Subjective wellbeing in Australian families of Holocaust survivors

This thesis explored the idea that trauma experienced by Holocaust survivors has been transferred to their children and grandchildren. Findings provided evidence for an ' intergenerational transmission of trauma, revealing children of two Holocaust survivors to be particularly at risk. The transmission oftrauma was best explained through an attachment model.

I don't know anyone that has two drinks a day : young people, alcohol and the government of pleasure

Problematic alcohol consumption is a major public health, health education and health promotion issue in Australia and internationally. In an effort to better understand young people's drinking patterns and motivations we investigated the cultural drivers of drinking in 14–24 year-old Australians. We interviewed 60 young people in the state of Victoria aged 20–24 about their drinking biographies. At the time of interviewing, the draft guidelines on low-risk drinking were released by the National Health and Medical Research Council, Australia, and we asked our participants what they knew about them and if they thought they would affect their drinking patterns. Their responses indicate that pleasure and sociability are central to young people's drinking cultures which is supported by a range of research. However, O’Malley and Valverde claim that pleasure is silenced and/or deployed strategically in neo-liberal governance discourses about drugs and alcohol such as these guidelines which raises questions about the limits of such discourses to affect changes in drinking patterns.

Family day care educators : an exploration of their understanding and experiences promoting children's social and emotional wellbeing

This study aimed to explore family day care (FDC) educators’ knowledge of child social and emotional wellbeing and mental health problems, the strategies used to promote children’s wellbeing, and barriers and opportunities for promoting children’s social and emotional wellbeing. Thirteen FDC educators participated in individual semi-structured interviews. FDC educators were more comfortable defining children’s social and emotional wellbeing than they were in identifying causes and early signs of mental health problems. Strategies used to promote children’s mental health were largely informal and dependent on educator skills and capacities rather than a systematic scheme-wide approach. Common barriers to mental health promotion were limited financial resources, a need for more training and hesitance raising child mental health issues with parents. There is a need to build FDC educators’ knowledge of child social and emotional wellbeing and for tailored mental health promotion strategies in FDC.

Evaluating the outcomes of adolescent day programs in an Australian child and adolescent mental health service

Adolescent day programs (ADPs) are an increasingly used approach to treating adolescents with mental health issues. However, there is a dearth of studies empirically examining the outcomes of adolescent day programs. This study retrospectively examined the mental health functioning of 84 adolescents, pre- and post-treatment, who in addition to their ongoing outpatient treatment had participated in an ADP during a five-year period. Their functioning was compared to matched adolescents who participated only in outpatient treatment during the same time period. Statistical and clinical examinations revealed the reported outcomes following ADP treatment were at least comparable, and sometimes significantly better, when compared to the reported outcomes following outpatient treatment excluding ADP involvement. This study, while having some methodological shortcomings, provides some evidence for the efficacy of ADPs.

‘No one will ever know...’ : the Holocaust, ‘privileged’ Jews, and the ‘grey zone’

This paper explores the problems of judgement and representation in relation to Jewish victims of the Holocaust who occupied so-called privileged positions in the camps and ghettos. Such figures, forced to act in ways that have proven controversial both during and after the war, faced unprecedented ethical dilemmas under Nazi persecution. Taking Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi’s highly influential essay on the ‘grey zone’ as a point of departure, I examine the extreme situations confronted by prisoner doctors, an important – though little discussed – category of ‘privileged’ Jews. Investigating the synergies between history, memory and film, I focus particularly on the case of Gisella Perl, a prisoner doctor whose experiences in Auschwitz-Birkenau are represented in her memoir and a recent fiction film. The emotionally and morally fraught circumstances of prisoner doctors can never be fully understood, yet reflecting on the double binds they faced, and acknowledging the inherent problems involved in representing and judging them, enables a nuanced approach to the moral complexities of the Holocaust.

Battlefield tourism - Anzac day commemorations at Gallipoli : an empirical analysis

This thesis used theoretical constructs of personal values, emotions, motives, event components of ceremony, transport and amenities to develop an empirical model that provided an understanding of the experiential components of the event and the antecedents associated with attendance, satisfaction and recommending behaviour of the Anzac Day Ceremonies at Gallipoli.

Every day's a festival!

