Clergy Sexual Abuse Litigation: Survivors Seeking Justice By Jennifer M. Balboni (Boulder: First Forum Press, 2011, 180pp. £43.77)

Balboni identifies her interest as being the processes of official disclosure and the path taken to civil litigation by survivors of child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic Clergy. The empirical data, on which this work is based, come in the form of in-depth face-to-face interviews with 22 survivors of clergy sexual abuse who have pursued litigation and 13 of their advocates. Balboni provides a space for survivors’ accounts of the ‘why’ behind their decision making and the impact of civil litigation on their lives to be heard, discussed and contextualized with both clarity and sensitivity. She acknowledges the breadth and depth of survivor responses, and the perspectives of their legal advocates, employing defiance theory, symbolic interaction and other points of analysis, to capture the journey of survivors towards litigation and beyond. Balboni’s work is deeply poignant in its recognition of survivors’ voices, the complex transformative capacity of litigation, the effects of community forming amongst survivors and the complex nature of ‘empowerment’ obtained by survivors through civil litigation. Acknowledging that, for many survivors, litigation becomes a means of identity change and truth telling, Balboni admits that ‘these survivors helped me understand that litigation is more about voice than monetary settlement’ (p. 149). This work is not deeply analytical or theoretically rich but privileges the voices of survivors and their advocates with sufficient frameworks to contextualize and explain participants’ perspectives and experiences.

Queer theory, media studies and editorial processes in queer student media

Australian queer (GLBTIQ) university student activist media is an important site of self-representation. Community media is a significant site for the development of queer identity, community and a key part of queer politics. This paper reviews my research into queer student media, which is grounded in a queer theoretical perspective. Rob Cover argues that queer theoretical approaches that study media products fail to consider the material contexts that contribute to their construction. I use an ethnographic approach to examine how editors construct queer identity and community in queer student media. My research contributes to queer media scholarship by addressing the gap that Cover identifies, and to the rich scholarship on negotiations of queer community.

Introduction to grounded theory

Grounded theory, first developed by Glaser and Strauss in the 1960s, was introduced into nursing education as a distinct research methodology in the 1970s. The theory is grounded in a critique of the dominant contemporary approach to social inquiry, which imposed "enduring" theoretical propositions onto study data. Rather than starting from a set theoretical framework, grounded theory relies on researchers distinguishing meaningful constructs from generated data and then identifying an appropriate theory. Grounded theory is thus particularly useful in investigating complex issues and behaviours not previously addressed and concepts and relationships in particular populations or places that are still undeveloped or weakly connected. Grounded theory data analysis processes include open, axial and selective coding levels. The purpose of this article was to explore the grounded theory research process and provide an initial understanding of this methodology.

Efficient route update and maintenance processes for multipath routing in large-scale industrial wireless sensor networks

Reliable communications is one of the major concerns in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Multipath routing is an effective way to improve communication reliability in WSNs. However, most of existing multipath routing protocols for sensor networks are reactive and require dynamic route discovery. If there are many sensor nodes from a source to a destination, the route discovery process will create a long end-to-end transmission delay, which causes difficulties in some time-critical applications. To overcome this difficulty, the efficient route update and maintenance processes are proposed in this paper. It aims to limit the amount of routing overhead with two-tier routing architecture and introduce the combination of piggyback and trigger update to replace the periodic update process, which is the main source of unnecessary routing overhead. Simulations are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed processes in improvement of total amount of routing overhead over existing popular routing protocols.

Silver Gelatin Print: A group exhibition curated by Karen Milder that investigates and captures the traditional processes using photograms, liquid emulsion, toning, hand-colouring and film. Part of the Queensland Festival of Photography 4 (QFP4).

Pillar of salt: (3 hand-applied silver gelatin photographs) Statement: For women moving into new experiences and spaces, loss and hardship is often a price to be paid. These courageous women look back to things they have overcome in order to continue to grow.

Automated risk mitigation in business processes

This paper proposes a concrete approach for the automatic mitigation of risks that are detected during process enactment. Given a process model exposed to risks, e.g. a financial process exposed to the risk of approval fraud, we enact this process and as soon as the likelihood of the associated risk(s) is no longer tolerable, we generate a set of possible mitigation actions to reduce the risks' likelihood, ideally annulling the risks altogether. A mitigation action is a sequence of controlled changes applied to the running process instance, taking into account a snapshot of the process resources and data, and the current status of the system in which the process is executed. These actions are proposed as recommendations to help process administrators mitigate process-related risks as soon as they arise. The approach has been implemented in the YAWL environment and its performance evaluated. The results show that it is possible to mitigate process-related risks within a few minutes.

