Consequences of introducing mandatory reporting legislation for child sexual abuse

To improve detection of child sexual abuse, many jurisdictions have enacted mandatory reporting laws requiring selected persons to report known and suspected cases. In Ireland, the Child First approach previously incorporated only a policy-based approach to reporting. Due to a perceived lack of efficacy, the Children First Bill was drafted in 2012 to shift this policy guidance to a legislative approach. What effects will the new legislative reporting duties have on numbers of reports, and outcomes of reports, of suspected child sexual abuse? This paper will shed light on these important questions by presenting results of analyses of the introduction of legislative reporting obligations in two Australian States. Three questions will be explored: 1. Does introducing reporting legislation result in enhanced detection of child sexual abuse? 2. Do different reporter groups have different patterns of reporting? 3. What do the patterns of report numbers and outcomes indicate for child protection systems and communities?

Prisoners, rights and citizenship

The denial of civil rights to convicts has a long history. Its origins lie in the idea of ‘civil death’. Convicts who were not punished by execution would instead suffer civil death which stripped them of inheritance, family and political rights (Davidson, 2004). In Australia and internationally the removal of prisoners’ voting rights has been a controversial topic which has been a subject of much debate and a number of legislation changes (Davidson, 2004). This article argues that even though the latest amendment to the Australian Electoral legislation is, on the face of it, democratic and inclusive, it is in fact a denial of prisoners’ civil rights, which has its roots in the concept of civil death. My argument is in keeping with the themes of the Crime and Governance thematic group and focuses on my research interests in sociology of deviance, social reactions to crime, and socio-legal topics.

Can water security be achieved in the urban environment through the implementation of the Neo Institutional theory government regulation and legislation?

The research seeks to address the current global water crisis and the built environments effect on the increasing demand for sustainability and water security. The fundamental question in determining the correct approach for water security in the built environment is whether government regulation and legislation could provide the framework for sustainable development and the conscious shift providing that change is the only perceivable option, there is no alternative. This article will attempt to analyse the value of the neo institutional theory as a method for directing individuals and companies to conform to water saving techniques. As is highlighted throughout the article, it will be investigated whether an incentive verse punishment approach to government legislations and regulations would provide the framework required to ensure water security within the built environment. Individuals and companies make certain choices or perform certain actions not because they fear punishment or attempt to conform; neither do they do so because an action is appropriate or feels some sort of social obligation. Instead, the cognitive element of neo institutionalism suggests that individuals make certain choices because they can conceive no alternative. The research seeks to identify whether sustainability and water security can become integrated into all aspects of design and architecture through the perception that 'there is no alternative.' This report seeks to address the omission of water security in the built environment by reporting on a series of investigations, interviews, literature reviews, exemplars and statistics relating to the built environment and the potential for increased water security. The results and analysis support the conclusions that through the support of government and local council, sustainability in the built environment could be achieved and become common practice for developments. Highlighted is the approach required for water management systems integration into the built environment and how these can be developed and maintained effectively between cities, states, countries and cultures.

Pattern-based topic models for information filtering

Topic modelling, such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), was proposed to generate statistical models to represent multiple topics in a collection of documents, which has been widely utilized in the fields of machine learning and information retrieval, etc. But its effectiveness in information filtering is rarely known. Patterns are always thought to be more representative than single terms for representing documents. In this paper, a novel information filtering model, Pattern-based Topic Model(PBTM) , is proposed to represent the text documents not only using the topic distributions at general level but also using semantic pattern representations at detailed specific level, both of which contribute to the accurate document representation and document relevance ranking. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of PBTM by using the TREC data collection Reuters Corpus Volume 1. The results show that the proposed model achieves outstanding performance.

