Free pussy riot crazy quilt

Digital photographs sewn onto secondhand tie-dye t-shirts. The work continues Wyman's interest in exploring feminist strategies for negotiating individual and collective identiities, equality and social activism.

Prevalence and visual risk factors for falls in bilateral cataract patients in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Purpose To determine the prevalence of falls in the 12 months prior to cataract surgery and examine the associations between visual and other risk factors and falls among older bilateral cataract patients in Vietnam. Methods Data collected from 413 patients in the week before scheduled cataract surgery included a questionnaire and three objective visual tests. Results The outcome of interest was self-reported falls in the previous 12 months. A total of 13% (n = 53) of bilateral cataract patients reported 60 falls within the previous 12 months. After adjusting for age, sex, race, employment status, comorbidities, medication usage, refractive management, living status and the three objective visual tests in the worse eye, women (odds ratio, OR, 4.64, 95% confidence interval, CI, 1.85–11.66), and those who lived alone (OR 4.51, 95% CI 1.44–14.14) were at increased risk of a fall. Those who reported a comorbidity were at decreased risk of a fall (OR 0.43, 95% CI 0.19–0.95). Contrast sensitivity (OR 0.31, 95% CI 0.10–0.95) was the only significant visual test associated with a fall. These results were similar for the better eye, except the presence of a comorbidity was not significant (OR 0.45, 95% CI 0.20–1.02). Again, contrast sensitivity was the only significant visual factor associated with a fall (OR 0.15, 95% CI 0.04–0.53). Conclusion Bilateral cataract patients in Vietnam are potentially at high risk of falls and in need of falls prevention interventions. It may also be important for ophthalmologists and health professionals to consider contrast sensitivity measures when prioritizing cataract patients for surgery and assessing their risk of falls.

Travel Journalism : Exploring Production, Impact and Culture

Travel journalism has experienced enormous growth over recent decades, with a record number of media organizations now involved in producing information for tourists in one way or another. Correspondingly, journalism and media scholars have begun to pay more attention to this phenomenon. This book gives a comprehensive overview of the burgeoning field of travel journalism studies. The contributors explore travel journalism in newspapers and magazines, on television and online, across a wide range of national and cultural contexts. Individual chapters provide critical discussions of theoretical approaches, present studies of production, content and impact, and explain how travel journalism can be understood through the lenses of postcolonialism, sustainability and cosmopolitanism. This fascinating account offers a thoroughly international and interdisciplinary perspective on an increasingly important field of journalism scholarship.

New Dawn (Parts I & II)

New Dawn is a cross-media visual art project that comprises a multi–channel video work (Boxcopy ARI, Brisbane) and a series of sculptural works (MetroArts, Brisbane) both of which conflate the online spectacle of real events with virtual gaming. The purpose of this project is to question this new phenomenon and what are the political, social and economic repercussions for these new technological developments on our bodies and subjectivities. By doing this my work asks us to reflect on how we function as a society in response to these new spaces of interaction, how we might respond to the political dimensions of these expanded sites of inhabitation, and how they might also represent a more troubling scenario for the possibility of dissent or opposition in our media saturated culture. The work was shown at multiple venues simultaneously. One of the components of the work won the 2013 Sunshine Coast Art Prize for sculpture.

Organisational culture, leadership behaviour and job satisfaction among primary health care professionals in Saudi Arabia : a mixed-methods study

The purpose of this study was to improve individual and organisational performance in primary health care (PHC) by identifying the relationship between organisational culture, leadership behaviour and job satisfaction. The study used a sequential explanatory mixed methods design, to investigate the relationships between organisational culture, leadership behaviour, and job satisfaction among 550 PHCC professionals in Saudi Arabia. From surveying the PHC professionals, the results highlighted the importance of human caring qualities, including praise and recognition, consideration, and support, with respect to their perceptions of job satisfaction, leadership behaviour, and organisational culture. As a consequence a management framework was proposed to address these issues.

