Directory of World Cinema : Australia and New Zealand

This ambitious volume offers an in-depth and exciting look at the cinema produced in Australia and New Zealand since the turn of the twentieth century. Though the two nations share cultural and economic connections, their film industries remain marked by differences of scale, level of government involvement and funding. Through discussion of prominent genres and themes, profiles of directors, and comprehensive reviews of significant titles, this user-friendly guide explores the diversity and distinctiveness of films from Australia and New Zealand including Whale Rider, and Wolf Creek.

Researching 'what works' in early intervention and prevention of homelessness : From systematic reviews to collaborative inquiry

Mechanisms of intervention and the contexts they are used in interact in complex ways. This helps explain why we can’t overgeneralize about what works in respect of models of service designed to prevent or respond to homelessness. This said there are some key messages from the totality of evidence that has been accumulated to date. First homelessness would be a lot easier to prevent for first or subsequent episodes if adequate and appropriate (developmentally/ culturally) housing was available. Second (and often dependent on the first) timely support of a particular character ‘works’ both in a preventive sense and in periods when people experience ongoing challenges which may render them vulnerable to further homelessness. This paper reflects on some of the critical features of how we can generate and use evidence, and how these complement each other in important ways.

Generalized-positioning for mixed-frequency of mixed-GNSS and its preliminary applications

Modernized GPS and GLONASS, together with new GNSS systems, BeiDou and Galileo, offer code and phase ranging signals in three or more carriers. Traditionally, dual-frequency code and/or phase GPS measurements are linearly combined to eliminate effects of ionosphere delays in various positioning and analysis. This typical treatment method has imitations in processing signals at three or more frequencies from more than one system and can be hardly adapted itself to cope with the booming of various receivers with a broad variety of singles. In this contribution, a generalized-positioning model that the navigation system independent and the carrier number unrelated is promoted, which is suitable for both single- and multi-sites data processing. For the synchronization of different signals, uncalibrated signal delays (USD) are more generally defined to compensate the signal specific offsets in code and phase signals respectively. In addition, the ionospheric delays are included in the parameterization with an elaborate consideration. Based on the analysis of the algebraic structures, this generalized-positioning model is further refined with a set of proper constrains to regularize the datum deficiency of the observation equation system. With this new model, uncalibrated signal delays (USD) and ionospheric delays are derived for both GPS and BeiDou with a large dada set. Numerical results demonstrate that, with a limited number of stations, the uncalibrated code delays (UCD) are determinate to a precision of about 0.1 ns for GPS and 0.4 ns for BeiDou signals, while the uncalibrated phase delays (UPD) for L1 and L2 are generated with 37 stations evenly distributed in China for GPS with a consistency of about 0.3 cycle. Extra experiments concerning the performance of this novel model in point positioning with mixed-frequencies of mixed-constellations is analyzed, in which the USD parameters are fixed with our generated values. The results are evaluated in terms of both positioning accuracy and convergence time.

Parliamentary committee reviews of police oversight agencies : a Queensland case study

The suggested model of an ideal public sector corruption commission includes oversight by a parliamentary committee with an attached parliamentary inspector (Prenzler, 2009). However, little research has been conducted on parliamentary oversight of corruption commissions. In Queensland, a role of the Parliamentary Crime and Misconduct Committee, which has the Parliamentary Crime and Misconduct Commissioner attached, is to review the Crime and Misconduct Commission every three years. This paper considers the public written and oral submissions made to the Parliamentary Crime and Misconduct Committee in the four reviews of the Crime and Misconduct Committee conducted to date (2004, 2006, 2009 and 2012). By doing this, the paper will begin to identify the gaps in our understanding of the relationship between parliamentary committees and public sector corruption commissions and the processes used by parliamentary committees to provide oversight of corruption commissions.

Integrating Poverty and Gender into Health Programmes : a Source Book for Health Professionals : Module on Curricular Integration

Over the past two to three decades, our understanding of poverty has broadened from a narrow focus on income and consumption to a multidimensional notion of education, health, social and political 1 participation, personal security and freedom and environmental quality. Thus, it encompasses not just low income, but lack of access to services, resources and skills; vulnerability; insecurity; and voicelessness and powerlessness. Multidimensional poverty is a determinant of health risks, health seeking behaviour, health care access and health outcomes. As analysis of health outcomes becomes more refined, it is increasingly apparent that the impressive gains in health experienced over recent decades are unevenly distributed. Aggregate indicators, whether at the global, regional or national level, often tend to mask striking variations in health outcomes between men and women, rich and poor, both across and within countries...

