Journal articles on the topic 'Fixed-point observing systems'

5G is the fifth generation of cellular networks and has been used in a lot of different areas. 5G often requires sudden rises in power consumption. To stabilize the power supply, a 5G system requires a lithium-ion battery (LIB) or a mechanism called AC main modernization to provide energy support during the power peak periods. The LIB approach is the best option in terms of simplicity and maintainability. Moreover, a 5G system requires not only high-performance energy but also the ability of tracking and prediction. Therefore, the requirement for a smart power supply for lithium-ion batteries with temporal monitoring and estimation is highly desirable. In this paper, we focus on artificial intelligence (AI) improvements to increase the accuracy of LIB state-of-health prediction. By observing the SeqInSeq nature of the battery data, our approach uses self-attention and fixed-point positional encoding. We also take advantage of autoregression to archive the trainable dependency from a non-linear branch and a linear branch in creating the final output. Compared with the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) method, our experimental results show that we provide better accuracy, compared with the baseline output using the NASA and CALCE datasets. From the same setting, we archive a reduction of 20.08% root mean square error (RMSE) and 29.01% mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) on NASA loss, compared to the SOTA approaches. On CALCE, the numbers are a 5.99% RMSE and 12.59% MAPE decrement, which is significant.

The expected amplitude of fixed-point sea surface temperature (SST) fluctuations induced by barotropic and baroclinic tidal flows is estimated from tidal current atlases and SST observations. The fluctuations considered are the result of the advection of pre-existing SST fronts by tidal currents. They are thus confined to front locations and exhibit fine-scale spatial structures. The amplitude of these tidally induced SST fluctuations is proportional to the scalar product of SST frontal gradients and tidal currents. Regional and global estimations of these expected amplitudes are presented. We predict barotropic tidal motions produce SST fluctuations that may reach amplitudes of 0.3 K. Baroclinic (internal) tides produce SST fluctuations that may reach values that are weaker than 0.1 K. The amplitudes and the detectability of tidally induced fluctuations of SST are discussed in the light of expected SST fluctuations due to other geophysical processes and instrumental (pixel) noise. We conclude that actual observations of tidally induced SST fluctuations are a challenge with present-day observing systems.

Direct ocean observing systems are a scarce set of data that build the backbone for understanding the current state of the ocean. These systems are limited in areas of high variability in temperature and salinity. Pioneering work of Wunsch (1977) proposed efforts to extract detailed hydrographic information using sound propagation through the ocean, providing the scaffolding to improve our understanding of the ocean's interior. The integrated nature of such measurements makes acoustic thermometry a powerful application for monitoring regional to basin-averaged hydrographic changes in the ocean, a measurement that is difficult to achieve by individual “point” measurements (moorings, ship-borne CTD casts, or autonomous floats) alone. This work models acoustic travel times corresponding to eigenrays between a fixed source and receiver from an evolving ocean state. Inclusive computation of acoustic travel times within a dynamically evolving modeled ocean state provide a novel approach to model data comparison within a general ocean circulation model. An adjoint assimilation framework combines observations with numerical models to estimate and update oceanic state variables Forget et al. (2015). This process provides the necessary operators for model data comparison of ocean acoustic observable quantities within a consistent state estimation framework allowing for data assimilation from acoustic tomography measurements.

The continuous sensing of water parameters is of great importance to the study of dynamic processes in the ocean, coastal areas, and inland waters. Conventional fixed-point and ship-based observing systems cannot provide sufficient sampling of rapidly varying processes, especially for small-scale phenomena. Acoustic tomography can achieve the sensing of water parameter variations over time by continuously using sound wave propagation information. A multi-station acoustic tomography experiment was carried out in a reservoir with three sound stations for water temperature observation. Specifically, multi-path propagation sound waves were identified with ray tracing using high-precision topography data obtained with ship-mounted ADCP. A new grid inverse method is proposed in this paper for water temperature profiling along a vertical slice. The progression of water temperature variation in three vertical slices between acoustic stations was mapped by solving an inverse problem. The reliability and adaptability of the grid method developed in this research are verified by comparison with layer-averaged water temperature results. The grid method can be further developed for the 3D mapping of water parameters over time, especially in small-scale water areas, where sufficient multi-path propagation sound waves can be obtained.

Abstract. Marine environments are influenced by a wide diversity of anthropogenic and natural substances and organisms that may have adverse effects on human health and ecosystems. Real-time measurements of pollutants, toxins, and pathogens across a range of spatial scales are required to adequately monitor these hazards, manage the consequences, and to understand the processes governing their magnitude and distribution. Significant technological advancements have been made in recent years for the detection and analysis of such marine hazards. In particular, sensors deployed on a variety of mobile and fixed-point observing platforms provide a valuable means to assess hazards. In this review, we present state-of-the-art of sensor technology for the detection of harmful substances and organisms in the ocean. Sensors are classified by their adaptability to various platforms, addressing large, intermediate, or small areal scales. Current gaps and future demands are identified with an indication of the urgent need for new sensors to detect marine hazards at all scales in autonomous real-time mode. Progress in sensor technology is expected to depend on the development of small-scale sensor technologies with a high sensitivity and specificity towards target analytes or organisms. However, deployable systems must comply with platform requirements as these interconnect the three areal scales. Future developments will include the integration of existing methods into complex and operational sensing systems for a comprehensive strategy for long-term monitoring. The combination of sensor techniques on all scales will remain crucial for the demand of large spatial and temporal coverage.

Abstract. Marine environments are influenced by a wide diversity of anthropogenic and natural substances and organisms that may have adverse effects on human health and ecosystems. Real-time measurements of pollutants, toxins, and pathogens across a range of spatial scales are required to adequately monitor these hazards, manage the consequences, and to understand the processes governing their magnitude and distribution. Significant technological advancements have been made in recent years for the detection and analysis of such marine hazards. In particular, sensors deployed on a variety of mobile and fixed-point observing platforms provide a valuable means to assess hazards. In this review, we present state-of-the-art of sensor technology for the detection of harmful substances and organisms in the ocean. Sensors are classified by their adaptability to various platforms, addressing large, intermediate, or small areal scales. Current gaps and future demands are identified with an indication of the urgent need for new sensors to detect marine hazards at all scales in autonomous real-time mode. Progress in sensor technology is expected to depend on the development of small-scale sensor technologies with a high sensitivity and specificity towards target analytes or organisms. However, deployable systems must comply with platform requirements as these interconnect the three areal scales. Future developments will include the integration of existing methods into complex and operational sensing systems for a comprehensive strategy for long-term monitoring. The combination of sensor techniques on all scales will remain crucial for the demand of large spatial and temporal coverage.

The author considers the new approaches to the rating system (labor complexity evaluation) of directors and specialists of the production and structural subdivisions of Transneft system entities, based on the results of independent expert and analytical evaluation of a universal set of production and technical values, representing the subdivisions’ activities. The author performed a number of practical studies and developments in the area of forming universal mathematical models, which allow economic analysis to be carried out and establishing a justified salary as per the positions of the directors of various subdivisions, regardless of activity type and level of position. The article introduces universal systems of point-based and factor-based ranking, based on the use of innovative mathematical analysis methods (multi-innovating normalizing, decision matrices, hierarchy analysis) for obtaining normalized assessment of production activity), administrative work load and professional labor complexity. The devised analytical approaches to the selection and assessment of the performance of subdivisions provide the possibility for objective and independent calculation for rating determination (salary) both for the Transneft system as a whole and for separate structural subdivisions (observing labor laws). The represented methods have significant applicability in modern conditions – on the stage of transition to the new system of professional standards and evaluation of qualifications, as well as the rejection of traditional models, based on strict attachment to the rating and qualification system, fixed salaries, etc.

This study provides a structured literature review of the recent COllaborative roBOT (COBOT) applications in industrial and service contexts. Several papers and research studies were selected and analyzed, observing the collaborative robot interactions, the control technologies and the market impact. This review focuses on stationary COBOTs that may guarantee flexible applications, resource efficiency, and worker safety from a fixed location. COBOTs offer new opportunities to develop and integrate control techniques, environmental recognition of time-variant object location, and user-friendly programming to interact safely with humans. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning systems enable and boost the COBOT’s ability to perceive its surroundings. A deep analysis of different applications of COBOTs and their properties, from industrial assembly, material handling, service personal assistance, security and inspection, Medicare, and supernumerary tasks, was carried out. Among the observations, the analysis outlined the importance and the dependencies of the control interfaces, the intention recognition, the programming techniques, and virtual reality solutions. A market analysis of 195 models was developed, focusing on the physical characteristics and key features to demonstrate the relevance and growing interest in this field, highlighting the potential of COBOT adoption based on (i) degrees of freedom, (ii) reach and payload, (iii) accuracy, and (iv) energy consumption vs. tool center point velocity. Finally, a discussion on the advantages and limits is summarized, considering anthropomorphic robot applications for further investigations.

ABSTRACT A gravitational wave early warning of a compact binary coalescence event, with a sufficiently tight localization skymap, would allow telescopes to point in the direction of the potential electromagnetic counterpart before its onset. Use of higher modes of gravitational radiation, in addition to the dominant mode typically used in templated real-time searches, was recently shown to produce significant improvements in early-warning times and skyarea localizations for a range of asymmetric mass binaries. We perform a large-scale study to assess the benefits of this method for a population of compact binary merger observations. In particular, we inject 100 000 such signals in Gaussian noise, with component masses $m_1 \in \left[1, 60 \right] \, \mathrm{M}_{\odot }$ and $m_2 \in \left[1, 3 \right] \, \mathrm{M}_{\odot }$. We consider three scenarios involving ground-based detectors: the fifth (O5) observing run of the Advanced LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA network, its projected Voyager upgrade, as well as a proposed third-generation (3G) network. We find that for fixed early-warning times of 20–60 s, the inclusion of the higher modes can provide localization improvements of a factor of ≳2 for up to ${\sim}60{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ ($70 {{\ \rm per\ cent}}$) of the neutron star–black hole (NSBH) systems in the O5 (Voyager) scenario. Considering only those NSBH systems that can produce potential electromagnetic counterparts, such improvements in the localization can be expected for ${\sim}5\!-\!35{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ $(20\!-\!50{{\ \rm per\ cent}})$ binaries in O5 (Voyager). For the 3G scenario, a significant fraction of the events have time gains of a minute to several minutes, assuming fiducial target localization areas of 100–1000 deg2.

INTRODUCTION: Oculography — a method of recording movement of eyeballs of a human or animal by analyzing changes in electrical potentials recorded by two electrodes fixed on skin near the eye socket is used to solve various problems. Among them are the determination of pronounced nystagmus, of characteristic changes of oculomotor reactions in different conditions of observing video images. Of interest is the determination of the position of gaze point (GP) and of the area of increased attention in three-dimensional space. This information is associated with the cognitive system of the observer and is of interest not only to physiologists, but also to specialists of related fields. . AIM: To experimentally prove the effectiveness of the developed method of 3D-oculography providing determination of the GP position in space. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The possibility of restoring GP position based on the analysis of recorded oculograms even in the presence of additive noise induced by the external electromagnetic fields, is proven by the numeric modeling method. Direct experimental studies were conducted with recording oculograms of a human observer on a previously verified equipment. A ZB-2 oculograph was used, the data obtained were verified by the method of average values. RESULTS: The obtained modeling results permitted to determine the maximal values of dispersion of additive noise and amplitude shifts of signals, which make possible satisfactory restoration of the coordinates of the GP and parameters of its movement trajectory. The qualitative correspondence of the experimental results to the results of numerical modeling was proven. The correspondence between trajectories of the observed object moving in space and trajectories of GP movement synthesized from counts of recorded oculograms was confirmed. CONCLUSION: Multichannel record of oculographic signals permits restoring parameters of the GP trajectory. Creating systems for recording these signals requires minimization of the noise level. An increase in dispersion of the noise component of the signal leads to most significant errors in calculating the coordinates of trajectory points.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is one of the most important anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHG) and significantly affects the energy balance of atmospheric systems. Larger coverage and higher spatial resolution of CO2 measurements can complement the existing in situ network and satellite measurements and thus improve our understanding of the global carbon cycle. In this study, we present a self-made airborne infrared remote sensing spectrometer (Air-IRSS) designed to determine the regional distribution of CO2. The Air-IRSS measured CO2 in the spectral range between 1590 and 1620 nm at a spectral resolution of 0.45 nm and an exposure time of 1 s. It was operated onboard an aircraft at a height of 3 km with a velocity of 180 km/h, and a spatial resolution of 50.00 m × 62.80 m. Weighting function modified differential optical absorption spectroscopy (WFM-DOAS) was used to analyze the measured spectra. The results show that the total uncertainty estimated for the retrieval of the CO2 column was 1.26% for airborne measurements over a large region, and 0.30% for a fixed point, such as power points or factories. Under vibration-free static conditions, the on-ground Air-IRSS observations can adequately reproduce the variations observed by Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT )with a correlation coefficient (r) of 0.72. Finally, we conducted an airborne field campaign to determine the regional distribution of CO2 over the North China Plain. The regional distribution of CO2 columns over four cities of Xing-tai, Hengshui, Shijiazhuang, and Baoding were obtained with the GPS information, which ranged from 2.00 × 1021 molec cm−2 to 3.00 × 1021 molec cm−2. The CO2 vertical distributions were almost uniform below a height of 3 km in the area without CO2 emission sources, and the highest values were found over Baoding City.

Searching for information when using a computerised retrieval system is a complex and inherently interactive process. Individuals during a search session may issue multiple queries, and examine a varying number of result summaries and documents per query. Searchers must also decide when to stop assessing content for relevance - or decide when to stop their search session altogether. Despite being such a fundamental activity, only a limited number of studies have explored stopping behaviours in detail, with a majority reporting that searchers stop because they decide that what they have found feels " good enough ". Notwithstanding the limited exploration of stopping during search, the phenomenon is central to the study of Information Retrieval, playing a role in the models and measures that we employ. However, the current de facto assumption considers that searchers will examine k documents - examining up to a fixed depth. In this thesis, we examine searcher stopping behaviours under a number of different search contexts. We conduct and report on two user studies, examining how result summary lengths and a variation of search tasks and goals affect such behaviours. Interaction data from these studies are then used to ground extensive simulations of interaction , exploring a number of different stopping heuristics (operationalised as twelve stopping strategies). We consider how well the proposed strategies perform and match up with real-world stopping behaviours. As part of our contribution, we also propose the Complex Searcher Model , a high-level conceptual searcher model that encodes stopping behaviours at different points throughout the search process (see Figure 1 below). Within the Complex Searcher Model, we also propose a new results page stopping decision point. From this new stopping decision point, searchers can obtain an impression of the page before deciding to enter or abandon it. Results presented and discussed demonstrate that searchers employ a range of different stopping strategies, with no strategy standing out in terms of performance and approximations offered. Stopping behaviours are clearly not fixed, but are rather adaptive in nature. This complex picture reinforces the idea that modelling stopping behaviour is difficult. However, simplistic stopping strategies do offer good performance and approximations, such as the frustration -based stopping strategy. This strategy considers a searcher's tolerance to non-relevance. We also find that combination strategies - such as those combining a searcher's satisfaction with finding relevant material, and their frustration towards observing non-relevant material - also consistently offer good approximations and performance. In addition, we also demonstrate that the inclusion of the additional stopping decision point within the Complex Searcher Model provides significant improvements to performance over our baseline implementation. It also offers improvements to the approximations of real-world searcher stopping behaviours. This work motivates a revision of how we currently model the search process and demonstrates that different stopping heuristics need to be considered within the models and measures that we use in Information Retrieval. Measures should be reformed according to the stopping behaviours of searchers. A number of potential avenues for future exploration can also be considered, such as modelling the stopping behaviours of searchers individually (rather than as a population), and to explore and consider a wider variety of different stopping heuristics under different search contexts. Despite the inherently difficult task that understanding and modelling the stopping behaviours of searchers represents, potential benefits of further exploration in this area will undoubtedly aid the searchers of future retrieval systems - with further work bringing about improved interfaces and experiences. Doctoral Supervisor Dr Leif Azzopardi (University of Strathclyde, Scotland) Examination Committee Professor Iadh Ounis (University of Glasgow, Scotland) and Dr Suzan Verberne (Leiden University, The Netherlands). Thanks to both of you for your insightful and fair questioning during the defence! Availability This thesis is available to download from http://www.dmax.org.uk/thesis/, or the University of Glasgow's Enlighten repository - see http://theses.gla.ac.uk/41132/. A Quick Thank You Five years of hard work has got me to the point at which I can now submit the abstract of my doctoral thesis to the SIGIR Forum. There have been plenty of ups and downs, but I'm super pleased with the result! Even though there is only a single name on the front cover of this thesis, there are many people who have helped me get to where I am today. You all know who you are - from my friends and family, those who granted me so many fantastic opportunities to travel and see the world - and of course, to Leif. Thanks to all of you for confiding your belief and trust in me, even when I may have momentarily lost that belief and trust in myself. This thesis is for you all.

The sampling of the users comfort, allows observing and predicting the level of comfort on the HVAC system. The development of online sampling systems assists in the recognition of the behaviour patterns that occur in the offices. This paper presents a methodology specially designed and developed in order to make easier knowledge extraction and representation, in this way it possible to make decisions about the comfort in buildings. The methodology used provides important and useful information to select the comfort set-point of the rooms of a central HVAC system without the need to use fixed values based on programmed time schedules or any other methodology. In this methodology, the users are evaluated by using a standard set of key questions in order to measure the level of satisfaction respect to environmental factors, thanks to a questionnaire of imprecise answers. We seek an improvement in the building users, regardless of their particularities.Keywords: comfort; HVAC; expert system; occupant; sampling;Metodología para el análisis y toma de decisiones mediante muestreo en los edificiosResumen: El muestreo del confort de los usuarios, permite observar y predecir el nivel de confort en el sistema de aire acondicionado. El desarrollo de los sistemas de muestreo online ayuda en el reconocimiento de patrones de comportamiento que se producen en las oficinas. En este trabajo se presenta una metodología especialmente diseñada y desarrollada con el fin de facilitar la extracción y representación del conocimiento, de esta manera es posible tomar decisiones sobre el confort en los edificios. La metodología utilizada proporciona información importante y útil para seleccionar el punto de ajuste del confort de las habitaciones para un sistema de climatización central, sin la necesidad de utilizar valores fijos, basados en horarios programados o cualquier otra metodología. En esta metodología, los usuarios son evaluados mediante el uso de un conjunto estándar de preguntas clave para medir el nivel de satisfacción respecto a los factores ambientales, gracias a un cuestionario de respuestas imprecisas. Buscamos una mejora en los usuarios de los edificios, independientemente de sus particularidades.Palabras clave: confort, climatización, sistema experto; ocupante; muestreo.

