Using the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale 21 (DASS-21) across cultures

DASS-21 has been validated in a number of populations such as Hispanic adults, American, British and Australian. The findings show that the DASS-21 is psychometrically sound with good reliability and validity. It is clear from the literature that the DASS-21 is a well established instrument for measuring depression, anxiety and stress in the Western world. Nonetheless, the lack of appropriate validation amongst Asian populations continues to pose concerns over the use of DASS-21 in Asian samples. Cultural variation may influence the individual’s experience and emotional expression. Thus, when researchers and practitioners employ Western-based assessments with Asian populations by directly translating them without an appropriate validation, the process can be challenging. In summary, we have conducted a series of rigorous statistical tests and minimised any potential confounds from the demographic information. The advantages of this revised DASS-18 stress scale are twofold. First, the revised DASS-18 stress scale possessed fewer items, which resulted in a cleaner factorial structure. Second, it also had a smaller inter-factor correlation. With these justifications, the revised DASS-18 stress scale is potentially more suitable for the Asian populations.

Disaster resilience and local adaptation capacity in coastal Queensland

The 2011 floods illustrated once again Queensland’s vulnerability to flooding and similar disasters. Climate change will increase the frequency and magnitude of such events and will have a variety of other impacts. To deal with these impacts governments at all levels need to be prepared and work together. Like the rest of the nation most of the population of the state is located in the coastal areas and these areas are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. This paper examines climate change adaptation efforts in coastal Queensland. The aim is increasing local disaster resilience of people and property through fostering coordination between local and state government planning activities in coastal high hazard areas. By increasing the ability of local governments and state agencies to coordinate planning activities, we can help adapt to impacts of climate change. Towards that end, we will look at the ways that these groups currently interact, especially with regard to issues involving uncertainty related to climate change impacts. Through an examination of climate change related activities by Queensland’s coastal local governments and state level planning agencies and how they coordinate their planning activities at different levels we aim to identify the weaknesses of the current planning system in responding to the challenges of climate change adaptation and opportunities for improving the ways we plan and coordinate planning, and make recommendations to improve resilience in advance of disasters so as to help speed up recovery when they occur.

Framing local stories for community consumption facilitation and evaluation in narrative driven arts-based projects

Cyclone Yasi struck the Cassowary Coast of Queensland in the early hours of Feb 3, 2011, destroying many homes sand property, including the destruction of the Cardwell and district historical society’s premises. With their own homes flattened, many were forced to live in mobile accommodation, with extended family, or leave altogether. The historical society members however were more devastated by their flattened foreshore museum and loss of their collection material. A call for assistance was made through the OHAA Qld branch, who along with QUT sponsored a trip to somehow plan how they could start to pick up the pieces to start again. This presentation highlights the need for communities to gather, preserve and present their own stories, in a way that is sustainable and meaningful to them, but that good advice and support along the way is important. Two 2 day workshops were held in March and then September, augmented by plenty of email correspondence and phone calls in between. Participants learnt that if they could conduct quality oral history interviews, they could later use these in many exhibitable ways including: documentary pieces; digital stories; photographic collections; creative short stories; audio segments –while also drawing closely together a suffering community. This story is not only about the people who were interviewed about the night Yasi struck, but the amazing women (all over 50) of the historical society who were willing to try and leap the digital divide that faces older Australians, especially those in rural Australia, so that their older local stories would not be lost and so that new stories could also be remembered.

The psychological treatment of refugees and asylum seekers : what does the literature tell us?

Over the past five years, Australia has accepted approximately 50 000 individuals through its Humanitarian program. To integrate these individuals specialised medical and psychological services have been established in major centres of Australia. Australia has been involved in a heated and partisan debate as to the policy of the government in responding to the refugee situation. Regardless of the outcome of the debate, it is imperative that Australia establishes and develops effective policies and processes to respond to the mental health needs of refugees and asylum seekers. To this end, the current review provides an overview of published studies relating to the psychological treatment of refugees and asylum seekers, as well as studies covering the delivery of related services in response to the needs of this group. In this review we aim to provide an informed perspective in terms of research evidence where this is available. Reported research is supported by findings from local focus groups conducted in Queensland, Australia. The overall aim is to provide an optimum response to facilitate the development of effective and humane programs for a significantly disadvantaged group in our community.

