Double blind : women as creative practice-led researchers

While the productive relationship between praxis and feminist research has been well established, the situation is more complicated for female artist/researchers in the fraught field of creative practice-led research. Firstly, their research is being conducted in the context of ongoing debate, as Andrea Phillips has summarized, over whether practice-led research has been embraced in order to potentially produce emancipatory knowledge, or whether it is simply the rationalization and quantification of creative processes. Secondly, there is a pervasive paradox whereby, rather than feeling empowered by the process of critical and reflective self-analysis, many women are inhibited by enduring insecurities about the value of their work and/or their ownership of it. The reasons for this appear to be twofold: they are disheartened by the ongoing disproportion of successful women artists, and they are intimidated by the fundamentally masculine discourse surrounding research in the university. Many of these anxieties appear to have been exacerbated by the research quality assessment process, the Excellence in Research for Australia Initiative (ERA). This collaborative paper draws on the authors' experiences as both artist-researchers and educators to contextualize this paradox and also discuss what forms of praxis intervention may be useful in the preparation for, and supervision of, creative practice-led research by women.

Contemporary Australia : women, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane 21 April–22 July 2012

'Contemporary Australia: Women' is the second in a series of triennial exhibitions at the Gallery of Modern Art in Queensland, providing a survey of contemporary art practices across the country. This exhibition's focus on women artists comes in the wake of a number of high profile international exhibitions looking at women artists in both contemporary and historical contexts. This review situates the exhibition within this field and considers its significance.

How difficult are exams? A framework for assessing the complexity of introductory programming exams

Student performance on examinations is influenced by the level of difficulty of the questions. It seems reasonable to propose therefore that assessment of the difficulty of exam questions could be used to gauge the level of skills and knowledge expected at the end of a course. This paper reports the results of a study investigating the difficulty of exam questions using a subjective assessment of difficulty and a purpose-built exam question complexity classification scheme. The scheme, devised for exams in introductory programming courses, assesses the complexity of each question using six measures: external domain references, explicitness, linguistic complexity, conceptual complexity, length of code involved in the question and/or answer, and intellectual complexity (Bloom level). We apply the scheme to 20 introductory programming exam papers from five countries, and find substantial variation across the exams for all measures. Most exams include a mix of questions of low, medium, and high difficulty, although seven of the 20 have no questions of high difficulty. All of the complexity measures correlate with assessment of difficulty, indicating that the difficulty of an exam question relates to each of these more specific measures. We discuss the implications of these findings for the development of measures to assess learning standards in programming courses.

Natural history of trees

Courtney Pedersen and Charles Robb's A Natural History of Trees was a installation mounted at Blindside ARI in Melbourne's CBD in 2012. The work took the form of a pine-panelled room containing a pair of life-sized tree trunks composed entirely of stacks of cut paper discs. A faux bois stool reinforced the sense of artificiality. Claustrophic and precarious, the installation was simultaneously a response to the complexity of our relationship with nature and place, and an evocation of the precarious quality of the collaborative process. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by writer/curator, Jane O'Neill.

Years lived with disability (YLDs) for 1160 sequelae of 289 diseases and injuries 1990–2010 : a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010

