Introduction

"The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is a major new international principle, adopted unanimously in 2005 by Heads of State and Government. Whilst it is broadly acknowledged that the principle has an important and intimate relationship with international law, especially the law relating to sovereignty, peace and security, human rights and armed conflict, there has yet to be a volume dedicated to this question. The Responsibility to Protect and International Law fills that gap by bringing together leading scholars from North America, Europe and Australia to examine R2P’s legal content. The Responsibility to Protect and International Law focuses on questions relating to R2P’s legal quality, its relationship with sovereignty, and the question of whether the norm establishes legal obligations. It also aims to introduce readers to different legal perspectives, including feminism, and pressing practical questions such as how the law might be used to prevent genocide and mass atrocities, and punish the perpetrators."--publisher website

Conclusion

"The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is a major new international principle, adopted unanimously in 2005 by Heads of State and Government. Whilst it is broadly acknowledged that the principle has an important and intimate relationship with international law, especially the law relating to sovereignty, peace and security, human rights and armed conflict, there has yet to be a volume dedicated to this question. The Responsibility to Protect and International Law fills that gap by bringing together leading scholars from North America, Europe and Australia to examine R2P’s legal content."--publisher website

Crime, Justice and Social Democracy: Proceedings of the Second International Conference, 2013, volume 2

The refereed papers contained in this volume of conference proceedings were among those presented at the 2nd International Conference on Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, hosted by the Crime and Justice Research Centre, Faculty of Law, QUT, from 8 – 11 July 2013. The conference attracted an impressive list of speakers from Australasia, Europe, North America and Latin America. These seven papers can be viewed at the Crime and Justice Research Centre’s website at http://crimejusticeconference.com/publications/ as can Volume 1 representing another 26 selected papers from the conference. As with the papers contained in the first volume, this set of papers raises important questions about the links between crime, justice and social democracy, and continues the contribution that the Crime and Justice Research Centre makes towards engaging with these topics. We thank all those who submitted papers for review for this second volume of proceedings, as well as the peer reviewers for taking the time to review the papers, often within very tight timelines.

Australian eco-pastoral poetry

Les Murray and Judith Wright are two Australian poets who are widely read as landscape poets. While this framing offers valuable insights into their work it often fails to bring the importance into a contemporary context or to recognise the long tradition Australia has had with , to use Leo Marx’ term, “the complex pastoral”. As Ruth Blair reminds us in her chapter “Hugging the Shore: The Green Mountains of South-East Queensland” in The Littoral Zone: Australian Contexts and their Writers it is accepted that North America has a tradition of the complex pastoral mode but it should be remembered that Australia also has a long history of this form. Both Judith Wright’s and Les Murray’s poetry encourages active campaigning for the environment .These Australian poets are eco-pastoral poets whose poetry encourages active reading rather than passive reflections. Their poetry speaks to the strong connection between the lived everyday landscape and the imagination of past, present and future. Their work is imbued with a strong sense of ecocritical awareness while at the same time drawing on pastoral conventions. These two Australian poets do not offer idealistic pastoral notions but rather reveal the complexities of lived human/nonhuman relationships. This paper will discuss these complexities and how poetry can be experienced as literature in action—ways for readers to connect with and negotiate with the land they inhabit. The research for this paper was, in part, drawn from the responses that local community library groups offered after reading the works of these poets. What became evident from this research was the way the poetry made the readers think not only of landscape as a place of refuge from the urban technological world but also as a contemporary place with connection to agency that motivates readers into active change.

