In search of Nirvana : why Nirvana : the True Story could never be "true"

In my book Nirvana: The True Story (2006), I undertake an autoethnographical approach to biography, attempting to impart an understanding of my chosen subject - the rock band Nirvana - via discussion of my own experiences. On numerous occasions, I veer off into tangential asides, frequently using extensive footnotes to explain obscure musical references. Personal anecdotes are juxtaposed with "insider" information; at crucial points in the story (notable concerts, the first meeting of singer Kurt Cobain with his future wife Courtney Love, the news of Cobain's suicide), the linear thread of the narrative spills over into a multi-faceted approach, with several different (and sometimes opposing) voices given equal prominence. Despite my firsthand experience of the band, however, Nirvana: The True Story is not considered authoritative, even within its own field. This article considers the reasons why this may be the case.In my book Nirvana: The True Story (2006), I undertake an autoethnographical approach to biography, attempting to impart an understanding of my chosen subject - the rock band Nirvana - via discussion of my own experiences. On numerous occasions, I veer off into tangential asides, frequently using extensive footnotes to explain obscure musical references. Personal anecdotes are juxtaposed with "insider" information; at crucial points in the story (notable concerts, the first meeting of singer Kurt Cobain with his future wife Courtney Love, the news of Cobain's suicide), the linear thread of the narrative spills over into a multi-faceted approach, with several different (and sometimes opposing) voices given equal prominence. Despite my firsthand experience of the band, however, Nirvana: The True Story is not considered authoritative, even within its own field. This article considers the reasons why this may be the case.

Hospital infection control units: Staffing, costs, and priorities

Background: This article describes infection prevention and control professionals’ (ICPs’) staffing levels, patient outcomes, and costs associated with the provision of infection prevention and control services in Australian hospitals. A secondary objective was to determine the priorities for infection control units. Methods: A cross-sectional study design was used. Infection control units in Australian public and private hospitals completed a Web-based anonymous survey. Data collected included details about the respondent; hospital demographics; details and services of the infection control unit; and a description of infection prevention and control-related outputs, patient outcomes, and infection control priorities. Results: Forty-nine surveys were undertaken, accounting for 152 Australian hospitals. The mean number of ICPs was 0.66 per 100 overnight beds (95% confidence interval, 0.55-0.77). Privately funded hospitals have significantly fewer ICPs per 100 overnight beds compared with publicly funded hospitals (P < .01). Staffing costs for nursing staff in infection control units in this study totaled $16,364,392 (mean, $380,566). Infection control units managing smaller hospitals (<270 beds) identified the need for increased access to infectious diseases or microbiology support. Conclusion: This study provides valuable information to support future decisions by funders, hospital administrators, and ICPs on service delivery models for infection prevention and control. Further, it is the first to provide estimates of the resourcing and cost of staffing infection control in hospitals at a national level. Copyright

Using academagogy to meet the needs of millennial learners: A comparative case study

Higher education institutions across the world are experiencing a new generation of students, known as millennial learners. They are more technologically literate and digitally connected than previous generations of learners. To meet the teaching and learning needs of these learners, we must offer more deliberate and meaningful learning experiences and opportunities, where students can see the connections between new material and their own experiences and real world applications – an academagogic approach. This study compares the implementation of academagogy for two different groups of millennial learners – one a traditional face-to-face undergraduate Engineering unit, and the other a mixed-mode (online and face-to-face) undergraduate Design unit. The units are discussed in terms of their student evaluation results, both qualitative and quantitative, and in terms of their academic outcomes for students. Conclusions are drawn about the applicability of academagogy as a heuristic for improving teaching and learning across disciplines, as well as its strengths and limitations in terms of student results.

The effectiveness of meaningful occupation interventions for people living with dementia in residential aged care: A systematic review protocol

Review questions/objective What is the effectiveness of meaningful occupation interventions for people living with dementia in residential aged care facilities? More specifically, the objectives are to identify: The effectiveness of interventions based on engaging residents of residential aged care facilities who have dementia in meaningful occupation (activities that have meaning for the individual) on: quality of life, behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia (such as agitation, aggression, depression, wandering, apathy, etc.), mood, function, cognition, and sleep. Inclusion criteria Types of participants This review will consider studies that include participants with a confirmed diagnosis of any type of dementia living in residential aged care facilities / long term care/nursing homes/permanent care. Types of intervention(s)/phenomena of interest This review will consider studies that evaluate non-pharmacological interventions that are based on occupational or activity interventions considered to be meaningful to the person with dementia, and tailoring the intervention to meet their needs, abilities, interests and/or preferences will be required as part of the study’s methodology. Such interventions may include reminiscence therapy, exercise therapy, music therapy, individualized activity, behavioral interventions, recreational therapy, diversional therapy and psychosocial interventions. Trials of combinations of two or more such interventions will also be considered. Interventions may be in comparison to usual care, other meaningful occupation interventions, or any other non-pharmacological control or comparator.

