My System of Career Influences MSCI (Adult) Workbook

NOTE: This client booklet is to be used in conjunction with the MSCI (Adult) Facilitators Guide. Career development in the 21st century presents many challenges and opportunities. Throughout your life you will make countless decisions and experience numerous transitions. Each decision may be subject to a range of influences, for example people we know may give us an opinion, we may be attracted to a particular place or a particular salary, or we may simply want a change. No two people will have the same pattern of influences. The My System of Career Influences MSCI (Adult) is a qualitative career assessment reflection process based on recent developments in theory and practice. It uses a constructivist view and encourages a narrative and story-based approach to your career development. It has been used successfully with employees by career development practitioners working in a range of businesses and organisations from large to small and in one-on-one career counselling sessions as well as in a group setting.

Changes to commercial service provision among sex workers from Queensland, Australia

Introduction: The role of commercial sex in facilitating infection transmission is a subject of ongoing empirical enquiry, with little attention to the variety and extent of ‘non-traditional’ commercial services that pose a lesser risk of infection. This study sought to examine the supply and demand of a wide range of traditional and non-traditional commercial sexual services among sex workers and their clients from Queensland, Australia. Methods: Cross-sectional convenience sampling was used to compare female sex workers in 1991 (n=200, aged 16-46 years) and 2003 (n=247, aged 18-57 years) and from male clients in 2003. The client sample comprised 160 male clients aged between 19 and 72 years. Results: Over the comparison period there was a significant increase in the provision of ‘exotic’ or non-traditional sexual services. In 2003, the availability of bondage and discipline, submission, fantasy, use of sex toys, golden showers, fisting and lesbian double acts had increased dramatically, while ‘traditional’ services had mostly remained at similar levels. Moreover, the proportion of sex workers in some industry sectors providing ‘exotic’ commercial services seem to have risen over time. Conclusion: Undoubtedly, the sex industry has professionalised and now includes more sophisticated and specialized suppliers. As with any commercial business, the diversification of services is largely driven with client demand, with the ‘menu’ being generally broader than the majority of client preferences. However, although clients demands for particular commercial sexual services seems to have been met, with regard to anal sex and anal play, supply has failed to meet client demand. Disclosure of Interest Statement: Funding for the 2003 study was provided by the Prostitution Licensing Authority. Acknowledgement and sincere thanks to the men and women who participated in this study.

