Menopause as a long-term risk to health : implications of general practitioner accounts of prevention for women’s choice and decision-making

Over the past two decades medical researchers and modernist feminist researchers have contested the meaning of menopause. In this article we examine various meanings of menopause in major medical and feminist literature and the construction of menopause in a semi-structured interview study of general practitioners in rural South Australia. Three discursive themes are identified in these interviews; (i) the hormonal menopause – symptoms, risk, prevention; (ii) the informed menopausal woman; and (iii) decision-making and hormone replacement therapy. By using the discourse of prevention, general practitioners construct menopause in relation to women's health care choices, empowerment and autonomy. We argue that the ways in which these concepts are deployed by general practitioners in this study produces and constrains the options available to women. The implications of these general practitioner accounts are discussed in relation to the proposition that medical and feminist descriptions of menopause posit alternative but equally-fixed truths about menopause and their relationship with the range of responses available to women at menopause. Social and cultural explanations of disease causality (c.f.Germov 1998, Hardey 1998) are absent from the new menopause despite their being an integral part of the framework of the women's health movement and health promotion drawn on by these general practitioners. Further, the shift of responsibility for health to the individual woman reinforces practice claims to empower women, but oversimplifies power relations and constructs menopause as a site of self-surveillance. The use of concepts from the women's health movement and health promotion have nevertheless created change in both the positioning of women as having ‘choices’ and the positioning of some general practitioners in terms of greater information provision to women and an attention to the woman's autonomy. In conclusion, we propose that a new menopause has evolved from a discursive shift in medicine and that there exists within this new configuration, claiming the empowerment of women as an integral part of health care for menopause, the possibility for change in medical practice which will broaden, strengthen, and maintain this position.

Can mechanism help explain insect host choice?

Evolutionary theory predicts that herbivorous insects should lay eggs on plants in a way that reflects the suitability of each plant species for larval development. Empirical studies, however, often fail to find any relationship between an adult insect’s choice of host–plant and offspring fitness, and in such cases, it is generally assumed that other ‘missing’ factors (e.g. predation, host–plant abundance, learning and adult feeding sites) must be contributing to overall host suitability. Here, I consider an alternative theory – that a fitness cost inherent in the olfactory mechanism could constrain the evolution of insect host selection. I begin by reviewing current knowledge of odour processing in the insect antennal lobe with the aid of a simple schematic: the aim being to explain the workings of this mechanism to scientists who do not have prior knowledge in this field. I then use the schematic to explore how an insect’s perception of host and non-host odours is governed by a set of processing rules, or algorithm. Under the assumptions of this mechanistic view, the perception of every plant odour is interrelated, and seemingly bad host choices can still arise as part of an overall adaptive behavioural strategy. I discuss how an understanding of mechanism can improve the interpretation of theoretical and empirical studies in insect behaviour and evolution.

