Browsing by Department "Administration"

Tasmania became an island separate from the rest of Australia around 14 000 years ago, during the final warming phase of the Pleistocene Ice Ages. As global temperatures increased towards modern levels and sea levels rose because of the melting ice caps, Australia's shorelines changed, closing the land bridge between Tasmania and the continent, and later that between Australia and New Guinea. From that time, Tasmania's cultures developed in isolation - an extreme case, some would say, of the more general isolation of Australian cultures, though people hardly feel deprived of contact when they know nothing of anywhere beyond the connections of their daily lives. Tasmanians and those from what is now the mainland turned their backs on each other and lived without knowledge of the other for 14 000 years. Now, by virtue of the creation of a single nation through processes of colonisation and federation, the communities on each side of Bass Strait are both identified as Aborigines, as a consequence of not being non-Aboriginal people of Australia.

The coastal plain formed by a series of relict beach ridges on the margin of Keppel Bay, central Queensland, Australia, preserves a detailed record of coastal sediment accumulation. Importantly, this record spans the historical period and extends back to early Holocene times, well before European settlement. The relict and modern beach ridges comprise fine sand that was originally deposited in Keppel Bay during flood discharge events of the Fitzroy River. This sediment was then reworked onto the shoreline by the prevailing tide, wave and wind-generated currents. Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) ages of the ridges reveal a long-term positive coastal sediment budget in Keppel Bay and show that during approximately the last 1500 years, sets of beach ridges were emplaced in rapid episodes, up to a few decades long. The OSL ages of the ridges suggests there is a 500-200 yr periodicity to these phases of rapid sediment accumulation. Our preliminary interpretation of these data is that this pattern of formation relates to the recurrence interval of high magnitude flood discharge events of the Fitzroy River and there has been a general decline in the rate at which sediment has accumulated on the Keppel Bay coast during the last 1500 years. This reduction may reflect a long-term decline in major rainfall events in the Fitzroy River catchment. The trace element composition of ridges deposited during the last 100 yrs indicates there has been a greater contribution from areas of basaltic soils within the catchment. This trace-element record reveals the impact on river and coastal sediment composition brought on by changes in catchment land use.

In 1890-94 Australia was convulsed by a crisis of historic proportions that marked a watershed in the development of the economy, society, culture, and polity. The preceding 40 years had been ones of great prosperity, wealth advancement, and democratization, sparked in 1851 by the great and long-lasting gold rush. By the late 1880s Australia was believed by boosters to be a 'working man's paradise' and a triumphant vindication of the egalitarian and democratic rejection of British social class and privilege. This successful settler capitalist country had ridden the great Victorian commodities boom and succeeded in overcoming the legacy of its prison foundation and the 'tyranny of distance' to become the richest society in the world. The capitalist model that had developed, however, was far from the 'laissez faire' of British theory and policy, combining instead industrial protection in most parts of the country with a significant degree of state ownership of economic enterprises. What was later called 'colonial socialism' was the more or less unquestioned model of a rudimentary developmental state that rested on the great wealth flowing from raw material exports and the distribution of rents for working-class urban expansion. Indeed, economic development and employment generation had been the chief preoccupation of colonial governments since the 1830s. In this context, the bursting of the long boom in 1890 and collapse into the first (and very severe) depression in half a century was a transformative event. The consequences of the crisis years, lasting for most of a decade, were profound. The main response by the political process, however, was not on the whole to question the centrality of the state in Australian capitalism but to reinforce it in new, ideologically-based as well as class-based, ways. Social democratic developments emerged that had long-lasting consequences, detectable even unto the 21st century. A 'historic compromise' of labourist-protectionism and other social measures was constructed and reinforced over the following decades that remained central to Australia's political economy until the 1980s.

Monitoring educational changes over many years is problematic when there are differences in curricula, the nature of the variables being measured, and the selection of participants. Rasch measurement techniques provide a procedure that enables each of these issues to be examined. Using archived and specially collected data, tests of numeracy undertaken in Tasmania over a 20-year period, from 1978 to 1997, were equated and mapped onto the same continuum through a combination of common item and common person equating. Examination of fit to the model showed that the nature of the measured construct had not changed over this period. Although test difficulty appears to have risen over the period, student achievement was relatively unchanged. The implications of these findings for longitudinal studies of achievement are discussed.

I want to start by saying something about the history of Australian history. There is a general idea, I think, that interest in the Australian past is mainly a product of the federation yem's and since. In other words, Australians tend to believe that no-one paid any attention to the history of Australia until about the 1880s and '90s. We have the impression that the birth of a national historiography, or historical sensibility, was marked by the publication of the Historical Records of New South Wales, the Historical Records of Australia and Rusden's three-volume History, by the crystallisation of 'the Australian Legend', and by the erection of all those statues which today so powerfully remind us of high Victorian pieties and aspirations. It seems to make sense that there should have been no feeling for history in this country until we were in a position to think of Australia as a single nation: one community with a single past and future.

