Human genome studies and intellectual property rights: Whither national interests?

India has been acknowledged as a large reservoir of nature's random mutation, an original 'rich' source of knowledge in the context of international genome studies. Human genome knowledge and the possible understanding of the basis of uniqueness of each individual in chemical terms has presented a number of inescapable challenges to our own jurisprudence philosophies and our ethical sensibilities.

ACE research briefing paper 009: Global Entrepreneurship Monitor: GEM Australia - 2014 National Report

Most policymakers and academics agree that entrepreneurship is critical to the development and wellbeing of society. Entrepreneurs create jobs. They drive and shape innovation, thereby speeding up structural changes in the economy. By introducing new competition they contribute indirectly to increased productivity and overall economic activity. Entrepreneurship is thus a catalyst for economic growth and national competitiveness. In 2014, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM)conducted its 15th annual survey of the rate and profile of entrepreneurial activity around the globe. GEM interviewed over 206,000 adults aged 18–64 in 70 economies, spanning diverse geographies and a range of development levels. The Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship Research (ACE) participated as the Australian GEM partner, surveying 2,177 Australian adults. This report provides a summary of entrepreneurship in Australia as measured by GEM, and benchmarks this against other countries. We compare the level of entrepreneurship in the population across different phases of the entrepreneurial process, and provide a profile of some key characteristics of entrepreneurs and the businesses they are starting. We also report on some of the institutional and framework conditions that support entrepreneurship.

The National Road Safety Partnership Program providing a pathway for any business/organisation to create a positive road safety culture

The National Road Safety Partnership Program (NRSPP) is an industry-led collaborative network which aims to support Australian businesses in developing a positive road safety culture. It aims to help businesses to protect their employees and the public, not only during work hours, but also when their staff are ‘off-duty’. How do we engage and help an organisation minimise work-related vehicle crashes and their consequences both internally, and within the broader community? The first step is helping an organisation to understand the true cost of its road incidents. Larger organisations often wear the costs without knowing the true impact to their bottom line. All they perceive is the change in insurance or vehicle repairs. Understanding the true cost should help mobilise a business’s leadership to do more. The next step is ensuring the business undertakes an informed, structured, evidence-based pathway which will guide them around the costly pitfalls. A pathway based around the safe system approach with buy-in at the top which brings the workforce along. The final step, benchmarking, allows the organisation to measure and track its change. This symposium will explore the pathway steps for organisations using NRSPP resources to become engaged in road safety. The 'Total Cost of Risk' calculator has been developed by Zurich, tested in Europe by Nestle and modified by NRSPP for Australia. This provides the first crucial step. The next step is a structured approach through the Workplace Road Safety Guide using experts and industry to discuss the preferred safe system approach which can then link into the national Benchmarking Project. The outputs from the symposium can help frame a pathway for organisations to follow through the NRSPP website.

The Great Gatsby and Ned Kelly: Telling national iconic stories through a transnational lens

This chapter will examine how transnational film making allows national and iconic stories to shift outside their imposed national boundaries, freeing them from “nation building” constraints and predetermined ideological motivations. Each interpretation creates one more dimension to the story’s complexity and hybridity assuring its continuance and relevance into the future. Each new film version, and in the case of iconic stories, each new transnational film version, breathes new energy and life into the stories and also stops monolithic ownership of them. What is also of interest in this chapter is the judgement cast upon each of the retelling and adaptations of these iconic stories. Every adaptation is weighed up and judged against a mythic ideal, and as such, each always falls short of imagined expectations. But in a paradoxical fashion, it is this failure to capture that provides the impetus for the story’s future retellings.

Given and News : Media discourse and the construction of community on national days

