Arresting the decline in senior school chemistry

Enrolments in Australian Year 11 and year 12 chemistry are declining. In 1992, 23% of Australian year 12 students studied chemistry, decreasing to 18% in 2010. For science as a whole, the decrease is even more dramatic, from 94% to 51%. The decrease is slowing, but is continuing.
How should we respond to the report? Firstly, we should realise that it is not all gloom and doom. Secondly, education is not solely the responsibility of curriculum authorities and teachers. Each RACI member can communicate, inform and generally educate the wider community about the excitement and value of chemical science. Just a couple of hours of your time is not a panacea, but it can still make long-lasting impacts and affect career choices: even the largest beach consists of tiny individual grains of sand.

Anthropometric profiling of elite junior and senior Australian football players

Purpose: Body structure and physical development must be addressed when preparing junior athletes for their first season in a senior competition. The aim of this preliminary study was to measure the extent of the assumption that final year junior Australian Football (AF) athletes are at a physical mismatch to their senior counterparts.

Methods: Twenty-one male participants (17.71 ± 0.27 y) were recruited from one state based elite junior AF competition and forty-one male participants (22.80 ± 4.24 y) were recruited from one club competing in the senior elite Australian Football League (AFL), who were subsequently divided into two groups; professional rookies aged 18-20 y (19.44 ± 0.70 y; n = 18) and professional seniors aged 21+ y (25.43 ± 3.98 y; n = 23). Dual energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA) scans of all participants were completed.

Results: Despite being an average 6.0% and 6.1% lighter in total weight and lean mass respectively, no significant difference was found between the elite junior athletes and their professional AFL rookie counterparts. However, significant differences were demonstrated in comparison with the professional AFL senior athletes (P < .01). Both professional AFL groups demonstrated greater than 0.3 kg total bone mineral content (BMC) than the elite junior athletes (P < .01) and significantly greater segmental BMC and bone mineral density (BMD) results (P < .05).

Conclusion: While the results identify the differences in body composition of the elite junior athletes, development in a linear fashion is noted, providing useful information for the creation of age appropriate expectations and training programs.

Tackling health inequalities : what do senior managers think

Objective: To describe how New South Wales (NSW) Area Health Service Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) understood concepts of equity in the development of NSW Health's Equity Statement; CEO knowledge and interpretation of a given concept being one aspect of developing policy.

Design and Setting: This paper describes the process through which NSW Area Health Service CEOs were involved in developing the Equity Statement, specifically:

1. Briefings with individual CEOs on key issues and identification of possible difficulties and potential 'equity champions'.
2. A two-hour workshop to explore ('pre-mortem') why the proposed statement might fail.
3. CEO involvement in identifying strategies that promoted equity already operating locally.
4. C onsultations with selected individuals about the draft recommendations.
5. Feedback to CEOs.

The article provides a case study of consultative policy making by illustrating how participant knowledge can both inform and be strengthened by involvement in the policy development process.

Results: There was a high level of awareness among CEOs of health inequalities and an acceptance of their responsibility to address them. They saw three main ways of doing this: a) equity of resource allocation for health service delivery within and between regions; b) equity of access to health services based on need; and c) equity of health outcomes. CEOs felt that making the health system accountable for health outcomes would provide pressure for system-wide resource allocation changes. They recognised that factors substantially impacting on health outcomes were outside the control of the health system. Furthermore, finding a balance to which they could be held accountable was difficult. All CEOs saw ensuring needs-based access to services as a key area where they could potentially have an impact; and they specifically saw challenges in a conflict between equity and efficiency, marginalisation of special treatment for disadvantaged people, balancing investment in rescue services and prevention/early intervention, and developing a rational health financing system. The resulting policy has been broadly embedded within the NSW health system with strong local support.

Conclusion: The NSW Health and Equity policy was embedded because CEO leadership and acceptance of the policy enhanced local ownership.

From blogging Central Asia to citizen media : a practitioners’ perspective on the evolution of the neweurasia blog project

This essay examines the development of one regional blogosphere, the Central Asian ‘Stanosphere’, through a focus on the neweurasia blog project. The neweurasia project began in 2005 as an Englishlanguage volunteer-run blog project about the former Soviet republics of Central Asia and the Caucasus, rapidly becoming one of the most visited blogs about the region. Following this auspicious start, over the next five years neweurasia developed into a multi-language locally driven project with more than 80,000 unique page views on average per month. Despite its indisputable successes, the project was often a steep learning curve for all involved. In this essay, we examine neweurasia’s evolution from ‘blogging Central Asia’ towards a citizen media project, and reflect on some of the issues and challenges encountered. On the basis of our discussion, we reflect upon how neweurasia, and citizen media in general, can maximise its impact on the nascent Stanosphere, in the process helping to give Central Asia a voice in the global blogosphere.

