Book review: the price of freedom denied: religious persecution and conflict in the twenty-first century

Rachel Dearlove discovers an invaluable evidence-based book on the role of religion in modern conflict, essential reading for students and for policy maker

Rapid identification of new transcribed human sequences: a semi-ordered approach

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Enhancing learning through strategies lecturers use: A snapshot of students\u27 learning at a satellite campus

This study sought to investigate undergraduate Education and Commerce students’ perceptions of learning within a distributed learning environment at the Loftus Education Centre (LEC), University of Wollongong (UOW). The LEC was established in 2003 as part of a distributed learning environment comprising regional campuses and centres to enable UOW to deliver tertiary education opportunities to regional students. It offers both undergraduate and post-graduate degrees. The distance of Loftus from the hub campus requires that, for reasons of economy and efficiency, studies often involve a blended learning approach. Also, the campus is small in size (an enrolment of 286 in 2009), which is a feature that allows for the development of cohesive on-campus learning communities. Thus, its size and its distance from the main campus are features which influence both the nature of the teaching and the learning that takes place. An open-ended questionnaire, based on the instrument used by Calder and Daly (2007) at James Cook University, asked students to identify strategies used by Loftus lecturers that assisted students’ learning. They were also asked which features of their subject environment contributed to their learning. The findings revealed differences between this study and the James Cook University study, raising questions about student engagement and highlighting possibilities for the effective use of blended learning in a distributed learning environment. The findings from the two faculties in this study share a number of similarities and a key difference in relation to technology. This suggests and affordance gap that could be dealt with by student and staff planning of the environment and the technologies used

The Retreat of the State (Editorial)

Article originally published July 1987, Volume 18 Issue 3; original IDS editing is retained here. We are currently witnessing a global process of economic restructuring in both North and South, East and West. Though country contexts may differ, there is one strikingly common element: the criticism of statist modes of development and provision and the move towards greater use of market mechanisms in the delivery of goods and services. As the case studies covered in this Bulletin suggest, this reaction against statist forms of development is common to both Western Europe and the Third World. This similarity is hardly surprising given their economic interdependence, the activity of international disciplinary institutions such as the MF and the World Bank, and the historical link between the emergence of developmental states in the newly independent territories and the system of managed capitalism practised by their former colonial masters. Do the contributors to this Bulletin offer any ways forward for both theory and practice? Certain analytical points emerge which arc important guides to thinking about policy

Measuring Asymmetry in Time-Stamped Phylogenies.

Previous work has shown that asymmetry in viral phylogenies may be indicative of heterogeneity in transmission, for example due to acute HIV infection or the presence of 'core groups' with higher contact rates. Hence, evidence of asymmetry may provide clues to underlying population structure, even when direct information on, for example, stage of infection or contact rates, are missing. However, current tests of phylogenetic asymmetry (a) suffer from false positives when the tips of the phylogeny are sampled at different times and (b) only test for global asymmetry, and hence suffer from false negatives when asymmetry is localised to part of a phylogeny. We present a simple permutation-based approach for testing for asymmetry in a phylogeny, where we compare the observed phylogeny with random phylogenies with the same sampling and coalescence times, to reduce the false positive rate. We also demonstrate how profiles of measures of asymmetry calculated over a range of evolutionary times in the phylogeny can be used to identify local asymmetry. In combination with different metrics of asymmetry, this combined approach offers detailed insights of how phylogenies reconstructed from real viral datasets may deviate from the simplistic assumptions of commonly used coalescent and birth-death process models.This work was supported by a Medical Research Council Methodology Research Programme grant to S.D.W.F (grant number MR/J013862/1).This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from PLoS via http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.100431

Patterns of paid work among higher education students: Implication for the Bradley Reforms

The Bradley review suggests that students with low socio-economic status (SES) need greater financial support than that which is currently offered to them if they are to take up university places and remain at university throughout their courses (Bradley, Noonan, Nugent, & Scales, 2008). This recommendation is, in part, based on research into the necessity for low SES students to maintain paid, term-time employment throughout their higher education to meet their basic needs. This study has been undertaken to explore the connection between SES status and paid term-time employment on a suburban satellite campus of a regional Australian university in order to determine the extent to which this holds true for this site. This research used a four page questionnaire to establish average hours of employment, types of employment, the necessity for employment, the expenditure of the money earned, and the potential for interference between study and paid employment for the full time undergraduate students studying at this site. Overall there was a remarkable level of similarity between the responses of the two SES cohorts studied (low and mid/high), although some differences indicated that the mid/high SES cohort may be slightly more dependent on their earnings than the low SES cohort and that the low SES cohort appeared more likely to view their employment as a preparation for their future careers. Implications for universities’ timetabling, student support services, and efforts to attract low SES students need to consider the site-specific reasons for low SES enrolment rates and the reasons for students’ term-time employment

Biased phylodynamic inferences from analysing clusters of viral sequences.

Phylogenetic methods are being increasingly used to help understand the transmission dynamics of measurably evolving viruses, including HIV. Clusters of highly similar sequences are often observed, which appear to follow a 'power law' behaviour, with a small number of very large clusters. These clusters may help to identify subpopulations in an epidemic, and inform where intervention strategies should be implemented. However, clustering of samples does not necessarily imply the presence of a subpopulation with high transmission rates, as groups of closely related viruses can also occur due to non-epidemiological effects such as over-sampling. It is important to ensure that observed phylogenetic clustering reflects true heterogeneity in the transmitting population, and is not being driven by non-epidemiological effects. We qualify the effect of using a falsely identified 'transmission cluster' of sequences to estimate phylodynamic parameters including the effective population size and exponential growth rate under several demographic scenarios. Our simulation studies show that taking the maximum size cluster to re-estimate parameters from trees simulated under a randomly mixing, constant population size coalescent process systematically underestimates the overall effective population size. In addition, the transmission cluster wrongly resembles an exponential or logistic growth model 99% of the time. We also illustrate the consequences of false clusters in exponentially growing coalescent and birth-death trees, where again, the growth rate is skewed upwards. This has clear implications for identifying clusters in large viral databases, where a false cluster could result in wasted intervention resources

Integrating biotechnology into the polyfarm concept

The polyfarm concept aims at strengthening traditional and appropriate farming technologies within the local agro-economic, cultural and socio-economic constraints of rural small farming. Different modules can be grouped together to suit the needs of the farmer. The polyfarm can serve as a demonstration and training facility to make rural farmers aware of the existence of biotechnologically-enhanced crops, their benefits and potential for use by resource-poor farmers. Enhanced soybean and maize are planted together with the conventional crop to demonstrate that these crops can improve yields, cut costs, reduce spraying and save time for the small-scale farmers