The excavation in the 1890s of a skeleton of the warm-water marine mammal 'Dugong dugon', associated with Aboriginal artefacts, from a Botany Bay salt marsh, marked the beginning of speculation about climate and sea level change in Australia over the period of human occupation. The dugong bones have recently been dated, giving a conventional ¹⁴C age of 5520±70 years BP, which is consistent with three older ¹⁴C dates for a layer of buried trees that underlies much of the north Botany sediments. The carefully drawn cross-sections of depositional strata produced by the original discoverers allow further interpretation of the pattern of Holocene sea-level fluctuations in the Sydney region. Layers of estuarine sediment, such as the one containing the dugong skeleton, are inter-bedded with peat layers containing 'in situ' roots and stumps, suggesting that the site alternated between sub-aerial exposure and submergence throughout the Holocene. The presence of the dugong is suggestive of warmer conditions, and its inland location indicates a more extensive Botany Bay in the recent past. This is in agreement with other work from southern New South Wales describing both warm-water marine species and higher sea levels several thousand years ago.

The name "Arcadia" has a seductive sound. From Virgil via Sir Philip Sidney to Tom Stoppard, through high art and popular fiction, it evokes an idyllic setting characterised by harmony and delight, a scene of youth, perpetual good health and abundance, where the greatest grief is occasioned by unrequited affection and expressed in the lamentations of the disappointed lover. Twenty-first-century drama has its citified and suburban versions of this idyllic but nevertheless anxious classical world – but they are now called sitcom and soap, the worlds of 'Friends' and 'Neighbours'. But when theatre in Sydney, over the past few years, has turned back to the classical tradition, it is not this gentle, bucolic version of antiquity that it has chosen to share with audiences; Australian theatregoers have been presented instead with images of the ancient Greek and Roman periods characterised by violence, brutality, deception, conspiracy, cruelty, torture, hatred, disharmony, the capricious abuse of power, and blood – buckets and buckets of blood. The image of antiquity presented by these theatrical events is more the version we know from intrigue-laden texts like Shakespeare's 'Julius Caesar', the televised adaptation of Robert Graves's 'I Claudius' and the more recent BBC/HBO/RAI television series 'Rome' than pastorals depicting a golden age. The productions I am referring to here are the Sydney Theatre Company's 'Oedipus' by Seneca in the translation by Ted Hughes (2000); 'The Lost Echo' (2006) and 'The Women of Troy' (2008).

The Academic Development Study of Australian Twins was established in 2012 with the purpose of investigating the relative influence of genes and environments in literacy and numeracy capabilities across two primary and two secondary school grades in Australia. It is the first longitudinal twin project of its kind in Australia and comprises a sample of 2762 twin pairs, 40 triplet sets and 1485 nontwin siblings. Measures include standardized literacy and numeracy test data collected at Grades 3, 5, 7 and 9 as part of the National Assessment Program: Literacy and Numeracy. A range of demographic and behavioral data was also collected, some at multiple longitudinal time points. This article outlines the background and rationale for the study and provides an overview for the research design, sample and measures collected. Findings emerging from the project and future directions are discussed.

Distance education at a tertiary level in Brazil represents a very new educational approach compared with countries such as Australia and the United Kingdom. However, higher educational institutions in these and other countries share similar concerns surrounding this issue. One concern relates to preparing academics for delivery of quality online education. This paper will explore a PhD investigation concerning academic professional development for online learning in Brazil, as well as discuss the current available literature regarding this topic.

Academics share their research, present their arguments, as well as establish their professional credentials through writing. However, researchers from language backgrounds other than English may be at a disadvantage when it comes to publishing in internationally recognised journals, many of which are in English. Studies suggest that cultural differences exist in the generic and rhetorical structures of texts across different languages. An investigation of the generic and rhetorical structure of academic texts in languages other than English may yield valuable insights into these debates. This paper presents a preliminary study of a specific genre of academic writing in Thai: the research article. The aim was to investigate how argument is carried in a text through rhetorical structure. The study looks at thematic development and the interpersonal or features or 'metadiscourse' in the text which writers use to engage with their audience. Initial results point to a need for further work in this area.

