A new life of Hans Christian Andersen : a study of the ‘peculiar nature’ of an author’s life

A review of "Hans Christian Andersen : European Witness" by Paul Binding (Yale UP, 2014). How a writer bears witness to his age is necessarily the expression of many things, not least the possibly quite peculiar nature of an author’s life. Literary works often emerge from complex upbringings, from periods of youthful isolation spent reading and writing. More still seem to have been written as a result of the fraught relationships that befall authors, perhaps because authors so often view their relationships with a degree of creative and critical distance. And yet, if a writer’s output evidences an unusual life, it also witnesses broader questions being asked by a community as a whole. At some level, even the most remarkable figures are typical of their age, and reflections of it. By the close of Paul Binding’s study of the life and works of Hans Christian Andersen (1805–75), we are reminded that extraordinary feats of originality and imagination are often the result of how unique minds enter wider discourses...

Literary Studies : The Author Cat - Clemens's Life in Fiction

A review of The Author Cat: Clemens's Life in Fiction by Forrest G. Robinson (Fordham UP, 2007). Even at its most basic, guilt forms a counterweight to the hesitancy and unpleasantness of authorship, forcing writers back to the desk when they have come to despise their work. Guilt as task-master is familiar to most, even those to whom more elevated feelings, such as inspiration, make occasional visits. It seems that guilt is effective because writing is so seldom an organic or natural activity - rather, good writing emerges out of unhappy pressures that eventually overwhelm the writer's evasive strategies, from visits to the fridge door to the most sophisticated forms they take, such as when the author creates a narrative persona that claims to have owned up...

Sharing ink

Sharing Ink is a Guerrilla Kindness work by public artist Sayraphim Lothian. 30 handmade books will be given to 30 local writers and artists to inscribe with a lovely message to a stranger. From 1 – 10 August, 2013, these books will be left out in various places around the Melbourne CBD as a gift to whoever finds them.

Transmedia Victoria

Christy Dena was commissioned by the Australia Council for the Arts to organise and curate a special conference and workshop event on transmedia. Her brief was to secure all the relevant funding bodies to support it financially (the first time they ever all funded the same event). Christy brought in transmedia professionals from around the world, and targeted directors, writers, designers, and producers, from film, TV, theatre, gaming, music, literature and digital sectors. She curated the audience as well as the speakers. It was a huge success, and follow-up meetups with the IGDA were also organised.

Do you have a big stick?

Can I write across media? Yes and no. No, I can’t begin writing a sentence with a pen on paper and then use that pen to write on a screen. I have to change my tools. But, I can use those different tools to write a story that begins in paper and ends on the screen. At it most fundamental level, this is transmedia. Transmedia is not synonymous with digital media as it often involves both digital and nondigital media. A transmedia writer is also not synonymous with writers who write both screenplays and novels. Instead, transmedia often involves the continuation of a story across media.

Maternal concern about her toddler undereating and becoming underweight and use of feeding practices - analysis of the NOURISH and SAIDI cohorts using structural equation modeling

The chubby baby who eats well is desirable in our culture. Perceived low weight gains and feeding concerns are common reasons mothers seek advice in the early years. In contrast, childhood obesity is a global public health concern. Use of coercive feeding practices, prompted by maternal concern about weight, may disrupt a child’s innate self regulation of energy intake, promoting overeating and overweight. This study describes predictors of maternal concern about her child undereating/becoming underweight and feeding practices. Mothers in the control group of the NOURISH and South Australian Infants Dietary Intake studies (n = 332) completed a self-administered questionnaire when the child was aged 12–16 months. Weight-for-age z-score (WAZ)was derived from weight measured by study staff. Mean age (SD) was 13.8 (1.3) months, mean WAZ (SD), 0.58 (0.86) and 49% were male. WAZ and two questions describing food refusal were combined in a structural equation model with four items from the Infant feeding Questionnaire (IFQ) to form the factor ‘Concern about undereating/weight’. Structural relationships were drawn between concern and IFQ factors ‘awareness of infant’s hunger and satiety cues’, ‘use of food to calm infant’s fussiness’ and ‘feeding infant on a schedule’, resulting in a model of acceptable fit. Lower WAZ and higher frequency of food refusal predicted higher maternal concern. Higher maternal concern was associated with lower awareness of infant cues (r = −.17, p = .01) and greater use of food to calm (r = .13, p = .03). In a cohort of healthy children, maternal concern about undereating and underweight was associated with practices that have the potential to disrupt self-regulation.

