A new approach to determining environmental flow requirements : sustaining the natural values of floodplains of the southern Murray-Darling Basin

Large overbank flood events play an important role in maintaining largescale ecological processes and connectivity along and across the floodplains and between the rivers and their floodplains in the southern Murray-Darling Basin. However, the regulation of rivers means that extensive overbank flooding can only occur in the rare circumstance of extreme flood events. Recent environmental water allocations have focussed on the largest floodplain blocks (‘icon’ sites) and a small set of specific values (e.g. colonial nesting waterbirds), as well as on trialling fine-scale manipulation of infrastructure (e.g. pumping) to water relatively small areas. There has been no comprehensive systematic assessment of the entire floodplain and its wider set of flood-dependent natural assets (such as ecosystems and species; herein referred to as ‘natural values’) to maximise the effectiveness of environmental water use and to catalogue values likely to be lost. This paper describes an assessment of some 220 000 ha found to support flood-dependent natural values in Victoria. We mapped the geographic distribution and estimated components of the flooding requirements (natural flooding frequency, and maximum period without flooding and minimum duration of each flooding event before significant deterioration) for each natural value. Using an example of one stretch of the River Murray, we show how the resultant spatial data can be used with floodplain inundation modelling to compare the outcomes of real or planned environmental watering events; potentially providing tools for management agencies to conserve a wider range of floodplain values than is currently the case. That is, water managers and the public can see what ecosystems and threatened species are intended to be maintained by environmental watering and what values are intended to be abandoned across the whole floodplain, rather than just seeing the small subset of values and ‘icon’ sites that are intended to be maintained. Examples are provided to illustrate how information about the location, water requirements and extent covered by potential floods for specific values can be used to build adaptive watering strategies for areas as large as the whole floodplain.

Fostering meaningful learning by using word problems in post-secondary mathematics

This research is a case study of action research investigating the effects of using word problems with Chinese Malaysian post-secondary students studying mathematics as an enabling science. A variety of word problems, a discussion method, reflective and peer learning, specific values in mathematics, and relevant socio-cultural and language issues were explored.

Consumer concerns about food and health : examination of general and specific relationships with personal values and demographics

Purpose – Aims to investigate the relationships between consumers' food concerns and their personal values and demographic characteristics.

Design/methodology/approach – A questionnaire was administered in a cross sectional random population survey conducted among a sample of 1,000 adults in South Australia. The questionnaire elicited information about respondents' concerns about 20 food and health issues, the perceived importance of 23 values items derived from the Schwartz values inventory, and their demographic characteristics.

Findings – Principal components analyses derived four food concerns factors and six personal values factors. Respondents' safety concerns scores were positively associated with devout-tradition, order-discipline, and moderate-independent values. Their disease concerns score was positively linked to beauty-nature, devout-tradition, and order-discipline. Multiple regression and chi-square automatic interaction detection (CHAID) analyses showed that individual values items were strong predictors of consumers; specific concerns such as food and heart disease, and, genetic modification of foods.

Research limitations/implications – The research was based on a cross sectional study. More refined indices of food concerns and personal values should be used in replications of this preliminary study.

Practical implications – The findings support the use of psychographic market segmentation approaches in communication programs about food and health issues.

Originality/value – The findings suggest that personal values, may be stronger predictors of consumers' concerns about food and health issues than demographics. They also show that measurement level of values and concerns influence the observed strength of their relationships.

News values and country non-daily reporting

Australia's country, non-daily newspapers present journalism graduates with excellent opportunities to get a foot in the door, experience a wide range of journalistic responsibilities and compile an impressive portfolio. However, tertiary journalism courses largely ignore the unique news values, issues and challenges involved with country non-daily reporting. Considering a large percentage of future journalists are likely to enter the industry on a country non-daily, journalism education's current attitude has serious implications for the profession. However, this situation cannot be rectified until these specific news values, issues and challenges have been documented in order for them to be integrated into pedagogical models. This article documents the country non-daily's news values, issues and challenges, and indicates their importance to journalism training and education.