The Ukrainian VLBI system of decameter radio telescopes URAN successfully solves many scientific problems, but implementing aperture synthesis technology has a number of difficulties. One of them is significant phase distortions in this range caused by an inhomogeneous propagation environment. Therefore, the task arose to develop an alternative technology with the conventional name "Interferovision", which would allow us to restore radio images with a limited number of antennas, operate with broadband signals, not require flatness of the objects scene, and have an extended field of view. A method of direct image reconstruction when observing objects in space, using a multi-element interferometer, is proposed. This method is based on a physically based principle that is similar to holography. The wave front is registered by the antennas of the interferometer, and further processing is equivalent to its playback in reverse and registration of the resulting spatial interference image. There are no special requirements for the radiation of individual points of the source, except for its delta correlation. A finite frequency band is considered, and each point can be characterized by its own spectrum, that is, its own autocorrelation function of radiation. The resolution of the direct reconstruction method depends on its width. With the quasi-monochromatic approximation, the autocorrelation functions of the radiation of all the source points degenerate into sinusoids, and the restoration of the image becomes possible only with the use of the Fourier transformation. A theoretical justification of the method for spaces of different dimensions has been obtained. Interferometric systems of the same rank with many antennas are reduced to a same canonical form with fixed number of virtual antennas placed at the origin of the coordinates and at unit distances on the coordinate axes. The ambiguity of the obtained solution is eliminated by using an additional antenna. A simulation of the proposed method of direct image reconstruction for two-dimensional space was carried out. Despite the low conditionality of the system for estimating the distance, when it increases, the angular characteristics are preserved. Therefore, the method is promising for restoring radio images of space radio sources.

It is known that in many applications of physics, biology and other sciences as an approximate dynamic model of complex nonlinear oscillatory processes a model of one or more interconnected van der Pol oscillators or some of its modifications is used \cite{ShD01}. For this reason, nonlinear oscillators are studied as a method of modeling, analysis or even control in various fields, such as electronics \cite{ShD02}, control, robotics \cite{ShD03, ShD04}, biomedical research \cite{ShD05}, geology \cite{ShD06} and others. Naturally, in such modeling there are problems in determining the state and parameters of the models based on the results of measuring the output signals in real time. One of these problems, namely: the problem of determining the state of pacemaker models, which are obtained as certain modifications of the van der Pol oscillator equation, is considered in this paper. In the scientific literature, publications on the modeling of cardiovascular activity using oscillatory systems are widely represented. In recent years, among them there are works that are related to the solution of inverse problems for such models. In particular, in \cite{ShD07} using differential-geometric methods of control theory, a general scheme for constructing asymptotically accurate estimates of the state of a two-dimensional dynamical system is proposed. The obtained results are used to effectively solve the problem of observing two models of pacemakers. In our case in this observation problem we used the method of invariant relations \cite{ShD08}, which was developed in analytical mechanics to find partial solutions (dependencies between variables) in the problems of dynamics of a rigid body with a fixed point. Modification of this method to the problems of control theory, observation, identification allowed to synthesize between known and unknown values of the original system additional connections that arise during the motion of its extended model \cite{ShD09, ShD10, ShD11}. The corresponding technique is to expand the original system by introducing additional controlled differential equations and immersing the original system in a system of greater dimension, which due to its sufficiently free structure is more suitable for constructing an observer or identifier. Controls in an extended system are used to synthesize on its trajectories pre-proposed relations that define the unknown components of the mathematical model (phase vector, parameters) as functions of known quantities. The obtained theoretical results are illustrated by numerical simulations of the corresponding nonlinear observers in Section 5.

"Use cases" are "a methodology used in system analysis to identify, clarify and organize system requirements" (Brush 2022). They provide context and purpose for data concepts. The Darwin Core (Wieczorek et al. 2012) was initially designed to serve two purposes: 1) to gather data for documenting species distributions, particularly through species distribution modeling, and 2) to support the discovery of specimens in biological collections. The occurrence concept, the "existence of a dwc:Organism at a particular place at a particular time" (Darwin Core Maintenance Group 2009), was established so that both observations and specimens could be combined into a single tabular data set and used to document the distribution of a species.By 2008, the TDWG Technical Architecture Group began recommending that TDWG develop its standards in the framework of the semantic web (SW); i.e., RDF. Two efforts have contributed significantly to casting the terms of Darwin Core in RDF. Baskauf and Webb (2015) distilled nearly a decade of online discussions into the Darwin-SW. In a separate effort, but involving many of the same people, a series of workshops were convened to coordinate standards between the genomics and biodiversity communities and produced the BioCollections Ontology (BCO; Walls et al. 2014), which placed Darwin Core terms in the context of the "OBO foundry" (Smith et al. 2007) and the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO; Arp et al. 2015, but also see videos by Smith).Darwin-SW included explicit recognition of IndividualOrganism, Occurrence, Event, and Token (i.e., evidence of a dwc:MaterialSample or an observation). The simplest use case, in which an organism is collected or observed once, doesn't require that Organism, Occurrence and MaterialSample/Observation be recognized as separate entities. The relationships are one-to-one-to-one. They can be joined into a single entity with only one identifier (e.g., materialSampleID) without loss of information. Note that a specimen or observation infers the existence of an organism and its occurrence in nature. The use cases that require separating Organism and possibly Occurrence from the MaterialSample or Observation are the ones where an organism is sampled or observed, remains in nature, and is subsequently sampled or observed again; i.e., the organism is the target of more than one dwc:Event. These cases require that the organism can be reliably identified as the same organism encountered earlier; e.g., by tag, identifying marking, DNA fingerprint, or precise and fixed location for sessile organisms.The BCO (Walls et al. 2014) does not explicitly recognize something equivalent to the dwc:Occurrence class. Following Smith et al. (2007), the focus is on "realism," things and relationships in the real world, as opposed to what we want our information systems to do. At a high level, the BFO separates material things, processes, and information artifacts as fundamentally different entities. Accordingly, the BCO separates the "material sampling process" from the "observing process," as observations and material samples are fundamentally different. Again, an occurrence class is not present because it represents a union of MaterialSample and Observation; it is justified by an analytical use-case, which was not in scope. That might not be ultimately disqualifying, but it raises a caution flag.A question then emerges for original providers who practice only the simplest case: should the provider manufacture dwc:occurrenceID and dwc:organismID even if they aren't used in the original database? If they are useful to someone outside the local context, should creating redundant identifiers be the responsibility of the provider or the aggregator?Fig. 1A shows how the concepts in Darwin-SW could be represented in an entity-relationship diagram, with the Occurrence entity used to realize the many-to-many relationship between Organism and Event. Fig. 1B shows an alternative model, in which MaterialSample realizes the relationship between Organism and Event (the Observation entity is not shown, but would parallel MaterialSample, realizing another association between Organism and Event). If there are no attributes that are most appropriately assigned to Occurrence, this representation could be viewed as simpler and sufficient.The Darwin Core Quick Reference Guide lists 25 properties of the Occurrence class. My contention is that all but a few would be more appropriately assigned to the MaterialSample or Observation. Note that the MaterialSample or Observation represents the Organism at the time of the Event, and can be viewed as the appropriate subject for properties that change over time, e.g., lifeStage and reproductiveCondition. Moreover, others have argued that even permanent features of an Organsim are more correctly represented as having been directly assessed in the MaterialSample/Observation. It allows for contradictory assessments, but accommodating and resolving contradictions are real parts of scientific research. The alternative placements of properties not assigned to MaterialSample/Observation are:occurrenceID: deprecated;recordedBy and recordedByID: move to EventgeoreferenceVerificationStatus: move to Location or Event.Under the model represented (in part) by Fig. 1B, the task of forming the union between MaterialSample and Observation (for documenting species distributions) would fall to the aggregator or end user. The important point is that where these unions are created in our biodiversity pipelines is an engineering choice. The dwc:Occurrence class is a term of convenience, not necessarily a reflection of real-world things and processes.

Understanding the dynamics of coastal marine ecosystems is fundamental for assessing environmental health and addressing anthropogenic impacts. This study analyzes a decade-long dataset of high-resolution Chlorophyll fluorescence (ChlF) measurements collected hourly from August 2012 to December 2022 at the E1 meteo-oceanographic buoy (Böhm et al. 2016). The buoy is located in the Northern Adriatic Sea (44° 08.58’ N; 12° 34.20’ E), approximately 100 km south of the Po River delta and 7 km northeast of Rimini, Italy. As part of the “Delta del Po and Costa Romagnola” (Bergami and Riminucci 2025) research site within the Italian LTER network and the PNRR ITINERIS project, the E1 station provides a unique platform for multidisciplinary research and long-term environmental monitoring. ChlF data, collected by the WET Labs® ECO Triplet (now SeaBird Scientific), reveal significant seasonal and interannual variations in chlorophyll concentration, estimates from in situ ChlF, ranging from below detection limits to a maximum daily average of 41 μg/L. Together with ChlF, other meteorological, chemical, and physical parameters such as temperature (TEMP), dissolved oxygen (DO), salinity (SAL), turbidity (TURB), and wind speed (WS) were incorporated for this study (Riminucci et al. 2024, Riminucci et al. 2025). A total of 40 distinct algal bloom events were identified using ChlF concentration thresholds and growth rate dynamics (Trombetta et al. 2019). The analysis of bloom frequency revealed two main periods of bloom events per year (Fig. 1), with the identified blooms lasting an average of 13±10 days. During these events, ChlF concentration increased to an average of 6.5 μg/L, indicating substantial algal growth, compared to a baseline of 2.8 μg/L observed outside bloom periods. The most intense blooms occurred in spring, driven by nutrient inputs and increased sunlight, while summer blooms were weaker, less frequent, and shorter in duration due to thermal stratification. In contrast, autumn and winter saw a resurgence of bloom activity, influenced by freshwater inflow, nutrient resuspension, and strong mixing. These seasonal patterns underscore the dynamic interplay between temperature, wind, and nutrient availability in shaping phytoplankton dynamics. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was conducted to identify key relationships among environmental variables and their influence on algal blooms (Fig. 2). The strong correlation between ChlF and DO during bloom periods reflects the role of photosynthesis in elevating oxygen levels. TEMP and SAL are linked due to seasonal stratification, while WS and TURB highlight wind-driven physical disturbances, such as sediment resuspension and waves. Overall, PCA captures both seasonal and biological processes, including bloom dynamics, as well as physical disturbances driven by wind and water movement. Seasonal factors govern bloom dynamics, with spring and late autumn/winter supporting phytoplankton growth due to favourable nutrient availability and stable conditions, while summer stratification limits blooms. These findings underscore the interplay of biological and physical drivers in shaping the ecosystem response over the decade. Two bloom types were identified: Single-Peak Blooms, typical in spring, characterized by rapid growth and short durations, and Multi-Peak Blooms, more common in autumn, with extended periods due to intermittent nutrient apportion. Nutrient-rich freshwater inputs from the Po River, nitrogen and phosphorus, and seasonal cycles of phytoplankton play a significant role in driving these blooms. Diatoms such as Skeletonema marinoi dominate the winter bloom, while spring and autumn blooms are diatom-driven, modulated by rainfall and nutrient runoff (Grilli et al. 2020, Totti et al. 2019). Summer, characterized by water column stratification, generally exhibits lower ChlF concentrations unless disturbed by storms or mixing events that reintroduce nutrients into surface waters. These findings emphasize the complex seasonal and environmental drivers shaping bloom dynamics. This study introduces a methodological framework for detecting coastal algal blooms by analyzing patterns derived from in-situ fluorescence measurements, offering insights into bloom dynamics. While challenges such as data gaps due to sensor maintenance and biofouling, the findings underscore the value of long-term, high-frequency observations in understanding environmental processes and managing coastal ecosystems. Future research should focus on integrating complementary datasets, such as nutrient concentrations or satellite observations, to deepen the understanding of bloom drivers. Additionally, expanding datasets temporally, by including more years, and spatially, by incorporating other monitoring systems (e.g., fixed-point stations), will further enhance the robustness and applicability of the framework.

Studies of the effects of particle-size polydispersity or of particle interactions on active matter have been limited to determine and analyze the system short-time dynamics in the high-density regime. On the other hand, the effects of polydispersity on the structural behavior of active systems are of relevance and have received much less attention. In this paper, we comprehensively analyze the effects of size dispersion of pseudo hard-disk active Brownian particles, on its structural behavior at different system densities and different self-propelling velocities, thus elucidating the interplay of these features with the polydispersity. This is introduced into our analysis by well-known particle size distributions in such a manner that the average size is fixed, but with a variance that accounts for different dispersion of the particle size according to: Gaussian, Weibull, uniform and “two point” distribution. Local and global structural properties of the system are determined under these considerations. We observe that activity and size polydisperse effects become relevantly conspicuous at densities above the motility induced phase separation critical point of the monodispersal fluid. We notice that, while the activity promotes a more defined local and global structural arrangement, the polydispersity decreases such structure, observing the greatest effect when the particle size is defined by a uniform distribution.

Chaos is ubiquitous in nonlinear dynamical systems. It is a hidden state of deterministic disorder in certain regions of parameters and initial conditions of a nonlinear system. The path taken by the system to reach chaos is known as its route to chaos. The state of the system can drastically change from a stable fixed point or a periodic solution to chaos due to the effect of local or global bifurcation. The available tools, such as bifurcation diagrams, Lyapunov spectra, Poincaré maps, phase plots, and time series plots, explore the routes for such qualitative changes. These are tiresome procedures. For more efficient verifications, this work offers a guide or catalog for several routes to chaos (RTC) through which a continuous-time dynamical system enters or exits from chaos. Additionally, this review paper highlights various signatures associated with common RTC to make identification easier. The main emphasis is on enabling a reader to assess these RTC by merely observing the explained signatures in the bifurcation diagrams and the Poincaré maps.

It is common in estuarine waters to place fixed monitoring stations, with the advantages of easy maintenance and continuous measurements. These two features make fixed monitoring stations indispensable for understanding the optical complexity of estuarine waters and enable an improved quantification of uncertainties in satellite-derived water quality variables. However, comparing the point-scale measurements of stationary monitoring systems to time-snapshots of satellite pixels suffers from additional uncertainties related to temporal/spatial discrepancies. This research presents a method for validating satellite-derived water quality variables with the continuous measurements of a fixed monitoring station in the Ems Dollard estuary on the Dutch-German borders. The method has two steps; first, similar in-situ measurements are grouped. Second, satellite observations are upscaled to match these point measurements in time and spatial scales. The upscaling approach was based on harmonizing the probability distribution functions of satellite observations and in-situ measurements using the first and second moments. The fixed station provided a continuous record of data on suspended particulate matter (SPM) and chlorophyll-a (Chl-a) concentrations at 1 min intervals for 1 year (2016–2017). Satellite observations were provided by Sentinel-2 (MultiSpectral Instrument, S2-MSI) and Sentinel-3 (Ocean and Land Color Instrument, S3-OLCI) sensors for the same location and time of in-situ measurements. Compared to traditional validation procedures, the proposed method has improved the overall fit and produced valuable information on the ranges of goodness-of-fit measures (slope, intercept, correlation coefficient, and normalized root-mean-square deviation). The correlation coefficient between measured and derived SPM concentrations has improved from 0.16 to 0.52 for S2-MSI and 0.14 to 0.84 for S3-OLCI. For the Chl-a matchup, the improvement was from 0.26 to 0.82 and from 0.14 to 0.63 for S2-MSI and S3-OLCI, respectively. The uncertainty in the derived SPM and Chl-a concentrations was reduced by 30 and 23% for S2-SMI and by 28 and 16% for S3-OLCI. The high correlation and reduced uncertainty signify that the matchup pairs are observing the same fluctuations in the measured variable. These new goodness-of-fit measures correspond to the results of the performed sensitivity analysis, previous literature, and reflect the inherent accuracy of the applied derivation model.

AbstractThe ground-based laser beam ceilometers are used at the Automated Surface Observing Systems (ASOS) in major airports in the U.S. to measure the cloud base height and report the sky conditions on an hourly basis or at shorter intervals. These laser ceilometers are fixed-type whose transmitters and receivers point straight up at the cloud (if any) base. They are unable to detect clouds that are not above the sensor. To report cloudiness at the local scale, many of these types of ceilometers are needed. A single cloud hanging over the sensor will cause overcast readings, whereas, a hole in the clouds above the sensor could cause a clear reading to be reported. To overcome this problem, we have set up a ventilated radiation station at Logan-Cache airport, Utah, U.S.A., since 1995. This airport is equipped with one of the above-mentioned ceilometers.This radiation station (composed of pyranometers, pyrgeometers with fields of view of 150°), and net radiometer provide continuous measurements of incoming and outgoing shortwave and longwave radiation and net radiation throughout the year. Considering the additional longwave radiation captured by the facing-up pyrgeometer during cloudy skies, coming from the cloud in the wave band (8-13 μm) which the gaseous emission lacks, we developed an algorithm which provides the continuous cloud information (cloud base height, cloud base temperature, and percent of skies covered by cloud) at local scale during the day and night throughout the year.Comparisons between the ASOS and the model data during the period June, 2004, are reported in this article. The proposed algorithm is a promising approach for evaluation of the cloud base temperature and height, and percent of skies covered by cloud and its effects on aviation throughout the year.

