Assessment of function and clinical utility of alcohol and other drug web sites : an observational, qualitative study

Background The increasing popularity and use of the internet makes it an attractive option for providing health information and treatment, including alcohol/other drug use. There is limited research examining how people identify and access information about alcohol or other drug (AOD) use online, or how they assess the usefulness of the information presented. This study examined the strategies that individuals used to identify and navigate a range of AOD websites, along with the attitudes concerning presentation and content. Methods Members of the general community in Brisbane and Roma (Queensland, Australia) were invited to participate in a 30-minute search of the internet for sites related to AOD use, followed by a focus group discussion. Fifty one subjects participated in the study across nine focus groups. Results Participants spent a maximum of 6.5 minutes on any one website, and less if the user was under 25 years of age. Time spent was as little as 2 minutes if the website was not the first accessed. Participants recommended that AOD-related websites should have an engaging home or index page, which quickly and accurately portrayed the site’s objectives, and provided clear site navigation options. Website content should clearly match the title and description of the site that is used by internet search engines. Participants supported the development of a portal for AOD websites, suggesting that it would greatly facilitate access and navigation. Treatment programs delivered online were initially viewed with caution. This appeared to be due to limited understanding of what constituted online treatment, including its potential efficacy. Conclusions A range of recommendations arise from this study regarding the design and development of websites, particularly those related to AOD use. These include prudent use of text and information on any one webpage, the use of graphics and colours, and clear, uncluttered navigation options. Implications for future website development are discussed.

Place and Space: Community in the Internet Economy and What This Will Mean for Property

By 2020 Australia‟s National Digital Economy Strategy aims to increase household online participation and engage 12 per cent of all employees in teleworking arrangements. Achieving these goals is generally perceived as positive due to the reduced impact on the natural environment from less use of transport. However, this also will enable greater flexibility as to where people live and thus will impact upon the maintenance and formation of communities and on property use. This paper commences by clarifying what is Australia‟s internet economy before highlighting the impact of the internet on community formation and maintenance. The paper concludes by identifying what the achievement of these goals will mean for property use in the future.

Do you see what I mean? charting changing representations and receptions of the disabled body in contemporary and pop cultural performance

The meaning of the body emerges through acts of seeing, looking and staring in daily and dramatic performances. Acts that are, as Maike Bleeker argues1, bound up with the scopic rules, regimes and narratives that apply in specific cultures at specific times. In Western culture, the disabled body has been seen as a sign of defect, deficiency, fear, shame or stigma. Disabled artists – Mat Fraser, Bill Shannon, Aaron Williamson, Katherine Araniello, Liz Crow and Ju Gosling – have attempted, via performances that co-opt conventional images of the disabled body, to challenge dominant ways of representing and responding such bodies from within. In this paper, I consider what happens when non-disabled artists co-opt images of the disabled body to draw attention to, affirm, and even exoticise, eroticise or beautify, other modalities of or desires for difference. As Carrie Sandahl has noted2, the signs, symbols and somatic idiosyncrasies of the disabled body are, today, transported or translated into theatre, film and television as a metaphor or "master trope" for every body’s experience of difference. This happens in performance art (Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s use of a wheelchair in Chamber of Confessions), performance (Marie Chouinard's use of crutches, canes and walkers to represent dancers’ experience of becoming different or mutant during training in bODY rEMIX /gOLDBERG vARIATIONS), and pop culture (characters in wheelchairs in Glee or Oz). In this paper, I chart changing representations and receptions of the disabled body in such contexts. I use analysis of this cultural shift as a starting point for a re-consideration of questions about whether a face-toface encounter with a disabled body is in fact a privileged site for the emergence of a politics, and whether co-opting disability as a metaphor for a range of difference differences reduces its currency as a category around which a specific group might mobilise a politics.

A new tip area function for instrumented nanoindentation at extremely small contact depths

The accuracy of measurement of mechanical properties of a material using instrumented nanoindentation at extremely small penetration depths heavily relies on the determination of the contact area of the indenter. Our experiments have demonstrated that the conventional area function could lead to a significant error when the contact depth was below 40. nm, due to the singularity in the first derivation of the function in this region and thus, the resultant unreasonable sharp peak on the function curve. In this paper, we proposed a new area function that was used to calculate the contact area for the indentations where the contact depths varied from 10 to 40. nm. The experimental results have shown that the new area function has produced better results than the conventional function. © 2011 Elsevier B.V.

Mean-field descriptions of collective migration with strong adhesion

Random walk models based on an exclusion process with contact effects are often used to represent collective migration where individual agents are affected by agent-to-agent adhesion. Traditional mean field representations of these processes take the form of a nonlinear diffusion equation which, for strong adhesion, does not predict the averaged discrete behavior. We propose an alternative suite of mean-field representations, showing that collective migration with strong adhesion can be accurately represented using a moment closure approach.

A practical approach for identifying expected solution performance and robustness in operations research applications

A practical approach for identifying solution robustness is proposed for situations where parameters are uncertain. The approach is based upon the interpretation of a probability density function (pdf) and the definition of three parameters that describe how significant changes in the performance of a solution are deemed to be. The pdf is constructed by interpreting the results of simulations. A minimum number of simulations are achieved by updating the mean, variance, skewness and kurtosis of the sample using computationally efficient recursive equations. When these criterions have converged then no further simulations are needed. A case study involving several no-intermediate storage flow shop scheduling problems demonstrates the effectiveness of the approach.

iiNet’s Hollywood ending : what does its court victory mean for copyright law?

In what is being billed as iiNet versus Hollywood, the Australian internet service provider has come out an apparent winner after the High Court dismissed a copyright infringement case brought by industry movie studios. The case was a final appeal by the industry in its attempts to crack down on internet users infringing copyright by using BitTorrent to download movies.

Regulation of proteasome structure and function

Proteasomes are cylindrical particles made up of a stack of four heptameric rings. In animal cells the outer rings are made up of 7 different types of alpha subunits and the inner rings are composed of 7 out of 10 possible different beta subunits. Regulatory complexes can bind to the ends of the cylinder.We have investigated aspects of the assembly, activity and subunit composition of core proteasome particles and 26S proteasomes, the localization of proteasome subpopulations, and the possible role of phosphorylation in determining proteasome localization, activities and association with regulatory components.