Child protection practitioners and decision-making tools : observations and reflections from the front line

Decision-making tools, particularly risk-assessment tools, have been implemented by governments around the world, perhaps most notably in the field of child protection, though little attention has been paid to how practitioners use them. This article presents the findings from ethnographic research that explored how child protection practitioners in the Department of Child Safety, Queensland, Australia, used four Structured Decision Making tools developed by the Children's Research Centre in Wisconsin in their daily practice in the intake and investigation stages of a case. The findings that the tools were not being used as intended by their designers and, in fact, tended to undermine the development of expertise by child protection workers has profound implications for the future development of technological approaches to child protection and, more broadly, human services practice.

An audit of local government planning tools for their potential use in addressing community food and nutrition issues

Issues addressed: This project aimed to identify how local government planning tools could be used to influence physical and policy environments to support healthy eating behaviours in communities.
Methods: An audit of Queensland's legislative and non-legislative local government planning tools was conducted by a public health nutritionist to assess their potential use in addressing strategies to achieve positive nutrition outcomes. Ten strategies were identified and covered the following themes: improving access to healthy foods and drinks; increasing access to breastfeeding facilities; decreasing fast food outlet density; and unhealthy food advertising. 
Results: The audit found that all of the 10 strategies to achieve positive nutrition outcomes could be considered through three or more of the planning tools.
Conclusion: Based on the findings of this audit, local government planning tools provide opportunities to address food and nutrition issues and contribute toward creating physical and policy environments that support healthy eating behaviours.

Valuation and sustainability : are rating tools enough?

The lack of sufficient financial drivers are preventing significant investment in sustainability because stakeholders have only very limited ability to measure the sustainability of the building or understand the impact upon the value. Valuers are unable to indicate or clarify whether sustainability is affecting market value as there is an absence of detailed market evidence, sales data and lease transactions of sustainable building. Leaving both Valuers and other stakeholders uncertain of the value implication as there is no reliable evidence as to whether sustainable buildings are feasible (Lutzkendorf and Lorenz, 2005). One of the key barriers is the confusion evident in the industry particularly the measurement of sustainability in commercial property. Although a range of environmental rating tools exist for buildings globally in commercial property, the synergy between these tools and identification of the relationship between the measurement and market value is inherently blurred due to the unique nature of the compilation of points attributed in the rating tools for sustainability or energy certificates in commercial property. The paper examines the challenges that face the Valuation profession in assessing the impact of sustainability on market value.

A suite of evidence-based continence assessment tools for residential aged care

The management of incontinence in residential aged care facilities presents staff with considerable challenges. In order to support the residential aged care workforce to provide evidence-based continence care, we developed a suite of evidence-based continence assessment tools and an accompanying educational resource for use in the residential aged care sector. The tools comply with international and accreditation standards. They address urinary and faceal incontinence and other bladder and bowel symptoms. They also include a number of cues to guide staff to assess and manage residents’ continence care needs and refer as needed. An evaluation of the tools conducted in 18 residential aged care facilities across three states revealed that staff members found the tools helpful, clear, simple and user-friendly. This paper provides a description of the newly developed suite of continence assessment tools for residential aged care and the accompanying education resources, and presents staff perspectives on their clinical usefulness.

Wry-necked memory : the matter of Ireland in cutting green hay and memory Ireland, and the poems of the pattern.

This paper examines the matter of Ireland in Buckley’s two memoirs, Cutting Green Hay (1983) and Memory Ireland (1985), and the poems of The Pattern (1979), in order to revisit critically the ways in which he constructs himself as a diasporic Irish-Australian, a participant in the most remote Gaeltacht. It raises questions of victimhood, of similar and different experience of being at the mercy of the land, and of his re-engineering of the place of the political in poetry. It argues that Buckley’s agonized positioning as Ireland’s ‘guest/foreigner/son’ was a project that was doomed by its utopianism, and that, obsessed as he became with Ireland, the angst within had little to do with ‘the Ireland within’ or without. The paper suggests that the poet’s slow and unacknowledged abandonment in his Irish period of a key tenet of modernism, its distrust of propaganda and the political, is in itself a new formation which had some continuity with the radicalism of his thinking during the formative years of the revolutionary catholic apostolate he led both at the University of Melbourne and nationally. It also points to the deployment of an ancient medieval Irish trope, that of the ocean (rather than a landmass) linking a dispersed community, as one of the ways the poetry effects a resolution of the issues of being ‘Irish’ in a remote country.

