Physical environments, policies and practices for physical activity and screen-based sedentary behaviour among preschoolers within child care centres in Melbourne, Australia and Kingston, Canada

Characteristics of preschool and child care centres have previously been shown to be associated with children's health behaviours such as physical activity and screen-based sedentary behaviour. This paper investigates differences in physical environments, policies and practices between child care centres in Melbourne, Australia and Kingston, Canada which may be associated with such behaviours.

Negotiating and creating intercultural relations: Chinese immigrant children in New Zealand early childhood education centres

A multiple-case study investigation of the experiences of eight Chinese immigrant children in New Zealand early childhood centres suggested that the immigrant children’s learning experiences in their first centre can be understood as a process of negotiating and creating intercultural relations. The children’s use of family cultural tools, such as the Chinese language, was a distinctive feature of their learning experiences, simultaneously revealing and extending their exploration of the intercultural practices and their establishment of a sense of belonging. In the presence of Chinese-speaking peers who acted as ‘bridges’ and ‘boundary objects’, the Chinese language was actively used by the immigrant children in English-speaking early childhood centres and, as a result, they created intercultural relations which: (i) bridged the two cultures; (ii) brought the cultures into convergence; (iii) enabled the children to claim group identity; and (iv) battled intercultural constraints. The absence of Chinese speakers, on the other hand, constrained possibilities for intercultural relations. The focus on intercultural relations in this study is expected to lead to educational initiatives to support the incorporation of diverse cultures in early childhood services.

Thermal comfort of multiple user groups in indoor aquatic centres

Aquatic centres are popular recreational facilities in Australia and other developed countries. These buildings have experienced exponential demand over the past few decades. The growing desire for better indoor environmental quality in aquatic centres has resulted in a marked increase in energy consumption in this sector. With the existence of multiple user groups, achieving thermal comfort has always been challenging. Even though several thermal comfort studies are conducted in other building types, such studies are very limited with respect to aquatic centres. This paper analyses the thermal comfort conditions of various user groups in seven aquatic centres in Australia. Comfort measurements are performed through monitoring environmental parameters and surveying swimmers, staff and spectators. The results revealed the variation of air temperatures among the buildings, resulting in high level of thermal discomfort for the spectators and staff in some of the buildings. The thermal sensation of the staff and spectators had good correlation with the indoor temperatures and PMVs. Altering temperature settings according to the seasons will help to improve the comfort with respect to the adaptation and expectation of the occupants.

Consuming postcolonial shopping malls

Through a naturalistic inquiry, we interpret shopping malls in India as post-colonial sites in which young consumers deploy the West in an attempt to transform their Third World identities. Shopping malls in former colonies represent a post-colonial hybridity that offers consumers the illusion of being Western, modern, and developed. Moreover, consumption of post-colonial retail arenas is characterised as a masquerade through which young consumers attempt to disguise or temporarily transcend their Third World realities. This interpretation helps us to offer insights into transitioning retail servicescapes of the Third World, which in turn helps to improve extant understanding of consumer identity and global consumer culture.

Optimal VM placement in data centres with architectural and resource constraints

Recent advance in virtualisation technology enables service provisioning in a flexible way by consolidating several virtual machines (VMs) into a single physical machine (PM). The inter-VM communications are inevitable when a group of VMs in a data centre provide services in a collaborative manner. With the increasing demands of such intra-data-centre traffics, it becomes essential to study the VM-to-PM placement such that the aggregated communication cost within a data centre is minimised. Such optimisation problem is proved NP-hard and formulated as an integer programming with quadratic constraints in this paper. Different from existing work, our formulation takes into consideration of data-centre architecture, inter-VM traffic pattern, and resource capacity of PMs. Furthermore, a heuristic algorithm is proposed and its high efficiency is extensively validated.