Overview of the ShARe/CLEF eHealth Evaluation Lab 2014

This paper reports on the 2nd ShARe/CLEFeHealth evaluation lab which continues our evaluation resource building activities for the medical domain. In this lab we focus on patients' information needs as opposed to the more common campaign focus of the specialised information needs of physicians and other healthcare workers. The usage scenario of the lab is to ease patients and next-of-kins' ease in understanding eHealth information, in particular clinical reports. The 1st ShARe/CLEFeHealth evaluation lab was held in 2013. This lab consisted of three tasks. Task 1 focused on named entity recognition and normalization of disorders; Task 2 on normalization of acronyms/abbreviations; and Task 3 on information retrieval to address questions patients may have when reading clinical reports. This year's lab introduces a new challenge in Task 1 on visual-interactive search and exploration of eHealth data. Its aim is to help patients (or their next-of-kin) in readability issues related to their hospital discharge documents and related information search on the Internet. Task 2 then continues the information extraction work of the 2013 lab, specifically focusing on disorder attribute identification and normalization from clinical text. Finally, this year's Task 3 further extends the 2013 information retrieval task, by cleaning the 2013 document collection and introducing a new query generation method and multilingual queries. De-identified clinical reports used by the three tasks were from US intensive care and originated from the MIMIC II database. Other text documents for Tasks 1 and 3 were from the Internet and originated from the Khresmoi project. Task 2 annotations originated from the ShARe annotations. For Tasks 1 and 3, new annotations, queries, and relevance assessments were created. 50, 79, and 91 people registered their interest in Tasks 1, 2, and 3, respectively. 24 unique teams participated with 1, 10, and 14 teams in Tasks 1, 2 and 3, respectively. The teams were from Africa, Asia, Canada, Europe, and North America. The Task 1 submission, reviewed by 5 expert peers, related to the task evaluation category of Effective use of interaction and targeted the needs of both expert and novice users. The best system had an Accuracy of 0.868 in Task 2a, an F1-score of 0.576 in Task 2b, and Precision at 10 (P@10) of 0.756 in Task 3. The results demonstrate the substantial community interest and capabilities of these systems in making clinical reports easier to understand for patients. The organisers have made data and tools available for future research and development.

Regulating supply-chains to address the occupational health and safety problems associated with precarious employment: The case of home-based clothing workers in Australia

Over the past 20 years the labour market, workforce and work organisation of most if not all industrialised countries have been significantly refashioned by the increased use of more flexible work arrangements, variously labelled as precarious employment or contingent work. There is now a substantial and growing body of international evidence that many of these arrangements are associated with a significant deterioration in occupational health and safety (OHS), using a range of measures such as injury rates, disease, hazard exposures and work-related stress. Moreover, there is an emerging body of evidence that these arrangements pose particular problems for conventional regulatory regimes. Recognition of these problems has aroused the concern of policy makers - especially in Europe, North America and Australia - and a number of responses have been adopted in terms of modifying legislation, producing new guidance material and codes of practice and revised enforcement practices. This article describes one such in itiative in Australia with regard to home-based clothing workers. The regulatory strategy developed in one Australian jurisdiction (and now being ‘exported’ into others) seeks to counter this process via contractual tracking mechanisms to follow the work, tie in liability and shift overarching legal responsibility to the top of the supply chain. The process also entails the integration of minimum standards relating to wages, hours and working conditions; OHS and access to workers’ compensation. While home-based clothing manufacture represents a very old type of ‘flexible’ work arrangement, it is one that regulators have found especially difficult to address. Further, the elaborate multi-tiered subcont racting and diffuse work locations found in this industry are also characteristic of newer forms of contingent work in other industries (such as some telework) and the regulatory challenges they pose (such as the tendency of elaborate supply chains to attenuate and fracture statutory responsibilities, at least in terms of the attitudes and behaviour of those involved).

Assessment of robust autonomy for unmanned systems : progress and challenges

The growing number of potential applications of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) in civilian operations and national security is putting pressure of National Airworthiness Authorities to provide a path for certification and allow UAS integration into the national airspace. The success of this integration depends not only on developments in improved UAS reliability and safety, but also on regulations for certification, and methodologies for operational performance and safety assessment. This paper focuses on the latter and describes progress in relation to a previously proposed framework for evaluating robust autonomy of UAS. The paper draws parallels between the proposed evaluation framework and the evaluation of pilots during the licensing process. It discusses how the data from the proposed evaluation can be used as an aid for decision making in certification and UAS designs. Finally, it discusses challenges associated with the evaluation.

Advances in the science of objective physical activity monitoring : 3rd International Conference on Ambulatory Monitoring of Physical Activity and Movement

Editorial: This theme issue of BJSM presents key papers from the 3rd International Conference on Ambulatory Monitoring of Physical Activity and Movement (ICAMPAM). The July 2013 conference was hosted by the University of Massachusetts and was attended by researchers, clinicians, students and technology vendors for North America, Europe, Australasia and Asia...