Item reputation-aware recommender systems

Recommender systems provide personalized advice for customers online based on their own preferences, while reputation systems generate a community advice on the quality of items on the Web. Both systems use users’ ratings to generate their output. In this paper, we propose to combine reputation models with recommender systems to enhance the accuracy of recommendations. The main contributions include two methods for merging two ranked item lists which are generated based on recommendation scores and reputation scores, respectively, and a personalized reputation method to generate item reputations based on users’ interests. The proposed merging methods can be applicable to any recommendation methods and reputation methods, i.e., they are independent from generating recommendation scores and reputation scores. The experiments we conducted showed that the proposed methods could enhance the accuracy of existing recommender systems.

The long and winding road : health services for clients with chronic leg ulcers in the community

The prevalence of leg ulcers of is 0.12%–1.1% and >3,000 lower limb amputations are performed yearly in Australia due to non-healing leg or foot ulcers. Although evidence on leg ulcer management is available, a significant evidence-practice gap exists. To identify current leg ulcer management, a cross-sectional retrospective study was undertaken in Brisbane, Australia. A sample of 104 clients was recruited from a community specialist wound clinic and a tertiary hospital outpatient’s specialist wound clinic. All clients had an ulcer below their knee or on their foot for ≥4 weeks. Data were collected on ulcer care, health service usage and clinical history for the year prior to admission. On admission, participants reported having their ulcer for a median of 25 weeks (range 2-728 weeks); with 51% (53/104) reporting an ulcer duration of ≥24 weeks. Including the wound clinic, participants sought ulcer care from a median of 3 health care providers (range 2-7). General Practitioners provided ulcer care to 82% of participants. Nearly half (42%) had self-cared for their ulcer; 29% (30/104) received treatment by a community nurse. A gap was found between the community-based ulcer care experienced by this population and evidence-based guidelines in regards to assessment, management, advice, and referrals.

Improved nutritional status is related to improved quality of life in Parkinson’s disease

Background: Quality of life is poorer in Parkinson’s disease than in other conditions and in the general population without Parkinson’s disease. Malnutrition also results in poorer quality of life. This study aimed at determining the relationship between quality of life and nutritional status. Methods: Community-dwelling people with Parkinson’s disease >18 years old were recruited. The Patient-Generated Subjective Global Assessment (PG-SGA) assessed nutritional status. The Parkinson’s Disease Questionnaire 39 (PDQ-39) measured quality of life. Phase I was cross-sectional. The malnourished in Phase I were eligible for a nutrition intervention phase, randomised into 2 groups: standard care (SC) with provision of nutrition education materials only and intervention (INT) with individualised dietetic advice and regular weekly follow-up. Data were collected at baseline, 6 weeks, and 12 weeks. Results: Phase I consisted of 120 people who completed the PDQ-39. Phase II consisted of 9 in the SC group and 10 in the INT group. In Phase I, quality of life was poorer in the malnourished, particularly for mobility and activities of daily living domains. There was a significant correlation between PG-SGA and PDQ-39 scores (Phase I, rs = 0.445, p = .000; Phase II, rs = .426, p = .002). In Phase II, no significant difference in the PDQ-39 total or sub-scores was observed between the INT and SC groups; however, there was significant improvement in the emotional well-being domain for the entire group, X2(2) = 8.84, p = .012. Conclusions: Malnourished people with Parkinson’s disease had poorer quality of life than the well-nourished, and improvements in nutritional status resulted in quality of life improvements. Attention to nutritional status is an important component of quality of life and therefore the total care of people with Parkinson’s disease.