‘The health-location connection’: using GIS and social media on smartphones to track engagement with the Local urban environment for work, recreation, and physical activity

A technologically innovative study was undertaken across two suburbs in Brisbane, Australia, to assess socioeconomic differences in women's use of the local environment for work, recreation, and physical activity. Mothers from high and low socioeconomic suburbs were instructed to continue with usual daily routines, and to use mobile phone applications (Facebook Places, Twitter, and Foursquare) on their mobile phones to ‘check-in’ at each location and destination they reached during a one-week period. These smartphone applications are able to track travel logistics via built-in geographical information systems (GIS), which record participants’ points of latitude and longitude at each destination they reach. Location data were downloaded to Google Earth and excel for analysis. Women provided additional qualitative data via text regarding the reasons and social contexts of their travel. We analysed 2183 ‘check-ins’ for 54 women in this pilot study to gain quantitative, qualitative, and spatial data on human-environment interactions. Data was gathered on distances travelled, mode of transport, reason for travel, social context of travel, and categorised in terms of physical activity type – walking, running, sports, gym, cycling, or playing in the park. We found that the women in both suburbs had similar daily routines with the exception of physical activity. We identified 15% of ‘check-ins’ in the lower socioeconomic group as qualifying for the physical activity category, compared with 23% in the higher socioeconomic group. This was explained by more daily walking for transport (1.7kms to 0.2kms) and less car travel each week (28.km to 48.4kms) in the higher socioeconomic suburb. We ascertained insights regarding the socio-cultural influences on these differences via additional qualitative data. We discuss the benefits and limitations of using new technologies and Google Earth with implications for informing future physical and social aspects of urban design, and health promotion in socioeconomically diverse cities.

QoS differentiation in IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks for real-time control

IEEE 802.11 based wireless local area networks (WLANs) are being increasingly deployed for soft real-time control applications. However, they do not provide quality-ofservice (QoS) differentiation to meet the requirements of periodic real-time traffic flows, a unique feature of real-time control systems. This problem becomes evident particularly when the network is under congested conditions. Addressing this problem, a media access control (MAC) scheme, QoS-dif, is proposed in this paper to enable QoS differentiation in IEEE 802.11 networks for different types of periodic real-time traffic flows. It extends the IEEE 802.11e Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) by introducing a QoS differentiation method to deal with different types of periodic traffic that have different QoS requirements for real-time control applications. The effectiveness of the proposed QoS-dif scheme is demonstrated through comparisons with the IEEE 802.11e EDCA mechanism.

Schools as meeting places : critical and inclusive literacies in changing local environments

Schools bring people together. Yet for many children there are major discontinuities between their lives in and out of school and such differences impact on literacy teaching and learning in both predictable and unpredictable ways. However if schools were reconceptualised as meeting places, where different people are thrown together (Massey, 2005) curriculum and pedagogy could be designed to take into account students’ and teachers’ different experiences and histories and to make those differences a resource for literacy learning. This paper draws on a long-term project with administrators and teachers working in a school situated in a site of urban regeneration and significant demographic shifts. It draws particularly on the ways in which one teacher re-positioned her grade 4/5 students as researchers, designers and journalists exploring student and staff memories of a school. It argues that place, and people’s relationships with places, can be a rich resource for literacy learning when teachers make it the object of study.

High-stakes literacy tests and local effects in a rural school

High-stakes literacy testing is now a ubiquitous educational phenomenon. However, it remains a relatively recent phenomenon in Australia. Hence it is possible to study the ways in which such tests are reorganising educators’ work during this period of change. This paper draws upon Dorothy Smith’s Institutional Ethnography and critical policy analysis to consider this problem and reports on interview data from teachers and the principal in small rural school in a poor area of South Australia. In this context high-stakes testing and the associated diagnostic school review unleashes a chain of actions within the school which ultimately results in educators doubting their professional judgments, increasing the investment in testing, narrowing their teaching of literacy and purchasing levelled reading schemes. The effects of high-stakes testing in disadvantaged schools are identified and discussed.