Producing and maintaining professional identities in early childhood

This study is an inquiry into early childhood teacher professional identities. In Australia, workforce reforms in early childhood include major shifts in qualification requirements that call for a university four-year degree-qualified teacher to be employed in child care. This marks a shift in the early years workforce, where previously there was no such requirement. At the same time as these reforms to quality measures are being implemented, and requiring a substantive up skilling of the workforce, there is a growing body of evidence through recent studies that suggests these same four-year degree-qualified early childhood teachers have an aversion to working in child care. Their preferred employment option is to work in the early years of more formal schooling, not in before-school contexts. This collision of agendas warrants investigation. This inquiry is designed to investigate the site at which advocacy for higher qualification requirements meets early childhood teachers who are reluctant to choose child care as a possible career pathway. The key research question for this study is: How are early childhood teachers’ professional identities currently produced? The work of this thesis is to problematise the early childhood teacher in child care through a particular method of discourse analysis. There are two sets of data. The first was a key early childhood political document that read as a "moment of arising" (Foucault, 1984a, p. 83). It is a political document which was selected for its current influence on the early childhood field, and in particular, workforce reforms that call for four-year degree-qualified teachers to work in before-school contexts, including child care. The second data set was generated through four focus group discussions conducted with preservice early childhood teachers. The document and transcripts of the focus groups were both analysed as text, as conceptualised by Foucault (1981). Foucault’s work spans a number of years and a range of philosophical matters. This thesis draws particularly on Foucault’s writings on discourse, power/knowledge, regimes of truth and resistance. In order to consider the production of early childhood teachers’ professional identities, the study is also informed by identity theorists, who have worked on gender, performativity and investment (Davies, 2004/2006; McNay, 1992; Osgood, 2012; Walkerdine, 1990; Weedon, 1997). The ways in which discourses intersect, compete and collide produce the subject (Foucault, 1981) and, in the case of this inquiry, there are a number of competing discourses at play, which produce the early childhood teacher. These particular theories turn particular lenses on the question of professional identities in early childhood, and such a study calls for the application of particular methodologies. Discourse analysis was used as the methodological framework, and the analysis was informed by Foucauldian concepts of discourse. While Foucault did not prescribe a form of discourse analysis as a method, his writings nonetheless provide a valuable framework for illuminating discursive practices and, in turn, how people are affected, through the shifts and distribution of power (Foucault, 1980a). The treatment used with both data sets involved redescription. For the policy document, a technique for reading document-as-text applied a genealogical approach (Foucault, 1984a). For the focus groups, the process of redescription (Rorty, 1989) involved reading talk-as-text. As a method, redescription involves describing "lots and lots of things in new ways until you have created a pattern of linguistic behaviour which will tempt the new generation to adopt it" (Rorty, 1989, p. 9). The development and application of categories (Davies, 2004/2006) built on a poststructuralist theoretical framework and the literature review informed the data analysis method of discourse analysis. Irony provided a rhetorical and playful tool (Haraway, 1991; Rorty, 1989), to look to how seemingly opposing discourses are held together. This opens a space to collapse binary thinking and consider seemingly contradictory terms in a way in which both terms are possible and both are true. Irony resists the choice of one or the other being right, and holds the opposites together in tension. The thesis concludes with proposals for new, ironic categories, which work to bring together seemingly opposing terms, located at sites in the field of early childhood where discourses compete, collide and intersect to produce and maintain early childhood teacher professional identities. The process of mapping these discourses goes some way to investigating the complexities about identities and career choices of early childhood teachers. The category of "the cost of loving" captures the collision between care/love, inherent in child care, and new discourses of investment/economics. Investment/economics has not completely replaced care/love, and these apparent opposites were not read as a binary because both are necessary and both are true (Haraway, 1991). They are held together in tension to produce early childhood teacher professional identities. The policy document under scrutiny was New Directions, released in 2007 by the then opposition ALP leader, Kevin Rudd. The claim was made strongly that the "economic prosperity" of Australia relies on investment in early childhood. The arguments to invest are compelling and the neuroscience/brain research/child development together with economic/investment discourses demand that early childhood is funding is increased. The intersection of these discourses produces professional identities of early childhood teachers as a necessary part of the country’s economy, and thus, worthy of high status. The child care sector and work in child care settings are necessary, with children and the early childhood teacher playing key roles in the economy of the nation. Through New Directions it becomes sayable (Foucault, 1972/1989) that the work the early childhood teacher performs is legitimated and valued. The children are produced as "economic units". A focus on what children are able to contribute to the future economy of the nation re-positions children and produces these "smart productive citizens", making future economic contribution. The early childhood teacher is produced through this image of a child and "the cost of loving" is emphasised. A number of these categories were produced through the readings of the document-as text and the talk-as-text. Two ironic categories were read in the analysis of the transcripts of the focus group discussions, when treated as talk-as-text data: the early childhood teacher as a "heroic victim"; and the early childhood teacher as a "glorified babysitter". This thesis raises new questions about professional identities in early childhood. These new questions might go some way to prompt re-thinking of some government policy, as well as some aspects of early childhood teacher education course design. The images of children and images of child care provide provocations to consider preservice teacher education course design. In particular, how child care, as one of the early childhood contexts, is located, conceptualised and spoken throughout the course. Consideration by course designers and teacher educators of what discourses are privileged in course content —what discourses are diminished or silenced—would go some way to reconceptualising child care within preservice teacher education and challenging dominant ways of speaking child care, and work in child care. This inquiry into early childhood teachers’ professional identities has gone some way to exploring the complexities around the early childhood teacher in child care. It is anticipated that the significance of this study will thus have immediate applicably and relevance for the Australian early childhood policy landscape. The early childhood field is in a state of rapid change, and this inquiry has examined some of the disconnects between policy and practice. Awareness of the discourses that are in play in the field will continue to allow space for conversations that challenge dominant assumptions about child care, work in child care and ways of being an early childhood teacher in child care.

