The sound of silence : the absence of voice in determining flexible working arrangements

In the context of a dramatically reconfigured labour market characterized by an individualistic culture and increasingly enmeshed life domains of employees, there is raised awareness of how employees may shape or modify their work arrangements. A small component of broader scholarship addressing issues that affect the social context in which individuals work, has focused on the role of ‘employee voice' in determining flexible-work outcomes (Donnelly et al., 2012). Employee voice is a broad term incorporating a spectrum of different practices designed to give employees a say in organisational issues and decisions (Dundon et al., 2004). This article extends work on voice and workplace flexibility by focusing not simply on ‘voice' but on its antithesis: employee silence. Silence is defined here, (following Van Dyne et al., 2003), as the intentional withholding of ideas, information and opinions. The consequences of employee silence in achieving work-life preferences are likely to be significant for both individuals and organizations, in achieving for example, the goals of business efficiency and facilitating employees' needs to fulfill multiple roles and minimize work-life interference.

Copyright exceptions beyond the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth)

Exceptions are an important part of the Australian copyright law landscape due to the role they play in delineating the extent of the rights held by copyright owners and, correspondingly, the permitted activities of users of copyright materials. The nature and scope of copyright exceptions has been examined in several reviews of copyright law and are again being considered by the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) as part of the ‘Copyright and the Digital Economy’ review which is currently underway. The ALRC’s terms of reference require it to examine, inter alia, ‘whether the exceptions and statutory licences in the Copyright Act 1968, are adequate and appropriate in the digital environment.’ While the ALRC inquiry focuses on exceptions provided under the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) (“Copyright Act”), there are several copyright exceptions in other Commonwealth statutes which are of relevance and which should not be overlooked.

Honesty about adverse events - more honoured in the breach than in the observance

The medical board of Australia Code of conduct reminds doctors that" "When adverse events occur, you have a responsibility to be open and honest in your communication with your patient, to review what has occurred and to report appropriately." More honoured in the breach rather than the observence may or may not be correct. Faced with the English concerns and the Netherlands research, an evidence based assessment of compliance with the ethical duty to disclose adverse events is warranted.

Doing adaptation differently? Does neoliberalism influence adaptation planning in Queensland?

Australian cities are particularly vulnerable to climate change. Adapting to climate change is a critical task for contemporary spatial planning, one that is widely recognised by the planning profession and beginning to receive substantive attention in planning policy. However adaptation takes place within the context of established spatial governance regimes and planning cultures, and examples of effective adaptation are often grounded in progressive contexts markedly different than Australia. In Australia, planning is subject to strong neoliberal reform agendas (Gleeson & Low, 2000a, 2000b) and national adaptation policies align with neoliberal views (Granberg & Glover, 2011). Planning in Queensland has been subject to deregulation (Buxton et al., 2012) and the continued influence of neoliberalism (Wright & Cleary, 2012). The influence of neoliberalism on climate change adaptation has received little consideration in research and literature. This paper reviews a case study of adaptation planning through the lens of the recent and contemporary influences of neoliberalism. It examines spatial/land-use planning for climate change adaptation in Queensland, identifying the underlying rationales, priorities and strategies. A justification for such an investigation is advanced based on the challenges to planning facilitating adaptation and identified links to neoliberalism. A preliminary analysis of interviews with planners is then used to identify and discuss the ideological influences practitioners perceive in current approaches to adaptation in Queensland and the implications of such.

Embedding EfS in teacher education : an introductory guide to using the systems change model

Welcome to this introductory guide on using a systems change model to embed Education for Sustainability (EfS) into teacher education. Pressing sustainability issues such as climate change, biodiversity loss and depletion of non-renewable resources pose new challenges for education. The importance of education in preparing future citizens to engage in sustainable living practices and help create a more sustainable world is widely acknowledged. As a result many universities around the world are beginning to recognize the need to integrate EfS into their teacher education programs. However, evidence indicates that there is little or no core EfS knowledge or pedagogy in pre-service teacher courses available to student teachers in a thorough and systematic fashion. Instead efforts are fragmented and individually or, at best, institutionally-based and lacking a systems approach to change, an approach that is seen as essential to achieving a sustainable society (Henderson & Tilbury, 2004). The result is new teachers are graduating without the necessary knowledge or skills to teach in ways that enable them to prepare their students to cope well with the new and emerging challenges their communities face. This guide has been prepared as part of a teaching and learning research project that applied a systems change approach to embedding the learning and teaching of sustainability into pre-service teacher education. The processes, outcomes and lessons learnt from this project are presented here as a guide for navigating pathways to systemic change in the journey of re-orienting teacher education towards sustainability. The guide also highlights how a systems change approach can be used to successfully enact change within a teacher education system. If you are curious about how to introduce and embed EfS into teacher education – or have tried other models and are looking for a more encompassing, transformative approach – this guide is designed to help you. The material presented in this guide is designed to be flexible and adaptive. However you choose to use the content, our aim is to help you and your students develop new perspectives, promote discussion and to engage with a system-wide approach to change.