Background Killing more than eight million people per year tobacco stands as one of the greatest public health threats mankind has faced. Out of the eight million seven million are due to direct tobacco use while 1.2 million are due to second-hand exposure. According to GATS 2016-17 267 million adults in India that is 29 of all adults are tobacco users. Every fourth adult who works indoors is exposed to second-hand smoke. As per COTPA smoking is not allowed in any public place. Any hotel bar and restaurants having more than 30 rooms seats should provide a designated smoking area to allow smoking. Though COTPA mentions these rules many of the restaurantshotels are violating these putting non-smokers at greater risk by exposing them to second-hand smoke. Therefore this study was conducted to assess the compliance of DSA to the COTPA rules.Methodology A cross- sectional study was conducted from July 2021 to August 2021 in two selected areas in Bangalore ndash Jayanagara and Indiranagara. These areas were selected keeping in mind the density of population and public places in Bangalore as a greater number of required sampling units were consolidated in these two zones. After getting the required number of sampling units Bar Restaurant ClubPub Hookah Bar the field investigator was instructed to observe each of the selected unit by the transect walk method. Each field investigator identified a fixed central point in each zone and followed a survey pathway - Observing compliance to DSA and filling the applicable checklist through mobile application. This process was continued until the recommended number was obtained.Results In our study 67.1 of the surveyed facilities were restaurants followed by bars hookah bars and clubs. The no smoking signage was seen in only 29.4 of the surveyed sites. Only 9.5 of the eligible facilities had DSA among the surveyed sites. Out of these only 20 of the indoor DSA fulfilled the recommended criteria.Conclusion The survey was conducted in predominant commercial areas of Bangalore city with more specifically public places and densely populated areas. Study revealed that majority of the sites were not following COTPA recommended signages and guidelines allowing indoor smoking. Compliance to DSA was observed in only 9.5 of the eligible facilities and among this only 20 followed recommended DSA criteria. Though the COTPA legislations are present since almost two decades significant number of breaches in law were observed during the survey.

This fourth Synthesis of the Science Diplomacy Action series involves that pedagogy of common-interest building among allies and adversaries alike as a negotiation skill to apply, train and refine. This serial edition also represents a journey with science diplomacy and its engine of informed decisionmaking among friends who facilitated the first formal dialogue between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Russia regarding security in the Arctic, which we co-directed at the University of Cambridge in 2010. The starting point for that NATO-Russia dialogue was science diplomacy, as an holistic (international, interdisciplinary and inclusive) process to balance national interests and common interests for the benefit of all on Earth across generations. Operation of this holistic process became clear in 2016 during the 1st International Dialogue on Science and Technology Advice in Foreign Ministries, when the ‘continuum of urgencies’ was identified from security time scales (mitigating risks of political, economic, cultural and environmental instabilities that are immediate) to sustainability time scales (balancing economic prosperity, environmental protection and societal well-being across generations). The following year, the theoretical framework of informed decisionmaking – operating across a ‘continuum of urgencies’ short-term to long-term – emerged with the case study published in Science about the 2017 Agreement on Enhancing International Arctic Scientific Cooperation, which has entered into force among the eight Arctic states. With continuing acceleration, in 2020, Springer published the first volume in the new book series on INFORMED DECISIONMAKING FOR SUSTAINABILITY. The graduate course on “Science Diplomacy: Environmental Security and Law in the Arctic Ocean” was introduced in 2016 with the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, involving a Mock Arctic Council Ministerial Meeting as the culminating synthesis with the Student Ambassadors. Framed around their working papers for the Mock Arctic Council Ministerial Meeting, the Student Ambassadors negotiated a declaration, which they adopted by consensus and signed at end of that first semester. In subsequent years, additional holistic integration exercises were introduced into the course, including the Common-Interest Building – Training Game with the pedagogy of the seventeen United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, each of which has international, interdisciplinary and inclusive relevance at local-global levels (APPENDIX 1: Syllabus – Spring 2020). From 2017 through 2020, the graduate course was expanded to Science Diplomacy: Environmental Security and Law in the Arctic Ocean, involving The Fletcher School in Medford (Massachusetts, United States) and the International Law Programme at MGIMO University in Moscow (Russian Federation). Building on a Memorandum of Understanding between our institutions, this joint video-conferencing course was approved by the Russian Ministry of Education and involved Carnegie Corporation of New York funding that was directed by Prof. Paul Arthur Berkman, contributing to the soon-to-be Russia and Eurasia Program at The Fletcher School. Each year, Student Ambassadors from the United States and Russian Federation adopted and signed joint declarations by consensus, as an exercise in common-interest building. Results of training skills with common-interest building are reflected herein with the compilation of consensus declarations crafted by the Student Ambassadors in their Mock Arctic Council Ministerial Meetings from 2016 to 2020. The essence of common-interest building is to make inormed decisions that operate across time in view of urgencies, short-term to long-term, tactical and strategic. Urgencies are embedded across diverse time scales with local-global relevance, as demonstrated by accelerating impacts through: month-years with our global pandemic; years-decades with high technologies; and decades-centuries with global human population size and atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentration in our Earth system. The underlying process of informed decisionmaking involves holistic integration with science as the ‘study of change’, revealed with the natural sciences and social sciences as well as Indigenous knowledge, all of which characterize patterns, trends and processes (albeit with different methods) that become the bases for decisions. Contributing with research and action, the institutions involved with decisionmaking produce: governance mechanisms (laws, agreements and policies as well as regulatory strategies, including insurance, at diverse jurisdictional levels); and built infrastructure (fixed, mobile and other assets, including communication, observing, information and other systems that require technology plus investment). Coupling of governance mechanisms and built infrastructure contributes to progress with sustainability, which were weaved throughout the course with the Arctic Ocean as a case study. Outcomes of the joint-video conferencing course between The Fletcher School and MGIMO University have accelerated globally into the training initiatives with diplomatic schools among foreign ministries as well as with the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). Our hope is science diplomacy and its engine of informed decisionmaking will lead to lifelong learning across the jurisdictional spectrum with its subnational-national-international legal levels for the benefit of all on Earth across generations.


 
 
 Complex systems are an invention of the universe. It is not at all clear that science has an a priori primacy claim to the study of complex systems. (Galanter 5) Introduction In popular dialogues, describing a system as “complex” is often the point of resignation, inferring that the system cannot be sufficiently described, predicted nor managed. Transport networks, management infrastructure and supply chain logistics are all often described in this way. In socio-cultural terms “complex” is used to describe those humanistic systems that are “intricate, involved, complicated, dynamic, multi-dimensional, interconnected systems [such as] transnational citizenship, communities, identities, multiple belongings, overlapping geographies and competing histories” (Cahir & James). Academic dialogues have begun to explore the collective behaviors of complex systems to define a complex system specifically as an adaptive one; i.e. a system that demonstrates ‘self organising’ principles and ‘emergent’ properties. Based upon the key principles of interaction and emergence in relation to adaptive and self organising systems in cultural artifacts and processes, this paper will argue that complex systems are cultural systems. By introducing generic principles of complex systems, and looking at the exploration of such principles in art, design and media research, this paper argues that a science of cultural systems as part of complex systems theory is the post modern science for the digital age. Furthermore, that such a science was predicated by post structuralism and has been manifest in art, design and media practice since the late 1960s. Complex Systems Theory Complexity theory grew out of systems theory, an holistic approach to analysis that views whole systems based upon the links and interactions between the component parts and their relationship to each other and the environment within they exists. This stands in stark contrast to conventional science which is based upon Descartes’s reductionism, where the aim is to analyse systems by reducing something to its component parts (Wilson 3). As systems thinking is concerned with relationships more than elements, it proposes that in complex systems, small catalysts can cause large changes and that a change in one area of a system can adversely affect another area of the system. As is apparent, systems theory is a way of thinking rather than a specific set of rules, and similarly there is no single unified Theory of Complexity, but several different theories have arisen from the natural sciences, mathematics and computing. As such, the study of complex systems is very interdisciplinary and encompasses more than one theoretical framework. Whilst key ideas of complexity theory developed through artificial intelligence and robotics research, other important contributions came from thermodynamics, biology, sociology, physics, economics and law. In her volume for the Elsevier Advanced Management Series, “Complex Systems and Evolutionary Perspectives on Organisations”, Eve Mitleton-Kelly describes a comprehensive overview of this evolution as five main areas of research: complex adaptive systems dissipative structures autopoiesis (non-equilibrium) social systems chaos theory path dependence Here, Mitleton-Kelly points out that relatively little work has been done on developing a specific theory of complex social systems, despite much interest in complexity and its application to management (Mitleton-Kelly 4). To this end, she goes on to define the term “complex evolving system” as more appropriate to the field than ‘complex adaptive system’ and suggests that the term “complex behaviour” is thus more useful in social contexts (Mitleton-Kelly). For our purpose here, “complex systems” will be the general term used to describe those systems that are diverse and made up of multiple interdependent elements, that are often ‘adaptive’, in that they have the capacity to change and learn from events. This is in itself both ‘evolutionary’ and ‘behavioural’ and can be understood as emerging from the interaction of autonomous agents – especially people. Some generic principles of complex systems defined by Mitleton Kelly that are of concern here are: self-organisation emergence interdependence feedback space of possibilities co-evolving creation of new order Whilst the behaviours of complex systems clearly do not fall into our conventional top down perception of management and production, anticipating such behaviours is becoming more and more essential for products, processes and policies. For example, compare the traditional top down model of news generation, distribution and consumption to the “emerging media eco-system” (Bowman and Willis 14). Figure 1 (Bowman & Willis 10) Figure 2 (Bowman & Willis 12) To the traditional news organisations, such a “democratization of production” (McLuhan 230) has been a huge cause for concern. The agencies once solely responsible for the representation of reality are now lost in a global miasma of competing perspectives. Can we anticipate and account for complex behaviours? Eve Mitleton Kelly states that “if organisations are understood as complex evolving systems co-evolving as part of a social ‘ecosystem’, then that changed perspective changes ways of acting and relating which lead to a different way of working. Thus, management strategy changes, and our organizational design paradigms evolve as new types of relationships and ways of working provide the conditions for the emergence of new organisational forms” (Mitleton-Kelly 6). Complexity in Design It is thus through design practice and processes that discovering methods for anticipating complex systems behaviours seem most possible. The Embracing Complexity in Design (ECiD) research programme, is a contemporary interdisciplinary research cluster consisting of academics and designers from architectural engineering, robotics, geography, digital media, sustainable design, and computing aiming to explore the possibility of trans disciplinary principles of complexity in design. Over arching this work is the conviction that design can be seen as model for complex systems researchers motivated by applying complexity science in particular domains. Key areas in which design and complexity interact have been established by this research cluster. Most immediately, many designed products and systems are inherently complex to design in the ordinary sense. For example, when designing vehicles, architecture, microchips designers need to understand complex dynamic processes used to fabricate and manufacture products and systems. The social and economic context of design is also complex, from market economics and legal regulation to social trends and mass culture. The process of designing can also involve complex social dynamics, with many people processing and exchanging complex heterogeneous information over complex human and communication networks, in the context of many changing constraints. Current key research questions are: how can the methods of complex systems science inform designers? how can design inform research into complex systems? Whilst ECiD acknowledges that to answer such questions effectively the theoretical and methodological relations between complexity science and design need further exploration and enquiry, there are no reliable precedents for such an activity across the sciences and the arts in general. Indeed, even in areas where a convergence of humanities methodology with scientific practice might seem to be most pertinent, most examples are few and far between. In his paper “Post Structuralism, Hypertext & the World Wide Web”, Luke Tredennick states that “despite the concentration of post-structuralism on text and texts, the study of information has largely failed to exploit post-structuralist theory” (Tredennick 5). Yet it is surely in the convergence of art and design with computation and the media that a search for practical trans-metadisciplinary methodologies might be most fruitful. It is in design for interactive media, where algorithms meet graphics, where the user can interact, adapt and amend, that self-organisation, emergence, interdependence, feedback, the space of possibilities, co-evolution and the creation of new order are embraced on a day to day basis by designers. A digitally interactive environment such as the World Wide Web, clearly demonstrates all the key aspects of a complex system. Indeed, it has already been described as a ‘complexity machine’ (Qvortup 9). It is important to remember that this ‘complexity machine’ has been designed. It is an intentional facility. It may display all the characteristics of complexity but, whilst some of its attributes are most demonstrative of self organisation and emergence, the Internet itself has not emerged spontaneously. For example, Tredinnick details the evolution of the World Wide Web through the Memex machine of Vannevar Bush, through Ted Nelsons hypertext system Xanadu to Tim Berners-Lee’s Enquire (Tredennick 3). The Internet was engineered. So, whilst we may not be able to entirely predict complex behavior, we can, and do, quite clearly design for it. When designing digitally interactive artifacts we design parameters or co ordinates to define the space within which a conceptual process will take place. We can never begin to predict precisely what those processes might become through interaction, emergence and self organisation, but we can establish conceptual parameters that guide and delineate the space of possibilities. Indeed this fact is so transparently obvious that many commentators in the humanities have been pushed to remark that interaction is merely interpretation, and so called new media is not new at all; that one interacts with a book in much the same way as a digital artifact. After all, post-structuralist theory had established the “death of the author” in the 1970s – the a priori that all cultural artifacts are open to interpretation, where all meanings must be completed by the reader. The concept of the “open work” (Eco 6) has been an established post modern concept for over 30 years and is commonly recognised as a feature of surrealist montage, poetry, the writings of James Joyce, even advertising design, where a purposive space for engagement and interpretation of a message is designated, without which the communication does not “work”. However, this concept is also most successfully employed in relation to installation art and, more recently, interactive art as a reflection of the artist’s conscious decision to leave part of a work open to interpretation and/or interaction. Art & Complex Systems One of the key projects of Embracing Complexity in Design has been to look at the relationship between art and complex systems. There is a relatively well established history of exploring art objects as complex systems in themselves that finds its origins in the systems art movement of the 1970s. In his paper “Observing ‘Systems Art’ from a Systems-Theroretical Perspective”, Francis Halsall defines systems art as “emerging in the 1960s and 1970s as a new paradigm in artistic practice … displaying an interest in the aesthetics of networks, the exploitation of new technology and New Media, unstable or de-materialised physicality, the prioritising of non-visual aspects, and an engagement (often politicised) with the institutional systems of support (such as the gallery, discourse, or the market) within which it occurs” (Halsall 7). More contemporarily, “Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970”, at Tate Modern, London, focuses upon systems artists “rejection of art’s traditional focus on the object, to wide-ranging experiments al focus on the object, to wide-ranging experiments with media that included dance, performance and…film & video” (De Salvo 3). Artists include Andy Warhol, Richard Long, Gilbert & George, Sol Lewitt, Eva Hesse and Bruce Nauman. In 2002, the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New York, held an international exhibition entitled “Complexity; Art & Complex Systems”, that was concerned with “art as a distinct discipline offer[ing] its own unique approache[s] and epistemic standards in the consideration of complexity” (Galanter and Levy 5), and the organisers go on to describe four ways in which artists engage the realm of complexity: presentations of natural complex phenomena that transcend conventional scientific visualisation descriptive systems which describe complex systems in an innovative and often idiosyncratic way commentary on complexity science itself technical applications of genetic algorithms, neural networks and a-life ECiD artist Julian Burton makes work that visualises how companies operate in specific relation to their approach to change and innovation. He is a strategic artist and facilitator who makes “pictures of problems to help people talk about them” (Burton). Clients include public and private sector organisations such as Barclays, Shell, Prudential, KPMG and the NHS. He is quoted as saying “Pictures are a powerful way to engage and focus a group’s attention on crucial issues and challenges, and enable them to grasp complex situations quickly. I try and create visual catalysts that capture the major themes of a workshop, meeting or strategy and re-present them in an engaging way to provoke lively conversations” (Burton). This is a simple and direct method of using art as a knowledge elicitation tool that falls into the first and second categories above. The third category is demonstrated by the ground breaking TechnoSphere, that was specifically inspired by complexity theory, landscape and artificial life. Launched in 1995 as an Arts Council funded online digital environment it was created by Jane Prophet and Gordon Selley. TechnoSphere is a virtual world, populated by artificial life forms created by users of the World Wide Web. The digital ecology of the 3D world, housed on a server, depends on the participation of an on-line public who accesses the world via the Internet. At the time of writing it has attracted over a 100,000 users who have created over a million creatures. The artistic exploration of technical applications is by default a key field for researching the convergence of trans-metadisciplinary methodologies. Troy Innocent’s lifeSigns evolves multiple digital media languages “expressed as a virtual world – through form, structure, colour, sound, motion, surface and behaviour” (Innocent). The work explores the idea of “emergent language through play – the idea that new meanings may be generated through interaction between human and digital agents”. Thus this artwork combines three areas of converging research – artificial life; computational semiotics and digital games. In his paper “What Is Generative Art? Complexity Theory as a Context for Art Theory”, Philip Galanter describes all art as generative on the basis that it is created from the application of rules. Yet, as demonstrated above, what is significantly different and important about digital interactivity, as opposed to its predecessor, interpretation, is its provision of a graphical user interface (GUI) to component parts of a text such as symbol, metaphor, narrative, etc for the multiple “authors” and the multiple “readers” in a digitally interactive space of possibility. This offers us tangible, instantaneous reproduction and dissemination of interpretations of an artwork. Conclusion: Digital Interactivity – A Complex Medium Digital interaction of any sort is thus a graphic model of the complex process of communication. Here, complexity does not need deconstructing, representing nor modelling, as the aesthetics (as in apprehended by the senses) of the graphical user interface conveniently come first. Design for digital interactive media is thus design for complex adaptive systems. The theoretical and methodological relations between complexity science and design can clearly be expounded especially well through post-structuralism. The work of Barthes, Derrida & Foucault offers us the notion of all cultural artefacts as texts or systems of signs, whose meanings are not fixed but rather sustained by networks of relationships. Implemented in a digital environment post-structuralist theory is tangible complexity. Strangely, whilst Philip Galanter states that science has no necessary over reaching claim to the study of complexity, he then argues conversely that “contemporary art theory rooted in skeptical continental philosophy [reduces] art to social construction [as] postmodernism, deconstruction and critical theory [are] notoriously elusive, slippery, and overlapping terms and ideas…that in fact [are] in the business of destabilising apparently clear and universal propositions” (4). This seems to imply that for Galanter, post modern rejections of grand narratives necessarily will exclude the “new scientific paradigm” of complexity, a paradigm that he himself is looking to be universal. Whilst he cites Lyotard (6) describing both political and linguistic reasons why postmodern art celebrates plurality, denying any progress towards singular totalising views, he fails to appreciate what happens if that singular totalising view incorporates interactivity? Surely complexity is pluralistic by its very nature? In the same vein, if language for Derrida is “an unfixed system of traces and differences … regardless of the intent of the authored texts … with multiple equally legitimate meanings” (Galanter 7) then I have heard no better description of the signifiers, signifieds, connotations and denotations of digital culture. Complexity in its entirety can also be conversely understood as the impact of digital interactivity upon culture per se which has a complex causal relation in itself; Qvortups notion of a “communications event” (9) such as the Danish publication of the Mohammed cartoons falls into this category. Yet a complex causality could be traced further into cultural processes enlightening media theory; from the relationship between advertising campaigns and brand development; to the exposure and trajectory of the celebrity; describing the evolution of visual language in media cultures and informing the relationship between exposure to representation and behaviour. In digital interaction the terms art, design and media converge into a process driven, performative event that demonstrates emergence through autopoietic processes within a designated space of possibility. By insisting that all artwork is generative Galanter, like many other writers, negates the medium entirely which allows him to insist that generative art is “ideologically neutral” (Galanter 10). Generative art, like all digitally interactive artifacts are not neutral but rather ideologically plural. Thus, if one integrates Qvortups (8) delineation of medium theory and complexity theory we may have what we need; a first theory of a complex medium. Through interactive media complexity theory is the first post modern science; the first science of culture. References Bowman, Shane, and Chris Willis. We Media. 21 Sep. 2003. 9 March 2007 http://www.hypergene.net/wemedia/weblog.php>. Burton, Julian. “Hedron People.” 9 March 2007 http://www.hedron.com/network/assoc.php4?associate_id=14>. Cahir, Jayde, and Sarah James. “Complex: Call for Papers.” M/C Journal 9 Sep. 2006. 7 March 2007 http://journal.media-culture.org.au/journal/upcoming.php>. De Salvo, Donna, ed. Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970. London: Tate Gallery Press, 2005. Eco, Umberto. The Open Work. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1989. Galanter, Phillip, and Ellen K. Levy. Complexity: Art & Complex Systems. SDMA Gallery Guide, 2002. Galanter, Phillip. “Against Reductionism: Science, Complexity, Art & Complexity Studies.” 2003. 9 March 2007 http://isce.edu/ISCE_Group_Site/web-content/ISCE_Events/ Norwood_2002/Norwood_2002_Papers/Galanter.pdf>. Halsall, Francis. “Observing ‘Systems-Art’ from a Systems-Theoretical Perspective”. CHArt 2005. 9 March 2007 http://www.chart.ac.uk/chart2005/abstracts/halsall.htm>. Innocent, Troy. “Life Signs.” 9 March 2007 http://www.iconica.org/main.htm>. Johnson, Jeffrey. “Embracing Complexity in Design (ECiD).” 2007. 9 March 2007 http://www.complexityanddesign.net/>. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984. McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1962. Mitleton-Kelly, Eve, ed. Complex Systems and Evolutionary Perspectives on Organisations. Elsevier Advanced Management Series, 2003. Prophet, Jane. “Jane Prophet.” 9 March 2007 http://www.janeprophet.co.uk/>. Qvortup, Lars. “Understanding New Digital Media.” European Journal of Communication 21.3 (2006): 345-356. Tedinnick, Luke. “Post Structuralism, Hypertext & the World Wide Web.” Aslib 59.2 (2007): 169-186. Wilson, Edward Osborne. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: A.A. Knoff, 1998. 
 