The N170 observed ‘in the wild’: robust event-related potentials to faces in cluttered dynamic visual scenes

As a social species in a constantly changing environment, humans rely heavily on the informational richness and communicative capacity of the face. Thus, understanding how the brain processes information about faces in real-time is of paramount importance. The N170 is a high temporal resolution electrophysiological index of the brain's early response to visual stimuli that is reliably elicited in carefully controlled laboratory-based studies. Although the N170 has often been reported to be of greatest amplitude to faces, there has been debate regarding whether this effect might be an artifact of certain aspects of the controlled experimental stimulation schedules and materials. To investigate whether the N170 can be identified in more realistic conditions with highly variable and cluttered visual images and accompanying auditory stimuli we recorded EEG 'in the wild', while participants watched pop videos. Scene-cuts to faces generated a clear N170 response, and this was larger than the N170 to transitions where the videos cut to non-face stimuli. Within participants, wild-type face N170 amplitudes were moderately correlated to those observed in a typical laboratory experiment. Thus, we demonstrate that the face N170 is a robust and ecologically valid phenomenon and not an artifact arising as an unintended consequence of some property of the more typical laboratory paradigm.

Better half-dead than read? The Mezzomorto cases and their implications for literary culture in the 1930s

This article focusses on the two libel cases arising from Brian Penton's review of Vivian Crockett's novel Mezzomorto for the Bulletin in 1934, viewing them as points of entry into Australian literary politics in the 1930s, and as windows on to one of the most enduring and interesting feuds in Australian literary culture, that between P.R. 'Inky' Stephensen, self-styled 'Bunyip Critic,' and Brian Penton, arch exponent of 'destructive criticism' and scourge of parochial pretension. The cases are particularly interesting for what they reveal about the evolving positions of two influential figures in Australian writing of the 1930s and 1940s. They also play in to contemporary debates about the state and status of 'literature' in Australia. And while Penton's biographer Patrick Buckridge avers that the cases did not impact on any of the larger contemporary literary issues (meaning censorship and free speech), a case may be made for the significance of the libel actions in the context of attempts to establish an industrial and cultural presence for a diverse range of Australian writing.

An organization of visual and auditory fear conditioning in the lateral amygdala

Pavlovian fear conditioning is an evolutionary conserved and extensively studied form of associative learning and memory. In mammals, the lateral amygdala (LA) is an essential locus for Pavlovian fear learning and memory. Despite significant progress unraveling the cellular mechanisms responsible for fear conditioning, very little is known about the anatomical organization of neurons encoding fear conditioning in the LA. One key question is how fear conditioning to different sensory stimuli is organized in LA neuronal ensembles. Here we show that Pavlovian fear conditioning, formed through either the auditory or visual sensory modality, activates a similar density of LA neurons expressing a learning-induced phosphorylated extracellular signal-regulated kinase (p-ERK1/2). While the size of the neuron population specific to either memory was similar, the anatomical distribution differed. Several discrete sites in the LA contained a small but significant number of p-ERK1/2-expressing neurons specific to either sensory modality. The sites were anatomically localized to different levels of the longitudinal plane and were independent of both memory strength and the relative size of the activated neuronal population, suggesting some portion of the memory trace for auditory and visually cued fear conditioning is allocated differently in the LA. Presenting the visual stimulus by itself did not activate the same p-ERK1/2 neuron density or pattern, confirming the novelty of light alone cannot account for the specific pattern of activated neurons after visual fear conditioning. Together, these findings reveal an anatomical distribution of visual and auditory fear conditioning at the level of neuronal ensembles in the LA.

