Book review: Glamour in the Pacific. Cultural internationalism and race politics in the women's Pan-Pacific

Since the publication of Leila J. Rupp’s Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement in 1997, historians have begun to investigate the myriad ways in which women, largely excluded from formal, government-based international relations, nonetheless forged significant personal and institutional relationships across national and cultural boundaries. As a result, women’s international activism has become an increasingly popular field of scholarly enquiry.

Special sauce in sesame seed buns: legal strategy and public policy in the fast-food industry

Lewis Bertly, a top lawyer with leading London law firm LL&B, is retained to defend a case with the potential to change the laws that affect fast-food marketing. Through its Department of Health, the Government of Australia seeks legislation for warning labels on fast-food packaging. To prepare a potential defense against this legal action for McDonald's Bertly is reviewing the history of legal action against the industry in fast-food labeling, nutrition and health. This history is important because the industry's actions through the decades in food nutrition and marketing are likely to be raised as evidence. He also hopes this will help him find a framework to map the way social expectations, a company's innovation, the legal system, and legislation combine to shape an industry. What he learns from this history and especially about the market leader, McDonald's, will inform how the defense approaches this case.

Teaching internet inquiry in the early years: a microcase of teaching practice with iPads

This paper focuses on teaching practices intended to support primary school students’ internet inquiries and the development of requisite knowledge and skills. The paper builds on growing knowledge about multimodal pedagogy (e.g., Walsh, 2011) and how such pedagogies not only bring with them intrinsic benefits for student engagement and learning, but also offer opportunities to reinforce and refine traditional print literacies (e.g., McKee and Heydon, 2015). A microethnographic approach is taken, involving a close examination of short classroom episodes. The data include classroom video footage and teacher interviews concerning one lesson where students aged six, seven and eight undertook research using iPads. Within the lesson, the iPads were treated as a suite of resources, tools and channels to be put into operation in the service of student inquiries, where informational texts could be found on the internet and then used as sources for new knowledge and material for the students’ multimedia artefacts. Print literacy skills were similarly treated as resources to be drawn upon in the service of inquiry work. The data is assembled to provide a window into the complexities of teaching in this context, with a particular focus on how new and traditional literacy practices are interwoven. The analysis shows how digital and ‘non-digital’ resources, modes and channels are strategically assembled by the teacher and her students through the practice of fit-for-purpose inquiry, reading and composition strategies. An explicit discourse of purpose is put to work in this classroom to make sense of materials, resources and curricula within a context of contradictory policy discourses. Thus an approach to curriculum and pedagogy is illustrated that lays the foundations for crucial contemporary information literacies, serving our increasingly everyday need to make strategic use of digital and online tools to navigate the internet and shape it for our own purposes. The interdependence of traditional and new literacies in such contexts reveals the nonsense of dominant discourses found in the media that emphasise the importance of one mode or one method, as well as divisive public politics that seeks to perpetuate understandings of traditional and new literacies as dichotomous domains that compete for airtime in classrooms, resulting in teachers’ neglect of literacy ‘basics’. In contrast to popular fears, in this classroom, both digital and traditional literacy skills and knowledge were developed, employed and reinforced as part of the students’ digital work.

Lazarus rises: storying the self in the migrant fandom of David Bowie

In this article we focus upon the ways that “migrants” in Melbourne have used David Bowie to story and make sense of their arrival to Australia, often as refugees or as people looking for a better life. In relation to identity and belonging, some recent work on music fandom (Groene and Hettinger 2015; Lowe 2003), has imposed a meta-frame on the empirical method, substituting voices for a top-down analysis and interpretation. Our approach is to instead draw both upon auto-ethnography and to allow our fellow fans to “story” their own responses, in an attempt to get beneath the modes of feeling that music fandom ignites – situated within the narratives that people construct as they talk these stories. We argue that Bowie’s alternative and outsider status resonates keenly with people who find themselves “strangers” in a new land.

The long game: five years of simulating the Middle East

Scholarly literature attesting to the benefits of role play in teaching international relations or political science subjects is abundant and universally positive. However, despite many case studies presenting snapshots of single examples, long term data concerning a role play exercise is difficult to find. This study presents student feedback data gathered from 10 iterations of the Middle East politics simulation carried out over 5 years from 2011-15. The data obtained from over 600 respondents establishes very clear trends in terms of satisfaction, engagement, and workload. The findings demonstrate that students can be significantly engaged in the subject matter through role plays and that they value these opportunities and the learning that ensues, even though it may represent more work than they are used to allotting to traditional assignments. The results show that year after year, successive student cohorts have made a clear judgement that extra work is worthwhile when it pays off against their perceived learning. The inference can also be drawn that they do not see this same pay off when completing essay type assignments.

ED-HOME: improving educator confidence and patient education in the emergency department

BACKGROUND: Barriers to effective patient communication in the emergency department (ED) are well recognised; time, resources and staff and consumer expectations. This project aimed to improve the quality of health education provided in the ED by increasing nurses' confidence as educators.

METHOD: By providing a staff information package including the introduction of a new structured education tool; ED-HOME, and by assessing the confidence and self-efficacy of the nurses in the process, we hoped to determine if an improvement in practice and confidence was achieved. A quantitative, pre and post-test questionnaire comparison study was undertaken before and after a four week implementation period. The project examined the attitudes and practices of registered emergency nurses and was conducted in one metropolitan emergency department.

