Alternatives to youth imprisonment : evaluating the Victorian youth attendance order

On 22 June 1988 the then Minister for Community Services Victoria, Race Matthews, officially launched the Youth Attendance Order (YAO), a high tariff alternative for young offenders aged between 15 and 18 years who were facing a term of detention. Throughout the order's gestation, much debate occurred about the impact it would have on rates of juvenile incarceration as well as about the potential ‘net widening’ effect it could have on less serious offenders. In May 1994 the National Centre For Socio-Legal Studies at La Trobe University submitted its report evaluating the Victorian Youth Attendance Order. This article presents some of the major findings of that report and examines the future options for this high tariff order in juvenile justice

Serious firearm offending in New Zealand : issues for gun controls and public safety

Reducing or preventing the misuse of firearms (whether criminal, suicidal or accidental) is central to gun controls policy. In June 1997 the New Zealand Government received the recommendations of the Review of Firearms Control, an independent inquiry commissioned by the Minister of Police and chaired by Sir Thomas Thorp.The Review comprehensively examined several firearm-related issues, including the nature and extent of serious firearm offending in New Zealand. The research presented in this article was commissioned by the Review. Based on a population of 709 offences for the 12 months ending 30 June 1996, this study provides an analysis of serious firearm offending in New Zealand and discusses the implications of these findings for gun controls policy.

Social defence and international reconstructon : illustrating the governance of post-war criminological discourse

This article examines the technocratic priorities of criminological discourse following the Second World War. In doing so, it charts the role and influence of the United Nations and the doctrine of social defence, and traces those shifts and events that have forged a nexus between criminological endeavour and processes of governance. This article aims to illustrate that social defence and international reconstruction provide a useful framework for understanding the links between power/knowledge and the pragmatic orientations of criminological scholarship.

New modes of governance and the commodification of criminological knowledge

This article explores the influence of new modes of governance on the production of criminological knowledge. In doing so, it examines the rise of discourses on risk and critiques the ways in which academic environments are changing under new managerialist philosophies. The article further explores the increasing 'commodification of criminological knowledge' and analyses its effect on contemporary criminological scholarship. Finally, this article examines the contours of critical criminological scholarship and advocates for a criminology of resistance.

CAT-SLAM : probabilistic localisation and mapping using a continuous appearance-based trajectory

This paper describes a new system, dubbed Continuous Appearance-based Trajectory Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (CAT-SLAM), which augments sequential appearance-based place recognition with local metric pose filtering to improve the frequency and reliability of appearance-based loop closure. As in other approaches to appearance-based mapping, loop closure is performed without calculating global feature geometry or performing 3D map construction. Loop-closure filtering uses a probabilistic distribution of possible loop closures along the robot’s previous trajectory, which is represented by a linked list of previously visited locations linked by odometric information. Sequential appearance-based place recognition and local metric pose filtering are evaluated simultaneously using a Rao–Blackwellised particle filter, which weights particles based on appearance matching over sequential frames and the similarity of robot motion along the trajectory. The particle filter explicitly models both the likelihood of revisiting previous locations and exploring new locations. A modified resampling scheme counters particle deprivation and allows loop-closure updates to be performed in constant time for a given environment. We compare the performance of CAT-SLAM with FAB-MAP (a state-of-the-art appearance-only SLAM algorithm) using multiple real-world datasets, demonstrating an increase in the number of correct loop closures detected by CAT-SLAM.