What are the health needs, familial and social problems of Thai migrants in a local community in Australia? A focus group study

This study explored the health needs, familial and social problems of Thai migrants in a local community in Brisbane, Australia. Five focus groups with Thai migrants were conducted. The qualitative data were examined using thematic content analysis that is specifically designed for focus group analysis. Four themes were identified: (1) positive experiences in Australia, (2) physical health problems, (3) mental health problems, and (4) familial and social health problems. This study revealed key health needs related to chronic disease and mental health, major barriers to health service use, such as language skills, and facilitating factors, such as the Thai Temple. We concluded that because the health needs, familial and social problems of Thai migrants were complex and culture bound, the development of health and community services for Thai migrants needs to take account of the ways in which Thai culture both negatively impacts health and offer positive solutions to problems.

Exploring shared services from an IS perspective : a literature review and research agenda

Shared services have gained significance as an organizational arrangement, in particular for support functions, to reduce costs, increase quality and create new capabilities. The Information Systems (IS) function is amenable to sharing arrangements and information systems can enable sharing in other functional areas. However, despite being a promising area for IS research, literature on shared services in the IS discipline is scarce and scattered. There is still little consensus on what shared services is. Moreover, a thorough understanding of why shared services are adopted, who are involved, and how things are shared is lacking. In this article, we set out to progress IS research on shared services by establishing a common ground for future research and proposing a research agenda to shape the field based on an analysis of the IS literature. We present a holistic and inclusive definition, discuss the primacy of economic-strategic objectives so far, and introduce conceptual frameworks for stakeholders and the notion of sharing. We also provide an overview of the theories and research methods applied. We propose a research agenda that addresses fundamental issues related to objectives, stakeholders, and the notion of sharing to lay the foundation for taking IS research on shared services forward.

A new research agenda into community-based protest in construction

Many countries face enormous development challenges in adapting to demographic change, urbanisation and emerging issues such as housing affordability and climate change. These challenges are best resolved in consultation with communities rather than in conflict with them. A rich tradition of research and intellectual frameworks exist in the fields of urban geography and planning to understand and manage community concerns during the pre-development approval stages of new projects. However current theoretical frameworks are inadequate in construction management and a new research agenda is needed to develop conceptual frameworks to guide thinking about the role of communities in the construction process. By discussing the components of such a model, it is concluded that this would require a fundamental shift in thinking which challenges traditional structuralist paradigms. A new constructivist paradigm is presented that conceives community consultation as a negotiation process which does not stop at the pre-development planning stages but which continues over the entire life of a project.

Comment on "Local accumulation times for source, diffusion, and degradation models in two and three dimensions" [J. Chem. Phys. 138, 104121 (2013)]

In a recent paper, Gordon, Muratov, and Shvartsman studied a partial differential equation (PDE) model describing radially symmetric diffusion and degradation in two and three dimensions. They paid particular attention to the local accumulation time (LAT), also known in the literature as the mean action time, which is a spatially dependent timescale that can be used to provide an estimate of the time required for the transient solution to effectively reach steady state. They presented exact results for three-dimensional applications and gave approximate results for the two-dimensional analogue. Here we make two generalizations of Gordon, Muratov, and Shvartsman’s work: (i) we present an exact expression for the LAT in any dimension and (ii) we present an exact expression for the variance of the distribution. The variance provides useful information regarding the spread about the mean that is not captured by the LAT. We conclude by describing further extensions of the model that were not considered by Gordon,Muratov, and Shvartsman. We have found that exact expressions for the LAT can also be derived for these important extensions...

