Affective response to gambling promotions during televised sport: A qualitative analysis

Gambling promotions extensively punctuate contemporary televised sport broadcasts and concerns have been raised about their potential impacts on vulnerable groups. Research suggests advertising can shape individuals’ emotions, or affect, towards a product/brand and can subsequently influence purchasing decisions. Consequently, understanding how promotion of gambling influences sport viewers is an important although sparsely addressed area of research. This paper presents exploratory research on affective responses towards gambling promotions displayed during televised sport. Eight online focus groups were conducted with a sample of regular sports viewers in Queensland, Australia. Participants were exposed to a variety of gambling promotions used in National Rugby League match telecasts. Utilising adaptive theory, themes reflecting affective responses to each promotional technique were identified. A range of positive and negative affective responses were identified including arousal, joy, anger and worry. A conceptual model representing emergent affective response categories, message delivery techniques and moderating variables is proposed to inform a broader future research agenda examining how gambling promotions during televised sport influence affective response and concomitant gambling intention.Associated Grant:Queensland Department of Justice and Attorney Genera

Secure RFID protocol to manage and prevent tag counterfeiting with Matryoshka concept

Since the RFID technology has been found couple of decades ago, there was much involvement of this emerging technology in the improvement of supply chain management. As this technology made the industry more reliable and faster to process, yet there were always some technical issues and security threats that emerged from the heavy use of the RFID tags in the SCM, or other industries. Hereby we represent a new protocol based on a new idea that can be used to manage and organize tags as well as the objects attached to them in SCM, to prevent counterfeiting and reduce the security threats taking into consideration the security and privacy concerns that faces the industry today. This new approach will open a new horizon to the supply chain management as well as the RFID systems technology since it will handle multi- tags attached to objects managed in one location as an entity of one in one. We called our approach the MATRYOSHKA approach since it has the same idea of the russian doll, in managing multi-tags as one entity and prevent counterfeiting. We also added extra authentication process based on a mathematical exchange key formation to increase the security during communication to prevent threats and attacks and to provide a secure mutual authentication method

Electronic gaming machine (EGM) environments: Market segments and risk

This study used a marketing-research paradigm to explore gamblers' attraction to EGMs based on different elements of the environment. A select set of environmental features was sourced from a prior study (Thorne et al. in J Gambl Issues 2016b), and a discrete choice experiment was conducted through an online survey. Using the same dataset first described by Rockloff et al. (EGM Environments that contribute to excess consumption and harm, 2015), a sample of 245 EGM gamblers were sourced from clubs in Victoria, Australia, and 7516 gamblers from an Australian national online survey-panel. Participants' choices amongst sets of hypothetical gambling environments allowed for an estimation of the implied individual-level utilities for each feature (e.g., general sounds, location, etc.). K-means clustering on these utilities identified four unique market segments for EGM gambling, representing four different types of consumers. The segments were named according to their dominant features: Social, Value, High Roller and Internet. We found that the environments orientated towards the Social and Value segments were most conducive to attracting players with relatively few gambling problems, while the High Roller and Internet-focused environments had greater appeal for players with problems and vulnerabilities. This study has generated new insights into the kinds of gambling environments that are most consistent with safe play

Augmenting reality for augmented reality

There are two competing narratives for the future of computationally augmented spaces. On the one hand, we have the Internet of Things [1], where the narrative is one of making our environments more aware of us and of themselves, and generally making everything “smarter” through embedded computation, sensing, and actuation. On the other hand, we have current approaches to augmented or mixed reality, in which the space remains unchanged and instead we hack our perception of the space by superimposing a layer of media between us and the world [2,3]. In this article we present examples of three projects that seek to merge these two approaches by creating and fabricating playful material elements that can be integrated with camera-based AR systems but that are independently meaningful objects in their own right. We argue that this new wave of physically grounded AR technologies constitutes the first steps toward a hybridized digital/physical future that can transform our world

Tackling self-harm in youth: Findings from a mental health promotion intervention in regional Queensland Schools

Even though mental health in children and youth is a national priority, more than half of Australian young people do not seek help for mental health problems because they perceive a stigma and lack of helpfulness in health science providers There is evidence that incidence of self-harm, bullying and lack of meaningful social connections are increasing. Within regional communities the situation is even bleaker, where young people are hospitalised for self-harm at twice the rate of young people living in major cities, and are less likely to present to services for help. This makes youth living in regional and remote areas a particularly vulnerable population in Australian societv. In order to empower young people in regional areas to engage in self-care and care to peers, the iCARE-R mental health promotion program was developed. The nurse-led iCARE program, in its fourth iteration, has been customised to appeal to young people from regional areas. An intervention and mixed method study has been delivered over two years targeting 25 regional Queensland high schools. The program is explicitly solution focused and uses a range of engaging strategies to stimulate reflection on self-care, resilience and social connection. An innovative online component was developed on the dedicated iCARE website to encourage students to share images reflecting symbols of strength, helpful habits and peace. iCARE helps guide young people through the discovery process of finding their own unique strengths, to develop these and enlist them in times of distress, helping them become more confident, more optimistic about the future, and better able to navigate obstacles they meet in everyday life. This is supported by emerging results indicating young people develop new knowledge around empathy, resilience, respect, connection, caring for self and helping others to improve their mental health and wellbeing while building optimism and strength in the whole community

