Rural and Urban Differentials in Primary Care Management of Chronic Heart Failure: New Data from the CASE Study

Objective: To determine whether primary care management of chronic heart failure (CHF) differed between rural and urban areas in Australia. Design: A cross-sectional survey stratified by Rural, Remote and Metropolitan Areas (RRMA) classification. The primary source of data was the Cardiac Awareness Survey and Evaluation (CASE) study. Setting: Secondary analysis of data obtained from 341 Australian general practitioners and 23 845 adults aged 60 years or more in 1998. Main outcome measures: CHF determined by criteria recommended by the World Health Organization, diagnostic practices, use of pharmacotherapy, and CHF-related hospital admissions in the 12 months before the study. Results: There was a significantly higher prevalence of CHF among general practice patients in large and small rural towns (16.1%) compared with capital city and metropolitan areas (12.4%) (P < 0.001). Echocardiography was used less often for diagnosis in rural towns compared with metropolitan areas (52.0% v 67.3%, P < 0.001). Rates of specialist referral were also significantly lower in rural towns than in metropolitan areas (59.1% v 69.6%, P < 0.001), as were prescribing rates of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors (51.4% v 60.1%, P < 0.001). There was no geographical variation in prescribing rates of β-blockers (12.6% [rural] v 11.8% [metropolitan], P = 0.32). Overall, few survey participants received recommended “evidence-based practice” diagnosis and management for CHF (metropolitan, 4.6%; rural, 3.9%; and remote areas, 3.7%). Conclusions: This study found a higher prevalence of CHF, and significantly lower use of recommended diagnostic methods and pharmacological treatment among patients in rural areas.

What it means to become a public relations professional: student perceptions of professional identity through real-world learning

Public relations educators need new solutions to prepare students to become tomorrow's practitioner today. Managers and employers in the new creative workforce (McWilliam, 2008) expect graduates to be problem solvers, critical and creative thinkers, reflective, and self reliant (Barrie, 2008; David, 2004). Enabling students to develop these attributes requires a collaborative and creative approach to pedagogy (Jeffrey & Craft, 2001, 2004). A model for the next generation of public relations education was developed to integrate industry partnerships as a way to bridge pedagogy and professional practice. The model suggests (a) that industry partnerships be embedded in learning activities, (b) that assessment items be considered on a continuum and delivered incrementally across a course of study, and (c) that connections between classroom and workplace activities are clearly signposted for students.

Parametric differences between a real-world distributed denial-of-service attack and a flash event

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks continue to be one of the most pernicious threats to the delivery of services over the Internet. Not only are DDoS attacks present in many guises, they are also continuously evolving as new vulnerabilities are exploited. Hence accurate detection of these attacks still remains a challenging problem and a necessity for ensuring high-end network security. An intrinsic challenge in addressing this problem is to effectively distinguish these Denial-of-Service attacks from similar looking Flash Events (FEs) created by legitimate clients. A considerable overlap between the general characteristics of FEs and DDoS attacks makes it difficult to precisely separate these two classes of Internet activity. In this paper we propose parameters which can be used to explicitly distinguish FEs from DDoS attacks and analyse two real-world publicly available datasets to validate our proposal. Our analysis shows that even though FEs appear very similar to DDoS attacks, there are several subtle dissimilarities which can be exploited to separate these two classes of events.

Creating new narratives through shared time and space : the performer/audience connection in multi-site dance events

Site-specific performance provides choices in audience experience via degrees of scale, proximity, levels of immersion and viewing perspectives. Beyond these choices, multi-site promenade events also form a connected audience/performer relationship in which moving together in time and space can produce a shared narrative and aesthetic sensibility of collective, yet individuated and shifting meanings. This paper interrogates this notion through audience/performer experiences in two separate multi-site, dance-led events. here/there/then/now occurred in four intimate sites within the Brisbane Powerhouse, providing a theatricalised platform for audiences to create linked narratives through open-ended and fragmented intertextuality. Accented Body, based on the concept of “the body as site and in site” and notions of connectivity, provided a more expansive platform for a similar, but heightened, shared engagement. Audiences traversed 6 outdoor and 2 indoor Brisbane sites moving to varying levels of a large complex. Eleven, predominantly interactive, screens provided links to other sites as well as to distributed presences in Seoul and London. The differentiation in scale and travel time between sites deepened the immersive experiences of audiences who reported transformative engagements with both site and architecture, accompanied by a sense of extended and yet quickened time.

