A Convenient Verisimilitude or Oppressive Internalization? Characterizing the Ethical Arguments surrounding Hierarchical Structures in Knowledge Organization Systems

This paper considers the ethical concerns that surface around hierarchy as structure in knowledge organization systems. In order to do this, I consider the relationship between semantics and structure and argue for a separation of the two in design and critique of knowledge organization systems. The paper closes with an argument that agency and intention, as ethical concerns in knowledge organization, lead us to argue for a neutral stance on hierarchy.

Impediments to Cosmopolitan Engagement: Technology and Late-Modern Cosmopolitanism

What characterises late modern variety of cosmopolitanism from its classical predecessors is the inherent connection between cosmopolitanism and technology. Technology enables a vital dimension of the cosmopolitan experience – to move beyond the cosmopolitan imagination to enable active, direct engagement with other cultures. Different types of technologies contribute to cosmopolitan practice but in this paper we focus on a specific set of these enabling technologies: technologies which play a crucial role in regulating the free movement of people and populations. We briefly examine how three of the great surveillance states of the 20th century – Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and the German Democratic Republic – used hightech solutions in pursuing an anti-cosmopolitanism. We suggest that in the period from 2001 to the present, important elements of the cosmopolitan ethos are being closed down, and once again high-tech is intimately connected to this moment. The increasing (and proposed) use of identity cards, biometric identification systems, ITS and GIS all work to make the globalised world much harder to traverse and inhibit the full expression and experience of cosmopolitanism. The result of these trends may be that the type of cosmopolitan sentiment exhibited in western countries is an ersatz, emptied out variety with little political-ethical robustness.

Perpetuating Racism: Legal Education, Race and Social Justice

By presenting the results of a content analysis of Australian undergraduate legal education, this paper examines the extent to which issues of race, ethnicity, discrimination, and multiculturalism feature within this component of the moral, ethical, and professional development of legal professionals. It will demonstrate that instead of encouraging a deep, critical and contextual understanding of such issues, legal education provides a relatively superficial one, which has important implications for the role that legal professionals play in overcoming injustices such as institutional racism, and the kinds of social reform that they are likely to undertake.

Six Curses

This creative writing work was selected for publication in a bi-lingual anthology, published in China, as suitable to be culturally applicable to both Chinese and Australian social contexts. The poem raises six social/ethical issues and comments on them. It is based on research into Chinese traditional poetry that focuses on an image, and after each image this poem provides an ethical comment. It is based in the ethical hypothesis that moral evaluation of individual and social behaviour can not be achieved without ethical judgement which questions social norms. In particular, the poem questions the validity of fundamentalism – the belief in religious, scientific and moral absolutes. This is a key issue in contemporary research into the effect of religion on politics. It also draws on contemporary psychological theory, especially the concept of narcissism. The sociological basis of the work is in drawing parallels between eastern and western ethical issues, stressing similarity by inference. The imagery on which the poem is based selects objects such a single ‘stone’ that take on symbolic connotations common to both Australian and Chinese readers. This is innovative, since very little creative writing has been dome to address commonalities between Australian and Chinese ethical thinking, especially by adopting Chinese motifs.

Fallen Awake

Photo from process: David Megarrity, albury 2007 - example of convergence of writing/design/perfomance/video RESEARCH COMPONENT Fallen Awake was a practice-led research process that opened the development process to the influence of collaborative authorship across artforms. The project focused on of how multiple artforms and artists converge their vision into a singular text, in the context of collaborative authorship. The work also uncovered new questions relating to the dream-life of children. The stimulus for the work was a selection of verbal statements by three-year-olds, raising complex ethical questions as the project progressed about the child’s voice, mediated by the adult artist, for the eventual presentation to a child audience. With the text emergent and open to influence, this project raised other questions related to the lived experience of children, dreaming, creative play and the development of consciousness. It pushed the creative process to experiment with associative, rather then causal narratives, and to negotiate the challenges this raises for traditional story structures and the development processes that usually shape them. It led to the consideration of each artforms and artist as equal contributors in the development of story: traditionally the province of the sole author. The outcomes appeared in various artforms, none of which was live-performance based. An ‘artist’s book’ by the designer, a ‘video treatment’ - a DVD capturing the approach to the performance and a script for an innovative large-scale performance. Fallen Awake was developed with the assistance of Strut & Fret Production House, Arts Queensland, and HotHouse Theatre, Albury Wodonga, through their ‘Month in the Country’ initiative.

