Teaching young people first aid skills to reduce injury

Background First aid given immediately after a motor vehicle crash can have considerable benefits. Less understood however is first aid training as a prevention strategy for reducing risk-taking. A first step is to understand whether first aid skills are associated with risk-taking and injury experiences. Further, students and teachers who undergo or deliver such training offer important perspectives about implementation. Aims The research has two aims: (i) to identify whether first aid knowledge is associated with road risk-taking and injury and (ii) to examine teachers’ and students’ experiences of first aid activities within a school-based injury prevention and control program. Method Participants were 173 Year 9s (47% male) who completed a survey which included demographic information, first aid knowledge and risk-taking behaviour and injury experiences. Focus groups were held with 8 teachers who delivered, and 70 students who participated in, a school-based injury prevention and control program. Results Results showed a relationship between greater first aid knowledge and reduced engagement in risk-taking and injury experiences. Both students and teachers reported favourably on first aid however teachers also acknowledged challenges in delivering practical activities. Discussion & Conclusion It appears that first aid can be implemented within the school setting, particularly at the Year 9 level, and that both students and teachers involved in such training identify multiple benefits and positive experiences with first aid training. In addition, the findings suggest that first aid knowledge could be an important part of a prevention program.

At-risk students and classroom engagement : listening to “voices of possibility and hope"

In my work with secondary school students who have disengaged from mainstream classrooms, I have often been surprised at the ways they enthusiastically engage with the projects on offer. They have demonstrated that, in apparent contradiction of their classroom behaviour, they still maintain hope in achieving a positive outcome from education. In a long-running schools-university project employing a “students-as-researchers” approach to investigating educational disadvantage, “at-risk” students have produced high quality results. Naturally, I wanted to know what it was about this sort of pedagogy that seemed to work for them. In this chapter, then, I outline the project and discuss some reasons for disengagement. I then address the features of the project that the participants themselves have identified as being instrumental in their re-engagement with formal education. Finally, I consider how these features may be transposed to maintaining the educational engagement of at-risk students in mainstream classrooms.

Listening to nature : techniques for large-scale monitoring of ecosystems using acoustics

Climate change and human activity are subjecting the environment to unprecedented rates of change. Monitoring these changes is an immense task that demands new levels of automated monitoring and analysis. We propose the use of acoustics as a proxy for the time consuming auditing of fauna, especially for determining the presence/absence of species. Acoustic monitoring is deceptively simple; seemingly all that is required is a sound recorder. However there are many major challenges if acoustics are to be used for large scale monitoring of ecosystems. Key issues are scalability and automation. This paper discusses our approach to this important research problem. Our work is being undertaken in collaboration with ecologists interested both in identifying particular species and in general ecosystem health.

Listening to nature : acoustic monitoring of the environment

The requirement to monitor the rapid pace of environmental change due to global warming and to human development is producing large volumes of data but placing much stress on the capacity of ecologists to store, analyse and visualise that data. To date, much of the data has been provided by low level sensors monitoring soil moisture, dissolved nutrients, light intensity, gas composition and the like. However, a significant part of an ecologist’s work is to obtain information about species diversity, distributions and relationships. This task typically requires the physical presence of an ecologist in the field, listening and watching for species of interest. It is an extremely difficult task to automate because of the higher order difficulties in bandwidth, data management and intelligent analysis if one wishes to emulate the highly trained eyes and ears of an ecologist. This paper is concerned with just one part of the bigger challenge of environmental monitoring – the acquisition and analysis of acoustic recordings of the environment. Our intention is to provide helpful tools to ecologists – tools that apply information technologies and computational technologies to all aspects of the acoustic environment. The on-line system which we are building in conjunction with ecologists offers an integrated approach to recording, data management and analysis. The ecologists we work with have different requirements and therefore we have adopted the toolbox approach, that is, we offer a number of different web services that can be concatenated according to need. In particular, one group of ecologists is concerned with identifying the presence or absence of species and their distributions in time and space. Another group, motivated by legislative requirements for measuring habitat condition, are interested in summary indices of environmental health. In both case, the key issues are scalability and automation.