Cometary evolution : Clues from chondritic interplanetary dust particles

Cometary and interplanetary dust particles (IDP) are compared, and the mineralogical evolution of comet nuclei is discussed. Chondritic IDP have properties consistent with properties expected for cometary dust. The complex and varied mineralogy of these particles may indicate mineral alteration processes that occur in comet nuclei. Depending on the thermal budget of a comet, the upper few meters of nucleus material may maintain temperatures within regimes of hydrocryogenic (200 to 237K) and low-temperature aqueous (274 to 400K) alteration. Thus, layer silicates, carbonates, and sulfates may be important components of cometary dust and, correspondingly are common constituents of chondritic IDPs. Alteration of comet starting materials may be a common occurrence, and depends on the specific physical and chemical properties of each individual comet.

Modeling and detection of complex attacks

A complex attack is a sequence of temporally and spatially separated legal and illegal actions each of which can be detected by various IDS but as a whole they constitute a powerful attack. IDS fall short of detecting and modeling complex attacks therefore new methods are required. This paper presents a formal methodology for modeling and detection of complex attacks in three phases: (1) we extend basic attack tree (AT) approach to capture temporal dependencies between components and expiration of an attack, (2) using enhanced AT we build a tree automaton which accepts a sequence of actions from input message streams from various sources if there is a traversal of an AT from leaves to root, and (3) we show how to construct an enhanced parallel automaton that has each tree automaton as a subroutine. We use simulation to test our methods, and provide a case study of representing attacks in WLANs.

Procuring OSM : base-line models of off-site manufacture business processes in Australia

A pressing cost issue facing construction is the procurement of off-site pre-manufactured assemblies. In order to encourage Australian adoption of off-site manufacture (OSM), a new approach to underlying processes is required. The advent of object oriented digital models for construction design assumes intelligent use of data. However, the construction production system relies on traditional methods and data sources and is expected to benefit from the application of well-established business process management techniques. The integration of the old and new data sources allows for the development of business process models which, by capturing typical construction processes involving OSM, provides insights into such processes. This integrative approach is the foundation of research into the use of OSM to increase construction productivity in Australia. The purpose of this study is to develop business process models capturing the procurement, resources and information flow of construction projects. For each stage of the construction value chain, a number of sub-processes are identified. Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN), a mainstream business process modelling standard, is used to create base-line generic construction process models. These models identify OSM decision-making points that could provide cost reductions in procurement workflow and management systems. This paper reports on phase one of an on-going research aiming to develop a proto-type workflow application that can provide semi-automated support to construction processes involving OSM and assist in decision-making in the adoption of OSM thus contributing to a sustainable built environment.

Fourier Lucas-Kanade Algorithm

In this paper we propose a framework for both gradient descent image and object alignment in the Fourier domain. Our method centers upon the classical Lucas & Kanade (LK) algorithm where we represent the source and template/model in the complex 2D Fourier domain rather than in the spatial 2D domain. We refer to our approach as the Fourier LK (FLK) algorithm. The FLK formulation is advantageous when one pre-processes the source image and template/model with a bank of filters (e.g. oriented edges, Gabor, etc.) as: (i) it can handle substantial illumination variations, (ii) the inefficient pre-processing filter bank step can be subsumed within the FLK algorithm as a sparse diagonal weighting matrix, (iii) unlike traditional LK the computational cost is invariant to the number of filters and as a result far more efficient, and (iv) this approach can be extended to the inverse compositional form of the LK algorithm where nearly all steps (including Fourier transform and filter bank pre-processing) can be pre-computed leading to an extremely efficient and robust approach to gradient descent image matching. Further, these computational savings translate to non-rigid object alignment tasks that are considered extensions of the LK algorithm such as those found in Active Appearance Models (AAMs).

A review of the Ustilago-Sporisorium-Macalpinomyces complex

The fungal genera Ustilago, Sporisorium and Macalpinomyces represent an unresolved complex. Taxa within the complex often possess characters that occur in more than one genus, creating uncertainty for species placement. Previous studies have indicated that the genera cannot be separated by morphology alone. Here we chronologically review the history of the Ustilago-Sporisorium-Macalpinomyces complex, argue for its resolution and suggest methods to accomplish a stable taxonomy. A combined molecular and morphological approach is required to identify synapomorphic characters that underpin a new classification. Ustilago, Sporisorium and Macalpinomyces require explicit re-description and new genera, based on monophyletic groups, are needed to accommodate taxa that no longer fit the emended descriptions. A resolved classification will end the taxonomic confusion that surrounds generic placement of these smut fungi.

Preparing citizens for a complex world : the grand challenge of teaching socio-scientific issues in science education

The dawn of the twenty-first century encouraged a number of scientific and technological organisations to identify what they saw as ‘Grand Challenges and Opportunities’. Issues of environment and health featured very prominently in these quite short lists, as can be seen from a sample of these challenges in Table 1. Indeed, the first two lists of challenges in Table 1 were identified as for the environment and for health, respectively.

