Rural and remote road safety study : final report

• Introduction: Concern and action for rural road safety is relatively new in Australia in comparison to the field of traffic safety as a whole. In 2003, a program of research was begun by the Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety - Queensland (CARRS-Q) and the Rural Health Research Unit (RHRU) at James Cook University to investigate factors contributing to serious rural road crashes in the North Queensland region. This project was funded by the Premier’s Department, Main Roads Department, Queensland Transport, QFleet, Queensland Rail, Queensland Ambulance Service, Department of Natural Resources and Queensland Police Service. Additional funding was provided by NRMA Insurance for a PhD scholarship. In-kind support was provided through the four hospitals used for data collection, namely Cairns Base Hospital, The Townsville Hospital, Mount Isa Hospital and Atherton Hospital.----- The primary aim of the project was to: Identify human factors related to the occurrence of serious traffic incidents in rural and remote areas of Australia, and to the trauma suffered by persons as a result of these incidents, using a sample drawn from a rural and remote area in North Queensland.----- The data and analyses presented in this report are the core findings from two broad studies: a general examination of fatalities and casualties from rural and remote crashes for the period 1 March 2004 until 30 June 2007, and a further linked case-comparison study of hospitalised patients compared with a sample of non-crash-involved drivers.----- • Method: The study was undertaken in rural North Queensland, as defined by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) statistical divisions of North Queensland, Far North Queensland and North-West Queensland. Urban areas surrounding Townsville, Thuringowa and Cairns were not included. The study methodology was centred on serious crashes, as defined by a resulting hospitalisation for 24 hours or more and/or a fatality. Crashes meeting this criteria within the North Queensland region between 1 March 2004 and 30 June 2007 were identified through hospital records and interviewed where possible. Additional data was sourced from coroner’s reports, the Queensland Transport road crash database, the Queensland Ambulance Service and the study hospitals in the region.----- This report is divided into chapters corresponding to analyses conducted on the collected crash and casualty data.----- Chapter 3 presents an overview of all crashes and casualties identified during the study period. Details are presented in regard to the demographics and road user types of casualties; the locations, times, types, and circumstances of crashes; along with the contributing circumstances of crashes.----- Chapter 4 presents the results of summary statistics for all casualties for which an interview was able to be conducted. Statistics are presented separately for drivers and riders, passengers, pedestrians and cyclists. Details are also presented separately for drivers and riders crashing in off-road and on-road settings. Results from questionnaire data are presented in relation to demographics; the experience of the crash in narrative form; vehicle characteristics and maintenance; trip characteristics (e.g. purpose and length of journey; periods of fatigue and monotony; distractions from driving task); driving history; alcohol and drug use; medical history; driving attitudes, intentions and behaviour; attitudes to enforcement; and experience of road safety advertising.----- Chapter 5 compares the above-listed questionnaire results between on-road crash-involved casualties and interviews conducted in the region with non-crash-involved persons. Direct comparisons as well as age and sex adjusted comparisons are presented.----- Chapter 6 presents information on those casualties who were admitted to one of the study hospitals during the study period. Brief information is given regarding the demographic characteristics of these casualties. Emergency services’ data is used to highlight the characteristics of patient retrieval and transport to and between hospitals. The major injuries resulting from the crashes are presented for each region of the body and analysed by vehicle type, occupant type, seatbelt status, helmet status, alcohol involvement and nature of crash. Estimates are provided of the costs associated with in-hospital treatment and retrieval.----- Chapter 7 describes the characteristics of the fatal casualties and the nature and circumstances of the crashes. Demographics, road user types, licence status, crash type and contributing factors for crashes are presented. Coronial data is provided in regard to contributing circumstances (including alcohol, drugs and medical conditions), cause of death, resulting injuries, and restraint and helmet use.----- Chapter 8 presents the results of a comparison between casualties’ crash descriptions and police-attributed crash circumstances. The relative frequency of contributing circumstances are compared both broadly within the categories of behavioural, environmental, vehicle related, medical and other groupings and specifically for circumstances within these groups.----- Chapter 9 reports on the associated research projects which have been undertaken on specific topics related to rural road safety.----- Finally, Chapter 10 reports on the conclusions and recommendations made from the program of research.---- • Major Recommendations : From the findings of these analyses, a number of major recommendations were made: + Male drivers and riders - Male drivers and riders should continue to be the focus of interventions, given their very high representation among rural and remote road crash fatalities and serious injuries.