Corners, squares and urban identities: perceptions, attitudes and values

In February 2000, the new Victorian Labor Government announced that they were removing the western shard from Lab Architecture Studio's winning Melbourne Federation Square design. then under construction. The specific 'contested terrain' at the intersection of Flinders Street and Swanston Street Walk. Melbourne, allows the exploration of the politics of place construction over time, through an examination of Young and Jackson's Hotel [1861]. St Paul's Cathedral [1886). Flinders Street Station [1912]. the Westin Hotel [1999) and Federation Square. This site brings together architectural and social history, questions public space and identity, and looks at Melburnian's perceptions, attitudes and values. It further demonstrates that the fragmentation of the professions, and fragmentary histories. lead to the preservation of 'bits' of architecture and the destruction of the urban/landscape context, jeopardizing the Identity of place.

Mill specific prediction of worsted yarn performance

Different spinning mills use different raw materials, processing methodologies, and equipment, all of which influence the quality of the yarns produced. Because of many variables, there is a difficulty in developing a universal empirical/theoretical model. This work presents a multilayer perceptron algorithm (MLP) model for the purpose of building a mill specific worsted spinning performance prediction tool. Sixteen inputs are used to predict key yarn properties and spinning performance, including number of fibers in cross-section, unevenness (U%), thin places, neps, yarn tenacity, elongation at break, thick places, and spinning ends-down. Validation of the model on mill specific commercial data set shows that the general fit to the target values is good. Importantly, the performance of the MLP shows a certain degree of stability to different, random selections of independent test data. Subsequent comparison against the predicted outputs of Sirolan Yarnspec™ confirms the overall performance of the artificial neural network (ANN) method to be more accuratefor mill specific predictions.

Pointwise construction of Lippschitz aggregation operators with specific properties

This paper describes an approach to pointwise construction of general aggregation operators, based on monotone Lipschitz approximation. The aggregation operators are constructed from a set of desired values at certain points, or from empirically collected data. It establishes tight upper and lower bounds on Lipschitz aggregation operators with a number of different properties, as well as the optimal aggregation operator, consistent with the given values. We consider conjunctive, disjunctive and idempotent n-ary aggregation operators; p-stable aggregation operators; various choices of the neutral element and annihilator; diagonal, opposite diagonal and marginal sections; bipolar and double aggregation operators. In all cases we provide either explicit formulas or deterministic numerical procedures to determine the bounds. The findings of this paper are useful for construction of aggregation operators with specified properties, especially using interpolation schemata.

