From rights to responsibilities : reconceptualising carbon sequestration rights in Australia

Biosequestration of carbon in trees, forests and vegetation is a key method for mitigating climate change in Australia. To facilitate this, all States have enacted legislation for carbon sequestration rights, separating commercial rights in carbon from ownership of the land, trees and vegetation in which the carbon is sequestered. Ownership of carbon sequestration rights under state law is a prerequisite for the issue of carbon credits to proponents of ‘eligible sequestration offsets projects’ under the Carbon Credits (Carbon Farming Initiative) Act 2011 (Cth) (‘Carbon Farming Act’). This article examines the extent to which current State carbon sequestration rights support the offsets regime established by the Carbon Farming Act. The Commonwealth Act is concerned with allocating responsibilities to ensure the maintenance of the carbon sequestration, while the State Acts confer commercial rights in the carbon and leave the responsibilities to be allocated by private agreements. The carbon sequestration rights as defined by state laws do not confer the rights of access and management over land that a project proponent needs in order to discharge its responsibilities to maintain the carbon sequestration.

It started with a KISS

This is the essay prepared for the exhibition titled 'Hot Chocolate' held at the SASA Gallery, Adelaide, South Australia, 24 October - 29 November, 2012. Below are the words that start the essay and which provide a glimpse of the artworks in the exhibition. By agreeing to work together in this exhibition, the artists in Hot Chocolate delivered across an eclectic assortment of academic enquiry: • the politics of identity • the politics of desire • fetishisation of racial and othered bodies • origin and place • the politics of skin • events, moments, and ephemerality • need We too, talked, laughed, cried and worked through these issues in relation to the artworks submitted, including Pamela’s work, and to the theory and literature we have read and utilised in our words with each other and communities. We begin this piece by reflecting on the writings of bell hooks, whose words kissed us awake and stirred us at the start of our respective formal research journeys. We align her words with some of our activism, advocacy, academic and community work. We will weave the magical lyrics from the 1970s iconic band Hot Chocolate throughout this essay.

What should I say?: Qualitative findings on dilemmas in palliative care nursing

The nursing literature suggests that talking and listening to patients about issues associated with death and dying, is both important and difficult, and may be improved with training. This discussion presents the results of recent nursing research to confirm, and elaborate on, this theme. In this research participants touched on many central issues in communicating with patients that included articulating a sense of discomfort and inadequacy about the whole process, detailing the innumerable blocks to open communication [e.g., interference, denial, unrealistic optimism, resistance, collusion and anger] and sharing their sense of success and failure. The insights of nurses who participated in this research testify to the ongoing need to prioritize the development of nursing skills and support in this challenging but important area.

A study of post diagnosis breast cancer concerns for women living in rural and remote Queensland. Part I : Personal concerns

The findings presented in this paper are part of a research project designed to provide a preliminary indication of the support needs of postdiagnosis women with breast cancer in remote and isolated areas in Queensland. This discussion will present data that focuses on the women’s expressed personal concerns. For participants in this research a diagnosis of breast cancer involves a confrontation with their own mortality and the possibility of a reduced life span. This is a definite life crisis, creating shock and needing considerable adjustment. Along with these generic issues the participants also articulated significant issues in relation to their experience as women in a rural setting. These concerns centred around worries about how their partner and families cope during their absences for treatment, the additional burden on the family of having to cope with running the property or farm during the participant’s absence or illness, added financial strain brought about by the cost of travel for treatment, maintenance of properties during absences, and problems created by time off from properties or self-employment. These findings accord with other reports of health and welfare services for rural Australian and the generic literature on psycho-oncology studies of breast cancer.

A study of postdiagnosis breast cancer concerns for women living in rural and remote Queensland. Part II : support issues

This paper presents the recent findings from a study on the postdiagnosis support needs of women with breast cancer living in rural and remote Queensland. The findings presented in this discussion focus on support needs from the perspective of the women experiencing breast cancer as well as health service providers. The tyranny of distance imposes unique hardships, such as separation from family and friends, during a time of great vulnerability for treatment, the need to travel long distances for support and follow-up services, and extra financial burdens, which can combine to cause strains on the marital relationship and family cohesion. Positive indications are, however, that the rural communities operate on strong, informal networks of support. This network of family, friends and community can, and does, play an active role in the provision of emotional and practical support.

