What causes childhood leukaemia? Some beliefs of parents of affected children

The theories of parents about the cause of their children's leukaemia have been documented in the course of a case-control study. From a sample of 175 children who were diagnosed as having acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, 91.4% of their parents put forward their theories. Some of these theories were related clearly to material that had been published and therefore had some scientific validity. Other theories often had no apparent scientific basis. Persons who are involved in the care of children with leukaemia should be aware of the wide variety of theories that are held by their parents so that they may provide counselling which could be of help in the relief of feelings of anxiety or guilt among the parents. Parents should always be afforded the opportunity to put forward their own theories so that they may be discussed on a rational basis. It is conceivable that some parents might put forward new hypotheses about leukaemogenesis that could be tested scientifically.

Intergroup relations and Muslims’ mental health in Western societies

This review article proposes that theories and research of intergroup contact, prejudice, and acculturation, enhance understanding of the current intercultural relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in Western societies, such as in Australia. The actual and perceived prejudice that many Muslims studying, working, and living in the West have been experiencing following the 2001 terrorist attacks, adds an additional layer of stress to the psychosocial adjustment of Muslim immigrants and sojourners, affecting their cross-cultural adaptation and mental health. Stephan and colleagues’ Integrated Threat Theory argues that the perceived threat experienced by all parties, explains the acts of prejudice. Berry’s acculturation framework highlights that adaptive acculturation is determined by congruent host nation policies and practices and immigrant acculturation strategies. Implications for multicultural policy, intercultural training, and mental health practice, and suggestions for future research, are discussed.

Teachers’ attitudes toward reporting child sexual abuse : problems with existing research leading to new scale development

This paper details a systematic literature review identifying problems in extant research relating to teachers’ attitudes towards reporting child sexual abuse, and offers a model for new attitude scale development and testing. Scale development comprised a five-phase process grounded in contemporary attitude theories including: a) developing the initial item pool; b) conducting a panel review; c) refining the scale via an expert focus group; d) building content validity through cognitive interviews; e) assessing internal consistency via field testing. The resulting 21-item scale displayed construct validity in preliminary testing. The scale may prove useful as a research tool, given the theoretical supposition that attitudes may be changed with time, context, experience, and education. Further investigation with a larger sample is warranted.

Meeting and greeting : activities in public outdoor spaces outside high-density urban residential communities

This paper examines the opportunities for social activities in public outdoor spaces associated with high-density residential living. This study surveyed activities in outdoor spaces outside three high-density residential communities in Brisbane. Results indicated that activity patterns in public outdoor space outside residential communities are different to general urban public outdoor space. This broadly but not fully supports current theories concerning activities in public space. That is some environmental factors have impacts on the level of social interaction. The relationship between outdoor space and a residential building may have a significant impact on the level of social activities. As a consequence, a new classification of activities in public space is suggested. In improving the level of social contact in public outdoor space outside a residential community, the challenge is how to encourage people to leave their comfortable homes and spend a short time in these public spaces. For residential buildings and public space to be treated as an integrated whole, the outdoor open spaces close to and surrounding these buildings must have a more welcoming design.