Public and stakeholder values and knowledge of wildlife in Victoria, Australia

Prompted by a lack of human dimensions research in Australia, this study investigated the values and knowledge relating to wildlife held by members of the public within distinct demographic subsets of the Victorian population and members of wildlife management stakeholder groups; and compared these characteristics with how Victorian wildlife managers perceive these groups. A combination of semi-structured interviews and postal questionnaires were used. Fifteen in-depth interviews were conducted to explore how wildlife managers perceive the values and knowledge of wildlife held by members of various subsets of the Victorian population. A total of 1,431 questionnaires were completed by members of 13 public and stakeholder groups throughout Victoria, and these were analysed to explore values and knowledge relating to wildlife in Victoria. The findings of this study suggest that Victorian people have a strong emotional attachment to individual animals (the humanistic value), and an interest in learning about wildlife (the curiosity/learning/interacting value). The dominionistic/wildlife-consumption, utilitarian-habitat, aesthetic and negativistic values were not expressed by the majority of respondents from the public samples. The data also suggest that Victorian people have relatively low levels of factual knowledge about Australian wildlife. Thus, wildlife managers should expect support for wildlife management objectives that reflect the strong humanistic orientation of Victorians and tailor management and education programs to appeal to this value and Victorians' interest in learning about wildlife. Members of the Field Naturalists Club of Victoria (FNCV), Bird Observers Club of Australia (BOCA), Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) stakeholder groups and management agency Parks Victoria expressed a strong interest in learning about wildlife. Members of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) obtained high humanistic value scores; and members of the Victorian Field and Game Association (VFGA) obtained high domimomstic/wildlife-consumption value scores. Importantly, the humanistic and curiosity/learning/interacting values were the most strongly expressed values in all six groups and these values could be the key to more effective communication and collaboration between groups. Relationships between demographic factors, and values and knowledge relating to wildlife were found. For example, rural Victorians held a stronger dominionistic/ wildlife-consumption value than urban Victorians; females held stronger humanistic, curiosity/learning/interacting and negativistic values than males; young Victorians (18-34 years) held a lower curiosity/learning/interacting value and lower factual knowledge of wildlife than older Victorians; and more highly educated Victorians were more knowledgeable about wildlife than people with less formal education. No statistically significant differences were found between the values and knowledge of wildlife held by different income classes. While relationships between demographic factors, and values and knowledge relating to wildlife were found, they were generally much smaller than expected based on wildlife managers' perceptions and previous research. For example, the results suggest that Victorian females have a slightly stronger humanistic value of wildlife than males do. However, the important message emerging from the data is that males and females both express a strong emotional attachment to individual animals. Importantly, the results indicate that the effects of demographic factors on values and knowledge relating to wildlife are not always consistent across different geographic locations and stakeholder groups. For example, the slightly stronger interest in learning about wildlife among females when compared with males was observed in the rural and urban-fringe samples but not in the urban samples. This suggests that caution must be used when generalising the findings from human dimensions studies from one type of community or stakeholder group to another. Management programs should be tailored to the specific characteristics of the target audience. The findings also indicate that Victorian wildlife managers have diverse perceptions about the values and knowledge of wildlife held by members of different publics and stakeholder groups, and that the perceptions held by wildlife managers are not always consistent with the actual values and knowledge of wildlife held by members of different publics and stakeholders. For example, counter to the perceptions expressed by the interviewed wildlife managers, the interest in and factual knowledge of wildlife held by members of voluntary conservation groups equalled or surpassed that of wildlife managers; young Victorian adults (18-34 years) held a slightly lower curiosity/learning/interacting value and slightly lower level of factual knowledge of wildlife than older Victorians; and rural and urban communities in Victoria held low dominionistic and utilitarian values. Such discrepancies highlight the importance of investigating the actual values and knowledge held by members of such groups, so that appropriate and effective wildlife management programs can be implemented. Inaccurate perceptions and assumptions may contribute to ineffective communication between managers, stakeholders and publics; and adversely effect the success of wildlife management programs.

A comparison of the socio-cultural influences on body size perceptions and values among European Australian and Indigenous Fijian adolescent girls

Western women are experiencing increases in the prevalence of overweight and obesity despite valuing slimness as ideal and equating thinness with attractiveness and beauty. Pacific populations are also experiencing high prevalence rates of overweight and obesity. A lage body size, however, has many positive connotations among pacific populations that stem from rich cultural practices such as feasts and deliberate fattening of women. There appears to be many sociocultural factors however, such as images of the slim ideal portrayed in Western media, influencing body image concerns that are shared between the two groups. A qualitative study involving semi-structured interviews was conducted to examine and compare the sociocultural influences on body size perceptionsand values. Participants include 16 European Australian and 16 Indigenous Fijian adolescent girls aged between 15 and 17 years. Inductive thematic analysis and analytical induction were qualitativemethods employed to facilitate interpretation of the findings. Preliminary findings suggest that Fijian adolescent girls experience greater conflict than European Australian girls about the desired body size endorsed in their community. Results also suggest that Indigenous Fijian girls place less importance than Australian girls on manipulating their body to achieve a specific ideal. Specific results of this study are reviewed and recommendations for future research are discussed.