Exploring empathy as a variable in the evaluation of professional development programmes for palliative care nurses

Research indicates that empathy, a quality regarded as fundamentally important to nursing practice, is a teachable skill. Because empathic nurse-patient relationships are particularly important in the care of the terminally ill, this has direct relevance to the professional development of palliative care nurses. This article discusses the place of empathy as a criterion variable in the evaluation of a professional development program for palliative care nurses introduced at the Centre for Mental Health Nursing Research at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. A modified version of the Staff-Patient Interaction Response Scale (SPIRS) was used as a pre- and postintervention measure to assess the expressed empathy of the participating nurses. The modifications to SPIR and its coding system to make it suitable for palliative care nursing, and the mechanisms for improving and evaluating the reliability of this instrument will be discussed. The full description of this particular modification of SPIRS for palliative care research is provided as an example of how this instrument could be used in projects for which nurses undertake the difficult task of providing compassionate care to the terminally ill.

Developmental lessons from the Capricornia Arts Mob : ‘learning to speak with one voice’

The Capricornia Arts Mob also known as CAM is a collective of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander visual artists, sculptors, photographers, carvers and writers based in the Rockhampton Region. Its members are eclectic and include an 18 year old through to Elders. CAM has already had a major exhibition in Rockhampton and is submitting work to a range of arts festivals, events and exhibitions. While their achievements are steadily growing and they have been meeting for 18 months, they have been reluctant to incorporate or implement a formalised structure. In learning how to work together there have been tensions and struggles, there has also been the exhilaration of working collaboratively as artists from diverse Indigenous cultures who utilise different mediums. This has resulted in an incredible vibrancy in creative praxis. Members will share some of CAM’s learnings of the developmental process to date and thoughts and dreams about the future.

Development and implementation of the Australian universities radiation therapy student clinical assessment form

Purpose: Prior to 2009, one of the problems faced by radiation therapists who supervised and assessed students on placement in Australian clinical centres, was that each of the six Australian universities where Radiation Therapy (RT) programmes were conducted used different clinical assessment and reporting criteria. This paper describes the development of a unified national clinical assessment and reporting form that was implemented nationally by all six universities in 2009. Methods: A four phase methodology was used to develop the new assessment form and user guide. Phase 1 included university consensus around domains of student practice and assessment, and alignment with national competency standards; Phase 2 was a national consensus workshop attended by radiation therapists involved in student supervision and assessment; Phase 3 was an action research re-iterative Delphi technique involving two rounds of a mail-out to gain further expert consensus; and stage 4 was national piloting of the developed assessment form. Results: The new assessment form includes five main domains of practice and 19 sub-domain criteria which students are assessed against during placement. Feedback from the pilot centre participants was positive, with the new form being assessed to be comprehensive and complemented by the accompanying user guide. Conclusion: The new assessment form has improved both the formative and summative assessment of students on placement, as well as enhancing the quality of feedback to students and the universities. The new national form has high acceptance from the Australian universities and has been subject to wide review by the profession.

Genome-wide association study identifies a possible susceptibility locus for endometrial cancer