 
 
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“Use cases” are “a methodology used in system analysis to identify, clarify and organize system requirements” (Brush 2022). They provide context and purpose for data concepts. The Darwin Core (Wieczorek et al. 2012) was initially designed to serve two purposes: 1) to gather data for documenting species distributions, particularly through species distribution modeling, and 2) to support the discovery of specimens in biological collections. The occurrence concept, the "existence of a dwc:Organism at a particular place at a particular time" (Darwin Core Maintenance Group 2009), was established so that both observations and specimens could be combined into a single tabular data set and used to document the distribution of a species. By 2008, the TDWG Technical Architecture Group began recommending that TDWG develop its standards in the framework of the semantic web (SW); i.e., RDF. Two efforts have contributed significantly to casting the terms of Darwin Core in RDF. Baskauf and Webb (2015) distilled nearly a decade of online discussions into the Darwin-SW. In a separate effort, but involving many of the same people, a series of workshops were convened to coordinate standards between the genomics and biodiversity communities and produced the BioCollections Ontology (BCO; Walls et al. 2014), which placed Darwin Core terms in the context of the "OBO foundry" (Smith et al. 2007) and the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO; Arp et al. 2015, but also see videos by Smith). Darwin-SW included explicit recognition of IndividualOrganism, Occurrence, Event, and Token (i.e., evidence of a dwc:MaterialSample or an observation). The simplest use case, in which an organism is collected or observed once, doesn't require that Organism, Occurrence and MaterialSample/Observation be recognized as separate entities. The relationships are one-to-one-to-one. They can be joined into a single entity with only one identifier (e.g., materialSampleID) without loss of information. Note that a specimen or observation infers the existence of an organism and its occurrence in nature. The use cases that require separating Organism and possibly Occurrence from the MaterialSample or Observation are the ones where an organism is sampled or observed, remains in nature, and is subsequently sampled or observed again; i.e., the organism is the target of more than one dwc:Event. These cases require that the organism can be reliably identified as the same organism encountered earlier; e.g., by tag, identifying marking, DNA fingerprint, or precise and fixed location for sessile organisms. The BCO (Walls et al. 2014) does not explicitly recognize something equivalent to the dwc:Occurrence class. Following Smith et al. (2007), the focus is on "realism," things and relationships in the real world, as opposed to what we want our information systems to do. At a high level, the BFO separates material things, processes, and information artifacts as fundamentally different entities. Accordingly, the BCO separates the "material sampling process" from the "observing process," as observations and material samples are fundamentally different. Again, an occurrence class is not present because it represents a union of MaterialSample and Observation; it is justified by an analytical use-case, which was not in scope. That might not be ultimately disqualifying, but it raises a caution flag. A question then emerges for original providers who practice only the simplest case: should the provider manufacture dwc:occurrenceID and dwc:organismID even if they aren’t used in the original database? If they are useful to someone outside the local context, should creating redundant identifiers be the responsibility of the provider or the aggregator? Fig. 1A shows how the concepts in Darwin-SW could be represented in an entity-relationship diagram, with the Occurrence entity used to realize the many-to-many relationship between Organism and Event. Fig. 1B shows an alternative model, in which MaterialSample realizes the relationship between Organism and Event (the Observation entity is not shown, but would parallel MaterialSample, realizing another association between Organism and Event). If there are no attributes that are most appropriately assigned to Occurrence, this representation could be viewed as simpler and sufficient. The Darwin Core Quick Reference Guide lists 25 properties of the Occurrence class. My contention is that all but a few would be more appropriately assigned to the MaterialSample or Observation. Note that the MaterialSample or Observation represents the Organism at the time of the Event, and can be viewed as the appropriate subject for properties that change over time, e.g., lifeStage and reproductiveCondition. Moreover, others have argued that even permanent features of an Organsim are more correctly represented as having been directly assessed in the MaterialSample/Observation. It allows for contradictory assessments, but accommodating and resolving contradictions are real parts of scientific research. The alternative placements of properties not assigned to MaterialSample/Observation are: occurrenceID: deprecated; recordedBy and recordedByID: move to Event georeferenceVerificationStatus: move to Location or Event. occurrenceID: deprecated; recordedBy and recordedByID: move to Event georeferenceVerificationStatus: move to Location or Event. Under the model represented (in part) by Fig. 1B, the task of forming the union between MaterialSample and Observation (for documenting species distributions) would fall to the aggregator or end user. The important point is that where these unions are created in our biodiversity pipelines is an engineering choice. The dwc:Occurrence class is a term of convenience, not necessarily a reflection of real-world things and processes.

IntroductionIn July 1997, the Mackay campus of Central Queensland University hosted a conference with the theme Regional Australia: Visions of Mackay. It was the first academic conference to be held at the young campus, and its aim was to provide an opportunity for academics, business people, government officials, and other interested parties to discuss their visions for the development of Mackay, a regional community of 75,000 people situated on the Central Queensland coast (Danaher). I delivered a presentation at that conference and authored a chapter in the book that emerged from its proceedings. The chapter entitled “Mackay Online” explored the potential impact that the Internet could have on the Mackay region, particularly in the areas of regional business, education, health, and entertainment (Pace). Two decades later, how does the reality compare with that vision?Broadband BluesAt the time of the Visions of Mackay conference, public commercial use of the Internet was in its infancy. Many Internet services and technologies that users take for granted today were uncommon or non-existent then. Examples include online video, video-conferencing, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), blogs, social media, peer-to-peer file sharing, payment gateways, content management systems, wireless data communications, smartphones, mobile applications, and tablet computers. In 1997, most users connected to the Internet using slow dial-up modems with speeds ranging from 28.8 Kbps to 33.6 Kbps. 56 Kbps modems had just become available. Lamenting these slow data transmission speeds, I looked forward to a time when widespread availability of high-bandwidth networks would allow the Internet’s services to “expand to include electronic commerce, home entertainment and desktop video-conferencing” (Pace 103). Although that future eventually arrived, I incorrectly anticipated how it would arrive.In 1997, Optus and Telstra were engaged in the rollout of hybrid fibre coaxial (HFC) networks in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane for the Optus Vision and Foxtel pay TV services (Meredith). These HFC networks had a large amount of unused bandwidth, which both Telstra and Optus planned to use to provide broadband Internet services. Telstra's Big Pond Cable broadband service was already available to approximately one million households in Sydney and Melbourne (Taylor), and Optus was considering extending its cable network into regional Australia through partnerships with smaller regional telecommunications companies (Lewis). These promising developments seemed to point the way forward to a future high-bandwidth network, but that was not the case. A short time after the Visions of Mackay conference, Telstra and Optus ceased the rollout of their HFC networks in response to the invention of Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL), a technology that increases the bandwidth of copper wire and enables Internet connections of up to 6 Mbps over the existing phone network. ADSL was significantly faster than a dial-up service, it was broadly available to homes and businesses across the country, and it did not require enormous investment in infrastructure. However, ADSL could not offer speeds anywhere near the 27 Mbps of the HFC networks. When it came to broadband provision, Australia seemed destined to continue playing catch-up with the rest of the world. According to data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), in 2009 Australia ranked 18th in the world for broadband penetration, with 24.1 percent of Australians having a fixed-line broadband subscription. Statistics like these eventually prompted the federal government to commit to the deployment of a National Broadband Network (NBN). In 2009, the Kevin Rudd Government announced that the NBN would combine fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP), fixed wireless, and satellite technologies to deliver Internet speeds of up to 100 Mbps to 90 percent of Australian homes, schools, and workplaces (Rudd).The rollout of the NBN in Mackay commenced in 2013 and continued, suburb by suburb, until its completion in 2017 (Frost, “Mackay”; Garvey). The rollout was anything but smooth. After a change of government in 2013, the NBN was redesigned to reduce costs. A mixed copper/optical technology known as fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) replaced FTTP as the preferred approach for providing most NBN connections. The resulting connection speeds were significantly slower than the 100 Mbps that was originally proposed. Many Mackay premises could only achieve a maximum speed of 40 Mbps, which led to some overcharging by Internet service providers, and subsequent compensation for failing to deliver services they had promised (“Optus”). Some Mackay residents even complained that their new NBN connections were slower than their former ADSL connections. NBN Co representatives claimed that the problems were due to “service providers not buying enough space in the network to provide the service they had promised to customers” (“Telcos”). Unsurprisingly, the number of complaints about the NBN that were lodged with the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman skyrocketed during the last six months of 2017. Queensland complaints increased by approximately 40 percent when compared with the same period during the previous year (“Qld”).Despite the challenges presented by infrastructure limitations, the rollout of the NBN was a boost for the Mackay region. For some rural residents, it meant having reliable Internet access for the first time. Frost, for example, reports on the experiences of a Mackay couple who could not get an ADSL service at their rural home because it was too far away from the nearest telephone exchange. Unreliable 3G mobile broadband was the only option for operating their air-conditioning business. All of that changed with the arrival of the NBN. “It’s so fast we can run a number of things at the same time”, the couple reported (“NBN”).Networking the NationOne factor that contributed to the uptake of Internet services in the Mackay region after the Visions of Mackay conference was the Australian Government’s Networking the Nation (NTN) program. When the national telecommunications carrier Telstra was partially privatised in 1997, and further sold in 1999, proceeds from the sale were used to fund an ambitious communications infrastructure program named Networking the Nation (Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts). The program funded projects that improved the availability, accessibility, affordability, and use of communications facilities and services throughout regional Australia. Eligibility for funding was limited to not-for-profit organisations, including local councils, regional development organisations, community groups, local government associations, and state and territory governments.In 1998, the Mackay region received $930,000 in Networking the Nation funding for Mackay Regionlink, a project that aimed to provide equitable community access to online services, skills development for local residents, an affordable online presence for local business and community organisations, and increased external awareness of the Mackay region (Jewell et al.). One element of the project was a training program that provided basic Internet skills to 2,168 people across the region over a period of two years. A second element of the project involved the establishment of 20 public Internet access centres in locations throughout the region, such as libraries, community centres, and tourist information centres. The centres provided free Internet access to users and encouraged local participation and skill development. More than 9,200 users were recorded in these centres during the first year of the project, and the facilities remained active until 2006. A third element of the project was a regional web portal that provided a free easily-updated online presence for community organisations. The project aimed to have every business and community group in the Mackay region represented on the website, with hosting fees for the business web pages funding its ongoing operation and development. More than 6,000 organisations were listed on the site, and the project remained financially viable until 2005.The availability, affordability and use of communications facilities and services in Mackay increased significantly during the period of the Regionlink project. Changes in technology, services, markets, competition, and many other factors contributed to this increase, so it is difficult to ascertain the extent to which Mackay Regionlink fostered those outcomes. However, the large number of people who participated in the Regionlink training program and made use of the public Internet access centres, suggests that the project had a positive influence on digital literacy in the Mackay region.The Impact on BusinessThe Internet has transformed regional business for both consumers and business owners alike since the Visions of Mackay conference. When Mackay residents made a purchase in 1997, their choice of suppliers was limited to a few local businesses. Today they can shop online in a global market. Security concerns were initially a major obstacle to the growth of electronic commerce. Consumers were slow to adopt the Internet as a place for doing business, fearing that their credit card details would be vulnerable to hackers once they were placed online. After observing the efforts that finance and software companies were making to eliminate those obstacles, I anticipated that it would only be a matter of time before online transactions became commonplace:Consumers seeking a particular product will be able to quickly find the names of suitable suppliers around the world, compare their prices, and place an order with the one that can deliver the product at the cheapest price. (Pace 106)This expectation was soon fulfilled by the arrival of online payment systems such as PayPal in 1998, and online shopping services such as eBay in 1997. eBay is a global online auction and shopping website where individuals and businesses buy and sell goods and services worldwide. The eBay service is free to use for buyers, but sellers are charged modest fees when they make a sale. It exemplifies the notion of “friction-free capitalism” articulated by Gates (157).In 1997, regional Australian business owners were largely sceptical about the potential benefits the Internet could bring to their businesses. Only 11 percent of Australian businesses had some form of web presence, and less than 35 percent of those early adopters felt that their website was significant to their business (Department of Industry, Science and Tourism). Anticipating the significant opportunities that the Internet offered Mackay businesses to compete in new markets, I recommended that they work “towards the goal of providing products and services that meet the needs of international consumers as well as local ones” (107). In the two decades that have passed since that time, many Mackay businesses have been doing just that. One prime example is Big on Shoes (bigonshoes.com.au), a retailer of ladies’ shoes from sizes five to fifteen (Plane). Big on Shoes has physical shopfronts in Mackay and Moranbah, an online store that has been operating since 2009, and more than 12,000 followers on Facebook. This speciality store caters for women who have traditionally been unable to find shoes in their size. As the store’s customer base has grown within Australia and internationally, an unexpected transgender market has also emerged. In 2018 Big on Shoes was one of 30 regional businesses featured in the first Facebook and Instagram Annual Gift Guide, and it continues to build on its strengths (Cureton).The Impact on HealthThe growth of the Internet has improved the availability of specialist health services for people in the Mackay region. Traditionally, access to surgical services in Mackay has been much more limited than in metropolitan areas because of the shortage of specialists willing to practise in regional areas (Green). In 2003, a senior informant from the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons bluntly described the Central Queensland region from Mackay to Gladstone as “a black hole in terms of surgery” (Birrell et al. 15). In 1997 I anticipated that, although the Internet would never completely replace a visit to a local doctor or hospital, it would provide tools that improve the availability of specialist medical services for people living in regional areas. Using these tools, doctors would be able to “analyse medical images captured from patients living in remote locations” and “diagnose patients at a distance” (Pace 108).These expectations have been realised in the form of Queensland Health’s Telehealth initiative, which permits medical specialists in Brisbane and Townsville to conduct consultations with patients at the Mackay Base Hospital using video-conference technology. Telehealth reduces the need for patients to travel for specialist advice, and it provides health professionals with access to peer support. Averill (7), for example, reports on the experience of a breast cancer patient at the Mackay Base Hospital who was able to participate in a drug trial with a Townsville oncologist through the Telehealth network. Mackay health professionals organised the patient’s scans, administered blood tests, and checked her lymph nodes, blood pressure and weight. Townsville health professionals then used this information to advise the Mackay team about her ongoing treatment. The patient expressed appreciation that the service allowed her to avoid the lengthy round-trip to Townsville. Prior to being offered the Telehealth option, she had refused to participate in the trial because “the trip was just too much of a stumbling block” (Averill 7).The Impact on Media and EntertainmentThe field of media and entertainment is another aspect of regional life that has been reshaped by the Internet since the Visions of Mackay conference. Most of these changes have been equally apparent in both regional and metropolitan areas. Over the past decade, the way individuals consume media has been transformed by new online services offering user-generated video, video-on-demand, and catch-up TV. These developments were among the changes I anticipated in 1997:The convergence of television and the Internet will stimulate the creation of new services such as video-on-demand. Today television is a synchronous media—programs are usually viewed while they are being broadcast. When high-quality video can be transmitted over the information superhighway, users will be able to watch what they want, when and where they like. […] Newly released movies will continue to be rented, but probably not from stores. Instead, consumers will shop on the information superhighway for movies that can be delivered on demand.In the mid-2000s, free online video-sharing services such as YouTube and Vimeo began to emerge. These websites allow users to freely upload, view, share, comment on, and curate online videos. Subscription-based streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime have also become increasingly popular since that time. These services offer online streaming of a library of films and television programs for a fee of less than 20 dollars per month. Computers, smart TVs, Blu-ray players, game consoles, mobile phones, tablets, and other devices provide a multitude of ways of accessing streaming services. Some of these devices cost less than 100 dollars, while higher-end electronic devices include the capability as a bundled feature. Netflix became available in Mackay at the time of its Australian launch in 2015. The growth of streaming services greatly reduced the demand for video rental shops in the region, and all closed down as a result. The last remaining video rental store in Mackay closed its doors in 2018 after trading for 26 years (“Last”).Some of the most dramatic transformations that have occurred the field of media and entertainment were not anticipated in 1997. The rise of mobile technology, including wireless data communications, smartphones, mobile applications, and tablet computers, was largely unforeseen at that time. Some Internet luminaries such as Vinton Cerf expected that mobile access to the Internet via laptop computers would become commonplace (Lange), but this view did not encompass the evolution of smartphones, and it was not widely held. Similarly, the rise of social media services and the impact they have had on the way people share content and communicate was generally unexpected. In some respects, these phenomena resemble the Black Swan events described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (xvii)—surprising events with a major effect that are often inappropriately rationalised after the fact. They remind us of how difficult it is to predict the future media landscape by extrapolating from things we know, while failing to take into consideration what we do not know.The Challenge for MackayIn 1997, when exploring the potential impact that the Internet could have on the Mackay region, I identified a special challenge that the community faced if it wanted to be competitive in this new environment:The region has traditionally prospered from industries that control physical resources such as coal, sugar and tourism, but over the last two decades there has been a global ‘shift away from physical assets and towards information as the principal driver of wealth creation’ (Petre and Harrington 1996). The risk for Mackay is that its residents may be inclined to believe that wealth can only be created by means of industries that control physical assets. The community must realise that its value-added information is at least as precious as its abundant natural resources. (110)The Mackay region has not responded well to this challenge, as evidenced by measures such as the Knowledge City Index (KCI), a collection of six indicators that assess how well a city is positioned to grow and advance in today’s technology-driven, knowledge-based economy. A 2017 study used the KCI to conduct a comparative analysis of 25 Australian cities (Pratchett, Hu, Walsh, and Tuli). Mackay rated reasonably well in the areas of Income and Digital Access. But the city’s ratings were “very limited across all the other measures of the KCI”: Knowledge Capacity, Knowledge Mobility, Knowledge Industries and Smart Work (44).The need to be competitive in a technology-driven, knowledge-based economy is likely to become even more pressing in the years ahead. The 2017 World Energy Outlook Report estimated that China’s coal use is likely to have peaked in 2013 amid a rapid shift toward renewable energy, which means that demand for Mackay’s coal will continue to decline (International Energy Agency). The sugar industry is in crisis, finding itself unable to diversify its revenue base or increase production enough to offset falling global sugar prices (Rynne). The region’s biggest tourism drawcard, the Great Barrier Reef, continues to be degraded by mass coral bleaching events and ongoing threats posed by climate change and poor water quality (Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority). All of these developments have disturbing implications for Mackay’s regional economy and its reliance on coal, sugar, and tourism. Diversifying the local economy through the introduction of new knowledge industries would be one way of preparing the Mackay region for the impact of new technologies and the economic challenges that lie ahead.ReferencesAverill, Zizi. “Webcam Consultations.” Daily Mercury 22 Nov. 2018: 7.Birrell, Bob, Lesleyanne Hawthorne, and Virginia Rapson. The Outlook for Surgical Services in Australasia. Melbourne: Monash University Centre for Population and Urban Research, 2003.Cureton, Aidan. “Big Shoes, Big Ideas.” Daily Mercury 8 Dec. 2018: 12.Danaher, Geoff. Ed. Visions of Mackay: Conference Papers. Rockhampton: Central Queensland UP, 1998.Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts. Networking the Nation: Evaluation of Outcomes and Impacts. Canberra: Australian Government, 2005.Department of Industry, Science and Tourism. Electronic Commerce in Australia. Canberra: Australian Government, 1998.Frost, Pamela. “Mackay Is Up with Switch to Speed to NBN.” Daily Mercury 15 Aug. 2013: 8.———. “NBN Boost to Business.” Daily Mercury 29 Oct. 2013: 3.Gates, Bill. The Road Ahead. New York: Viking Penguin, 1995.Garvey, Cas. “NBN Rollout Hit, Miss in Mackay.” Daily Mercury 11 Jul. 2017: 6.Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. Reef Blueprint: Great Barrier Reef Blueprint for Resilience. Townsville: Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, 2017.Green, Anthony. “Surgical Services and Referrals in Rural and Remote Australia.” Medical Journal of Australia 177.2 (2002): 110–11.International Energy Agency. World Energy Outlook 2017. France: IEA Publications, 2017.Jewell, Roderick, Mary O’Flynn, Fiorella De Cindio, and Margaret Cameron. “RCM and MRL—A Reflection on Two Approaches to Constructing Communication Memory.” Constructing and Sharing Memory: Community Informatics, Identity and Empowerment. Eds. Larry Stillman and Graeme Johanson. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. 73–86.Lange, Larry. “The Internet: Where’s It All Going?” Information Week 17 Jul. 1995: 30.“Last Man Standing Shuts Doors after 26 Years of Trade.” Daily Mercury 28 Aug. 2018: 7.Lewis, Steve. “Optus Plans to Share Cost Burden.” Australian Financial Review 22 May 1997: 26.Meredith, Helen. “Time Short for Cable Modem.” Australian Financial Review 10 Apr. 1997: 42Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Random House, 2007.“Optus Offers Comp for Slow NBN.” Daily Mercury 10 Nov. 2017: 15.Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. “Fixed Broadband Subscriptions.” OECD Data, n.d. <https://data.oecd.org/broadband/fixed-broadband-subscriptions.htm>.Pace, Steven. “Mackay Online.” Visions of Mackay: Conference Papers. Ed. Geoff Danaher. Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 1998. 111–19.Petre, Daniel and David Harrington. The Clever Country? Australia’s Digital Future. Sydney: Lansdown Publishing, 1996.Plane, Melanie. “A Shoe-In for Big Success.” Daily Mercury 9 Sep. 2017: 6.Pratchett, Lawrence, Richard Hu, Michael Walsh, and Sajeda Tuli. The Knowledge City Index: A Tale of 25 Cities in Australia. Canberra: University of Canberra neXus Research Centre, 2017.“Qld Customers NB-uN Happy Complaints about NBN Service Double in 12 Months.” Daily Mercury 17 Apr. 2018: 1.Rudd, Kevin. “Media Release: New National Broadband Network.” Parliament of Australia Press Release, 7 Apr. 2009 <https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id:"media/pressrel/PS8T6">.Rynne, David. “Revitalising the Sugar Industry.” Sugar Policy Insights Feb. 2019: 2–3.Taylor, Emma. “A Dip in the Pond.” Sydney Morning Herald 16 Aug. 1997: 12.“Telcos and NBN Co in a Crisis.” Daily Mercury 27 Jul. 2017: 6.