Despite their ubiquity and cultural prominence, the academic study of arts festivals has long been neglected. The burgeoning festivals industry is, however, firmly embedded in both the arts funding and weekly calendar of European cities, and there is no doubt that festivals are fast becoming a defining feature of urban life in the twenty-first century. Understanding their nature and their potential impact is now more pressing than ever before. The contributors to this volume explore the modern urban festival and the difference it makes to the experience and management of diversity in the city. Their research reveals an unsettling coupling of the celebration of local diversity with institutional amnesia, in which the memory of a festival hardly ever outlasts its funding. This book documents a key phenomenon of our time, the supplanting of community-based remembering with the repetitive structures of events whose historic and interpretative depth is lost amid a spiraling velocity of "festivalization."

Zero-day malware detection based on supervised learning algorithms of API call signatures

Zero-day or unknown malware are created using code obfuscation techniques that can modify the parent code to produce offspring copies which have the same functionality but with different signatures. Current techniques reported in literature lack the capability of detecting zero-day malware with the required accuracy and efficiency. In this paper, we have proposed and evaluated a novel method of employing several data mining techniques to detect and classify zero-day malware with high levels of accuracy and efficiency based on the frequency of Windows API calls. This paper describes the methodology employed for the collection of large data sets to train the classifiers, and analyses the performance results of the various data mining algorithms adopted for the study using a fully automated tool developed in this research to conduct the various experimental investigations and evaluation. Through the performance results of these algorithms from our experimental analysis, we are able to evaluate and discuss the advantages of one data mining algorithm over the other for accurately detecting zero-day malware successfully. The data mining framework employed in this research learns through analysing the behavior of existing malicious and benign codes in large datasets. We have employed robust classifiers, namely Naïve Bayes (NB) Algorithm, k−Nearest Neighbor (kNN) Algorithm, Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO) Algorithm with 4 differents kernels (SMO - Normalized PolyKernel, SMO – PolyKernel, SMO – Puk, and SMO- Radial Basis Function (RBF)), Backpropagation Neural Networks Algorithm, and J48 decision tree and have evaluated their performance. Overall, the automated data mining system implemented for this study has achieved high true positive (TP) rate of more than 98.5%, and low false positive (FP) rate of less than 0.025, which has not been achieved in literature so far. This is much higher than the required commercial acceptance level indicating that our novel technique is a major leap forward in detecting zero-day malware. This paper also offers future directions for researchers in exploring different aspects of obfuscations that are affecting the IT world today.

Building the capacity of family day care educators to promote children’s social and emotional wellbeing : an exploratory cluster randomised controlled trial

Background: Childhood mental health problems are highly prevalent, experienced by one in five children living in socioeconomically disadvantaged families. Although childcare settings, including family day care are ideal to promote children’s social and emotional wellbeing at a population level in a sustainable way, family day care educators receive limited training in promoting children’s mental health. This study is an exploratory wait-list control cluster randomised controlled trial to test the appropriateness, acceptability, cost, and effectiveness of “Thrive,” an intervention program to build the capacity of family day care educators to promote children’s social and emotional wellbeing. Thrive aims to increase educators’ knowledge, confidence and skills in promoting children’s social and emotional wellbeing.
Methods/Design: This study involves one family day care organisation based in a low socioeconomic area of Melbourne. All family day care educators (term used for registered carers who provide care for children for financial reimbursement in the carers own home) are eligible to participate in the study. The clusters for randomisation will be the fieldworkers (n = 5) who each supervise 10-15 educators. The intervention group (field workers and educators) will participate in a variety of intervention activities over 12 months, including workshops; activity exchanges with other educators; and focused discussion about children’s social and emotional wellbeing during field worker visits. The control group will continue with their normal work practice. The intervention will be delivered to the intervention group and then to the control group after a time delay of 15 months post intervention commencement. A baseline survey will be conducted with all consenting educators and field workers (n = ~70) assessing outcomes at the cluster and individual level. The survey will also be administered at one month, six months and 12 months post-intervention commencement. The survey consists of questions measuring perceived levels of knowledge, confidence and skills in promoting children’s social and emotional wellbeing. As much of this intervention will be delivered by field workers, field worker-family day care educator relationships are key to its success and thus supervisor support will also be measured. All educators will also have an in-home quality of care assessment at baseline, one month, six months and 12 months post-intervention commencement. Process evaluation will occur at one month, six months and 12 months post-intervention commencement. Information regarding intervention fidelity and economics will also be assessed in the survey.
Discussion: A capacity building intervention in child mental health promotion for family day care is an essential contribution to research, policy and practice. This initiative is the first internationally, and essential in building an evidence base of interventions in this extremely policy-timely setting.