Implementation and evaluation of open source unified communications for SMBs

Unified Communication (UC) is the integration of two or more real time communication systems into one platform. Integrating core communication systems into one overall enterprise level system delivers more than just cost saving. These real-time interactive communication services and applications over Internet Protocol (IP) have become critical in boosting employee accessibility and efficiency, improving customer support and fostering business agility. However, some small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are far from implementing this solution due to the high cost of initial deployment and ongoing support. In this paper, we will discuss and demonstrate an open source UC solution, viz. “Asterisk” for use by SMBs, and report on some performance tests using SIPp. The contribution from this research is the provision of technical advice to SMBs in deploying UC, which is manageable in terms of cost, ease of deployment and support.

Teaching peer review reflective processes in accounting

A well designed peer review process in higher education subjects can lead to more confident and reflective learners who become skilled at making independent judgements of their own and others’ work; essential requirements for successful lifelong learning. The challenge for educators is to ensure their students gain these important graduate attributes within the constraints of a range of internal and external tensions currently facing higher education systems, including, respectively, the realities of large undergraduate Accounting subjects, culturally diverse and time-poor academics and students, and increased calls for public accountability of the Higher Education sector by groups such as the OECD. Innovative curriculum and assessment design and collaborative technologies have the capacity to simultaneously provide some measure of relief from these internal and external tensions and to position students as responsible partners in their own learning. This chapter reports on a two phase implementation of an online peer review process as part of the assessment in a large, under-graduate, International Accounting class. Phase One did not include explicit reflective strategies within the process, and anonymous and voluntary student views served to clearly highlight that students were ‘confused’ and ‘hesitant’ about moving away from their own ideas; often mistrusting the conflicting advice received from multiple peer reviewers. A significant number of students also felt that they did not have the skills to constructively review the work of their peers. Phase Two consequently utilised the combined power of e-Technology, peer review feedback and carefully scaffolded and supported reflective practices from Ryan and Ryan’s Teaching and Assessing Reflective Learning (TARL) model (see Chap. 2). Students found the reflective skills support workshop introduced in Phase Two to be highly useful in maximising the benefits of the peer review process, with 83 % reporting it supported them in writing peer reviews, while 90 % of the respondents reporting the workshop supported them in utilising peer and staff feedback.

Comparing the effectiveness of education and technology in reducing wood smoke pollution: A field experiment

This study describes a field experiment assessing the effectiveness of education and technological innovation in reducing air pollution generated by domestic wood heaters. Two-hundred and twenty four households from a small regional center in Australia were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions: (1) Education only – households received a wood smoke reduction education pack containing information about the negative health impacts of wood smoke pollution, and advice about wood heater operation and firewood management; (2) SmartBurn only – households received a SmartBurn canister designed to improve combustion and help wood fires burn more efficiently, (3) Education and SmartBurn, and (4) neither Education nor SmartBurn (control). Analysis of covariance, controlling for pre-intervention household wood smoke emissions, wood moisture content, and wood heater age, revealed that education and SmartBurn were both associated with significant reduction in wood smoke emissions during the post-intervention period. Follow-up mediation analyses indicated that education reduced emissions by improving wood heater operation practices, but not by increasing health risk perceptions. As predicted, SmartBurn exerted a direct effect on emission levels, unmediated by wood heater operation practices or health risk perceptions.