Virtual Environments and Colonial Spatial Practices The history of artificial and virtual environments, particularly those found in digital games, is rife with destructive colonial ideologies. Themes of conquest, domination, and Othering permeate many kinds of game design, for instance, including board games where mechanics such as seizing large tracts of ‘uninhabited’ land, stripping it of resources, and dominating those that live there are considered part and parcel even today (Flanagan and Jakobsson 9). In Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games, Dyer-Witheford and de Pauter draw from Hardt and Negri’s Empire to articulate how digital games are fundamentally linked to the ongoing effects of colonialism. For instance, they trace how games feed into issues like energy consumption and exploitive labour practices in their production and dissemination: a result of unequal distribution of power and capital after imperialism (xviii). They also point to how games like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002) have the player reassert and act out the processes and structures of imperialism, in which their relationship to the virtual landscape is to “occupy it, activate it, and network it into a setting for optimal capital accumulation” (162). Other scholars have pointed to how strategy and adventure games have players perpetuate colonial practices such as military manoeuvring, map-making, and resource extraction, and encourage them to lay claim to supposedly empty spaces through violence and exploration (Lammes 1; Mukherjee 35). As such, many of these destructive colonial practices and ideologies manifest in the player’s movement through the virtual spaces that they occupy, which are often framed as territory to be constantly expanded and acquired. While particularly visible in contemporary works such as No Man’s Sky (2016), this movement pattern has dominated the design of videogame environments for some time. Games such as Super Mario Bros. (1985) recycle the myths and movements of sixteenth and seventeenth-century colonisers, for instance, using the seemingly harmless “appetite for encountering a succession of new spaces” to fuel the consumption and mastering of artificial land (Fuller and Jenkins 62). This endless pursuit of new and exciting spaces produces a particular, goal-oriented, point-to-point movement pattern, in which arrival is always deferred to another destination, just over the horizon (63). This movement pattern is particularly endemic to contemporary open-world game designs, where the player moves directly and efficiently between any resource that will give them an advantage: items, power-ups, quests, and so on (Keogh par. 2). While open-world games will often claim to grant total freedom of movement, players are thus instead funnelled into “a constrictive topology of nodes and [the] connections between them” (Aarseth 161). Even in the open, non-linear Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (2020), for instance, where the player can theoretically wander in any direction they choose, objective markers embedded in the game’s user interface constantly push them towards the next item or place of value, just over the horizon. Importantly, this goal-oriented, colonial movement structure affects not only how players traverse a virtual environment, but also how they look at and value that environment. For instance, Magnet outlines how the totalising, distanced perspective of strategy games like Tropico (2001) encourages the player to ignore the impact of their actions on the artificial landscape and non-player characters below them (149). Similarly, in a virtual environment viewed and explored from an embedded, first-person perspective, a point-to-point movement pattern flattens the player’s view of that environment, reducing it to a series of potential resources to be acquired in an expanse of unimportant negative space. The landscape itself is seen by the player as simple set-dressing, merely there to fill out the areas in between where they really want to be. Their attention is directed outwards, to the next objective, the next landmark, or the next resource to be commodified: the environment itself is seen as incidental, and thus ripe for exploitation and plunder. This matters, because how players view, move through, and interact with artificial environments shapes and affects how they view, move through, and interact with actual environments. As cultural artefacts, videogames and virtual environments are formed within and perpetuate the dynamics of societal power, and so do not “simply transcend ‘old-media’ problems of ideology and political control” (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter xxvii). Indeed, as performed, interactive experiences they actively train players in certain behaviours, viewpoints, and modes of engaging with the world (Flanagan and Jakobsson 19). In the era of climate crisis and ecological destruction, virtual environment designers should therefore seek to design and engender alternative, more caring ways of seeing and interacting with virtual and actual environments. Rather than encouraging players to devalue, accumulate, and plunder virtual landscapes, we should encourage them to value, care for, and maintain those landscapes, informed by the practices and principles of those who have been caring for and maintaining the environment for thousands of years: Indigenous Australians (Pascoe). As scholars such as Pumpa have noted, these principles and practices have been cultivated and developed in actual, dynamic environments as lived, collaborative, and dynamic knowledge, and thus might at first seem incompatible with the fixed, unchanging structure of a digital virtual environment (51). However, he also points out that it is possible to design virtual environments that negotiate this tension by embracing a fluid and collaborative design process where the environment continues to evolve, as in the Virtual Songlines (2003-present) project (Pumpa 53). Others have pushed further, stating that the form itself is a particularly useful vessel for the sharing of cultural heritage and practices. This is due to the way that first-person virtual environments foreground direct participation and performance in response to spatial events and features, similar to many Indigenous systems of environmentally-embedded knowledge storage and access (Barrett 77). Projects like Torres Strait Virtual Reality (2018), for example, leverage the direct perspective and navigation of virtual reality to immerse the player in Indigenous stories, practices, and language. These projects represent one way of encouraging care for environments: by virtually collecting and sharing the specific stories and knowledges that make a particular place unique and valuable. Other projects offer other ways of cultivating care for land: by encouraging players to pay closer attention to it. In discussing the design of their site-specific AR app Hidden Rippon Lea (2024), Briggs et al. highlight the importance of attuning oneself to an environment when building a relationship of care and maintenance with it. Before we can care for an environment, we must first orient ourselves and our senses towards it, as “understanding comes through our own awareness of Country — our capacity to listen and observe” (5). An important part of this process of listening and observing, they note, is physically slowing down, and moving through the environment at a gentle pace. “Slowing down can be a deliberate act of respect and a pathway to careful interactions with others”, as it affords the cognitive space necessary for contemplation and reflection, and guides our attention towards our current surroundings, in the present moment, rather than what’s ahead (11). A similar project, Epiphyte (2017), offers a particular way of encouraging this close attention, by using AR markers to lead players on a bushwalk through the Sherbrooke Forest in Melbourne’s Dandenong Ranges. Each of these markers, placed temporarily amongst the natural landscape, allows the player to collect a virtual seed that contributes to an “artificial ecology on their mobile device” (Riley et al. 240). Epiphyte thus aims to “encourage an affinity” between the player and their surroundings by engaging them in an attentive, non-linear wandering of the space, rather than leading them through it along a pre-determined trail (240). In order to discover the various markers distributed throughout the space, the player has to slow down, explore, and pay careful attention to their environment (243). In discussing what she calls wandering games, Kagen explicitly positions this kind of intuitive meandering as “a mode of movement much opposed to purpose-driven conquest” (7). When we wander an environment, we embrace ambiguity, indeterminacy, and inefficiency, because we are allowing our own intuition to guide us, rather than a pre-determined spatial goal or pathway. Solnit similarly notes that the “indeterminacy of the ramble” allows and encourages us to attune ourselves to an environment, to understand its layout and features, and to gain a stronger sense of place (10). Wandering, in other words, requires and encourages close and sustained attention, and close and sustained attention affords and encourages care, as we are not extracting resources from the environment for our own use, but engaging with and appreciating the environment on its own terms in order to move forward. In projects like Hidden Rippon Lea and Epiphyte, players are not exploiting or consuming the environment, but paying attention to and conversing with it (Briggs et al. 1). How might these kinds of environmental practices be encouraged in a wholly virtual environment, rather than an augmented reality overlying an actual environment? And how can designers use the unique affordances of that form to further encourage a more collaborative relationship between player and environment, in the interests of fostering a more caring design paradigm? Designing for Wandering, Attention, and Care Fig. 1: One of the interactive vignettes that the player can uncover in Walking the Face of My Dead Grandfather. To investigate this, I designed and made a shortform, exploration-based virtual environment entitled Walking the Face of My Dead Grandfather (2024). The project is a spatial memorial to my late grandfather, and has the player wandering through an artificial landscape based on the beaches, neighbourhoods, and parks close to his house, in Boon Wurrung Country in Melbourne, Australia. My goal was to bake the principles of wandering, attention, and environmental collaboration into the design at a deep level, so that the player’s performance is fundamentally motivated by care and reciprocity, rather than consumption and exploitation. To elicit the intuitive wandering that would foster the requisite careful attention to the environment, I began by designing a series of interactive, three-dimensional vignettes that were based on key memories that I have of my grandfather, and distributed them throughout the virtual space for the player to find. These included sitting on a bench to watch the trains go past (see fig. 1), a particularly eventful Christmas at his house, and so on. Crucially, the player does not know the location of these scenes ahead of time. Rather than positioning each vignette above the ground, so that they were visible from a distance, I placed them under the surface of the landscape, ready to be drawn forth with a mouse click. I used a looping sound and animation effect to mark the specific location of each vignette, but these can only be heard and seen when the player is relatively close to them. As such, the player can only happen upon these interactive scenes through genuine exploration and discovery, rather than moving directly between a series of enticing, but pre-given landmarks. The player must feel out the environment through their movement, with the vignettes serving to show the player where they have already been, rather than directing them where to go next. This means that the virtual landscape, at least initially, appears quite sparse, which results in a visual uniformity that presents all possible locations within the space as equally viable for exploration. This lack of any distinguishing features—and thus explicit spatial direction—produces a more intuitive, dérive-like movement pattern (Debord). It encourages the player to consciously and deliberately look down and pay closer attention to their immediate surroundings as they meander over the virtual landscape and trace its contours, rather than simply looking up and over it in anticipation of a clear destination on the horizon. As in Hidden Rippon Lea and Epiphyte, wandering in Walking the Face of My Dead Grandfather requires and encourages close attention to the landscape, but I also took specific steps to cultivate that attention. I slowed down the movement speed of the player’s avatar to a substantial degree, and reduced how quickly they can look around the virtual space. This prevented the player from rushing through the experience at speed, and instead gives them time to attend to the environment around them, and to notice the various stories and objects that I have embedded within it. To further direct the player’s attention towards the environment, I deliberately avoided some of the traditional control inputs that one might expect in a first-person, exploration-based virtual environment, such as sprinting and jumping. Not only did this slow the player down, but it encouraged them to look around their immediate vicinity, as “with fewer interactions to perform, the player has little else to focus on other than the audio-visual and virtual environment” (Muscat et al. 5). Rather than overloading the player with a complicated set of instructions and movements to learn and perform as part of the experience, I limited the interactive design to a simple mouse click for each action, allowing them to focus on their exploration of and interactions with the environment itself. I also used a series of explicit spatial barriers—in the form of fences, buildings, and the edges of the landscape itself—to circumscribe the environment, and to contain the player’s wandering within it. Rather than trying to push outwards to conquer and consume an endless expanse of terrain, these barriers make it clear to the player that their attention should be focussed within the boundaries, rather than outside of them. Thus, with the player’s attention firmly and sustainably on the environment, I turned to developing a more collaborative relationship between the player and the environment. To do so, I set each of the 3D models that populate the landscape—every plant, fence, building, bench, bridge, pathway, stair, and powerline—to be invisible to the player until they are approached. Fig. 2: A series of buildings that have been activated by the player’s movement in Walking the Face of My Dead Grandfather. I achieved this by placing a trigger zone around each of these assets: when hit by the player, the associated object will fade into the scene over a couple of seconds. Because I distributed the assets across the landscape and positioned them slightly apart from one another, this has the effect of the environment filling in with detail as the player moves through it. Importantly, this shifts the character of the player’s interaction with the environment. Rather than ignoring the landscape as they dash to a new destination, the player is attentive to its form and its details, and looking at and listening to it as it expresses itself. Players of Walking the Face of My Dead Grandfather are not destroying the environment through violence, or removing elements from it. Instead, they are contributing to it in an act of co-creation: they are bringing parts of the environment into being through their movement, at the same time that the environment is offering them stories, objects, and knowledge (see fig. 2). The final form of the landscape is the unique result of the collaboration between the player and the environment, with each party having as much effect on that form as the other. Without the player, the details of the environment do not emerge; without those details, the player has no sense of place or narrative. As such, the player is not the sole producer of meaning, but reminded that they are “merely a small part of a greater whole” (Reitsma 1556). In other words, the environment and the player enter into a reciprocal relationship of what Bawaka Country et al. call co-becoming. In this ontology, an environment, the knowledge that it carries, and the people and animals within it, are understood “as relational, as always emerging … and as both bounded and constituted through flows and relationships” (460). In each interaction in Walking the Face of My Dead Grandfather, the player becomes something a little bit more, as does the environment. As the player wanders the artificial landscape, and encounters and interacts with each of the vignettes and objects, they build up a subjective, interpretive impression of who my grandfather was. This impression is expanded and deepened as they draw connections between each vignette and the details of the places that he occupied, and they learn more about him. Therefore, just as the player shapes the environment by activating the assets through their movement and interaction, the environment shapes the player by offering new emotional and narrative information to reflect upon, and to inform their broader impression of my grandfather. Both entities enjoy a ludic and spatial relationship that is more cooperative than combative, and so the player is motivated to learn from, value, and care for the environment as an equal partner in their play, rather than an incidental container for it. This relationship is made possible by their close attention to the space, fostered by the spatial practice of wandering that I embedded into the structure of the design. Conclusion There is no doubt that the content and structure of Walking the Face of My Dead Grandfather is specific and local. I didn’t attempt to capture a particular place in meticulous detail like Virtual Songlines does, nor did I use the virtual environment as a vessel to store and transmit specific cultural knowledge from a specific cultural group (Wyeld et al.). Instead, I have poured my memories and knowledge of a particular place that is important to me into a virtual, impressionistic depiction of that place. In doing so, I used that specificity to encourage players to wander, pay attention to, and care for the specific places that are important to them, and to offer designers a model for producing work that is informed by principles of care and collaboration, rather than destruction and consumption. Virtual environments, like all media, are not devoid of ideology and socio-political propagation: after all, they “embody the values to which the surrounding society subscribes” (Flanagan and Jakobsson 19). In the case of many exploration-based and open-world videogames in particular, these values are informed by the legacies of violence and colonialism that equally shaped many of the countries in which these games are made and played. In order to disrupt and displace these problematic and destructive legacies as they manifest in the design of virtual environments and videogames, it behooves designers to consider how their work can foster more caring and sustainable modes of seeing and interacting with space, both virtual and actual. References Aarseth, Espen. “Allegories of Space: The Question of Spatiality in Computer Games.” Cybertext Yearbook 2000, eds. Markku Eskelinen and Raine Koskimaa. Research Centre for Contemporary Culture, 2001. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. PlayStation 4 version. Ubisoft Montreal, 2020. Bawaka Country, et al. “Co-Becoming Bawaka: Towards a Relational Understanding of Place/Space.” Progress in Human Geography 40.4 (2015): 455–75. Barrett, James. “Virtual Worlds and Indigenous Narratives.” The Immersive Internet: Reflections on the Entangling of the Virtual with Society, Politics and the Economy, eds. Robin Teigland and Dominic Power. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 77–91. Blouin-Payer, Roxane, et al. Decolonizing Play: Exploring Frameworks for Game Design Free of Colonial Values. 7. Polaris Game Design Retreat, 2023. Briggs, N’Arwee’t Carolyn, et al. “Listen – Look Up! Listen – Look Down! Experiencing the Counter-City through a Sonic and Augmented Reality Experience of Urban Undergrounds in Southeast Melbourne.” Cities: The International Journal of Urban Policy and Planning 14.2 (2023). Epiphyte. Mobile app. Matthew Riley and Troy Innocent, 2017. Debord, Guy. “Theory of the Dérive.” Les Lévres Nues. Trans. Ken Knabb. 1956. Dyer-Witheford, Nick, and Greig de Peuter. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009. Flanagan, Mary, and Mikael Jakobsson. Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games. Cambridge: MIT P, 2022. Fuller, Mary, and Henry Jenkins. “Nintendo and New World Travel Writing: A Dialogue.” CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, ed. Steven G. Jones. Sage Publications, 1995. 57–72. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. PlayStation 2 version. Rockstar North, 2002. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001. Hidden Rippon Lea. Mobile app. Carolyn Briggs and Laura Harper, 2024. Kagen, Melissa. Wandering Games. Cambridge: MIT P, 2022. Keogh, Brendan. “Performing Colonialism.” Reverse Shot, 24 Mar. 2016. 10 Sep. 2024 <https://reverseshot.org/series/entry/2189/performing_colonialism>. Lammes, Sybille. “Postcolonial Playgrounds: Games as Postcolonial Cultures.” Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture 4.1 (2010): 1–6. Magnet, Shoshana. “Playing at Colonization: Interpreting Imaginary Landscapes in the Video Game Tropico.” Journal of Communication Inquiry 30.2 (2006): 142–62. Mukherjee, Souvik. Videogames and Postcolonialism: Empire Plays Back. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Muscat, Alexander, et al. “First-Person Walkers: Understanding the Walker Experience through Four Design Themes.” Proceedings of 1st International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG, 2016. Pascoe, Bruce. Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture. Magabala Books, 2018. Pumpa, Malcolm. “Beyond the Map: Issues in the Design of a Virtual 3D Knowledge Space for Aboriginal Knowledge.” VSMM’07: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia. Springer, 2007. 47–57. Reitsma, Lizette, et al. “A Respectful Design Framework. Incorporating Indigenous Knowledge in the Design Process.” The Design Journal 22.1 (2019): 1555–70. Riley, Matthew, et al. “Re-Imagining Bushland Settings through Location-Based AR Mobile Gameplay.” The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media Art, eds. Larissa Hjorth et al. Taylor & Francis, 2020. 236–47. No Man’s Sky. Windows PC version. Hello Games, 2016. Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Penguin, 2000. Super Mario Bros. Nintendo Entertainment System version. Nintendo R&D4, 1985. Torres Strait Virtual Reality. Windows PC version. Rhett Loban, 2018. Tropico. Windows PC version. PopTop Software, 2001. Virtual Songlines. Browser-based. Indijiverse, 2003 - present. Walking the Face of My Dead Grandfather. Windows PC version. Liam Gibbons, 2024. Wyeld, Theodor G., et al. “Doing Cultural Heritage Using the Torque Game Engine: Supporting Indigenous Storytelling in a 3D Virtual Environment.” International Journal of Architectural Computing 5.2 (2007): 417–35.