IT professionals' experience of ethics and its implications for IT education

This study investigates variation in IT professionals' experience of ethics with a view to enhancing their formation and support. This is explored through an examination of the experience of IT, IT professional ethics and IT professional ethics education. The study's principal contribution is the empirical study and description of IT professionals' experience of ethics. The empirical phase is preceded by a review of conceptions of IT and followed by an application of the findings to IT education. The study's empirical findings are based on 30 semi-structured interviews with IT professionals who represent a wide demographic, experience and IT sub-discipline range. Their experience of ethics is depicted as five citizenships: Citizenship of my world, Citizenship of the corporate world, Citizenship of a shared world, Citizenship of the client's world and Citizenship of the wider world. These signify an expanding awareness, which progressively accords rights to others and defines responsibility in terms of others. The empirical findings inform a Model of Ethical IT. This maps an IT professional space increasingly oriented towards others. Such a model provides a conceptual tool, available to prompt discussion and reflection, and which may be employed in pursuing formation aimed at experiential change. Its usefulness for the education of IT professionals with respect to ethics is explored. The research approach employed in this study is phenomenography. This method seeks to elicit and represent variation of experience. It understands experience as a relationship between a subject (IT professionals) and an object (ethics), and describes this relationship in terms of its foci and boundaries. The study's findings culminate in three observations, that change is indicated in the formation and support of IT professionals in: 1. IT professionals' experience of their discipline, moving towards a focus on information users; 2. IT professionals' experience of professional ethics, moving towards the adoption of other-centred attitudes; and 3. IT professionals' experience of professional development, moving towards an emphasis on a change in lived experience. Based on these results, employers, educators and professional bodies may want to evaluate how they approach professional formation and support, if they aim to promote a comprehensive awareness of ethics in IT professionals.

Exploring the influence of a science content course incorporating explicit nature of science and argumentation instruction on preservice primary teachers' views of nature of science

There exists a general consensus in the science education literature around the goal of enhancing students. and teachers. views of nature of science (NOS). An emerging area of research in science education explores NOS and argumentation, and the aim of this study was to explore the effectiveness of a science content course incorporating explicit NOS and argumentation instruction on preservice primary teachers. views of NOS. A constructivist perspective guided the study, and the research strategy employed was case study research. Five preservice primary teachers were selected for intensive investigation in the study, which incorporated explicit NOS and argumentation instruction, and utilised scientific and socioscientific contexts for argumentation to provide opportunities for participants to apply their NOS understandings to their arguments. Four primary sources of data were used to provide evidence for the interpretations, recommendations, and implications that emerged from the study. These data sources included questionnaires and surveys, interviews, audio- and video-taped class sessions, and written artefacts. Data analysis involved the formation of various assertions that informed the major findings of the study, and a variety of validity and ethical protocols were considered during the analysis to ensure the findings and interpretations emerging from the data were valid. Results indicated that the science content course was effective in enabling four of the five participants. views of NOS to be changed. All of the participants expressed predominantly limited views of the majority of the examined NOS aspects at the commencement of the study. Many positive changes were evident at the end of the study with four of the five participants expressing partially informed and/or informed views of the majority of the examined NOS aspects. A critical analysis of the effectiveness of the various course components designed to facilitate the development of participants‟ views of NOS in the study, led to the identification of three factors that mediated the development of participants‟ NOS views: (a) contextual factors (including context of argumentation, and mode of argumentation), (b) task-specific factors (including argumentation scaffolds, epistemological probes, and consideration of alternative data and explanations), and (c) personal factors (including perceived previous knowledge about NOS, appreciation of the importance and utility value of NOS, and durability and persistence of pre-existing beliefs). A consideration of the above factors informs recommendations for future studies that seek to incorporate explicit NOS and argumentation instruction as a context for learning about NOS.

