Ecological risk analysis of transgenic plants

Public concern about the safety of many forms of industrial technology are known to be linked to a range of factors including a perceived lack of confidence in regulatory decision making.1 The use of transgenic plants in agriculture may be seen as an issue that could generate similar concern. Criticism has been made about the completeness of knowledge on the potential for aberrant behaviour of genetically manipulated organisms (GMO's) in release environments, and the adequacy of existing pre­‐release screening and assessment methodologies (Goldberg & Tjaden, 1990). Such comments are important because any perceived shortcomings in the pre-release assessment of GMO safety may lead to decreased public support of the technology -­‐and the industry itself...

A cisgender girl in a transgender world : The methodological challenges of researching in the transgender community

The available research literature on intimate partner violence is often centred around a heteronormative understanding of gender, relationships and violence. When it comes to intimate partner violence in the transgender community, the research is limited or nonexistent due in part to the methodological issues of visibility and access by those outside this community. Drawing from Renzetti (1992, 1995), McClennen (2003), and the feminist participatory research model, this paper examines the techniques for overcoming the methodological barriers as a cisgender or 'normatively gendered' woman in a transgender community. Throughout the research with the transgender community, five strategies for overcoming methodological barriers were developed: Cultural Immersion, Commitment and Visibility, Sensitivity and Acceptance, Honesty, and Communication. This paper explores how utilising these strategies enabled access to the transgender community in order to conduct effective research.

A design approach to the study of people's experiences with technologies in the context of public transport

Relevant to the study of people’s attitudes towards public transport use is the consideration to the role of technology as part of the travel experience. Technologies aim to enhance daily tasks but tend to change the way people interact with products and can be perceived as difficult to use. This is critical in the context of “public use” where products and services are to be used by the population at large: adults, children, elderly, people with disabilities, and tourists. From different perspectives, the topic of users and the use of technologies have been studied in the social sciences and human computer interaction fields; however, earlier approaches fail to address the ways in which experiential knowledge informs people’s interactions with products and technologies, and how such information could guide the design of future technologies. This paper describes a pilot study, part of a larger ongoing exploratory research that investigates people’s experiences with infrastructure, systems, and technologies in the context of public transport. The methodological approach included focus groups, field observations, and retrospective verbal reports. At this stage, the study found that four context led factors were the primary source of reference informing participants’ actions and interactions; they are: (i) context >> experience, (ii) context >> interface, (iii) context >> knowledge, (iv) context >> emotion.

eHealth-as-a-Service (eHaaS) : a data-driven decision making approach in Australian context

A commitment in 2010 by the Australian Federal Government to spend $466.7 million dollars on the implementation of personally controlled electronic health records (PCEHR) heralded a shift to a more effective and safer patient centric eHealth system. However, deployment of the PCEHR has met with much criticism, emphasised by poor adoption rates over the first 12 months of operation. An indifferent response by the public and healthcare providers largely sceptical of its utility and safety speaks to the complex sociotechnical drivers and obstacles inherent in the embedding of large (national) scale eHealth projects. With government efforts to inflate consumer and practitioner engagement numbers giving rise to further consumer disillusionment, broader utilitarian opportunities available with the PCEHR are at risk. This paper discusses the implications of establishing the PCEHR as the cornerstone of a holistic eHealth strategy for the aggregation of longitudinal patient information. A viewpoint is offered that the real value in patient data lies not just in the collection of data but in the integration of this information into clinical processes within the framework of a commoditised data-driven approach. Consideration is given to the eHealth-as-a-Service (eHaaS) construct as a disruptive next step for co-ordinated individualised healthcare in the Australian context.

See to believe : the Center for Tactical Magic’s sleight of hand

The Bay Area’s Center for Tactical Magic has been performing ‘‘magical’’ art interventions since 2000. The Center’s work augments traditional activist techniques by offering new conceptions of what art and activism can entail in a contemporary urban context. This article explores how Jacques Rancie`re’s reconfigured relationship between art and politics can be applied to the Center’s work, providing new distributions of the sensible for participants.

Activism, art and social practice : a case study using Jacques Ranciere’s framework for analysis

The question can no longer just be whether “art and social practice” or creative forms of activism are part of larger neo liberal agenda nor if they are potentially radical in their conception, delivery or consumption. The question also becomes: what are the effects of social practice art and design for the artists, institutions, and the publics they elicit in public and private spaces; that is, how can we consider such artworks differently? I argue the dilution of social practices’ potentially radical interventions into cultural processes and their absorption into larger neo liberal agendas limits how, as Jacques Rancière might argue, they can intervene in the “distribution of the sensible.” I will use a case study example from The Center for Tactical Magic, an artist group from the San Francisco Bay Area.

