The development of an early warning system to detect trends in illicit drug use in Australia: The illicit drug reporting-system

Appropriate ways to monitor the availability and use of illicit drugs were examined. Four methods were tested concurrently: (1) a quantitative survey of injecting drug users, (2) a qualitative key informant study of illicit drug users and professionals working in the drug field, (3) examination of existing sources of survey, health and law enforcement data and (4) an ethnographic study of a high risk group of illicit drug users. The first three methods were recommended for inclusion in an ongoing national monitoring system, enabling the collection of both quantitative and qualitative data on a range of illicit drugs in a relatively brief, quick and cost-effective manner. A degree of convergent validity was also noted among these methods, improving the degree of confidence in drug trends. The importance of injecting drug users as a sentinel population of illicit drug users was highlighted, along with optimal methods for qualitative research.

Reflections on the development and implementation of an early warning system for ecstasy and related drug markets in Australia

Regular and systematic monitoring of drug markets provides the basis for evidence-based policy. In Australia, trends in ecstasy and related drug (ERD) markets have been monitored in selected jurisdictions since 2000 and nationally since 2003, by the Party Drugs Initiative (PDI). The PDI maximises the validity of conclusions by triangulating information from (a) interviews with regular ecstasy users (REU), (b) interviews with key experts and (c) indicator data. There is currently no other system in Australia for monitoring these markets systematically; however, the value of the PDI has been constrained by the quality of available data. Difficulties in recruiting and interviewing appropriate consumers (REU) and key experts have been experienced, but largely overcome. Limitations of available indicator data from both health and law enforcement continue to present challenges and there remains considerable scope for enhancing existing routine data collection systems, to facilitate monitoring of ERD markets. With an expanding market for ecstasy and related drugs in Australia, and in the context of indicator data that continue to be limited in scope and detail, there is a strong argument for the continued collection of annual, comparable data from a sentinel group of REU, such as those recruited for the PDI.

Effects of reduction in heroin supply on injecting drug use: analysis of data from needle and syringe programmes

n early 2001 there was a dramatic decline in the availability of heroin in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, where previously heroin had been readily available at a low price and high purity.1 The decline was confirmed by Australia's strategic early warning system, which revealed a reduction in heroin supply across Australia and a considerable increase in price,2 particularly from January to April 2001. This "heroin shortage" provided a natural experiment in which to examine the effect of substantial changes in price and availability on injecting drug use and its associated harms in Australia's largest heroin market,2 a setting in which harm reduction strategies were widely used. Publicly funded needle and syringe programmes were introduced to Australia in 1987, and methadone maintenance programmes, which were established in the 1970s, were significantly expanded in 1985 and again in 1999.

Changes in the initiation of heroin use after a reduction in heroin supply

Increasing heroin use in Australia over the past 30 years has been associated with a decline in the age of initiation to heroin use. The 2001 Australian heroin shortage was used to assess the effects of a reduction in heroin supply on age of initiation into heroin injecting. Data collected from regular injecting drug users (IDU) over the period 1996-2004 as part of the Australian Illicit Drug Reporting System were examined for changes in self- reported age of first heroin use after the onset of the heroin shortage. Estimates were also made of the number of young people who may not have commenced injecting heroin during the heroin shortage. The proportion of IDU interviewed in the IDRS who were aged

Enhancing student performance through cooperative learning in physical sciences

Students in a physical sciences course were introduced to cooperative learning at the University of Queensland, Gatton Campus. Groups of four to five students worked together in tutorial and practical sessions. Mid-term and practical examinations were abolished and 40% of total marks were allocated to the cooperative learning activities. A peer- and self-assessment system was successfully adapted to account for individual performance in cooperative learning group assignments. The results suggest that cooperative learning was very well received by students, and they expressed willingness to join cooperative learning groups in other courses. In addition, cooperative learning offered many benefits to students in terms of graduate attributes such as teamwork, communication, lifelong learning and problem-solving.

