Teaching crabs to walk straight : is there a place for ethics education in Malaysian accountancy courses?

Recent releases from the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) highlight the importance of ethics education. Academic institutions employ varying methods of teaching ethics and place varying levels of emphasis on ethics teaching during a business/accounting degree. This paper attempts to evaluate whether teaching ethics to final year accountancy students is beneficial. At the commencement of a semester 85 final year accounting students were given five ethical scenarios on which to make an ethical decision. During the semester they were subject to two different methods of teaching ethics, a traditional lecture/tutorial process and a group assignment. ----- After a significant gap, students were re-presented with the ethical scenarios and asked what action they now considered appropriate. In all five instances students offered a more ethical response the second time. When asked to evaluate the methodologies the students considered both training methods to have a positive effect on their ethical thinking. The results suggest it is beneficial to include ethics teaching in accountancy courses, if the profession’s goal of ethical practitioners is to be achieved.

The population approach to falls injury prevention in older people : findings of a two community trial

Background: There is a sound rationale for the population-based approach to falls injury prevention but there is currently insufficient evidence to advise governments and communities on how they can use population-based strategies to achieve desired reductions in the burden of falls-related injury.---------- Aim: To quantify the effectiveness of a streamlined (and thus potentially sustainable and cost-effective), population-based, multi-factorial falls injury prevention program for people over 60 years of age.---------- Methods: Population-based falls-prevention interventions were conducted at two geographically-defined and separate Australian sites: Wide Bay, Queensland, and Northern Rivers, NSW. Changes in the prevalence of key risk factors and changes in rates of injury outcomes within each community were compared before and after program implementation and changes in rates of injury outcomes in each community were also compared with the rates in their respective States.---------- Results: The interventions in neither community substantially decreased the rate of falls-related injury among people aged 60 years or older, although there was some evidence of reductions in occurrence of multiple falls reported by women. In addition, there was some indication of improvements in fall-related risk factors, but the magnitudes were generally modest.---------- Conclusion: The evidence suggests that low intensity population-based falls prevention programs may not be as effective as those are intensively implemented.

Professional Responsibility and Legal Ethics in Queensland

With the commencement of the Legal Profession Act 2007 (Qld) and the establishment of the Legal Services Commission, the legal profession and legal services market in Queensland has experienced significant changes to its regulatory environment. Professional Responsibility and Legal Ethics in Queensland provides a detailed explanation and analysis of these changes. The book will assist lawyers to plan for successful practice within this new environment by examining such topics as: • The scope and application of key provisions within the Legal Profession Act; • The role, functions and policies of the Legal Services Commission; • The ethical and regulatory implications of operating as an Incorporated Legal Practice or as a Multi-Disciplinary Partnership; • Developments affecting trust accounts and client money dealings more generally; • Recent case law, Tribunal decisions and Legal Services Commission guidelines in relation to the new conduct standards of Unsatisfactory Professional Conduct and Professional Misconduct; and • The impact of the new legislation and regulatory environment on a range of traditional ethical duty categories such as the duty to communicate, costs and billing practices, as well as the paramount duties to the court and to the administration of justice. An invaluable reference for legal professionals, this book is also an important resource for law students grappling with questions raised by legal ethics and their application to the workplace.

Listening to late discovery adoption and donor offspring stories : adoption, ethics and implications for contemporary donor insemination practices

