Psychosocial predictors of rule following in hostels for women experiencing homelessness

This study examined the psychosocial factors impacting upon the rule-following behaviour of residents of a hostel providing crisis accommodation to women who are homeless. After their arrival, residents of a women’s hostel (N = 83) completed questionnaires assessing the Theory of Planned Behaviour constructs of attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioural control (PBC), and intentions related to rule-following while residing at the hostel. Perceived resident group norms for rule-following were assessed also. Follow-up staff evaluations of the target behaviour were completed after participants ceased their hostel residence. As expected, attitude, subjective norm, PBC, and group norm significantly predicted intention to follow hostel rules, and intention and PBC predicted rule following behaviour. As rule following is a crucial requirement for continuation of their stay, these findings can inform strategies to improve the experiences and outcomes of women’s short-term hostel stays.

Transfer of Title by a Non-Owner : Personal Property Securities Act 2009 (Cth) exceptions to the nemo dat quod non habet rule

The fundamental personal property rule – no one can transfer a better title to property than they had – is subject to exceptions in the Sale of Goods legislation, which aim to protect innocent buyers who are deceived by a seller’s apparent physical possession of property. These exceptions cover a limited range of transactions and are restrictive in their operation. Australia now has national legislation - the Personal Property Securities Act 2009 (Cth) - which will apply to many transactions outside the scope of the Sale of Goods Act and which includes rules for sales by non-owners which will provide exceptions to the nemo dat quod non habet rule for many common commercial transactions. This article explores the effect of the Personal Property Securities Act 2009 (Cth) on the Sale of Goods exceptions, explains that the new provisions are so wide that there is little continuing relevance for the Sale of Goods Act exceptions, and indicates where they may still apply.

A majority experience: young people’s encounters with the labour market

Young people are frequently the focus of study in social science. Education, employment, leisure, criminality and family life are all spheres within which the different experiences of young people have been examined (Pollock 2008). A still relatively small, but expanding strand of this broader scholarship addressing youth-related issues is a body of theoretical and empirical literature which focuses on young people's participation in work. This growing interest in young people's employment has followed a significant shift in many western societies. Younger and much larger numbers of young people, still engaged in full time education, are entering the formal labour market. Indeed, in many countries, employment is a majority experience for children (Hobbs and McKechnie 1997), and for young people in general. While in such work there has been a tendency to blur definitional lines, here we adopt the term 'young people' which incorporates the definitions of 'children' as those under 18 years and 'youth' as those under 24 (UN n.d.).

Quo Vadis? Reliable and Practical Rule Extraction from Neural Networks

Rule extraction from neural network algorithms have been investigated for two decades and there have been significant applications. Despite this level of success, rule extraction from neural network methods are generally not part of data mining tools, and a significant commercial breakthrough may still be some time away. This paper briefly reviews the state-of-the-art and points to some of the obstacles, namely a lack of evaluation techniques in experiments and larger benchmark data sets. A significant new development is the view that rule extraction from neural networks is an interactive process which actively involves the user. This leads to the application of assessment and evaluation techniques from information retrieval which may lead to a range of new methods.

Rule-based approach for identifying assertions in clinical free-text data

A rule-based approach for classifying previously identified medical concepts in the clinical free text into an assertion category is presented. There are six different categories of assertions for the task: Present, Absent, Possible, Conditional, Hypothetical and Not associated with the patient. The assertion classification algorithms were largely based on extending the popular NegEx and Context algorithms. In addition, a health based clinical terminology called SNOMED CT and other publicly available dictionaries were used to classify assertions, which did not fit the NegEx/Context model. The data for this task includes discharge summaries from Partners HealthCare and from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre, as well as discharge summaries and progress notes from University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre. The set consists of 349 discharge reports, each with pairs of ground truth concept and assertion files for system development, and 477 reports for evaluation. The system’s performance on the evaluation data set was 0.83, 0.83 and 0.83 for recall, precision and F1-measure, respectively. Although the rule-based system shows promise, further improvements can be made by incorporating machine learning approaches.

UCPR rule 687 - exercise of discretion to fix costs - applicable principles

Although the Uniform Civil Procedure Rules 1999 (Qld) (UCPR) have always included a power for the court to order a party to pay an amount for costs to be fixed by the court, until recently the power was rarely used in the higher courts. In light of recent practice directions, and the changes to the procedures for assessment of costs contained in the new Chapter 17A of the UCPR, this is no longer the case. The judgment of Mullins J in ASIC v Atlantic 3 Financial (Aust) Pty Ltd [2008] QSC 9 provides some helpful guidance for practitioners about the principles which might be applied.