Background: Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified more than 100 genetic loci for various cancers. However, only one is for endometrial cancer. Methods: We conducted a three-stage GWAS including 8,492 endometrial cancer cases and 16,596 controls. After analyzing 585,963 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) in 832 cases and 2,682 controls (stage I) from the Shanghai Endometrial Cancer Genetics Study, we selected the top 106 SNPs for in silico replication among 1,265 cases and 5,190 controls from the Australian/British Endometrial Cancer GWAS (stage II). Nine SNPs showed results consistent in direction with stage I with P < 0.1. These nine SNPs were investigated among 459 cases and 558 controls (stage IIIa) and six SNPs showed a direction of association consistent with stages I and II. These six SNPs, plus two additional SNPs selected on the basis of linkage disequilibrium and P values in stage II, were investigated among 5,936 cases and 8,166 controls from an additional 11 studies (stage IIIb). Results: SNP rs1202524, near the CAPN9 gene on chromosome 1q42.2, showed a consistent association with endometrial cancer risk across all three stages, with ORs of 1.09 [95% confidence interval (CI), 1.03–1.16] for the A/G genotype and 1.17 (95% CI, 1.05–1.30) for the G/G genotype (P = 1.6 × 10−4 in combined analyses of all samples). The association was stronger when limited to the endometrioid subtype, with ORs (95% CI) of 1.11 (1.04–1.18) and 1.21 (1.08–1.35), respectively (P = 2.4 × 10−5). Conclusions: Chromosome 1q42.2 may host an endometrial cancer susceptibility locus. Impact: This study identified a potential genetic locus for endometrial cancer risk

Structure-preserving Runge-Kutta methods for stochastic Hamiltonian equations with additive noise

There has been considerable recent work on the development of energy conserving one-step methods that are not symplectic. Here we extend these ideas to stochastic Hamiltonian problems with additive noise and show that there are classes of Runge-Kutta methods that are very effective in preserving the expectation of the Hamiltonian, but care has to be taken in how the Wiener increments are sampled at each timestep. Some numerical simulations illustrate the performance of these methods.

Exosomes in prostate cancer: Putting together the pieces of a puzzle

Exosomes have been shown to act as mediators for cell to cell communication and as a potential source of biomarkers for many diseases, including prostate cancer. Exosomes are nanosized vesicles secreted by cells and consist of proteins normally found in multivesicular bodies, RNA, DNA and lipids. As a potential source of biomarkers, exosomes have attracted considerable attention, as their protein content resembles that of their cells of origin, even though it is noted that the proteins, miRNAs and lipids found in the exosomes are not a reflective stoichiometric sampling of the contents from the parent cells. While the biogenesis of exosomes in dendritic cells and platelets has been extensively characterized, much less is known about the biogenesis of exosomes in cancer cells. An understanding of the processes involved in prostate cancer will help to further elucidate the role of exosomes and other extracellular vesicles in prostate cancer progression and metastasis. There are few methodologies available for general isolation of exosomes, however validation of those methodologies is necessary to study the role of exosomal-derived biomarkers in various diseases. In this review, we discuss “exosomes” as a member of the family of extracellular vesicles and their potential to provide candidate biomarkers for prostate cancer.

Developmental lessons from the Capricornia Arts Mob (CAM)

The Capricornia Arts Mob (CAM) is a collective of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander visual artists, sculptors, photographers, carvers and writers based in the Rockhampton region of Central Queensland. This paper explores the early development of CAM, identifies some of the lessons its members have learned about working together, and considers its role as a regional artists’ collective. The authors identify that traditional Indigenous practices, such as yarning and the sharing of food, have helped to facilitate the emergence of CAM as a vibrant, challenging, eclectic artistic family. They recognise the cultural challenges faced by the collective – including finding a culturally appropriate place to meet and work, and the cross-cultural issues that can emerge within Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups. In just 18 months, CAM has held successful exhibitions and developed public artworks. It is a strong part of regional Queensland’s arts scene, which supports emerging artists and provides a space to celebrate and support Indigenous art.

Always “tasty”, regardless: Art, chocolate and Indigenous Australians

This paper examines race and colour through the metaphor of chocolate. The authors use the metaphor of chocolate to question why some Aboriginal people are chosen ahead of others, with the choosing done by non-Indigenous people, perhaps on the basis of who is most likely to be “soft-centred”, agreeable, and pliable. The authors discuss the development of the Hot Chocolate art exhibition in Adelaide in 2012, with a particular focus on the works of Pamela CroftWarcon. The exhibition combined chocolate (the food), lyrics from Hot Chocolate (the band), and chocolate (the metaphor for skin colour) to encourage visitors to question their assumptions about representations of Aboriginal people in Australia.