A calibration protocol for population-specific accelerometer cut-points in children

Purpose

To test a field-based protocol using intermittent activities representative of children's physical activity behaviours, to generate behaviourally valid, population-specific accelerometer cut-points for sedentary behaviour, moderate, and vigorous physical activity.
Methods

Twenty-eight children (46% boys) aged 10–11 years wore a hip-mounted uniaxial GT1M ActiGraph and engaged in 6 activities representative of children's play. A validated direct observation protocol was used as the criterion measure of physical activity. Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) curve analyses were conducted with four semi-structured activities to determine the accelerometer cut-points. To examine classification differences, cut-points were cross-validated with free-play and DVD viewing activities.
Results

Cut-points of ≤372, >2160 and >4806 counts•min−1 representing sedentary, moderate and vigorous intensity thresholds, respectively, provided the optimal balance between the related needs for sensitivity (accurately detecting activity) and specificity (limiting misclassification of the activity). Cross-validation data demonstrated that these values yielded the best overall kappa scores (0.97; 0.71; 0.62), and a high classification agreement (98.6%; 89.0%; 87.2%), respectively. Specificity values of 96–97% showed that the developed cut-points accurately detected physical activity, and sensitivity values (89–99%) indicated that minutes of activity were seldom incorrectly classified as inactivity.
Conclusion

The development of an inexpensive and replicable field-based protocol to generate behaviourally valid and population-specific accelerometer cut-points may improve the classification of physical activity levels in children, which could enhance subsequent intervention and observational studies.

Integrating biological and social values when prioritizing places for biodiversity conservation

The consideration of information on social values in conjunction with biological data is critical for achieving both socially acceptable and scientifically defensible conservation planning outcomes. However, the influence of social values on spatial conservation priorities has received limited attention and is poorly understood. We present an approach that incorporates quantitative data on social values for conservation and social preferences for development into spatial conservation planning. We undertook a public participation GIS survey to spatially represent social values and development preferences and used species distribution models for 7 threatened fauna species to represent biological values. These spatially explicit data were simultaneously included in the conservation planning software Zonation to examine how conservation priorities changed with the inclusion of social data. Integrating spatially explicit information about social values and development preferences with biological data produced prioritizations that differed spatially from the solution based on only biological data. However, the integrated solutions protected a similar proportion of the species' distributions, indicating that Zonation effectively combined the biological and social data to produce socially feasible conservation solutions of approximately equivalent biological value. We were able to identify areas of the landscape where synergies and conflicts between different value sets are likely to occur. Identification of these synergies and conflicts will allow decision makers to target communication strategies to specific areas and ensure effective community engagement and positive conservation outcomes.

Sexual niche segregation and gender-specific individual specialisation in a highly dimorphic marine mammal

While sexual segregation is expected in highly dimorphic species, the local environment is a major factor driving the degree of resource partitioning within a population. Sexual and individual niche segregation was investigated in the Australian fur seal (Arctocephalus pusillus doriferus), which is a benthic foraging species restricted to the shallow continental shelf region of south-eastern Australia. Tracking data and the isotopic values of plasma, red blood cells and whiskers were combined to document spatial and dietary niche segregation throughout the year. Tracking data indicated that, in winter, males and females overlapped in their foraging habitat. All individuals stayed within central Bass Strait, relatively close (< 220 km) to the breeding colony. Accordingly, both genders exhibited similar plasma and red cell δ13C values. However, males exhibited greater δ13C intra-individual variation along the length of their whisker than females. This suggests that males exploited a greater diversity of foraging habitats throughout the year than their female counterparts, which are restricted in their foraging grounds by the need to regularly return to the breeding colony to suckle their pup. The degree of dietary sexual segregation was also surprisingly low, both sexes exhibiting a great overlap in their δ15N values. Yet, males displayed higher δ15N values than females, suggesting they fed upon a higher proportion of higher trophic level prey. Given that males and females exploit different resources (mainly foraging habitats), the degree of individual specialisation might differ between the sexes. Higher degrees of individual specialisation would be expected in males which exploit a greater range of resources. However, comparable levels of inter-individual variation in δ15N whisker values were found in the sampled males and females, and, surprisingly, all males exhibited similar seasonal and inter-annual variation in their δ13C whisker values, suggesting they all followed the same general dispersion pattern throughout the year.