This thesis reports on a study of decisions and decision making among academics in a student development unit,the Educational development department, located on the Footscray Campus of the Victoria University of Technology (formerly the Footscray Institute of Technology). The study reviews literature on academic culture and decision making. Broad ideas from that field are applied to empirical data gathered at the field work site from 1986 to 1991. Individual academics gave key decisions sampled from their workplace settings and each was interviewed for their perceptions about further key decisions being made or contemplated. During the data gathering phase, the researcher tried to stay close to actors' own perceptions of the field. The study focuses mainly upon the many and varied ways in which academics perceived the domain of decision making within their own close circles of work. Among its findings, the thesis calls for a more careful approach to discourse upon decisions and decision making, finding that confusions arising in ordinary Language distort social realities. Decisions are more usefully seen as pinnacle points of meaning that do not remain static within social settings. Widely and deeply across fields of legitimation, actors in this higher education setting were found to use them to both support and undermine, and by that dual process, to displace persons, ideas and programs that are normally seen to be held static in authority locations

This paper presents a narrative analysis of autism. It follows much of the literature on illness and narrative by emphasising the moral quality of illness narratives and the role it plays in creating coherence out of the disordering effects of autism on family life. In particular, the significance of narratives as "moralizing antidotes" to the experience of marginality and their linkages to the cultural "master narratives" of science, politics and faith are stressed. The three narratives presented display both conformity and non-conformity with the official narrative of autism offered by the autistic treatment centre where the research was based. Accordingly, they are described as narratives of accommodation, resistance and transcendence.

Notwithstanding exemptions provided through professional accounting bodies around the world, standards and procedures applicable to publicly traded firms are often used to identify and analyse financial information about privately held firms. Such approaches may not always be applicable. In an environment of emerging international standardisation and differential reporting for small enterprises, the focus of this paper is on one potentially inappropriate procedure that relates to the identification of debt and equity. In many instances the debt reported in the financial reports of privately held firms is provided to the firm only because the owner's personal assets have been provided as debt collateral. Such a circumstance means the amount involved has more of an equity characteristic than a debt characteristic because the owner's personal wealth is put at risk for an uncertain return. For this reason the existence of debt secured by personal collateral is often referred to as quasi-equity. The presence of unrecognised quasi-equity generates two significant types of problem. Firstly, a potential investor analysing the financial reports of a firm in which reported debt is really quasiequity may assess the firm to be a poor investment opportunity because it has an apparently high reliance on debt in its financial structure. The second problem is that there is an increasing reliance on the content of the financial reports of privately held firms by researchers gathering and analysing data to inform and guide policy. By aggregating that data without recognition of the quasi-equity characteristic of such debt, invalid understandings of the nature of the equity and debt funding of privately held firms might be emerging. Unfortunately the accounting profession has not recognised the existence of these problems and, apart from the special reporting requirements in the United Kingdom, there does not appear to be any attempt to ensure reports prepared for privately held firms identify the presence of quasiequity.

Deterministic predictions of the accuracy of genomic breeding values in selection candidates with no phenotypes have been derived based on the heritability of the trait, number of phenotyped and genotyped animals in the reference population where the marker effects are estimated, the effective population size and the length of the genome. We assessed the value of these deterministic predictions given the results that have been achieved in Holstein and Jersey dairy cattle. We conclude that the deterministic predictions are useful guide for establishing the size of the reference populations which must be assembled in order to predict genomic breeding values at a desired level of accuracy in selection candidates.

Soil acidification is a serious, world wide, land-degradation problem that can be accelerated by pasture management. In Australia, the true extent of soil acidification and distribution of acid soils is not fully known. Agriculturally-induced soil acidification is widespread in southern New South Wales (NSW), Australia, and active research has been undertaken in that area. Soil acidification is not well understood on the NSW Northern Tablelands and more research was needed to understand better soil acidification in NSW. The extent and severity of acid soils under pasture, and pasture management impacts on soil acidification in the Northern Tablelands region were assessed in this project.

Major changes in government policy and institutional management have impacted adversely on Australian university academics who tend to be highly critical of the new directions and their effects on the academic profession. Academics strongly oppose reduced government funding per student unit, higher workloads and new styles of corporatist university management that have resulted in reduced collegiality. At the same time, many academics have made surprisingly impressive transitions to the new environment. National survey data demonstrate that the changes have not adversely affected the commitment of academics to teaching and research. In fact, academics in both science and technology fields and in the social sciences show high rates of interest in academic work. They work longer hours per week than in the past, report higher levels of research outputs, and have achieved substantial success in attracting external research funds. The paper thus provides an alternative view to the dismal portrait in the scholarly literature about recent changes in the Australian academic profession.

