Youth off the Streets "Our Place, Walgett Youth and Young Families Project" Project Evaluation.

The Project: • YOTS is a major youth specific agency established in 1991. It is a non-denominational, non-discriminatory and not-for-profit organisation, providing a wide range of services and offering a full continuum of care. It seeks to build on the strengths and positive aspects of marginalised young people and communities. • The 'Our Place, Walgett Youth and Young Families Project' further develops an existing YOTS capacity to provide services to Aboriginal young people. • The project adopted an action-research and community development model in which YOTS worked in partnership with the Youth Sub-committee of the Walgett Interagency. • Specific goals/objectives of the program were to: Coordinate youth and young family activities in partnership with local services and the community to build self-esteem, pride, resilience, motivation and skills; Contribute to the prevention and reduction of homelessness, unstable and unsafe housing and disruptive mobility (Walgett/Redfern) in youth and young families; Increase and improve collaborative engagement between youth and family focused services; and, research, adapt and implement Australian and international best-practice homelessness prevention/reduction initiatives to contribute to new models of practice relevant to rural and regional areas. • The project centred around an out-reach model that focused on providing a safe space with relevant structured activities coordinated by YOTS youth and family workers. Through community and service provider consultation, it was proposed that local services could coordinate strategies and activities and run them, where possible, from the centre, providing ease of access in a safe and supportive context. • Specific activities included: Implementing regular meetings with the stakeholders and community representatives; Developing a Terms of Reference for YOTS presence in the Walgett community; Undertaking a community consultation prior to finalising program activities; Implementing a range of recreational activities (sports, music, arts and crafts) early on in the activity; Implementing young family support initiatives; implementing a volunteering program, including volunteer support to young families through intergenerational volunteering; running a series of Culture and Healing Camps in partnership with local Elders and other services; Running a series of Music Camps; Providing alternative education support and referrals in partnership with local schools; Researching, identifying and adapting other best-practice models.

Evaluation of Indigenous justice programs.: final report / Project D, Safe Aboriginal Youth Patrol Programs in New South Wales and Northbridge Policy and Juvenile Aid Group in Western Australia

The Australian Government has provided funding to evaluate the effectiveness of Indigenous law and justice programs across five subject areas to identify the best approaches to tackling crime and justice issues and better inform government funding decisions in the future. This report presents the findings of subject area "D", which examined two different approaches to delivering community and night patrol services for young people: the Safe Aboriginal Youth Patrol programs in New South Wales, and the Northbridge Policy project (the Young People in Northbridge project), in Western Australia. Night patrols can address crime either directly or indirectly, by prevention work or by addressing the social causes of crime through community development.

Evolution of New Zealand insects : summary and prospectus for future research

Knowledge on the evolution of the New Zealand insect fauna is reviewed and outstanding questions are highlighted. The New Zealand insect fauna is a composite of old and recent lineages and many spectacular examples of evolutionary processes are evident, including species radiations, hybridisation and unusual adaptations. We discuss the origins and evolution of four prominent communities within the insect fauna: terrestrial lowland insects, alpine insects, aquatic insects and insect communities from offshore islands. Within each of these communities, significant lineages are discussed, and in particular the crucial adaptations that enable these lineages to thrive and diversify. Glacial history has had a dramatic impact on the New Zealand insects, and the effects on different lineages are discussed. The New Zealand insects are unique, yet many are threatened with extinction, and efforts to preserve the fauna are reviewed. Despite the accumulating knowledge, major gaps still exist and these are outlined, as are opportunities to address key questions. The review concludes with a synthesis and a discussion of how systematics, new technologies and integrative approaches have the promise to improve dramatically our understanding of New Zealand insect evolution.

Toward a model for forming psychological safety climate in construction project management

The nature of construction projects and their delivery exposes participants to accidents and dangers. Safety climate serves as a frame of reference for employees to make sense of safety measures in the workplace and adapt their behaviors. Though safety climate research abounds, fewer efforts are made to investigate the formation of a safety climate. An effort to explore forming psychological safety climate, an operationalization of safety climate at the individual level, is an appropriate starting point. Taking the view that projects are social processes, this paper develops a conceptual framework of forming the psychological safety climate, and provides a preliminary validation. The model suggests that management can create the desired psychological safety climate by efforts from structural, perceptual, interactive, and cultural perspectives. Future empirical research can be built on the model to provide a more comprehensive and coherent picture of the determinants of safety climate.

Preventing infections through cleaner hospitals project

While many Australian hospitals have good infection control practices, research about the role cleaning in the hospital environment plays in preventing infections is limited.

A hybrid quality function deployment and cybernetic analytic network process model for project manager selection

Identifying appropriate decision criteria and making optimal decisions in a structured way is a complex process. This paper presents an approach for doing this in the form of a hybrid Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and Cybernetic Analytic Network Process (CANP) model for project manager selection. This involves the use of QFD to translate the owner's project management expectations into selection criteria and the CANP to weight the expectations and selection criteria. The supermatrix approach then prioritises the candidates with respect to the overall decision-making goal. A case study is used to demonstrate the use of the model in selecting a renovation project manager. This involves the development of 18 selection criteria in response to the owner's three main expectations of time, cost and quality.