Audit fees and asset securitization risks

The thesis investigates “where were the auditors in asset securitizations”, a criticism of the audit profession before and after the onset of the global financial crisis (GFC). Asset securitizations increase audit complexity and audit risks, which are expected to increase audit fees. Using US bank holding company data from 2003 to 2009, this study examines the association between asset securitization risks and audit fees, and its changes during the global financial crisis. The main test is based on an ordinary least squares (OLS) model, which is adapted from the Fields et al. (2004) bank audit fee model. I employ a principal components analysis to address high correlations among asset securitization risks. Individual securitization risks are also separately tested. A suite of sensitivity tests indicate the results are robust. These include model alterations, sample variations, further controls in the tests, and correcting for the securitizer self-selection problem. A partial least squares (PLS) path modelling methodology is introduced as a separate test, which allows for high intercorrelations, self-selection correction, and sequential order hypotheses in one simultaneous model. The PLS results are consistent with the main results. The study finds significant and positive associations between securitization risks and audit fees. After the commencement of the global financial crisis in 2007, there was an increased focus on the role of audits on asset securitization risks resulting from bank failures; therefore I expect that auditors would become more sensitive to bank asset securitization risks after the commencement of the crisis. I find that auditors appear to focus on different aspects of asset securitization risks during the crisis and that auditors appear to charge a GFC premium for banks. Overall, the results support the view that auditors consider asset securitization risks and market changes, and adjust their audit effort and risk considerations accordingly.

One-stop shopping : some notes on the concept and some Australian initiatives

This paper aims to review the notion of the one-stop shop, particularly as it has developed in Australia. It has three main components. The first focuses on a significant initiative taken by the Coombs Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration as a form of action research in the mid-1970s. The second highlights the associated work on access theory by the late Bernard Schaffer and his associates and explains why this work was of fundamental importance for the development of the idea of the one-stop shop. The third deals with subsequent Australian understandings and a pp lications of the idea.

Jeff Wall photographs

This review assesses a survey of Jeff Wall's photographs at the MCA in Sydney. It analyses works such as "The Destroyed Room", "A Sudden Gust of Wind", and "A View from an Apartment". It also situates Wall as a preeminent early postmodern artist, post-photographer, and salon style maker of images.

Exploring Bodies in Time and Space

While the body, time and space are fundamental to human experience, comparatively little attention has been given to the connections between them. Here scholars from a wide range of disciplines explore important themes of embodied life in time and space across cultures, activities and bodymind states. Motivated by a common desire to deepen and extend our comprehension of these phenomena and the connections and conversations between them, this book emerged from intense inter-disciplinary dialogue during the 1st Global Conferences on Time, Space and the Body and Body Horror. A plenitude of theoretical approaches and media are deployed to investigate assumptions and pose problems, to creatively deconstruct and reconstruct the terms through which experience is rendered meaningful, pleasurable, and functional. These investigations, pursued through various research methods in fields of the arts, social and psychological sciences and humanities, invite readers into a genuinely pluralistic conversation around the most basic and profound aspects of being.

Introduction : Understanding Connections between Time, Space and the Body

The experiences and constructs of time, space and bodies saturate human discourse—naturally enough, since they are fundamental to existence—yet there has long been a tendency for the terms to be approached somewhat independently, belying the depth of their interconnections. It was a desire to address that apparent shortcoming that inspired this book, and the interdisciplinary meetings from which it was born, the 1st Global Conferences on ‘Time, Space and the Body’ and ‘Body Horror’ held in Sydney in February 2013. Following the lively, often provocative, exchange of ideas throughout those meetings, the writing here crosses conventional boundaries inhabiting everyday life and liminal experiences, across cultures, life circumstances, and bodily states. Through numerous theoretical frameworks and with reference to a variety of media, the authors problematize or deconstruct commonplace assumptions to reveal challenging new perspectives on the diverse cultures and communities which make our world. If there is an overarching theme of this collection it is diversity itself. The writers here come from numerous academic fields, but a good number of them also draw on first-hand cultural production in the arts: photography, sculpture and fine art instillation, for example. Of course, however laudable it might be, there is a potential problem in such diversity: does it produce fruitful dialogue moving toward creative, workable syntheses or simply a cacophony of competing, incomprehensible, barely comprehending voices? To a large degree this depends upon the intellectual, existential ambitions as well as the old-fashioned goodnatured tolerance of both writers and readers. But we hope three unifying characteristics are discernable in the following chapters viewed as a whole: firstly, a genuine concern for the world humans inhabit and the communities they form as bodies in space and time; secondly, an emphasis upon the experience of the human subject, exemplified perhaps by the number of chapters drawing on phenomenology; thirdly, an adventurous, explorative impulse associated with an underlying sense that being, since it is inseparable from the body’s temporality, is always becoming, and here the presence of poststructuralist influences is unmistakable, often explicit. Our challenge as editors has been to present the enormous variety of subjects and views in a way that would render the book coherent and at the same time encourage readers to make explorations themselves into realms they might usually consider beyond their field of interest. To that end we have divided the book into six sections around loosely defined themes, each offering different angles on how time and/or space unfold in and around bodies.