Is e-governance a function of government or media? Some directions for future research and development of electronically mediated citizen participation

Citizen participation, enabled by electronic means, grows, in parallel with government's apparent failure to promote it. Organisations such as Getup and Moveon flourish; the BBC announced in 2003 that 'Internet-based political activism is happening...The BBC wants to help a wider audience find their voice by tackling obstacles to greater participation' (http://www.opendemocracy.net). (Kevill, 2003). Such actions echo, perhaps, the enthusiastic adoption of the Internet by activist media groups, particularly Indymedia. This paper presents a response to this situation. It provides a richer account of the contradictory rise of e-government without e-governance, and examines the potential for media-based participatory engagement to complement e-government. It presents two models of the future of electronically mediated citizen engagement: the first involving agonistic relations between government and citizenry, with civic participation occurring outside of government-approved forums; the second involving the intimate linking of governmental transactions to participation by those citizens engaged in them. Finally it will outline mechanisms for researching the capacity of either or both models to sustain effective participation.

Broadband technologies, techno-optimism and the "hopeful" citizen

Using the internet to promote or facilitate learning has a relatively long history. As early as the mid-1980s, at a time when the internet itself was relatively experimental, a few early pioneers such as Hiltz were exploring the possibilities that networked computer communications technology could provide for education. Not only were universities the birthplace of the internet as a research network, they also had both staff with interests in using technology for learning as well as the critical infrastructure which might permit early development and adoption. But, with the widespread public uptake of the internet from 1994 onwards, online learning has become much more widespread-through traditional institutions of learning (schools, colleges, and universities), and also through the auto-didactic qualities of both the internet itself and many who use it; and finally through the opportunities which commercial “providers” of education and training imagine might be embedded in this new technology to deinstitutionalize learning.

E-governance as digital ecosystem : a new way to think about citizen engagement and the internet?

There has been a long history of attempting to deploy networked information and communications – mostly in the form of the Internet – to support the broad goals of effective, efficient and responsible democratic government. While there has been considerable talk about the way such technologies might promote better governance – through increased citizen participation in debates and discussions about future outcomes – there has been, in contrast, much action that actually uses the Internet for more efficient government, by creating online and networked interfaces by which citizens can transact business with government. There has been only limited success in using the Internet and similar communications channels to allow citizens to participate in their own governance. Undoubtedly, the Internet does facilitate public consultation. For example, the European Commission used an Interactive Policy Making web tool for public consultation on legislation for regulation of chemicals. Over 6,500 contributions were received over a period of 2 months and the consultation process led to the identification of key flaws in proposals, saving billions of Euros (Timmers,2008). However, consultation of this kind tends to be a mechanism for gathering opinion and gaining citizen approval for change that is not different except in transmission form than previous approaches based on meetings and written submissions. While the European Commission example can be seen as successful, Internet-based consultation can too easily become promotional or marketing oriented, as in recent efforts in Australian by the Federal Communications Minister to use a blog to discuss proposed changes to Internet censorship regulations: in this case, discussion and debate from participants appears largely to have been ignored in favour of a pre-existing position. This paper aims to provide a solution to some of these problems by drawing on the idea of how the Internet can host and support a digital eco-system.

Assessing the impact of diabetes on the quality of life of older adults living in a care home : validation of the ADDQoL senior

Aims  Around a quarter of UK care-home residents have diabetes. Diabetes is known to impact quality of life but existing diabetes-specific quality of life measures are unsuitable for elderly care-home residents. We aimed to develop and evaluate a new measure for use with older adults, to be particularly suitable for use with care-home residents: the Audit of Diabetes-Dependent Quality of Life (ADDQoL) Senior†.

Methods  Content and format changes were made to the 19-domain ADDQoL, informed by related measures for people with visual impairments (12 domain-specific items were retained, four items were revised/added and three items were removed). This revision was modified further following cognitive debriefing interviews with three older adults living in a care home. Psychometric evaluation of the newly developed 17-domain ADDQoL Senior was conducted using data from 90 care-home residents with diabetes who took part in a broader intervention study.

Results  The life domains most impacted by diabetes were ‘independence’ and ‘freedom to eat as I wish’. The ADDQoL Senior demonstrated good factor structure and internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.924). Domain scores were, as expected, significantly intercorrelated.

Conclusions  The ADDQoL Senior measures the perceived impact of diabetes on quality of life in older adults, and has been found to be suitable for those living in care homes if administered by interview. The scale has demonstrated acceptability and excellent psychometric properties. It is anticipated that the number of items may be reduced in the future if our current findings can be replicated.