Effect of constitutive material models on seismic response of two-story reinforced concrete frame

This paper focuses on the finite element (FE) response sensitivity and reliability analyses considering smooth constitutive material models. A reinforced concrete frame is modeled for FE sensitivity analysis followed by direct differentiation method under both static and dynamic load cases. Later, the reliability analysis is performed to predict the seismic behavior of the frame. Displacement sensitivity discontinuities are observed along the pseudo-time axis using non-smooth concrete and reinforcing steel model under quasi-static loading. However, the smooth materials show continuity in response sensitivity at elastic to plastic transition points. The normalized sensitivity results are also used to measure the relative importance of the material parameters on the structural responses. In FE reliability analysis, the influence of smoothness behavior of reinforcing steel is carefully noticed. More efficient and reasonable reliability estimation can be achieved by using smooth material model compare with bilinear material constitutive model.

Community engagement or community conversation?: Boomtown, a large-scale regional, outdoor community theatrical event

On the 18th of July 2013, three hundred local members of Gladstone, Queensland erupted into song and dance performing the fraught history of their community harbourside through tug boat ballets, taiko drumming, German bell ringing and BMX bike riding. Over 17,500 people attended the four performances of Boomtown, a Queensland Music Festival event. This was the largest regional, outdoor community-engaged musical performance staged in Australia. The narrative moved beyond the dominant, pejorative view of Gladstone as an industrial town to include the community members’ sense of purpose and aspirations. It was a celebratory, contentious and ambitious project that sought to disrupt the traditional conventions of performance-making through working in artistically democratic ways. This article explores the potential for Australian Community Engaged Arts (CEA) projects such as Boomtown to democratically engage community members and co-create culturally meaningful work within a community. Research into CEA projects rarely consider how the often delicate conversations between practitioners and the community work. The complex processes of finding and co-writing the narrative, casting, and rehearsing Boomtown are discussed with reference to artistic director/dramaturge Sean Mee’s innovative approaches. Boomtown began with and concluded with community conversations. Skilful negotiation ensured congruence between the townspeople’s stories and the “community story” presented on stage, abrogating potential problems of narrative ownership. To supplement the research, twenty-one personal interviews were undertaken with Gladstone community members invested in the production before, during and after the project: performers, audience members and local professionals. The stories shared and emphasised in the theatricalised story were based on propitious, meaningful, local stories from lived experiences rather than preconceived, trivial or tokenistic matters, and were underpinned by a consensus formed on what was in the best interests of the majority of community members. Boomtown exposed hidden issues in the community and gave voice to thoughts, feelings and concerns which triggered not just engagement, but honest conversation within the community.

The organisational context of nursing care in stroke units: A case study approach

Background Internationally the stroke unit is recognised as the evidence-based model for patient management, although clarity about the effective components of stroke units is lacking. Whilst skilled nursing care has been proposed as one component, the theoretical and empirical basis for stroke nursing is limited. We attempted to explore the organisational context of stroke unit nursing, to determine those features that staff perceived to be important in facilitating high quality care. Design A case study approach was used, that included interviews with nurses and members of the multidisciplinary teams in two Canadian acute stroke units. A total of 20 interviews were completed, transcribed and analysed thematically using the Framework Approach. Trustworthiness was established through the review of themes and their interpretation by members of the stroke units. Findings Nine themes that comprised an organisational context that supported the delivery of high quality nursing care in acute stroke units were identified, and provide a framework for organisational development. The study highlighted the importance of an overarching service model to guide the organisation of care and the development of specialist and advanced nursing roles. Whilst multidisciplinary working appears to be a key component of stroke unit nursing, various organisational challenges to its successful implementation were highlighted. In particular the consequence of differences in the therapeutic approach of nurses and therapy staff needs to be explored in greater depth. Successful teamwork appears to depend on opportunities for the development of relationships between team members as much as the use of formal communication systems and structures. A co-ordinated approach to education and training, clinical leadership, a commitment to research, and opportunities for role and practice development also appear to be key organisational features of stroke unit nursing. Recommendations for the development of stroke nursing leadership and future research into teamwork in stroke settings are made.

ACE Research Vignette 045: Are “Entrepreneurial Opportunities” a meaningful topic for entrepreneurship research?