National anniversaries such as independence days demand precise coordination in order to make citizens change their routines to forego work and spend the day at rest or at festivities that provide social focus and spectacle. The complex social construction of national days is taken for granted and operates as a given in the news media, which are the main agents responsible for coordinating these planned disruptions of normal routines. This study examines the language used in the news to construct the rather unnatural idea of national days and to align people in observing them. The data for the study consist of news stories about the Fourth of July in the New York Times, sampled over 150 years and are supplemented by material from other sources and other countries. The study is multidimensional, applying concepts from pragmatics (speech acts, politeness, information structure), systemic functional linguistics (the interpersonal metafunction and the Appraisal framework) and cognitive linguistics (frames, metaphor) as well as journalism and communications to arrive at an interdisciplinary understanding of how resources for meaning are used by writers and readers of the news stories. The analysis shows that on national anniversaries, nations tend to be metaphorized as persons having birthdays, to whom politeness should be shown. The face of the nation is to be respected in the sense of identifying the nation's interests as one's own (positive face) and speaking of citizen responsibilities rather than rights (negative face). Resources are available for both positive and negative evaluations of events and participants and the newspaper deftly changes footings (Goffman 1981) to demonstrate the required politeness while also heteroglossically allowing for a certain amount of disattention and even protest - within limits, for state holidays are almost never construed as Bakhtinian festivals, as they tend to reaffirm the hierarchy rather than invert it. Celebrations are evaluated mainly for impressiveness, and for the essentially contested quality of appropriateness, which covers norms of predictability, size, audience response, aesthetics, and explicit reference to the past. Events may also be negatively evaluated as dull ("banal") or inauthentic ("hoopla"). Audiences are evaluated chiefly in terms of their enthusiasm, or production of appropriate displays for emotional response, for national days are supposed to be occasions of flooding-out of nationalistic feeling. By making these evaluations, the newspaper reinforces its powerful position as an independent critic, while at the same time playing an active role in the construction and reproduction of emotional order embodied in "the nation's birthday." As an occasion for mobilization and demonstrations of power, national days may be seen to stand to war in the relation of play to fighting (Bateson 1955). Evidence from the newspaper's coverage of recent conflicts is adduced to support this analysis. In the course of the investigation, methods are developed for analyzing large collections of newspaper content, particularly topical soft news and feature materials that have hitherto been considered less influential and worthy of study than so-called hard news. In his work on evaluation in newspaper stories, White (1998) proposed that the classic hard news story is focused on an event that threatens the social order, but news of holidays and celebrations in general does not fit this pattern, in fact its central event is a reproduction of the social order. Thus in the system of news values (Galtung and Ruge 1965), national holiday news draws on "ground" news values such as continuity and predictability rather than "figure" news values such as negativity and surprise. It is argued that this ground helps form a necessary space for hard news to be seen as important, similar to the way in which the information structure of language is seen to rely on the regular alternation of given and new information (Chafe 1994).

Using an ‘interpretative model’ for contextual design of heritage landscape databases: The case of St Helena Island National Park in Queensland, Australia

Due to the increasing speed of landscape changes and the massive development of computer technologies, the methods of representing heritage landscapes using digital tools have become a worldwide concern in conservation research. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how an ‘interpretative model’ can be used for contextual design of heritage landscape information systems. This approach is explored through building a geographic information system database for St Helena Island national park in Moreton Bay, South East Queensland, Australia. Stakeholders' interpretations of this landscape were collected through interviews, and then used as a framework for designing the database. The designed database is a digital inventory providing contextual descriptions of the historic infrastructure remnants on St Helena Island. It also reveals the priorities of different sites in terms of historic research, landscape restoration, and tourism development. Additionally, this database produces thematic maps of the intangible heritage values, which could be used for landscape interpretation. This approach is different from the existing methods because building a heritage information system is deemed as an interpretative activity, rather than a value-free replication of the physical environment. This approach also shows how a cultural landscape methodology can be used to create a flexible information system for heritage conservation. The conclusion is that an ‘interpretative model’ of database design facilitates a more explicit focus on information support, and is a potentially effective approach to user-centred design of geographic information systems.

Governance and regional variation of homicide rates: Evidence from cross-national data

Criminological theories of cross-national studies of homicide have underestimated the effects of quality governance of liberal democracy and region. Data sets from several sources are combined and a comprehensive model of homicide is proposed. Results of the spatial regression model, which controls for the effect of spatial autocorrelation, show that quality governance, human development, economic inequality, and ethnic heterogeneity are statistically significant in predicting homicide. In addition, regions of Latin America and non-Muslim Sub-Saharan Africa have significantly higher rates of homicides ceteris paribus while the effects of East Asian countries and Islamic societies are not statistically significant. These findings are consistent with the expectation of the new modernization and regional theories.

