A Worthwhile Exchange - a Guide to Indigenous Philanthropy: research findings and success stories from philanthropy supporting Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander People.

The Guide includes research findings from the Australian Centre for Philanthropy and Non Profit Studies at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). This research probed the experiences of fourteen Indigenous people who have had different degrees of success in seeking funding from philanthropic organisations. This research shows how grantmakers can make a significant difference in the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

A discourse on the non-method

In spite of the activism of professional bodies and researchers, empirical evidence shows that project management still does not deliver the expected benefits and promises. Hence, many have questioned the validity of the hegemonic rationalist paradigm anchored in the Enlightenment and Natural Sciences tradition supporting project management research and practice for the last 60 years and the lack of relevance to practice of the current conceptual base of project management. In order to address these limitations many authors, taking a post-modernist stance in social sciences, build on ‘pre-modern’ philosophies such as the Aristotelian one, specially emphasizing the role of praxis (activity), and phronesis (practical wisdom, prudence). Indeed, ‘Praxis … is the central category of the philosophy which is not merely an interpretation of the world, but is also a guide to its transformation …’ (Vazquez, 1977:. 149). Therefore, praxis offers an important focus for practitioners and researchers in social sciences, one in which theory is integrated with practice at the point of intervention. Simply stated, praxis can serve as a common ground for those interested in basic and applied research by providing knowledge of the reality in which action, informed by theory, takes place. Consequently, I suggest a ‘praxeological’ style of reasoning (praxeology being defined as study or science of human actions and conduct, including praxis, practices and phronesis) and to go beyond the ‘Theory-Practice’ divide. Moreover, I argue that we need to move away from the current dichotomy between the two classes ‘scholars experts-researchers’ and ‘managers/workers-practitioners-participants’. Considering one single class of ‘PraXitioner’, becoming a phronimos, may contribute to create new perspectives and open up new ways of thinking and acting in project situations. Thus, I call for a Perestroika in researching and acting in project management situations. My intent is to suggest a balanced praxeological view of the apparent opposition between social and natural science approaches. I explore, in this chapter, three key questions, covering the ontological, epistemological and praxeological dimensions of project management in action. 1. Are the research approaches being currently used appropriate for generating contributions that matter to both theory and practice with regards to what a ‘project’ is or to what we do when we call a specific situation ‘a project’? 2. On the basis of which intellectual virtues is the knowledge generated and what is the impact for theory and practice? 3. Are the modes of action of the practitioners ‘prudent’ and are they differentiating or reconciling formal and abstract rationality from substantive rationality and situated reasoning with regards to the mode of action they adopt in particular project situations? The investigation of the above questions leads me to debate about ‘Project Management-as-Praxis’, and to suggest ‘A’ (not ‘THE’) ‘praxeological’ style of reasoning and mode of inquiry – acknowledging a non-paradigmatic, subjective and kaleidoscopic perspective – for ‘Knowing-as-Practicing’ in project management. In short, this is about making a ‘Projects Science’ that matters.

Folk opera : stories crossing borders in Papua New Guinea

The Life Drama project is a drama-based sexual health promotion project, developed by a cross-cultural research team in Papua New Guinea (PNG) over the past four years. Recognising the limitations of established theatre-in-education and theatre-for-development approaches when working across cultures, the research team explored ways of tapping into the everyday performativity of PNG participants and their communities in order to communicate more powerfully about the personal and social issues involved in sexual health. Through the Folk Opera form, developed by PNG theatre company Raun Raun Theatre around the time of national Independence, the research explored the importance of ‘story’ in identity formation, maintenance and change, the communication of meaning, and the transmission of tacit local knowledges. In a highly diverse and rapidly-changing country like PNG, enacted stories inherently compel the exchange and exploration of different knowledges, and promote the dialogue and ownership that drives social change. The paper will present and unpack the folk opera form as developed in the Life Drama program, drawing conclusions which may apply to other programs which to promote health and social justice across cultures.

The remediation of the personal photograph and the politics of self-representation in digital storytelling

Over the past couple of decades, the cultural field formerly known as ‘domestic’, and later ‘personal’ photography has been remediated and transformed as part of the social web, with its convergence of personal expression, interpersonal communication, and online social networks (most recently via platforms like Flickr, Facebook and Twitter). Meanwhile, the Digital Storytelling movement (involving the workshop-based production of short autobiographical videos) from its beginnings in the mid 1990s relied heavily on the narrative power of the personal photograph, often sourced from family albums, and later from online archives. This paper addresses the new issues arising for the politics of self-representation and personal photography in the era of social media, focusing particularly on the consequences of online image-sharing. It discusses in detail the practices of selection, curation, manipulation and editing of personal photographic images among a group of activist-oriented queer digital storytellers who have in common a stated desire to share their personal stories in pursuit of social change, and whose stories often aim to address both intimate and antagonistic publics.