Review: "Breast cancer : can you prevent it?" by A. Lawson, J. Lawson. McGraw-Hill Book (1998)

While reviewing this book, I was not of the target audience. For example, there is a first chapter (presented as a case study, and integrated in an unconvincing manner into the remainder of the book) that obviously meant to soften the book for the lay person. In the third chapter, the authors provide their philosophical interpretation on the meaning of breasts for reasons that entirely escape me, and that have no relation to the book as a whole. Finally, there are potted histories of the heroics of ‘tireless’, ‘dedicated’ and ‘earnest’ epidemiologists, some of whom have nothing to do with breast cancer or the book at all. Despite this lack of focus, the authors give an honest and coherent account of the current state of breast cancer research from an epidemiological viewpoint...

Editors' introduction : literacy, learning & culture

We come together as editors to prepare an introduction to this international volume at a time of economic turbulence, new uncertainties about the future, and a growing demand on the part of most governments for further alignment of education with the economy. Literacy, in particular, is in the vanguard, for literacy only too frequently is positioned as a proxy for education. What are the purposes of literacy teaching and how is it to be achieved? What counts as literacy in ‘new times,’ in ‘participatory culture’ where people ‘believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another’ (Abrams and Merchant, Chapter 23)? How can everyone be included as critical citizens of the world in whatever definition of literacy we endorse? What fresh perspectives, new ways of thinking, and good ideas for the understanding of literacy are out there? What are the possibilities for the future? An exploration of these kinds of questions and their answers, however tentative, provides us, we believe, with our best defense against the uncertainties of our age. In some respects this is our overall purpose in the volume, to explore our understanding and future possibilities by bringing together critical reviews of the major theories, methods, and pedagogical advances that have taken place in the past 20 years in the field of literacy research at the primary/elementary school level. Each chapter in the volume is newly written for the Handbook while overall the book is intended to be a distillation of key thinking and theory which offers new directions for research in literacy. It aims to revisit current interpretations, make novel connections, frame new possibilities, and encourage researchers to pursue innovative and compelling lines of inquiry...

Legal Reasoning in Environmental Law : a Study of Structure, Form and Language

This book analyses the structure, form and language of a selected number of international and national legal instruments and reviews how an illustrative range of international and national judicial institutions have responded to the issues before them and the processes of legal reasoning engaged by them in reaching their decisions. This involves a very detailed discussion of these primary sources of international and national environmental law with a view to determining their jurisprudential architecture and the processes of reasoning expected of those responsible for implementing these architectural arrangements. This book is concerned not with the effectiveness or the quality of an environmental legal system but only with its jurisprudential characteristics and their associated processes of legal reasoning.

The primary school as a logic machine

This paper makes a case for thinking about the primary school as a logic machine (apparatus) as a way of thinking about processes of in-school stratification. Firstly we discuss related literature on in-school stratification in primary schools, particularly as it relates to literacy learning. Secondly we explain how school reform can be thought about in terms of the idea of the machine or apparatus. In which case the processes of in-school stratification can be mapped as more than simply concerns about school organisation (such as students grouping) but also involve a politics of truth, played out in each school, that constitutes school culture and what counts as ‘good’ pedagogy. Thirdly, the chapter will focus specifically on research conducted into primary schools in the Northern Suburbs of Adelaide, one of the most educationally disadvantaged regions in Australia, as a case study of the relationship between in-school stratification and the reproduction of inequality. We will draw from more than 20 years of ethnographic work in primary school in the northern suburbs of Adelaide and provide a snapshot of a recent attempt to improve literacy achievement in a few Northern Suburbs public primary schools (SILA project). The SILA project, through diagnostic reviews, has provided a significant analysis of the challenges facing policy and practice in such challenging school contexts that also maps onto existing (inter)national research. These diagnostic reviews said ‘hard things’ that required attention by SILA schools and these included: · an over reliance on whole class, low level, routine tasks and hence a lack of challenge and rigour in the learning tasks offered to students ; · a focus on the 'code breaking' function of language at the expense of richer conceptualisations of literacy that might guide teachers’ understanding of challenging pedagogies ; · the need for substantial shifts in the culture of schools, especially unsettling deficit views of students and their communities ; · a need to provide a more ‘consistent’ approach to teaching literacy across the school; · a need to focus School Improvement Plans in order to implement a clear focus on literacy learning; and, · a need to sustain professional learning to produce new knowledge and practice . The paper will conclude with suggestions for further research and possible reform projects into the primary school as a logic machine.