For most of the 20th Century a ‘closed’ system of adoption was practised throughout Australia and other modern Western societies. This ‘closed’ system was characterised by sealed records; amended birth certificates to conceal the adoption, and prohibited contact with all biological family. Despite claims that these measures protected these children from the taint of illegitimacy the central motivations were far more complex, involving a desire to protect couples from the stigma of infertility and to provide a socially acceptable family structure (Triseliotis, Feast, & Kyle, 2005; Marshall & McDonald, 2001). From the 1960s significant evidence began to emerge that many adopted children and adults were experiencing higher incidences of psychological difficulties, characterised by problems with psychological adjustment, building self-esteem and forming a secure personal identity. These difficulties became grouped under the term ‘genealogical bewilderment’. As a result, new policies and practices were introduced to try to place the best interests of the child at the forefront. These changes reflected new understandings of adoption; as not only an individual process but also as a social and relational process that continues throughout life. Secrecy and the withholding of birth information are now prohibited in the overwhelming majority of all domestic adoptions processed in Australia (Marshall & McDonald, 2001). One little known consequence of this ‘closed’ system of adoption was the significant number of children who were never told of their adoptive status. As a consequence, some have discovered or had this information disclosed to them, as adults. The first study that looked at the late discovery of genetic origins experiences was conducted by the Post Adoption Resource Centre in New South Wales in 1999. This report found that the participants in their study expressed feelings of disbelief, confusion, anger, sorrow and loss. Further, the majority of participants continued to struggle with issues arising from this intentional concealment of their genetic origins (Perl & Markham, 1999). A second and more recent study (Passmore, Feeney & Foulstone, 2007) looked at the issue of secrecy in adoptive families as part of a broader study of 144 adult adoptees. This study found that secrecy and/or lies or misinformation on the part of adoptive parents had negative effects on both personal identity and relationships with others. The authors noted that those adoptees who found out about their adoption as adults were ‘especially likely to feel a sense of betrayal’ (p.4). Over recent years, stories of secrecy and late discovery have also started to emerge from sperm donor conceived adults (Spencer, 2007; Turner & Coyle, 2000). Current research evidence shows that although a majority of couples during the donor assisted conception process indicate that they intend to tell the offspring about their origins, as many as two-thirds or more of couples continue to withhold this information from their children (Akker, 2006; Gottlieb, A. McWhinnie, 2001; Salter-Ling, Hunter, & Glover, 2001). Why do they keep this secret? Infertility involves a range of complex factors that are often left unresolved or poorly understood by those choosing insemination by donor as a form of family building (Schaffer, J. A., & Diamond, R., 1993). These factors may only impact after the child is born, when resemblance talk becomes most pronounced. Resemblance talk is an accepted form of public discourse and a social convention that legitimises the child as part of the family and is part of the process of constructing the child’s identity within the family. Couples tend to become focused on resemblance as this is where they feel most vulnerable, and the lack of resemblance to the parenting father may trigger his sense of loss (Becker, Butler, & Nachtigall, 2005).

Journalism Ethics : Arguments and Cases

Hirst and Patching's second edition of Journalism Ethics: Arguments and Cases provides a fully updated exploration of the theory and practice of ethics in journalism. The authors situate modern ethical dilemmas in their social and historical context, which encourages students to think critically about ethics across the study and practice of journalism. Using a unique political economy approach, the text provides students with a theoretical and philosophical understanding of the major ethical dilemmas in journalism today. It commences with a newly recast discussion of theoretical frameworks, which explains the complex concepts of ethics in clear and comprehensive terms. It then examines the 'fault lines' in modern journalism, such as the constant conflict between the public service role of the media, and a journalist's commercial imperative to make a profit. All chapters have been updated with new examples, and many new cases demonstrating the book's theoretical underpinnings have been drawn from 'yesterday's headlines'. These familiar cases encourage student engagement and classroom discussion, and archived cases will still be available to students on an Online Resource Centre. Expanded coverage of the 'War on Terror', issues of deception within journalism, and infotainment and digital technology is included.

Regulating corporate governance in China and Hong Kong : do Chinese values and ethics have a place in the age of globalization?

Much has been said about the convergence of corporate governance and regulations. The underlying assumptions of this phenomenon are driven by globalisation and the dominance of the Anglo-US model of corporate governance. Since the Asian crisis in 1997, Hong Kong and perhaps to a less extend Mainland China, had amended both Company laws and Stock Exchange Listing Rules obligations, arguably, mirroring provisions and rules in the UK and US. However, there has been a small amount of literature in law drawing from cross cultural management asking the question - is Western governance and regulation appropriate for the East? This paper will approach this issue from a different mindset, instead of drawing distinctions about East and West, a meta-regulatory framework will attempt to incorporate Western ‗hard‘ and ‗soft‘ laws with Asian ethical values. The aim is to combine laws and ethics thereby enhancing corporate governance and, improve compliance of those rules by adapting Chinese ethical values like Confucianism into the regulatory system. The overarching goal of this exercise is to adapt the wisdom of Chinese ethics into regulatory guidelines to suit the modern global market.