----- - The group of males aged between 30 and 50 years comprised the largest number of casualties and must also be targeted for change if there is to be a meaningful improvement in rural and remote road safety.----- + Motorcyclists - Single vehicle motorcycle crashes constitute over 80% of serious, on-road rural motorcycle crashes and need particular attention in development of policy and infrastructure.----- - The motorcycle safety consultation process currently being undertaken by Queensland Transport (via the "Motorbike Safety in Queensland - Consultation Paper") is strongly endorsed. As part of this process, particular attention needs to be given to initiatives designed to reduce rural and single vehicle motorcycle crashes.----- - The safety of off-road riders is a serious problem that falls outside the direct responsibility of either Transport or Health departments. Responsibility for this issue needs to be attributed to develop appropriate policy, regulations and countermeasures.----- + Road safety for Indigenous people - Continued resourcing and expansion of The Queensland Aboriginal Peoples and Torres Strait Islander Peoples Driver Licensing Program to meet the needs of remote and Indigenous communities with significantly lower licence ownership levels.----- - Increased attention needs to focus on the contribution of geographic disadvantage (remoteness) factors to remote and Indigenous road trauma.----- + Road environment - Speed is the ‘final common pathway’ in determining the severity of rural and remote crashes and rural speed limits should be reduced to 90km/hr for sealed off-highway roads and 80km/hr for all unsealed roads as recommended in the Austroads review and in line with the current Tasmanian government trial.----- - The Department of Main Roads should monitor rural crash clusters and where appropriate work with local authorities to conduct relevant audits and take mitigating action. - The international experts at the workshop reviewed the data and identified the need to focus particular attention on road design management for dangerous curves. They also indicated the need to maximise the use of audio-tactile linemarking (audible lines) and rumble strips to alert drivers to dangerous conditions and behaviours.----- + Trauma costs - In accordance with Queensland Health priorities, recognition should be given to the substantial financial costs associated with acute management of trauma resulting from serious rural and remote crashes.----- - Efforts should be made to develop a comprehensive, regionally specific costing formula for road trauma that incorporates the pre-hospital, hospital and post-hospital phases of care. This would inform health resource allocation and facilitate the evaluation of interventions.----- - The commitment of funds to the development of preventive strategies to reduce rural and remote crashes should take into account the potential cost savings associated with trauma.----- - A dedicated study of the rehabilitation needs and associated personal and healthcare costs arising from rural and remote road crashes should be undertaken.----- + Emergency services - While the study has demonstrated considerable efficiency in the response and retrieval systems of rural and remote North Queensland, relevant Intelligent Transport Systems technologies (such as vehicle alarm systems) to improve crash notification should be both developed and evaluated.----- + Enforcement - Alcohol and speed enforcement programs should target the period between 2 and 6pm because of the high numbers of crashes in the afternoon period throughout the rural region.----- + Drink driving - Courtesy buses should be advocated and schemes such as the Skipper project promoted as local drink driving countermeasures in line with the very high levels of community support for these measures identified in the hospital study.------ - Programs should be developed to target the high levels of alcohol consumption identified in rural and remote areas and related involvement in crashes.----- - Referrals to drink driving rehabilitation programs should be mandated for recidivist offenders.----- + Data requirements - Rural and remote road crashes should receive the same quality of attention as urban crashes. As such, it is strongly recommended that increased resources be committed to enable dedicated Forensic Crash Units to investigate rural and remote fatal and serious injury crashes.----- - Transport department records of rural and remote crashes should record the crash location using the national ARIA area classifications used by health departments as a means to better identifying rural crashes.----- - Rural and remote crashes tend to be unnoticed except in relatively infrequent rural reviews. They should receive the same level of attention and this could be achieved if fatalities and fatal crashes were coded by the ARIA classification system and included in regular crash reporting.----- - Health, Transport and Police agencies should collect a common, minimal set of data relating to road crashes and injuries, including presentations to small rural and remote health facilities.----- + Media and community education programmes - Interventions seeking to highlight the human contribution to crashes should be prioritised. Driver distraction, alcohol and inappropriate speed for the road conditions are key examples of such behaviours.----- - Promotion of basic safety behaviours such as the use of seatbelts and helmets should be given a renewed focus.----- - Knowledge, attitude and behavioural factors that have been identified for the hospital Brief Intervention Trial should be considered in developing safety campaigns for rural and remote people. For example challenging the myth of the dangerous ‘other’ or ‘non-local’ driver.----- - Special educational initiatives on the issues involved in rural and remote driving should be undertaken. For example the material used by Main Roads, the Australian Defence Force and local initiatives.