Background Non-fatal health outcomes from diseases and injuries are a crucial consideration in the promotion and monitoring of individual and population health. The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) studies done in 1990 and 2000 have been the only studies to quantify non-fatal health outcomes across an exhaustive set of disorders at the global and regional level. Neither effort quantified uncertainty in prevalence or years lived with disability (YLDs). Methods Of the 291 diseases and injuries in the GBD cause list, 289 cause disability. For 1160 sequelae of the 289 diseases and injuries, we undertook a systematic analysis of prevalence, incidence, remission, duration, and excess mortality. Sources included published studies, case notification, population-based cancer registries, other disease registries, antenatal clinic serosurveillance, hospital discharge data, ambulatory care data, household surveys, other surveys, and cohort studies. For most sequelae, we used a Bayesian meta-regression method, DisMod-MR, designed to address key limitations in descriptive epidemiological data, including missing data, inconsistency, and large methodological variation between data sources. For some disorders, we used natural history models, geospatial models, back-calculation models (models calculating incidence from population mortality rates and case fatality), or registration completeness models (models adjusting for incomplete registration with health-system access and other covariates). Disability weights for 220 unique health states were used to capture the severity of health loss. YLDs by cause at age, sex, country, and year levels were adjusted for comorbidity with simulation methods. We included uncertainty estimates at all stages of the analysis. Findings Global prevalence for all ages combined in 2010 across the 1160 sequelae ranged from fewer than one case per 1 million people to 350 000 cases per 1 million people. Prevalence and severity of health loss were weakly correlated (correlation coefficient −0·37). In 2010, there were 777 million YLDs from all causes, up from 583 million in 1990. The main contributors to global YLDs were mental and behavioural disorders, musculoskeletal disorders, and diabetes or endocrine diseases. The leading specific causes of YLDs were much the same in 2010 as they were in 1990: low back pain, major depressive disorder, iron-deficiency anaemia, neck pain, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, anxiety disorders, migraine, diabetes, and falls. Age-specific prevalence of YLDs increased with age in all regions and has decreased slightly from 1990 to 2010. Regional patterns of the leading causes of YLDs were more similar compared with years of life lost due to premature mortality. Neglected tropical diseases, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and anaemia were important causes of YLDs in sub-Saharan Africa. Interpretation Rates of YLDs per 100 000 people have remained largely constant over time but rise steadily with age. Population growth and ageing have increased YLD numbers and crude rates over the past two decades. Prevalences of the most common causes of YLDs, such as mental and behavioural disorders and musculoskeletal disorders, have not decreased. Health systems will need to address the needs of the rising numbers of individuals with a range of disorders that largely cause disability but not mortality. Quantification of the burden of non-fatal health outcomes will be crucial to understand how well health systems are responding to these challenges. Effective and affordable strategies to deal with this rising burden are an urgent priority for health systems in most parts of the world. Funding Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Catalytic conversion of gases via cation-exchangable alumino-silicate materials

A process for catalytic conversion and/or adsorption of gases inclusive of NOx, SOx, CO2, CO, dioxins and PAHs and combinations thereof wherein said gases may contain particulates which include contacting one or more of such gases with an alumino-silicate material having: a primarily tetrahedrally co-ordinated aluminium as established by the fact that the 27 A1 Magic Angle Spinning (MAS) provides a single peak at 55-58 ppm (FWHM ~23 ppm) relative to Al(H 2 0) 6 3 and (ii) a cation exchange capacity of at least 1 meq 100 in aqueous solution at room temperature.

Brave new green world : consequences of a carbon economy for the conservation of Australian biodiversity

Pricing greenhouse gas emissions is a burgeoning and possibly lucrative financial means for climate change mitigation. Emissions pricing is being used to fund emissions-abatement technologies and to modify land management to improve carbon sequestration and retention. Here we discuss the principal land-management options under existing and realistic future emissions-price legislation in Australia, and examine them with respect to their anticipated direct and indirect effects on biodiversity. The main ways in which emissions price-driven changes to land management can affect biodiversity are through policies and practices for (1) environmental plantings for carbon sequestration, (2) native regrowth, (3) fire management, (4) forestry, (5) agricultural practices (including cropping and grazing), and (6) feral animal control. While most land-management options available to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions offer clear advantages to increase the viability of native biodiversity, we describe several caveats regarding potentially negative outcomes, and outline components that need to be considered if biodiversity is also to benefit from the new carbon economy. Carbon plantings will only have real biodiversity value if they comprise appropriate native tree species and provide suitable habitats and resources for valued fauna. Such plantings also risk severely altering local hydrology and reducing water availability. Management of regrowth post-agricultural abandonment requires setting appropriate baselines and allowing for thinning in certain circumstances, and improvements to forestry rotation lengths would likely increase carbon-retention capacity and biodiversity value. Prescribed burning to reduce the frequency of high-intensity wildfires in northern Australia is being used as a tool to increase carbon retention. Fire management in southern Australia is not readily amenable for maximising carbon storage potential, but will become increasingly important for biodiversity conservation as the climate warms. Carbon price-based modifications to agriculture that would benefit biodiversity include reductions in tillage frequency and livestock densities, reductions in fertiliser use, and retention and regeneration of native shrubs; however, anticipated shifts to exotic perennial grass species such as buffel grass and kikuyu could have net negative implications for native biodiversity. Finally, it is unlikely that major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions arising from feral animal control are possible, even though reduced densities of feral herbivores will benefit Australian biodiversity greatly.