Truth, obligation and ethics in the propagation of democracy

In this paper I present an analysis of the language used by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) on its website (NED, 2008). The specific focus of the analysis is on the NED's high usage of the word “should” revealed in computer assisted corpus analysis using Leximancer. Typically we use the word “should” as a term to propose specific courses of action for ourselves and others. It is a marker of obligation and “oughtness”. In other words, its systematic institutional use can be read as a statement of ethics, of how the NED thinks the world ought to behave. As an ostensibly democracy-promoting institution, and one with a clear agenda of implementing American foreign policy, the ethics of NED are worth understanding. Analysis reveals a pattern of grammatical metaphor in which “should” is often deployed counter intuitively, and sometimes ambiguously, as a truth-making tool rather than one for proposing action. The effect is to present NED's imperatives for action as matters of fact rather than ethical or obligatory claims.

Knowledge, attitudes and beliefs towards injury prevention : a population based telephone survey

Public knowledge and beliefs about injury prevention are currently poorly understood. A total of 1030 residents in the State of Queensland, Australia responded to questions about injury prevention in or around the home, on the roads, in or on the water, at work, deliberate injury, and responsibility for preventing deliberate injury allowing comparison with published injury prevalence data. Overall the youngest members of society were identified as being the most vulnerable to deliberate injury with young adults accounting for 59% of responses aligning with published data. However, younger adults failed to indicate an awareness of their own vulnerability to deliberate injury in alcohol environments even though 61% of older respondents were aware of this trend. Older respondents were the least inclined to agree that they could make a difference to their own safety in or around the home but were more inclined to agree that they could make a difference to their own safety at work. The results are discussed with a view to using improved awareness of public beliefs about injury to identify barriers to the uptake of injury prevention strategies (e.g. low perceived injury risk) as well as areas where injury prevention strategies may receive public support.

Toward robust image detection of crown-of-thorns starfish for autonomous population monitoring

Robust texture recognition in underwater image sequences for marine pest population control such as Crown-Of-Thorns Starfish (COTS) is a relatively unexplored area of research. Typically, humans count COTS by laboriously processing individual images taken during surveys. Being able to autonomously collect and process images of reef habitat and segment out the various marine biota holds the promise of allowing researchers to gain a greater understanding of the marine ecosystem and evaluate the impact of different environmental variables. This research applies and extends the use of Local Binary Patterns (LBP) as a method for texture-based identification of COTS from survey images. The performance and accuracy of the algorithms are evaluated on a image data set taken on the Great Barrier Reef.

Ethics on-the-run

Midwives are involved in a very dynamic profession. As they face their everyday tasks they encounter many different situations and a variety of people which results in a vast number of interactions. This narrative research project sought to identify some of the ‘ordinary’ encounters and interactions that midwives working in a hospital environment experience in their daily work and explore them from an ethical perspective. It found that many ethical decisions have to be made ‘on-the-run’, with no time to contemplate or decide what the best course of action might be. As ethics is embedded within every encounter a midwife has, it is essential that all midwives have an awareness and understanding of their own value systems, professional ethical codes and ethical principles that can act as guides when they have to make choices in these situations, which are frequently challenging.

Electronic telephone directory listings : preferred sampling frame for a population-based study of childhood cancer in Australia

PURPOSE: We report our telephone-based system for selecting community control series appropriate for a complete Australia-wide series of Ewing's sarcoma cases. METHODS: We used electronic directory random sampling to select age-matched controls. The sampling has all listed telephone numbers on an up-dated CD-Rom. RESULTS: 95% of 2245 telephone numbers selected were successfully contacted. The mean number of attempts needed was 1.94, 58% answering at the first attempt. On average, we needed 4.5 contacts per control selected. Calls were more likely to be successful (reach a respondent) when made in the evening (except Saturdays). The overall response rate among contacted telephone numbers was 92.8%. Participation rates among female and male respondents were practically the same. The exclusion of unlisted numbers (13.5% of connected households) and unconnected households (3.7%) led to potential selection bias. However, restricting the case series to listed cases only, plus having external information on the direction of potential bias allow meaningful interpretation of our data. CONCLUSION: Sampling from an electronic directory is convenient, economical and simple, and gives a very good yield of eligible subjects compared to other methods.