Improving short utterance based I-vector speaker recognition using source and utterance-duration normalization techniques

A significant amount of speech is typically required for speaker verification system development and evaluation, especially in the presence of large intersession variability. This paper introduces a source and utterance duration normalized linear discriminant analysis (SUN-LDA) approaches to compensate session variability in short-utterance i-vector speaker verification systems. Two variations of SUN-LDA are proposed where normalization techniques are used to capture source variation from both short and full-length development i-vectors, one based upon pooling (SUN-LDA-pooled) and the other on concatenation (SUN-LDA-concat) across the duration and source-dependent session variation. Both the SUN-LDA-pooled and SUN-LDA-concat techniques are shown to provide improvement over traditional LDA on NIST 08 truncated 10sec-10sec evaluation conditions, with the highest improvement obtained with the SUN-LDA-concat technique achieving a relative improvement of 8% in EER for mis-matched conditions and over 3% for matched conditions over traditional LDA approaches.

Assessing the short-term effects of heatwaves on mortality and morbidity in Brisbane, Australia : comparison of case-crossover and time series analyses

Background Heat-related impacts may have greater public health implications as climate change continues. It is important to appropriately characterize the relationship between heatwave and health outcomes. However, it is unclear whether a case-crossover design can be effectively used to assess the event- or episode-related health effects. This study examined the association between exposure to heatwaves and mortality and emergency hospital admissions (EHAs) from non-external causes in Brisbane, Australia, using both case-crossover and time series analyses approaches. Methods Poisson generalised additive model (GAM) and time-stratified case-crossover analyses were used to assess the short-term impact of heatwaves on mortality and EHAs. Heatwaves exhibited a significant impact on mortality and EHAs after adjusting for air pollution, day of the week, and season. Results For time-stratified case-crossover analysis, odds ratios of mortality and EHAs during heatwaves were 1.62 (95% confidence interval (CI): 1.36–1.94) and 1.22 (95% CI: 1.14–1.30) at lag 1, respectively. Time series GAM models gave similar results. Relative risks of mortality and EHAs ranged from 1.72 (95% CI: 1.40–2.11) to 1.81 (95% CI: 1.56–2.10) and from 1.14 (95% CI: 1.06–1.23) to 1.28 (95% CI: 1.21–1.36) at lag 1, respectively. The risk estimates gradually attenuated after the lag of one day for both case-crossover and time series analyses. Conclusions The risk estimates from both case-crossover and time series models were consistent and comparable. This finding may have implications for future research on the assessment of event- or episode-related (e.g., heatwave) health effects.

Inpatients had mostly negative experiences of seclusion during short term treatment in a mental health facility

Design Semi-structured interviews. Setting 2 open, acute care units of a large tertiary mental health facility in Queensland, Australia. Patients 12 patients (58% men) who were 18–52 years of age and were secluded in the previous 7 days (mean duration 3.4 h). Methods Semi-structured, thematically organised interviews were audiotaped and transcribed. Transcripts were checked for errors against the audiotaped versions and were analysed using the process of meaning categorisation. Themes were identified and coded to produce categories. All members of the research team agreed on the final categorisations. These broad categories were further analysed, and themes were used to reflect patients' experiences of seclusion. Main findings 5 recurrent themes emerged. (1) Patients described the use of seclusion. Some patients thought that seclusion was used inappropriately and that the seclusion period was of more benefit to …

Folk opera : stories crossing borders in Papua New Guinea

The Life Drama project is a drama-based sexual health promotion project, developed by a cross-cultural research team in Papua New Guinea (PNG) over the past four years. Recognising the limitations of established theatre-in-education and theatre-for-development approaches when working across cultures, the research team explored ways of tapping into the everyday performativity of PNG participants and their communities in order to communicate more powerfully about the personal and social issues involved in sexual health. Through the Folk Opera form, developed by PNG theatre company Raun Raun Theatre around the time of national Independence, the research explored the importance of "story" in identity formation, maintenance and change, the communication of meaning, and the transmission of tacit local knowledges. In a highly diverse and rapidly-changing country like PNG, enacted stories inherently compel the exchange and exploration of different knowledges, and promote the dialogue and ownership that drives social change. The paper will present and unpack the Folk Opera form as developed in the Life Drama program, drawing conclusions which may apply to other programs which to promote health and social justice across cultures.