Gatekeeping, gatewatching, real-time feedback : new challenges for Journalism

How bloggers and other independent online commentators criticise, correct, and otherwise challenge conventional journalism has been known for years, but has yet to be fully accepted by journalists; hostilities between the media establishment and the new generation of citizen journalists continue to flare up from time to time. The old gatekeeping monopoly of the mass media has been challenged by the new practice of gatewatching: by individual bloggers and by communities of commentators which may not report the news first-hand, but curate and evaluate the news and other information provided by official sources, and thus provide an important service. And this now takes place ever more rapidly, almost in real time: using the latest social networks, which disseminate, share, comment, question, and debunk news reports within minutes, and using additional platforms that enable fast and effective ad hoc collaboration between users. When hundreds of volunteers can prove within a few days that a German minister has been guilty of serious plagiarism, when the world first learns of earthquakes and tsunamis via Twitter – how does journalism manage to keep up?

Cultural chaos : Journalism, News and Power in a Globalised World

With examples drawn from media coverage of the War on Terror, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and the London underground bombings, Cultural Chaos explores the changing relationship between journalism and power in an increasingly globalised news culture. In this new text, Brian McNair examines the processes of cultural, geographic and political dissolution in the post-Cold War era and the rapid evolution of information and communication technologies. He investigates the impact of these trends on domestic and international journalism and on political processes in democratic and authoritarian societies across the world. Written in a lively and accessible style, Cultural Chaos provides students with an overview of the evolution of the sociology of journalism, a critical review of current thinking within media studies and an argument for a revision and renewal of the paradigms that have dominated the field since the early twentieth century. Separate chapters are devoted to new developments such as the rise of the blogosphere and satellite television news and their impact on journalism more generally. Cultural Chaos will be essential reading for all those interested in the emerging globalised news culture of the twenty-first century.

The impact of infrastructure charges on new housing costs : an international comparison

Sourcing funding for the provision of new urban infrastructure has been a policy dilemma for governments around the world for decades. This is particularly relevant in high growth areas where new services are required to support swelling populations. Existing communities resist the introduction of new taxes to fund such infrastructure, hence the introduction of charges to the developer has flourished. The Australian infrastructure funding policy dilemmas are reflective of similar matters to some extent in the United Kingdom, and to a greater extent the United States of America. In these countries, infrastructure cost recovery policies have been in place since the 1940’s and 1970’s respectively. There is an extensive body of theoretical and empirical literature that discusses the passing on (to home buyers) or passing back (to the englobo land seller) of these increased infrastructure charges, and the corresponding impact on housing cost and supply. The purpose of this research is to examine the international evidence that suggests infrastructure charges contribute to increased house prices as well as reduced land supply. The paper concludes that whilst the theoretical work is largely consistent, the empirical research to date is inconclusive and further research is required into these impacts in Australia.

Stepping Stones A world-Class Mathematics program for the Australian Curriculum Year 1 (Student Journal)

ORIGO Stepping Stones gives mathematics teachers the best of both worlds by delivering lessons and teacher guides on a digital platform blended with the more traditional printed student journals. This uniquely interactive program allows students to participate in exciting learning activites whilst still allowing the teacher to maintain control of learning outcomes. It is the first program in Australia to give teachers activities to differentiate instruction within each lesson and across school years. Written by a team of Australia's leading mathematics educators, this program integrates key research findings in a practical sequence of modules and lessons providing schools with a step-by-step approach to the new curriculum. Click links on the right to explore the program.

Infrastructure charges and increases to new house prices : a preliminary analysis of the US empirical models

Sourcing appropriate funding for the provision of new urban infrastructure has been a policy dilemma for governments around the world for decades. This is particularly relevant in high growth areas where new services are required to support swelling populations. The Australian infrastructure funding policy dilemmas are reflective of similar matters in many countries, particularly the United States of America, where infrastructure cost recovery policies have been in place since the 1970’s. There is an extensive body of both theoretical and empirical literature from these countries that discusses the passing on (to home buyers) of these infrastructure charges, and the corresponding impact on housing prices. The theoretical evidence is consistent in its findings that infrastructure charges are passed on to home buyers by way of higher house prices. The empirical evidence is also consistent in its findings, with “overshifting” of these charges evident in all models since the 1980’s, i.e. $1 infrastructure charge results in greater than $1 increase in house prices. However, despite over a dozen separate studies over two decades in the US on this topic, no empirical works have been carried out in Australia to test if similar shifting or overshifting occurs here. The purpose of this research is to conduct a preliminary analysis of the more recent models used in these US empirical studies in order to identify the key study area selection criteria and success factors. The paper concludes that many of the study area selection criteria are implicit rather than explicit. By collecting data across the models, some implicit criteria become apparent, whilst others remain elusive. This data will inform future research on whether an existing model can be adopted or adapted for use in Australia.

