Synthesis of some copper(II)-chelating (dialkylamino)pyridine amphiphiles and evaluation of their esterolytic capacities in cationic micellar media

Three new (dialkylamino)pyridine (DAAP)-based ligand amphiphiles 3-5 have been synthesized. All of the compounds possess a metal ion binding subunit in the form of a 2,6-disubstituted DAAP moiety. In addition, at least one ortho-CH2OH substituent is present in all the ligands. Complex formation by these ligands with various metal ions were examined under micellar conditions, but only complexes with Cu(II) ions showed kinetically potent esterolytic capacities under micellar conditions. Complexes with Cu(II) were prepared in host comicellar cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTABr) media at pH 7.6. Individual complexes were characterized by UV-visible absorption spectroscopy and electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy. These metallomicelles speed the cleavage of the substrates p-nitrophenyl hexanoate or p-nitrophenyl diphenyl phosphate. To ascertain the nature of the active esterolytic species, the stoichiometries of the respective Cu(II) complexes were determined from the kinetic version of Job's plot. In all the instances, 2:1 complex ligand/Cu(II) ion are the most kinetically competent species. The apparent pK(a) values of the Cu(II)-coordinated hydroxyl groups of the ligands 3, 4, and 5, in the comicellar aggregate, are 7.8, 8.0, and 8.0, respectively, as estimated from the rate constant vs pH: profiles of the ester cleavage reactions. The nucleophilic metallomicellar reagents and the second-order "catalytic" rate constants toward esterolysis of the substrate p-nitrophenyl hexanoate (at 25 degrees C, pH 7.6) are 37.5 for 3, 11.4 for 4, and 13.8 for 5. All catalytic systems comprising the coaggregates of 3, 4, or 5 and CTABr demonstrate turnover behavior in the presence of excess substrate.

A methodological survey of future mobility literature: Opportunities for design research

This research establishes that the study of mobility and transportation is multi-disciplinary and highly complex, involving the diverse interplay between infrastructural and psychological factors. Coincidently, a new paradigm in personal mobility is developing. A new generation of mobility solutions is becoming widely available in the form of car and ride sharing services. These services build on the assumption that customers no longer need ownership of a product in order to benefit from it. With the emergence of this new paradigm, this paper presents a methodological review of current practises used by the wider research community. Therefore, this research piece aims to explore methodological approaches involved in the study the effect of community on an individual’s attitudes, perceptions and behaviours of future mobility solutions. The results of this review indicate that the majority of published literature uses quantitative methods as opposed to qualitative and even fewer studies have sought to understand the human factors in these new mobility solutions. This gap in knowledge is a valuable opportunity for design. Inherently qualitative and human focused, design research can fill this gap in knowledge by applying distinctly user-centred methods such as persona design, narrative storytelling, and in-depth observations to discover deeper human insights.

Dashboards in performance management: The foundations and research opportunities for their effective use

When designed effectively dashboards are expected to reduce information overload and improve performance management. Hence, interest in dashboards has increased recently,which is also evident from the proliferation of dashboard solution providers in the market. Despite dashboards popularity, little is known about the extent of their effectiveness in organizations. Dashboards draw from multiple disciplines but ultimately use visualization to communicate important information to stakeholders. Thus,a better understanding of visualization can improve the design and use of dashboards. This paper reviews the foundations and roles of dashboards in performance management and proposes a framework for future research, which can enhance dashboard design and perceived usefulness depending on the fit between the features of the dashboard and the characteristics of the users.

Population health planning and health promotion: Opportunities and challenges to improve social determinants

Complex social factors and health issues challenge equitable health outcomes for many people, in particular those living in marginalised communities. Primary health care promises solutions through population health and health promotion approaches to improve social conditions (determinants) affecting health with emphasis on change at systems levels. Yet short-term efficiency focus policy decisions without long-term planning can undermine the effectiveness of primary health care. The workshop goal is to explore opportunities and share ideas about population health planning in Primary Health Networks and other community health care settings, so as to draw out opportunities, challenges and forward thinking health planning and health promotion strategies.