Doing blog research

Blogs and other online platforms for personal writing such as LiveJournal have been of interest to researchers across the social sciences and humanities for a decade now. Although growth in the uptake of blogging has stalled somewhat since the heyday of blogs in the early 2000s, blogging continues to be a major genre of Internet-based communication. Indeed, at the same time that mass participation has moved on to Facebook, Twitter, and other more recent communication phenomena, what has been left behind by the wave of mass adoption is a slightly smaller but all the more solidly established blogosphere of engaged and committed participants. Blogs are now an accepted part of institutional, group, and personal communications strategies (Bruns and Jacobs, 2006); in style and substance, they are situated between the more static information provided by conventional Websites and Webpages and the continuous newsfeeds provided through Facebook and Twitter updates. Blogs provide a vehicle for authors (and their commenters) to think through given topics in the space of a few hundred to a few thousand words – expanding, perhaps, on shorter tweets, and possibly leading to the publication of more fully formed texts elsewhere. Additionally, they are also a very flexible medium: they readily provide the functionality to include images, audio, video, and other additional materials – as well as the fundamental tool of blogging, the hyperlink itself. Indeed, the role of the link in blogs and blog posts should not be underestimated. Whatever the genre and topic that individual bloggers engage in, for the most part blogging is used to provide timely updates and commentary – and it is typical for such material to link both to relevant posts made by other bloggers, and to previous posts by the present author, both to background material which provides readers with further information about the blogger’s current topic, and to news stories and articles which the blogger found interesting or worthy of critique. Especially where bloggers are part of a larger community of authors sharing similar interests or views (and such communities are often indicated by the presence of yet another type of link – in blogrolls, often in a sidebar on the blog site, which list the blogger’s friends or favourites), then, the reciprocal writing and linking of posts often constitutes an asynchronous, distributed conversation that unfolds over the course of days, weeks, and months. Research into blogs is interesting for a variety of reasons, therefore. For one, a qualitative analysis of one or several blogs can reveal the cognitive and communicative processes through which individual bloggers define their online identity, position themselves in relation to fellow bloggers, frame particular themes, topics and stories, and engage with one another’s points of view. It may also shed light on how such processes may differ across different communities of interest, perhaps in correlation with the different societal framing and valorisation of specific areas of interest, with the socioeconomic backgrounds of individual bloggers, or with other external or internal factors. Such qualitative research now looks back on a decade-long history (for key collections, see Gurak, et al., 2004; Bruns and Jacobs, 2006; also see Walker Rettberg, 2008) and has recently shifted also to specifically investigate how blogging practices differ across different cultures (Russell and Echchaibi, 2009). Other studies have also investigated the practices and motivations of bloggers in specific countries from a sociological perspective, through large-scale surveys (e.g. Schmidt, 2009). Blogs have also been directly employed within both K-12 and higher education, across many disciplines, as tools for reflexive learning and discussion (Burgess, 2006).

Cognitive behavior therapy and dialectical behavior therapy for treating obese emotional eaters

This study describes the treatment of obese individuals who rated high on emotional eating using four case studies that involved 22 sessions of either cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) or dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT). Outcomes measures relating to weight, body mass index, emotional eating, depression, anxiety, and stress were all assessed with each participant prior to each baseline (three weekly sessions), during treatment and posttherapy. At the 8-week follow-up, the two cases that had received DBT had lost 10.1% and 7.6% of their initial body weight, whereas the two cases that had received CBT had lost 0.7% and 0.6% of their initial body weight. The two DBT cases also exhibited reductions in emotional distress, frequency of emotional eating or quantity of food eating in response to emotions, whereas the two CBT cases showed no overall reductions in these areas. Important processes from all four cases are described as are the implications to clinicians for developing more effective interventions for obese clients who engage in emotional eating.

Melbourne and Brisbane: The Claims of Suburbs

This chapter critiques the imagined geography of creative cities and the creative industries, which presumes that inner cities are densely clustered hubs of urban culture and creativity while suburbs are dull, homogeneous dormitories from which creative people must escape in order to realize their potential. Drawing upon a study on creative industries workers in Melbourne and Brisbane, the authors argue that these workers are as likely to be located in the suburbs as in the inner city, and that they clearly identify advantages to being in outer suburban locations. Their findings provide a corrective to dominant urban cultural policy narratives that stress cultural amenity in the inner cities.

Creative suburbia : cultural research and suburban geographies

Suburbanisation today is not necessarily what it used to be: rather than suburbs being outer urban commuter zones for people who work in the central business district, people living in new suburbs are increasingly likely to work in those suburbs, or to commute to other outer suburbs as their places of work. At one level, such trends affirm the analyses of the ‘Los Angeles School’ of urban geographers about the shift from the classical modernist city, with radial zones spreading out from a city centre where core businesses were located, to a more decentralised, ‘postmodern’ city. But they increasingly move beyond this postmodern perspective, in that the many suburbs are themselves centres of work and industry, and not simply centres of lifestyle and consumption. This article critically reflects upon the contemporary dynamics of the suburbs, and the public discourses that surround their development, in the context of the rise of the creative industries.

Functional and advanced functional and causal relationship diagrams for remote condition monitoring

Analysing the condition of an asset is a big challenge as there can be many aspects which can contribute to the overall functional reliability of the asset that have to be considered. In this paper we propose a two-step functional and causal relationship diagram (FCRD) to address this problem. In the first step, the FCRD is designed to facilitate the analysis of the condition of an asset by evaluating the interdependence (functional and causal) relationships between different components of the asset with the help of a relationship diagram. This is followed by the advanced FCRD (AFCRD) which refines the information from the FCRD into a comprehensive and manageable format. This new two-step methodology for asset condition monitoring is tested and validated for the case of a water treatment plant. © IMechE 2012.

