Seasonality of suicide in Shandong China, 1991–2009 : associations with gender, age, area and methods of suicide

Backgrounds Whether suicide in China has significant seasonal variations is unclear. The aim of this study is to examine the seasonality of suicide in Shandong China and to assess the associations of suicide seasonality with gender, residence, age and methods of suicide. Methods Three types of tests (Chi-square, Edwards' T and Roger's Log method) were used to detect the seasonality of the suicide data extracted from the official mortality data of Shandong Disease Surveillance Point (DSP) system. Peak/low ratios (PLRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated to indicate the magnitude of seasonality. Results A statistically significant seasonality with a single peak in suicide rates in spring and early summer, and a dip in winter was observed, which remained relatively consistent over years. Regardless of gender, suicide seasonality was more pronounced in rural areas, younger age groups and for non-violent methods, in particular, self-poisoning by pesticide. Conclusions There are statistically significant seasonal variations of completed suicide for both men and women in Shandong, China. Differences exist between residence (urban/rural), age groups and suicide methods. Results appear to support a sociological explanation of suicide seasonality.

Alternatives to the behavioural technicist approaches to study skills

The content and approach of study skills courses are critiqued and alternatives are suggested. It is proposed that an approach providing students with knowledge about the cognitive processes involved in mastering complex material would make the study skills teacher an agent of social change aiming for the enlightenment and emancipation of students and lecturers.

Vibrational spectroscopic study of multianion mineral clinotyrolite Ca2Cu9[(As,S)O4]4(OH)10•10(H2O)

The molecular structure of the mixed anion mineral Clinotyrolite Ca2Cu9[(As,S)O4]4(OH)10•10(H2O) has been determined by the combination of Raman and infrared spectroscopy. Characteristic bands associated with arsenate, sulphate and hydroxyl units are identified. Broad bands in the OH stretching region are observed and are resolved into component bands. Estimates of hydrogen bond distances were made using a Libowitzky function and both short and long hydrogen bonds are identified. Two intense Raman bands at 842 and ~796 cm-1 are assigned to the ν1 (AsO4)3- symmetric stretching and ν3 (AsO4)3- antisymmetric stretching modes. The comparatively sharp Raman band at 980 cm-1 is assigned to the ν1 (SO4)2- symmetric stretching mode and a broad Raman spectral profile centred upon 1100 cm-1 is attributed to the ν3 (SO4)2- antisymmetric stretching mode.

Disobedient Citizens : Press Depictions of Striking School Teachers in NSW and Anti-Vietnam War Demonstrators in NSW and Victoria in 1968

Across Australia in 1968, students demonstrating against the Vietnam War engaged in confrontational behaviour. The metropolitan daily newspapers,the most important source of news for most people, enthusiastically reported the scenes. The demonstrations were exciting. Sensational headlines and photographs captured the interest of readers and influenced their opinions. But radical opposition to government policies at the time was not limited to university students opposing the Vietnam War. Teachers had become increasingly critical of conditions in schools, with Victorian secondary school teachers having stopped work on a number of occasions since 1965. In October 1968, both primary and secondary school teachers in New South Wales participated in eastern Australia’s first state-wide teachers’ strike. As Sydney’s Sun commented on 1 October 1968, “The teachers’ strike threw the ... education system into chaos ... A huge proportion of the State’s 2764 schools were silent and empty.” Similarities with the anti-war demonstrations were obvious. Although not as confrontational, the New South Wales teachers’ strike was a publicity-seeking action. This examination of the teachers’ more restrained, but more effective, approach to challenging government policies provides a new voice and vision to our understandings of the diverse nature of radicalism in Australia in the 1960s.

Risk and Responsibility in Women's Prisons

I have been invited to discuss Risk and Responsibility in Women’s Prisons, a task which, is slightly intimidating for one such as I, who, having never worked in a prison, have never experienced the risks and responsibilities working in a prison entails. However, this discussion is based on what prisons’ staff have told me, as they have ruminated on the complexities of their jobs in women’s prisons and many of the examples which I will be using are taken from cross-national research which I did in 2000 and 2001 and which set out to analyse the fortunes of some innovatory programmes in relation to women’s prisons in England, Scotland, North America, Australia and Israel (Carlen 2002). The discussion draws in particular on the imaginative way in which the Scottish women’s prison, Cornton Vale, responded to the spate of suicides which it had in the late 1990s and which resulted in far reaching organizational change.