Australian domestic violence protection order legislation : a comparative quantitative content analysis of victim safety provisions

In Australia, protection orders are a key legal response to domestic violence, and are often viewed as a way of providing for victim safety. For instance, recently the joint Australian and New South Wales Law Reform Commissions recommended that a common core purpose of all state and territory domestic violence legislation should be ‘to ensure or maximise the safety and protection of persons who fear or experience family violence’ (2010:Recommendation 7-4). Drawing and building upon prior research in Australia and the United States (‘US’), this paper uses comparative quantitative content analysis to assess the victim safety focus of domestic violence protection order legislation in each Australian state and territory. The findings of this analysis show that the Northern Territory, South Australia and Victoria ‘stand out’ from the other jurisdictions, having the highest victim safety focus in their legislation. However, there remains sizeable scope for improvement in all Australian jurisdictions, in terms of the victim safety focus of their legislative provisions and the considerations of legislative inconsistency between jurisdictions.

Academic legal research and academic research capacity enhancement working topic : "purposes and objectives of law schools beyond educating students (research, capacity building,community service and outreach)"

One of the main objectives of law schools beyond educating students is to produce viable legal research. The comments in this paper are basically confined to the Australian context, and to examine this topic effectively, it is necessary to briefly review the current tertiary research agenda in Australia. This paper argues that there is a need for recognition and support for an expanded legal research framework along with additional research training for legal academics. There also needs to be more effective methods of measuring and recognising quality in legal research. This method needs to be one that can engender respect in an interdisciplinary context.

Integrating time forgetting mechanisms into topic-based user interest profiling

The rapid development of the World Wide Web has created massive information leading to the information overload problem. Under this circumstance, personalization techniques have been brought out to help users in finding content which meet their personalized interests or needs out of massively increasing information. User profiling techniques have performed the core role in this research. Traditionally, most user profiling techniques create user representations in a static way. However, changes of user interests may occur with time in real world applications. In this research we develop algorithms for mining user interests by integrating time decay mechanisms into topic-based user interest profiling. Time forgetting functions will be integrated into the calculation of topic interest measurements on in-depth level. The experimental study shows that, considering temporal effects of user interests by integrating time forgetting mechanisms shows better performance of recommendation.

A topic based document relevance ranking model

Topic modelling has been widely used in the fields of information retrieval, text mining, machine learning, etc. In this paper, we propose a novel model, Pattern Enhanced Topic Model (PETM), which makes improvements to topic modelling by semantically representing topics with discriminative patterns, and also makes innovative contributions to information filtering by utilising the proposed PETM to determine document relevance based on topics distribution and maximum matched patterns proposed in this paper. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of PETM by using the TREC data collection Reuters Corpus Volume 1. The results show that the proposed model significantly outperforms both state-of-the-art term-based models and pattern-based models.

Fundamental Tax Legislation [22nd Edition]

This edition includes a revised Year in Review section, which summarises the legislative developments in taxation over the previous 12 months, a listing of the passage of tax-related legislation during the last year and the inclusion of reference statistics (such as CPI quarterly figures and individual tax rates for residents and non-residents). A Tax Rates and Tables section which contains an accessible summary of the main tax rates and tables that students will need to refer to for their tax studies

Violence in and around entertainment districts : a longitudinal analysis of the impact of late-night lockout legislation

Violence in entertainment districts is a major problem across urban landscapes throughout the world. Research shows that licensed premises are the third most common location for homicides and serious assaults, accounting for one in ten fatal and nonfatal assaults. One class of interventions that aims to reduce violence in entertainment districts involves the use of civil remedies: a group of strategies that use civil or regulatory measures as legal “levers” to reduce problem behavior. One specific civil remedy used to reduce problematic behavior in entertainment districts involves manipulation of licensed premise trading hours. This article uses generalized linear models to analyze the impact of lockout legislation on recorded violent offences in two entertainment districts in the Australian state of Queensland. Our research shows that 3 a.m. lockout legislation led to a direct and significant reduction in the number of violent incidents inside licensed premises. Indeed, the lockouts cut the level of violent crime inside licensed premises by half. Despite these impressive results for the control of violence inside licensed premises, we found no evidence that the lockout had any impact on violence on streets and footpaths outside licensed premises that were the site for more than 80 percent of entertainment district violence. Overall, however, our analysis suggests that lockouts are an important mechanism that helps to control the level of violence inside licensed premises but that finely grained contextual responses to alcohol-related problems are needed rather than one-size-fits-all solutions.