Vision based control for micro aerial vehicles : Application to sense and avoid

This work presents a collision avoidance approach based on omnidirectional cameras that does not require the estimation of range between two platforms to resolve a collision encounter. Our method achieves minimum separation between the two vehicles involved by maximising the view-angle given by the omnidirectional sensor. Only visual information is used to achieve avoidance under a bearing- only visual servoing approach. We provide theoretical problem formulation, as well as results from real flights using small quadrotors

Modelling sea water intrusion in coastal aquifers using heterogeneous computing

The objective of this PhD research program is to investigate numerical methods for simulating variably-saturated flow and sea water intrusion in coastal aquifers in a high-performance computing environment. The work is divided into three overlapping tasks: to develop an accurate and stable finite volume discretisation and numerical solution strategy for the variably-saturated flow and salt transport equations; to implement the chosen approach in a high performance computing environment that may have multiple GPUs or CPU cores; and to verify and test the implementation. The geological description of aquifers is often complex, with porous materials possessing highly variable properties, that are best described using unstructured meshes. The finite volume method is a popular method for the solution of the conservation laws that describe sea water intrusion, and is well-suited to unstructured meshes. In this work we apply a control volume-finite element (CV-FE) method to an extension of a recently proposed formulation (Kees and Miller, 2002) for variably saturated groundwater flow. The CV-FE method evaluates fluxes at points where material properties and gradients in pressure and concentration are consistently defined, making it both suitable for heterogeneous media and mass conservative. Using the method of lines, the CV-FE discretisation gives a set of differential algebraic equations (DAEs) amenable to solution using higher-order implicit solvers. Heterogeneous computer systems that use a combination of computational hardware such as CPUs and GPUs, are attractive for scientific computing due to the potential advantages offered by GPUs for accelerating data-parallel operations. We present a C++ library that implements data-parallel methods on both CPU and GPUs. The finite volume discretisation is expressed in terms of these data-parallel operations, which gives an efficient implementation of the nonlinear residual function. This makes the implicit solution of the DAE system possible on the GPU, because the inexact Newton-Krylov method used by the implicit time stepping scheme can approximate the action of a matrix on a vector using residual evaluations. We also propose preconditioning strategies that are amenable to GPU implementation, so that all computationally-intensive aspects of the implicit time stepping scheme are implemented on the GPU. Results are presented that demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed numeric methods and formulation. The formulation offers excellent conservation of mass, and higher-order temporal integration increases both numeric efficiency and accuracy of the solutions. Flux limiting produces accurate, oscillation-free solutions on coarse meshes, where much finer meshes are required to obtain solutions with equivalent accuracy using upstream weighting. The computational efficiency of the software is investigated using CPUs and GPUs on a high-performance workstation. The GPU version offers considerable speedup over the CPU version, with one GPU giving speedup factor of 3 over the eight-core CPU implementation.

Food in an Australian primary school curriculum : a critical sociological study

Food is a multidimensional construct. It has social, cultural, economic, psychological, emotional, biological, and political dimensions. It is both a material object and a catalyst for a range of social and cultural action. Richly implicated in the social and cultural milieu, food is a central marker of culture and society. Yet little is known about the messages and knowledges in the school curriculum about food. Popular debates around food in schools are largely connected with biomedical issues of obesity, exercise and nutrition. This is a study of the sociological dimensions of food-related messages, practices and knowledge formations in the primary school curriculum. It uses an exploratory, qualitative case study methodology to identify and examine the food activities of a Year 5 class in a Queensland school. Data was gathered over a twoyear period using observation, documentation and interviews methods. Food was found to be an integral part of the primary school's activity. It had economic, symbolic, pedagogic, and instrumental value. Messages about food were found in the official, enacted and hidden curricular which were framed by a food governance framework of legislation, procedures and norms. In the school studied, food knowledge was commodified as a part of a political economy that centred on an 'eat more' message. Certain foods were privileged over others while myths about energy, fruit, fruit juice and sugar shaped student dispositions, values, norms and action. There was little engagement with the cognitive and behavioural dimensions of food and nutrition. The thesis concludes with recommendations for a whole scale reconsideration of food in schools as curricular content and knowledge.

