’s fixation with border security and the consequent imperative to keep out non-white others said to pose a threat to the nation on racial, religious or moral grounds. It provides yet another historical echo to the twenty-first century ‘Stop the Boats’ discourses and anti-refugee policies

Evaluation of configurational entropy of a model liquid from computer simulations

Computer simulations have been employed in recent years to evaluate the configurational entropy changes in model glass-forming liquids. We consider two methods, both of which involve the calculation of the `intra-basin' entropy as a means for obtaining the configurational entropy. The first method involves the evaluation of the intra-basin entropy from the vibrational frequencies of inherent structures, by making a harmonic approximation of the local potential energy topography. The second method employs simulations that confine the liquid within a localized region of configuration space by the imposition of constraints; apart from the choice of the constraints, no further assumptions are made. We compare the configurational entropies estimated for a model liquid (binary mixture of particles interacting {\it via} the Lennard-Jones potential) for a range of temperatures, at fixed density.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, Proceedings of "Unifying Concepts in Glass Physics" Trieste 1999 (to appear in J. Phys. Cond. Mat.

Jamming transitions in amorphous packings of frictionless spheres occur over a continuous range of volume fractions

We numerically produce fully amorphous assemblies of frictionless spheres in three dimensions and study the jamming transition these packings undergo at large volume fractions. We specify four protocols yielding a critical value for the jamming volume fraction which is sharply defined in the limit of large system size, but is different for each protocol. Thus, we directly establish the existence of a continuous range of volume fraction where nonequilibrium jamming transitions occur. However, these jamming transitions share the same critical behaviour. Our results suggest that, even in the absence of partial crystalline ordering, a unique location of a random close packing does not exist, and that volume fraction alone is not sufficient to describe the properties of jammed states.Comment: 5 pages, 3 fig

Landscapes, dynamic heterogeneity and kinetic facilitation in a simple off-lattice model

We present a simple off-lattice hard-disc model that exhibits glassy dynamics. The inherent structures are enumerated exactly, transitions between metabasins are well understood, and the particle configurations that act to facilitate dynamics are easily identified. The model readily maps to a coarse grained dynamic facilitation description.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, submitted to PR

Diffusion in simple fluids

Computed self diffusion coefficients for the Lennard-Jones and hard sphere fluids are related by Dej = DNs(aB) exp (--e/2kB T) where σB=σLJ(2/[1+ii(1+2kBT/ε)])1/6, the effective hard sphere diameter, is the (average) distance of closest approach in collisions between molecules which interact with the positive part of the LJ potential, and the Arrhenius term reflects the influence of the negative part. σLJ and ε are the size and well depth parameters. Measured diffusion coefficients of the halomethane liquids are reproduced by the equation over wide ranges of temperature and density and do not reveal any influence of the inelastic effects associated with molecular anisotropy

End-On Innovation : A School-Based Approach to Secondary Teacher Education

One year end-on teacher education programs following a degree have long been a common approach to initial preparation of teachers, particularly secondary teachers. These programs have also been the subject of consistent criticism. They have been variously described as too brief, too theoretical, overcrowded with too many topics, superficial, short on school practice. Major reviews such as the Report of the National Inquiry into Teacher Education (Department of Education 1980) and the Discipline Review of Teacher Education in Mathematics and Science (DEET 1989) have recommended increasing both the length of the programs and their emphasis on preparation for classroom practice. If one year end -on programs continue to be used for initial teacher preparation how can they be made more effective? Consideration of this problem has given rise to the development of an innovative program in the Faculty of Education (Salisbury Campus) of the University of South Australia as one positive response to the problem. So far it has been offered in 1992 and 1993. This article describes the development of the program, the key concepts on which it is based, its implementation and evaluation in 1992, and modifications subsequently made in 1993. The article then discusses problems related to funding and issues to be taken into account in adopting or adapting the program for wider use