The next generation health intervention tool - Can smart phone applications help young people track and moderate alcohol use and potential harms?

Whilst alcohol is a common feature of many social gatherings, there are numerous immediate and long-term health and social harms associated with its abuse. Alcohol consumption is the world’s third largest risk factor for disease and disability with almost 4% of all deaths worldwide attributed to alcohol. Not surprisingly, alcohol use and binge drinking by young people is of particular concern with Australian data reporting that 39% of young people (18-19yrs) admitted drinking at least weekly and 32% drank to levels that put them at risk of alcohol-related harm. The growing market penetration and connectivity of smartphones may be an opportunities for innovation in promoting health-related self-management of substance use. However, little is known about how best to harness and optimise this technology for health-related intervention and behaviour change. This paper explores the utility and interface of smartphone technology as a health intervention tool to monitor and moderate alcohol use. A review of the psychological health applications of this technology will be presented along with the findings of a series of focus groups, surveys and behavioural field trials of several drink-monitoring applications. Qualitative and quantitative data will be presented on the perceptions, preferences and utility of the design, usability and functionality of smartphone apps to monitoring and moderate alcohol use. How these findings have shaped the development and evolution of the OnTrack app will be specifically discussed, along with future directions and applications of this technology in health intervention, prevention and promotion.

Genomic evidence for the parallel evolution of coastal forms in the Senecio lautus complex

Instances of parallel ecotypic divergence where adaptation to similar conditions repeatedly cause similar phenotypic changes in closely related organisms are useful for studying the role of ecological selection in speciation. Here we used a combination of traditional and next generation genotyping techniques to test for the parallel divergence of plants from the Senecio lautus complex, a phenotypically variable groundsel that has adapted to disparate environments in the South Pacific. Phylogenetic analysis of a broad selection of Senecio species showed that members of the S. lautus complex form a distinct lineage that has diversified recently in Australasia. An inspection of thousands of polymorphisms in the genome of 27 natural populations from the S. lautus complex in Australia revealed a signal of strong genetic structure independent of habitat and phenotype. Additionally, genetic differentiation between populations was correlated with the geographical distance separating them, and the genetic diversity of populations strongly depended on geographical location. Importantly, coastal forms appeared in several independent phylogenetic clades, a pattern that is consistent with the parallel evolution of these forms. Analyses of the patterns of genomic differentiation between populations further revealed that adjacent populations displayed greater genomic heterogeneity than allopatric populations and are differentiated according to variation in soil composition. These results are consistent with a process of parallel ecotypic divergence in face of gene flow.

Driven to drive : designing gamification for a learner logbook smartphone application

Driving can be dangerous, especially for young and inexperienced drivers. To help address the issue of inexperience a gamified logbook application was developed for Learner drivers. The application aims to encourage learners to undertake a wider range of practice, while also making it easier to record their mandatory practice sessions. This paper reports on the design of this application, focusing on the effect that adding gamification can have on the usability and user experience of the application and the importance of playability testing for gamified systems. Two versions of the application were developed, one with game elements and one without game elements. This paper presents findings from a study that compares the user experience of these two versions of the application with twelve recent Learner drivers. Overall, participants reported that the gamified version was more engaging and motivating than the non-gamified version, however neither versions were preferred over the other. We theorise that this may have occurred due to a number of usability issues that arose, including an increased difficulty in learnability due to the added game elements. These design issues are important to address in future gamified system designs.

Convergence and divergence during the adaptation to similar environments by an Australian Groundsel

Adaptation to replicate environments is often achieved through similar phenotypic solutions. Whether selection also produces convergent genomic changes in these situations remains largely unknown. The variable groundsel, Senecio lautus, is an excellent system to investigate the genetic underpinnings of convergent evolution, because morphologically similar forms of these plants have adapted to the same environments along the coast of Australia. We compared range-wide patterns of genomic divergence in natural populations of this plant and searched for regions putatively affected by natural selection. Our results indicate that environmental adaptation followed complex genetic trajectories, affecting multiple loci, implying both the parallel recruitment of the same alleles and the divergence of completely different genomic regions across geography. An analysis of the biological functions of candidate genes suggests that adaptation to coastal environments may have occurred through the recruitment of different genes participating in similar processes. The relatively low genetic convergence that characterizes the parallel evolution of S. lautus forms suggests that evolution is more constrained at higher levels of biological organization.