Imaging in turbid media using quasi-ballistic photons

We study by means of experiments and Monte Carlo simulations, the scattering of light in random media, to determine the distance up to which photons travel along almost undeviated paths within a scattering medium, and are therefore capable of casting a shadow of an opaque inclusion embedded within the medium. Such photons are isolated by polarisation discrimination wherein the plane of linear polarisation of the input light is continuously rotated and the polarisation preserving component of the emerging light is extracted by means of a Fourier transform. This technique is a software implementation of lock-in detection. We find that images may be recovered to a depth far in excess of that predicted by the diffusion theory of photon propagation. To understand our experimental results, we perform Monte Carlo simulations to model the random walk behaviour of the multiply scattered photons. We present a. new definition of a diffusing photon in terms of the memory of its initial direction of propagation, which we then quantify in terms of an angular correlation function. This redefinition yields the penetration depth of the polarisation preserving photons. Based on these results, we have formulated a model to understand shadow formation in a turbid medium, the predictions of which are in good agreement with our experimental results.

How information around acute events comes into being on social media?

In this digital age, as social media is emerging as a central site where information is shared and interpreted, it is essential to study information construction issues on social media sites in order to understand how social reality is constructed. While there is a number of studies taking an information-as-objective point of view, this proposed study emphasizes the constructed and interpretive nature of information and explores the processes through which information surrounding acute events comes into being on micro-blogs. In order to conduct this analysis systematically and theoretically, the concept of interpretive communities will be deployed. This research investigates if or not micro-blog based social groups can serve as interpretive communities, and, if so, what role might they play in the construction of information, and the social impacts that may arise. To understand how this process is entangled with the surrounding social, political, technical contexts, cases from both China (focusing on Sina Weibo) and Australia (focusing on Twitter) will be analysed.

Support Frameworks for the Use of Social Media by Emergency Management Organisations

Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are now widely recognised as playing an increasingly important role in the dissemination of information during crisis events. They are used by emergency management organisations as well as by the public to share information and advice. However, the official use of social media for crisis communication within emergency management organisations is still relatively new and ad hoc, rather than being systematically embedded within or effectively coordinated across agencies. This policy report suggests a more effectively coordinated approach to leverage social media use, involving stronger networking between social media staff within emergency management organisations. This could be realised by establishing a national network of social media practitioners managed by the Australia-New Zealand Emergency Management Committee (ANZEMC), reinforced by a Federal government task force that promotes further policy initiatives in this space.

Social media in selected Australian federal and state election campaigns, 2010-15

Campaigning in Australian election campaigns at local, state, and federal levels is fundamentally affected by the fact that voting is compulsory in Australia, with citizens who are found to have failed to cast their vote subject to fines. This means that - contrary to the situation in most other nations – elections are decided not by which candidate or party has managed to encourage the largest number of nominal supporters to make the effort to cast their vote, but by some 10-20% of genuine ‘swinging voters’ who change their party preferences from one election to the next. Political campaigning is thus aimed less at existing party supporters (so-called ‘rusted on’ voters whose continued support for the party is essentially taken for granted) than at this genuinely undecided middle of the electorate. Over the past decades, this has resulted in a comparatively timid, vague campaigning style from both major party blocs (the progressive Australian Labor Party [ALP] and the conservative Coalition of the Liberal and National Parties [L/NP]). Election commitments that run the risk of being seen as too partisan and ideological are avoided as they could scare away swinging voters, and recent elections have been fought as much (or more) on the basis of party leaders’ perceived personas as they have on stated policies, even though Australia uses a parliamentary system in which the Prime Minister and state Premiers are elected by their party room rather than directly by voters. At the same time, this perceived lack of distinctiveness in policies between the major parties has also enabled the emergence of new, smaller parties which (under Australia’s Westminster-derived political system) have no hope of gaining a parliamentary majority but could, in a close election, come to hold the balance of power and thus exert disproportionate influence on a government which relies on their support.