The Remnant

An Interactive Installation with holographic 3D projections, satellite imagery, surround sound and intuitive body driven interactivity. Remnant (v.1) was commissioned by the 2010 TreeLine ecoArt event - an initiative of the Sunshine Coast Council and presented at a remnant block of subtropical rainforest called ‘Mary Cairncross Scenic Reserve’ - located 100kms north of Brisbane near the township of Maleny. V2 was later commissioned for KickArts Gallery, Cairns, re-presenting the work in a new open format which allowed audiences to both experience the original power of the work and to also understand the construction of the work's powerful illusory, visual spaces. This art-science project focused upon the idea of remnant landscapes - isolated blocks of forest (or other vegetation types) typically set within a patchwork quilt of surrounding farmed land. Participants peer into a mysterious, long tunnel of imagery whilst navigating entirely through gentle head movements - allowing them to both 'steer' in three dimensions and also 'alight', as a butterfly might, upon a sector of landscape - which in turn reveals an underlying 'landscape of mind'. The work challenges audiences to re-imagine our conceptions of country in ways that will lead us to better reconnect and sustain today’s heavily divided landscapes. The research field involved developing new digital image projection methods, alternate embodied interaction and engagement strategies for eco-political media arts practice. The context was the creation of improved embodied and improvisational experiences for participants, further informed by ‘eco-philosophical’ and sustainment theories. By engaging with deep conceptions of connectivity between apparently disparate elements, the work considered novel strategies for fostering new desires, for understanding and re-thinking the requisite physical and ecological links between ‘things’ that have been historically shattered. The methodology was primarily practice-led and in concert with underlying theories. The work’s knowledge contribution was to question how new media interactive experience and embodied interaction might prompt participants to reflect upon appropriate resources and knowledges required to generate this substantive desire for new approaches to sustainment. This accentuated through the power of learning implied by the works' strongly visual and kinaesthetic interface (i.e. the tunnel of imagery and the head and torso operated navigation). The work was commissioned by the 2010 TreeLine ecoArt event - an initiative of the Sunshine Coast Council and the second version was commissioned by Kickarts Gallery, Cairns, specifically funded by a national optometrist chain. It was also funded in development by Arts Queensland and reviewed in Realtime.

Political theory and theoretical physics [Revised]

This paper explains, somewhat along a Simmelian line, that political theory may produce practical and universal theories like those developed in theoretical physics. The reasoning behind this paper is to show that the Element of Democracy Theory may be true by way of comparing it to Einstein’s Special Relativity – specifically concerning the parameters of symmetry, unification, simplicity, and utility. These parameters are what make a theory in physics as meeting them not only fits with current knowledge, but also produces paths towards testing (application). As the Element of Democracy Theory meets these same parameters, it could settle the debate concerning the definition of democracy. This will be shown firstly by discussing why no one has yet achieved a universal definition of democracy; secondly by explaining the parameters chosen (as in why these and not others confirm or scuttle theories); and thirdly by comparing how Special Relativity and the Element of Democracy match the parameters.

What is language and how is it learnt?

This chapter describes the nature of human language and introduces theories of language acquisition.

The soft skills of project management : a view from diploma graduates

A research study was conducted in a key area of project management: stakeholder and relationship management through communication - ‘the soft skills’. It was conducted with Diploma of Project Management graduates from one Australian Registered Training Organisation (RTO), the Australian College of Project Management (ACPM). The study was designed to initially identify the qualifications and project management experience of the participants. Further, it identified the respondents’ understanding of and attitude to commonly held principles and literature within the project management field as it relates to the soft skills of projects. This is specifically connected to their project experience and knowledge, approach to project communications, and the stakeholder’s needs. Some of the literature showed that through the management and application of the project soft skills by project managers may actually be a recipe for project success. Hence, an important underpinning of this study was that the project manager can enhance project success (or reduce the impact of failure) by identifying and prioritising stakeholders, developing and implementing strategies for engaging and communicating with them. The use of a positivist approach to this research study allowed for the evaluation and understanding of respondents to the emergent theories of successful projects being delivered through the management of stakeholders, communications, and relationships. Consequently, a quantitative approach to this study was undertaken. The participants were drawn from graduates who completed (graduated) from the ACPM with the Diploma of Project Management between January 2004 and December 2007 only. A list of graduates was collated from this period indicating that a total of 656 graduates have completed and graduated with the qualification. The data collection for this study was done in one phase only. The questionnaire was emailed individually by the researcher directly to the selected potential respondents. Subsequently, a total of 44 responses were received, providing an overall response rate of 43%. Two key factors emerged from the survey questionnaire. Firstly, the need for the soft skills to be incorporated in project management curriculum and education programs, and secondly, that successful projects are delivered through the management and application of the project soft skills. It is expected that the findings of this study be provided across various forums (such as vocational education and training, and project management conferences) and via project management bodies such as the Australian Institute of Project Management (AIPM) to inform learning and provide greater insight into the soft skills of project management. It is the contention of the researcher that this quantitative study of Diploma of Project Management graduates’ views and attitudes highlights the importance of project soft skills and its importance in the delivery of successful projects as well as being part of the competencies of a successful project manager. This study also revealed the value of project experience and knowledge as it pertains to the management and application of the project soft skills.