Many countries conduct regular national time use surveys, some of which date back as far as the 1960s. Time use surveys potentially provide more detailed and accurate national estimates of the prevalence of sedentary and physical activity behavior than more traditional self-report surveillance systems. In this study, the authors determined the reliability and validity of time use surveys for assessing sedentary and physical activity behavior. In 2006 and 2007, participants (n = 134) were recruited from work sites in the Australian state of New South Wales. Participants completed a 2-day time use diary twice, 7 days apart, and wore an accelerometer. The 2 diaries were compared for test-retest reliability, and comparison with the accelerometer determined concurrent validity. Participants with similar activity patterns during the 2 diary periods showed reliability intraclass correlations of 0.74 and 0.73 for nonoccupational sedentary behavior and moderate/vigorous physical activity, respectively. Comparison of the diary with the accelerometer showed Spearman correlations of 0.57–0.59 and 0.45–0.69 for nonoccupational sedentary behavior and moderate/vigorous physical activity, respectively. Time use surveys appear to be more valid for population surveillance of nonoccupational sedentary behavior and health-enhancing physical activity than more traditional surveillance systems. National time use surveys could be used to retrospectively study nonoccupational sedentary and physical activity behavior over the past 5 decades.

The human auditory system possesses an amazing ability to hear sounds with two ears and to combine the two signals into one to be processed by the brain. This is called binaural processing. This chapter discusses the cues that our auditory system uses to recognize sounds and to separate them into different sound sources, and how listeners with hearing aids and cochlear implants use these cues to enable binaural hearing. It should be noted that most of this discussion on how the auditory system processes sounds is based on findings generally tested in a controlled laboratory environment. Therefore, we try to generalize our discussion to how the auditory system may work in a noncontrolled environment (i.e., a local restaurant).

This article is triggered by a central policy problem: how to promote the 'creative city' for economic benefit, but without producing socially unjust outcomes. We propose one means to negotiate this problem - affordable housing for the arts - and draw briefly upon examples from Sydney and Seattle to illustrate our point. The role of creativity in the economy is becoming increasingly recognised. It is argued that places now compete with each other for a new kind of economic development, fuelled not by the availability of raw materials, cheap labour, or by state investment in infrastructure, but by the decisions of creative producers in industries such as film, design and advertising to live and work in particular localities. Such producers are part of what Richard Florida has called the 'creative class'. According to Florida, the creative class - flexible, hypermobile, and entrepreneurial - is now more than any other actively shaping the economy and demography of contemporary cities. The creative class moves to places that are tolerant, diverse, cosmopolitan and interesting, seeking art galleries and museums, cafe culture, festivals and events, and a social mix of immigrant communities, gay and lesbian culture, students and artists. Numerous places have since sought to build on Florida's ideas, developing policy initiatives aimed at growing the arts, promoting social diversity, and attracting creative producers and investments.

This paper outlines an approach to teaching academic writing in an online mode. The Pathways Enabling Course at the University of New England (UNE) was launched in 2008 and has provided us with a cohort of students from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds who often lack the social capital necessary to write successfully in an academic context. These academic literacy units have been developed and taught by Academic Language and Learning (ALL) staff at UNE. As the Pathways students are external, there is a danger that they will not engage with the unit content and learning environment. The challenge has been to adapt writing pedagogy to the online environment, subject to the constraints of the tools that are available in the learning management system (Moodle). In the five years that this program has been offered, we have developed some key strategies that provide appropriate, scaffolded teaching and learning activities to develop academic writing in the online environment. This involves the innovative use of the available tools to successfully engage students in writing activities. Our primary teaching tools included Moodle’s database activity, which we integrated with other online activities to generate substantial student engagement, participation and interactivity. We believe our approach offers a valuable opportunity for ALL professionals and students to interact online, producing written work that can be shaped through corrective feedback and redrafting. We present some samples of student work and show how, with appropriate feedback and learning resources, students can develop their proficiency in academic writing to improve their chances of academic success.

The new millennium has brought general improvements in the health status and lifestyles of older people. Life expectancy has increased more in the past 50 years than the previous 5000 years! But one thing has not changed much, and some people even argue that things have become worse-older people continue to be devalued and discriminated against because of their 'age' attribute. Some predict that 'ageism' will become one of the major social challenges of the twenty-first century, much like sexism and racism were the hallmark of social change in the previous century. We continue to use language and take action that stigmatises older persons, with the effect that we consider them not to be like us. This creates the context for ageism, and partly legitimates giving older people what Goffman terms a 'spoiled identity'.

This paper reports on a study of agency in three Thai political science texts. Agency is a key notion that attributes power to and legitimises or delegitimises some social actors and ideas over others. This paper draws on the tools of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) (e.g., Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004; Pattama, 2006) to ascertain how the writers of three academic texts (Chaiwat, 2007; Khien, 2006; Pitch, 2007) construe participants and agency or the lack of agency in the exercise and contestation of power. To elicit conceptions of agency and ideology, I refer to Duranti's (2007) definition of agency in language, and to Fairclough's (1992) notion of discourse as the ideological use of language in social or cultural contexts. I argue that the writers of the three Thai texts attribute agency to social actors, events and ideas as a means to convey their position on the legitimacy of certain political events. The way in which the writers attribute agency reflects their different ideological positions. That is, their positions are expressed through the way that the authors attribute different degrees of control or lack of control that social actors have over their environment or other participants, or in the degree to which ideas or events are construed as impacting in some way on participants in the clause. This paper explores how the writers construe who/what does what to whom - which grammatical participants are agents, and which are affected by an action - and the manner in which the writers valorise some actors, events or ideas over others through the lexicogrammatical choices that they make in the texts.