Geek goddesses go to school : A study of female pre-service teachers in information technology courses

Various reasons have been proffered for female under-representation in tertiary information technology (IT) courses and the IT industry with most relating to cultural moirés. The 2006 Geek Goddess calendar was designed to alter IT’s “geeky image” and the term is used here to represent young women enrolled in pre-service IT teaching courses. Their special mix of IT and teaching draws on conflicting stereotypes and represents a micro-climate which is typically lost in studies of IT occupations because of the aggregation of all IT roles. This paper will report on a small-scale investigation of female students (N=25) at a university in Queensland (Australia) studying to become teachers of secondary IT subjects. They are entering the IT industry, gendered as a “male” occupation, through the safe space of teaching a discipline allied to feminine qualities of nurturing. They are “geek goddesses” who – perhaps to balance the masculine and feminine of these occupations - have decided to go to school rather than into corporations or government.

Is the Marlboro man the only alternative? The role of gender identity and self-construal salience in evaluations of male models

This research examines how men react to male models in print advertisements. In two experiments, we show that the gender identity of men influences their responses to advertisements featuring a masculine, feminine, or androgynous male model. In addition, we explore the extent to which men feel they will be classified by others as similar to the model as a mechanism for these effects. Specifically, masculine men respond most favorably to masculine models and are negative toward feminine models. In contrast, feminine men prefer feminine models when their private self is salient. Yet in a collective context, they prefer masculine models.These experiments shed light on how gender identity and self-construal influence male evaluations and illustrate the social pressure on men to endorse traditional masculine portrayals. We also present implications for advertising practice.

Whiteness, Epistemology and Indigenous representation

With its focus on Australia, Whitening Race engages with relations between migration, Indigenous dispossession and whiteness. It creates a new intellectual space that investigates the nature of racialised conditions and their role in reproducing colonising relations in Australia.

Long-term outcomes of seriously injured children : a study using the Child Health Questionnaire

Objective: To assess the health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in children 1-2 years after they had sustained an injury. Methods: Parents of all children who were identified by the Queensland Trauma Registry during their admission to either of the two paediatric specialty hospitals in Brisbane, Australia, for the treatment of an injury, were invited to participate in this study. Parents who consented to participation received a copy of the Child Health Questionnaire (CHQ) that required them to provide information regarding their child’s HRQoL following injury. The CHQ scores for the study respondents were compared with those of the Australian norms. This study was approved by the relevant ethics committees. Results: Two hundred and forty-one completed questionnaires were returned. The majority of cases were male (65%) and there was even representation across all age groups. The majority of injuries were considered to be minor (81%) and were predominantly the result of falls and cycling accidents causing mainly fractures and intracranial injury. On the majority of subscales of the CHQ, study participants recorded scores that were statistically significantly below those of the Australian norms. None of the relevant variables collected by the Queensland Trauma Registry were found to predict scores on the CHQ in this study (for those children hospitalized for >24 h). Conclusion: Injured children are worse off than their Australian counterparts in terms of HRQoL even up to 2 years following an injury. Further research needs to be undertaken to identify factors that predict lower HRQoL in order to reduce the burden of injury on children and their families.

Wrapped fragments : Drapery, the eighteenth century portrait bust and the male subject

The depiction of drapery (generalised cloth as opposed to clothing) is a well-established convention of Neo-Classical sculpture and is often downplayed by art historians as of purely rhetorical value. It can be argued however that sculpted drapery has served a spectrum of expressive ends, the variety and complexity of which are well illustrated by a study of its use in portrait sculpture. For the Neo-Classical portrait bust, drapery had substantial iconographic and political meaning, signifying the new Enlightenment notions of masculine authority. Within the portrait bust, drapery also served highly strategic aesthetic purposes, alleviating the abruptness of the truncated format and the compromising visual consequences of the “cropped” body. With reference to Joseph Nollekens’ portraits of English statesman Charles James Fox and the author’s own sculptural practice, this paper analyses the Neo-Classical use of drapery to propose that rendered fabric, far from mere stylistic flourish, is a highly charged visual signifier with much scope for exploration in contemporary sculptural practice.

Poly-immunoglobulin receptor-mediated transport of IgA into the male genital tract is important for clearance of chlamydia muridarum infection

Problem: Chlamydia trachomatis is the most common sexually transmitted infection worldwide. While infection in females requires a Th1 response for clearance, such a response in males may disrupt the immune privileged nature of the male reproductive tract, potentially contributing to infertility. Method of study: We investigated the role of IgA in protection against an intrapenile Chlamydia muridarum infection of C57BL/6 and pIgR−/− mice. Results: Here, we show that the poly immunoglobulin receptor is the main pathway for IgA transport into the male reproductive tract. The high levels of IgA seen in prostatic fluid of wild-type mice correlate with reduction in chlamydial infection both in vitro and in vivo. Conclusion: These findings indicate that a Chlamydia vaccine that induces neutralizing IgA in the prostate will aid in the protection against infection in males.