Contraction-induced changes in TNFα and Akt-mediated signalling are associated with increased myofibrillar protein in rat skeletal muscle

Resistance training results in skeletal muscle hypertrophy, but the molecular signalling mechanisms responsible for this altered phenotype are incompletely understood. We used a resistance training (RT) protocol consisting of three sessions [day 1 (d1), day 3 (d3), day 5 (d5)] separated by 48 h recovery (squat exercise, 4 sets × 10 repetitions, 3 min recovery) to determine early signalling responses to RT in rodent skeletal muscle. Six animals per group were killed 3 h after each resistance training session and 24 and 48 h after the last training session (d5). There was a robust increase in TNF? protein expression, and IKKSer180/181 and p38MAPK Thr180/Tyr182 phosphorylation on d1 (P < 0.05), which abated with subsequent RT, returning to control levels by d5 for TNF? and IKK Ser180/181. There was a trend for a decrease in MuRF-1 protein expression, 48 h following d5 of training (P = 0.08). Notably, muscle myofibrillar protein concentration was elevated compared to control 24 and 48 h following RT (P < 0.05). AktSer473 and mTORSer2448 phosphorylation were unchanged throughout RT. Phosphorylation of p70S6k Thr389 increased 3 h post-exercise on d1, d3 and d5 (P < 0.05), whilst phosphorylation of S6Ser235/236 increased on d1 and d3 (P < 0.05). Our results show a rapid attenuation of inflammatory signalling with repeated bouts of resistance exercise, concomitant with summation in translation initiation signalling in skeletal muscle. Indeed, the cumulative effect of these signalling events was associated with myofibrillar protein accretion, which likely contributes to the early adaptations in response to resistance training overload in the skeletal muscle.

Effect of high-frequency resistance exercise on adaptive responses in skeletal muscle

PURPOSE: Regulation of skeletal muscle mass is highly dependent on contractile loading. The purpose of this study was to examine changes in growth factor and inflammatory pathways following high-frequency resistance training. METHODS: Using a novel design in which male Sprague-Dawley rats undertook a "stacked" resistance training protocol designed to generate a summation of transient exercise-induced signaling responses (four bouts of three sets × 10 repetitions of squat exercise, separated by 3 h of recovery), we determined the effects of high training frequency on signaling pathways and transcriptional activity regulating muscle mass. RESULTS: The stacked training regimen resulted in acute suppression of insulin-like growth factor 1 mRNA abundance (P < 0.05) and Akt phosphorylation (P < 0.05), an effect that persisted 48 h after the final training bout. Conversely, stacked training elicited a coordinated increase in the expression of tumor necrosis factor alpha, inhibitor kappa B kinase alpha/beta activity (P < 0.05), and p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase phosphorylation (P < 0.05) at 3 h after each training bout. In addition, the stacked series of resistance exercise bouts induced an increase in p70 S6 kinase phosphorylation 3 h after bouts ×3 and ×4, independent of the phosphorylation state of Akt. CONCLUSIONS: Our results indicate that high resistance training frequency extends the transient activation of inflammatory signaling cascades, concomitant with persistent suppression of key mediators of anabolic responses. We provide novel insights into the effects of the timing of exercise-induced overload and recovery on signal transduction pathways and transcriptional activity regulating skeletal muscle mass in vivo.

Phase III study of matrix metalloproteinase inhibitor prinomastat in non-small-cell lung cancer

Purpose: Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) degrade extracellular proteins and facilitate tumor growth, invasion, metastasis, and angiogenesis. This trial was undertaken to determine the effect of prinomastat, an inhibitor of selected MMPs, on the survival of patients with advanced non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC), when given in combination with gemcitabine-cisplatin chemotherapy. Patients and Methods: Chemotherapy-naive patients were randomly assigned to receive prinomastat 15 mg or placebo twice daily orally continuously, in combination with gemcitabine 1,250 mg/m2 days 1 and 8 plus cisplatin 75 mg/m2 day 1, every 21 days for up to six cycles. The planned sample size was 420 patients. Results: Study results at an interim analysis and lack of efficacy in another phase III trial prompted early closure of this study. There were 362 patients randomized (181 on prinomastat and 181 on placebo). One hundred thirty-four patients had stage IIIB disease with T4 primary tumor, 193 had stage IV disease, and 34 had recurrent disease (one enrolled patient was ineligible with stage IIIA disease). Overall response rates for the two treatment arms were similar (27% for prinomastat v 26% for placebo; P = .81). There was no difference in overall survival or time to progression; for prinomastat versus placebo patients, the median overall survival times were 11.5 versus 10.8 months (P = .82), 1-year survival rates were 43% v 38% (P = .45), and progression-free survival times were 6.1 v 5.5 months (P = .11), respectively. The toxicities of prinomastat were arthralgia, stiffness, and joint swelling. Treatment interruption was required in 38% of prinomastat patients and 12% of placebo patients. Conclusion: Prinomastat does not improve the outcome of chemotherapy in advanced NSCLC. © 2005 by American Society of Clinical Oncology.