Stories into games (Workshops and digital work)

In the summer of 2012 - 2013, the State Library of Queensland invited us to run a number of workshops for younger participants as part of the Garage Gamer program. The brief was very much about the local games industry and the SLQ community, the core concept was about participant contribution. The 'Stories into Games' series of workshops ran across three Saturdays (January 5 - March 2). The workshops were aimed at younger audiences (ages 6-12) and the concept was to engage this group with games as game makers and designers, rather than players. Each session saw a group of participants create a shared story, illustrate the story and then make game assets and objects out of their illustrative work. These were then put into a raw framework created in the Unity Game Engine so that the stories could be played.

In arrayed ranks array technology in the study of mesothelioma steven

Mesothelioma is a rare malignancy arising from mesothelial cells lining the pleura and peritoneum. Advances in modern technology have allowed the development of array based approaches to the study of disease allowing researchers the opportunity to study many genes or proteins in a high-throughput fashion. This review describes the current knowledge surrounding array based approaches with respect to mesothelioma research. © 2009 by the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer.

Exploring influencing factors of short-lived buildings in China's urban renewal : evidence from Chongqing

With the fast development of urban sprawl and renewal in China, many buildings are “non-nature” short-lived, i.e. demolished after only a few years. For this concern, this research explores the influencing factors of short-lived buildings and provides the scientific foundation for sustainable urban management and planning. Cases for this research are 1734 buildings demolished in Jiangbei district, the middle region of Chongqing City. Internal and external factors for the short-lived buildings are identified by applying logistic analysis. The results indicate that nine factors have significant influence on short-lived buildings. This research also find that buildings with low density, utilization and compensation while high land development potential are more likely to become short-lived buildings.

Role of short RNAs in gene silencing

Recent research has revealed the existence of an elegant defence mechanism in plants and lower eukaryotes. The mechanism, known in plants as post-transcriptional gene silencing, works through sequence-specific degradation of RNA. It appears to be directed by double-stranded RNA, associated with the production of short 21-25 nt RNAs, and spread through the plant by a diffusible signal. The short RNAs are implicated as the guides for both a nuclease complex that degrades the mRNA and a methyltransferase complex that methylates the DNA of silenced genes. It has also been suggested that these short RNAs might be the mobile silencing signal, a suggestion that has been challenged recently.

Review essay : Crime, risk and money : "The Currency of Justice : Fines and Damages in Consumer Societies" and "Crime and Risk", both by Pat O'Malley

Sharing some closely related themes and a common theoretical orientation based on the governmentality analytic, these are nevertheless two very different contributions to criminological knowledge and theory. The first, The Currency of Justice: Fines and Damages in Consumer Societies (COJ), is a sustained and highly original analysis of that most pervasive yet overlooked feature of modern legal orders; their reliance on monetary sanctions. Crime and Risk (CAR), on the other hand, is a short synoptic overview of the many dimensions and trajectories of risk in contemporary debate and practice, both the practices of crime and the governance of crime. It is one of the first in a new series by Sage, 'Compact Criminology', in which authors survey in little more than a hundred pages some current field of debate. With this small gem, Pat O'Malley has set the bar very high for those who follow. For all its brevity, CAR traverses a massive expanse of research, debates and issues, while also opening up new and challenging questions around the politics of risk and the relationship between criminal risk-taking and the governance of risk and crime. The two books draw together various threads of O'Malley's rich body of work on these issues, and once again demonstrate that he is one of the foremost international scholars of risk inside and outside criminology.

Recovering from the earthquake : early childhood teachers and children collaboratively telling stories about their experiences

Purpose – Traumatic events can cause post-traumatic stress disorder due to the severity of the often unexpected events. The purpose of this paper is to reveal how conversations around lived experiences of traumatic events, such as the Christchurch earthquake in February 2011, can work as a strategy for people to come to terms with their experiences collaboratively. By encouraging young children to recall and tell of their earthquake stories with their early childhood teachers they can begin to respond, renew, and recover (Brown, 2012), and prevent or minimise more stress being developed. Design/methodology/approach – The study involved collecting data of the participating children taking turns to wear a wireless microphone where their interactions with each other and with teachers were video recorded over one week in November 2011. A total of eight hours and 21 minutes of footage was collected; four minutes and 19 seconds of that footage are presented and analysed in this paper. The footage was watched repeatedly and transcribed using conversation analysis methods (Sacks, 1995). Findings – Through analysing the detailed turn-taking utterances between teachers and children, the orderliness of the co-production of remembering is revealed to demonstrate that each member orients to being in agreement about what actually happened. These episodes of story telling between the teachers and children demonstrate how the teachers encourage the children to tell about their experiences through actively engaging in conversations with them about the earthquake. Originality/value – The conversation analysis approach used in this research was found to be useful in investigating aspects of disasters that the participants themselves remember as important and real. This approach offers a unique insight into understanding how the earthquake event was experienced and reflected on by young children and their teachers, and so can inform future policy and provision in post-disaster situations.