Women and ADR

Alternative dispute resolution, or ‘ADR’, is defined by the National Alternative Dispute Resolution Advisory Council as: … an umbrella term for processes, other than judicial determination, in which an impartial person assists those in a dispute to resolve the issues between them. ADR is commonly used as an abbreviation for alternative dispute resolution, but can also be used to mean assisted or appropriate dispute resolution. Some also use the term ADR to include approaches that enable parties to prevent or manage their own disputes without outside assistance. A broad range of ADR processes are used in legal practice contexts, including, for example, arbitration, conciliation, mediation, negotiation, conferencing, case appraisal and neutral evaluation. Hybrid processes are also used, such as med-arb in which the practitioner starts by using mediation, and then shifts to using arbitration. ADR processes generally fall into one of three general categories: facilitative, advisory or determinative. In a facilitative process, the ADR practitioner has the role of assisting the parties to reach a mutually agreeable outcome to the dispute by helping them to identify the issues in dispute, and to develop a range of options for resolving the dispute. Mediation and facilitated negotiation are examples of facilitative processes. ADR processes that are advisory involve the practitioner appraising the dispute, providing advice as to the facts of the dispute, the law and then, in some cases, articulating possible or appropriate outcomes and how they might be achieved. Case appraisal and neutral evaluation are examples of advisory processes. In a determinative ADR process, the practitioner evaluates the dispute (which may include the hearing of formal evidence from the parties) and makes a determination. Arbitration is an example of a determinative ADR process. The use of ADR processes has increased significantly in recent years. Indeed, in a range of contemporary legal contexts the use of an ADR process is now required before a party is able to file a matter in court. For example, Juliet Behrens discusses in Chapter 11 of this book how the Family Law Act 1975 (Cth) now effectively mandates attendance at pre-filing family dispute resolution in parenting disputes. At the state level, in Queensland, for example, attendance at a conciliation conference can be required in anti-discrimination matters, and is encouraged in residential tenancy matters, and in personal injuries matters the parties must attend a preliminary compulsory conference. Certain ADR processes are used more commonly in the resolution of particular disputes. For example, in family law contexts, mediation and conciliation are generally used because they provide the parties with flexibility in terms of process and outcome while still ensuring that the negotiations occur in a positive, structured and facilitated framework. In commercial contexts, arbitration and neutral evaluation are often used because they can provide the parties with a determination of the dispute that is factually and legally principled, but which is also private and more timely than if the parties went to court. Women, as legal personalities and citizens of society, can find themselves involved in any sort of legal dispute, and therefore all forms of ADR are relevant to women. Perhaps most commonly, however, women come into contact with facilitative ADR processes. For example, through involvement in family law disputes women will encounter family dispute resolution processes, such as mediation. In this chapter, therefore, the focus is on facilitative ADR processes and, particularly, issues for women in terms of their participation in such processes. The aim of this chapter is to provide legal practitioners with an understanding of issues for women in ADR to inform your approach to representing women clients in such processes, and to guide you in preparing women clients for their participation in ADR. The chapter begins with a consideration of the ways in which facilitative ADR processes are positive for women participants. Next, some of the disadvantages for women in ADR are explored. Finally, the chapter offers ways in which legal practitioners can effectively prepare women clients for participation in ADR. Before embarking on a discussion of issues for women in ADR, it is important to acknowledge that women’s experiences in these dispute resolution environments, whilst often sharing commonalities, are diverse and informed by a range of factors specific to each individual woman; for example, her race or socio-economic background. This discussion, therefore, addresses some common issues for women in ADR that are fundamentally gender based. It must be noted, however, that providing advice to women clients about participating in ADR processes requires legal practitioners to have a very good understanding of the client as an individual, and her particular needs and interests. Some sources of diversity are discussed in Chapters 13, 14 and 15.

Contradictions and the Appropriation of ERP Packages

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software typically takes the form of a package that is licensed for use to those in a client organisation and is sold as being able to automate a wide range of processes within organisations. ERP packages have become an important feature of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructures in organizations. However, a number of highly publicised failures have been associated with the ERP packages too. For example: Hershey, Aero Group and Snap-On have blamed the implementation of ERP packages for negative impacts upon earnings (Scott and Vessey 2000); Cadbury Schweppes implemented plans to fulfil 250 orders where normally they would fulfil 1000 due to the increased complexity and the need to re-train staff post implementation (August 1999) and FoxMeyer drug company’s implementation of an ERP package has been argued to have lead to bankruptcy proceedings resulting in litigation against SAP, the software vendor in question (Bicknell 1998). Some have even rejected a single vendor approach outright (Light et. al. 2001). ERP packages appear to work for some and not for others, they contain contradictions. Indeed, if we start from the position that technologies do not provide their own explanation, then we have to consider the direction of a technological trajectory and why it moves in one way rather than another (Bijker and Law 1994). In other words, ERP appropriation cannot be predetermined as a success, despite the persuasive attempts of vendors via their websites and other marketing channels. Moreover, just because ERP exists, we cannot presume that all will appropriate it in the same fashion, if at all. There is more to the diffusion of innovations than stages of adoption and a simple demarcation between adoption and rejection. The processes that are enacted in appropriation need to be conceptualised as a site of struggle, political and imbued with power (Hislop et. al. 2000; Howcroft and Light, 2006). ERP appropriation and rejection can therefore be seen as a paradoxical phenomenon. In this paper we examine these contradictions as a way to shed light on the presence and role of inconsistencies in ERP appropriation and rejection. We argue that much of the reasoning associated with ERP adoption is pro-innovation biased and that deterministic models of the diffusion of innovations such as Rogers (2003), do not adequately take account of contradictions in the process. Our argument is that a better theoretical understanding of these contradictions is necessary to underpin research and practice in this area. In the next section, we introduce our view of appropriation. Following this is an outline of the idea of contradiction, and the strategies employed to ‘cope’ with this. Then, we introduce a number of reasons for ERP adoption and identify their inherent contradictions using these perspectives. From this discussion, we draw a framework, which illustrates how the interpretive flexibility of reasons to adopt ERP packages leads to contradictions which fuel the enactment of appropriation and rejection.