Granule-based knowledge representation for intra and inter transaction association mining

Abstract With the phenomenal growth of electronic data and information, there are many demands for the development of efficient and effective systems (tools) to perform the issue of data mining tasks on multidimensional databases. Association rules describe associations between items in the same transactions (intra) or in different transactions (inter). Association mining attempts to find interesting or useful association rules in databases: this is the crucial issue for the application of data mining in the real world. Association mining can be used in many application areas, such as the discovery of associations between customers’ locations and shopping behaviours in market basket analysis. Association mining includes two phases. The first phase, called pattern mining, is the discovery of frequent patterns. The second phase, called rule generation, is the discovery of interesting and useful association rules in the discovered patterns. The first phase, however, often takes a long time to find all frequent patterns; these also include much noise. The second phase is also a time consuming activity that can generate many redundant rules. To improve the quality of association mining in databases, this thesis provides an alternative technique, granule-based association mining, for knowledge discovery in databases, where a granule refers to a predicate that describes common features of a group of transactions. The new technique first transfers transaction databases into basic decision tables, then uses multi-tier structures to integrate pattern mining and rule generation in one phase for both intra and inter transaction association rule mining. To evaluate the proposed new technique, this research defines the concept of meaningless rules by considering the co-relations between data-dimensions for intratransaction-association rule mining. It also uses precision to evaluate the effectiveness of intertransaction association rules. The experimental results show that the proposed technique is promising.

Fractions, reunitisation and the number-line representation

Centre for Mathematics and Science Education, QUT, Brisbane, Australia This paper reports on a study in which Years 6 and 10 students were individually interviewed to determine their ability to unitise and reunitise number lines used to represent mixed numbers and improper fractions. Only 16.7% of the students (all Year 6) were successful on all three tasks and, in general, Year 6 students outperformed Year 8 students. The interviews revealed that the remaining students had incomplete, fragmented or non-existent structural knowledge of mixed numbers and improper fractions, and were unable to unitise or reunitise number lines. The implication for teaching is that instruction should focus on providing students with a variety of fraction representations in order to develop rich and flexible schema for all fraction types (mixed numbers, and proper and improper fractions).

Homophobia, heteronormativism and hegemonic masculinity : male same-sex intimate violence from the perspective of Brisbane service providers

Few studies have explored the problem of male same-sex intimate partner violence, especially in the context of Australia. Utilizing in-depth interviews with gay-friendly service providers in Brisbane, the research presented in this article sought to ascertain whether (a) intimate partner violence occurs in male same-sex intimate relationships, (b)if so, what form this violence takes,(c) what contextual triggers underpin this violence,(d) what barriers victims face in exiting abusive relationships and seeking support, and (e) what services are available and appropriate to the needs of men in violent intimate relationships with other men. Results suggest that the prevalence, types and contextual triggers of violence in male same-sex relationships parallel abuse in opposite-sex relationships. Heteronormativism, homophobia, and its close association with hegemonic masculinity, however, emerge as features unique to the male same-sex intimate partner violence experience.

Energy polarization and popular representation: Evidence from the Russian Duma

In this article we introduce the term “energy polarization” to explain the politics of energy market reform in the Russian Duma. Our model tests the impact of regional energy production, party cohesion and ideology, and electoral mandate on the energy policy decisions of the Duma deputies (oil, gas, and electricity bills and resolution proposals) between 1994 and 2003. We find a strong divide between Single-Member District (SMD) and Proportional Representation (PR) deputies High statistical significance of gas production is demonstrated throughout the three Duma terms and shows Gazprom's key position in the post-Soviet Russian economy. Oil production is variably significant in the two first Dumas, when the main legislative debates on oil privatization occur. There is no constant left–right continuum, which is consistent with the deputies' proclaimed party ideology. The pro- and anti-reform poles observed in our Poole-based single dimensional scale are not necessarily connected with liberal and state-oriented regulatory policies, respectively. Party switching is a solid indicator of Russia's polarized legislative dynamics when it comes to energy sector reform.

Representation and learning of visual information for pose recognition

Recovering position from sensor information is an important problem in mobile robotics, known as localisation. Localisation requires a map or some other description of the environment to provide the robot with a context to interpret sensor data. The mobile robot system under discussion is using an artificial neural representation of position. Building a geometrical map of the environment with a single camera and artificial neural networks is difficult. Instead it would be simpler to learn position as a function of the visual input. Usually when learning images, an intermediate representation is employed. An appropriate starting point for biologically plausible image representation is the complex cells of the visual cortex, which have invariance properties that appear useful for localisation. The effectiveness for localisation of two different complex cell models are evaluated. Finally the ability of a simple neural network with single shot learning to recognise these representations and localise a robot is examined.