Whichever way you look at it, self is bound up with consciousness, so it seems useful to review some of the more significant existing conceptions of this relationship. A claim by Mikhail Bakhtin can serve as an anchoring point for this discussion. He firmly predicates the formation of self not just on the existence of an individual consciousness, but on what might be called a double or social (or dialogic) consciousness. Summarising his argument, Pam Morris writes: 'A single consciousness could not generate a sense of its self; only the awareness of another consciousness outside the self can produce that image.' She goes on to say that, 'Behind this notion is Bakhtin's very strong sense of the physical and spatial materiality of bodily being,' and quotes directly from Bakhtin's essay as follows: This other human being whom I am contemplating, I shall always see and know something that he, from his place outside and over against me, cannot see himself: parts of his body that are inaccessible to his own gaze (his head, his face and its expression), the world behind his back . . . are accessible to me but not to him. As we gaze at each other, two different worlds are reflected in the pupils of our eyes . . . to annihilate this difference completely, it would be necessary to merge into one, to become one and the same person. This ever--present excess of my seeing, knowing and possessing in relation to any other human being, is founded in the uniqueness and irreplaceability of my place in the world. (Bakhtin in Morris 6 Recent investigations in neuroscience and the philosophy of mind lay down a challenge to this social conception of the self. Notably, it is a challenge that does not involve the restoration of any variant of Cartesian rationalism; indeed, it arguably over--privileges rationalism's subjective or phenomenological opposite. 'Self' in this emerging view is a biologically generated but illusory construction, an effect of the operation of what are called 'neural correlates of consciousness' (NCC). Very briefly, an NCC refers to the distinct pattern of neurochemical activity, a 'neural representational system' -- to some extent observable by modern brain--imaging equipment – that corresponds to a particular configuration of sense--phenomena, or 'content of consciousness' (a visual image, a feeling, or indeed a sense of self). Because this science is still largely hypothetical, with many alternative terms and descriptions, it would be better in this limited space to focus on one particular account – one that is particularly well developed in the area of selfhood and one that resonates with other conceptions included in this discussion. Thomas Metzinger begins by postulating the existence within each person (or 'system' in his terms) of a 'self--model', a representation produced by neural activity -- what he calls a 'neural correlate of self--consciousness' -- that the individual takes to be the actual self, or what Metzinger calls the 'phenomenal self'. 'A self--model is important,' Metzinger says, 'in enabling a system to represent itself to itself as an agent' (293). The individual is able to maintain this illusion because 'the self--model is the only representational structure that is anchored in the brain by a continuous source of internally generated input' (297). In a manner partly reminiscent of Bakhtin, he continues: 'The body is always there, and although its relational properties in space and in movement constantly change, the body is the only coherent perceptual object that constantly generates input.' The reason why the individual is able to jump from the self--model to the phenomenal self in the first place is because: We are systems that are not able to recognise their subsymbolic self--model as a model. For this reason, we are permanently operating under the conditions of a 'naïve--realistic self--misunderstanding': We experience ourselves as being in direct and immediate epistemic contact with ourselves. What we have in the past simply called a 'self' is not a non--physical individual, but only the content of an ongoing dynamical process – the process of transparent self—modeling. (Metzinger 299) The question that nonetheless arises is why it should be concluded that this self--model emerges from subjective neural activity and not, say, from socialisation. Why should a self--model be needed in the first place? Metzinger's response is to say that there is good evidence 'for some kind of innate 'body prototype'' (298), and he refers to research that shows that even children born without limbs develop self--models which sometimes include limbs, or report phantom sensations in limbs that have never existed. To me, this still leaves open the possibility that such children are modelling their body image on strong identification with human others. But be that as it may, one of the things that remains unclear after this relatively rich account of contemporary or scientific phenomenology is the extent to which 'neural consciousness' is or can be supplemented by other kinds of consciousness, or indeed whether neural consciousness can be overridden by the 'self' acting on the basis of these other kinds of consciousness. The key stake in Metzinger's account is 'subjectivity'. The reason why the neural correlate of self--consciousness is so important to him is: 'Only if we find the neural and functional correlates of the phenomenal self will we be able to discover a more general theoretical framework into which all data can fit. Only then will we have a chance to understand what we are actually talking about when we say that phenomenal experience is a subjective phenomenon' (301). What other kinds of consciousness might there be? It is significant that, not only do NCC exponents have little to say about the interaction with other people, they rarely mention language, and they are unanimously and emphatically of the opinion that the thinking or processing that takes place in consciousness is not dependent on language, or indeed any signifying system that we know of (though conceivably, it occurs to me, the neural correlates may signify to, or 'call up', each other). And they show little 'consciousness' that a still influential body of opinion (informed latterly by post--structuralist thinking) has argued for the consciousness shaping effects of 'discourse' -- i.e. for socially and culturally generated patterns of language or other signification to order the processing of reality. We could usefully coin the term 'verbal correlates of consciousness' (VCC) to refer to these patterns of signification (words, proverbs, narratives, discourses). Again, however, the same sorts of questions apply, since few discourse theorists mention anything like neuroscience: To what extent is verbal consciousness supplemented by other forms of consciousness, including neural consciousness? These questions may never be fully answerable. However, it is interesting to work through the idea that NCC and VCC both exist and can be in some kind of relation even if the precise relationship is not measurable. This indeed is close to the case that Charles Shepherdson makes for psychoanalysis in attempting to retrieve it from the misunderstanding under which it suffers today: We are now familiar with debates between those who seek to demonstrate the biological foundations of consciousness and sexuality, and those who argue for the cultural construction of subjectivity, insisting that human life has no automatically natural form, but is always decisively shaped by contingent historical conditions. No theoretical alternative is more widely publicised than this, or more heavily invested today. And yet, this very debate, in which 'nature' and 'culture' are opposed to one another, amounts to a distortion of psychoanalysis, an interpretive framework that not only obscures its basic concepts, but erodes the very field of psychoanalysis as a theoretically distinct formation (2--3). There is not room here for an adequate account of Shepherdson's recuperation of psychoanalytic categories. A glimpse of the stakes involved is provided by Shepherdson's account, following Eugenie Lemoine--Luccione, of anorexia, which neither biomedical knowledge nor social constructionism can adequately explain. The further fact that anorexia is more common among women of the same family than in the general population, and among women rather than men, but in neither case exclusively so, thereby tending to rule out a genetic factor, allows Shepherdson to argue: [A]norexia can be understood in terms of the mother--daughter relation: it is thus a symbolic inheritance, a particular relation to the 'symbolic order', that is transmitted from one generation to another . . . we may add that this relation to the 'symbolic order' [which in psychoanalytic theory is not coextensive with language] is bound up with the symbolisation of sexual difference. One begins to see from this that the term 'sexual difference' is not used biologically, but also that it does not refer to general social representations of 'gender,' since it concerns a more particular formation of the 'subject' (12). An intriguing, and related, possibility, suggested by Foucault, is that NCC and VCC (or in Foucault's terms the 'visible' and the 'articulable'), operate independently of each other – that there is a 'disjunction' (Deleuze 64) or 'dislocation' (Shepherdson 166) between them that prevents any dialectical relation. Clearly, for Foucault, the lack of dialectical relation between the two modes does not mean that both are not at all times equally functional. But one can certainly speculate that, increasingly under postmodernity and media saturation, the verbal (i.e. the domain of signification in general) is influential. And if linguistic formations -- discourses, narratives, etc. -- can proliferate and feed on each other unconstrained by other aspects of reality, we get the sense of language 'running away with itself' and, at least for a time, becoming divorced from a more complete sense of reality. (This of course is basically the argument of Baudrillard.) The reverse may also be possible, in certain periods, although the idea that language could have no mediating effect at all on the production of reality (just inconsequential fluff on the surface of things) seems far--fetched in the wake of so much postmodern and media theory. However, the notion is consistent with the theories of hard--line materialists and genetic determinists. But we should at least consider the possibility that some sort of shaping interaction between NCC and VCC, without implicating the full conceptual apparatus of psychoanalysis, is continuously occurring. This possibility is, for me, best realised by Jacques Derrida when he writes of an irreducible interweaving of consciousness and language (the latter for Derrida being a cover term for any system of signification). This interweaving is such that the significatory superstructure 'reacts upon' the 'substratum of non--expressive acts and contents', and the name for this interweaving is 'text' (Mowitt 98). A further possibility is that provided by Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus -- the socially inherited schemes of perception and selection, imparted by language and example, which operate for the most part below the level of consciousness but are available to conscious reflection by any individual lucky enough to learn how to recognise that possibility. If the subjective representations of NCC exist, this habitus can be at best only partial; something denied by Bourdieu whose theory of individual agency is founded in what he has referred to as 'the relation between two states of the social' – i.e. 'between history objectified in things, in the form of institutions, and history incarnate in the body, in the form of that system of durable dispositions I call habitus' (190). At the same time, much of Bourdieu's thinking about the habitus seems as though it could be consistent with the kind of predictable representations that might be produced by NCC. For example, there are the simple oppositions that structure much perception in Bourdieu's account. These range from the obvious phenomenological ones (dark/light; bright/dull; male/female; hard/soft, etc.) through to the more abstract, often analogical or metaphorical ones, such as those produced by teachers when assessing their students (bright/dull again; elegant/clumsy, etc.). It seems possible that NCC could provide the mechanism or realisation for the representation, storage, and reactivation of impressions constituting a social model--self. However, an entirely different possibility remains to be considered – which perhaps Bourdieu is also getting at – involving a radical rejection of both NCC and VCC. Any correlational or representational theory of the relationship between a self and his/her environment -- which, according to Charles Altieri, includes the anti--logocentrism of Derrida -- assumes that the primary focus for any consciousness is the mapping and remapping of this relationship rather than the actions and purposes of the agent in question. Referring to the later philosophy of Wittgenstein, Altieri argues: 'Conciousness is essentially not a way of relating to objects but of relating to actions we learn to perform . . . We do not usually think about objects, but about the specific form of activity which involves us with these objects at this time' (233). Clearly, there is not yet any certainty in the arguments provided by neuroscience that neural activity performs a representational role. Is it not, then, possible that this activity, rather than being a 'correlate' of entities, is an accompaniment to, a registration of, action that the rest of the body is performing? In this view, self is an enactment, an expression (including but not restricted to language), and what self--consciousness is conscious of is this activity of the self, not the self as entity. In a way that again returns us towards Bakhtin, Altieri writes: '>From an analytical perspective, it seems likely that our normal ways of acting in the world provide all the criteria we need for a sense of identity. As Sidney Shoemaker has shown, the most important source of the sense of our identity is the way we use the spatio--temporal location of our body to make physical distinctions between here and there, in front and behind, and so on' (234). Reasonably consistent with the Wittgensteinian view -- in its focus on self--activity -- is that contemporary theorisation of the self that compares in influence with that posed by neuroscience. This is the self avowedly constructed by networked computer technology, as described by Mark Poster: [W]hat has occurred in the advanced industrial societies with increasing rapidity . . . is the dissemination of technologies of symbolisation, or language machines, a process that may be described as the electronic textualisation of daily life, and the concomitant transformations of agency, transformations of the constitution of individuals as fixed identities (autonomous, self--regulating, independent) into subjects that are multiple, diffuse, fragmentary. The old (modern) agent worked with machines on natural materials to form commodities, lived near other workers and kin in urban communities, walked to work or traveled by public transport, and read newspapers but engaged as a communicator mostly in face--to--face relations. The new (postmodern) agent works mostly on symbols using computers, lives in isolation from other workers and kin, travels to work by car, and receives news and entertainment from television. . . . Individuals who have this experience do not stand outside the world of objects, observing, exercising rational faculties and maintaining a stable character. The individuals constituted by the new modes of information are immersed and dispersed in textualised practices where grounds are less important than moves. (44--45) Interestingly, Metzinger's theorisation of the model--self lends itself to the self--mutability -- though not the diffusion -- favoured by postmodernists like Poster. [I]t is . . . well conceivable that a system generates a number of different self--models which are functionally incompatible, and therefore modularised. They nevertheless could be internally coherent, each endowed with its own characteristic phenomenal content and behavioral profile. . . this does not have to be a pathological situation. Operating under different self--models in different situational contexts may be biologically as well as socially adaptive. Don't we all to some extent use multiple personalities to cope efficiently with different parts of our lives? (295--6) Poster's proposition is consistent with that of many in the humanities and social sciences today, influenced variously by postmodernism and social constructionism. What I believe remains at issue about his account is that it exchanges one form of externally constituted self ('fixed identity') for another (that produced by the 'modes of information'), and therefore remains locked in a logic of deterministic constitution. (There is a parallel here with Altieri's point about Derrida's inability to escape representation.) Furthermore, theorists like Poster may be too quickly generalising from the experience of adults in 'textualised environments'. Until such time as human beings are born directly into virtual reality environments, each will, for a formative period of time, experience the world in the way described by Bakhtin – through 'a unified perception of bodily and personal being . . . characterised . . . as a loving gift mutually exchanged between self and other across the borderzone of their two consciousnesses' (cited in Morris 6). I suggest it is very unlikely that this emergent sense of being can ever be completely erased even when people subsequently encounter each other in electronic networked environments. It is clearly not the role of a brief survey like this to attempt any resolution of these matters. Indeed, my review has made all the more apparent how far from being settled the question of consciousness, and by extension the question of selfhood, remains. Even the classical notion of the homunculus (the 'little inner man' or the 'ghost in the machine') has been put back into play with Francis Crick and Christof Koch's (2000) neurobiological conception of the 'unconscious homunculus'. The balance of contemporary evidence and argument suggests that the best thing to do right now is to keep the questions open against any form of reductionism – whether social or biological. One way to do this is to explore the notions of self and consciousness as implicated in ongoing processes of complex co--adaptation between biology and culture -- or their individual level equivalents, brain and mind (Taylor Ch. 7). References Altieri, C. "Wittgenstein on Consciousness and Language: a Challenge to Derridean Literary Theory." Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts. Ed. Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey. New York: Routledge, 2001. Bourdieu, P. In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology. Trans. Matthew Adamson. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Crick, F. and Koch, C. "The Unconscious Homunculus." Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Empirical and Conceptual Questions. Ed. Thomas Metzinger. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000. Deleuze, G. Foucault. Trans. Sean Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Metzinger, T. "The Subjectivity of Subjective Experience: A Representationalist Analysis of the First-Person Perspective." Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Empirical and Conceptual Questions. Ed. Thomas Metzinger. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000. Morris, P. (ed.). The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov. London: Edward Arnold, 1994. Mowitt, J. Text: The Genealogy of an Interdisciplinary Object. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992. Poster, M. Cultural History and Modernity: Disciplinary Readings and Challenges. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Shepherdson, C. Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 2000. Taylor, M. C. The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Wallace, Derek. "'Self' and the Problem of Consciousness" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.5 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Wallace.html &gt. Chicago Style Wallace, Derek, "'Self' and the Problem of Consciousness" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 5 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Wallace.html &gt ([your date of access]). APA Style Wallace, Derek. (2002) 'Self' and the Problem of Consciousness. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0210/Wallace.html &gt ([your date of access]).