Towards rope shovel automation operation information system

The road to electric rope shovel automation is marked with technological innovations that include an increase in operational information available to mining operations. The CRCMining Shovel Operator Information System not only collects machine operational data but also provides the operator with knowledge-of-performance and influences his/her performance to achieve higher productivity with reduced machine duty. The operator’s behaviour is one of the most important aspects of the man-machine interaction to be considered before semi- or fully-automated shovel systems can be realised. This paper presents the results of the rope shovel studies conducted by CRCMining between 2002 and 2004, provides information on current research to improve shovel performance and briefly discusses the implications of human-system interactions on future designs of autonomous machines.

A synchronous multimedia annotation system for secure collaboratories

In this paper, we describe the Vannotea system - an application designed to enable collaborating groups to discuss and annotate collections of high quality images, video, audio or 3D objects. The system has been designed specifically to capture and share scholarly discourse and annotations about multimedia research data by teams of trusted colleagues within a research or academic environment. As such, it provides: authenticated access to a web browser search interface for discovering and retrieving media objects; a media replay window that can incorporate a variety of embedded plug-ins to render different scientific media formats; an annotation authoring, editing, searching and browsing tool; and session logging and replay capabilities. Annotations are personal remarks, interpretations, questions or references that can be attached to whole files, segments or regions. Vannotea enables annotations to be attached either synchronously (using jabber message passing and audio/video conferencing) or asynchronously and stand-alone. The annotations are stored on an Annotea server, extended for multimedia content. Their access, retrieval and re-use is controlled via Shibboleth identity management and XACML access policies.

Biomechanical consequences of impairment: A taxonomically valid basis for classification in a unified disability athletics system

Developing a unified classification system to replace four of the systems currently used in disability athletics (i.e., track and field) has been widely advocated. The diverse impairments to be included in a unified system require severed assessment methods, results of which cannot be meaningfully compared. Therefore, the taxonomic basis of current classification systems is invalid in a unified system. Biomechanical analysis establishes that force, a vector described in terms of magnitude and direction, is a key determinant of success in all athletic disciplines. It is posited that all impairments to be included in a unified system may be classified as either force magnitude impairments (FMI) or force control impairments (FCI). This framework would provide a valid taxonomic basis for a unified system, creating the opportunity to decrease the number of classes and enhance the viability of disability athletics.

DR-NEGOTIATE - A system for automated agent negotiation with defeasible logic-based strategies

This paper reports on a system for automated agent negotiation, based on a formal and executable approach to capture the behavior of parties involved in a negotiation. It uses the JADE agent framework, and its major distinctive feature is the use of declarative negotiation strategies. The negotiation strategies are expressed in a declarative rules language, defeasible logic, and are applied using the implemented system DR-DEVICE. The key ideas and the overall system architecture are described, and a particular negotiation case is presented in detail.

Probabilistic Action System Trace Semantics

Action systems are a construct for reasoning about concurrent, reactive systems, in which concurrent behaviour is described by interleaving atomic actions. Sere and Troubitsyna have proposed an extension to action systems in which actions may be expressed and composed using discrete probabilistic choice as well as demonic nondeterministic choice. In this paper we develop a trace-based semantics for probabilistic action systems. This semantics provides a simple theoretical base on which practical refinement rules for probabilistic action systems may be justified.

The collision branching process

We consider a branching model, which we call the collision branching process (CBP), that accounts for the effect of collisions, or interactions, between particles or individuals. We establish that there is a unique CBP, and derive necessary and sufficient conditions for it to be nonexplosive. We review results on extinction probabilities, and obtain explicit expressions for the probability of explosion and the expected hitting times. The upwardly skip-free case is studied in some detail.

The emergence of the determiner system in Mauritian Creole: a syntax semantics mapping

This paper describes the emergence of new functional items in the Mauritian Creole noun phrase, following the collapse of the French determiner system when superstrate and substrate came into contact. The aim of the paper is to show how the new language strived to express the universal semantic contrasts of (in)definiteness and singular vs. plural. The process of grammaticalization of new functional items in the determiner system was accompanied by changes in the syntax from French to creole. An analysis within Chomsky’s Minimalist framework (1995, 2000, 2001) suggests that these changes were driven by the need to map semantic features onto the syntax.