The modelling of livestock movements within Australia is of national importance for the purposes of the management and control of exotic disease spread, infrastructure development and the economic forecasting of livestock markets. In this paper an agent based model for the forecasting of livestock movements is presented. This models livestock movements from farm to farm through a saleyard. The decision of farmers to sell or buy cattle is often complex and involves many factors such as climate forecast, commodity prices, the type of farm enterprise, the number of animals available and associated off-shore effects. In this model the farm agent's intelligence is implemented using a fuzzy decision tree that utilises two of these factors. These two factors are the livestock price fetched at the last sale and the number of stock on the farm. On each iteration of the model farms choose either to buy, sell or abstain from the market thus creating an artificial supply and demand. The buyers and sellers then congregate at the saleyard where livestock are auctioned using a second price sealed bid. The price time series output by the model exhibits properties similar to those found in real livestock markets.

The conventional model of aggregate formation suggests a hierarchy where micro-aggregates with lower porosity and therefore reduced soil organic carbon (SOC) mineralization form inside macro-aggregates. This model has however been questioned for highly weathered Oxisols where inconclusive results regarding the presence of aggregate hierarchy have been obtained to date. We hypothesized that in Oxisols (i) an aggregate hierarchy would be present (ii) the porosity of micro-aggregates would be lower than that of macro-aggregates and (iii) pore geometry of aggregates would influence SOC mineralization. We collected topsoils from Oxisols in northern New South Wales, Australia from which macro-aggregates (>250 μm), micro-aggregates (53-250 μm) and <53 μm fractions were isolated from bulk soil by wet sieving. 3D images of macro- and micro-aggregates were produced using X-ray computed tomography (μCT) showing the presence of micro-aggregates inside macro-aggregates, which confirmed the presence of an aggregate hierarchy in the Oxisols studied. Macro-aggregates were more common and SOC in higher concentrations in forest systems compared with agricultural (the cultivation or pasture) land-uses, but aggregate geometry differed little between the land-uses studied. The porosity of macro-aggregates (4%) was significantly lower than micro-aggregates (5.5%). Despite the differences in pore geometry between macro- and micro-aggregates, SOC mineralized (SOC'min') during a 2-month incubation (at 25°C) was similar in macro- (3% of SOC concentration) and micro-aggregates (2.8% of SOC concentration). We conclude that although aggregate hierarchy exists in these soils and that aggregate geometry did differ between aggregate size classes, there was no evidence to support the porosity exclusion principle and the assumption that SOC is preferentially stabilized within micro-aggregates in these soils.

The question of the place of culture in the curriculum is complex and, at times, problematic for educators and community members. The issue is frequently at the heart of debates within fudigenous education. In particular, the critics of culturalism in fudigenous education argue that too often there is an over-emphasis on cultural issues to the detriment of other aspects of the curriculum. In addition, representations of fudigenous cultural practices often reify and essentialise Indigenous peoples. Despite these critiques, many Indigenous community members argue for respect for their cultural practices, standpoints and beliefs in education.
This thesis considers the issues surrounding the incorporation of dance in the curriculum for Torres Strait Islander students. It does so through a critical discourse analysis of Torres Strait Islander community discourses. As with other Indigenous peoples throughout the world, Torres Strait Islander perspectives are diverse. Among the dominant discourses identified was a discourse that linked dance to broader social imperatives. Not only a cultural practice, Island Dance (Ailan Dans) emerges as an important aspect of postcolonial social movements amongst Torres Strait Islander people.
Visual and performing arts such as dance are important in a postcolonial society and postcolonial curriculum in providing spaces to interrogate and engage with colonialist legacies, structures and representations. Dance is more than a practice or commodity in, for example, tourist performances: it is also a political product, in that fudigenous peoples can assert their rights through dance. Indigenous cultural practices are crucial as forums of Indigenous expression and 'voice', allowing people to resist dominant practices. The research suggests that Ailan Dans is important in community healing. Cultural practices such as dance also provide the possibility of interrogating stereotypical representations and images of Torres Strait Islander people.
This thesis interrogates anthropological representations of Ailan Dans and suggests the need to consider the significance of Torres Strait Islander dance in the curriculum as an important, although contested, aspect of Torres Strait Islander resistance, affirmation, economic empowerment, communal wellbeing and artistic expression.

