Food fortification : the evidence, ethics and politics of adding nutrients to food

This research book presents a critical analysis of mandatory food fortification as a technology for protecting and promoting public health. Increasing numbers of foods fortified with novel amounts and combinations of nutrients are being introduced into the food supplies of countries around the world to raise populations’ nutrient intakes. Three topical food fortification case studies representing the different public health rationales for adding nutrients to food were assessed for their public health benefits, risks and ethical considerations: Universal salt iodisation (USI) to help prevent iodine deficiency disorders; mandatory flour fortification with folic acid (MFFFA) to help prevent neural tube defects; and mandatory milk fortification with vitamin D (MMFVD) to help prevent vitamin D deficiency. These assessments found that whereas USI performs strongly as a public health intervention, MFFFA and MMFVD are associated with more risks and less ethical justification than an alternative policy option. Food fortification can be a blunt policy response to complex policy problems. The findings highlight that the primary predictor of a mandatory food fortification policy’s benefits, risks and ethics is its ability to address the underlying cause of the policy problem. The analysis of the policy-making processes for each case study found that certain powerful actors use their influence to determine what counts as evidence in policy processes to privilege food fortification activities over alternative policy options. Policy-making frequently was notable for the low prominence it afforded ethical considerations and its lack of public engagement. Priority activities to help strengthen policy processes and outcomes are suggested.

Consuming environmentalism: following codes or practicing ethics?

In this article, I consider some of the pedagogical challenges presented by a new wave of environmentalism that implores individuals to "save the earth" through simple, normalised acts like recycling. In the context of teaching environmental education in higher education settings, I provide a justification for an alternative conception of environmentalism based on self-stylisation. This conception draws on the work of French philosopher, Michel Foucault, who studied ancient Greeks to contemplate a new perspective on ethics.

The nexus between feminism and postmodernism: still a central concern for critical social work

 In this paper, we provide a critical review of the literature that discusses the nexus between feminism and postmodernism. Further, we argue that the current debates about using postmodernism to enhance structural theories such as feminism are often polarised, and continue to limit the potential for developing critical social work practice and theory. In transcending these dualistic debates, we have explored what the possibilities are for postmodernism to contribute to critical objectives such as those espoused by feminism and why this is particularly important for social work at this point in time. We have contended that engaging with postmodernism critically has significant potential to enhance feminist practice. We begin the article with a justification for the importance of re(visiting) the nexus between postmodern and structural theory in the current context.

The cost of healthcare for children with mental health difficulties

Objective: Childhood mental health difficulties affect one in every seven children in Australia, posing a potential financial burden to society. This paper reports on the early lifetime individual and population non-hospital healthcare costs to the Australian Federal Government for children experiencing mental health difficulties. It also reports on the use and cost of particular categories of service use, including the Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS) mental health items introduced in 2006.

Putting traditional values into practice: Russia’s anti-gay laws

This article examines the rise of so-called anti-gay laws in Russia as a response to international Russian-led support for using “traditional values” as the foundation for human rights norms. Viewed in this way, a logic of moral sovereignty emerges that purports to offer a compromise between international human rights obligations and local socio-cultural norms. However, in the case of anti-gay laws, moral panic over LGBTQ people has made homophobia a political proxy for understandings of traditional values, in the process implicitly legitimizing homophobic violence and discrimination, and setting a dangerous precedent for traditional values to be invoked as a justification for violations of human rights norms.

The Aristotelian spoudaios as ethical exemplar in Finnis’s natural law theory

One provocative but frequently overlooked feature of John Finnis’s natural law theory is its appeal to the normative role of the Aristotelian spoudaios (the mature person of practical reasonableness). Finnis’s account of the basic requirements of practical reasonableness and defense of the methodological device of “focal meaning” both have recourse to Aristotle’s claim that, in ethics and politics, things should be judged in terms of how they appear to the mature practically reasonable person. The current paper examines the normative role played by the spoudaios within Finnis’s natural law theory and provides a defense of that role against the objection that it lacks justificatory force because it is dependent upon circular reasoning. Section one contextualizes Finnis’s use of the spoudaios by considering its Aristotelian origins and also sketches some reasons for its demise in subsequent moral theory. This serves as the basis for an assessment in section two of whether Finnis’s employment of the spoudaios as an ethical exemplar conflates explanation and justification, and therefore culminates in decisionism. The conclusion of the paper is that Finnis’s recourse to the spoudaios is not viciously circular, because it is grounded in the reflexive and dialogical mode of justification proper to ethical enquiry.