Residential dissonance and mode choice

Residential dissonance refers to the mismatch in land-use patterns between individuals’ preferred residential neighbourhood type and the type of neighbourhood in which they currently reside. Current knowledge regarding the impact of residential dissonance is limited to short-term travel behaviours in urban vs. suburban, and rural vs. urban areas. Although the prevailing view is that dissonants adjust their orientation and lifestyle around their surrounding land use over time, empirical evidence is lacking to support this proposition. This research identifies both short-term mode choice behaviour and medium-term mode shift behaviour of dissonants in transit oriented development (TODs) vs. non-TOD areas in Brisbane, Australia. Natural groupings of neighbourhood profiles (e.g. residential density, land use diversity, intersection density, cul-de-sac density, and public transport accessibility levels) of 3957 individuals were identified as living either in a TOD (510 individuals) or non-TOD (3447 individuals) areas in Brisbane using the TwoStep cluster analysis technique. Levels of dissonance were measured based on a factor analysis of 16 items representing the travel attitudes/preferences of individuals. Two multinomial logistic (MNL) regression models were estimated to understand mode choice behaviour of (1) TOD dissonants, and (2) non-TOD dissonants in 2009, controlling for socio-demographics and environmental characteristics. Two additional MNL regression models were estimated to investigate mode shift behaviour of (3) TOD dissonants, and (4) non-TOD dissonants between 2009 and 2011, also controlling for socio-demographic, changes in socio-demographic, and built environmental factors. The findings suggest that travel preference is relatively more influential in transport mode choice decisions compared with built environment features. Little behavioural evidence was found to support the adjustment of a dissonant orientation toward a particular land use feature and mode accessibility they represent (e.g. a modal shift to greater use of the car for non-TOD dissonants). TOD policies should focus on reducing the level of dissonance in TODs in order to enhance transit ridership.

Improving the ability of guarantors to make a real choice : lenders' practices in taking third party guarantees

This article considers recent cases on guarantees of business loans to identify the lending practices that led the court to set aside the guarantee as against the creditor on the basis that the creditor had engaged in unconscionable conduct. It also explores the role of industry codes of practice in preventing unconscionable conduct, including whether there is a correlation between commitment to an industry code and higher standards of lending practices; whether compliance with an industry code would have produced different outcomes in the cases considered; and whether lenders need to do more than comply with an industry code to ensure their practices are fair and reasonable.

Implementation of a better choice healthy food and drink supply strategy for staff and visitors in government owned health facilities in Queensland, Australia

Objective The present paper reports on a quality improvement activity examining implementation of A Better Choice Healthy Food and Drink Supply Strategy for Queensland Health Facilities (A Better Choice). A Better Choice is a policy to increase supply and promotion of healthy foods and drinks and decrease supply and promotion of energy-dense, nutrient-poor choices in all food supply areas including food outlets, staff dining rooms, vending machines, tea trolleys, coffee carts, leased premises, catering, fundraising, promotion and advertising. Design An online survey targeted 278 facility managers to collect self-reported quantitative and qualitative data. Telephone interviews were sought concurrently with the twenty-five A Better Choice district contact officers to gather qualitative information. Setting Public sector-owned and -operated health facilities in Queensland, Australia. Subjects One hundred and thirty-four facility managers and twenty-four district contact officers participated with response rates of 48·2 % and 96·0 %, respectively. Results Of facility managers, 78·4 % reported implementation of more than half of the A Better Choice requirements including 24·6 % who reported full strategy implementation. Reported implementation was highest in food outlets, staff dining rooms, tea trolleys, coffee carts, internal catering and drink vending machines. Reported implementation was more problematic in snack vending machines, external catering, leased premises and fundraising. Conclusions Despite methodological challenges, the study suggests that policy approaches to improve the food and drink supply can be implemented successfully in public-sector health facilities, although results can be limited in some areas. A Better Choice may provide a model for improving food supply in other health and workplace settings.

Semi-binary based video features for activity representation

Efficient and effective feature detection and representation is an important consideration when processing videos, and a large number of applications such as motion analysis, 3D scene understanding, tracking etc. depend on this. Amongst several feature description methods, local features are becoming increasingly popular for representing videos because of their simplicity and efficiency. While they achieve state-of-the-art performance with low computational complexity, their performance is still too limited for real world applications. Furthermore, rapid increases in the uptake of mobile devices has increased the demand for algorithms that can run with reduced memory and computational requirements. In this paper we propose a semi binary based feature detectordescriptor based on the BRISK detector, which can detect and represent videos with significantly reduced computational requirements, while achieving comparable performance to the state of the art spatio-temporal feature descriptors. First, the BRISK feature detector is applied on a frame by frame basis to detect interest points, then the detected key points are compared against consecutive frames for significant motion. Key points with significant motion are encoded with the BRISK descriptor in the spatial domain and Motion Boundary Histogram in the temporal domain. This descriptor is not only lightweight but also has lower memory requirements because of the binary nature of the BRISK descriptor, allowing the possibility of applications using hand held devices.We evaluate the combination of detectordescriptor performance in the context of action classification with a standard, popular bag-of-features with SVM framework. Experiments are carried out on two popular datasets with varying complexity and we demonstrate comparable performance with other descriptors with reduced computational complexity.