Towards developing an integrated model of information behaviour

This paper presents the results from a study of information behaviors in the context of people's everyday lives undertaken in order to develop an integrated model of information behavior (IB). 34 participants from across 6 countries maintained a daily information journal or diary – mainly through a secure web log – for two weeks, to an aggregate of 468 participant days over five months. The text-rich diary data was analyzed using a multi-method qualitative-quantitative analysis in the following order: Grounded Theory analysis with manual coding, automated concept analysis using thesaurus-based visualization, and finally a statistical analysis of the coding data. The findings indicate that people engage in several information behaviors simultaneously throughout their everyday lives (including home and work life) and that sense-making is entangled in all aspects of them. Participants engaged in many of the information behaviors in a parallel, distributed, and concurrent fashion: many information behaviors for one information problem, one information behavior across many information problems, and many information behaviors concurrently across many information problems. Findings indicate also that information avoidance – both active and passive avoidance – is a common phenomenon and that information organizing behaviors or the lack thereof caused the most problems for participants. An integrated model of information behaviors is presented based on the findings.

Service employee behaviour : the role of compliance and risk taking

This paper looks at the decision-making process that determines the amount of effort frontline service employees will expend in delivering a service in a business-to-business context. Using theories in behavioural economics and interactional and social psychology, the paper develops and presents a model of employee decision-making. Managerial implications, which have the potential to enhance the marketing of business-to-business services and directions for future research in this area, are indicated.

Do warnings deter rather than produce more sophisticated malingering?

Following Youngjohn, Lees-Haley, and Binder's (1999) comment on Johnson and Lesniak-Karpiak's (1997) study that warnings lead to more subtle malingering, researchers have sought to better understand warning effects. However, such studies have been largely atheoretical and may have confounded warning and coaching. This study examined the effect on malingering of a warning that was based on criminological-sociological concepts derived from the rational choice model of deterrence theory. A total of 78 participants were randomly assigned to a control group, an unwarned simulator group, or one of two warned simulator groups. The warning groups comprised low- and high-level conditions depending on warning intensity. Simulator participants received no coaching about how to fake tests. Outcome variables were scores derived from the Test of Memory Malingering and Wechsler Memory Scale-III. When the rate of malingering was compared across the four groups, a high-level warning effect was found such that warned participants were significantly less likely to exaggerate than unwarned simulators. In an exploratory follow-up analysis, the warned groups were divided into those who reported malingering and those who did not report malingering, and the performance of these groups was compared to that of unwarned simulators and controls. Using this approach, results showed that participants who were deterred from malingering by warning performed no worse than controls. However, on a small number of tests, self-reported malingerers in the low-level warning group appeared less impaired than unwarned simulators. This pattern was not observed in the high-level warning condition. Although cautious interpretation of findings is necessitated by the exploratory nature of some analyses, overall results suggest that using a carefully designed warning may be useful for reducing the rate of malingering. The combination of some noteworthy effect sizes, despite low power and the small size of some groups, suggests that further investigation of the effects of warnings needs to continue to determine their effect more fully.