A just judgement? Considerations on Ronald Srigley’s Camus’ Critique of Modernity

This paper responds critically to Ronald Srigley’s groundbreaking 2011 study Albert Camus’ Critique of Modernity. Srigley’s book reasserts Camus’ credentials as a deeply serious thinker, whose literary and philosophical oeuvre was dedicated to rethinking modernity on the basis of critical reassessments of theWest’s entire premodern heritage. Yet we challenge whether Camus was ever, even in his final writings, so uncompromisingly anti-modern as Srigley contends. Srigley’s attempt to present Camus as committed to a return to the Greeks, on the basis of a total critique of modernity as deleteriously post-Christian, forces him to occlude important distinctions in Camus’ thought: those between unity and totality, rebellion and revolution. By contrast, we compare Camus’ defence of modern rebellion with Blumenberg’s argument in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age: finding justification for this rebellion in the deep problem faced by Christian theology of resolving the ‘problem of evil’. Finally, we suggest that Srigley overplays the extent of Camus’ ‘Hellenic’ critique of the Christian heritage (notably its ethical commitment to protecting the weak), in contrast to Christian theodicy and eschatology, which serve to rationalize avoidable suffering.

Transcendental arguments about other minds and intersubjectivity

This article describes some of the main arguments for the existence of other minds, and intersubjectivity more generally, that depend upon a transcendental justification. This means that our focus will be largely on ‘continental’ philosophy, not only because of the abiding interest in this tradition in thematising intersubjectivity, but also because transcendental reasoning is close to ubiquitous in continental philosophy. Neither point holds for analytic philosophy. As such, this essay will introduce some of the important contributions of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Karl-Otto Apel, all of whom use transcendental reasoning as a key part of their analyses of intersubjectivity, and we also consider the work of Peter Strawson who does likewise in the analytic tradition.

Bonhoeffer as Kierkegaard’s ‘single individual’ in a ‘state of exception’

This thesis interrogates the idea that violence can be justified as a ‘last resort’ through investigating the concept of ‘exception’ in the writing and action of the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in conjunction with the writings of Soren Kierkegaard and the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.

Online motor fault detection and diagnosis using a hybrid FMM-CART model

In this brief, a hybrid model combining the fuzzy min-max (FMM) neural network and the classification and regression tree (CART) for online motor detection and diagnosis tasks is described. The hybrid model, known as FMM-CART, exploits the advantages of both FMM and CART for undertaking data classification and rule extraction problems. To evaluate the applicability of the proposed FMM-CART model, an evaluation with a benchmark data set pertaining to electrical motor bearing faults is first conducted. The results obtained are equivalent to those reported in the literature. Then, a laboratory experiment for detecting and diagnosing eccentricity faults in an induction motor is performed. In addition to producing accurate results, useful rules in the form of a decision tree are extracted to provide explanation and justification for the predictions from FMM-CART. The experimental outcome positively shows the potential of FMM-CART in undertaking online motor fault detection and diagnosis tasks.

Motivations for doing interdisciplinary research: Results from an Australian qualitative study

While the literature provides a strong conceptual justification for Interdisciplinary Research (for example: Klein 1990, 1996; Sherif & Sherif, 1969) and a number of studies document the benefits and challenges of such studies (such as: Slatin, Galizzi, Melillo & Mawn 2004; Rhoten, 2004; Lynch 2006; Jacobs & Frickel 2009), there are surprisingly few empirical analyses of the reasons why individual researchers become involved in Interdisciplinary Research projects. Responding to this gap in the extant literature, the current study was undertaken to identify individual influences and motivations for participating in Interdisciplinary Research projects. In this paper we report findings that emerged from 30 interviews with researchers from a wide range of disciplines, as well as different stage of career, on the major reasons why they are drawn to Interdisciplinary Research. As part of the paper we also report the extent to which participants agreed or disagreed with a variety of pitfalls identified in the literature as potential impediments or deterrents to individuals becoming involved in Interdisciplinary studies.