Write of passage: Crime fiction as trauma literature

The subject matter of crime fiction makes this form of creative writing an ideal vehicle for representing trauma as a subset of trauma literature, however, the ongoing debate about the definition of ‘literature’ has meant that crime fiction is positioned hierarchically lower in the cultural field than trauma literature. This paper will dispute a widely-held belief that crime fiction cannot be literary by presenting a framework of trauma theory and its relationship to literature, followed by an analysis of how narrative strategies used in trauma literature that mimic the symptoms of trauma, such as fragmentation and repetition, can be aligned with the fast-paced narrative and literary devices typical of crime fiction. Through a case study and critical reflection of how writers have engaged with trauma in contemporary crime fiction, this argument supports an emerging theory that crime fiction can be literary when it includes an authentic representation of trauma that serves similar purposes to that of trauma literature. The re-writing of the traumatic past in crime fiction offers an opportunity to empower large audiences with empathetic knowledge of trauma, which may transform perceptions, remove stigmas and thereby assist in combating the marginalisation that impedes recovery for trauma survivors. It also provides a safe narrative space for readers to confront their own fears, brought on by exposure to traumatic events in more graphic and perilous ways. This investigation will be informative for crime fiction writers, particularly those aiming to engage with literary institutions and attempting a more authentic representation of trauma in their work. It will also provide a foundation for writing strategies that transgress the boundaries between mass genre fiction and literary fiction and lead the way for further research into the power that narrative has to evoke psychological and emotional growth and benefits for a large genre fiction audience

Photonic instantaneous frequency measurement: Parallel simultaneous implementations in a single highly nonlinear fiber

A microwave photonic system that simultaneously implements multiple parallel instantaneous frequency measurement systems within a single highly nonlinear optical fiber is proposed and practically demonstrated. Three optical carriers of different wavelengths are modulated by the same radio-frequency (RF) signal and then delayed differentially. All three carriers are then mixed within a highly nonlinear optical fiber. The mixing products are separated, and the optical power of each is used to deduce input RF frequency. We demonstrate simultaneous acquisition of two distinct frequency measurement responses over the range from 1 to 40 GHz. This system is all-optical and requires no high-speed electronic components. Avenues for further increasing the number of simultaneous channels are identified. © 2009 IEEE

Random Gabor based templates for facial expression recognition in images with facial occlusion

Robust facial expression recognition (FER) under occluded face conditions is challenging. It requires robust algorithms of feature extraction and investigations into the effects of different types of occlusion on the recognition performance to gain insight. Previous FER studies in this area have been limited. They have spanned recovery strategies for loss of texture features in local facial regions and testing limited to only a few types of occlusion and predominantly a matched train-test strategy. This paper proposes a robust approach that employs a Monte Carlo algorithm to extract a set of Gabor based part-face templates from gallery images and converts these templates into template match distance features. The resulting feature vectors are robust to occlusion because occluded parts are covered by some but not all of the random templates. The method is evaluated using facial images with occluded regions around the eyes and the mouth, randomly placed occlusion patches of different sizes, and near-realistic occlusion of eyes with clear and solid glasses. Both matched and mis-matched train and test strategies are adopted to analyze the effects of such occlusion. Overall recognition performance and the performance for each facial expression are investigated. Experimental results on the Cohn-Kanade and JAFFE databases demonstrate the high robustness and fast processing speed of our approach, and provide useful insight into the effects of occlusion on FER. Results on the parameter sensitivity experiments demonstrate a certain level of robustness of the approach to changes in the orientation and scale of Gabor filters, the size of templates, and occlusion ratios. Performance comparisons with previous approaches show that the proposed method is more robust to occlusion with lower reductions in accuracy from occlusion of eyes or mouth.Associated Grant Code:This work was partially funded by Xi'an University of Technology Grant no. 116-21140

Comprehensive systematic review of appropriateness and effectiveness of intervention programs that aim to build and maintain resilience in nurses and midwives

The purpose of this chapter is to present the findings from a comprehensive systematic literature review that included research that gathered both qualitative and quantitative data, aimed to identify the appropriateness and effectiveness of intervention programs designed to build and maintain resilience in nurses and midwives

Reshaping the role of the tribunal as third party in Australian workplace conflict resolution

In common with courts and tribunals in other developed countries, Australia has experienced the rise of the self-represented litigant. This chapter examines innovations in the approaches taken by the Australian Fair Work Commission (FWC), the national employment relations tribunal, in responding to the growing number of self-represented employers and employees appearing before it or seeking redress. In particular, the chapter explores and discusses the shift towards alternative dispute resolution (ADR) and an increasing number of self-help initiatives in the context of the growing individualization of the Australian labour market and the consequent rise of self-represented litigants before the tribunal. These changes are reshaping the role of the tribunal as a third party in Australian workplace conflict resolution. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016