Boiler room scams destroy lives yet police blame victims

The Queensland Organised Crime Commission of Inquiry recently handed down its findings examining how organised crime has been policed in recent years. While media attention has been focused on the implications for child sexual exploitation and paedophilia, the report also made some substantial findings related to financial crimes such as investment fraud (commonly known as boiler rooms scams). Quite disturbingly, the report notes a strong victim blaming mentality that police expressed towards individuals who invested in fraudulent companies and who subsequently lost money in these boiler room scams. The attitude of the police towards boiler room victims was largely one of apathy towards the likelihood of any investigation, and of blame towards victims for not doing what was perceived to be “due diligence”. This finding illustrates several myths which are argued to exist around investment fraud victims, particularly around the concept of “due diligence”. It also feeds into the idea that victims are greedy/naïve and financially illiterate/not investment savvy. These are both problematic and largely inaccurate. Drawing on examples from my own research with fraud victims, the article will illustrate the complexity and sophistication of many boiler room schemes and demonstrate the difficulties in identifying fraudulent investment opportunities.

Precarious Creativity: Global Media, Local Labor

Precarious Creativity examines the seismic changes confronting media workers in an age of globalization and corporate conglomeration. This pathbreaking anthology peeks behind the hype and supposed glamor of screen media industries to reveal the intensifying pressures and challenges confronting actors, editors, electricians, and others. The authors take on pressing conceptual and methodological issues while also providing insightful case studies of workplace dynamics regarding creativity, collaboration, exploitation, and cultural difference. Furthermore, it examines working conditions and organizing efforts on all six continents, offering broad-ranging and comprehensive analysis of contemporary screen media labor in such places as Lagos, Prague, Hollywood, and Hyderabad. The collection also examines labor conditions across a range of job categories that includes, for example, visual effects, production services, and adult entertainment. With contributions from such leading scholars as John Caldwell, Vicki Mayer, Herman Gray, and Tejaswini Ganti, Precarious Creativity offers timely critiques of media globalization while also intervening in broader debates about labor, creativity, and precarity.

Given and News : Media discourse and the construction of community on national days

National anniversaries such as independence days demand precise coordination in order to make citizens change their routines to forego work and spend the day at rest or at festivities that provide social focus and spectacle. The complex social construction of national days is taken for granted and operates as a given in the news media, which are the main agents responsible for coordinating these planned disruptions of normal routines. This study examines the language used in the news to construct the rather unnatural idea of national days and to align people in observing them. The data for the study consist of news stories about the Fourth of July in the New York Times, sampled over 150 years and are supplemented by material from other sources and other countries. The study is multidimensional, applying concepts from pragmatics (speech acts, politeness, information structure), systemic functional linguistics (the interpersonal metafunction and the Appraisal framework) and cognitive linguistics (frames, metaphor) as well as journalism and communications to arrive at an interdisciplinary understanding of how resources for meaning are used by writers and readers of the news stories. The analysis shows that on national anniversaries, nations tend to be metaphorized as persons having birthdays, to whom politeness should be shown. The face of the nation is to be respected in the sense of identifying the nation's interests as one's own (positive face) and speaking of citizen responsibilities rather than rights (negative face). Resources are available for both positive and negative evaluations of events and participants and the newspaper deftly changes footings (Goffman 1981) to demonstrate the required politeness while also heteroglossically allowing for a certain amount of disattention and even protest - within limits, for state holidays are almost never construed as Bakhtinian festivals, as they tend to reaffirm the hierarchy rather than invert it. Celebrations are evaluated mainly for impressiveness, and for the essentially contested quality of appropriateness, which covers norms of predictability, size, audience response, aesthetics, and explicit reference to the past. Events may also be negatively evaluated as dull ("banal") or inauthentic ("hoopla"). Audiences are evaluated chiefly in terms of their enthusiasm, or production of appropriate displays for emotional response, for national days are supposed to be occasions of flooding-out of nationalistic feeling. By making these evaluations, the newspaper reinforces its powerful position as an independent critic, while at the same time playing an active role in the construction and reproduction of emotional order embodied in "the nation's birthday." As an occasion for mobilization and demonstrations of power, national days may be seen to stand to war in the relation of play to fighting (Bateson 1955). Evidence from the newspaper's coverage of recent conflicts is adduced to support this analysis. In the course of the investigation, methods are developed for analyzing large collections of newspaper content, particularly topical soft news and feature materials that have hitherto been considered less influential and worthy of study than so-called hard news. In his work on evaluation in newspaper stories, White (1998) proposed that the classic hard news story is focused on an event that threatens the social order, but news of holidays and celebrations in general does not fit this pattern, in fact its central event is a reproduction of the social order. Thus in the system of news values (Galtung and Ruge 1965), national holiday news draws on "ground" news values such as continuity and predictability rather than "figure" news values such as negativity and surprise. It is argued that this ground helps form a necessary space for hard news to be seen as important, similar to the way in which the information structure of language is seen to rely on the regular alternation of given and new information (Chafe 1994).

