Why the tuberculosis incidence rate is not falling in New Zealand

Aims To assess the role of migration from high-incidence countries, HIV/AIDS infection, and prevalence of multi-drug resistant organisms as contributors to tuberculosis (TB) incidence in New Zealand (NZ) relative to ongoing local transmission and reactivation of disease.

Methods TB notification data and laboratory data for the period 1995 to 2004 and population data from the 1996 and 2001 Census were used to calculate incidence rates of TB by age and ethnicity, country of birth (distinguishing high and low -incidence countries), and interval between migration and onset of disease. Published reports of multi-drug-resistant TB for the period 1995 to 2004 were reviewed. Anonymous HIV surveillance data held by AIDS Epidemiology Group were matched with coded and anonymised TB surveillance data to measure the extent of HIV/AIDS coinfection in notified TB cases.

Results Migration of people from high-TB incidence countries is the main source of TB in NZ. Of those who develop TB, a quarter does so within a year of migration, and a quarter of this group (mainly refugees) probably enter the country with pre-existing disease. Rates of local TB transmission and reactivation of old disease are declining steadily for NZ-born populations, except for NZ-born Māori and Pacific people under 40. HIV/AIDS and multi-drug-resistant organisms are not significant contributors to TB incidence in NZ and there is no indication that their role is increasing.

Conclusion TB incidence is not decreasing in NZ mainly due to migration of TB infected people from high-incidence countries and subsequent development of active disease in some of them in NZ. This finding emphasises the importance of regional and global TB control initiatives. Refugees and migrants are not acting as an important source of TB for most NZ-born populations. Those caring for them should have a high level of clinical suspicion for TB.

Beyond the rational museum : toward a discourse of inclusion

Museum discourse is not inclusive in that it neglects or negates the affective potential of museums. Affect is precognitive sensation, it is unexpected, and leaves a more lasting impression than re-cognition. The museum’s role in the shaping of histories, and its origins in class and gender exploitation are important areas of discourse, however, the focus on these issues also limits discourse. Ideologically driven critique seems unable to explain the experiential affect of exhibits of art and material culture. Arguably, an alternative museum with a contradictory set of meanings has always existed alongside the rational museum of critical discourse. Some critics do acknowledge that their disciplines seem unable to grapple with this ‘alternative museum’, however, there is not a critical vocabulary of affect with which to give it appropriate expression. Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical ideas give relevance to affect, and are useful in shaping or ‘shocking’ a way toward a more inclusive critical discourse, which might lead toward more inclusive museum practices.

The tale of two cultures : differences in technology acceptance in Twitter usage

Despite its huge uptake all over the world, Twitter is still in its early stages of being used as an educational tool. Here, we present an experiment that was conducted across two undergraduate groups from different universities, an Australian and another American university. In this experiment we looked at Twitter usage in class and compared the results with a particular focus on analysing technology acceptance differences between the two groups. Both groups used Twitter as part of their tutorial work and participated in a survey at the end of the semester. Empirical investigation was done using Davis’ technology acceptance model (TAM). The study findings reveal highly significant differences in the technology acceptance behaviours of the two groups, thus highlight cultural differences in the acceptance of technology, in this case Twitter.

The langauge of tourism : perfecting soft skills in a flat world

India is Australia's 11th-biggest inbound tourism market, bringing in 148,200 visitors who spent $867 million last year, but by 2020 officials say that could reach 300,000 visitors spending $2.3 billion.
Delhi and Mumbai have been targeted by Australia because they have an emerging middle class and India's highest concentration of affluent households.
The Minister for Tourism, Martin Ferguson, unveiled an India 2020 strategic plan last month at the annual Australian Tourism Exchange in Perth, the largest travel trade show in the southern hemisphere. "We have put a huge effort into attracting tourists from China recently and the next cab off the rank is India," he said.
The plan means that Tourism Australia's "There's Nothing Like Australia" campaign will be rolled out in Delhi and Mumbai and there will be extensive advertising on TV and digital channels as well as print.

Expanding children's food experiences : the impact of a school-based kitchen garden program

Objective: Evaluate achievement of the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Program in increasing child appreciation of diverse, healthy foods.

Design: Comparative 2-year study.

Setting: Six program and 6 comparison primary schools in rural and metropolitan Victoria, Australia, matched for socioeconomic status and size.

Participants: A total of 764 children in grades 3 to 6 (8–12 years of age) and 562 parents recruited. Retention rates at follow-up included 85% children and 75% parents.

Intervention: Each week of the school year, children spent 45 to 60 minutes in a garden class and 90 minutes in a kitchen class.

Phenomenon of interest: Program impact on children’s willingness to try new foods, capacity to describe foods, and healthy eating.

Analysis: Qualitative data analyzed using inductive thematic analysis. Quantitative data analyzed using random-effects linear regressions adjusted for school clustering.