Nutritional support in chronic obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) a randomised trial

Rationale Nutritional support is effective in managing malnutrition in COPD (Collins et al., 2012) leading to functional improvements (Collins et al., 2013). However, comparative trials of first line interventions are lacking. This randomised trial compared the effectiveness of individualised dietary advice by a dietitian (DA) versus oral nutritional supplements (ONS). Methods A target sample of 200 stable COPD outpatients at risk of malnutrition (‘MUST’; medium + high risk) were randomised to either a 12-week intervention of ONS (ONS: ~400 kcal/d, ~40 g/d protein) or DA with supportive written advice. The primary outcome was quality of life (QoL) measured using St George’s Respiratory Questionnaire with secondary outcomes including handgrip strength, body weight and nutritional intake. Both the change from baseline and the differences between groups was analysed using SPSS version 20. Results 84 outpatients were recruited (ONS: 41 vs. DA: 43), 72 completed the intervention (ONS: 33 vs. DA: 39). Mean BMI was 18.2 SD 1.6 kg/m2, age 72.6 SD 10 years, FEV1% predicted 36 SD 15% (severe COPD). In comparison to the DA group, the ONS group experienced significantly greater improvements in protein intakes above baseline values at both week 6 (+21.0 SEM 4.3 g/d vs. +0.52 SEM 4.3 g/d; p < 0.001) and week 12 (+19.0 SEM 5.0 g/d vs. +1.0 SEM 3.6 g/d; p = 0.033;ANOVA). QoL and secondary outcomes remained stable at 12 weeks in both groups with slight improvements in the ONS group but no differences between groups. Conclusion In outpatients at risk of malnutrition with severe COPD, nutritional support involving either ONS or DA appears to maintain in tritional status, functional capacity and QoL. However, larger trials, and earlier, multi-modal nutritional interventions for an extended duration should be explored.

Antimicrobial stewardship activities : a survey of Queensland hospitals

Objective: In 2011, the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care (ACSQHC) recommended that all hospitals in Australia must have an Antimicrobial Stewardship (AMS) program by 2013. Nevertheless, little is known about current AMS activities. This study aimed to determine the AMS activities currently undertaken, and to identify gaps, barriers to implementation and opportunities for improvement in Queensland hospitals. Methods: The AMS activities of 26 facilities from 15 hospital and health services in Queensland were surveyed during June 2012 to address strategies for effective AMS: implementing clinical guidelines, formulary restriction, reviewing antimicrobial prescribing, auditing antimicrobial use and selective reporting of susceptibility results. Results: The response rate was 62%. Nineteen percent had an AMS team (a dedicated multidisciplinary team consisting of a medically trained staff member and a pharmacist). All facilities had access to an electronic version of Therapeutic Guidelines: Antibiotic, with a further 50% developing local guidelines for antimicrobials. One-third of facilities had additional restrictions. Eighty-eight percent had advice for restricted antimicrobials from in-house infectious disease physicians or clinical microbiologists. Antimicrobials were monitored with feedback given to prescribers at point of care by 76% of facilities. Deficiencies reported as barriers to establishing AMS programs included: pharmacy resources, financial support by hospital management, and training and education in antimicrobial use. Conclusions: Several areas for improvement were identified: reviewing antimicrobial prescribing with feedback to the prescriber, auditing, and training and education in antimicrobial use. There also appears to be a lack of resources to support AMS programs in some facilities. What is known about the topic? The ACSQHC has recommended that all hospitals implement an AMS program by 2013 as a requirement of Standard 3 (Preventing and Controlling Healthcare-Associated Infections) of the National Safety and Quality Health Service Standards. The intent of AMS is to ensure appropriate prescribing of antimicrobials as part of the broader systems within a health service organisation to prevent and manage healthcare-associated infections, and improve patient safety and quality of care. This criterion also aligns closely with Standard 4: Medication Safety. Despite this recommendation, little is known about what AMS activities are undertaken in these facilities and what additional resources would be required in order to meet these national standards. What does the paper add? This is the first survey that has been conducted of public hospital and health services in Queensland, a large decentralised state in Australia. This paper describes what AMS activities are currently being undertaken, identifies practice gaps, barriers to implementation and opportunities for improvement in Queensland hospitals. What are the implications for practitioners? Several areas for improvement such as reviewing antimicrobial prescribing with feedback to the prescriber, auditing, and training and education in antimicrobial use have been identified. In addition, there appears to be a lack of resources to support AMS programs in some facilities.