Importance of knowledge management processes in a project-based organization : a case study of research enterprise

Knowledge Management (KM) is vital factor to successfully undertake projects. The temporary nature of projects necessitates employing useful KM practices for tackling issues such as knowledge leakiness and rework. The Project Management Office (PMO) is a unit within organizations to facilitate and oversee organizational projects. Project Management Maturity Models (PMMM) shows the development of PMOs from immature to mature levels. The existing PMMMs have focused on discussing Project Management (PM) practices, however, the management of project knowledge is yet to be addressed, at various levels of maturity. This research project was undertaken to investigate the mentioned gap for addressing KM practices at the existing PMMMs. Due to the exploratory and inductive nature of this research, qualitative methods were chosen as the research methodology. In total, three cases selected from different industries: research; mining and government organizations, to provide broad categories for research and research questions were examined using the developed framework. This paper presents the partial findings of undertaken investigation of the research organisation with the lowest level of maturity. The result shows that knowledge creation and capturing are the most important processes, while knowledge transferring and reusing are not as important as the other two processes. In addition, it was revealed that provision of “knowledge about client” and “project management knowledge” are the most important types of knowledge that are required at this level of maturity. In conclusion, the outcomes of this paper shall provide powerful guidance to PMOs at lowest level of maturity from KM point of view.

Developing graduate TPACK capabilities in initial teacher education programs: Insights from the Teaching Teachers for the Future Project

There is increased accountability of initial teacher education (ITE) programs in Australia to develop Graduate teachers who are better prepared. Most ITE programs have been designed using Pedagogical Content Knowledge. Informed by the growing Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) research, this journal article suggests that ITE programs need to develop Graduate teachers who have the TPACK capabilities to use technologies to support teaching and student learning. Insights from the research and evaluation of the Teaching Teachers for the Future (TTF) Project, which was guided by the TPACK conceptualisation, are provided. The TTF Project, which involved all Higher Education Institutions providing ITE programs in Australia, drew upon the TPACK conceptualisation. The TTF Project research and evaluation included the development and administration of a TTF TPACK Survey and the implementation of the Most Significant Change Methodology. Key findings resulting from the employment of these methodologies are summarised to provide guidance to inform the improvement of ITE programs to develop Graduate TPACK capabilities.

Student reporting abroad : a journalism project built on internationalisation

This article updates research by the writer on overseas reporting trips for Australian Journalism students, conducted since 2000. It describes changing educational contexts, with expanded internationalisation and work integrated learning. A precursor of both, the trips project provides a Faculty-level model for implementing such changes. Previous research, to 2008, recorded 60 students making nine field trips, to South-east Asia, China, Papua New Guinea or Europe. Participants working as foreign correspondents for campus-based media outlets, would apply that experience to theoretical work, e.g. on international journalism or inter-cultural issues. The research has supported arguments for internationalisation of the curriculum, positing that intensified experience will concentrate the mind, improve skills and stimulate reflection. The present work goes further, with more individual and detailed probing of student responses. As a case study, nine participants travelling to South-east Asia and Europe in 2012 documented their experience and their reflective work. The investigation concludes such travel programs can be highly effective in core learning.

The BAD project: data mining, database and prediction of protein adsorption on surfaces

Protein adsorption at solid-liquid interfaces is critical to many applications, including biomaterials, protein microarrays and lab-on-a-chip devices. Despite this general interest, and a large amount of research in the last half a century, protein adsorption cannot be predicted with an engineering level, design-orientated accuracy. Here we describe a Biomolecular Adsorption Database (BAD), freely available online, which archives the published protein adsorption data. Piecewise linear regression with breakpoint applied to the data in the BAD suggests that the input variables to protein adsorption, i.e., protein concentration in solution; protein descriptors derived from primary structure (number of residues, global protein hydrophobicity and range of amino acid hydrophobicity, isoelectric point); surface descriptors (contact angle); and fluid environment descriptors (pH, ionic strength), correlate well with the output variable-the protein concentration on the surface. Furthermore, neural network analysis revealed that the size of the BAD makes it sufficiently representative, with a neural network-based predictive error of 5% or less. Interestingly, a consistently better fit is obtained if the BAD is divided in two separate sub-sets representing protein adsorption on hydrophilic and hydrophobic surfaces, respectively. Based on these findings, selected entries from the BAD have been used to construct neural network-based estimation routines, which predict the amount of adsorbed protein, the thickness of the adsorbed layer and the surface tension of the protein-covered surface. While the BAD is of general interest, the prediction of the thickness and the surface tension of the protein-covered layers are of particular relevance to the design of microfluidics devices.