Contemporary comments: The limited benefit of prison in controlling crime

A number of recent developments in the United State (US), United Kingdom (UK) and Australia suggest that conditions may be ripe for a political shift in the reliance on escalating rates of imprisonment as a default criminal justice strategy for responding to crime. The default position is illustrated by the Yabsleyite response of former New South Wales (NSW) Premier Nathan Rees’s to questioning over the cost of prison building and NSW’s high recidivism rate: ‘[t]he advice to me is we have still got 500 cells empty, I don't mind if we fill them up, and if we fill them up and have to build another jail, we'll build another jail’ (Knox and Tadros 2008)...

The Nagle Royal Commission 25 years on : gaining perspective on two and a half decades of NSW prison reform

This article attempts an audit of changes in the NSW penal system over the last nearly 30 years. Taking the 1978 Nagle Royal Commission findings and analysis as the starting point a comparison is made between the Nagle era and the contemporary scene across a range of practices including imprisonment rates, violence, drug use, deaths in custody, prison conditions, prisoners rights, legal regulation, and others. It is suggested that developments since Nagle are mixed and cannot be attributed to a single logic or force. Major changes include a doubling of imprisonment rates, significant increases in Indigenous and women's imprisonment rates, the apparent ending of institutionalised bashings and the centrality of drug use to imprisonment and to the culture, health and security practices which characterise the current prison experience. The article may constitute a useful starting point for broader attempts to relate current penal practices to far wider changes in the conditions of life under late modernity.

The Royal Commission into the NSW Police Service : process corruption and the limits of judicial reflexivity

This paper will offer an examination of the Reports of the Royal Commission into the NSW Police Service (Interim Report February 1996; Interim Report: Immediate Measures November 1996; Final Report Vol I: Corruption; Final Report Vol II: Reform; Final Report Vol III: Appendices May 1997) excluding the Report on Paedophilia, August 1997. The examination will be confined essentially to one question: to what extent do the published Reports consider the part played by the judiciary, prosecutors and lawyers, in the construction of a form of criminal justice revealed by the Commission itself, to be disfigured by serious process corruption? The examination will be conducted by way of a chronological trawl through the Reports of the Commission in an attempt to identify all references to the role of the judiciary, prosecutors and lawyers. The adequacy of any such treatment will then be considered. In order to set the scene a brief and generalised overview of the Wood Commission will be offered together with the Commission's definition of process corruption.

Innovation for Equity in Rural Education : Proceedings of the International Symposium for Innovation in Rural Education

PREFACE The concept of an international symposium on rural education arose from a meeting between members of the SiMERR National Centre, Australia and the NURI Teacher Education Innovation Centre (NURI-TEIC) at Kongju National University, Korea in 2007. Despite the very different national contexts, the teams were struck by the similarities of the challenges facing rural schools in the two countries, and curious about the degree to which these challenges were shared by other countries. At a subsequent meeting in Australia in December 2007, the two centre Directors - Professor John Pegg (SiMERR) and Professor Youn-Kee Im (NURI-TEIC) - agreed on a framework for the first International Symposium for Innovation in Rural Education (ISFIRE). This volume consists of the keynotes and refereed papers presented at ISFIRE 2009. The papers provide insights into rural education in Australia, Bhutan, Canada, Korea, Norway, South Africa and the United States along the following themes: 1. Promoting rural policy initiatives; 2. Nurturing the rural teacher experience; 3. Enhancing rural student experience and growth; 4. Optimising the curriculum; 5. Improving resources in rural schools; and 6. Addressing special issues in rural education. The authors and titles of a further 23 presentations based on refereed abstracts only are listed at the end of this volume. The abstracts for these presentations can be found in the symposium Program. The academics and practitioners who came together for this symposium are passionate about rural education and have dedicated their time and capacities to working for the benefit of rural teachers, students and communities. The papers in this volume offer direction not only for Australia and South Korea, who jointly hosted this symposium, but for all countries in which rural education is contested ground. The keynotes in particular contribute rich perspectives on rural education trends, policies and practices. We hope that this volume generates a greater appreciation of the advantages of rural education and the many innovative approaches being implemented to meet its challenges.

Structures of μOconotoxins from Conusmarmoreus. Inhibitors of tetrodotoxin (TTX)-sensitive and TTX-resistant sodium channels in mammalian sensory neurons

The μO-conotoxins are an intriguing class of conotoxins targeting various voltage-dependent sodium channels and molluscan calcium channels. In the current study, we have shown MrVIA and MrVIB to be the first known peptidic inhibitors of the transient tetrodotoxin-resistant (TTX-R) Na+ current in rat dorsal root ganglion neurons, in addition to inhibiting tetrodotoxin-sensitive Na+ currents. Human TTX-R sodium channels are a therapeutic target for indications such as pain, highlighting the importance of the μO-conotoxins as potential leads for drug development. Furthermore, we have used NMR spectroscopy to provide the first structural information on this class of conotoxins. MrVIA and MrVIB are hydrophobic peptides that aggregate in aqueous solution but were solubilized in 50% acetonitrile/water. The three-dimensional structure of MrVIB consists of a small β-sheet and a cystine knot arrangement of the three-disulfide bonds. It contains four backbone “loops” between successive cysteine residues that are exposed to the solvent to varying degrees. The largest of these, loop 2, is the most disordered part of the molecule, most likely due to flexibility in solution. This disorder is the most striking difference between the structures of MrVIB and the known δ- and ω-conotoxins, which along with the μO-conotoxins are members of the O superfamily. Loop 2 of ω-conotoxins has previously been shown to contain residues critical for binding to voltage-gated calcium channels, and it is interesting to speculate that the flexibility observed in MrVIB may accommodate binding to both sodium and molluscan calcium channels.