Results: Child and parent qualitative and quantitative measures (if never tried before, odds ratio 2.0; confidence interval, 1.06–3.58) showed increases in children’s reported willingness to try new foods. No differences in articulation of food descriptions (program vs comparison groups). Qualitative evidence showed that the program extended its influence to healthy eating, but this was not reflected in the quantitative evidence.

Conclusions and Implications: Findings indicate program success in achieving its primary objective, meriting further program research.

Detecting patterns of change in benthic habitats by acoustic remote sensing

Changes in benthic habitats occur as a result of natural variation or human-induced processes. It is important to understand natural fine-scale inter-annual patterns of change to separate these signals from patterns of long-term change. Describing change from an acoustic remote sensing standpoint has been facilitated by the recent availability of full coverage swath acoustic datasets, but is limited by cost pressures associated with multiple surveys of the same area. We studied the use of landscape transition analysis as a means to differentiate seemingly random patterns of habitat change from systematic signals of habitat transition at a shallow (10 to 50 m depth) 18 km2 site on the temperate Australian continental shelf in 2006 and 2007. Supervised classifications for each year were accomplished using inde pendently collected highresolution swath acoustic and video reference data. Of the 4 representative biotic clas ses considered, signals of directional systematic changes occurred be tween a kelp-dominated class, a sessile invertebrate-dominated class and a mixed class of kelp and sessile invertebrates. We provide a detailed analysis of the components of the traditional change detection cross tabulation matrix, allowing identification of the strongest signals of systematic habitat transitions. Iden tifying patterns of habitat change is an important first step toward understanding the processes that drive them.

Speaking as 'other'

As a child of Chilean migrants I have always felt a strong affinity with the displaced and vulnerable. It would be as difficult to change this as it would be to change my place of birth for this is my inheritance. By this i mean the physics of who I am - woman, non- white, Chilean born; the social milieu and economic conditions that I was born into - Catholic and working class; and the politics that i have adopted - a commitment to social and political reform.

Recognition from appearance subspaces across image sets of variable scale

Linear subspace representations of appearance variation are pervasive in computer vision. In this paper we address the problem of robustly matching them (computing the similarity between them) when they correspond to sets of images of different (possibly greatly so) scales. We show that the naïve solution of projecting the low-scale subspace into the high-scale image space is inadequate, especially at large scale discrepancies. A successful approach is proposed instead. It consists of (i) an interpolated projection of the low-scale subspace into the high-scale space, which is followed by (ii) a rotation of this initial estimate within the bounds of the imposed “downsampling constraint”. The optimal rotation is found in the closed-form which best aligns the high-scale reconstruction of the low-scale subspace with the reference it is compared to. The proposed method is evaluated on the problem of matching sets of face appearances under varying illumination. In comparison to the naïve matching, our algorithm is shown to greatly increase the separation of between-class and within-class similarities, as well as produce far more meaningful modes of common appearance on which the match score is based.

Remix the social: remix the learning

This paper reports on how the findings from an eighteen month secondary school action research study, in which social media was integrated into face-to-face classroom practice, was used to inform a fourth year undergraduate teacher-education unit at Deakin University in Australia. The school action research study was conducted in an Australian public secondary school. Students were aged between 13 and 16 years of age and a total of thirteen classes were involved. In each of the three semesters of data collection, one online social network was shared with up to seven classes and each class had approximately 25 students. Blogs, Groups, Chats, Discussion Forums, Web 2.0 tools and a wide range of student-generated content were shared online, within a class and between classes. Students were encouraged to interact and to share their thoughts and ideas about planning as well as using their out-of-school skills and knowledge. Each topic, within each class, was one action research cycle, using Armstrong and Moore’s (2004) framework. By following Graham Nuthall’s lens on learning, the researcher was able to focus on teaching as being about sensitivity and adaptation: adjusting to the here-and-now circumstances of particular students (Nuthall 2007). Elements of self organisation with spontaneous and strange attractors were identified throughout the study and these made links to Doll’s (1993) post-modern perspective of chaotic behaviour and the complexity of Hayles’ (1990) ‘disorderly order’.

A global approach to dissecting lipid-induced impairment of liver gluconeogenesis

This thesis identified: 1) novel aspects of cholesterol metabolism, 2) a novel signalling lipid in the phosphatidylinositol class, and 3) a gene involved in regulating lipid breakdown, as being regulated in the reversal of a fatty acid induced diabetic liver. The identification of these targets may allow for future development of targeted therapies against type 2 diabetes with a specific focus on the liver.

Spoken mathematics as a distinguishing characteristics of mathematics classrooms in different countries

This paper reports research into the occurrence of spoken mathematics in some well-taught classrooms in Australia, China (both Shanghai and Hong Kong), Japan, Korea and the USA. The analysis distinguished one classroom from another on the basis of public “oral interactivity” (the number of utterances in whole class and teacher-student interactions in each lesson) and “mathematical orality” (the frequency of occurrence of key mathematical terms in each lesson). Our concern in this analysis was to document the opportunity provided to students for the oral articulation of the relatively sophisticated mathematical terms that formed the conceptual content of the lesson. Classrooms characterized by high public oral interactivity were not necessarily sites of high mathematical orality. The contribution of student-student conversations also varied significantly. Of particular interest are the different learning theories implicit in the role accorded to spoken mathematics in each classroom.