Pavement cafes as the activity zone in the social life of neighbourhood centres

This paper reports the findings from a research project that examines the relationship between urban design and the physical environment, and aspects of social and communal life in suburbs. Australian suburbs are perceived to be lacking in vitality and sociability. To address this, three suburban commercial streets were selected for investigation. Through documents and maps of the residents’ activities and behaviour, this study aims to identify the popular zones of activity and investigate the physical characteristics that encourage a sociable atmosphere in activity zones. The observation of activities in the three streets has been registered in tables relative to the date and time of occurrence. According to the behavioural mappings, the zones of activity are mostly shaped around pavement cafes and popular everyday food stores. Since more than half the activities have been observed to be initiated from the pavement cafes, this paper will investigate how the physical qualities of commercial streets such as the width of the pavements, personalization, soft edges and greenery have contributed to the pavement café culture in the selected neighbourhood centres.

Investigating energy and indoor environmental performance of aquatic centres

Aquatic centres are popular recreational facilities in Australia and other developed countries. These buildings have experienced exponential demand over the past few decades. The growing desire for better indoor environmental quality in aquatic centres has resulted in a marked increase in energy consumption in this sector. Community expectations in relation to aquatic centres are rising and these spaces are associated with wellness and health. Energy consumption in indoor swimming pool buildings is high due to the high indoor air temperatures, increased ventilation heat losses and the need to disinfect water. This study investigates the energy consumption and indoor environmental quality of seven aquatic centres in Australia. The construction and various energy consuming systems of the facilities are analysed and compared against the energy consumption. Thermal comfort data is collected through measuring the indoor environmental parameters. Building envelopes were found to be leaky in most of the buildings resulting in energy wastage. The main indicators for energy consumption were gross floor area, area of pool surface, and number of visitors. It was found that the set point temperatures were significantly high in some of the buildings resulting in high level of discomfort for the spectators and staff.

Mathematically-rich interactions in early childhood centres

 This study investigated children’s engagement in mathematically-rich interactions in early childhood centres. While mathematically-rich interactions were found to be occurring with regular frequency, educators sometimes had difficulty identifying mathematical concepts in their planning. These findings may be used to inform the content of pre- and in-service early childhood education courses.

Secrecy and human rights abuse in Australia’s offshore immigration detention centres

All asylum seekers who arrive in Australia’s territorial waters by boat are subject to mandatory, indefinite and unreviewable detention on Nauru and Papua New Guinea. This offshore detention regime is characterised by a high degree of secrecy, low levels of transparency and accountability, and few opportunities for external oversight. This has created a closed, controlled environment, in which people are routinely neglected and harmed. To better understand the human impact of Australia’s offshore detention regime, this article draws on research from social psychology regarding human behaviour in closed institutions. This research – which has substantially informed prison policies throughout the Western world – demonstrates the critical importance of external oversight, openness and transparency for the protection of human rights of people in closed institutions. This knowledge has not been applied to Australia’s offshore immigration detention regime. To the contrary: creating a closed, opaque system of detention has been an explicit policy goal of the Australian government. By actively restricting transparency, this research demonstrates that not only are the abuses of detainees’ human rights hidden from the public eye, they are inevitable.

White window shopping

This poem is an attempt to critique easy acts of identification by non-Indigenous Australians with the Indigenous victims of the pervasive and frequently violent forces of racism. It represents this as 'window shopping': attempting to inscribe the paradox of all acts of representation as potentially cynical commodification. And yet... again and again, ways have to be attempted because silence is a greater killing force. The poem commemorates the racist killing of Louis St John Johnson on the 4th January 1992.

Shopping for schools or shopping for peers : public schools and catchment area segregation

Market theory positions the consumer as a rational choice actor, making informed schooling choices on the basis of ‘hard’ evidence of relative school effectiveness. Yet there are concerns that parents simply choose schools based on socio-demographic characteristics, thus leading to greater social segregation and undercutting the potential of choice to drive quality improvements. In this paper we explore segregation by examining catchment areas for a range of public high schools in a specific middle-class urban area. We focus on socio-demographic characteristics, including levels of income, country of birth and religion affiliation, in order to explore residential segregation according to public high school catchment areas. Our data suggests distinct residential segregation between catchment areas for each public school within our dataset, particularly for the schools deemed to be popular and rejected, that may pose risks for broader equity concerns. We argue that, in contrast to market theory, even more affluent and active choosers are not equipped with information on the programmatic quality of their different school options, but instead may be relying on socio-demographic characteristics of schools—through surrogate information about the urban spaces that the schools occupy—in order to choose peer groups, if not programs, for their children.