Evaluating cutting fluid machinability performance

Changes in the metal-working industry, as a result of new environmental legislation or health and safety initiatives, creates the need for constant re-formulation of soluble cutting fluids. In order for there to be confidence in the product's ability to perform its required function successfully, there must be some clearly defined test methods for assessing machinability. Such a test methodology must provide comprehensive data on the fluid's lubrication and cooling properties, which are likely to occur in application. This paper describes the functions of soluble cutting fluids and discusses ways in which performance has been previously determined. Furthermore, it presents a new method for assessing machinability which is proposed as the basis for the development of a new and universal test protocol.

Changing philosophies and tools for statistical inferences in behavioral ecology

Recent developments in ecological statistics have reached behavioral ecology, and an increasing number of studies now apply analytical tools that incorporate alternatives to the conventional null hypothesis testing based on significance levels. However, these approaches continue to receive mixed support in our field. Because our statistical choices can influence research design and the interpretation of data, there is a compelling case for reaching consensus on statistical philosophy and practice. Here, we provide a brief overview of the recently proposed approaches and open an online forum for future discussion (https://bestat.ecoinformatics.org/). From the perspective of practicing behavioral ecologists relying on either correlative or experimental data, we review the most relevant features of information theoretic approaches, Bayesian inference, and effect size statistics. We also discuss concerns about data quality, missing data, and repeatability. We emphasize the necessity of moving away from a heavy reliance on statistical significance while focusing attention on biological relevance and effect sizes, with the recognition that uncertainty is an inherent feature of biological data. Furthermore, we point to the importance of integrating previous knowledge in the current analysis, for which novel approaches offer a variety of tools. We note, however, that the drawbacks and benefits of these approaches have yet to be carefully examined in association with behavioral data. Therefore, we encourage a philosophical change in the interpretation of statistical outcomes, whereas we still retain a pluralistic perspective for making objective statistical choices given the uncertainties around different approaches in behavioral ecology. We provide recommendations on how these concepts could be made apparent in the presentation of statistical outputs in scientific papers.

Evaluating and improving morpho-syntactic classification over multiple corpora using pre-trained, "off-the-shelf", parts-of-speech tagging tools

This paper evaluates six commonly available parts-of-speech tagging tools over corpora other than those upon which they were originally trained. In particular this investigation measures the performance of the selected tools over varying styles and genres of text without retraining, under the assumption that domain specific training data is not always available. An investigation is performed to determine whether improved results can be achieved by combining the set of tagging tools into ensembles that use voting schemes to determine the best tag for each word. It is found that while accuracy drops due to non-domain specific training, and tag-mapping between corpora, accuracy remains very high, with the support vector machine-based tagger, and the decision tree-based tagger performing best over different corpora. It is also found that an ensemble containing a support vector machine-based tagger, a probabilistic tagger, a decision-tree based tagger and a rule-based tagger produces the largest increase in accuracy and the largest reduction in error across different corpora, using the Precision-Recall voting scheme.

Evaluating and improving morpho-syntactic classification over multiple corpora using pre-trained, “off-the-shelf”, parts-of-speech tagging tools

his paper evaluates six commonly available parts-of-speech tagging tools over corpora other than those upon which they were originally trained. In particular this investigation measures the performance of the selected tools over varying styles and genres of text without retraining, under the assumption that domain specific training data is not always available. An investigation is performed to determine whether improved results can be achieved by combining the set of tagging tools into ensembles that use voting schemes to determine the best tag for each word. It is found that while accuracy drops due to non-domain specific training, and tag-mapping between corpora, accuracy remains very high, with the support vector machine-based tagger, and the decision tree-based tagger performing best over different corpora. It is also found that an ensemble containing a support vector machine-based tagger, a probabilistic tagger, a decision-tree based tagger and a rule-based tagger produces the largest increase in accuracy and the largest reduction in error across different corpora, using the Precision-Recall voting scheme.