Revisiting sub-topic retrieval in the ImageCLEF 2009 photo retrieval task

Ranking documents according to the Probability Ranking Principle has been theoretically shown to guarantee optimal retrieval effectiveness in tasks such as ad hoc document retrieval. This ranking strategy assumes independence among document relevance assessments. This assumption, however, often does not hold, for example in the scenarios where redundancy in retrieved documents is of major concern, as it is the case in the sub–topic retrieval task. In this chapter, we propose a new ranking strategy for sub–topic retrieval that builds upon the interdependent document relevance and topic–oriented models. With respect to the topic– oriented model, we investigate both static and dynamic clustering techniques, aiming to group topically similar documents. Evidence from clusters is then combined with information about document dependencies to form a new document ranking. We compare and contrast the proposed method against state–of–the–art approaches, such as Maximal Marginal Relevance, Portfolio Theory for Information Retrieval, and standard cluster–based diversification strategies. The empirical investigation is performed on the ImageCLEF 2009 Photo Retrieval collection, where images are assessed with respect to sub–topics of a more general query topic. The experimental results show that our approaches outperform the state–of–the–art strategies with respect to a number of diversity measures.

The use of headings and marginal notes in interpreting Queensland legislation : appearances can be deceptive

This article considers the rules relating to the use of marginal notes and headings in interpreting Queensland legislation, both in its original form and in reprinted legislation. It also examines the application of the principles of construction as to the use of section headings in the interpretation of provisions of the Criminal Code 1899 (Qld). Finally, it suggests that amendments should be made to the Acts Interpretation Act 1954 (Qld) in order to clarify the position as to the status of marginal notes and headings in statutory interpretation.

A design approach to the study of people's experiences with technologies in the context of public transport

Relevant to the study of people’s attitudes towards public transport use is the consideration to the role of technology as part of the travel experience. Technologies aim to enhance daily tasks but tend to change the way people interact with products and can be perceived as difficult to use. This is critical in the context of “public use” where products and services are to be used by the population at large: adults, children, elderly, people with disabilities, and tourists. From different perspectives, the topic of users and the use of technologies have been studied in the social sciences and human computer interaction fields; however, earlier approaches fail to address the ways in which experiential knowledge informs people’s interactions with products and technologies, and how such information could guide the design of future technologies. This paper describes a pilot study, part of a larger ongoing exploratory research that investigates people’s experiences with infrastructure, systems, and technologies in the context of public transport. The methodological approach included focus groups, field observations, and retrospective verbal reports. At this stage, the study found that four context led factors were the primary source of reference informing participants’ actions and interactions; they are: (i) context >> experience, (ii) context >> interface, (iii) context >> knowledge, (iv) context >> emotion.

Topic dependent language modelling for spoken term detection

This paper investigates the effect of topic dependent language models (TDLM) on phonetic spoken term detection (STD) using dynamic match lattice spotting (DMLS). Phonetic STD consists of two steps: indexing and search. The accuracy of indexing audio segments into phone sequences using phone recognition methods directly affects the accuracy of the final STD system. If the topic of a document in known, recognizing the spoken words and indexing them to an intermediate representation is an easier task and consequently, detecting a search word in it will be more accurate and robust. In this paper, we propose the use of TDLMs in the indexing stage to improve the accuracy of STD in situations where the topic of the audio document is known in advance. It is shown that using TDLMs instead of the traditional general language model (GLM) improves STD performance according to figure of merit (FOM) criteria.

Phonetic spoken term search using topic information

The aim of spoken term detection (STD) is to find all occurrences of a specified query term in a large audio database. This process is usually divided into two steps: indexing and search. In a previous study, it was shown that knowing the topic of an audio document would help to improve the accuracy of indexing step which results in a better performance for STD system. In this paper, we propose the use of topic information not only in the indexing step, but also in the search step. Results of our experiments show that topic information could also be used in search step to improve the STD accuracy.