We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, have no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabulary of science that we desire. We also want a language of that different yield. A yield rich as the harvests of the earth, a yield that returns us to our own sacredness, to a self-love and respect that will carry out to others (Hogan 122). Through storytelling the world is created and recreated: in the values and worldviews stories offer, in the patterns of thinking and knowing that listening and reading place in our spirits and minds, in the stories we tell and live. We walk in the ripples our old people left behind and we follow them up, just as our children and the generations after us will walk in shapes and patterns we make with our lives. Our delicate world is poised on a precipice with increasing species extinction and loss of habitat, deforestation, displacement of animal and human communities, changing weather patterns, and polluted waterways. How do we manage the environmental and cultural issues of our complex global world? How do we come together to look after each other and the world around us? Often there is a sense that science will save us, that if we keep “progressing” at a fast enough rate we can escape the consequences of our actions. However, science alone, no matter how sophisticated, cannot alter the fundamental truths of action and reaction in Country: that if you take too much, something, somewhere, will go without. As Guungu Yimithirr man Roy McIvor writes: Dad often spoke about being aware of the consequences of our actions. He used different stories as teaching tools, but the idea was the same. Like a boomerang, your bad actions will come back to hurt you (89). In the end, it will not be technological innovation alone that will alter the course we have set out for ourselves. Rather, it will be human beings embracing a different way of relating to the environment than the current dominant paradigm that sees people take too much, too often. With this is mind, we would like to consider the integral role children’s literature plays in sustaining knowledge patterns of Country and ecology for the future. In the context of children’s literature and ecology the idea of sustaining environmental and cultural awareness is shared via the written word—how it is used, presented, and read, particularly with ideas of the child reader in mind. Our children will be the ones who struggle with the ripples we leave in our wake and they will be the ones who count the cost of our decisions as they in turn make decisions for the generations that will follow them. If we teach the right values then the behaviour of our children will reflect those ideas. In the Aboriginal way it’s about getting the story right, so that they can learn the right ways to be in Country, to be a human being, and to look after the world they inherit. As Deborah Bird Rose states, Country is a “nourishing terrain; a place that gives and receives life” (Rose Country 7). This paper will examine two Aboriginal children’s stories that teach about a living, holistic, interrelated world and the responsibilities of human beings to look after it. Specifically, the authors will examine Joshua and the Two Crabs by Joshua Button and Dingo’s Tree by Gladys and Jill Milroy. Both stories are published by Aboriginal publisher Magabala Books and represent a genre of Aboriginal writing about Country and how to take care of it. They form part of the “language of that different yield” (Hogan 122) that Indigenous writer Linda Hogan advocates, a language that emerges from an ecology of the mind that locates human beings as an interconnected part of the patterns of the earth. The first text discussion focuses on the sharing of implicit meaning via textual form—that is, the lay out of the story, its peritext, and illustrations. The second textual discussion centres explicitly on content and meaning. Both textual analyses aim to open up a dialogue between Aboriginal ecology and children’s literature to provide inter-subjective approaches for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal readers/listeners. Aboriginal Story Ecology In Aboriginal philosophy the universe is the creative expression of Dreaming Ancestors who created the world—the land, plants, animals, stars and elements—and then settled into the creation they had made: …white people also call this the Dreaming. The Tjukurpa tells how the landscape, animals, plants, and people were made and what they mean for one another. The Tjukurpa is in everything. It is in the rocks, in the trees, even in the mice, mingkiri (Baker xii). Through their actions they formed the pattern of reality that finds its expression in human beings and in everything around us—the stars, earth, rivers, trees, rocks, and forms of life that make up the world. Aboriginal knowledge systems understand the patterns of life and our relationships to them through the structure of story. Dreaming stories—stories about the creation of the world and how the fundamental Laws were handed down to the people—have special significance. However, the stories we make with our lives and experiences are also important—stories about funny things that happened and our relationships with our families and loved ones. These stories are also a part of Country because there is nothing that does not emerge and return to the land, nothing that is not part of the pattern that the Dreaming Ancestors made: The Story is the Land, and the Land is the Story. The Story holds the people, and the people live inside the Story. The Story lives inside the people also. It goes all ways to hold the land (Turner 45). The imprint of creation, the structure of the relationships that make up the world, is held in story. Thus, in Aboriginal logic the patterns of nature, the patterns of stories, and the patterns of language, society, and culture are reflections and expressions of the pattern of creation woven by the Dreaming Ancestors. As Yunipingu writes: …For us society and nature are not separate. We have Yirritja and Dhuwa, and these categories contain elements which are both natural and social. Also, of course, they have elements which Europeans call supernatural or metaphysical (9). Through stories we come to know not just the world but who we are and the proper ways of relating to the ecology’s around us. As we learn stories the pattern of learning grows inside of us, in our ways of thinking, doing, and being. They provide the framework for our spirit and mind to develop so we come to know and be in the world in a proper or straight way—to enhance the pattern of life, not to destroy it. This is an Aboriginal “Story Ecology” where stories serve as maps that teach us who we are and our role in the world. Yuin Elder Max Harrison (2009) observes the three truths on passing on traditional knowledge: See the land…the beautyHear the land….the storyFeel the land…the spirit (no pg). To sustain Country is to sustain the self. To tell, share, and know story is to know the environment and to sustain the environment. As Kathy Deveraux writes ‘it’s like the spider: a lot of things tie in together, so when you ask one thing, you get a whole big history’ (qtd in Rose, Country 7). Aboriginal story promotes ecological practice by enlivening the reader’s empathy toward the environment and nurturing a sense of union between what is within us and what is outside of us. The imagery and text of Aboriginal story often achieves this umbilical in two defining ways. The first is through the positioning of the age, setting, or backdrop. The second is born from the relationships animated between these vitally active surrounds and the characters contained therein. Makere Stewart-Harrawira states that: All human experiences and all forms of knowledge contributed to the overall understandings and interpretations. The important task was to find the proper pattern of interpretation. Hence it can be said that indigenous peoples have traditionally regarded knowledge as something that must be stood in its entire context. The traditional principles of traditional knowledge [...] remain fixed and provide the framework within which new experiences and situations are understood and given meaning. As such, these principles are the means by which cultural knowledge becomes remade and given meaning in our time. Another principle is that every individual element of the natural world, each individual rock and stone, each individual animal and plant, every body of land and of water, has its own unique life force (155). Examples of these features of Aboriginal story ecology can be seen in our analysis of the following two stories Joshua and the Two Crabs and Dingo’s Tree. Joshua and the Two Crabs In Joshua and the Two Crabs by Joshua Button, published by Magabala Books in 2008, the narrative, illustrations, and peritext all combine to enable alternative eco-cultural understandings and values. Joshua Button is a young Indigenous author from saltwater country, as is the protagonist in the text. Joshua, the character, observes the movements of country and its inhabitants and Joshua, the author and illustrator, expresses these meanings via words, colours, and illustrations. In particular, the text represents relationships with, and within, Crab Creek. The peritext offers information about Crab Creek—a tidal creek in the mangroves of Roebuck Bay in north-west Western Australia. “The area abounds with wildlife, including migratory birds, fruit bats, crabs and shellfish. It is a place for local people to spend the day fishing off the beach for a ‘pan-sized’ feed of salmon, queenfish, silver bream or trevally. Catching and cooking mud crabs is one of Joshua’s favourite things to do” (no pg). Story, place, and child are now formally positioned as the centre of the narrative and their relationship strengthened by the colours used to represent country and movement. The narrative focuses on Joshua’s family trip to Crab Creek and his interactions with the land, the water, and the animals. His story reveals a meeting of land and sea, a reading of land and sea, and a listening to land and sea. Country and its inhabitants are revealed as having multiple relationships. From the moment his mob arrives, the narrative emphasizes listening to and reading country: Joshua’s Mum moves faster when she reads the movement of the tides and when Joshua ventures into the mangroves he listens to the “Plop! Plop! Plop! Of the air rising up through the mud” (Button, no pg.). With his bucket and spear Joshua’s movements through country are observed and considered by the creatures around him; wader birds carefully watch him and Joshua engages in a dialogue with two big mud crabs that remind the boy that he has also been perceived by Country, which is itself sentient. Animals and country speak and observe—the tide moves, the sand is hot, mudskippers skip, and crabs escape and hide. Joshua’s relationship with the mud crabs is dependent on the boy and the crabs seeing each other and communicating: “‘I can see you two!’ ‘Well, we can see you too,’ said the crabs” (Button, no pg). The narrative provides a beautifully simplistic example of different perspectives and positions for the intended child reader. Both Joshua and the crabs’ perspectives are given space to be acknowledged and understood: one character is searching, another character is escaping. When Joshua finally catches the crabs he carefully brings them back to camp and the entire family have a good feed of them and the golden trevally Joshua’s Mum caught. “Afterwards they sat watching the tide empty out of the bay. Long-legged wader birds picked their way across the silvery mudflats. It had been a good day” (Button, no pg). The story offers a colourful, fun, and cyclical way of seeing country from a perspective that centres the relationship between family, food, and land. It presents this relationship and the implicit meaning of observing and living in country via traditional textual elements such as the written word, colour illustrations, and movement from left to right, but in doing so, the text becomes a form of sustaining relationship with country as well, not just for Joshua but also for the intended child reader. Dingo’s Tree Dingo’s Tree by Jill and Gladys Milroy is a much longer story than Joshua and the Two Crabs and also deals with more serious themes. The story is about Dingo who drew his own rain tree on a rock because the other animals didn’t share their shade with him. The tree then becomes real and grows beyond the limit of the sky and keeps Dingo’s waterhole full through the drought season. The others come to rely on Dingo’s waterhole and feel bad for not sharing with him and teasing him about his tree. As the water dries up, one single special raindrop is found on a little tree and Dingo decides to spare the drop even when all the waterholes become dry. Dingo feels that something is wrong when he sees that the raindrop is slowly growing larger. To survive, Dingo and his friend Wombat teach Little Tree to walk to water. He becomes known as Walking Tree and they are soon joined by all of the others in the land. On their way to the mountain to find water they see the river and half the mountain replaced by mining, and Walking Tree soon becomes overburdened with the weight of the others. The birds decide to carry him—his branches full of friends—and they succeed for a short time only to grow tired. Soon they are all falling toward their impending death until Dingo chooses to use the last raindrop, now much larger, and their fall is broken and a new waterhole is made. However, it is only enough for Walking Tree to live forever and because he is the last tree, the others (but one baby crow) go to the Heavens awaiting their return at the end of humankinds reign on the land. In the story of the Dingo’s Tree the adventure begins in “unspoiled country” with its inventory of cast members who, in real life, naturally inhabit the area. All are shown to be adjusting recurrently within the known cycles of drought and abundance, suggested by the authors in the line “the drought came”, then a subtle reference to patterns of migration as the season is introduced and the cast move to more reliable waterholes. Establishing the story in this space encourages the young reader to identify the natural landscape as “normal”, and part of that normality are the cycles that create and degenerate growth. It is the antagonist that is responsible for the creation of unnatural change. Mining becomes the assassin of country with men as poachers "carting away great loads of rock and earth in huge machines" (Milroy and Milroy 39). This scene is of great importance, although it is only allocated a single page, because it shows where the artery of country has been severed. Its effects have been cleverly woven into the storyline beforehand in several ways. The line “the drought stayed” illustrates a seasonal defiance. In turn, Dingo becomes aware of this imbalance: "for a while Dingo lived happily in his cave but lately he’d begun to worry about the country, something wasn’t right" (Milroy and Milroy 1). Dingo reads the signs of the country. His attention to the life cycles of the land are brought to the attention of the reader teaching children about the important role of observation in caring for country. In addition to this, a warning is given to Crow by the Rain Tree through a vision of a future landscape devastated and dying: "It is what your country will become…The mining is cutting too deep for the scars to heal. Once destroyed the mountains can’t grow again and give birth to the rivers that they send to the sea…"(Milroy and Milroy 20). Contained in this passage is a direct environmental truth, but the beauty of the passage lies in the language chosen by the authors. The phrase “cutting too deep for the scars to heal” links a human experience to an environmental one, as does the phrase “give birth to the rivers”. A child is able to recognise the physical pain of a cut and a child is also able to recognise that birth belongs to the Mother. The use of this language forges a powerful connection in the mind of the reader between the self and the Earth - the child and the Mother. Country feels pain, the mountains and rivers activate their own membership in life’s cycles, and even the far off Moon participates in thought and conversation, all of which awaken a consciousness within the reader toward the animate spirit of the natural world, parenting a considerate relationship to land. It is this animate relationship with the land that it is at the heart of the story. It is the mountain that sends the rivers to the sea, rather than the abstract force of gravity. If the authors were to omit this living relationship between the mountains, the rivers, and the sea, the readers understanding would be contained to simple geophysical processes with their life force reduced to an impersonal science, if thought of at all. Instead, the mountain chooses to send the rivers to the sea because it is the right way, so natural processes become exposed as conscious participants in story rather than being portrayed as passive or inanimate objects and this not only deepens the impact of their destruction later in the plot, it also deepens the connection between the reader and the land. Writing the Future Joshua and the Two Crabs and Dingo’s Tree offer two different Aboriginal stories with underlying commonalities: they both position relationships, Country, and people into an integrated web and provide a moral framework for sustaining the relationships around us. Children’s picture books and narratives are foundational initiations for many Australian child readers in their ecological education—whether overtly or covertly. How a society, a character, a narrative, represents, treats, and perceives the land influences how the reader encounters the landscape. We argue that Indigenous Australian children’s literature, written, illustrated, produced, and disseminated largely by Indigenous knowledges, offers counter-point views and stories about the land and accompanying interrelated relationships that provide the reader with a space to re-consider, re-inhabit, or transform their own ecological positioning. References Baker, Lynn. Mingkirri: A Natural History of Ulu-ru by the Mu-titjulu Community. Canberra: IAD Press, 1996. Button, Joshua. Joshua and the Two Crabs. Broome: Magabala Books, 2008. Harrison, Max. My Peoples Dreaming. Sydney: Finch Publishing, 2009. Hogan, Linda. “A Different Yield.” Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision. Ed. Marie Battise. Toronto: UBC Press, 2000. 115 – 23. McIvor, Roy. Cockatoo: My Life in Cape York. Broome: Magabala Books, 2010. Milroy, Gladys and Jill Milroy. Dingo’s Tree. Broome: Magabala Books, 2012. Rose, Deborah Bird. Country of the Heart: An Indigenous Australian Homeland. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2002. ——-. “Pattern, Connection, Desire: In Honour of Gregory Bateson”. Australian Humanities Review, 35 (2005). 14th June 2012, ‹http://wwwlib.latrobe.cdu.au/A1IR/archive!lssue-June 2005/rose.html›. Stewart-Harawira, Makere. “Cultural Studies, Indigenous Knowledge and Pedagogies of Hope.” Policy Futures in Education 3.2 (2005):153-63. Turner, Margaret. Iwenhe Tyerrtye: What It Means to Be an Aboriginal Person. Alice Springs: IAD Press, 2010. Yunupingu, Mandawuy. Voices from the Land. Canberra: Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 1994.