Ethics and public health

Note: see later edition of this work at http://eprints.qut.edu.au/47632/ This chapter introduces you to the basic ethical principles that underpin public health practice. The themes to be considered in this chapter include: the characteristics of ‘ethics’, the justification for reflecting on ethics and values, the foundations of public health ethics, whether and how we can incorporate ethics and values into our practice and the nature of some of the potential ethical complications of public health practice.

Gamma-tocotrienol as an effective agent in targeting prostate cancer stem cell-like population

Emerging evidence supports that prostate cancer originates from a rare sub-population of cells, namely prostate cancer stem cells (CSCs). Conventional therapies for prostate cancer are believed to mainly target the majority of differentiated tumor cells but spare CSCs, which may account for the subsequent disease relapse after treatment. Therefore, successful elimination of CSCs may be an effective strategy to achieve complete remission from this disease. Gamma-tocotrienols (-T3) is one of the vitamin-E constituents which have been shown to have anticancer effects against a wide-range of human cancers. Recently, we have reported that -T3 treatment not only inhibits prostate cancer cell invasion but also sensitizes the cells to docetaxel-induced apoptosis, suggesting that -T3 may be an effective therapeutic agent against advanced stage prostate cancer. Here, we demonstrate for the first time that -T3 can down-regulate the expression of prostate CSC markers (CD133/CD44) in androgen independent (AI) prostate cancer cell lines (PC-3 & DU145), as evident from western blotting analysis. Meanwhile, the spheroid formation ability of the prostate cancer cells was significantly hampered by -T3 treatment. In addition, pre-treatment of PC-3 cells with -T3 was found to suppress tumor initiation ability of the cells. More importantly, while CD133-enriched PC-3 cells were highly resistant to docetaxel treatment, these cells were as sensitive to -T3 treatment as the CD133-depleted population. Our data suggest that -T3 may be an effective agent in targeting prostate CSCs, which may account for its anticancer and chemosensitizing effects reported in previous studies.

The ethics of regional water planning : planning and management of water resources in a growth region

Abstract Providing water infrastructure in times of accelerating climate change presents interesting new problems. Expanding demands must be met or managed in contexts of increasingly constrained sources of supply, raising ethical questions of equity and participation. Loss of agricultural land and natural habitats, the coastal impacts of desalination plants and concerns over re-use of waste water must be weighed with demand management issues of water rationing, pricing mechanisms and inducing behaviour change. This case study examines how these factors impact on infrastructure planning in South East Queensland, Australia: a region with one of the developed world’s most rapidly growing populations, which has recently experienced the most severe drought in its recorded history. Proposals to match forecast demands and potential supplies for water over a 20 year period are reviewed by applying ethical principles to evaluate practical plans to meet the water needs of the region’s activities and settlements.

Artful shaping : the ethics of fictionalising oral history

The paper documents the development of an ethical framework for my current PhD project. I am a practice-led researcher with a background in creative writing. My project invovles conducting a number of oral history interviews with individuals living in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. I use the interviews to inform a novel set in Brisbane. In doing so, I hope to provide a lens into a cultural and historical space by creating a rich, textured and vivid narrative while still retaining some of the essential aspects of the oral history. While developing a methodology for fictionalising these oral histories, I have encountered a derserve range of ethical issues. In particular I have had to confront my role as a writer and researcher working with other people’s stories. In order to grapple with the complex ethics of such an engagment, I examine the devices and stratedgies employed by other creative practioners working in similar fields. I focus chielfy on Miguel Barnet’s Biography of a Runaway Slave (published in English in 1968) Dave Eggers’What is the what: The autobiography of Valentino Achek Deng, a novel (2005) in order to understand the complex processes of mediation invloved in the artful shaping of oral histories. The paper explores how I have confronted and resolved ethical considerations in my theoretical and creative work.