A genealogy of calculations at an early Queensland sugar mill

This study of a unique historic situation is sociologically framed and politically contextualized. It examines the technical and persuasive rhetorical dimensions of calculations employed at a nineteenth-century Queensland sugar plantation and mill in relation to the employment of indentured labour. Historical archival data is interpreted through the lens of the rhetoric of rationality. Queensland legislation permitted the employment of indentured Pacific islanders to assist in the development of its sugar industry. Accounting practices employed at the Colonial Sugar Refinery (CSR) Company’s Goondi Plantation and Mill focused on recording and controlling labour costs to maximize profits and maintain a healthy dividend to shareholders. The use of this single perspective, while it provides a restricted interpretation of events, nevertheless enables some unique insights about the practice of accounting in this historic context.

Mesoporous bioactive glass scaffolds for efficient delivery of vascular endothelial growth factor

In this article, we, for the first time, investigated mesoporous bioactive glass scaffolds for the delivery of vascular endothelial growth factor. We have found that mesoporous bioactive glass scaffolds have significantly higher loading efficiency and more sustained release of vascular endothelial growth factor than non-mesoporous bioactive glass scaffolds. In addition, vascular endothelial growth factor delivery from mesoporous bioactive glass scaffolds has improved the viability of endothelial cells. The study has suggested that mesopore structures in mesoporous bioactive glass scaffolds play an important role in improving the loading efficiency, decreasing the burst release, and maintaining the bioactivity of vascular endothelial growth factor, indicating that mesoporous bioactive glass scaffolds are an excellent carrier of vascular endothelial growth factor for potential bone tissue engineering applications.

Family literacy practices and home literacy resources : an Australian pilot study

The combined impact of social class, cultural background and experience upon early literacy achievement in the first year of schooling is among the most durable questions in educational research. Links have been established between social class and achievement but literacy involves complex social and cognitive practices that are not necessarily reflected in the connections that have been made. The complexity of relationships between social class, cultural background and experience, and their impact on early literacy achievement have received little research attention. Recent refinements of the broad terms of social class or socioeconomic status have questioned the established links between social class and achievement. Nevertheless, it remains difficult to move beyond deficit and mismatch models of explaining and understanding the underperformance of children from lower socioeconomic and cultural minority groups when conventional measures are used. The data from an Australian pilot study reported here add to the increasing evidence that income is not necessarily related directly to home literacy resources or to how those resources are used. Further, the data show that the level of print resources in the home may not be a good indicator of the level of use of those resources.

Mining work, family and community : a spatially-oriented approach to the impact of the Ravensthorpe nickel mine closure in remote Australia

While changes in work and employment practices in the mining sector have been profound, the literature addressing mining work is somewhat partial as it focuses primarily on the workplace as the key (or only) site of analysis, leaving the relationship between mining work and families and communities under-theorized. This article adopts a spatially oriented, case-study approach to the sudden closure of the Ravensthorpe nickel mine in the south-west of Western Australia to explore the interplay between the new scales and mobilities of labour and capital and work–family–community connections in mining. In the context of the dramatically reconfigured industrial arena of mining work, the study contributes to a theoretical engagement between employment relations and the spatial dimensions of family and community in resource-affected communities.

Implications of lipid biology for the pathogenesis of schizophrenia

Objective: Preclinical and clinical data suggest that lipid biology is integral to brain development and neurodegeneration. Both aspects are proposed as being important in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia. The purpose of this paper is to examine the implications of lipid biology, in particular the role of essential fatty acids (EFA), for schizophrenia. Methods: Medline databases were searched from 1966 to 2001 followed by the crosschecking of references. Results: Most studies investigating lipids in schizophrenia described reduced EFA, altered glycerophospholipids and an increased activity of a calcium-independent phospholipase A2 in blood cells and in post-mortem brain tissue. Additionally, in vivo brain phosphorus-31 Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (31P-MRS) demonstrated lower phosphomonoesters (implying reduced membrane precursors) in first- and multi-episode patients. In contrast, phosphodiesters were elevated mainly in first-episode patients (implying increased membrane breakdown products), whereas inconclusive results were found in chronic patients. EFA supplementation trials in chronic patient populations with residual symptoms have demonstrated conflicting results. More consistent results were observed in the early and symptomatic stages of illness, especially if EFA with a high proportion of eicosapentaenoic acid was used. Conclusion: Peripheral blood cell, brain necropsy and 31P-MRS analysis reveal a disturbed lipid biology, suggesting generalized membrane alterations in schizophrenia. 31P-MRS data suggest increased membrane turnover at illness onset and persisting membrane abnormalities in established schizophrenia. Cellular processes regulating membrane lipid metabolism are potential new targets for antipsychotic drugs and might explain the mechanism of action of treatments such as eicosapentaenoic acid.