Troubling dissemination : experimentations with the salon as conference event

Salons became popular in Europe in 17th Century as sites of philosophic and literary conversation. A group of female academics interested in Deleuzian theories experimented with the salon to challenge presentation and dissemination norms that hierarchize and centralize the human. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987), assemblages are shifting and decentering, so how might assemblages of chairs, tables, bodies, lights, space, help to trouble thinking about the methodological conventions around academic disseminations? The authors discuss the salon as a critical-cultural site: Cumming presents Deleuze and play-dough, an exploration of how the playful dissemination format of the salon prompted a re-reading of a methodological vignette from earlier research. Knight, an arts-based researcher, uses video art as a creative methodology to examine conceptualizations of rhizomes and assemblages at the salon as a dissemination site. The authors conclude that the salon, as a critical, cultural site disrupts hierarchized ways of approaching and presenting research.

Feminism and Global Justice

This book attempts to persuade a new generation of scholars, criminologists, activists, and policy makers sympathetic to the quest for global justice to open the envelope, to step out of their comfort zones and typical frames of analysis to gaze at a world full of injustice against the female sex, much of it systemic, linked to culture, custom and religion. In some instances the sources of these injustices intersect with those that produce global inequality, imperialism and racism. This book also investigates circumstances where the globalising forces cultivate male on male violence in the anomic spaces of supercapitalism – the border zones of Mexico and the United States, and the frontier mining communities in the Australian desert. However systemic gendered injustices, such as forced marriage of child female brides, sati the cremation of widows, genital cutting, honour crimes, rape and domestic violence against women, are forms of violence only experienced by the female sex. The book does not shirk away from female violence either. Carrington argues that if feminism wants to have a voice in the public, cultural, political and criminological debates about heightened, albeit often exaggerated, social concerns about growing female violence and engagement in terrorism, then new directions in theorising female violence are required. Feminist silences about the violent crimes, atrocities and acts of terrorism committed by the female sex leave anti-feminist explanations uncontested. This allows a discursive space for feminist backlash ideologues to flourish. This book contests those ideologies to offer counter explanations for the rise in female violence and female terrorism, in a global context where systemic gendered violence against women is alarming and entrenched. The world needs feminism to take hold across the globe, now more than ever.

Domestic ecologies : gender and domesticity in Harold Pinter's Rooms

Harold Pinter's work opens the walls to the relatively closed rooms of domesticity. The room of the love affair, the unpredictable liaison, the cramped cluttered rooms of poverty and the disaffected. This study uses Pinter's rooms to analyse existing ideologies of gender, territory, power and domesticity. Pinter's rooms are more often than not reflections of familiar domestic spaces. This research investigates Pinter's rooms through a case study of a theatre set for one of his plays and textual analysis of selected works, developing an understanding of how Pinter's characters reflect behaviours within the domestic environment, mimicking while subverting domestic ecologies.

Mobility in the child (and carer) friendly city : SEQ vs. Stockholm

The rationale for providing state subsidised public transport has changed over time from a social obligation to provide transport options for those without access to private transport to an environmental and economic imperative to minimize congestion and greenhouse gas emissions. In many jurisdictions this shift has seen a greater focus on the provision of peak hour commuter services and a shift in the demographic profile of the riding public and a significant increase in the number of commuter passengers relative to others. The scheduling of commuter services is not geared to meet the needs of children and their generally female carers who often need to engage in trip chaining and travel outside peak commuting periods and on weekends. In addition to service scheduling difficulties, transport infrastructure, both on-board and supporting infrastructure such as bus stops, train stations and connecting footpaths often do not support children and their carers to use public transport services. Combined with a negative attitude by passengers and service providers, such as bus drivers, which may see children, babies and young people as out of place and unwelcome on commuter services, these issues conspire to hinder the use of public transport by children and their carers. Overlaying feminist geography analysis and insights and child-friendly cities objectives, this paper proposes some basic criteria for the provision of public transport services and supporting infrastructure which meets the needs of children, babies and their carers and juxtaposes the achievement of these in South East Queensland, Australia and Stockholm, Sweden.