Visual predictive control of spiral motion

This paper deals with constrained image-based visual servoing of circular and conical spiral motion about an unknown object approximating a single image point feature. Effective visual control of such trajectories has many applications for small unmanned aerial vehicles, including surveillance and inspection, forced landing (homing), and collision avoidance. A spherical camera model is used to derive a novel visual-predictive controller (VPC) using stability-based design methods for general nonlinear model-predictive control. In particular, a quasi-infinite horizon visual-predictive control scheme is derived. A terminal region, which is used as a constraint in the controller structure, can be used to guide appropriate reference image features for spiral tracking with respect to nominal stability and feasibility. Robustness properties are also discussed with respect to parameter uncertainty and additive noise. A comparison with competing visual-predictive control schemes is made, and some experimental results using a small quad rotor platform are given.

Effect of rod-cone interactions on mesopic visual performance mediated by chromatic and luminance pathways

We studied the effect of rod–cone interactions on mesopic visual reaction time (RT). Rod and cone photoreceptor excitations were independently controlled using a four-primary photostimulator. It was observed that (1) lateral rod–cone interactions increase the cone-mediated RTs; (2) the rod–cone interactions are strongest when rod sensitivity is maximal in a dark surround, but weaker with increased rod activity in a light surround; and (3) the presence of a dark surround nonselectively increased the mean and variability of chromatic (+L-M, S-cone) and luminance (L+M+S) RTs independent of the level of rod activity. The results demonstrate that lateral rod–cone interactions must be considered when deriving mesopic luminous efficiency using RT.

Simulated hyperopic anisometropia and reading, visual information processing, and reading-related eye movement performance in children

Purpose: This study investigated the impact of simulated hyperopic anisometropia and sustained near work on performance of academic-related measures in children. Methods: Participants included 16 children (mean age: 11.1 ± 0.8 years) with minimal refractive error. Academic-related outcome measures included a reading test (Neale Analysis of Reading Ability), visual information processing tests (Coding and Symbol Search subtests from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children) and a reading-related eye movement test (Developmental Eye Movement test). Performance was assessed with and without 0.75 D of imposed monocular hyperopic defocus (administered in a randomised order), before and after 20 minutes of sustained near work. Unilateral hyperopic defocus was systematically assigned to either the dominant or non-dominant sighting eye to evaluate the impact of ocular dominance on any performance decrements. Results: Simulated hyperopic anisometropia and sustained near work both independently reduced performance on all of the outcome measures (p<0.001). A significant interaction was also observed between simulated anisometropia and near work (p<0.05), with the greatest decrement in performance observed during simulated anisometropia in combination with sustained near work. Laterality of the refractive error simulation (ocular dominance) did not significantly influence the outcome measures (p>0.05). A reduction of up to 12% in performance was observed across the range of academic-related measures following sustained near work undertaken during the anisometropic simulation. Conclusion: Simulated hyperopic anisometropia significantly impaired academic–related performance, particularly in combination with sustained near work. The impact of uncorrected habitual anisometropia on academic-related performance in children requires further investigation.

The driving visual field and a history of motor vehicle collision involvement in older drivers: A population-based examination

Purpose We designed a visual field test focused on the field utilized while driving to examine associations between field impairment and motor vehicle collision involvement in 2,000 drivers ≥70 years old. Methods The "driving visual field test" involved measuring light sensitivity for 20 targets in each eye, extending 15° superiorly, 30° inferiorly, 60° temporally and 30° nasally. The target locations were selected on the basis that they fell within the field region utilized when viewing through the windshield of a vehicle or viewing the dashboard while driving. Monocular fields were combined into a binocular field based on the more sensitive point from each eye. Severe impairment in the overall field or a region was defined as average sensitivity in the lowest quartile of sensitivity. At-fault collision involvement for five years prior to enrollment was obtained from state records. Poisson regression was used to calculate crude and adjusted rate ratios examining the association between field impairment and at-fault collision involvement. Results Drivers with severe binocular field impairment in the overall driving visual field had a 40% increased rate of at-fault collision involvement (RR 1.40, 95%CI 1.07-1.83). Impairment in the lower and left fields was associated with elevated collision rates (RR 1.40 95%CI 1.07-1.82 and RR 1.49, 95%CI 1.15-1.92, respectively), whereas impairment in the upper and right field regions was not. Conclusions Results suggest that older drivers with severe impairment in the lower or left region of the driving visual field are more likely to have a history of at-fault collision involvement.