State cycles, initialization and the Trivium stream cipher

Trivium is a keystream generator for a binary additive synchronous stream cipher. It was selected in the final portfolio for the Profile 2 category of the eSTREAM project. The keystream generator is constructed using bit- based shift registers. In this paper we present an alternate representation of Trivium using word-based shift registers, with a word size of three bits. This representation is useful for determining cycles of internal state values. Under this representation it is clear that the state space can be partitioned into subspaces and that over some of these subspaces the state update function is effectively linear. The role of the initialization process is critical in ensuring the states used for generating keystream are updated nonlinearly at some point, as the state update function alone does not provide this.

The children and sunscreen study : a crossover trial investigating children's sunscreen application thickness and the influence of age and dispenser type.

OBJECTIVES: To measure the thickness at which primary schoolchildren apply sunscreen on school day mornings and to compare it with the thickness (2.00 mg/cm(2)) at which sunscreen is tested during product development, as well as to investigate how application thickness was influenced by age of the child (school grades 1-7) and by dispenser type (500-mL pump, 125-mL squeeze bottle, or 50-mL roll-on). DESIGN: A crossover quasiexperimental study design comparing 3 sunscreen dispenser types. SETTING: Children aged 5 to 12 years from public primary schools (grades 1-7) in Queensland, Australia. PARTICIPANTS: Children (n=87) and their parents randomly recruited from the enrollment lists of 7 primary schools. Each child provided up to 3 observations (n=258). INTERVENTION: Children applied sunscreen during 3 consecutive school weeks (Monday through Friday) for the first application of the day using a different dispenser each week. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: Thickness of sunscreen application (in milligrams per square centimeter). The dispensers were weighed before and after use to calculate the weight of sunscreen applied. This was divided by the coverage area of application (in square centimeters), which was calculated by multiplying the children's body surface area by the percentage of the body covered with sunscreen. RESULTS: Children applied their sunscreen at a median thickness of 0.48 mg/cm(2). Children applied significantly more sunscreen when using the pump (0.75 mg/cm(2)) and the squeeze bottle (0.57 mg/cm(2)) compared with the roll-on (0.22 mg/cm(2)) (P<.001 for both). CONCLUSIONS: Regardless of age, primary schoolchildren apply sunscreen at substantially less than 1.00 mg/cm(2), similar to what has been observed among adults. Some sunscreen dispensers seem to facilitate thicker application than others.

Exploring the Pro-Am interface between production and produsage

This conference celebrates the passing of 40 years since the establishment of the Internet (dating this, presumably, to the first connection between two nodes on ARPANET in October 1969). For a gathering of media scholars such as this, however, it may be just as important not only to mark the first testing of the core technologies upon which much of our present-day Net continues to build, but also to reflect on another recent milestone: the 20th anniversary of what is today arguably the chief interface through which billions around the world access and experience the Internet – the World Wide Web, launched by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989.

Library research support in Queensland : a survey

University libraries worldwide are reconceptualising the ways in which they support the research agenda in their respective institutions. This paper is based on a survey completed by member libraries of the Queensland University Libraries Office of Cooperation (QUL OC), the findings of which may be informative for other university libraries. After briefly examining major emerging trends in research support, the paper discusses the results of the survey specifically focussing on support for researchers and the research agenda in their institutions. All responding libraries offer a high level of research support, however, eResearch support, in general, and research data management support, in particular, have the highest variance among the libraries, and signal possible areas for growth. Areas for follow-up, benchmarking and development are suggested.

"What is contemporary art? A review of two books by Terry Smith'

What is contemporary art and what are the key components of contemporary culture? This review demonstrates where Terry Smith provides important answers to this question. The books thus help to improve understanding of how art has changed in recent decades and how a global culture now shapes its parameters. This review does not however concur that Smith provides a convincing case for a complete cultural paradigm transformation.