The dissection of paraprofessional support in inclusive education: ‘you're in mainstream with a chaperone’

The experiences of young people with disabilities of inclusive schooling are largely underresearched. This paper reports recent findings of a small-scale Australian qualitative study, in which secondary students with vision impairment spoke about their experiences of receiving paraprofessional support. Two overarching themes emerged from this study: ‘light’ and ‘heavy’ paraprofessional support. The results presented here demonstrate that participants described that support personnel upheld the strong arm of the special education tradition, which was manifestly detrimental to their inclusion. Raw data is presented to elucidate the emergent themes, and to explain the various pedagogical and general support roles of class and special educators in eliminating the need for direct paraprofessional presence in lessons. The light and heavy model of support is also examined in terms of how it fits into the complexity of the education discourse and the young people’s own aspirations for full inclusion.

Maternal hair selenium levels as a possible long-term nutritional indicator of recurrent pregnancy loss

BackgroundApproximately 1% of all couples trying to conceive will suffer from recurrent pregnancy loss (RPL). Nutritional deficiencies have been postulated as a possible cause of RPL and in particular, selenium deficiency has been associated with reproductive failure in animal studies and more recently, in some human studies. This study was undertaken to assess the maternal hair selenium levels in women with RPL without an identified cause and to compare these results with those of women with successful reproductive histories.MethodsTwenty four patients with RPL and twenty four control subjects with at least one successful pregnancy and no pregnancy failures, who were matched for age and ethnicity, were recruited. A questionnaire was completed, which included demographic and social information and a dietary history. Hair samples were collected and analyzed for selenium content by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry.ResultsThe control subjects had a higher mean income and had completed more years of education compared with the RPL patients. There was no significant difference in the intake of selenium rich foods between the 2 groups. The patients, however, consumed significantly more fruit, cheese, potatoes and chocolate than the controls. The median (range) selenium content was 0.80 ppm (0.19-4.15) and 0.68 ppm (0.43-3.76) in patients and controls respectively (Mann Whitney U test 209.5 p = 0.74).ConclusionsWhile there were significant differences in the 2 groups with regard to resources, education and diet our results show that hair selenium concentrations and dietary selenium intake, were similar in the two groups. Both groups had low levels of this important element.

The Greek Diaspora of Melboure, Australia, through the eyes of the second generation Greek Australians

Melbourne has a large and dynamic Greek community that began to form in the 1950s with migration to Australia in the years following the Second World War and the Greek Civil War. The elders of this community, in particular, have tried to ensure that their culture and traditions are kept alive and are handed down from generation to generation. The long history and cultural richness of the Greek tradition is a great source of pride to its members, and this is a key characteristic of the Greek community of Australia. Young and old Greek Australians speak of their country of origin with great pride and passion, as it remains central to their perception of nationality and ethnicity. This importance placed on the retention of the language and culture of their nation of origin means that cultural transmission across generations is of great significance to the community and can provide valuable insight into their interpretation of their own experiences. This paper will present findings from a three generation study about health beliefs and practices of women in the Melbourne Greek community. The experience of granddaughters, who represent the second Australian generation, and how they see their grandmothers’ experience as migrants to Australia will be discussed. The impact of the Diaspora phenomenon and the creation of a Greek community in Melbourne will be considered in the context of health, memory, religion, Greek culture, food, and personal and group identity.

Sparse representation with multi-manifold analysis for texture classification from few training images

Texture classification is one of the most important tasks in computer vision field and it has been extensively investigated in the last several decades. Previous texture classification methods mainly used the template matching based methods such as Support Vector Machine and k-Nearest-Neighbour for classification. Given enough training images the state-of-the-art texture classification methods could achieve very high classification accuracies on some benchmark databases. However, when the number of training images is limited, which usually happens in real-world applications because of the high cost of obtaining labelled data, the classification accuracies of those state-of-the-art methods would deteriorate due to the overfitting effect. In this paper we aim to develop a novel framework that could correctly classify textural images with only a small number of training images. By taking into account the repetition and sparsity property of textures we propose a sparse representation based multi-manifold analysis framework for texture classification from few training images. A set of new training samples are generated from each training image by a scale and spatial pyramid, and then the training samples belonging to each class are modelled by a manifold based on sparse representation. We learn a dictionary of sparse representation and a projection matrix for each class and classify the test images based on the projected reconstruction errors. The framework provides a more compact model than the template matching based texture classification methods, and mitigates the overfitting effect. Experimental results show that the proposed method could achieve reasonably high generalization capability even with as few as 3 training images, and significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art texture classification approaches on three benchmark datasets. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.