This paper describes the self-reporting patterns of alcohol and drug consumption amongmale sex workers (MSWs) in three Australian cities during commercial sex encounters, and examinesto what extent alcohol and drugs are used and whether this is related to the safe/unsafe outcome of thecommercial sex encounter. One hundred and eighty-six MSWs from Brisbane, Sydney andMelbourne completed a diary following each commercial sex encounter over a two-week period.MSWs reported 2,087 commercial sex encounters during the study period. Alcohol or drugconsumption was reported in 50.5% of the encounters. There were 488 instances of marijuana usereported before or during a commercial sex encounter, 210 instances of volatile inhalants use, 149instances of heroine use and 151 of other drug use, including benzodiasepines, ecstasy, speed andcocaine. These substances were consumed either alone or combined. Marijuana consumption wasassociated with the commercial sex encounter occurring at the MSWs' place of residence andconsumption of alcohol, marijuana and nitrites with the client's place. The results also reveal thatconsumption of drugs and alcohol was statistically related to length of the encounter, and that clientsobtained through escort agencies or brothels were significantly associated with marijuana, other drugconsumption and heroine use. Interestingly, a multivariate analysis indicated that encounters wherethe MSW consumed marijuana or did not consume any substance were less likely to have an unsafeoutcome. The paper argues that it is necessary to identify and target risk groups and behaviours thatare usually not included in broad based health education messages.

Heat shock protein (HSP) expression in lymphocytesisolated from 20 patients with HIV diseaseand 15 age-matched controls was determined.Fold increases in lymphocyte hsp70 expressionafter heat shock were 4.52 ± 2.97 in HIV-positiveindividuals compared with 2.60 ± 1.29 for HIV-negativecontrols (P = 0.001). Given clear rolesfor HSP in the cross-presentation of antigens, α-defensininternalization and pro-inflammatorycytokine production, a further investigation ofHSP in HIV patients is merited.

The modern broiler chicken increases its bodyweight by 5000% in the first six weeks of life. Even so, the genetic potential of the bird is ever increasing. The intensive nature of the modern broiler meat production system also potentially increases risk of transmissible diseases. Thus, the stresses on the bird's physiological systems; skeletal/muscular, digestive, immune and cardiovascular, are also increasing. Augmentation of suitable husbandry practices with appropriate nutrition will allow improved broiler production and health, by helping the birds’ physiological systems serve their respective intended purposes. That is, nutritionists need to present a feed to the broiler that more accurately meets its needs, not only on a nutritional level, but also on a physiological level, such that the bird is more able to effectively digest and absorb the feed due to improved physiological responses to the feed itself. The nutritionist can only do so much when it comes to feeding for profit. Aside from the nutritional needs of the bird, economic constraint is the largest factor that must be considered when formulating a broiler diet. It is therefore important that feed production costs are reduced, and at the other end, feed efficiency is improved, essentially enabling a more profitable product per unit cost of feed.

This study investigates the relationships between institutional ambition to be different and national policy in the higher education environment. It explores the notion of institutional diversity from a variety of perspectives within an underpinning context of the changing nature of the university, and the form of a contemporary university of technology. The study is built around a broad case study of institutional diversity in Australia and New Zealand. The post-war history of change from a unitary to a binary and back to a unitary system of higher education in Australia is reviewed and investigated with particular reference to the emergence of the 'university of technology' as a distinctive form of university in Australia. The ambition to be different of three institutional members of the Australian Technology Network (ATN), namely Queensland University of Technology, RMIT University, and the University of South Australia, is illustrated through a series of interviews with key senior staff of these institutions. The actual institutional differentiation of these universities from more traditional universities in Australia is considered from different stakeholder perspectives. The ebb and flow of diversity in New Zealand higher education is then explored, reflecting on illustrations and examples from Australia. In the New Zealand setting particular emphasis is placed on the intended and unintended consequences of 1990 education legislation, and on the institutional ambition of one institution, UNITEC Institute of Technology, to become a distinctive university of technology within a national higher education system of largely traditional universities. The study indicates that a number of intersecting factors, such as the environment, national policy, funding, competition and ranking impact significantly on institutional diversity within a national higher education system, and that, in the absence of strong and unambiguous policy specifically promoting diversity, these factors will promote institutional convergence rather than diversity. Within this environment, it is therefore extremely difficult for a single institution to promote and maintain its own distinctiveness.

