Making waves: Australian ocean development assistance

This paper argues for ocean development  to be a key strategic goal of Australia\u27s increased aid investments. In particular, it recommends that AusAID fund key features of the follow-on to Australia\u27s successful Defence funded Pacific Patrol Boat program. Australia has a vital national interest in the management of its adjacent oceans and seas

Terms of engagement: Australia’s regional defence diplomacy

Australia is in the process of pivoting back to our own region and looking for new strategies for Defence re-engagement. But the Defence Cooperation Program hasn’t been scrutinised in any depth since an audit report by the Auditor-General in 2001. That pointed to a lack of financial information management and clear and public articulation of the goals and objectives of defence cooperation activities.A fundamental conclusion of the report is that these criticisms remain valid today. The emphasis has shifted over the years from assisting regional countries to build their own defence forces more towards working together to promote a secure region. The report makes a number of recommendations including that our defence engagement in the priority regions should focus on the maritime dimension. The highest priority should be attached to implementing the Pacific Maritime Security Project as the cornerstone of our maritime security engagement in the South Pacific

SnoPatrol: how many snoRNA genes are there?

Small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs) are among the most evolutionarily ancient classes of small RNA. Two experimental screens published in BMC Genomics expand the eukaryotic snoRNA catalog, but many more snoRNAs remain to be found

What are the requirements of foreign capital?

Photographs not included in Web versio

Building a strong European alliance for personality disorder research and intervention

People with personality disorders frequently face stigma, ignorance and pessimism regarding the treatability of their disorders. This is despite substantial progress that has been made in developing a number of effective evidence based psychotherapeutic treatments. However, expertise in how to systematically deliver these treatments in a sustainable way throughout Europe is largely lacking. To bridge the gap between evidence based treatments and their implementation in health services, the European Society for the Study of Personality Disorders is currently building a new alliance of experts to promote personality disorder scholarship, and to support the development of clinical expertise and systematic treatment implementation throughout Europe. The aim of this paper is to describe how the Society is currently using its interdisciplinary and international roster of experts to address the specific treatment and research needs of the European personality disorder field, particularly to countries in which expertise in the field is less developed

Measuring the Core Components of Maladaptive Personality: Severity Indices of Personality Problems (SIPP-118)

This report describes a series of studies among 2231 subjects on the development of the Severity Indices for Personality Problems (SIPP), a self-report questionnaire measuring the core components of (mal)adaptive personality functioning. Results show that the 16 facets have good psychometric properties and test-retest reliability, are generic across various types of personality disorders, and have good discriminative validity between various populations. The facets fit well into a common factor model with five higher-order domains (i.e., self-control, identity integration, responsibility, relational capacities, and social concordance) that are eminently interpretable, and replicable across various populations. Domain scorThis report is the first document to describe the development of the SIPP-118: Severity Indices of Personality Problems, 118 items. It provides details about the items selection, validations and reliability studies and norm values. The report is meant as a detailed description of our investigation and is made directly after the data collection in order to allow for fast communication between researchers. Although the report will probably remain the most detailed description of our research effort, it must not be seen as the final interpretation of the results. The report now serves as an easy accessible collection of research data, on which basis we hope to write peer-reviewed articles. This original report will remain available on request, for those researchers who would like to have a detailed description of the research and the data. Note that parts of the report still reveal the early thoughts and interpretations, which are characteristic for a first report written just after finishing the data collection. Up-to-date information, norm scores, and translations of the SIPP-118 in Dutch, English, Norwegian, Argentinean, and Italian language, are freely available at www.vispd.nl