This series of research vignettes is aimed at sharing current and interesting research findings from our team of international entrepreneurship researchers. In this vignette, Professor Per Davidsson discusses research on “entrepreneurial opportunities”. A “Government Health Warning” is in place for this particular vignette: it mainly concerns matters internal to entrepreneurship research; however, reflective practitioners may find it to be of interest.

Working the story : News curation in social media as a second save of citizen journalism

For the first decade of its existence, the concept of citizen journalism has described an approach which was seen as a broadening of the participant base in journalistic processes, but still involved only a comparatively small subset of overall society – for the most part, citizen journalists were news enthusiasts and “political junkies” (Coleman, 2006) who, as some exasperated professional journalists put it, “wouldn’t get a job at a real newspaper” (The Australian, 2007), but nonetheless followed many of the same journalistic principles. The investment – if not of money, then at least of time and effort – involved in setting up a blog or participating in a citizen journalism Website remained substantial enough to prevent the majority of Internet users from engaging in citizen journalist activities to any significant extent; what emerged in the form of news blogs and citizen journalism sites was a new online elite which for some time challenged the hegemony of the existing journalistic elite, but gradually also merged with it. The mass adoption of next-generation social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, however, has led to the emergence of a new wave of quasi-journalistic user activities which now much more closely resemble the “random acts of journalism” which JD Lasica envisaged in 2003. Social media are not exclusively or even predominantly used for citizen journalism; instead, citizen journalism is now simply a by-product of user communities engaging in exchanges about the topics which interest them, or tracking emerging stories and events as they happen. Such platforms – and especially Twitter with its system of ad hoc hashtags that enable the rapid exchange of information about issues of interest – provide spaces for users to come together to “work the story” through a process of collaborative gatewatching (Bruns, 2005), content curation, and information evaluation which takes place in real time and brings together everyday users, domain experts, journalists, and potentially even the subjects of the story themselves. Compared to the spaces of news blogs and citizen journalism sites, but also of conventional online news Websites, which are controlled by their respective operators and inherently position user engagement as a secondary activity to content publication, these social media spaces are centred around user interaction, providing a third-party space in which everyday as well as institutional users, laypeople as well as experts converge without being able to control the exchange. Drawing on a number of recent examples, this article will argue that this results in a new dynamic of interaction and enables the emergence of a more broadly-based, decentralised, second wave of citizen engagement in journalistic processes.

‘…souvlaki and a bit of lemon’: An Aboriginal Australian Greek Story.

In Victoria, Aboriginal peoples are collectively known as Koories (Koori History Website 2014). It’s a name that most people are comfortable with, even though each Koori will also hold their own specific tribal affiliations (Horton 1999). For example, the people of the Kulin nation are the Traditional Owners of the land that is now known by the English name of Melbourne. I am an Aboriginal Australian woman who originates from south-east Queensland (Brisbane/Ipswich). In south-east Queensland, some groups are collectively referred to as Murries...

Fall rates in hospital rehabilitation units after individualised patient and staff education programmes: A pragmatic, stepped-wedge, cluster-randomised controlled trial

- Background Falls are the most frequent adverse events that are reported in hospitals. We examined the effectiveness of individualised falls-prevention education for patients, supported by training and feedback for staff, delivered as a ward-level programme. - Methods Eight rehabilitation units in general hospitals in Australia participated in this stepped-wedge, cluster-randomised study, undertaken during a 50 week period. Units were randomly assigned to intervention or control groups by use of computer-generated, random allocation sequences. We included patients admitted to the unit during the study with a Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) score of more than 23/30 to receive individualised education that was based on principles of changes in health behaviour from a trained health professional, in addition to usual care. We provided information about patients' goals, feedback about the ward environment, and perceived barriers to engagement in falls-prevention strategies to staff who were trained to support the uptake of strategies by patients. The coprimary outcome measures were patient rate of falls per 1000 patient-days and the proportion of patients who were fallers. All analyses were by intention to treat. This trial is registered with the Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials registry, number ACTRN12612000877886). - Findings Between Jan 13, and Dec 27, 2013, 3606 patients were admitted to the eight units (n=1983 control period; n=1623 intervention period). There were fewer falls (n=196, 7·80/1000 patient-days vs n=380, 13·78/1000 patient-days, adjusted rate ratio 0·60 [robust 95% CI 0·42–0·94], p=0·003), injurious falls (n=66, 2·63/1000 patient-days vs 131, 4·75/1000 patient-days, 0·65 [robust 95% CI 0·42–0·88], p=0·006), and fallers (n=136 [8·38%] vs n=248 [12·51%] adjusted odds ratio 0·55 [robust 95% CI 0·38 to 0·81], p=0·003) in the intervention compared with the control group. There was no significant difference in length of stay (intervention median 11 days [IQR 7–19], control 10 days [6–18]). - Interpretation Individualised patient education programmes combined with training and feedback to staff added to usual care reduces the rates of falls and injurious falls in older patients in rehabilitation hospital-units.

