Engaging sex: Promoting the statutory interpretation experience in legal education

Given the ever increasing importance of legislation to the resolution of legal disputes, there is a concomitant need for law students to be well trained in the anatomy, identification, interpretation and application of laws made by or under parliament. This article discusses a blended learning project called Indigo’s Folly, implemented at the Queensland University of Technology Law School in 2014. Indigo’s Folly was created to increase law student competency with respect to statutory interpretation. Just as importantly, it was designed to make the teaching of statutory interpretation more interesting – to “bring the sexy” to the student statutory interpretation experience. Quantitative and qualitative empirical data will be presented as evidence to show that statutory interpretation can be taught in a way that law students find engaging.

Defective co-creation: Developing a typology of consumer dysfunction in professional services

Purpose This study aims to explore the scope of consumers’ defective co-creation behaviour in professional service encounters. One of the founding premises of service-dominant logic (Vargo and Lusch, 2004, 2008) is that consumers co-create the value they derive from service encounters. In practice, however, dysfunctional consumer behaviour can obstruct value co-creation. Extant research has not yet investigated consumers’ defective co-creation behaviour in highly relational services, such as professional services, that are heavily reliant on co-creation. Design/methodology/approach To investigate defective co-creation in professional services, 164 critical incidents were collected from 38 health-care and financial service providers using the critical incident technique within semi-structured, in-depth interviews. Thematic coding was used to identify emergent themes and patterns of consumer behaviour. Findings Thematic coding resulted in a comprehensive typology of consumers’ defective co-creation behaviour that both confirms the prevalence of previously identified dysfunctional behaviours (e.g. verbal abuse and physical aggression) and identifies two new forms of consumer misbehaviour: underparticipation and overparticipation. Further, these behaviours can vary, escalate and co-occur during service encounters. Originality/value Both underparticipation and overparticipation are newly identified forms of defective co-creation that need to be examined within the broader framework of service-dominant logic (SDL).

In vitro pre-vascularisation of tissue-engineered constructs: A co-culture perspective

In vitro pre-vascularization is one of the main vascularization strategies in the tissue engineering field. Culturing cells within a tissue-engineered construct (TEC) prior to implantation provides researchers with a greater degree of control over the fate of the cells. However, balancing the diverse range of different cell culture parameters in vitro is seldom easy and in most cases, especially in highly vascularized tissues, more than one cell type will reside within the cell culture system. Culturing multiple cell types in the same construct presents its own unique challenges and pitfalls. The following review examines endothelial-driven vascularization and evaluates the direct and indirect role other cell types have in vessel and capillary formation. The article then analyses the different parameters researchers can modulate in a co-culture system in order to design optimal tissue-engineered constructs to match desired clinical applications.

‘The door creaked shut’: The new breach of bail offence for youth in Queensland

As part of the 2014 amendments to the Youth Justice Act 1992 (Qld) the previous Queensland government introduced a new breach of bail offence and a reverse onus provision in relation to the new offence. Also included in the raft of amendments was a provision removing the internationally accepted principle that, in relation to young offenders, detention should be used as ‘a last resort’. This article argues that these changes are likely to increase the entrenchment of young people within the criminal justice system.

Evaluating the effects of international exposure from networks ties and mimetic pressure on clustered SMEs in Brazil

Research on the internationalisation of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) has received increasing attention in recent years due to the important role they play in today’s economic environment. Internationalisation prompting, or awareness, is an already recognised phase of the innovation-related stages model (I-model). This phase of awareness is closely related to the international exposure that a firm may experience during the occasion when it realises its competitors are already internationalising. Although the literature has discussed the various forms in which international exposure may happen, there has been limited attention given to the extent of its effect on the internationalisation of clustered SMEs that behave according to the I-Model. This study will assess the applicability of the I-Model in a dynamic, competitive and co-operative setting of an industrial cluster. It also evaluates the impact (if any) of international exposure derived from networks and the mimetic pressure that these firms may experience due to their embeddedness in an industrial cluster. Results from this study will indicate the effectiveness of the improved adapted model that will provide a richer insight for both academic researchers and policy makers.

The first cut is the deepest: Repeated interactions of co-authorship and academic productivity in Nobel laureate teams

Despite much in-depth investigation of factors influencing the co-authorship evolution in various scientific fields, our knowledge about how efficiency or creativity is linked to the longevity of collaborative relationships remains very limited. We explore what Nobel laureates’ co-authorship patterns reveal about the nature of scientific collaborations looking at the intensity and success of scientific collaborations across fields and across laureates’ collaborative lifecycles in physics, chemistry, and physiology/medicine. We find that more collaboration with the same researcher is actually no better for advancing creativity: publications produced early in a sequence of repeated collaborations with a given coauthor tend to be published better and cited more than papers that come later in the collaboration with the same coauthor. Our results indicate that scientific collaboration involves conceptual complementarities that may erode over a sequence of repeated interactions.

Optimal production resource reallocation for CO2 emissions reduction in manufacturing sectors

To mitigate the effects of climate change, countries worldwide are advancing technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This paper proposes and measures optimal production resource reallocation using data envelopment analysis. This research attempts to clarify the effect of optimal production resource reallocation on CO2 emissions reduction, focusing on regional and industrial characteristics. We use finance, energy, and CO2 emissions data from 13 industrial sectors in 39 countries from 1995 to 2009. The resulting emissions reduction potential is 2.54 Gt-CO2 in the year 2009, with former communist countries having the largest potential to reduce CO2 emissions in the manufacturing sectors. In particular, basic material industry including chemical and steel sectors has a lot of potential to reduce CO2 emissions.