Natural, engineered and synthetic inhibitors of kallikrein-related peptidases

There is a rapidly growing appreciation of the important physiological roles played by kallikreins and kallikrein-related peptidases (KLKs). Recent studies have revealed that these enzymes control key events in processes as diverse as inflammation and skin desquamation. Accordingly, there is considerable interest in developing tools to further dissect kallikrein activity, and a burgeoning effort aimed at producing lead inhibitors for therapeutic development. Indeed, several candidate inhibitors are already in clinical trials. This chapter surveys the naturally occurring kallikrein inhibitors, together with strategies for employing these molecules as bioscaffolds, as well as current progress in the development of small-molecule kallikrein inhibitors.

Context matters : Violence against women and reporting to police in rural, suburban and urban areas

Despite plentiful efforts to identify perpetrator, victim, and incident characteristics correlated with reporting violence against women to police, few studies have addressed the contexts that shape such reporting. Even fewer have examined variations in these contexts across geographic areas. Drawing upon National Crime Victimization Survey data from 1992 through 2009, this paper uses conjunctive analysis of case configurations to identify and investigate the dominant situational contexts of reporting of violence against women to police across rural, suburban, and urban areas. Our findings show that context matters and the importance of incident, perpetrator, and victim characteristics vary across geographic areas.

Claims about women's use of non-fatal force in intimate relationships : A contextual review of Canadian research

Claims that violence is gender-neutral are increasingly becoming “common sense” in Canada. Antifeminist groups assert that the high rates of woman abuse uncovered by major Canadian national surveys conducted in the early 1990s are greatly exaggerated and that women are as violent as men. The production of degendered rhetoric about “intimate partner violence” contributes to claims that women’s and men’s violence is symmetrical and mutual. This article critically evaluates common claims about Canadian women’s use of nonlethal force in heterosexual intimate relationships in the context of the political struggle over the hegemonic frame for violence and abuse. The extant Canadian research documenting significant sex differences in violence and abuse against adult intimate partners is reviewed.

Indirect message injection for MAC generation

This paper presents a model for the generation of a MAC tag using a stream cipher. The input message is used indirectly to control segments of the keystream that form the MAC tag. Several recent proposals can be considered as instances of this general model, as they all perform message accumulation in this way. However, they use slightly different processes in the message preparation and finalisation phases. We examine the security of this model for different options and against different types of attack, and conclude that the indirect injection model can be used to generate MAC tags securely for certain combinations of options. Careful consideration is required at the design stage to avoid combinations of options that result in susceptibility to forgery attacks. Additionally, some implementations may be vulnerable to side-channel attacks if used in Authenticated Encryption (AE) algorithms. We give design recommendations to provide resistance to these attacks for proposals following this model.

Security analysis of linearly filtered NLFSRs

Non-linear feedback shift register (NLFSR) ciphers are cryptographic tools of choice of the industry especially for mobile communication. Their attractive feature is a high efficiency when implemented in hardware or software. However, the main problem of NLFSR ciphers is that their security is still not well investigated. The paper makes a progress in the study of the security of NLFSR ciphers. In particular, we show a distinguishing attack on linearly filtered NLFSR (or LF-NLFSR) ciphers. We extend the attack to a linear combination of LF-NLFSRs. We investigate the security of a modified version of the Grain stream cipher and show its vulnerability to both key recovery and distinguishing attacks.

Intimate relationship status variations in violence against women : urban, suburban, and rural differences

Woman abuse varies across intimate relationship categories (e.g., marriage, divorce, separation). However, it is unclear whether relationship status variations in violence against women differ across urban, suburban, and rural areas. We test the hypothesis that rural females, regardless of their intimate partner relationship status, are at higher risk of intimate violence than their urban and suburban counterparts. Results indicate that marital status is an important aspect of the relationship between intimate victimization and geographic area and that rural divorced and separated females are victimized at rates exceeding their urban counterparts.