Sustainable transport and the impact on the built environment : Future trends and directions

We love the automobile and the independence that it gives us. We are more mobile than we have ever been before in recorded history. In Australia 80% of journeys are by private motor vehicle. But it is becoming increasingly obvious that this era has a very limited lifespan. Fuel prices have skyrocketed recently with no end in sight. In spite of massive amounts of road construction, our cities are becoming increasingly congested. We desperately need to address climate change and the automobile is a major contributor. Carbon trading schemes will put even more upward pressure on fuel prices. At some point in the near future, most of us will need to reconsider our automobile usage whether we like it or not. The time to plan for the future is now. But what will happen to our mobility when access to cheap and available petroleum becomes a thing of the past? Will we start driving electric/hydrogen/ethanol vehicles? Or will we flock to public transport? Will our public transport systems cope with a massive increase in demand? Will thousands of people take to alternatives such as bicycles? If so, where do we put them? How do we change our roads to cope? How do we change our buildings to suit? Will we need recharging stations in our car park for example? Some countries are less reliant on the car than others e.g. Holland and Germany. How can the rest of the world learn from them? This paper discusses many of the likely outcomes of the inevitable shift away from society’s reliance on petroleum and examines the expected impact on the built environment. It also looks at ways in which the built environment can be planned to help ease the transition to a fossil free world. 1.

Commercialisation of regenerative human tissue : Regulation and reform in Australia and England, Wales and Northern Ireland

The commercialisation of therapeutic products containing regenerative human tissue is regulated by the common law, statute and ethical guidelines in Australia and England, Wales and Northern Ireland. This article examines the regulatory regimes in these jurisdictions and considers whether reform is required to both support scientific research and ensure conformity with modern social views on medical research and the use of human tissue. The authors consider the crucial role of informed consent in striking the balance between the interests of researchers and the interests of the public.

Bwembya Chikolwa quoted by Mike Taylor for Money Management 7th September 2009, Thaw for listed property

Australian property bond markets are starting to improve, but don’t expect a return to the buoyant days of the past any time soon.

Investigating Familiarity in Older Adults to Facilitate Intuitive Interaction

This paper discusses how intuitive interaction is a possible way to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of interaction with older adults. It provides insights into existing research on intuitive interaction, and the role of prior experience and familiarity in intuition. An experiment is discussed which investigates differences in familiarity between younger and older adults. A comprehensive coding system has been developed to help analyse the data collected. This research is currently in progress.

Situated case-based reasoning as a constructive memory model for design reasoning

This paper describes an extended case-based reasoning model that addresses the notion of situatedness in designing through constructive memory. The model is illustrated through an application for predicting the corrosion rate for a specific material on a specific building.

User behaviours and intentions with digital news media in Australia

This paper summarises findings from a survey of user behaviors and intentions towards digital media and information in Australia. It was undertaken in the first quarter of 2009 by the Queensland University of Technology Creative Industries Faculty and was funded by the Smart Services Cooperative Research Centre. The survey targeted users of 2 news and information sites that are available online only. Findings highlighted differences between the 18-24 year age segment and older users. Social networks (specifically friends and family) were rated as the least reliable, relevant and accurate sources of news. Other findings indicate online news sources that are associated with an established newspaper are highly valued as reliable, relevant and accurate news sources by most people. While most people prefer to use online news sources, there is a great deal of variation in the ways in which people actually use online news. From a total of 524 respondents to the survey it was possible to identify three main types of online news consumers: convenience, loyal and customising users.

Transitioning students to work through authentic employment-based training in an Australian senior secondary VET program.