The Gothic is not always suited to women’s emancipation, but it is very well suited to women’s anger, and all other instances of what Barbara Creed (3) would refer to as ‘abject’ femininity: excessive, uncanny and uncontained instances that disturb patriarchal norms of womanhood. This article asserts that the conventions of the Gothic genre are well suited to expressions of women’s rage; invoking Sarah Ahmed’s work on the discomforting presence of the kill-joy in order to explore how the often-alienating processes of uncensored female anger coincide with contemporary notions of the Monstrous Feminine. This should not suggest that the Gothic is a wholly feminist genre - one need only look to Jane Eyre to observe the binarised construction of Gothic women as either ‘pure’ or ‘deviant’: virginal heroine or mad woman in the attic. However, what is significant about the Gothic genre is that it often permits far more in-depth, even sympathetic explorations of ‘deviant femininity’ that are out of place elsewhere.Indeed, the normative, rationalist demand for good health and accommodating cheerfulness is symptomatic of what Queer Crip scholar Katarina Kolářová (264) describes as ‘compulsory, curative positivity’ – wherein the Monstrousness of deviant femininity, Queerness and disability must be ‘fixed’ in order to produce blithe, comforting feminine docility. It seems almost too obvious to point to The Yellow Wallpaper as a perfect exemplar of this: the physician husband of Gillman’s protagonist literally prescribes indolence and passivity as ‘cures’ for what may well be post-partum depression – another instance of distinctly feminine irrationality that must be promptly contained. The short story is peppered through with references to the protagonist’s ‘illness’ as a source of consternation or discomfort for her husband, who declares, “I feel easier with you now” (134) as she becomes more and more passive.The notion of men’s comfort is important within discussions of women’s anger – not only within the Gothic, but within a broader context of gendered power and privileged experience. Sara Ahmed’s Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness asserts that we “describe as happy a situation that you wish to defend. Happiness translates its wish into a politics, a wishful politics, a politics that demands that others live according to a wish” (573) For Ahmed, happiness is not solely an individual experience, but rather is relational, and as much influenced by normative systems of power as any other interpersonal process.It has historically fallen upon women to sacrifice their own happiness to ensure that men are comfortable; being quiet and unargumentative, remaining both chase and sexually alluring, being maternal and nurturing, while scrupulously censoring any evidence of pregnancy, breastfeeding or menstrual cycles (Boyer 79). If a woman has ceased to be happy within these terms, then she has failed to be a good woman, and experiences what Ahmed refers to as a ‘negative affect’ – a feeling of being out of place. To be out of place is to be an ‘affect alien’: one must either continue feeling alienated or correct one’s feelings (Ahmed 582). Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild uses the analogy of a bride feeling miserable at her wedding, obliging herself to bring her feelings in-line with what is expected of her, “Sensing a gap between the ideal feeling and the actual feeling she tolerated, the bride prompts herself to be happy” (Hochschild 61).Ahmed uses to the term ‘Kill Joy’ to refer to feminists – particularly black feminists – whose actions or presence refuse this obligation, and in turn project their discomfort outwards, instead of inwards. The stereotype of the angry black woman, or the humourless feminist persist because these women are not complicit in social orders that hold the comfort of white men as paramount (583); their presence is discomforting.Contrary to its title, Killing Joy does not advocate for an end to happiness. Rather, one might understand the act of killing joy as a tactic of subjective honesty – an acknowledgement of dis-ease, of one’s alienation and displacement within the social contract of reciprocal happiness. Here I use the word dis-ease as a deliberate double entendre – implying both the experience of a negative affect, as well as the apparent social ‘illness’ of refusing acquiescent female joy. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the protagonist’s passive femininity is ironically both the antithesis and the cause of her Monstrous transformation, demonstrating an instance of feminine liminality that is the hallmark of the Gothic heroine.Here I introduce the example of Lily Frankenstein, a modern interpretation of the Bride of the Creature, portrayed by Billie Piper in the Showtime series Penny Dreadful. In Shelley’s novel the Bride is commissioned for the Creature’s contentment, a contract that Frankenstein acknowledges she could not possibly have consented to (Shelley 206). She is never given sentience or agency; her theoretical existence and pre-natal destruction being premised entirely on the comfort of men. Upon her destruction, the Creature cries, “Are you to be happy while I grovel in the intensity of my wretchedness?” (Shelley 209). Her first film portrayal by Elsa Lanchester in James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein (1936) is iconic, but brief. She is granted no dialogue, other than a terrified scream, followed by a goose-like hiss of disgust at Boris Karloff’s lonely Creature. Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) merges the characters of Elizabeth and the Bride into the same doomed woman. After being murdered by the Creature, she is resurrected by Frankenstein – and consequently fought over by both. Her inevitable suicide is her one moment of tragic autonomy.Penny Dreadful is the first time that the Bride has been given an opportunity to speak for herself. Lily’s character arc is neither that of the idealised, innocent victim, nor is she entirely abject and wanton: she is – quite literally – two women in one. Before she is re-animated and conditioned by Victor Frankenstein to be the perfect bride, she was Brona, a predictably tragic, Irish street-walker with a taste for whisky and a consumptive cough. Diane Long Hoeveler describes the ambiguous duality of the Gothic feminine arising from the fantasies of middle-class woman writing gothic fiction during the 19th century (106). Drawing upon Harriet Guest’s examination of the development of femininity in early Gothic literature, Hoeveler asserts that women may explore the ‘deviant’ pleasures of wanton sexuality and individualistic, sadistic power while still retaining the chaste femininity demanded of them by their bourgeois upbringings. As both innocent victim of patriarchy and Monstrous Feminine, the construction of the gothic heroine simultaneously criminalises and deifies women.I assert that Penny Dreadful demonstrates the blurring of these boundaries in such a way that the fantasy of the sympathetic, yet Monstrous Gothic Feminine is launched out of the parlours of bored Victorian housewives into a contemporary feminist moment that is characterised by a split between respectable diplomacy and the visibility of female rage. Her transition from coerced docility and abject, sexualised anger manifests in the second season of the show. The Creature – having grown impatient and jealous – comes to collect his Bride and is met with a furious refusal.Lily’s rage is explosive. Her raw emotion is evidently startling to the Creature, who stands in astonishment and fear at something even more monstrous and alien than himself – a woman’s unrestrained anger. For all his wretched ‘Otherness’ and misery, he is yet a man - a bastard son of the Enlightenment, desperate to be allowed entrance into the hallowed halls of reason. In both Shelley’s original novel and the series, he tries (and fails) to establish himself as a worthy and rational citizen; settling upon the Bride as his coveted consolation prize for his Monstrous failure. If he cannot be a man as his creator was, then he shall have a companion that is ‘like’ him to soothe his pain.Consequently, Lily’s refusal of the Creature is more than a rejection – it is the manifestation of an alien affect that has been given form within the undead, angry woman: a trifecta of ‘Otherness’. “Shall we wonder the pastures and recite your fucking poetry to the fucking cows?” She mocks the Creature’s bucolic, romantic ideals, killing his joyful phantasy that she, as his companion, will love and comfort him despite his Monstrousness (“Memento Mori”).Lily’s confrontation of the Creature is an unrestrained litany of women’s pain – the humiliation of corsetry and high heels, the slavery of marriage, the brutality of sexual coercion: all which Ahmed would refer to as the “signs of labour under the sign of happiness” (573). These are the pains that women must hide in order to maintain men’s comfort, the sacrificial emotional labours which are obfuscated by the mandates of male-defined femininity. The Gothic’s nurturance of anger transforms Lily’s outburst from an act of cruelty and selfishness to a site of significant feminine abjection. Through this scene Hochschild’s comment takes on new meaning: Lily – being quite literally the Bride (or the intended Bride) of the Creature – has turned the tables and has altered the process of disaffection – and made herself happy at the expense of men.Lily forms a militia of ‘fallen’ women from whom she demands tribute: the bleeding, amputated hands of abusive men. The scene is a thrilling one, recalling the misogyny of witch trials, sexual violence and exploitation as an army of angry kill joys bang on the banquet table, baying for men’s blood (“Ebb Tide”). However, as seems almost inevitable, Lily’s campaign is short-lived. Her efforts are thwarted and her foot soldiers either murdered or fled. We last see her walking dejectedly through the London fog, her fate and future unknown.Lily’s story recalls an instance of the ‘bad feminism’ that nice, respectable, mainstream feminists seek to distance themselves from. In her discussion of the acquittal of infamous castatrix Lorena Bobbitt, poet Katha Pollitt (65-66) observes the scramble by “nice, liberal middle-class professional” feminists to distance themselves from the narratives of irrational rage that supposedly characterise ‘victim feminism’ – opting instead for the comforting ivory towers of self-control and diplomacy.Lily’s speech to her troops is seen partly through the perspective of an increasingly alarmed Dorian Gray, who has hitherto been enjoying the debauched potential of these liberated, ‘deviant’ women, recalling bell hooks’ observation that “ultimately many males revolted when we stated that our bodies were territories that they could not occupy at will. Men who were ready for female sexual liberation if it meant free pussy, no strings attached, were rarely ready for feminist female sexual agency” (41). This is no longer a coterie of wanton women that he may enjoy, but a sisterhood of angry, vengeful kill-joys that will not be respectable, or considerate of his feelings in their endeavours.Here, parallels arise between the absolutes drawn between women as agents or victims, and the positioning of women as positive, progressive ‘rational’ beings or melancholic kill-joys that Ahmed describes. We need only turn to the contemporary debate surrounding the MeToo movement (and its asinine, defensive response of ‘Not All Men’) to observe that the process of identifying oneself as a victim has – for many – become synonymous with weakness, even amongst other feminists. Notably, Germaine Greer referred to the movement as ‘whinging’, calling upon women to be more assertive, instead of wallowing in self-victimisation and misandry, as Lily supposedly does (Miller).While Greer may be a particularly easy strawman, her comments nonetheless recall Judith Halberstam’s observations of prescriptive paternalism (maternalism?) within Western feminist discourse. His chapter Shadow Feminisms uses the work of Gayatri Spivak to describe how triumphalist narratives of women’s liberation often function to restrict the terms of women’s agency and expression – particularly those of women of colour.Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak? asserts that the colonial narratives inherent within white feminists’ attempts to ‘save’ non-Western women are premised upon the imagined heroicism of the individual, which in turn demands the rejection of ‘subaltern’ strategies like passiveness, anger and refusal. She asks, “does the category of resistance impose a teleology of progressive politics on the analytics of power?” (9). Put more simply, both Halberstam and Spivak beg the question of why it is necessary for women and other historically marginalised groups to adopt optimistic and respectable standards of agency? Especially when those terms are pre-emptively defined by feminists like Greer.Halberstam conceptualises Shadow Feminisms in the melancholic terms of refusal, undoing, failure and anger. Even in name, Shadow Feminism is well suited to the Gothic – it has no agenda of triumphant, linear progress, nor the saccharine coercion of individualistic optimism. Rather, it emphasises the repressed, quiet forms of subversion that skulk in the introspective, resentful gloom. This is a feminism that cannot and will not let go of its traumas or its pain, because it should not have to (Halberstam, Queer Art 128-129).Thus, the Monstrousness of female rage is given space to acknowledge, rather than downplay or dismiss the affective-alienation of patriarchy. To paraphrase scholars Andrew Smith and Diana Wallace, the Gothic allows women to explore the hidden or censured expressions of dissatisfaction and resentment within patriarchal societies, being a “coded expression of women’s fears of entrapment within the domestic and within the female body” (Smith & Wallace 2).It may be easy to dismiss the Gothic as eldritch assemblages of Opheliac madness and abject hyperbole, I argue that it is valuable precisely because it invites the opening of festering wounds and the exploration of mouldering sepulchres that are shunned by the squeamish mainstream; coaxing the skeletons from the closet so that they may finally air their musty grievances. As Halberstam states in Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, the Gothic represents the return of the repressed and thus encourages rather than censors the exploration of grief, madness and irrationality (Skin Shows 19). Accordingly, we may understand Lily’s rage as what Halberstam would refer to as a Monstrous Technology (21-22) – more specifically, a technology of the Monstrous Feminine: a significant site of disruption within Gothic narratives that not only ‘shows’ the source of its abjection, but angrily airs its dirty laundry for everyone to see.Here emerges the distinction between the ‘non-whinging’, respectable feminism advocated by the likes of Greer and Lily’s Monstrous, Gothic Feminism. Observing a demonstration by a group of suffragettes, Lily describes their efforts as unambitious – “their enemies are same, but they seek equality” (“Good and Evil Braided Be”). Lily has set her sights upon mastery. By allowing her rage to manifest freely, her movement has manifested as the violent misandry that anti-suffragists and contemporary anti-feminists alike believe is characteristic of women’s liberation, provoking an uncomfortable moment for ‘good’ feminists who desperately wish to avoid such pejorative stereotypes.What Lily offers is not ethical. It does not conform to any justifiable feminist ideology. She represents that which is repressed, a distinctly female rage that has no place within any rational system of belief. Nonetheless, Lily remains a sympathetic character, her “doomed, keening women” (“Ebb Tide”) evoking a quiet, subversive thrill of solidarity that must be immediately hushed. This, I assert, is indicative of the liminal ambiguity that makes the Monstrous Feminine so unsettling, and so significant.And Monsters are always significant. Their ‘Otherness’ functions like lighthouses of meaning. Further, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (6) reminds us, Monsters signify not only the fragile boundaries of human subjectivity and discourse, but also the origins of the alterity that defines them. Like the tragic creature of Shelley’s masterpiece, Monsters eventually follow their creators home to demand an explanation – their revenant terror demands accountability (Cohen 20). What Lily exemplifies does not have to make others comfortable, and it is under no obligation to remain within any standards of ethics. To return one last time to Halberstam, I argue that the Monstrosity manifested within female rage is valuable precisely because it because it obliges us “to be unsettled by the politically problematic connections history throws our way” (Halberstam, Queer Art 162). Therefore, to be angry, to dwell on traumatic pasts, and to revel in the ‘failure’ of negativity is to ensure that these genealogies are not ignored.When finally captured, Victor Frankenstein attempts to lobotomise her, promising to permanently take away the pain that is the cause of her Monstrous rage. To this, Lily responds: “there are some wounds that can never heal. There are scars that make us who we are, but without them, we don’t exist” (“Perpetual Night and the Blessed Dark”). Lily refuses to let go of her grief and her anger, and in so doing she fails to coalesce within the placid, docile femininity demanded by Victor Frankenstein. But her refusal is not premised in an obdurate reactionism. Rather, it is a tactic of survival. By her own words, without her trauma – and that of countless women before her – she does not exist. The violence of rape, abuse and the theft of her agency have defined her as both a woman and as a Monster. “I’m the sum part of one woman’s days. No more, no less”, she tells Frankenstein. To eschew her rage is to deny its origin.So, to finish I ask readers to take a moment, and dwell on that rage. On women’s rage. On yours. On the rage that may have been directed at you. Does that make you uncomfortable?Good.ReferencesAhmed, Sara. “Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 35.3 (2010): 571-593.Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1996. 3-25.Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1993.“Ebb Tide.”. Penny Dreadful. Showtime, 2016.“Good and Evil Braided Be.” Penny Dreadful. Showtime, 2016.Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. USA: Duke UP, 1995.———. The Queer Art of Failure. 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