Cultural considerations in will-making in Australia: A case study of Islamic or Sharia-compliant wills

This article explores the influence of cultural and religious beliefs and laws on how individuals make decisions about asset distribution through wills, drawing on a case study of Islamic will makers. Findings highlight diversity in beliefs and practices within Australian Islamic communities. When drafting a will people from culturally diverse backgrounds need to accommodate their religious and cultural values and local law. Implications of research findings for legal policy and practice in Australia are discussed.

Critical success factors for positioning Australian business talent in the global knowledge economy : a current research agenda

"Globalisation‟ and the "global knowledge economy‟ have become some of the most common "buzzwords‟ in Australian business, economic, and social sectors in the past decade. Further, knowledge service exports are a growing sector for Australia that utilise complex technical and creative capacities, increasingly rely on virtual work innovations, require new socio-technical systems to establish and maintain effective client relationships in global contexts; and – along with other innovations in the electronic age – may require novel coping abilities on the part of both managers and their employees to achieve desired outcomes (Bandura, 2002). Accordingly, this paper overviews such trends. The paper also includes a research agenda which is a "work-in-progress‟ with a major global company, Shell (Australia); it highlights both the objectives and proposed methodology of the study; it also outlines anticipated key benefits arising from the research.

Report on the Development and Validation of the Best Practice Decision Matrix

The Co-operative Research Centre for Construction Innovation (CRC-CI) is funding a project known as Value Alignment Process for Project Delivery. The project consists of a study of best practice project delivery and the development of a suite of products, resources and services to guide project teams towards the best procurement approach for a specific project or group of projects. These resources will be focused on promoting the principles that underlie best practice project delivery rather than simply identifying an off-the-shelf procurement system. This project builds on earlier work by Sidwell, Kennedy and Chan (2002), on re-engineering the construction delivery process, which developed a procurement framework in the form of a Decision Matrix

Articulating cooperative systems and driver behaviour theories

There has been increased research interest in Co-operative Vehicle Infrastructure Systems (CVIS) from the eld of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). However most of the research have focused on the engineering aspects and overlooked their relevance to the drivers' behaviour. This paper argues that the priority for cooperative systems is the need to improve drivers decision making and reduce drivers' crash risk exposure to improve road safety. Therefore any engineering solutions need to be considered in conjuction with traffic psychology theories on driver behaviour. This paper explores the advantages and limitations of existing systems and emphasizes various theoretical issues that arise in articulating cooperative systems' capabilities and drivers' behaviour.

Spaces of care in the third sector : Understanding the effects of professionalization

Increasingly the health and welfare needs of individuals and communities are being met by third sector, or not-for-profit, organizations. Since the 1980s third sector organizations have been subject to significant, sector-wide changes, such as the development of contractual funding and an increasing need to collaborate with governments and other sectors. In particular, the processes of ‘professionalization’ and ‘bureaucratization’ have received significant attention and are now well documented in third sector literature. These processes are often understood to create barriers between organizations and their community groups and neutralize alternative forms of service provision. In this article we provide a case study of an Australian third sector organization undergoing professionalization. The case study draws on ethnographic and qualitative interviews with staff and volunteers at a health-based third sector organization involved in service provision to marginalized community groups. We examine how professionalization alters organizational spaces and dynamics and conclude that professionalized third sector spaces may still be ‘community’ spaces where individuals may give and receive care and services. Moreover, we suggest that these community spaces hold potential for resisting the neutralizing effects of contracting.

Peace education

There are various understandings of peace education. What might be called maximalist peace education refers to educating students towards personal fulfilment and the creation of a just and co-operative society. What might be called minimalist peace education refers to educating students to avoid war, militarism and arms races. Peace education is only now being formally accepted as an integral part of educational endeavour, and an important part of this acceptance is recognition in international pronouncements and instruments, emphasizing the importance of a culture of peace and the right to peace. In terms of methodology, peace education includes curriculum, structures and process, and personal leadership. This last element is clearly the most challenging of all.

The impact of flooding on residential property values in England

Severe flooding throughout England in Autumn 1998 and 2000, has seen an increase in the extent of flood liable residential areas throughout England, as well as an increase in the actual levels of flood damage in all previously recognised flood prone residential areas. The increasing cost of rectifying the damage caused to residential properties from flooding has been of some concern to the residential property valuation profession and sales and leasing agency practices. However, the increasing trend in the frequency of flooding in England, combined with an increase in severity of flooding is now causing some degree of concern in the residential insurance and housing finance sectors. In order to determine and quantify the impact of flooding and flood damage on the residential property market in England, a survey of Chartered Surveyors and Chartered Real Estate Valuers has been carried out across the main flood affected counties of England. This survey will provide similar details to the research completed by Eves (1999, 2001) and Fibbens (1993) in relation to residential property flooding in Australia. This survey provides comprehensive responses in relation to the degree of flood affectation across counties, the effect of flooding on residential property values, the impact of flooding on building insurance premiums and possible difficulties in obtaining finance to purchase residential property in recognised flood areas.