Now everything looks like a game : Mobile phones and location-based games.

This paper explores how we may transform peoples’ perceived access to cultural participation by exploiting the possible relationships between place, play and mobile devices. It presents SCOOT; a location-based game in order to investigate how aspects of game-play can be employed to evoke at once playful and culturally meaningful experiences of place. In particular this paper is concerned with how the portable, communicative and social affordances of mobile phones are integral to making a “now everything looks like a game” experience.

Brain and cognitive development

'The Millennial Adolescent' offers contemporary, stimulating insights for those currently teaching as well as those preparing to teach. This book investigates the characteristics of Generation Y, using students own voices, generational theory and case studies. The text is structured around the principle that effective teachers need to know who they are teaching as well as what to teach, how to teach it, and how to assess the outcome. Using generational theory, 'The Millennial Adolescent' investigates the characteristics of Generation Y, or the Millennial Generation, and points out what all teachers need to know about working with this current generation of students who are described in a number of ways digital natives, team oriented, confident, multi-taskers, high achievers, and a generation unlike any other. The book contains well-known frameworks for developing understandings about adolescents, blended and contrasted with a contemporary socio-cultural construction of adolescence, set in our particular time, era and society. This book reflects the uniqueness of Australian contexts, while connecting with international trends and global patterns. Engaging and full of insights, this book is essential reading for all professionals dealing with adolescents.

Hypercapitalism: language, new media and social perceptions of value

Using examples from contemporary policy and business discourses, and exemplary historical texts dealing with the notion of value, I put forward an argument as to why a critical scholarship that draws on media history, language analysis, philosophy and political economy is necessary to understand the dynamics of what is being called 'the global knowledge economy'. I argue that the social changes associated with new modes of value determination are closely associated with new media forms.

Open City, Rossellini and neorealism : sixty years on

For Bakhtin, it is always important to know from where one speaks. The place from which I speak is that of a person who grew up in Italy during the economic miracle (pre-1968) in a working class family, watching film matinees on television during school holidays. All sort of films and genres were shown: from film noir to westerns, to Jean Renoir's films, German expressionism, Italian neorealism and Italian comedy. Cinema has come to represent over time a sort of memory extension that supplements lived memory of events, and one which, especially, mediates the intersection of many cultural discourses. When later in life I moved to Australia and started teaching in film studies, my choice of a film that was emblematic of neorealism went naturally to Roma città aperta (Open city hereafter) by Roberto Rossellini (1945), and not to Paisan or Sciuscà or Bicycle Thieves. My choice was certainly grounded in my personal memory - especially those aspects transmitted to me by my parents, who lived through the war and maintained that Open City had truly made them cry. With a mother who voted for the Christian Democratic Party and a father who was a unionist, I thought that this was normal in Italian families and society. In the early 1960s, the Resistance still offered a narrative of suffering and redemption, shared by Catholics or Communists. This construction of psychological realism is what I believe Open City continues to offer in time.

Safety culture research, lead indicators, and the development of safety effectiveness indicators in the construction sector

Construction sector application of Lead Indicators generally and Positive Performance Indicators (PPIs) particularly, are largely seen by the sector as not providing generalizable indicators of safety effectiveness. Similarly, safety culture is often cited as an essential factor in improving safety performance, yet there is no known reliable way of measuring safety culture. This paper proposes that the accurate measurement of safety effectiveness and safety culture is a requirement for assessing safe behaviours, safety knowledge, effective communication and safety performance. Currently there are no standard national or international safety effectiveness indicators (SEIs) that are accepted by the construction industry. The challenge is that quantitative survey instruments developed for measuring safety culture and/ or safety climate are inherently flawed methodologically and do not produce reliable and representative data concerning attitudes to safety. Measures that combine quantitative and qualitative components are needed to provide a clear utility for safety effectiveness indicators.

An institutional understanding of triple bottom line evaluations and the use of social and environmental metrics

Measuring social and environmental metrics of property is necessary for meaningful triple bottom line (TBL) assessments. This paper demonstrates how relevant indicators derived from environmental rating systems provide for reasonably straightforward collations of performance scores that support adjustments based on a sliding scale. It also highlights the absence of a corresponding consensus of important social metrics representing the third leg of the TBL tripod. Assessing TBL may be unavoidably imprecise, but if valuers and managers continue to ignore TBL concerns, their assessments may soon be less relevant given the emerging institutional milieu informing and reflecting business practices and society expectations.

WorkChoices, ImageChoices and the marketing of new industrial relations legislation

This article takes a critical discourse approach to one aspect of the Australian WorkChoices industrial relations legislation: the government’s major advertisement published in national newspapers in late 2005 and released simultaneously as a 16-page booklet. This strategic move was the initial stage of one of the largest ‘information’ campaigns ever mounted by an Australian government, costing more than $AUD137 million. This article analyse the semiotic (visual and graphic) elements of the advertisement to uncover what these elements contribute to the message, particularly through their construction of both an image of the legislation and a portrayal of the Australian worker. We argue for the need to fuse approaches from critical discourse studies and social semiotics to deepen understanding of industrial relations phenomena such as the ‘hard sell’ to win the hearts and minds of citizens regarding unpopular new legislation.