Book Reviews: "Fashion Media: Past and Present"

The book Fashion Media: Past and Present is a timely insight into the historical relationship between fashion and media. Edited by Djurdja Bartlett (Senior Research Fellow at the London College of Fashion), Shaun Cole (Course Leader for the MA in the History and Culture of Fashion and MA Fashion Curation at the London College of Fashion) and Agnès Rocamora (Reader in Social and Cultural Studies at the London College of Fashion), Fashion Media offers a wide historical perspective on how painting, photography, film, television and the Internet have intersected with fashion. The book also provides a useful understanding of social and cultural key issues related to this synergy...

Patient decision aids in routine maternity care: Benefits, barriers, and new opportunities

Background and aim Participation in decision-making, supported by comprehensive and quality information provision, is increasingly emphasised as a priority for women in maternity care. Patient decision aids are tools that can offer women greater access to information and guidance to participate in maternity care decision-making. Relative to their evaluation in controlled settings, the implementation of patient decision aids in routine maternity care has received little attention and our understanding of which approaches may be effective is limited. This paper critically discusses the application of patient decision aids in routine maternity care and explores viable solutions for promoting their successful uptake. Discussion A range of patient decision aids have been developed for use within maternity care, and controlled trials have highlighted their positive impact on the decision-making process for women. Nevertheless, evidence of successful patient decision aid implementation in real world health care settings is lacking due to practical and ideological barriers that exist. Patient-directed social marketing campaigns are a relatively novel approach to patient decision aid delivery that may facilitate their adoption in maternity care, at least in the short-term, by overcoming common implementation barriers. Social marketing may also be particularly well suited to maternity care, given the unique characteristics of this health context. Conclusions The potential of social marketing campaigns to facilitate patient decision aid adoption in maternity care highlights the need for pragmatic trials to evaluate their effectiveness. Identifying which sub-groups of women are more or less likely to respond to these strategies will further direct implementation.

Photodimerization of coumarin in aqueous and micellar media

The photochemical and photophysical processes of many organic compounds are a function of the environment in which they are present. In this connection we have chosen to investigate the environmental perturbations on the photodimerization of coumarin,l and the results of our study in aqueous and micellar media are presented in this paper. Coumarin has historically been the subject of intense photochemical and spectroscopic interest, mainly as a consequence of its importance in biological systems. Coumarin has been chosen for our investigation as its fascinating photochemical behavior has been fairly well explored,2 and therefore the environmental influence, which is the subject of our concern, would be easily understandable.

The micropolitics of management in universities: Challenges and opportunities

In recent decades, there has been a strong call by writers in education for alternative forms of leadership and management that are human centred and that value social cohesion, fairness, and democratic practices. Referred to by names such as transformative leadership (Shields, 2013) and ethical leadership (Starratt, 1996), those promoting these types of leadership argue for the use of “power as a moral force for the common good” (Duignan, 2007, p.12). In this chapter, our interest lies with managers in universities and how they use power in ethical and unethical ways. We consider some macro forces (e.g., globalisation, neo-liberal policies) that have impacted universities, making it difficult for managers to promote socially just and equitable practices. In particular, we examine the influence of managerialism—the application of private sector practices to the public sector—where the role of manager is not to question current practices, but to conform to performance targets, and to ensure compliance (O’Brien & Down, 2002). To come to an understanding of what might constitute ethical practices, we refer to the field of micropolitics as a way to help illuminate current practice and point to more positive ways of working.