On medium specificity and discipline crossovers in modern art : An interview with Jacques Ranciére on Medium-Specificity and Discipline Crossovers in Modern Art

Jacques Ranciere's work on aesthetics has received a great deal of attention recently. Given his work has enormous range – taking in art and literature, political theory, historiography, pedagogy and worker's history – Andrew McNamara and Toni Ross (UNSW) seek to explore his wider project in this interview, while showing how it leads to his alternative insights into aesthetics. Rancière sets aside the core suppositions linking the medium to aesthetic judgment, which has informed many definitions of modernism. Rancière is emphatic in freeing aesthetic judgment from issues of medium-specificity. He argues that the idea of autonomy associated with medium-specificity – or 'truth to the medium' – was 'a very late one' in modernism, and that post-medium trends were already evident in early modernism. While not stressing a simple continuity between early modernism and contemporary art, Ranciere nonetheless emphasizes the ethical and political ramifications of maintaining an a-disciplinary stance.

SELinux policy management framework for HIS

Health Information Systems (HIS) make extensive use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). The use of ICT aids in improving the quality and efficiency of healthcare services by making healthcare information available at the point of care (Goldstein, Groen, Ponkshe, and Wine, 2007). The increasing availability of healthcare data presents security and privacy issues which have not yet been fully addressed (Liu, Caelli, May, and Croll, 2008a). Healthcare organisations have to comply with the security and privacy requirements stated in laws, regulations and ethical standards, while managing healthcare information. Protecting the security and privacy of healthcare information is a very complex task (Liu, May, Caelli and Croll, 2008b). In order to simplify the complexity of providing security and privacy in HIS, appropriate information security services and mechanisms have to be implemented. Solutions at the application layer have already been implemented in HIS such as those existing in healthcare web services (Weaver et al., 2003). In addition, Discretionary Access Control (DAC) is the most commonly implemented access control model to restrict access to resources at the OS layer (Liu, Caelli, May, Croll and Henricksen, 2007a). Nevertheless, the combination of application security mechanisms and DAC at the OS layer has been stated to be insufficient in satisfying security requirements in computer systems (Loscocco et al., 1998). This thesis investigates the feasibility of implementing Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) to enforce a Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) policy to help protect resources at the Operating System (OS) layer. SELinux provides Mandatory Access Control (MAC) mechanisms at the OS layer. These mechanisms can contain the damage from compromised applications and restrict access to resources according to the security policy implemented. The main contribution of this research is to provide a modern framework to implement and manage SELinux in HIS. The proposed framework introduces SELinux Profiles to restrict access permissions over the system resources to authorised users. The feasibility of using SELinux profiles in HIS was demonstrated through the creation of a prototype, which was submitted to various attack scenarios. The prototype was also subjected to testing during emergency scenarios, where changes to the security policies had to be made on the spot. Attack scenarios were based on vulnerabilities common at the application layer. SELinux demonstrated that it could effectively contain attacks at the application layer and provide adequate flexibility during emergency situations. However, even with the use of current tools, the development of SELinux policies can be very complex. Further research has to be made in order to simplify the management of SELinux policies and access permissions. In addition, SELinux related technologies, such as the Policy Management Server by Tresys Technologies, need to be researched in order to provide solutions at different layers of protection.

"Get new lawyers!"

In James Rubin's account of the Kosovo war, he describes an exchange between Secretary Albright and Robin Cook (the British Foreign Secretary). Cook was explaining that it is difficult for Britain to commit to the war without UN Security Council approval because the legal advice he had received was that such action would be illegal under international law. Albright's response was, simply, "get new lawyers". Rubin "credits" Blair with a "push" that swung the British to "finally agree" that a UN Security Council resolution was "not legally required". Robin Cook later stated in Parliament and that the war was legal. Interestingly, Blair did not. This article does not look at whether or not such an exchange took place; rather look at the ethical issues that such a situation would generate. The article suggests what the ethical obligations of the key legal players in such institutional dramas should be—including governments seeking advice, the lawyers giving it, the ministers reporting it and the opposition in Parliament. The article sets out the particular responsibilities of the lawyers and officials of a Westminster system. It also sets out some of the institutional mechanisms for making it more likely that those obligations are fulfilled—as always through the interaction of obligations by different players that make it more risky for any player to breach his or her ethical obligations. Analogous duties would be faced by the relevant actors in other systems.