A question of agency : applying Sen’s theory of human capability to the concept of secondary school student career ‘choice’

In this paper, we seek to operationalize Amartya Sen's concept of human capability to guide a scholarly investigation of student career choice capability. We begin by outlining factors affecting youth labour markets in Australia; a prosperous country that is affected by a ‘two-speed’ national economy. We then examine recent government initiatives that have been designed to combat youth unemployment and cyclical disadvantage by enhancing the aspirations and career knowledge of secondary school students. We argue that these policy measures are based on four assumptions: first, that career choice capability is a problem of individual agency; second, that the dissemination of career information can empower students to act as ‘consumers’ in an unequal job market; third, that agency is simply a question of will; and finally, that school education and career advice – as a means to freedom in the space of career development – is of equal quality, distribution and value to an increasingly diverse range of upper secondary school students. The paper concludes by outlining a conceptual framework capable of informing an empirical research project that aims to test these assumptions by measuring and comparing differences between groups in the range of freedom to achieve and, therefore, to choose.

Who struggles most in making a career choice and why?Findings from a cross-sectional survey of highschool students

This paper reports findings from an empirical study examining the influence of student background and educational experiences on the development of career choice capability. Secondary school students attending years 9-12 (N = 706) in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, were invited to participate in an online survey that sought to examine factors influencing their career choices. The survey included questions relating to student demographics, parental occupation, attitudes to school and to learning, student aspirations, and students’ knowledge of the further education or skills required to achieve their desired goal. We found no significant differences in the proportions of students who were “uncertain” of their future career aspirations with respect to their socio-educational background. There were, however, significantly more students struggling with career decision making from an English-speaking background in comparison to households where children spoke a language other than English. Those students were proportionally present in government and non-government schools and had some behavioural and attitudinal characteristics in common.

Identifying steganographic payload location in binary image

In this paper, we propose a steganalysis method that is able to identify the locations of stego bearing pixels in the binary image. In order to do that, our proposed method will calculate the residual between a given stego image and its estimated cover image. After that, we will compute the local entropy difference between these two versions of images as well. Finally, we will compute the mean of residual and mean of local entropy difference across multiple stego images. From these two means, the locations of stego bearing pixels can be identified. The presented empirical results demonstrate that our proposed method can identify the stego bearing locations of near perfect accuracy when sufficient stego images are supplied. Hence, our proposed method can be used to reveal which pixels in the binary image have been used to carry the secret message.

Binary image steganographic techniques classification based on multi-class steganalysis

In this paper, we propose a new multi-class steganalysis for binary image. The proposed method can identify the type of steganographic technique used by examining on the given binary image. In addition, our proposed method is also capable of differentiating an image with hidden message from the one without hidden message. In order to do that, we will extract some features from the binary image. The feature extraction method used is a combination of the method extended from our previous work and some new methods proposed in this paper. Based on the extracted feature sets, we construct our multi-class steganalysis from the SVM classifier. We also present the empirical works to demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively identify five different types of steganography.

Blind steganalysis : a countermeasure for binary image steganography

In this paper, we propose a new blind steganalytic method to detect the presence of secret messages embedded in black and white images using the steganographic techniques. We start by extracting several sets of matrix, such as run length matrix, gap length matrix and pixel difference. We also apply characteristic function on these matrices to enhance their discriminative capabilities. Then we calculate the statistics which include mean, variance, kurtosis and skewness to form our feature sets. The presented empirical works demonstrate our proposed method can effectively detect three different types of steganography. This proves the universality of our proposed method as a blind steganalysis. In addition, the experimental results show our proposed method is capable of detecting small amount of the embedded message.

Estimating hidden message length in binary image embedded by using boundary pixels steganography

In this paper, we propose a new steganalytic method to detect the message hidden in a black and white image using the steganographic technique developed by Liang, Wang and Zhang. Our detection method estimates the length of hidden message embedded in a binary image. Although the hidden message embedded is visually imperceptible, it changes some image statistic (such as inter-pixels correlation). Based on this observation, we first derive the 512 patterns histogram from the boundary pixels as the distinguishing statistic, then we compute the histogram difference to determine the changes of the 512 patterns histogram induced by the embedding operation. Finally we propose histogram quotient to estimate the length of the embedded message. Experimental results confirm that the proposed method can effectively and reliably detect the length of the embedded message.