Group membership, power and social rules: A study of doctor-nurse relationship

The purposes of this research are: (1) to compare the similarides and differences in intra-group and inter-group social rules of hospital doctors and nurses; (2) to compare rule following, rule breaking & tolerance of rule breaking of doctors and nurses with respect to different work reladonships. Professional discipline and idendficadon, ingroup-outgroup membership and reladve status were used as predictors. In-depth interview of 20 doctors and 20 nurses were conducted to elicit social rules and goals. In the second study, 30 rules and 10 goals with high consensus were selected from study one and developed into a quesdonnaire which measured their applicadon to four different work reladonships, namely, padents, peers, seniors and doctors/nurses. Forty-three doctors and one hundred and seven nurses completed this questionnaire. In the third study, the frequency and goals of violation and tolerance of violation of five different social rules were measured. One hundred and thirty-six doctors and one hundred and sixty-six nurses completed the questionnaire.

Co-existing conditions for deaths from infectious and parasitic diseases in Australia

Objective: To examine the frequency distribution of co-existing conditions for deaths where the underlying cause was infectious and parasitic diseases. Materials and methods: Besides the underlying cause of death, the distributions of co-existing conditions for deaths from infectious and parasitic diseases were examined in total and by various age and sex groups, at individual and chapter levels, using 1998 Australian mortality data. Results: In addition to the underlying cause of death, the average number of reported co-existing conditions for a single infectious and parasitic death was 1.62. The most common co-existing conditions were respiratory failure, acute renal failure non-specific causes, ischaemic heart disease, pneumonia and diabetes. When studying the distribution of co-existing conditions at the ICD-9 chapter level, it was found that the circulatory system diseases were the most important. There was an increasing trend in the number of reported co-existing conditions from 60 years of age upwards. Gender differences existed in the frequency of some reported co-existing conditions. The most common organism types of co-existing conditions were other bacterial infection and other viruses. Conclusions: The study indicated that the quality of death certificates is less than satisfactory for the 1998 Australian mortality data. The findings may be helpful in clarifying the ICD coding rules and the development of disease prevention strategies. (C) 2003 International Society for Infectious Diseases. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Graphic satire and public life in the age of terror

This paper investigates media representations of international insecurity through a selection of newspaper cartoons from some of the major daily Australian broadsheets. Since 2001, cartoonists such as Bruce Petty, John Spooner and Bill Leak (in The Age and The Australian) have provided an ongoing and vehement critique of the Australian government’s policies of ‘border protection’, the ‘war on terror’ and the words of mass distraction associated with Australia joining the war in Iraq. Cartoonists are often said to represent the ‘citizen’s perspective’ of public life through their graphic satire on the editorial pages of our daily newspapers. Increasingly, they can also be seen to be fulfilling the role of public intellectuals, defined by Richard A. Posner as ‘someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma, to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments and corporations’. Cartoonists enjoy an independence and freedom from censorship that is rarely extended to their journalistic colleagues in the print media and it is this independence that is the vital component in their being categorised as public intellectuals. Their role is to ‘question over and over again what is postulated as self-evident, to disturb people’s mental habits, to dissipate what is familiar and accepted, to re-examine rules and institutions’ (Posner, 2003: 31). With this useful — if generalised — definition in mind, the paper considers how cartoonists have contributed to debates concerning international insecurity in public life since 2001.

Off-line signature verification and forgery detection using fuzzy modeling

Automatic signature verification is a well-established and an active area of research with numerous applications such as bank check verification, ATM access, etc. This paper proposes a novel approach to the problem of automatic off-line signature verification and forgery detection. The proposed approach is based on fuzzy modeling that employs the Takagi-Sugeno (TS) model. Signature verification and forgery detection are carried out using angle features extracted from box approach. Each feature corresponds to a fuzzy set. The features are fuzzified by an exponential membership function involved in the TS model, which is modified to include structural parameters. The structural parameters are devised to take account of possible variations due to handwriting styles and to reflect moods. The membership functions constitute weights in the TS model. The optimization of the output of the TS model with respect to the structural parameters yields the solution for the parameters. We have also derived two TS models by considering a rule for each input feature in the first formulation (Multiple rules) and by considering a single rule for all input features in the second formulation. In this work, we have found that TS model with multiple rules is better than TS model with single rule for detecting three types of forgeries; random, skilled and unskilled from a large database of sample signatures in addition to verifying genuine signatures. We have also devised three approaches, viz., an innovative approach and two intuitive approaches using the TS model with multiple rules for improved performance. (C) 2004 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Community broadcasting and the enclosure of the public sphere

One of the normative tenets of the Habermasian public sphere is that it should be an open and universally accessible forum. In Australia, one way of achieving this is the provision for community broadcasting in the Broadcasting Services Act. A closer examination of community broadcasting, however, suggests practices that contradict the idea of an open and accessible public sphere. Community broadcasting organizations regulate access to their media assets through a combination of formal and informal structures. This suggests that the public sphere can be understood as a resource, and that community broadcasting organizations can be analysed as ‘commons regimes’. This approach reveals a fundamental paradox inherent in the public sphere: access, participation and the quality of discourse in the public sphere are connected to its enclosure, which limits membership and participation through a system of rules and norms that govern the conduct of a group. By accepting the view that a public sphere is governed by property rights, it follows that an open and universally accessible public sphere is neither possible nor desirable.