Teachers' motivations for working in rural schools

This paper reports on the analysis of qualitative and quantitative data concerning Australian teachers’ motivations for taking up, remaining in, or leaving teaching positions in rural and regional schools. The data were collected from teachers (n = 2940) as part of the SiMERR National Survey, though the results of the qualitative data analysis were not published with the survey report in 2006. The teachers’ comments provide additional insight into their career decisions, complementing the quantitative findings. Content and frequency analyses of the teachers’ comments reveal individual and collective priorities which together with the statistical evidence can be used to inform policies aimed at addressing the staffing needs of rural schools.

Arts practice and disconnected youth in Australia : impact and domains of change

Background: This paper describes research conducted with Big hART, Australia's most awarded participatory arts company. It considers three projects, LUCKY, GOLD and NGAPARTJI NGAPARTJI across separate sites in Tasmania, Western NSW and Northern Territory, respectively, in order to understand project impact from the perspective of project participants, Arts workers, community members and funders. Methods: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 29 respondents. The data were coded thematically and analysed using the constant comparative method of qualitative data analysis. Results: Seven broad domains of change were identified: psychosocial health; community; agency and behavioural change; the Art; economic effect; learning and identity. Conclusions: Experiences of participatory arts are interrelated in an ecology of practice that is iterative, relational, developmental, temporal and contextually bound. This means that questions of impact are contingent, and there is no one path that participants travel or single measure that can adequately capture the richness and diversity of experience. Consequently, it is the productive tensions between the domains of change that are important and the way they are animated through Arts practice that provides sign posts towards the impact of Big hART projects.

Starting out in STEM : a study of young men and women in first year science, technology, engineering and mathematics courses

In late 2011, first year university students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) courses across Australia were invited to participate in the international Interests and Recruitment in Science (IRIS) study. IRIS investigates the influences on young people's decisions to choose university STEM courses and their subsequent experiences of these courses. The study also has a particular focus on the motivations and experiences of young women in courses such as physics, IT and engineering given the low rates of female participation in these fields. Around 3500 students from 30 Australian universities contributed their views on the relative importance of various school and non-school influences on their decisions, as well as insights into their experiences of university STEM courses so far. It is hoped that their contributions will help improve recruitment, retention and gender equity in STEM higher education and careers.

Measurement of the first neutron diffraction peak of D2O flowing in a 2 mm diameter aluminium tube as a function of temperature

A pilot experiment was performed using the WOMBAT powder diffraction instrument at ANSTO in which the first neutron diffraction peak (Q0) was measured for D2O flowing in a 2 mm internal diameter aluminium tube. Measurements of Q0 were made at -9, 4.3, 6.9, 12, 18.2 and 21.5 °C. The D2O was circulated using a siphon with water in the lower reservoir returned to the upper reservoir using a small pump. This enabled stable flow to be maintained for several hours. For example, if the pump flow increased slightly, the upper reservoir level rose, increasing the siphon flow until it matched the return flow. A neutron wavelength of 2.4 Å was used and data integrated over 60 minutes for each temperature. A jet of nitrogen from a liquid N2 Dewar was directed over the aluminium tube to vary water temperature. After collection of the data, the d spacing of the aluminium peaks was used to calculate the temperature of the aluminium within the neutron beam and therefore was considered to be an accurate measure of water temperature within the beam. Sigmaplot version 12.3 was used to fit a Weibull five parameter peak fit to the first neutron diffraction peak. The values of Q0 obtained in this experiment showed an increase with temperature consistent with data in the literature [1] but were consistently higher than published values for bulk D20. For example at 21.5 °C we obtained a value of 2.008 Å-1 for Q0 compared to a literature value of 1.988 Å-1 for bulk D2O at 20 °C, a difference of 1%. Further experiments are required to see if this difference is real or artifactual.

Establishing a framework for transforming student engagement, success and retention in higher education institutions [Final Report]

The perennial issues of student engagement, success and retention (SESR) in higher education continue to attract attention as key indicators of learning and teaching quality. This project aimed to establish and provide a holistic framework that would allow higher education institutions (HEIs) manage and improve their student engagement and retention strategies and programs. The framework and main project deliverable is a Maturity Model (MM) for Student Engagement, Success and Retention (SESR-MM). The project involved three Australian universities with experience and reputations in SESR activities: Queensland University of Technology (lead institution), the University of Queensland and Griffith University, working cooperatively to develop and trial the project deliverables. Project findings suggest that the SESR-MM has the potential to positively transform the holistic—academic, social and personal—engagement experiences of students in Australian universities, and that the SESR-MM is a useful mechanism for sharing good practice and improving programs designed to enhance the student experience.