Fire performance of LSF walls made of hollow flange section studs

Load bearing Light Gauge Steel Frame (LSF) walls made of cold-formed steel studs and tracks are commonly used in residential and commercial buildings. Fire safety of these walls is essential to minimize the damage caused by fire related accidents. Past investigations on the fire performance of load bearing LSF wall systems have been limited to LSF walls made of conventional lipped channel section studs. Although structurally efficient hollow flange steel sections are available in the building industry, they are not used as LSF wall studs due to the lack of fire performance data for such walls. The hollow flange sections have torsionally rigid hollow flanges that eliminate the occurrence of local and distortional buckling to an extent, thereby increasing their structural efficiency. The weaknesses of hollow flange sections such as lower lateral distortional buckling capacity are also eliminated when they are used as studs of LSF walls as the plasterboard restraints will prevent any lateral movement. Therefore hollow flange sections can be considered as structurally more efficient studs for use in LSF wall systems. This paper reports the full scale fire tests of LSF walls made of hollow flange section studs under standard fire conditions. The frames were made of 1.6 mm thick and 150 mm deep hollow flange section studs with two closed rectangular flanges of 45 mm width x 15 mm depth. Dual plasterboards were attached on both sides of the test wall panels. The load ratio was varied and the failure times, the lateral deflections and the axial displacements of the test walls were obtained. The failure behaviour of LSF walls made of hollow flange section studs was found to be different to that of LSF walls made of conventional lipped channel section studs. The results of these fire tests show that hollow flange section studs have a higher potential in being used in load bearing LSF Walls.

Digital soapboxes : towards an interaction design agenda for situated civic innovation

We argue that there are at least two significant issues for interaction designers to consider when creating the next generation of human interfaces for civic and urban engagement: (1) The disconnect between citizens participating in either digital or physical realms has resulted in a neglect of the hybrid role that public place and situated technology can play in contributing to civic innovation. (2) Under the veneer of many social media tools, hardly any meaningful strategies or approaches are found that go beyond awareness raising and allow citizens to do more than clicking a ‘Like’ button. We call for an agenda to design the next generation of ‘digital soapboxes’ that contributes towards a new form of polity helping citizens not only to have a voice but also to appropriate their city in order to take action for change.

A public asset management framework for Indonesian local governments

The decentralisation reform in Indonesia has mandated the Central Government to transfer some functions and responsibilities to local governments including the transfer of human resources, assets and budgets. Local governments became giant asset holders almost overnight and most were ill prepared to handle these transformations. Assets were transferred without analysing local government need, ability or capability to manage the assets and no local government was provided with an asset management framework. Therefore, the aim of this research is to develop a Public Asset Management Framework for provincial governments in Indonesia, especially for infrastructure and real property assets. This framework will enable provincial governments to develop integrated asset management procedures throughout asset‘s lifecycle. Achieving the research aim means answering the following three research questions; 1) How do provincial governments in Indonesia currently manage their public assets? 2) What factors influence the provincial governments in managing these public assets? 3) How is a Public Asset Management Framework developed that is specific for the Indonesian provincial governments‘ situation? This research applied case studies approach after a literature review; document retrieval, interviews and observations were collated. Data was collected in June 2009 (preliminary data collection) and January to July 2010 in the major eastern Indonesian provinces. Once the public asset management framework was developed, a focus group was used to verify the framework. Results are threefold and indicate that Indonesian provincial governments need to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of current practice of public asset management in order to improve public service quality. The second result shows that the 5 major concerns that influence the local government public asset management processes are asset identification and inventory systems, public asset holding, asset guidance and legal arrangements, asset management efficiency and effectiveness, and, human resources and their organisational arrangements. The framework was then applied to assets already transferred to local governments and so included a system of asset identification and a needs analysis to classify the importance of these assets to local governments, their functions and responsibilities in delivering public services. Assets that support local government functions and responsibilities will then be managed using suitable asset lifecycle processes. Those categorised as surplus assets should be disposed. Additionally functions and responsibilities that do not need an asset solution should be performed directly by local governments. These processes must be measured using performance measurement indicators. All these stages should be guided and regulated with sufficient laws and regulations. Constant improvements to the quality and quantity of human resources hold an important role in successful public asset management processes. This research focuses on developing countries, and contributes toward the knowledge of a Public Asset Management Framework at local government level, particularly Indonesia. The framework provides local governments a foundation to improve their effectiveness and efficiency in managing public assets, which could lead to improved public service quality. This framework will ensure that the best decisions are made throughout asset decision ownership and provide a better asset life cycle process, leading to selection of the most appropriate asset, improve its acquisition and delivery process, optimise asset performance, and provide an appropriate disposal program.