‘It's all scientific to me’ : focus group insights into why young people do not apply safe-sex knowledge

Despite rising levels of safe-sex knowledge in Australia, sexually transmitted infection notifications continue to increase. A culture-centred approach suggests it is useful in attempting to reach a target population first to understand their perspective on the issues. Twenty focus groups were conducted with 89 young people between the ages of 14 and 16 years. Key findings suggest that scientific information does not articulate closely with everyday practice, that young people get the message that sex is bad and they should not be preparing for it and that it is not appropriate to talk about sex. Understanding how young people think about these issues is particularly important because the focus groups also found that young people disengage from sources of information that do not match their own experiences.

Building communities through co-creative storytelling : sound walking in New England

The Story Project is a small, not-for-profit community media arts company based on the Sunshine Coast hinterland. It specialises in facilitating first-person storytelling. Since 2012 The Story Project has been collaborating with a small community arts organisation based in northern NSW, Uralla Arts, to record local heritage in first-person story form and to curate and present it ways that will appeal to new generations of listeners. The initial collaboration was funded by a Federal government Community Heritage program. The project successfully adapted a participatory method of life storytelling to this regional context and some 40 stories were contributed to a collection. A more ambitious suite of projects to develop soundwalks in a number of towns across the New England region has since grown from this initial collaboration. The soundwalks seek to combine local creative works in oral story, music and visual forms, and make them accessible through an application that can be downloaded to GPS-enabled mobile devices. While soundwalks are not new, the needs and challenges of creative community-building that New England soundwalks attempt to solve in this regional setting hold value for a broader range of interests than just those of the immediate project stakeholders. This paper reports on a research collaboration between The Story Project and QUT researchers that looked at The Story Project’s engagement with Uralla Arts and other New England community-based networks and organisations. It considers how this instance of story-centred, participatory media arts practice contributes to building population-wide capacity for creative expression.

Secure modular password authentication for the web using channel bindings

Secure protocols for password-based user authentication are well-studied in the cryptographic literature but have failed to see wide-spread adoption on the Internet; most proposals to date require extensive modifications to the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol, making deployment challenging. Recently, a few modular designs have been proposed in which a cryptographically secure password-based mutual authentication protocol is run inside a confidential (but not necessarily authenticated) channel such as TLS; the password protocol is bound to the established channel to prevent active attacks. Such protocols are useful in practice for a variety of reasons: security no longer relies on users' ability to validate server certificates and can potentially be implemented with no modifications to the secure channel protocol library. We provide a systematic study of such authentication protocols. Building on recent advances in modelling TLS, we give a formal definition of the intended security goal, which we call password-authenticated and confidential channel establishment (PACCE). We show generically that combining a secure channel protocol, such as TLS, with a password authentication protocol, where the two protocols are bound together using either the transcript of the secure channel's handshake or the server's certificate, results in a secure PACCE protocol. Our prototype based on TLS is available as a cross-platform client-side Firefox browser extension and a server-side web application which can easily be installed on deployed web browsers and servers.

