Do Children still need to Escape Childhood? A Reassessment of John Holt and his Vision for Children's Rights

The work of children’s liberationists have been long been critiqued for pushing the parameters of rights discourse too far; specifically, by suggesting that there are no significant differences between children and adults, including their ability for self-determination. John Holt’s 1974 text Escape from Childhood is one such work which was deemed highly controversial for its time. This article uses Holt’s Escape from Childhood as an overarching framework against which to examine the current state of play on children’s rights as explicated through the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It suggests that whilst Holt has often been critiqued for being too radical, in the context of current children’s rights discourse Holt’s visioning is not as radical as it might first appear.

Robust Room Temperature Hysteresis in an FeIII Spin Crossover Metallomesogen

The high temperature magnetic and structural properties of an amphiphilic iron(III) spin crossover complex are reported. Thermal cycling reveals a scan rate-dependent 20 K thermal hysteresis in the mT vs. T data close to room temperature. A fast scan rate is essential for the hysteresis but it is robust and reproducible after multiple thermal cycles. Differential scanning calorimetry and cross polarized microscopy are used to show that the magnetic switching aligns with a material state change from solid to ordered liquid phase on warming.

Hanna, John Connor (1871-1947)

Profile and biography entry of John Connor Hanna, early film censor

Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland has been considered a conflict-resolution success story. The 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement provided a framework for managing a long-standing ethnonational conflict, and has ushered in relative political stability. The consociational features of the Northern Ireland Assembly can be seen either as necessary for managing conflict or as institutionalizing sectarianism so that politics along left–right lines cannot emerge. Although there is evidence for the development of a “Northern Irish” identity to counter competing British and Irish identities, Northern Ireland is a long way from transcending the sectarian structures that shape almost all aspects of social and political life. Northern Ireland remains segregated along religious lines and is also prone to tensions around the anniversaries of atrocities and the public use of symbols and rituals. The failure to systematically “deal with the past” through public information recovery and truth-telling mechanisms also seems to have hindered progress toward reconciliation.

Similarity or Variation? Employee Representation and Consultation Approaches Amongst Liberal Market Economy Multinationals

This paper engages with the varieties of capitalism literature to investigate the employee representation and consultation approaches of liberal market economy multinational companies (MNCs), specifically Australian, British and US MNCs operating in Australia. While the literature would suggest commonality amongst these MNCs, the paper considers whether the evidence points to similarity or variation amongst liberal market headquartered MNCs. The findings contribute to filling a recognized empirical gap on MNC employment relations practice in Australia and to a better understanding of within category varieties of capitalism similarity and variation. Drawing on survey data from MNCs operating in Australia, the results demonstrated that UK-owned MNCs were the least likely to report collective structures of employee representation. Moreover, it was found that Australian MNCs were the most likely to engage in collective forms of employee representation and made less use of direct consultative mechanisms relative to their British and US counterparts. In spite of the concerted individualization of the employment relations domain over previous decades, Australian MNCs appear to have upheld more long-standing national institutional arrangements with respect to engaging with employees on a collective basis. This varies from British and US MNC approaches which denotes that our results display within category deviation in the variety of capitalism liberal market economy typology. Just as Hall and Soskice described their seminal work on liberal market economy (LME) and coordinated market economy (CME) categories as a “work-in-progress” (2001: 2), we too suggest that Australia’s evolution in the LME category, and more specifically its industrial relations system development, and the consequences for employment relations practices of its domestic MNCs, may be a work-in-progress.

Delineating human resource management practice in domestic and foreign owned multinational enterprises in Australia

To date there is an absence of any systematic and extensive data on Australian multinational enterprises (MNEs). This research paper fills the information gap and leads to a discussion of the human resource management (HRM) practices of Australian MNEs in the global arena and whether there is a distinctive national identity associated with these practices. We report on the profile of Australian-based multinational enterprises (MNEs). Drawing on a systematic database developed by the authors in 2010–11 we are able to identify the numbers of Australian MNEs and their characteristics and compare them against a representative sample of foreign-owned MNEs operating in Australia.

Automated retinal image quality assessment on the UK Biobank dataset for epidemiological studies

Morphological changes in the retinal vascular network are associated with future risk of many systemic and vascular diseases. However, uncertainty over the presence and nature of some of these associations exists. Analysis of data from large population based studies will help to resolve these uncertainties. The QUARTZ (QUantitative Analysis of Retinal vessel Topology and siZe) retinal image analysis system allows automated processing of large numbers of retinal images. However, an image quality assessment module is needed to achieve full automation. In this paper, we propose such an algorithm, which uses the segmented vessel map to determine the suitability of retinal images for use in the creation of vessel morphometric data suitable for epidemiological studies. This includes an effective 3-dimensional feature set and support vector machine classification. A random subset of 800 retinal images from UK Biobank (a large prospective study of 500,000 middle aged adults; where 68,151 underwent retinal imaging) was used to examine the performance of the image quality algorithm. The algorithm achieved a sensitivity of 95.33% and a specificity of 91.13% for the detection of inadequate images. The strong performance of this image quality algorithm will make rapid automated analysis of vascular morphometry feasible on the entire UK Biobank dataset (and other large retinal datasets), with minimal operator involvement, and at low cost.