A connective model for the practice-led research exegesis : an analysis of content and structure

Since the formal recognition of practice-led research in the 1990s, many higher research degree candidates in art, design and media have submitted creative works along with an accompanying written document or ‘exegesis’ for examination. Various models for the exegesis have been proposed in university guidelines and academic texts during the past decade, and students and supervisors have experimented with its contents and structure. With a substantial number of exegeses submitted and archived, it has now become possible to move beyond proposition to empirical analysis. In this article we present the findings of a content analysis of a large, local sample of submitted exegeses. We identify the emergence of a persistent pattern in the types of content included as well as overall structure. Besides an introduction and conclusion, this pattern includes three main parts, which can be summarized as situating concepts (conceptual definitions and theories); precedents of practice (traditions and exemplars in the field); and researcher’s creative practice (the creative process, the artifacts produced and their value as research). We argue that this model combines earlier approaches to the exegesis, which oscillated between academic objectivity, by providing a contextual framework for the practice, and personal reflexivity, by providing commentary on the creative practice. But this model is more than simply a hybrid: it provides a dual orientation, which allows the researcher to both situate their creative practice within a trajectory of research and do justice to its personally invested poetics. By performing the important function of connecting the practice and creative work to a wider emergent field, the model helps to support claims for a research contribution to the field. We call it a connective model of exegesis.

Australian landscape lineages

Stephen Krog has pointed out that landscape architecture has an ill-studied Modernist history, and further suggested that landscape architecture is too theoretically bereft to have a considered theoretical Post-Modernism anyway. The projects that make up the Sunburnt exhibition all emerge from practitioners who were educated during the Post-Modern period in Australia, roughly the 10 years between 1985 and 1995 - a period corresponding to the Australian Bicentennial celebrations in 1988. This essay will quickly trace lineages of education, office experience and ideas through the projects and practices during that period. In common with theories of Post-Modernism in architecture propounded at the time, many of the projects exhibit an interest in pluralistic views of places, cultures and issues, including engaging contextual relationships with places, and involving urban form. These designers were interested in form at a time when it was regarded as incidental rather than important.

Interrogating statistical models of music perception

We have developed a new experimental method for interrogating statistical theories of music perception by implementing these theories as generative music algorithms. We call this method Generation in Context. This method differs from most experimental techniques in music perception in that it incorporates aesthetic judgments. Generation In Context is designed to measure percepts for which the musical context is suspected to play an important role. In particular the method is suitable for the study of perceptual parameters which are temporally dynamic. We outline a use of this approach to investigate David Temperley’s (2007) probabilistic melody model, and provide some provisional insights as to what is revealed about the model. We suggest that Temperley’s model could be improved by dynamically modulating the probability distributions according to the changing musical context.

The coming

Through an exploration of representations of metamorphosis and the creation of a body of written work, this thesis uses a critical examination of theoretical approaches to metamorphosis in combination with textual analysis of representations of metamorphosis and creative practice as research to arrive at the beginnings of an ethic of writing. The creative work, The Coming, consists of a collection of short fiction, The Coming, and two collections of poetry, Orison and Milagros. The exegesis, Transhuman Change: towards an ethic of writing, explores theories about metamorphosis as a figure for writing, as a trope, and as a motif for exploring identity to contextualise the analysis of representations of metamorphosis from which the ethic is developed. With reference to the psychosexual development theory of Jacques Lacan and Elaine Scarry’s philosophy of the body, pain, language and creativity, the exegesis examines existing approaches to metamorphosis and uses supplementary textual analysis of influential representations of metamorphosis from Ovid to Pygmalion, X-Men and Extreme Makeover to explore assumptions about the body, language, the self, gender in western culture. The limitations of the performance of representations of metamorphosis as a figure for the self’s survival of death are considered in the light of voice as metonym for self to propose an ethic which valorises life. The experience of sex and the construction of gender in representations of metamorphosis are considered in the light of Lacan’s theory of desire and Scarry’s theory of the body and language to propose an ethic of representing gender ironically. The motif of the faithless lover and the Pygmalion myth are considered in the light of the (m)other’s role in language to propose an ethic in which indeterminacy constitutes the condition for being aware of oneself among selves. Each of the three proposals is discussed in relation to the short fiction, memoir and poems produced in the course of this research to test their limits and possibilities as the foundation of an emerging ethic of writing.