Shattered dreams : a community project

The research field was community empowerment through education and skill-building. The context was the high rates of domestic violence in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community, and the dearth of culturally-appropriate resource materials to stimulate and encourage community engagement with the issue. The research question concerned the use of a specific media project – the creation of a 7-minute 48-second DVD on the causes and impacts of domestic violence – as a focus for community empowerment, education and skills development. The research represented an innovative partnership between the university research team, a non-government organisation, and various expert content-providers. The project generated new knowledge regarding best practice, in such areas as the culturally appropriate use of the voices of elders, focusing on the responsibilities of both men and women in relation to family and domestic violence, and the protection of Aboriginal and Islander children. The project has created an excellent tool for workshops on related issues including familiarity with the legal system. The film has been distributed to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander domestic violence services throughout the State, and has generated interstate interest, indicating a significant gap in available culturally-appropriate domestic violence resources. A support package for educational workers within Indigenous community groups wishing to use the resource has also been produced. In 2010, the DVD was nominated for a Queensland Domestic and Family Violence Prevention Award. Other non-government organisations have expressed interest in using the model created through this community-based project.

Disputes in Everyday Life : Social and Moral Orders of Children and Young People

"The research presented in this volume has been undertaken in a range of settings and across ages, to display the rich, varied, and complex aspects of children and young people's everyday lives. The papers contribute to understanding children's disputes, framed as forms of social practice, by closely examining children's talk and interaction in disputes to offer insight into how they arrange their social lives within the context of school, home, neighborhood, correctional, and cafe settings. As such, this volume contributes to an emerging body of edited volumes that investigate children and young people's everyday interactions (Cromdal, 2009; Cromdal & Tholander, in press; Gardner & Forrester, 2010; Goodwin & Kyratzis, 2007; Hutchby & Moran-Ellis, 1998). Each paper has been peer reviewed, by respected researchers of the field, in some cases authors of this volume, and revised. We also thank Charlotte Cobb-Moore who so ably assisted in the final preparation of the manuscripts."---publisher website

Introduction : disputes in everyday life – Social and moral orders of children and young people

Volume 15 of Sociological Studies of Children and Youth (SSYC) presents a rich description of children’s and young people’s disputes. Children and young people live and experience their youth in a variety of contexts, settings and situations in contemporary society, and the studies discussed in this volume draw on empirical data to investigate the interactional procedures used by children and young people as disputes arise in varying contexts of their everyday life. The aim of this volume is to extend current understandings of on children’s disputes by examining how, in the varying arenas and social worlds of children and young people, matters of ownership, alignment and social and moral order are always at play. Applying a sociological perspective, the research papers in this special volume show that disputes can offer analytic opportunities to examine, and make visible typically unseen social and moral orders. This consideration provides rich accounts of dispute practices within social and institutional contexts.

Corporate governance and misappropriation

This study examines the occurrence of misappropriation-type fraud within Australian listed firms and the relation between the incidence of this type of fraud and a firm's governance strength. We measure governance strength using factors relating to traditional corporate governance, such as board composition, CEO duality, and audit committee composition, as well as factors relating to information technology governance. In our study, we use actual dollar amount of fraud reported by listed companies responding to the 2004 KPMG Fraud Survey as one of three different misappropriation measures and publicly available firm-specific data to measure the other variables in the model. Our study found that where the chief executive officer (CEO) also holds the position of chairperson of the board of directors, the likelihood of fraud increases. We also find that the greater the number of independent directors on the audit committee, the lower the level of fraud. Taken together, these results are particularly encouraging as they provide support for regulatory bodies such as the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) and the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC), which place considerable emphasis on the importance of establishing good corporate governance practices. The study provides empirical evidence that employing good corporate governance reduces the risk of the misappropriation of assets.

State convergence and keyspace reduction of the mixer stream cipher

This paper presents an analysis of the stream cipher Mixer, a bit-based cipher with structural components similar to the well-known Grain cipher and the LILI family of keystream generators. Mixer uses a 128-bit key and 64-bit IV to initialise a 217-bit internal state. The analysis is focused on the initialisation function of Mixer and shows that there exist multiple key-IV pairs which, after initialisation, produce the same initial state, and consequently will generate the same keystream. Furthermore, if the number of iterations of the state update function performed during initialisation is increased, then the number of distinct initial states that can be obtained decreases. It is also shown that there exist some distinct initial states which produce the same keystream, resulting in a further reduction of the effective key space

The Neighbourhood Disputes Resolution Act 2011 (Qld) and disclosure issues

This article examines the recently introduced Neighbourhood Disputes Resolution Act 2011 (Qld). The operation of the Act is considered as it impacts upon the responsibility of neighbours for dividing fences and trees as well as disclosure obligations associated with sale transactions. A particular focus of the article is the interrelationship of the disclosure obligations imposed by the Act with the operation of standard contractual warranties in Queensland.

Youth alcohol and drug practice guide 2: Legal and ethical dimensions of practice

This Guide is designed to assist workers better understand the and negotiate the complex interplay of ethical, legal and organisational considerations in their practice. The goal is to provide frontline workers and managers with information, questions and principles which promote good youth AOD practice. Legal information provided relates to Queensland, Australia.

Reflective practice as a tool for addressing high levels of psychological distress in Australian law schools and the legal profession

This paper discusses: -The need for law schools to use curriculum as a site for positive interventions to support student psychological well-being. -The potential for law school interventions to impact on the psychological well-being of the profession. -Reflective practice as a possible tool for promoting psychological well-being in law school and the profession because it provides a way of coping with ‘indeterminate zones’ of experience.

Termination And Discipline Procedures, Disputes Procedures & Work Evaluation

This series of paper examines industrial issues from a nonprofit management perspective.

Strategy taxonomy and classification system development : study of two state governments

There is limited understanding about business strategies related to parliamentary government's departments. This study focuses on the strategies of departments of two state governments in Australia. The strategies are derived from department strategic plans available in public domain and collected from respective websites. The results of this research indicate that strategies fall into seven categories: internal, development, political, partnership, environment, reorientation and status quo. The strategies of the departments are mainly internal or development where development strategy is mainly the focus of departments such as transport, and infrastructure. Political strategy is prevalent for departments related to communities, and education and training. Further three layers of strategies are identified as kernel, cluster and individual, which are mapped to the developed taxonomy.