Seeing pedestrians at night : effect of driver age and visual abilities

Purpose To quantify the effects of driver age on night-time pedestrian conspicuity, and to determine whether individual differences in visual performance can predict drivers' ability to recognise pedestrians at night. Methods Participants were 32 visually normal drivers (20 younger: M = 24.4 years ± 6.4 years; 12 older: M = 72.0 years ± 5.0 years). Visual performance was measured in a laboratory-based testing session including visual acuity, contrast sensitivity, motion sensitivity and the useful field of view. Night-time pedestrian recognition distances were recorded while participants drove an instrumented vehicle along a closed road course at night; to increase the workload of drivers, auditory and visual distracter tasks were presented for some of the laps. Pedestrians walked in place, sideways to the oncoming vehicles, and wore either a standard high visibility reflective vest or reflective tape positioned on the movable joints (biological motion). Results Driver age and pedestrian clothing significantly (p < 0.05) affected the distance at which the drivers first responded to the pedestrians. Older drivers recognised pedestrians at approximately half the distance of the younger drivers and pedestrians were recognised more often and at longer distances when they wore a biological motion reflective clothing configuration than when they wore a reflective vest. Motion sensitivity was an independent predictor of pedestrian recognition distance, even when controlling for driver age. Conclusions The night-time pedestrian recognition capacity of older drivers was significantly worse than that of younger drivers. The distance at which drivers first recognised pedestrians at night was best predicted by a test of motion sensitivity.

Visual function and the ageing visual system

The population is ageing. Globally, the number of older adults (aged 60 years or over) is expected to more than double, from 841 million people in 2013 to more than 2 billion in 2050.1 In light of the increasing size of the older adult population, there is a pressing need to better identify the nature of, and mechanisms underlying, age-related vision impairment and the functional impact it has on the performance of everyday activities in older adults. The content of this feature issue reflects the diversity of research currently being undertaken on the topic of the ageing visual system and the important visual challenges that this presents for our ageing patient population. The scope is broad and includes topics relating to three main related themes: 1) The treatment of age-related ocular disorders and diseases and their consequences, including presbyopia and AMD; 2) The impact of age-related visual changes on everyday activities in older people, including mobility, driving and falls, and; 3) The interaction of age-related visual impairments and other age-related impairments including hearing and cognitive changes.

The visual and functional impacts of astigmatism and its clinical management

Purpose: To provide a comprehensive overview of research examining the impact of astigmatism on clinical and functional measures of vision, the short and longer term adaptations to astigmatism that occur in the visual system, and the currently available clinical options for the management of patients with astigmatism. Recent findings: The presence of astigmatism can lead to substantial reductions in visual performance in a variety of clinical vision measures and functional visual tasks. Recent evidence demonstrates that astigmatic blur results in short-term adaptations in the visual system that appear to reduce the perceived impact of astigmatism on vision. In the longer term, uncorrected astigmatism in childhood can also significantly impact on visual development, resulting in amblyopia. Astigmatism is also associated with the development of spherical refractive errors. Although the clinical correction of small magnitudes of astigmatism is relatively straightforward, the precise, reliable correction of astigmatism (particularly high astigmatism) can be challenging. A wide variety of refractive corrections are now available for the patient with astigmatism, including spectacle, contact lens and surgical options. Conclusion: Astigmatism is one of the most common refractive errors managed in clinical ophthalmic practice. The significant visual and functional impacts of astigmatism emphasise the importance of its reliable clinical management. With continued improvements in ocular measurement techniques and developments in a range of different refractive correction technologies, the future promises the potential for more precise and comprehensive correction options for astigmatic patients.