Using the factors that have a positive impact on the retention of low socioeconomic students to prepare accelerated enrolled nurses for the science units of a nursing degree : a practice report

At a campus in a low socioeconomic (SES) area, our University allows enrolled nurses entry into the second year of a Bachelor of Nursing, but attrition is high. Using the factors, described by Yorke and Thomas (2003) to have a positive impact on the attrition of low SES students, we developed strategies to prepare the enrolled nurses for the pharmacology and bioscience units of a nursing degree with the aim of reducing their attrition. As a strategy, the introduction of review lectures of anatomy, physiology and microbiology, was associated with significantly reduced attrition rates. The subsequent introduction of a formative website activity of some basic concepts in bioscience and pharmacology, and a workshop addressing study skills and online resources, were associated with a further reduction in attrition rates of enrolled nursing students in a Bachelor of Nursing.

A New Class Of Photo-Cross-Linkable Side-Chain Liquid Crystalline Polymers Containing Bis(Benzylidene)Cyclohexanone Units

This paper reports a new class of photo-cross-linkable side chain liquid crystalline polymers (PSCLCPs) based on the bis(benzylidene)cyclohexanone unit, which functions as both a mesogen and a photoactive center. Polymers with the bis(benzylidene)cyclohexanone unit and varying spacer length have been synthesized. Copolymers of bis(benzylidene)cyclohexanone containing monomer and cholesterol benzoate containing monomer with different compositions have also been prepared. All these polymers have been structurally characterized by spectroscopic techniques. Thermal transitions were studied by DSC, and mesophases were identified by polarized light optical microscopy (POM). The intermediate compounds OH-x, the monomers SCLCM-x, and the corresponding polymers PSCLCP-x, which are essentially based on bis(benzylidene)cyclohexanone, all show a nematic mesophase. Transition temperatures were observed to decrease with increasing spacer length. The copolymers with varying compositions exhibit a cholesteric mesophase, and the transition temperatures increase with the cholesteric benzoate units in the copolymer. Photolysis of the low molecular weight liquid crystalline bis(benzylidene)-cyclohexanone compound reveals that there are two kinds of photoreactions in these systems: the EZ photoisomerization and 2 pi + 2 pi addition. The EZ photoisomerization in the LC phase disrupts the parallel stacking of the mesogens, resulting in the transition from the LC phase to the isotropic phase. The photoreaction involving the 2 pi + 2 pi addition of the bis(benzylidene)cyclohexanone units in the polymer results in the cross-linking of the chains. The liquid crystalline induced circular dichroism (LCICD) studies of the cholesterol benzoate copolymers revealed that the cholesteric supramolecular order remains even after the photo-cross-linking.

Achieving meaningful use of eHealth through Accountable-eHealth (AeH) systems

Meaningful use of eHealth, as seen through four key lenses: Usability; Usefulness; Utility; and Safety, is achieved through Accountable-eHealth systems.

African Gamer: Whose Story Is It Anyway?

New Video Gamer: Africa Needs More Technology (CNN 12/12/2011) In December 2011 CNN news service online edition (Sutter, 2011) posted a short item about Cwi Nqane, a Khoisan man who entered Samsung’s Namibian World Cyber Games (WCG) heats held at the 2011 the annual Windhoek Show. Cwi Nqane won a place on the Namibian WCG team playing a smartphone game called Asphalt 6: Adrena-line (Gameloft, 2011). Cwi was presented with a ‘top of the line’ Samsung Galaxy tablet and subsequently sent to compete in Korea. Later, other news and game news websites re-reported the incident, which inspired a variety of enthusiastic comment about tech-nology and ‘new knowledge’. Then Kotaku news service picked up the item (Narcisse, 2011) and took a very different slant. Kotaku proposed that Samsung was exploiting Cwi and had assumed the role of a Techno-Tarzan: “striding into Nqane’s homeland and swinging him off into the wonders of the modern world where they can trot him out as a curiosity”. These two perspectives on the story of Cwi’s WCG entry expose two dominant views on Indigenous knowledges and technologies: ICTs as progress for in-digenous peoples and ICTs as disruptive and exploitative. Neither position, however, allows for the claiming of digital technology by indigenous communities, indeed both views position indigenous cultures as being outsiders.