Experiences of racism, racial/ethnic attitudes, motivated fairness and mental health outcomes among primary and secondary school students

While studies investigating the health effects of racial discrimination for children and youth have examined a range of effect modifiers, to date, relationships between experiences of racial discrimination, student attitudes, and health outcomes remain unexplored. This study uniquely demonstrates the moderating effects of vicarious racism and motivated fairness on the association between direct experiences of racism and mental health outcomes, specifically depressive symptoms and loneliness, among primary and secondary school students. Across seven schools, 263 students (54.4% female), ranging from 8 to 17 years old (M = 11.2, SD = 2.2) reported attitudes about other racial/ethnic groups and experiences of racism. Students from minority ethnic groups (determined by country of birth) reported higher levels of loneliness and more racist experiences relative to the majority group students. Students from the majority racial/ethnic group reported higher levels of loneliness and depressive symptoms if they had more friends from different racial/ethnic groups, whereas the number of friends from different groups had no effect on minority students' loneliness or depressive symptoms. Direct experiences of racism were robustly related to higher loneliness and depressive symptoms in multivariate regression models. However, the association with depressive symptoms was reduced to marginal significance when students reported low motivated fairness. Elaborating on the negative health effects of racism in primary and secondary school students provides an impetus for future research and the development of appropriate interventions.

Hydrologic landscape regionalisation using deductive classification and random forests

Landscape classification and hydrological regionalisation studies are being increasingly used in ecohydrology to aid in the management and research of aquatic resources. We present a methodology for classifying hydrologic landscapes based on spatial environmental variables by employing non-parametric statistics and hybrid image classification. Our approach differed from previous classifications which have required the use of an a priori spatial unit (e.g. a catchment) which necessarily results in the loss of variability that is known to exist within those units. The use of a simple statistical approach to identify an appropriate number of classes eliminated the need for large amounts of post-hoc testing with different number of groups, or the selection and justification of an arbitrary number. Using statistical clustering, we identified 23 distinct groups within our training dataset. The use of a hybrid classification employing random forests extended this statistical clustering to an area of approximately 228,000 km2 of south-eastern Australia without the need to rely on catchments, landscape units or stream sections. This extension resulted in a highly accurate regionalisation at both 30-m and 2.5-km resolution, and a less-accurate 10-km classification that would be more appropriate for use at a continental scale. A smaller case study, of an area covering 27,000 km2, demonstrated that the method preserved the intra- and inter-catchment variability that is known to exist in local hydrology, based on previous research. Preliminary analysis linking the regionalisation to streamflow indices is promising suggesting that the method could be used to predict streamflow behaviour in ungauged catchments. Our work therefore simplifies current classification frameworks that are becoming more popular in ecohydrology, while better retaining small-scale variability in hydrology, thus enabling future attempts to explain and visualise broad-scale hydrologic trends at the scale of catchments and continents.

Health-care costs of underweight, overweight and obesity: Australian population-based study

AIM: Child health varies with body mass index (BMI), but it is unknown by what age or how much this attracts additional population health-care costs. We aimed to determine the (1) cross-sectional relationships between BMI and costs across the first decade of life and (2) in longitudinal analyses, whether costs increase with duration of underweight or obesity. METHODS: Participants: Baby (n = 4230) and Kindergarten (n = 4543) cohorts in the nationally representative Longitudinal Study of Australian Children. OUTCOME: Medicare Benefits Scheme (including all general practitioner plus a large proportion of paediatrician visits) plus prescription medication costs to federal government from birth to sixth (Baby cohort) and fourth to tenth (Kindergarten cohort) birthdays. PREDICTOR: biennial BMI measurements over the same period. RESULTS: Among Australian children under 10 years of age, 5-6% were underweight, 11-18% overweight and 5-6% obese. Excess costs with low and high BMI became evident from age 4-5 years, with normal weight accruing the least, obesity the most, and underweight and overweight intermediate costs. Relative to overall between-child variation, these excess costs per child were very modest, with a maximum of $94 per year at age 4-5 years. Nonetheless, this projects to a substantial cost to government of approximately $13 million per annum for all Australian children aged less than 10 years. CONCLUSIONS: Substantial excess population costs provide further economic justification for promoting healthy body weight. However, obese children's low individual excess health-care costs mean that effective treatments are likely to increase short-term costs to the public health purse during childhood.