Not like my mother : truth and the author in creative nonfiction

This exegesis examines how a writer can effectively negotiate the relationship between author, character, fact and truth, in a work of Creative Nonfiction. It was found that individual truths, in a work of Creative Nonfiction, are not necessarily universal truths due to individual, cultural, historical and religious circumstances. What was also identified, through the examination of published Creative Nonfiction, is a necessity to ensure there are clear demarcation lines between authorial truth and fiction. The Creative Nonfiction works examined, which established this framework for the reader, ensured an ethical relationship between author and audience. These strategies and frameworks were then applied to my own Creative Nonfiction.

Encouraging ethics and challenging corruption : reforming governance in public institutions

Encouraging Ethics and Preventing Corruption brings theory and practice together in addressing the question: How are we to be ethical in public life and through public institutions? It is a major contribution to public sector ethics within Australia and internationally because it provides an exhaustive analysis of reform across a decade in one jurisdiction, Queensland, and then proceeds to itemise a best practice integrity system or ethics regime. Drawing on the extensive research of two of Australia's leading practical ethicists, this text is essential reading for all students and practitioners of applied and professional ethics in the public sphere. Part A of the text provides a preferred theoretical and conceptual framework which both justifies and guides the development of a public sector ethics regime. Part B examines the place of the individual within a world of institutional ethics. Part C outlines the Queensland governance reforms introduced since 1989 following the Fitzgerald Inquiry which exposed corruption in the police and ministry. The final chapter, the 'Epilogue', gathers the insights of earlier chapters and suggests a more explicitly ethics-centred approach to governance reform that may take us 'beyond best practice'. Clearly, while it is the Australian context we have in mind, we are confident that this is a text which addresses the quest for integrity and ethics in government wherever society is committed to social and liberal democratic ideals.

Management, organisation, and ethics in the public sector

Since the 1980s, in Australia and other developed nations, public sector management philosophies and how the public sector is organized have changed dramatically. At the same time, there have been many demands, and several attempts, to preserve and promote ethical behaviour within the public sector - though few go much beyond the publication of a code. Both developments require an understanding of how public organizations operate in this new environment. Organizational and management theory are seen as providing important potential insights into the opportunities and pitfalls for building ethics into the practices, culture and norms of public organizations. This book brings together the experience and research of a range of "reflective practitioners" and "engaged academics" in public sector management, organizational theory, management theory, public sector ethics and law. It addresses what management and organization theory might suggest about the nature of public organizations and the institutionalization of ethics.

Review of international procurement procedures

Contractor selection is a crucial element in construction procurement (Drew & Skitmore 1993, p. 363). Contractors are selected through the tender process, which varies according to country, state and contracting organisation and is subject to individual differences. This paper reviews a range of international tender processes, highlighting the ethical features that govern these guidelines. The paper is part of a project to develop ethical guidelines for procurement for major contracting authorities. By reviewing tender guidelines we are able to gain an indication of the type of ethical standards reserved for procurement. The need for good business ethics in the tender process stems from the belief that ‘good ethical practice’ is critical in meeting organisational goals (Vee & Skitmore 2003, p. 125). Hence, an ethical tender process will select ethical contractors who are viewed as beneficial to the contracting authority.

The public management issues of access to electronic gaming machines (EGMs) : a case study of policy in Victoria, its effects and requirements for evaluation

Wynne and Schaffer (2003) have highlighted both the strong growth of gambling activity in recent years, and the revenue streams this has generated for governments and communities. Gambling activities and the revenues derived from them have, unsurprisingly, therefore also been seen as a way in which to increase economic development in deprived areas (Jinkner-Lloyd, 1996). Consequently, according to Brown et al (2003), gambling is now a large taxation revenue earner for many western governments, at both federal and state levels, worldwide (for example UK, USA, Australia). In size and importance, the Australian gambling industry in particular has grown significantly over the last three decades, experiencing a fourfold increase in real gambling turnover. There are, however, also concerns expressed about gambling and Electronic Gaming in particular, as illustrated in economic, social and ethical terms in Oddo (1997). There are also spatial aspects to understanding these issues. Marshall’s (1998) study, for example, highlights that benefits from gambling are more likely to accrue at the macro as opposed to the local level, because of centralised tax gathering and spending of tax revenues, whilst localities may suffer from displacement of activities with higher multipliers than the institutions with EGMs that replace them. This also highlights a regional context of costs, where benefits accrue to the centre, but the costs accrue to the regions and localities, as simultaneously resources leave those communities through both the gambling activities themselves (in the form of revenue for the EGM owners), and the government (through taxes).