After the establishment of Armidale, early New Englanders received medical attention at the hands of medical practioners in their own homes or in the consulting rooms of the local physicians. These rooms included venues rented in the local hotels. An improvement was made with the establishment of the first hospital in Dumaresq Street near the corner of Marsh Street in 1853. This enterprise was relocated to the corner of Donnelly and O'Dell Streets prior to the subsequent construction of a hospital at the current site in 1883. The Donnelly Street building remained as the infectious diseases ward until 1911 when the old building was demolished and the site burned to prevent the spread of disease. Whilst doctors, midwives and the coroner made house calls in early Armidale it was not until January 1927, after a public meeting called by the then Mayor, Morgan Stephens, that the first ambulance service for Armidale commenced from a house provided rent free for a year in Butler Street. This service was free to residents of the New England area. The increase in demand for the service saw its base move from Butler Street to Barney Street before being housed in a purpose built premises in Rusden Street near the Town Hall in 1933.

Our contemporary society, including organisations and government bodies, higher education institutions, university teachers and learners, appears to be experiencing a growing awareness of the importance of education and its potential to overcome poverty and achieve sustainable development. This recognition has certainly contributed to the development and proliferation of Open Educational Resources (OERs) worldwide. Currently, more than 300 universities around the globe have launched OER projects. Millions of learners have benefited from learning through OER materials, and individual higher educational institutions, mostly distance education providers, have obtained significant rewards in terms of enhancing their reputations, increasing student enrolment and developing innovative ways to produce distance learning materials. Thus, the OER movement appears to have overcome some issues such as its resistance to giving away information and knowledge for "free", licensing, copyright and so forth. However, many questions still remain unanswered mostly those regarding the sustainability and quality of OERs. Based on the above assumption, this paper attempts to explore the existing guiding principles for sustainability and quality adopted to assure users that the OERs materials they are exploring have high-quality attributes. In addition, this paper discusses OER initiatives and policy development, with a focus on the Australian context. The issues that this paper outline are congruent with the current line of research that several organisations concerned with education, particularly with distance education worldwide, seem to follow. This is certainly the case of the DEHub, a research centre for innovation in distance education at the University of New England, Australia.

Many of the items in the "Speech, Spatial, and Qualities of Hearing" scale questionnaire [S. Gatehouse and W. Noble, Int. J. Audiol. 43, 85–99 (2004)] are concerned with speech understanding in a variety of backgrounds, both speech and nonspeech. To study if this self-report data reflected informational masking, previously collected data on 414 people were analyzed. The lowest scores (greatest difficulties) were found for the two items in which there were two speech targets, with successively higher scores for competing speech (six items), energetic masking (one item), and no masking (three items). The results suggest significant masking by competing speech in everyday listening situations.

Australian economic history as a branch of social science has had a history of disputation and debate between different approaches. Broad consensus about the main causal forces and explanations of this historical process has been difficult to construct and ideological predispositions have been influential. This is no different from the experience of other countries or disciplines. Economic history has been part of a broader western and later global intellectual development that, while exhibiting some distinctive features of Australia's historical trajectory and economic structure, has evolved in a dynamic context of local and international issues, problems and ideas. As in all social sciences, intellectual frameworks and viewpoints have played a role just as important as problems of describing and explaining the evolving economic reality. The truth of economic history, as with all the social sciences, is not given objectively in reality in some immediate way but has to be conceptualised, discovered, debated and constantly investigated and re-examined in a broadly improving research process. In the 21st century there is good reason to think that convergence between approaches has grown and that a new consensus could be emerging.

It seems reasonable to expect that the molecular composition and bioactivity of essential oils will undergo changes after protracted storage times, reflecting, among other things, the effects of differential evaporation, photo-oxidisation or temperature. These effects may produce significant changes despite careful handling and storage during the ensuing storage period. Long-term effects are not expected to be consistent across a range of oils, which makes it relatively difficult to predict successful preservation or changes in activity as benign or otherwise. Here we compare the composition and bioactivity of oils prepared by hydrodistillation from a range of common aromatic plants over 75 years ago and subsequently stored at room temperature with oils from the same species recently hydrodistilled in our laboratory or sourced from commercial suppliers. Tests for bioactivity focus on free radical scavenging, antioxidant, antimicrobial and antifungal activities across a range of essential oils; using DPPH, FRAP, broth dilution/disc diffusion and a core transplant method, respectively. TLC and TLC-bioautography is used to further correlate effects of likely changes in chemical composition with bioactivity of discrete components identified following characterization using GC/MS. Results may serve as a useful guide for appropriate preservation of commercial essential oils.