Melaleuca densispicata in Currawinya National Park, South-West Queensland: Ecology and preliminary implications for management of a rare plant species

Melaleuca densispicata Byrnes is an uncommon species with a limited distribution, comprising disjunct populations in inland southern Queensland and northern New South Wales, Australia. It is a dense, woody shrub, 2–4 m in height, which exhibits a marked 'clumping' growth habit. It has thick, papery bark and displays many white flowers during spring or early summer. Although it has long been known to exist, M. densispicata was only formally described in 1984, and very little is currently known about its ecology or specific management requirements. There are only seven known subpopulations of the species across its range. A major population at the western limit of its distribution occurs on Currawinya National Park (28°52'S, 144°30'E). Here, it is locally abundant and listed as a noteworthy plant species under the Management Plan (Queensland Parks & Wildlife Service 2001). This study aimed to identify patterns in the distribution of M. densispicata in Currawinya National Park, describe its ecological niche and role, and provide management recommendations for the species within the study area. Recent anecdotal observations of recruitment failure in south-western Queensland (Peter McRae, QPWS, October 2004, pers. comm.; Dick O'Connell, local grazier, July 2005 pers. comm.) caused additional emphasis to be placed on the examination of recruitment and recruitment factors.

Feeding mode of Australian infants in the first 12 months of life: An assessment against national breastfeeding indicators

Background: In 2011, Australia published a set of 6 population-level indicators assessing breastfeeding, formula use, and the introduction of soft/semisolid/solid foods. Objectives: This study aimed to report the feeding practices of Australian infants against these indicators and determine the predictors of early breastfeeding cessation and introduction of solids. Methods: Mother–infant dyads (N = 1470) were recruited postnatally in 2 Australian capital cities and regional areas of 1 state between February 2008 and March 2009. Demographic and feeding intention data were collected by self-completed questionnaire at infant birth, with feeding practices (current feeding mode, age of breastfeeding cessation, age of formula and/or solids introduction) reported when the infant was between 4 and 7 months of age, and around 13 months of age. Multiple logistic regression was used to determine the predictors of breastfeeding cessation and solids introduction. Results: Although initiation of breastfeeding was almost universal (93.3%), less than half of the infants were breastfed to 6 months (41.7%) and 33.3% were receiving solids by 4 months. Women who were socially disadvantaged, younger, less educated, unpartnered, primiparous, and/or overweight were most likely to have ceased breastfeeding before 6 months of age, and younger and/or less educated women were most likely to have introduced solid food by 4 months of age. Not producing adequate milk was the most common reason provided for cessation of breastfeeding. Conclusion: The feeding behaviors of Australian infants in the first 12 months fall well short of recommendations. Women need anticipatory guidance as to the indicators of breastfeeding success and the tendency of women to doubt the adequacy of their breast milk supply warrants further investigation.

Understanding the determinants of Australian hospital nurses' hand hygiene decisions following the implementation of a national hand hygiene initiative

Hand hygiene is the primary measure in hospitals to reduce the spread of infections, with nurses experiencing the greatest frequency of patient contact. The ‘5 critical moments’ of hand hygiene initiative has been implemented in hospitals across Australia, accompanied by awareness-raising, staff training and auditing. The aim of this study was to understand the determinants of nurses’ hand hygiene decisions, using an extension of a common health decision-making model, the theory of planned behaviour (TPB), to inform future health education strategies to increase compliance. Nurses from 50 Australian hospitals (n = 2378) completed standard TPB measures (attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioural control [PBC], intention) and the extended variables of group norm, risk perceptions (susceptibility, severity) and knowledge (subjective, objective) at Time 1, while a sub-sample (n = 797) reported their hand hygiene behaviour 2 weeks later. Regression analyses identified subjective norm, PBC, group norm, subjective knowledge and risk susceptibility as the significant predictors of nurses’ hand hygiene intentions, with intention and PBC predicting their compliance behaviour. Rather than targeting attitudes which are already very favourable among nurses, health education strategies should focus on normative influences and perceptions of control and risk in efforts to encourage hand hygiene adherence.

A Guide to Disability Statistics from the National Health Interview Survey – Disability Supplement

The National Health Interview Survey - Disability supplement (NHIS-D) provides information that can be used to understand myriad topics related to health and disability. The survey provides comprehensive information on multiple disability conceptualizations that can be identified using information about health conditions (both physical and mental), activity limitations, and service receipt (e.g. SSI, SSDI, Vocational Rehabilitation). This provides flexibility for researchers in defining populations of interest. This paper provides a description of the data available in the NHIS-D and information on how the data can be used to better understand the lives of people with disabilities.