The role of the rule of law in virtual communities

Please see the updated published version of this work at http://eprints.qut.edu.au/37850/ There is a severe tendency in cyberlaw theory to delegitimize state intervention in the governance of virtual communities. Much of the existing theory makes one of two fundamental flawed assumptions: that communities will always be best governed without the intervention of the state; or that the territorial state can best encourage the development of communities by creating enforceable property rights and allowing the market to resolve any disputes. These assumptions do not ascribe sufficient weight to the value-laden support that the territorial state always provides to private governance regimes, the inefficiencies that will tend to limit the development utopian communities, and the continued role of the territorial state in limiting autonomy in accordance with communal values...

Rule-based transit signal priority control method using a real-time transit travel time prediction model

An advanced rule-based Transit Signal Priority (TSP) control method is presented in this paper. An on-line transit travel time prediction model is the key component of the proposed method, which enables the selection of the most appropriate TSP plans for the prevailing traffic and transit condition. The new method also adopts a priority plan re-development feature that enables modifying or even switching the already implemented priority plan to accommodate changes in the traffic conditions. The proposed method utilizes conventional green extension and red truncation strategies and also two new strategies including green truncation and queue clearance. The new method is evaluated against a typical active TSP strategy and also the base case scenario assuming no TSP control in microsimulation. The evaluation results indicate that the proposed method can produce significant benefits in reducing the bus delay time and improving the service regularity with negligible adverse impacts on the non-transit street traffic.

Book review : Olivier Corten, The Law Against War

Olivier Corten’s The Law Against War is a comprehensive, meticulously-researched study of contemporary international law governing the use of armed force in international relations. As a translated and updated version of a 2008 book published in French, it offers valuable insights into the positivist methodology that underpins much of the European scholarship of international law. Corten undertakes a rigorous analysis of state practice from 1945 onwards, with a view to clarifying the current meaning and scope of international law’s prohibition on the use of force. His central argument is that the majority of states remain attached to a strict interpretation of this rule. For Corten, state practice indicates that the doctrines of anticipatory self-defence, pre-emptive force and humanitarian intervention have no basis in contemporary international law. His overall position accords with a traditional, restrictive view of the circumstances in which states are permitted to use force...

Slid pairs in the initialisation of the A5/1 stream cipher

A5/1 is a shift register based stream cipher which uses a majority clocking rule to update its registers. It is designed to provide privacy for the GSM system. In this paper, we analyse the initialisation process of A5/1. We demonstrate a sliding property of the A5/1 cipher, where every valid internal state is also a legitimate loaded state and multiple key-IV pairs produce phase shifted keystream sequences. We describe a possible ciphertext only attack based on this property.

Analyzing the effectiveness of graph metrics for anomaly detection in online social networks

Online social networks can be modelled as graphs; in this paper, we analyze the use of graph metrics for identifying users with anomalous relationships to other users. A framework is proposed for analyzing the effectiveness of various graph theoretic properties such as the number of neighbouring nodes and edges, betweenness centrality, and community cohesiveness in detecting anomalous users. Experimental results on real-world data collected from online social networks show that the majority of users typically have friends who are friends themselves, whereas anomalous users’ graphs typically do not follow this common rule. Empirical analysis also shows that the relationship between average betweenness centrality and edges identifies anomalies more accurately than other approaches.

The phosphate mineral sigloite Fe3+Al2(PO4)2(OH)3·7(H2O), an exception to the paragenesis rule – a vibrational spectroscopic study

The secondary phosphate mineral sigloite Fe3+Al2(PO4)2(OH)3·7H2O is the exception to the rule that phosphate mineral paragenesis is related to the final phase of hydrothermal mineralization at low temperatures. Sigloite was formed as an oxidation pseudomorph after paravauxite, during the last supergene paragenetic stage. We have studied the secondary phosphate mineral sigloite Fe3+Al2(PO4)2(OH)3·7H2O using vibrational spectroscopic techniques. Because the mineral is a phosphate mineral, it is readily studied by spectroscopic techniques as the phosphate and hydrogen phosphate units are readily measured. Indeed, sigloite shows the presence of both phosphate and hydrogen phosphate units in its structure. Raman bands at 1009 cm−1 with shoulders at 993 and 1039 cm−1 are assigned to stretching vibrations of and units. The Raman band at 993 cm−1 is assigned to the ν1 symmetric stretching mode of the POH units, whereas the Raman band at 1009 cm−1 is assigned to the ν1 symmetric stretching mode. Raman bands observed at 506, 528, 571, 596, 619 and 659 cm−1 are attributed to the ν4 out of plane bending modes of the PO4 and H2PO4 units. The Raman bands at 2988, 3118 and 3357 cm−1 are assigned to water stretching vibration. The series of bands at 3422, 3449, 3493, 3552 and 3615 cm−1 are assigned to the OH stretching vibrations of the hydroxyl units. The observation of multiple bands gives credence to the non-equivalence of the OH units in the sigloite structure.