Lesbian and gay parents and reproductive technologies: The 2008 Australian and UK reforms

This article analyses the laws that govern the allocation of parental responsibility for children conceived through non-coital reproduction by lesbians and gay men in England/Wales and Australia. In 2008 both jurisdictions introduced important reforms affecting this area of law, providing new options for the legal recognition of parent–child relationships in lesbian and gay households. However, the practical usefulness or effectiveness of the reforms may be limited by the excessive complexity or obscurity of the system of parental responsibility thus introduced. Furthermore, the reform Acts encourage the formation of some family structures—especially homonuclear families—while discouraging the emergence of more imaginative and cooperative parenting configurations at odds with heteronormative parenting scripts. Only through a clearer commitment to intentionality as a ground for the allocation of parental responsibility will future reform be likely to adequately protect the interests of lesbian and gay parents and their children.

Styx grid services: lightweight middleware for efficient scientific workflows

The service-oriented approach to performing distributed scientific research is potentially very powerful but is not yet widely used in many scientific fields. This is partly due to the technical difficulties involved in creating services and workflows and the inefficiency of many workflow systems with regard to handling large datasets. We present the Styx Grid Service, a simple system that wraps command-line programs and allows them to be run over the Internet exactly as if they were local programs. Styx Grid Services are very easy to create and use and can be composed into powerful workflows with simple shell scripts or more sophisticated graphical tools. An important feature of the system is that data can be streamed directly from service to service, significantly increasing the efficiency of workflows that use large data volumes. The status and progress of Styx Grid Services can be monitored asynchronously using a mechanism that places very few demands on firewalls. We show how Styx Grid Services can interoperate with with Web Services and WS-Resources using suitable adapters.

The strength of the system and my experiences of it, was that in fact, oddly enough, it was actually a very collaborative enterprise already

Video:35 mins, 2006. The video shows a group of performers in a studio and seminar situation. Individually addressing the camera they offer personal views and experiences of their own art production in relation to the institution, while reflecting on their role as teachers. The performance scripts mainly originate from a series of real interviews with a diverse group of artist teachers, who emphasise the collaborative, performative and subversive nature of teaching. These views may seems symptomatic for contemporary art practices, but are ultimately antagonistic to the ongoing commodification of the system of art education.