Homophobic bullying in secondary schools : a prejudice worth fighting about

This thesis reports on the outcomes of the first mixed-methods controlled trial of a manualised anti-homophobia program with 72 year nine students.  The program tended to produce small improvements although most of the changes occured in the control group which experienced an overall worsening of homophobia.  Qualitative data suggests that the program has led to an increase in awareness of homophobia and highlights the need for specialised teacher training.

Am I able? Is it worth it? Adolescent girls' motivational predispositions to school physical education : Associations with health-enhancing physical activity

The study purpose was to investigate predictive associations between adolescent girls’ motivational predispositions to physical education (PE) and habitual physical activity. Two hundred girls (age 13.1 ± 0.6 years) completed the Physical Education Predisposition Scale and the Physical Activity Questionnaire for Older Children. ANCOVAs revealed that girls with the highest Perceived PE Worth and Perceived PE Ability scores were the most habitually active groups (p < .0001). Significant predictors of physical activity identified by hierarchical regression were Perceived PE Ability and body mass index, which accounted for 17% and 3% of variance, respectively. As Perceived PE Ability was strongly associated with physical activity, the correlates of this construct should be further established to inform future school and PE-based interventions.

AdaM : adaptive-maximum imputation for neighborhood-based collaborative filtering

In the context of collaborative filtering, the well known data sparsity issue makes two like-minded users have little similarity, and consequently renders the k nearest neighbour rule inapplicable. In this paper, we address the data sparsity problem in the neighbourhood-based CF methods by proposing an Adaptive-Maximum imputation method (AdaM). The basic idea is to identify an imputation area that can maximize the imputation benefit for recommendation purposes, while minimizing the imputation error brought in. To achieve the maximum imputation benefit, the imputation area is determined from both the user and the item perspectives; to minimize the imputation error, there is at least one real rating preserved for each item in the identified imputation area. A theoretical analysis is provided to prove that the proposed imputation method outperforms the conventional neighbourhood-based CF methods through more accurate neighbour identification. Experiment results on benchmark datasets show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the other related state-of-the-art imputation-based methods in terms of accuracy.

Culture, media and sport : the Gambling Act 2005: a bet worth taking? Written evidence submitted by Professor Linda Hancock

At the outset, it should be noted that under the watch of the 2005 Gambling Act, there is robust evidence of increasing harms caused by gambling. The increase in problem gambling from 0.6% (prior to the implementation of the Act) to 0.9% of the British population reported in the British Gambling Prevalence Survey (BGPS) (2010) is significant at the .05 level; which is internationally recognised as a robust significance level. This represents a 50% rise in problem gambling since the Act was implemented. It was disingenuous of the Gambling Commission to report the results as “not statistically relevant” and “at the margins of statistical relevance” in its media release concerning the study. This equates to around 451,000 adults aged 16 and over experiencing serious gambling-related problems and significant additional numbers experiencing moderate problems. Regular (approximately monthly) use of gaming machines, fixed odds betting terminals (FOBTs) in betting shops, casino games and online gambling are associated with problem gambling.

Adam Richards: diverse comedy with some mishits

Review of Adam Richard's Gayapocalypse for the 2014 Maelbourne Comedy Festival.

Indigenous subjectivities. How young women prisoners subvert domination representations to maintain their sense of intrinsic worth

This chapter describes how young women prisoners draw on NZ Maori spiritual values to resist limiting and limited identity constructions in language use within the prison.

Bollywood and Australia : worth making a song and dance about

 It’s 101 years since the birth of Bollywood, the world’s largest and most vibrant movie industry and, of course, that’s more than enough time to mature and alter, to grow arms and legs. For some time, but since the 1990s particularly, the connections between Australia and Bollywood have really taken hold. So sit back and enjoy a cinematic journey that’s sure to entertain.

Teaching and learning in virtual worlds: is it worth the effort?

Educators have been quick to spot the enormous potential afforded by virtual worlds for situated and authentic learning, practising tasks with potentially serious consequences in the real world and for bringing geographically dispersed faculty and students together in the same space (Gee, 2007; Johnson and Levine, 2008). Though this potential has largely been realised, it generally isn't without cost in terms of lack of institutional buy-in, steep learning curves for all participants, and lack of a sound theoretical framework to support learning activities (Campbell, 2009; Cheal, 2007; Kluge & Riley, 2008). This symposium will explore the affordances and issues associated with teaching and learning in virtual worlds, all the time considering the question: is it worth the effort?. © 2010 Helen Farley, Sue Gregory, Allan Ellis, Geoffrey Crisp, Jenny Grenfell, Angela Thomas & Mathew Campbell.