Informal caring networks for people at end of life: Building social capital in Australian communities

The care of a person living at home near the end of their life is predominantly provided by family carers with the support of health services such as palliative care. In addition, informal caring networks also contribute at times to the support to the dying person and their carer. In this way, these networks can promote social capital in the communities from which they are drawn. This social approach to end of life care enhances community capacity to provide support to those dying at home and their carers. This article examines relevant published literature to explore the conceptual foundations of informal caring networks, examining the place of social capital and community development in the provision of end of life care at home, particularly in the Australian context.

Do good things and talk about them : a theory of academics usage of enterprise social networks for impression management tactics

Enterprise social networks provide benefits especially for knowledge-intensive work as they enable communication, collaboration and knowledge exchange. These platforms should therefore lead to increased adoption and use by knowledge-intensive workers such as consultants or indeed researchers. Our interest is in ascertaining whether scientific researchers use enterprise social networks as part of their work practices. This focus is motivated by an apparent schism between a need for researchers to exchange knowledge and profile themselves, and the aversion to sharing breakthrough ideas and joining in an ever-increasing publishing and marketing game. We draw on research on academic work practices and impression management to develop a model of academics’ ESN usage for impression management tactics. We describe important constructs of our model, offer strategies for their operationalization and give an outlook to our ongoing empirical study of the use of an ESN platform by 20 schools across six faculties at an Australian university.

The role of other people and emotion for blood donation : an altruistic social service

Blood donation is a critical part of health services with a viable blood supply underpinning an effective health program in any country. Typically blood is provided by voluntary donations from citizens and is therefore reliant on the goodwill and altruistic commitment of donors. In Australia, like many other developed nations, there are many challenges in maintaining a sufficient and sustainable blood supply. The Australian Red Cross Blood Service Donor and Community research group aim is to understand the barriers, motivations and perceptions of donors. Blood donation is a ‘people-processing’ service (Lovelock 1983, Russell-Bennett et al 2013) with the marketing exchange relating to bodily fluid rather than money and is an altruistic social service that has no direct benefit for the customer donor rather the benefit is for other people and society (Kotler and Zaltman 1971). Emotion has been shown to be a motivator and a barrier in a variety of Blood Service studies, this is a key insight that is further explored in the current study. Other key social factors that impact blood donor behavior are classified as social because they involve perceptions of other people’s beliefs and responses (such as moral or subjective norms), peer pressure, other people’s expectations and other people as a form of support. Given that emotions are social phenomena (Parkinson 1996), this study focuses on the role of other people in the blood donation process and how other people relates to the emotional experience of blood donors. We argue in this paper that overcoming emotional barriers to blood donation by leveraging the role of other people will influence low donation rates in Australia. To date, there has been little evidence in service research that identifies. In this paper we explore how other people influence the emotional experience of donors and how, donor emotions create the need for other people as a coping resource.

Anomaly detection in online social networks : using data-mining techniques and fuzzy logic

This research is a step forward in improving the accuracy of detecting anomaly in a data graph representing connectivity between people in an online social network. The proposed hybrid methods are based on fuzzy machine learning techniques utilising different types of structural input features. The methods are presented within a multi-layered framework which provides the full requirements needed for finding anomalies in data graphs generated from online social networks, including data modelling and analysis, labelling, and evaluation.

Ranking based clustering for social event detection

The problem of clustering a large document collection is not only challenged by the number of documents and the number of dimensions, but it is also affected by the number and sizes of the clusters. Traditional clustering methods fail to scale when they need to generate a large number of clusters. Furthermore, when the clusters size in the solution is heterogeneous, i.e. some of the clusters are large in size, the similarity measures tend to degrade. A ranking based clustering method is proposed to deal with these issues in the context of the Social Event Detection task. Ranking scores are used to select a small number of most relevant clusters in order to compare and place a document. Additionally,instead of conventional cluster centroids, cluster patches are proposed to represent clusters, that are hubs-like set of documents. Text, temporal, spatial and visual content information collected from the social event images is utilized in calculating similarity. Results show that these strategies allow us to have a balance between performance and accuracy of the clustering solution gained by the clustering method.