Institutionalization

During the 18th and 19th centuries, prostitution came to be understood as a potentially disruptive element in the management of society. New forms of social control developed that sought to transform the souls of prostitutes to better control their bodies. Institutions for managing prostitutes, such as Magdalen Homes and lock hospitals, were introduced or increased in number throughout the British Empire, North America, and Western Europe. Often these institutions had as their stated objective the physical purification and moral reform of prostitutes, appearing to make a dramatic break with earlier methods of social control that had relied on practices of physical punishment and spatial segregation. Emergent institutions for the social control of prostitutes used a regimen of religious training, hard labor, and medical expertise. The objective of the Magdalen Home was not to punish sin but to absolve it, while the function of the lock hospital was not simply to confine the ill, but to confine the ill to "cure" them. The role of these institutions was not only symbolic, mirroring in some way the operation of earlier forms of social control, but was also practical and transformative. The mass institutionalization of prostitutes that occurred during the 18th and 19th centuries produced and emphasized sexual, class, and gender boundaries, grounded in the broad distinction between "pure" and "impure" women. Because of its association with sin, prostitution before the 18th century had been constructed as a religious problem relating to salvation and penitence. Throughout Western Europe during the Middle Ages, prostitutes, like the medieval leper and the Jew, were subject to restrictions designed to distinguish and isolate them from other members of their communities. The repression of prostitution during the Middle Ages was neither systematic nor highly organized, although it reinforced the image of the prostitute as sinful "other".

Penal Colonies

Prostitution has been closely associated with the transportation of women convicts to British penal colonies. Convict labor was used to found a number of British colonies including Barbados, Jamaica, Maryland, Virginia, Singapore, New South Wales, Tasmania, and Western Australia. Between 1607 and 1939, Britain transported approximately 400,000 convicts, 162,000 of whom came to Australia and about 50,000 to North America. Significant numbers of women were among those transported to the Australian and North American colonies, although their numbers were relatively small in comparison to male convicts. Transportation was typically reserved for the most recalcitrant of female offenders. Most women transported came from working-class populations, resided in metropolitan centers, and were single at the time of their offense. Although few of these women were actually sentenced for activities associated with prostitution, large numbers had a history of involvement with prostitution. Transportation was considered to offer prostitutes a chance at redemption, with colonial commentators drawing contrasts between the Old World and its vice-ridden sensuality and the colonies, which offered opportunities for redemption through religious devotion and hard work. Many women transported to the Australian colonies were described by officials as being "on the town" at their time of apprehension and were collectively considered to be "damned whores, possessed of neither virtue nor honesty". Recently, historians have argued that these assessments were emblematic of middle-class prejudices toward the open and aggressive sexuality of working-class women. The number of convict women involved in prostitution may have been higher than recorded crimes, typically involving "larceny", suggest. A number of women were charged with theft from men who had paid them (or, in some instances, refused to pay them) for sex. Historians have estimated that one in five convict women were part-time or full-time prostitutes before transportation. Many continued in prostitution after transportation, with prostitution becoming an important element in the social and economic life of the Australian colonies, where, between 1788-1830, men outnumbered women six to one. Officially, prostitution was tolerated to dissuade men from vice. For women, prostitution presented a means of securing physical protection and accommodation at a time when general amenities and employment opportunities were restricted.

Factors influencing bike share membership : an analysis of Melbourne and Brisbane

The number of bike share programs has increased rapidly in recent years and there are currently over 700 programs in operation globally. Australia’s two bike share programs have been in operation since 2010 and have significantly lower usage rates compared to Europe, North America and China. This study sets out to understand and quantify the factors influencing bike share membership in Australia’s two bike share programs located in Melbourne and Brisbane. An online survey was administered to members of both programs as well as a group with no known association with bike share. A logistic regression model revealed several significant predictors of membership including reactions to mandatory helmet legislation, riding activity over the previous month, and the degree to which convenience motivated private bike riding. In addition, respondents aged 18 - 34 and having docking station within 250m of their workplace were found to be statistically significant predictors of bike share membership. Finally, those with relatively high incomes increased the odds of membership. These results provide insight as to the relative influence of various factors impacting on bike share membership in Australia. The findings may assist bike share operators to maximize membership potential and help achieve the primary goal of bike share – to increase the sustainability of the transport system.