The molar effect on citizenship and nomad immigration: Reading, readingthe world and self

This presentation explores molarization and overcoding of social machines and relationality within an assemblage consisting of empirical data of immigrant families in Australia. Immigration is key to sustainable development of Western societies like Australia and Canada. Newly arrived immigrants enter a country and are literally taken over by the Ministry of Immigration regarding housing, health, education and accessing job possibilities. If the immigrants do not know the official language(s) of the country, they enroll in language classes for new immigrants. Language classes do more than simply teach language. Language is presented in local contexts (celebrating the national day, what to do to get a job) and in control societies, language classes foreground values of a nation state in order for immigrants to integrate. In the current project, policy documents from Australia reveal that while immigration is the domain of government, the subject/immigrant is nevertheless at the core of policy. While support is provided, it is the subject/immigrant transcendent view that prevails. The onus remains on the immigrant to “succeed”. My perspective lies within transcendental empiricism and deploys Deleuzian ontology, how one might live in order to examine how segmetary lines of power (pouvoir) reflected in policy documents and operationalized in language classes rupture into lines of flight of nomad immigrants. The theoretical framework is Multiple Literacies Theory (MLT); reading is intensive and immanent. The participants are one Korean and one Sudanese family and their children who have recently immigrated to Australia. Observations in classrooms were obtained and followed by interviews based on the observations. Families also borrowed small video cameras and they filmed places, people and things relevant to them in terms of becoming citizen and immigrating to and living in a different country. Interviews followed. Rhizoanalysis informs the process of reading data. Rhizoanalysis is a research event and performed with an assemblage (MLT, data/vignettes, researcher, etc.). It is a way to work with transgressive data. Based on the concept of the rhizome, a bloc of data has no beginning, no ending. A researcher enters in the middle and exists somewhere in the middle, an intermezzo suggesting that the challenges to molar immigration lie in experimenting and creating molecular processes of becoming citizen.

New perspectives on context-based chemistry education : using a dialectical sociocultural approach to view teaching and learning

Context-based chemistry education aims to improve student interest and motivation in chemistry by connecting canonical chemistry concepts with real-world contexts. Implementation of context-based chemistry programmes began 20 years ago in an attempt to make the learning of chemistry meaningful for students. This paper reviews such programmes through empirical studies on six international courses, ChemCom (USA), Salters (UK), Industrial Science (Israel), Chemie im Kontext (Germany), Chemistry in Practice (The Netherlands) and PLON (The Netherlands). These studies are categorised through emergent characteristics of: relevance, interest/attitudes motivation and deeper understanding. These characteristics can be found to an extent in a number of other curricular initiatives, such as science-technology-society approaches and problem-based learning or project based science, the latter of which often incorporates an inquiry-based approach to science education. These initiatives in science education are also considered with a focus on the characteristics of these approaches that are emphasised in context-based education. While such curricular studies provide a starting point for discussing context-based approaches in chemistry, to advance our understanding of how students connect canonical science concepts with the real-world context, a new theoretical framework is required. A dialectical sociocultural framework originating in the work of Vygotsky is used as a referent for analysing the complex human interactions that occur in context-based classrooms, providing teachers with recent information about the pedagogical structures and resources that afford students the agency to learn.

Learning science through real-world contexts

Curriculum developers and researchers have promoted context based programmes to arrest waning student interest and participation in the enabling sciences at high school and university. Context-based programmes aim for connections between scientific discourse and real-world contexts to elevate curricular relevance without diminishing conceptual understanding. Literature relating to context-based approaches to learning will be reviewed in this chapter. In particular, international trends in curricular development and results from evaluations of major projects (e.g. PLON, Salters Advanced Chemistry, ChemCom) will be highlighted. Research projects that explore context-based interventions focusing on such outcomes as student interest, perceived relevance and conceptual understanding also will feature in the review. The chapter culminates with a discussion of current context-based research that interprets classroom actions from a dialectical socio-cultural framework, and identifies possible new directions for research.

Serious fears across cultures about the collapse of the world order

This chapter approaches resilience from an evolutionary psychology (socio-biological) perspective. It argues that the internal constitution and mental toughness of the individual will provide a core protection for life’s inevitable tests in the innumerable micro and macro environments humans find themselves. The many descriptors of the construct of resilience used in various studies are explored. Finally, the difference psychologists can make in the therapy of clients whose resilience is being tested, is examined by means of case examples.