The civic virtue of developmentalism : on the mining industry’s social licence to develop Western Australia

This paper examines the social licence to operate (SLO) of Western Australia's (WA's) mining industry in the context of the state's ‘developmentalist’ agenda. We draw on the findings of a multi-disciplinary body of new research on the risks and challenges posed byWA's mining industry for environmental, social and economic sustainability. We synthesise the findings of this work against the backdrop of the broader debates on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and resource governance. In light of the data presented, this paper takes issue with the mining sector's SLO and its assessment of social and environmental impacts in WA for three inter-related reasons. A state government ideologically wedded to resource-led growth is seen to offer the resource sector a political licence to operate and to give insufficient attention to its potential social and environmental impacts. As a result, the resource sector can adopt a self-serving CSR agenda built on a limited win–win logic and operate with a ‘quasi social licence’ that is restricted to mere economic legitimacy. Overall, this paper problematises the political-cum-commercial construction and neoliberalisation of the SLO and raises questions about the impact of mining in WA.

Southern New England Social and Community Plan 2009 - Covering Local Government Authorities: Armidale Dumaresq, Guyra, Uralla and Walcha

The Southern New England (SNE) Social and Community Plan is a guide to collaborative, integrated planning involving the three spheres of government, the community and commercial sectors. The Plan is based on social justice principles such as: • Equity - fairness in resource distribution, particularly for those most in need • Access - fairer access for everyone to the economic resources and services essential to meeting their basic needs and improving their quality of life • Rights - recognition and promotion of civil rights • Participation - better opportunities for genuine participation and consultation about decisions affecting people's lives. The Plan is also aimed at improving the accountability of decision-makers, and should help the councils, in conjunction with their communities meet the state government's social justice commitments. Preparation of a social and community plan is required at least every five years, and as with most councils, Armidale Dumaresq Council (ADC) has produced two already, one in 1999 and one in 2004, following the amalgamation of the former Armidale City and Dumaresq Shire Councils in 2000. Those Councils formerly prepared their own Plans in 1999, based on shared consultancy work on a community profile. This is the first joint Southern New England Plan, featuring Armidale Dumaresq, Walcha, Uralla and Guyra Councils. This Social Plan has aimed to identify and address the needs of the local community by: • describing who makes up the community • summarising key priority issues • assessing the effectiveness of any previous plans • recommending strategic ways for council and other government and non-government agencies to met community needs.

Tamworth Regional Council Social Plan 2006

The Tamworth Regional Social Plan is a document for collaborative planning involving the three spheres of government, the community and commercial sectors, with the aim of enhancing the quality and fairness of life in Tamworth. The Plan is a way of identifying needs and priorities for community facilities and services for Tamworth. The Social Plan reflects Council’s ongoing commitment to the people of the Tamworth Region and, in particular, the social needs and aspirations of our community. The Local Government (General) Amendment (Community and Social Plans) Regulation 1998 grew out of the 1996 NSW Social Justice Directions Statement “Fair Go, Fair Share, Fair Say” which committed the Department of Local Government to ensuring government services are responsive to community needs and diversity. The regulation is designed to:- • Improve Councils’ ability to take account of community needs when formulating their management plans; • Assist Councils to provide or advocate for appropriate and accessible services/facilities; and • Increase the community’s ability to monitor Council efforts in addressing community needs over time. The Local Government (General) Regulation 1999 requires that all councils develop a community/social plan and that all plans be prepared in accordance with guidelines issued by the Department. While Council has a broad function of providing leadership for Tamworth, it is not the only group responsible for providing community services. Developing the Social Plan has required cooperation with various State and Federal agencies as well as with Tamworth’s community groups and agencies.