Indie 100 2013

The Independent Music Project is centred around the development and creation of new music, and includes research into copyright, business models of the future, new technologies, and new audiences. The music industry is undergoing the most radical changes it has faced in almost a century. New digital technologies have made the production, distribution, and promotion of recorded music accessible to anyone with a personal computer. People can now make high-quality digital copies of music and distribute them globally within minutes. Even bastions of the established industries, such as EMI and Columbia, are struggling to make sense of the new industry terrain. The whole employment picture has changed just as radically for people who wish to make a living from music. In Australia, many of the avenues that provided employment for musicians have either disappeared or dramatically shrunk. The advertising industry no longer provides the level of employment it used to prior to the Federal deregulation of the industry in 1992. In many places, new legislative pressures on inner-city and suburban venues have diminished the number of performance spaces that musicians can work in. Just as quickly, new sectors have opened to professional musicians: computer games, ringtones, sound-enabled toys and web advertising all present new opportunities to the enterprising musician. The opportunity to distribute music internationally without being signed to a major label is very attractive to many aspiring and established professionals. No doubt the music industry will face many more challenges as technologies continue to change, as global communication gets easier and faster, and as the challenges to copyright proliferate and change. These challenges cannot be successfully met on a single front. They require research and expertise from all sectors being affected, and this is why the independent music project (IMP) exists.

Indie 100 2014

The Independent Music Project is centred around the development and creation of new music, and includes research into copyright, business models of the future, new technologies, and new audiences. The music industry is undergoing the most radical changes it has faced in almost a century. New digital technologies have made the production, distribution, and promotion of recorded music accessible to anyone with a personal computer. People can now make high-quality digital copies of music and distribute them globally within minutes. Even bastions of the established industries, such as EMI and Columbia, are struggling to make sense of the new industry terrain. The whole employment picture has changed just as radically for people who wish to make a living from music. In Australia, many of the avenues that provided employment for musicians have either disappeared or dramatically shrunk. The advertising industry no longer provides the level of employment it used to prior to the Federal deregulation of the industry in 1992. In many places, new legislative pressures on inner-city and suburban venues have diminished the number of performance spaces that musicians can work in. Just as quickly, new sectors have opened to professional musicians: computer games, ringtones, sound-enabled toys and web advertising all present new opportunities to the enterprising musician. The opportunity to distribute music internationally without being signed to a major label is very attractive to many aspiring and established professionals. No doubt the music industry will face many more challenges as technologies continue to change, as global communication gets easier and faster, and as the challenges to copyright proliferate and change. These challenges cannot be successfully met on a single front. They require research and expertise from all sectors being affected, and this is why the independent music project (IMP) exists.

100 Songs Project 2012

The Independent Music Project is centred around the development and creation of new music, and includes research into copyright, business models of the future, new technologies, and new audiences. The music industry is undergoing the most radical changes it has faced in almost a century. New digital technologies have made the production, distribution, and promotion of recorded music accessible to anyone with a personal computer. People can now make high-quality digital copies of music and distribute them globally within minutes. Even bastions of the established industries, such as EMI and Columbia, are struggling to make sense of the new industry terrain. The whole employment picture has changed just as radically for people who wish to make a living from music. In Australia, many of the avenues that provided employment for musicians have either disappeared or dramatically shrunk. The advertising industry no longer provides the level of employment it used to prior to the Federal deregulation of the industry in 1992. In many places, new legislative pressures on inner-city and suburban venues have diminished the number of performance spaces that musicians can work in. Just as quickly, new sectors have opened to professional musicians: computer games, ringtones, sound-enabled toys and web advertising all present new opportunities to the enterprising musician. The opportunity to distribute music internationally without being signed to a major label is very attractive to many aspiring and established professionals. No doubt the music industry will face many more challenges as technologies continue to change, as global communication gets easier and faster, and as the challenges to copyright proliferate and change. These challenges cannot be successfully met on a single front. They require research and expertise from all sectors being affected, and this is why the independent music project (IMP) exists.