Soral synapomorphies are significant for the systematics of the Ustilago-Sporisorium-Macalpinomyces complex (Ustilaginaceae)

The genera Ustilago, Sporisorium and Macalpinomyces are a polyphyletic complex of plant pathogenic fungi. The four main morphological characters used to define these genera have been considered homoplasious and not useful for resolving the complex. This study re-evaluates character homology and discusses the use of these characters for defining monophyletic groups recovered from a reconstructed phylogeny using four nuclear loci. Generic delimitation of smut fungi based on their hosts is also discussed as a means for identifying genera within this group. Morphological characters and host specificity can be used to circumscribe genera within the Ustilago-Sporisorium-Macalpinomyces complex.

Update on complex nonpharmacological interventions for breathlessness

Purpose of review: The study provides a review of current evidence about the role of complex nonpharmacological strategies in managing the multidimensional components of the breathlessness experience for individuals with life-limiting conditions. Recent findings: Evidence continues to demonstrate the significant impact of breathlessness on patients’ quality of life, day-to-day activity, and physical and psychosocial functioning. Recent evidence also confirms that patients draw on a number of self-initiated actions to cope with breathlessness, although many do not use strategies that are supported by a growing body of evidence from randomized controlled trials. Current literature supports the use of multicomponent, nonpharmacological interventions comprising strategies to improve breathing efficiency and reducing psychological distress to manage breathlessness. However trials of these approaches have mostly been conducted among patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) or lung cancer, and few studies have investigated the benefits of nonpharmacological for patients in later stages of disease. Further investigation of interventions is required across a broader range of chronic life-limiting conditions. Addressing breathlessness and its co-occurring symptoms (symptom clusters) is also an area for future enquiry. Summary: The experience of breathlessness and strategies adopted by patients to manage the experience highlight the importance of multidimensional approaches to improve outcomes for patients with life-limiting conditions. There is good evidence to support the role of multicomponent, nonpharmacological interventions in reducing breathlessness for patients with COPD and lung cancer, although further studies are required to understand the particular clinical contexts in which such interventions are appropriate.

Approaches to designing for older adults' intuitive interaction with complex devices

Many older people have difficulties using modern consumer products due to increased product complexity both in terms of functionality and interface design. Previous research has shown that older people have more difficulty in using complex devices intuitively when compared to the younger. Furthermore, increased life expectancy and a falling birth rate have been catalysts for changes in world demographics over the past two decades. This trend also suggests a proportional increase of older people in the work-force. This realisation has led to research on the effective use of technology by older populations in an effort to engage them more productively and to assist them in leading independent lives. Ironically, not enough attention has been paid to the development of interaction design strategies that would actually enable older users to better exploit new technologies. Previous research suggests that if products are designed to reflect people's prior knowledge, they will appear intuitive to use. Since intuitive interfaces utilise domain-specific prior knowledge of users, they require minimal learning for effective interaction. However, older people are very diverse in their capabilities and domain-specific prior knowledge. In addition, ageing also slows down the process of acquiring new knowledge. Keeping these suggestions and limitations in view, the aim of this study was set to investigate possible approaches to developing interfaces that facilitate their intuitive use by older people. In this quest to develop intuitive interfaces for older people, two experiments were conducted that systematically investigated redundancy (the use of both text and icons) in interface design, complexity of interface structure (nested versus flat), and personal user factors such as cognitive abilities, perceived self-efficacy and technology anxiety. All of these factors could interfere with intuitive use. The results from the first experiment suggest that, contrary to what was hypothesised, older people (65+ years) completed the tasks on the text only based interface design faster than on the redundant interface design. The outcome of the second experiment showed that, as expected, older people took more time on a nested interface. However, they did not make significantly more errors compared with younger age groups. Contrary to what was expected, older age groups also did better under anxious conditions. The findings of this study also suggest that older age groups are more heterogeneous in their capabilities and their intuitive use of contemporary technological devices is mediated more by domain-specific technology prior knowledge and by their cognitive abilities, than chronological age. This makes it extremely difficult to develop product interfaces that are entirely intuitive to use. However, by keeping in view the cognitive limitations of older people when interfaces are developed, and using simple text-based interfaces with flat interface structure, would help them intuitively learn and use complex technological products successfully during early encounter with a product. These findings indicate that it might be more pragmatic if interfaces are designed for intuitive learning rather than for intuitive use. Based on this research and the existing literature, a model for adaptable interface design as a strategy for developing intuitively learnable product interfaces was proposed. An adaptable interface can initially use a simple text only interface to help older users to learn and successfully use the new system. Over time, this can be progressively changed to a symbols-based nested interface for more efficient and intuitive use.