How Modern Governments Made Prostitution a Social Problem: Creating a Responsible Prostitute Population

Table of Contents Acknowledgments Preface by Dr. Pat Carlen Introduction 1. Political Languages of Prostitution 2. Genealogical Analysis: Documenting The Disorder of Things 3. From Death Rituals to Health Practices 4. Policing Female Prostitutes 5. Private Remedies for Public Concerns 6. The Emergence of the Male Prostitute 7. From Procreation to Pleasure 8. HIV/AIDS and Prostitution Conclusion Bibliography Index

‘Children Ask the Damnedest Questions’: Sex(uality) Education as a Social Problem

Perspectives in Human Sexuality is an overview of key debates, research findings and theories in the area of sex and sexuality. This textbook written especially for undergraduate students offers a detailed and comprehensive introduction to sex and sexuality from an Australian and New Zealand perspective. It examines controversial issues such as sex and age, sex work and gay, lesbian and queer sex in a fair and balanced manner.

Modes of criminal justice, indigenous youth and social democracy

The political question of how the will of a community is to be democratically formed and adhered to, the question of social democracy, is normatively tied to the mode of criminal justice employed within that democratic public sphere. Liberal, republican, procedural and communitarian forms of democratic will-formation respectively reflect retributive,restorative, procedural and co-operative modes of criminal justice. After first elaborating these links through the critical response of republican and procedural theories of democracy to the liberal practice of democratic will-formation and its retributive mode of justice, our discussion considers the recent practice of restorative and procedural justice with respect to Indigenous youth; and this in the context of a severely diminished role for Indigenous justice agencies in the public sphere. In light of certain shortcomings in both the restorative and procedural modes of justice, and so too with republican and procedural understandings of the democratic public sphere, we turn to a discussion of procedural communitarianism, anchored as it is in Dewey’s notion of social co-operation. From here we attempt a brief formulation of what a socially co-operative mode of justice might consist of; a mode of justice where historically racial and economically coercive injustices are sufficiently recognised.

SAIVT-ADMRG @ MediaEval 2014 social event detection

This paper outlines the approach taken by the Speech, Audio, Image and Video Technologies laboratory, and the Applied Data Mining Research Group (SAIVT-ADMRG) in the 2014 MediaEval Social Event Detection (SED) task. We participated in the event based clustering subtask (subtask 1), and focused on investigating the incorporation of image features as another source of data to aid clustering. In particular, we developed a descriptor based around the use of super-pixel segmentation, that allows a low dimensional feature that incorporates both colour and texture information to be extracted and used within the popular bag-of-visual-words (BoVW) approach.

An exploration of advertising engagement, advertising avoidance and privacy concerns on social networking sites

This thesis examines perceptions of advertising on social networking sites (SNS), in particular consumers' privacy concerns, advertising engagement and advertising avoidance. It contributes to the understanding of social media by providing results of a longitudinal investigation of consumer perceptions of advertising, a topography of engagement and avoidance triggers and a three dimensional model of advertising avoidance on SNS. This research used a mixed methodology, employing Critical Incident Technique, In-depth interviews and online surveys.

Emotional experiences of preservice science teachers in online learning : the formation, disruption and maintenance of social bonds

The enactment of learning to become a science teacher in online mode is an emotionally charged experience. We attend to the formation, maintenance and disruption of social bonds experienced by online preservice science teachers as they shared their emotional online learning experiences through blogs, or e-motion diaries, in reaction to videos of face-to-face lessons. A multi-theoretic framework drawing on microsociological perspectives of emotion informed our hermeneutic interpretations of students’ first-person accounts reported through an e-motion diary. These accounts were analyzed through our own database of emotion labels constructed from the synthesis of existing literature on emotion across a range of fields of inquiry. Preservice science teachers felt included in the face-to-face group as they watched videos of classroom transactions. The strength of these feelings of social solidarity were dependent on the quality of the video recording. E-motion diaries provided a resource for interactions focused on shared emotional experiences leading to formation of social bonds and the alleviation of feelings of fear, trepidation and anxiety about becoming science teachers. We offer implications to inform practitioners who wish to improve feelings of inclusion amongst their online learners in science education.