RESULTS: Results indicated that nurse confidence and self-efficacy improved by using the new structured ED-HOME format and both staff satisfaction and education competence increased. Participants positively responded to the new tool and recommended future use in the ED.

CONCLUSION: This project demonstrates that if emergency nurses feel more confident with their educating practices and by using a structured format, patients will benefit from better quality patient education provided in the ED.

Status and the potential for extinction of the largetooth sawfish Pristis pristis in the Atlantic Ocean

1. Sawfishes currently are among the most threatened elasmobranchs in the world. Only two species inhabit Atlantic waters: the largetooth sawfish (Pristis pristis) and the smalltooth sawfish (Pristis pectinata), both having suffered dramatic declines in their ranges. 2. The goal of this study was to evaluate the status of P. pristis in the Atlantic, and estimate local extinction risk based on historical and recent occurrence records. In order to accomplish these goals, a thorough search for historical and recent records of P. pristis in the Atlantic was conducted, by reviewing scientific and popular literature, museum specimens, and contacting regional scientists from the species’ historical range. 3. In total, 801 P. pristis records (1830–2009) document its occurrence in four major regions in the Atlantic: USA (n =41), Mexico and Central America (n =535), South America (n=162), and West Africa (n =48). Locality data were not available for 15 records. 4. Historical abundance centres were the Colorado-San Juan River system in Nicaragua and Costa Rica (and secondarily Lake Izabal of Guatemala), the Amazon estuary, and coastal Guinea-Bissau. 5. Currently, the species faces drastic depletion throughout its entire former range and centres of abundance. It appears to have been extirpated from several areas. The probability of extinction was highest in the USA, northern South America (Colombia to Guyane), and southern West Africa (Cameroon to Namibia). 6. Currently, the Amazon estuary appears to have the highest remaining abundance of P. pristis in the Atlantic, followed by the Colorado–San Juan River system in Nicaragua and Costa Rica and the Bissagos Archipelago in Guinea Bissau. Therefore the protection of these populations is crucial for the preservation and recovery of the species.

Music copyright in the digital age: creators, commerce and copyright - an empirical study of the UK music copyright industries

Copyright markets, it is said, are ‘winner takes all’ markets favouring the interests of corporate investors over the interests of primary creators. However, little is known about popular music creators’ ‘lived experience’ of copyright. This thesis interrogates key aspects of copyright transactions between creators and investors operating in the UK music industries using analysis of various copyright related documents and semi-structured interviews with creators and investors. The research found considerable variety in the types of ‘deal’ creators enter into and considerable divergence in the potential rewards. It was observed that new-entrant creators have little comprehension of the basic tenets of copyright, but with experience they become more ‘copyright aware’. Documentary and interview evidence reveals creators routinely assign copyright to third party investors for the full term of copyright in sound recordings: the justification for this is questionable. An almost inevitable consequence of this asymmetry of understanding of copyright and asymmetry of bargaining power is that creators become alienated from their copyright works. The empirical evidence presented here supports historic and contemporary calls for a statutory mechanism limiting the maximum copyright assignment period to ten-years.

Prenatal education: profile and expectations of the couples.

Develop the capacities of women/couples to stay healthy during pregnancy, becoming aware of the rights, needs and potential problems of maternal and newborn health is a challenge for nurses and midwives who work with this population (Departamento de Reducir los Riesgos del Embarazo 2010). Prenatal education is a good strategy to meet the needs of pregnant women/couples, to improve outcomes in health and community development (Svenson, Barclay & Cooke 2006). Knowing the profile and expectations of the participants in these prenatal education groups, improves the quality of prenatal education programs and enables higher qualification of the professionals who promote them.

Prenatal education: profile and expectations of the couples.

Characterize the profile and describe the expectations of a sample of couple's participants in prenatal education programs integrated into the 'Tender Adventure - Preparation for childbirth and parenting' ", an outreach project of Nursing School of Coimbra.

Computer and laboratory simulation in the teaching of neonatal nursing: innovation and impact on learning

Objectives: to evaluate the cognitive learning of nursing students in neonatal clinical evaluation from a blended course with the use of computer and laboratory simulation; to compare the cognitive learning of students in a control and experimental group testing the laboratory simulation; and to assess the extracurricular blended course offered on the clinical assessment of preterm infants, according to the students. Method: a quasi-experimental study with 14 Portuguese students, containing pretest, midterm test and post-test. The technologies offered in the course were serious game e-Baby, instructional software of semiology and semiotechnique, and laboratory simulation. Data collection tools developed for this study were used for the course evaluation and characterization of the students. Nonparametric statistics were used: Mann-Whitney and Wilcoxon. Results: the use of validated digital technologies and laboratory simulation demonstrated a statistically significant difference (p = 0.001) in the learning of the participants. The course was evaluated as very satisfactory for them. The laboratory simulation alone did not represent a significant difference in the learning. Conclusions: the cognitive learning of participants increased significantly. The use of technology can be partly responsible for the course success, showing it to be an important teaching tool for innovation and motivation of learning in healthcare.