Organic and acquisitive employment growth : re-examining,testing and extending Penrose's Growth Theory.

Edith Penrose’s theory of firm growth postulates that a firm’s current growth rate will be influenced by the adjustment costs of, and changes to a firm’s productive opportunity set arising from, previous growth. Although she explicitly considered the impact of previous organic growth on current organic growth, she was largely silent about the impact of previous acquisitive growth. In this paper we extend Penrose’s work to examine that the relative impact of organic and acquisitive growth on the adjustment costs and productive opportunity set of the firm. Employing a panel of commercially active enterprises in Sweden over a 10 year period our results suggest the following. First, previous organic growth acts as a constraint on current organic growth. Second, previous acquisitive growth has a positive effect on current organic growth. We conclude that organic growth and acquisitive growth constitute two distinct strategic options facing the firm, which have a differential impact on the future organic growth of the firm.

Termination of a minor’s pregnancy : critical issues for consent and the criminal law

The recent Supreme Court decision of Queensland v B [2008] 2 Qd R 562 has significant implications for the law that governs consent and abortions. The judgment purports to extend the ratio of Secretary, Department of Health and Community Services (NT) v JWB and SMB (1991) 175 CLR 218 (Marion’s Case) and impose a requirement of court approval for terminations of pregnancy for minors who are not Gillick-competent. This article argues against the imposition of this requirement on the ground that such an approach is an unjustifiable extension of the reasoning in Marion’s Case. The decision, which is the first judicial consideration in Queensland of the position of medical terminations, also reveals systemic problems with the criminal law in that State. In concluding that the traditional legal excuse for abortions will not apply to those which are performed medically, Queensland v B provides further support for calls to reform this area of law.

Every player wins a prize? Family provision applications and bequests to charity

This research deals with the interaction of family provision law and charitable bequests in wills, including qualitative research relating to the practical issues arising with both legal practitioners and charities’ bequest officers.

Interview with Dr. Young-Ki Paik, President of the Human Proteome Organization (HUPO): Pharmacoproteomics and the approaching wave of “Proteomics Diagnostics”

Dr. Young-Ki Paik directs the Yonsei Proteome Research Center in Seoul, Korea and was elected as the President of the Human Proteome Organization (HUPO) in 2009. In the December 2009 issue of the Current Pharmacogenomics and Personalized Medicine (CPPM), Dr. Paik explains the new field of pharmacoproteomics and the approaching wave of “proteomics diagnostics” in relation to personalized medicine, HUPO’s role in advancing proteomics technology applications, the HUPO Proteomics Standards Initiative, and the future impact of proteomics on medicine, science, and society. Additionally, he comments that (1) there is a need for launching a Gene-Centric Human Proteome Project (GCHPP) through which all representative proteins encoded by the genes can be identified and quantified in a specific cell and tissue and, (2) that the innovation frameworks within the diagnostics industry hitherto borrowed from the genetics age may require reevaluation in the case of proteomics, in order to facilitate the uptake of pharmacoproteomics innovations. He stresses the importance of biological/clinical plausibility driving the evolution of biotechnologies such as proteomics,instead of an isolated singular focus on the technology per se. Dr. Paik earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Missouri-Columbia and carried out postdoctoral work at the Gladstone Foundation Laboratories of Cardiovascular Disease, University of California at San Francisco. In 2005, his research team at Yonsei University first identified and characterized the chemical structure of C. elegans dauer pheromone (daumone) which controls the aging process of this nematode. He is interviewed by a multidisciplinary team specializing in knowledge translation, technology regulation, health systems governance, and innovation analysis.

Departing from the virtual community : a discussion of the ways and means to uncover localised order in online games

This paper is part one of a three part study into the collective regulation processes of players in massive multiplayer online games (MMOG). Traditionally game playing has not been classed as problematic, however with introduction of new media technologies and new ways to play games, certain contexts have become obscure, namely the localised order of ‘playing online’ or how players manage and maintain order between each other as opposed to ‘following the rules’. Principally this paper will examine concepts of ‘virtual community’. These will be illustrated as particularly unhelpful when considering how people conduct themselves in these spaces. Thus, ‘virtual community’ will be seen as critical in implicating various online behaviours as superior to other online behaviours causing obscurity and blurring actions. This obscurity is grounded by strong associations in the virtual community as logic of practise in and of itself; behaviours that fall outside this category become common sense and as such are made invisible for investigation. This paper will draw upon the theories of Basil Bernstein and Pierre Bourdieu to produce a distinction between online behaviours and ultimately make them visible for further investigation. In doing so this paper seeks to form a basis for future research where interaction in these spaces can be identified as belonging to a certain framework to inform the design of online games and applications more effectively.