A common challenge among OECD countries has been the development of education and training pathways that accommodate student needs and interests at the upper secondary level (OECD, 2000). The introduction of trade-focussed Australian Technical Colleges (ATCs) has met with mixed response. The ATCs aim to create a supported transition from school to work through dual pathway programs enabling students to follow a trade career while completing their upper secondary studies. There has been little explicit examination of the effectiveness of such senior secondary school arrangements. Using one such Australian Technical College as a case-study, this paper investigates the perceptions of the employers and students who were associated with the college. Using mixed-methods consisting of quantitative perception surveys and focus interviews, the results of this study show that students and employers are very satisfied with the College and illustrate that students have made significant gains in relating their learning to the workplace and everyday life.

I-cobb - An innovative technique in spinal radiographic measurement

The measurement of Cobb angles on radiographs of patients with spinal deformities is routine practice in spinal clinics. The technique relies on the use and availability of specialist equipment such as a goniometer, cobbometer or protractor. The aim of this study was to validate the use of i-Phone (Apple Inc) combined with Tilt Meter Pro software as compared to a protractor in the measurement of Cobb angles. The i-Phone combined with Tilt Meter Pro software offers a faster alternative to the traditional method of Cobb angle measurement. The use of i-Phone offers a more convenient way of measuring Cobb angles in the outpatient setting. The intra-observer repeatability of the iPhone is equivalent to the protractor in the measurement of Cobb angles.

Effects of fare collection policy on operating characteristics of a Brisbane busway station

Transit agencies across the world are increasingly shifting their fare collection mechanisms towards fully automated systems like the smart card. One of the objectives in implementing such a system is to reduce the boarding time per passenger and hence reduce the overall dwell time for the buses at the bus stops/bus rapid transit (BRT) stations. TransLink, the transit authority responsible for public transport management in South East Queensland, has introduced ‘GoCard’ technology using the Cubic platform for fare collection on its public transport system. In addition to this, three inner city BRT stations on South East Busway spine are operating as pre-paid platforms during evening peak time. This paper evaluates the effects of these multiple policy measures on operation of study busway station. The comparison between pre and post policy scenarios suggests that though boarding time per passenger has decreased, while the alighting time per passenger has increased slightly. However, there is a substantial reduction in operating efficiency was observed at the station.

Strongly Secure Certificateless Key Agreement

We introduce a formal model for certificateless authenticated key exchange (CL-AKE) protocols. Contrary to what might be expected, we show that the natural combination of an ID-based AKE protocol with a public key based AKE protocol cannot provide strong security. We provide the first one-round CL-AKE scheme proven secure in the random oracle model. We introduce two variants of the Diffie-Hellman trapdoor the introduced by \cite{DBLP:conf/eurocrypt/CashKS08}. The proposed key agreement scheme is secure as long as each party has at least one uncompromised secret. Thus, our scheme is secure even if the key generation centre learns the ephemeral secrets of both parties.

Curriculum mapping of the Spatial Science Program, QUT : what was the cartography journey?

There are currently a number of issues of great importance affecting universities and the way in which their programs are now offered. Many issues are largely being driven top-down and impact both at a university-wide and at an individual discipline level. This paper provides a brief history of cartography and digital mapping education at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). It also provides an overview of what is curriculum mapping and presents some interesting findings from the program review process. Further, this review process has triggered discussion and action for the review, mapping and embedding of graduate attributes within the spatial science major program. Some form of practical based learning is expected in vocationally oriented degrees that lead to professional accreditation and are generally regarded as a good learning exposure. With the restructure of academic programs across the Faculty of Built Environment and Engineering in 2006, spatial science and surveying students now undertake a formal work integrated learning unit. There is little doubt that students acquire the skills of their discipline (mapping science, spatial) by being immersed in the industry culture- learning how to process information and solve real-world problems within context. The broad theme of where geo-spatial mapping skills are embedded in this broad-based tertiary education course are examined with some focused discussion on the learning objectives, outcomes and examples of some student learning experiences