A continent-wide study reveals clear relationships between regional abiotic conditions and post-dispersal seed predation

Aim Large-scale patterns linking energy availability, biological productivity and diversity form a central focus of ecology. Despite evidence that the activity and abundance of animals may be limited by climatic variables associated with regional biological productivity (e.g. mean annual precipitation and annual actual evapotranspiration), it is unclear whether plant–granivore interactions are themselves influenced by these climatic factors across broad spatial extents. We evaluated whether climatic conditions that are known to alter the abundance and activity of granivorous animals also affect rates of seed removal. Location Eleven sites across temperate North America. Methods We used a common protocol to assess the removal of the same seed species (Avena sativa) over a 2-day period. Model selection via the Akaike information criterion was used to determine a set of candidate binomial generalized linear mixed models that evaluated the relationship between local climatic data and post-dispersal seed predation. Results Annual actual evapotranspiration was the single best predictor of the proportion of seeds removed. Annual actual evapotranspiration and mean annual precipitation were both positively related to mean seed removal and were included in four and three of the top five models, respectively. Annual temperature range was also positively related to seed removal and was an explanatory variable in three of the top four models. Main conclusions Our work provides the first evidence that energy and precipitation, which are known to affect consumer abundance and activity, also translate to strong, predictable patterns of seed predation across a continent. More generally, these findings suggest that future changes in temperature and precipitation could have widespread consequences for plant species composition in grasslands, through impacts on plant recruitment.

Learning Chinese as a heritage language in Australia and beyond : the role of capital

The benefits of learning and retaining heritage languages are well documented in the literature. Chinese heritage language learners’ commitment to their heritage language learning has gained significant research ground in social psychological and post-structural schools, with empirical evidence predominantly emerging from the North American contexts. There is scant sociological examination of similar problems conducted outside North America. The current study aims to make a contribution in this regard. The use of Bourdieu's sociological notion of capital in the Australian context complements the social psychological and post-structural work predominantly produced in the North American contexts. The initial quantitative sub-study analyses the impacts of various resources on the Chinese heritage language proficiency of 230 snowball-sampled Chinese Australian respondents to an online survey. The subsequent qualitative sub-study explores the profits of learning Chinese heritage language through interviews with a subset of the survey sample. Findings indicate that cultural, social, and symbolic capital significantly positively contributes to Chinese Australians’ Chinese heritage language proficiency, which, in return, produces profits in different forms of capital. The study suggests a reciprocal relationship between ‘capital’ and Chinese heritage language proficiency.

Surveillance snapshot of Clostridium difficile infection in hospitals across Queensland detects binary toxin producing ribotype UK 244

In North America and Europe, the binary toxin positive Clostridium difficile strains of the ribotypes 027 and 078 have been associated with death, toxic megacolon and other adverse outcomes. Following an increase in C. difficile infections (CDIs) in Queensland, a prevalence study involving 175 hospitals was undertaken in early 2012, identifying 168 cases of CDI over a 2 month period. Patient demographics and clinical characteristics were recorded, and C. difficile isolates were ribotyped and tested for the presence of binary toxin genes. Most patients (106/168, 63.1%) were aged over 60 years. Overall, 98 (58.3%) developed symptoms after hospitalisation; 89 cases (53.0%) developed symptoms more than 48 hours after admission. Furthermore, 27 of the 62 (67.7%) patients who developed symptoms in the community ad been hospitalised within the last 3 months. Thirteen of the 168 (7.7%) cases identified had severe disease, resulting in admission to the Intensive Care Unit or death within 30 days of the onset of symptoms. The 3 most common ribotypes isolated were UK 002 (22.9%), UK 014 (13.3%) and the binary toxin-positive ribotype UK 244 (8.4%). The only other binary toxin positive ribotype isolated was UK 078 (n = 1). Of concern was the detection of the binary toxin positive ribotype UK 244, which has recently been described in other parts of Australia and New Zealand. No isolates were of the international epidemic clone of ribotype UK 027, although ribotype UK 244 is genetically related to this clone. Further studies are required to track the epidemiology of ribotype UK 244 in Australia and New Zealand. Commun Dis Intell 2014;38(4):E279–E284.

Urban Form at the Edge : Proceedings from ISUF 2013 [Volume 1]

Urban morphology as a field of study has developed primarily in Europe and North America, and more recently emerging as a recurrent topic in China and South America. As a counterpoint to this centric view, the ISUF 2013 conference explored aspects of ‘urban form at the edge’. In particular the conference examined ‘off centre areas’ such as India, Africa, Middle East, Central Asia and Australasia which require innovative approaches to the study of traditional, as well as post-colonial and contemporary, morphologies. Broader interpretations of urban form at the edge focus on minor centres and suburbia, with their developing and transilient character; edge cities and regional centres; and new technologies and approaches that are developing alongside established methods, tools and theories of urban morphology...