The phosphate mineral sigloite Fe3+Al2(PO4)2(OH)3·7(H2O), an exception to the paragenesis rule – a vibrational spectroscopic study

The secondary phosphate mineral sigloite Fe3+Al2(PO4)2(OH)3·7H2O is the exception to the rule that phosphate mineral paragenesis is related to the final phase of hydrothermal mineralization at low temperatures. Sigloite was formed as an oxidation pseudomorph after paravauxite, during the last supergene paragenetic stage. We have studied the secondary phosphate mineral sigloite Fe3+Al2(PO4)2(OH)3·7H2O using vibrational spectroscopic techniques. Because the mineral is a phosphate mineral, it is readily studied by spectroscopic techniques as the phosphate and hydrogen phosphate units are readily measured. Indeed, sigloite shows the presence of both phosphate and hydrogen phosphate units in its structure. Raman bands at 1009 cm−1 with shoulders at 993 and 1039 cm−1 are assigned to stretching vibrations of and units. The Raman band at 993 cm−1 is assigned to the ν1 symmetric stretching mode of the POH units, whereas the Raman band at 1009 cm−1 is assigned to the ν1 symmetric stretching mode. Raman bands observed at 506, 528, 571, 596, 619 and 659 cm−1 are attributed to the ν4 out of plane bending modes of the PO4 and H2PO4 units. The Raman bands at 2988, 3118 and 3357 cm−1 are assigned to water stretching vibration. The series of bands at 3422, 3449, 3493, 3552 and 3615 cm−1 are assigned to the OH stretching vibrations of the hydroxyl units. The observation of multiple bands gives credence to the non-equivalence of the OH units in the sigloite structure.

Load-unloading response of intact and artificially degraded articular cartilage correlated with near infrared (NIR) absorption spectra

The conventional mechanical properties of articular cartilage, such as compressive stiffness, have been demonstrated to be limited in their capacity to distinguish intact (visually normal) from degraded cartilage samples. In this paper, we explore the correlation between a new mechanical parameter, namely the reswelling of articular cartilage following unloading from a given compressive load, and the near infrared (NIR) spectrum. The capacity to distinguish mechanically intact from proteoglycan-depleted tissue relative to the "reswelling" characteristic was first established, and the result was subsequently correlated with the NIR spectral data of the respective tissue samples. To achieve this, normal intact and enzymatically degraded samples were subjected to both NIR probing and mechanical compression based on a load-unload-reswelling protocol. The parameter δ(r), characteristic of the osmotic "reswelling" of the matrix after unloading to a constant small load in the order of the osmotic pressure of cartilage, was obtained for the different sample types. Multivariate statistics was employed to determine the degree of correlation between δ(r) and the NIR absorption spectrum of relevant specimens using Partial Least Squared (PLS) regression. The results show a strong relationship (R(2)=95.89%, p<0.0001) between the spectral data and δ(r). This correlation of δ(r) with NIR spectral data suggests the potential for determining the reswelling characteristics non-destructively. It was also observed that δ(r) values bear a significant relationship with the cartilage matrix integrity, indicated by its proteoglycan content, and can therefore differentiate between normal and artificially degraded proteoglycan-depleted cartilage samples. It is therefore argued that the reswelling of cartilage, which is both biochemical (osmotic) and mechanical (hydrostatic pressure) in origin, could be a strong candidate for characterizing the tissue, especially in regions surrounding focal cartilage defects in joints.

Diversity and Differentiation

New ways of working are being embraced by early childhood educators as they cope with demands from national reforms and changing communities. While reformers are pressing for social equity and improved outcomes for families and children, communities are diverging in terms of ethnicity, culture, language and socioeconomic status. As a consequence, early childhood educators are being challenged to expand their existing repertoire of practices in order to more effectively provide quality learning experiences for every child in their care. Practice enhancement and differentiated pedagogy are needed to address the additional needs of an increasing number of diverse learners. Community expectations are particularly focused on better educational supports for children in five cluster areas: • Culturally diverse and Indigenous backgrounds • ‘at risk’ because of socio-economic and abuse conditions • Communicative, emotional and behavioural disorders • Disabilities and learning difficulties and • Recognised gifts and talents This chapter focuses on some everyday ractices that can be used strategically to better support all children, including those with additional educational needs. All practices are well supported in the literature and are substantiated by either research findings or strong, socially determined values. They also very ‘doable’ and sustainable in today’s dynamic and multifaceted early childhood settings. Seven keys practices will be introduced, together with examples of how they can be applied to both enhance the learning of individual children and to strengthen a sense of group belonging. The practices are: • Having positive beliefs about all children • Learning about each child • Building meaningful relationships around the child • Creating supportive learning environments for the child • Providing engaging learning experiences for the child • Differentiating instruction for the child • Using child progress data to improve learning and teaching