It is widely accepted that the absence of suffering no longer defines animal welfare and that positive affective experiences are imperative. For example, laying hens may be housed in environments that do not cause chronic stress but may lack particular resources that promote positive affective experiences, such as conspecifics or effective enrichment. Despite a consensus of how important positive affect is for animal welfare, they are difficult to identify objectively. There is a need for valid and reliable indicators of positive affect. Pharmacological interventions can be an effective method to provide insight into affective states and can assist with the investigation of novel indicators such as associated biomarkers. We aimed to validate a pharmacological intervention that blocks the subjective hedonistic phase associated with reward in laying hens via the administration of the non-selective (μ, δ, and κ) opioid receptor antagonist, nalmafene. We hypothesized that nonfood deprived, hens that did not experience a positive affective state when presented with a mealworm food reward due to the administration of nalmefene, would show minimal anticipatory and consummatory behavior when the same food reward was later presented. Hens (n = 80) were allocated to treatment groups, receiving either nalmefene or vehicle (0.9% saline) once or twice daily, for four consecutive days. An anticipatory test (AT) was performed on all days 30 min post-drug administration. Behavioral responses during the appetitive and consummatory phase were assessed on days 1, 3 and 4. Anticipatory behavior did not differ between treatment groups the first time hens were provided with mealworm food rewards. However, antagonism of opioid receptors reduced anticipatory and consummatory behavior on days 3 and 4. Feed intake of standard layer mash was not impacted by treatment, thus nalmefene reduced non-homeostatic food consumption but not homeostatic consumption. Behavioral observations during the AT provided no evidence that nalmefene treated hens were fearful, sedated or nauseous. The results suggest that we successfully blocked the hedonistic subjective component of reward in laying hens and provide evidence that this method could be used to investigate how hens perceive their environment and identify associated novel indicators to assess hen welfare.

Environmental and dietary factors can stimulate the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS), resulting in uncontrolled oxidation and hence artificially increased levels of free radicals and decreased antioxidant levels in the body. This can cause damage to cells and tissues, and ROS have been implicated as factors responsible for premature or accelerated ageing and the initiation and progression of some chronic degenerative diseases such as cancer, rheumatoid arthritis and atherosclerosis. Together with metabolic processes, ROS concentrations can be lowered by some dietary compounds. Evidence suggests that ingested antioxidants work best in combination. In this study we tested the hypothesis that a combination of 'Polygonum cuspidarurn' (containing resveratrol) with ascorbic acid/ascorbate and flavanoids works better as an antioxidant than the equivalent of either ascorbic acid or resveratrol alone, or their theoretical combination, using the model of free radical induced haemolysis of red blood cells it was established that the herbal-nutrient complex significantly delayed haemolysis (To = 271 min) when compared to an untreated control (To = 126 min) and either ascorbic acid (To = 229 rain) or resveratrol (To = 131 min) alone. Significantly the theoretical additive effect (To = 234 rain) was less than the observed effect from the herbal-nutrient complex (To = 271 min) a 37 min improvement. This in vitro study supports the concept of combining herbal extracts with nutrients in order to achieve more profound antioxidant effects than the additive effects of the individual chemical components.

Increased expression of a specific set of genes as a consequence of extracellular stress is typically observed in all organisms. Heat shock proteins (hsps) are a set of evolutionarily conserved proteins, some constitutively expressed and others induced in response to physiological and environmental stressors. UVB has been reported to initiate a variety of hsp expression in mouse keratinocytes, as well as the induction of hsp72 in cultured human fibroblasts and keratinocytes. This stress response may be extremely important in the protection of human skin from UV-induced injury, typically seen as part of the ageing process. The ability of UVB to induce the expression of hsps in human skin cells is important because these proteins are critical for the survival of cells exposed to a variety of environmental stresses. In particular, a suboptimal stress response in skin cells may predispose skin to melanoma development and photoageing. Seen in this light, heat shock protein function offers a potential therapeutic target for modulation of UV-irradiation mediated skin carcinogenesis and photoageing.

Detailed appendices related to all facets of the QuickSmart in Schools programs support the Pegg, Graham & Croeser (2009) Report to the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR).

Ever since the appearance of Vanek’s pioneering article in 1974, there has been a controversy about whether ‘labour saving’ domestic appliances actually save labour time. Vanek argued that time spent in housework had barely changed since 1926, despite the diffusion of practically every known domestic appliance over this period. Gershuny and Robinson challenge Vanek’s ‘constancy of housework’ thesis, arguing that, between 1965 and 1985, domestic technology has significantly reduced the weekly hours of women’s routine housework. Although there is much talking past each other, none of the protagonists in this dispute have any direct data about which households own or do not own domestic appliances. Instead, they all rely on the passage of the years as a proxy for ownership of domesticappliances, since a higher proportion of contemporary households now own domestic appliances. The Australian 1997 Time Use Survey (Australian Bureau of Statistics 1998b) is rare among official surveys, as it simultaneously provides detailed information on time spent in housework and an inventory of household appliances. The analysis of this data show that domestic technology rarely reduceswomen’s unpaid working time and even, paradoxically, produces some increases in domestic labour. The domestic division of labour by gender remains remarkably resistant to technological innovation.