Same blind eyes turned on Timor

Given advance notice that the street bully is about to beat up your neighbour, three courses of action are open to you. The first is to try to dissuade the bully from his violent intent. The second is to warn your neighbour so that he can make preparations to defend himself or flee. The third is to do nothing, sit back and watch the attack. Last week, Captain Andrew Plunkett claimed the Australian Government failed to act on intelligence that could have prevented the massacre of 47 civilians at a police station in Maliana in September 1999. If his claims are true, it will be the second time in 24 years that Canberra chose option three in its dealings with the people of East Timor.

Has the ban on smoking in New South Wales restaurants worked? A comparison of restaurants in Sydney and Melbourne

Objective: To evaluate compliance with a legislative ban on smoking inside restaurants by comparing smoking in Sydney restaurants (where it is legally banned) with smoking in Melbourne restaurants (not subject to a legal ban).

Design and participants: Unobtrusive observational study of restaurant patrons, and interviews with restaurant staff, carried out by 159 volunteers.

Setting: 78 Sydney restaurants with smoke-free indoor environments (as required by legislation) and 81 Melbourne restaurants not subject to legislation preventing smoking. The study took place from 20-31 October 2000.

Intervention: Legislation to ban smoking in indoor areas of restaurants was introduced in New South Wales in September 2000 (about six weeks before our study).

Outcomes: Observed incidents of smoking inside restaurants; staff attitudes to the ban; customer satisfaction as indicated by comments to staff; staff perceptions of restaurant patronage.

Results: No restaurant patrons were seen smoking in 78 Sydney restaurants during 156 hours of observation of 2646 diners, compared with 176 smokers among 3014 Melbourne diners over 154 hours of observation. Thirty-one per cent (24/78) of Sydney restaurants had experienced smokers attempting to smoke indoors after the legislation was introduced; 6% (5/78) reported instances of smokers refusing to stop smoking when asked; 79% (62/78) of restaurants had received favourable comments from patrons about the smoke-free law; 81% (63/78) of restaurant staff interviewed either supported or strongly supported the law. Since introduction of the legislation, 76% of restaurants reported normal trade, 14% increased trade, and 9% reduced trade.

Conclusions: Smoke-free restaurants do not require "smoking police" to enforce bans, present few ongoing difficulties for staff, attract many more favourable than unfavourable comments from patrons, and do not adversely affect trade.

The significance of social influences and established housing values

Investment in housing represents the largest single source of wealth for individuals and has an important role in the macro economy. Traditional economic indicators cannot always observe the degree of purchaser and vendor willingness and therefore consideration should also be given to characteristics of buyers and sellers in the marketplace. This study draws the disciplines of housing research and demography closer and looks to social indicators for an insight into residential housing markets.

The research analysed changes in the value of established residential house prices in Brisbane and the influence of variations in social structure on a longitudinal time series basis. Results confirmed the existence of strong linkages between social constructs and established house prices. While it is acknowledged that established house values are significantly influenced by external! economic and political factors, this research confirmed that serious consideration must also be given to social factors and demographic variables.

Public and personal domains : professional standards for teachers of English in Australia

For many teachers the term ‘professional standards’ conjures up notions of benchmarks against which to measure their performance. This is to locate standards in a public domain that is external to individual teachers, defining their professional role largely in terms of their accountability to other stakeholders in education. The following article argues an alternative view of standards as mediating between public and personal domains. Those domains should remain distinct – indeed, sometimes they may exist in a productive tension – but for standards to have any purchase with the profession they must be personally meaningful. The author draws on both his experience in teaching graduate English students in the pre-service Diploma in Education course at Monash University and his research in a national project to develop subject specific standards for primary and secondary teachers of English. The project, Standards for Teachers of English Language and Literacy in Australia (STELLA), is federally funded and involves a consortium of universities, state government bodies and the two English teaching associations, whose members constitute the panels of teachers at the heart of the project.

Serum leptin levels are associated with bone mass in nonobese women

Both serum leptin and bone mineral density are positively correlated with body fat, generating the hypothesis that leptin may be a systemic and/or local regulator of bone mass. We investigated 214 healthy, nonobese Australian women aged 20-91 yr. Bone mineral content, projected bone area, and body fat mass were measured by dual energy x-ray absorptiometry and fasting serum leptin levels by RIA. Associations between bone mineral content (adjusted for age, body weight, body fat mass, and bone area) and the natural logarithm of serum leptin concentrations were analyzed by multiple regression techniques. There was a significant positive association at the lateral spine, two proximal femur sites (Ward's triangle and trochanter), and whole body (partial r² = 0.019 to 0.036; all P < 0.05). Similar trends were observed at the femoral neck and posterior-anterior-spine. With bone mineral density the dependent variable (adjusted for age, body weight, and body fat mass), the association with the natural logarithm of leptin remained significant at the lateral spine (partial r² = 0.030; P = 0.011), was of borderline significance at the proximal femur sites (partial r² = 0.012 to 0.017; P = 0.058 to 0.120), and was not significant at the other sites. Our results demonstrate an association between serum leptin levels and bone mass consistent with the hypothesis that circulating leptin may play a role in regulating bone mass.

Video indexing and similarity retrieval by largest common subgraph detection using decision trees

While the largest common subgraph (LCSG) between a query and a database of models can provide an elegant and intuitive measure of similarity for many applications, it is computationally expensive to compute. Recently developed algorithms for subgraph isomorphism detection take advantage of prior knowledge of a database of models to improve the speed of on-line matching. This paper presents a new algorithm based on similar principles to solve the largest common subgraph problem. The new algorithm significantly reduces the computational complexity of detection of the LCSG between a known database of models, and a query given on-line.