Quests for healing and identity in the fiction and films of John Sayles : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand

John Sayles, writer and independent filmmaker, is, first and foremost a storyteller. The "stories" in his fiction and films tell of individuals trying to come to terms with personal and/or political issues and often lead their protagonists on journeys or quests in search of healing and identity. These quests frequently involve characters returning to places either from the past, or to the source of the trauma in order to understand and deal with the present. This thesis examines this particular aspect of the fiction and films of John Sayles

Everybody or Somebody? Assessing the impact of social media on newsroom organisational structures

With social media’s increasingly important role in fast-paced news, there is a need to identify the occupational and professional implications of social media specifically in terms of jobs and roles in newsrooms. This paper serves as a preliminary enquiry into what social media jobs have been created in newsrooms under which job ti-tles. It explores trends associated with this and the tasks being carried out in those roles to assess the extent to which social media is ring-fenced as a responsibility. From this it is possible to query the wider impact of social me-dia on organisational structure in newsrooms. Two main newsroom models are identified: firstly, newsrooms that place an emphasis on everyone being responsible for so-cial media and secondly, newsrooms where social media is a specified role. The study further serves to guide social media skills for inclusion in journalism trainin

Livestock and landscape: exploring animal exploitation in later prehistory in the South West of Britain.

The animal remains from British later prehistory have frequently been treated as generally only able to inform us about economy, and occasionally about symbolic behaviour. On the other hand, the use and division of landscape has been largely discussed in terms of social organisation. There has been a failure to appreciate that there is a reflexive relationship between pastoral farming and the utilisation and inhabiting of landscapes. The nature and needs of livestock and detailed consideration of husbandry methods have informed identification of the types of archaeological data we can use to discuss husbandry practices. This thesis integrates faunal, field and environmental data to achieve a holistic understanding. Husbandry practices and animal consumption and deposition identified from analysis of over 130,000 fragments of animal bone from Cadbury Castle, Somerset, and sites in its environs, have been considered in the light of successive arrangements of fields in the area. The relationship between changes in landscape organisation and in animal exploitation has been established and can also be detected across the south west. The fields of the earlier Bronze Age apparently relate to continuation of extensive husbandry regimes, whilst fixing the activity within the landscape. Small scale arable farming was integrated during the Middle Bronze Age. Subsequently there was a return to extensive grazing and mobility. An approach dominated by sheep farming began in the Early Iron Age. This gained ascendency in the Middle Iron Age, with new, small, fields that are indicative of a highly integrated arable and pastoral system and which were both intensive, localised, and reflect the technical, social and ideological complexity surrounding animals. This thesis has found that the form of landscape division and organisation was intimately bound up with the practicalities of livestock management. It has identified a variety of features and arrangements that can assist in understanding livestock management elsewhere in Britain and beyond. At different times and places this involved different social and technological choice, but was founded in the needs of managed animals. This study has shown the benefits of integrating archaeological, faunal and landscape data, together with a strong understanding of the practicalities of animal husbandry. This approach not only enables better understanding of arable and pastoral systems, it allows us to better recognise and understand the social and ideological choices expressed in the farming landscape

Children’s Health in a Legal Framework

The interdisciplinary periodical Future of Children has dedicated an issue to children’s health policy. This contribution to the issue maps the legal landscape influencing policy choices. The authors demonstrate that in the U.S. legal system, parents have robust rights, grounded in the Constitution, to make decisions concerning their children’s health and medical treatment. Following from its commitment to parental rights, the system typically assumes the interests of parents and children are aligned, even when that assumption seems questionable. Thus, for example, parents who would limit their children’s access to health care on the basis of the parents’ religious belief have considerable latitude to do so, unless the child’s life is imminently threatened. There are some exceptions to this legal regime. Adolescents have the right to obtain some health services independently; in these contexts, social welfare needs such as pregnancy prevention trump parental rights. Minors also have access to abortion (although this right is more restricted than for adults). Moreover, the state has the power to intervene when parents place their children’s health at risk through abuse or neglect. A hallmark feature of the legal regime based on parental rights is that the state has no affirmative obligation to help parents care for their children’s health needs. This libertarian framing of the family-state relationship has profound implications for the development of public policy. To the extent the state provides support for families and children, it is doing so as a matter of policy choice (as with Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program) and not enforceable legal obligation. The importance of family autonomy thus results in a weak conception of shared responsibility for children. The framework also means that the state often takes a reactive approach to child wellbeing, intervening primarily when families have broken down or parents have seriously defaulted on their duties. Appreciation of the legal framework underscores the need to develop political support for any initiative to improve health services for children. Often, as this article shows, the state intervenes to promote children’s health only in response to compelling social welfare needs such as crime or disease prevention, or to crises in which parents abuse their children or fail to provide adequate care

Chasing Sustainability on the Net : International research on 69 journalistic pure players and their business models

This report outlines how online-based journalistic startups have created their economical locker in the evolving media ecology. The research introduces the ways that startups have found sustainability in the markets of ten countries. The work is based on 69 case studies from Europe, USA and Japan. The case analysis shows that business models can be divided into two groups. The storytelling-oriented business models are still prevalent in our findings. These are the online journalistic outlets that produce original content – news and stories for audiences. But the other group, service-oriented business models, seems to be growing. This group consists of sites that don’t try to monetize the journalistic content as such but rather focus on carving out new functionality. The project was able to identify several revenue sources: advertising, paying for content, affiliate marketing, donations, selling data or services, organizing events, freelancing and training or selling merchandise. Where it was hard to evidence entirely new revenue sources, it was however possible to find new ways in which revenue sources have been combined or reconfigured. The report also offers practical advice for those who are planning to start their own journalistic site

The effect of temperature on the rate of shoot development in the raspberry (Rubus idaeus L.) cultivar Autumn Bliss

Imperial Users onl

Research-practice interaction: Building bridges, closing the gap

Previous work in the CHI community has identified and explored gaps between theory and practice in HCI research [2]. The recently formed SIGCHI Community on Research-Practice Interaction aims to help bridge the gap between research and practice, by for example supporting practitioner-­friendly dissemination of results, and serving as a conduit for feedback from practitioners to researchers. This SIG is an opportunity for interested CHI attendees to meet members of the SIGCHI RPI community, and engage in discussions on RPI issues including the CHI format, dissemination of results, and supporting practice-based research

Collaborative Revenue Capture for Exiled Media

One area which has much potential for wider impact in the digital economy is the as-yet underresearched field of collaborative revenue capture in journalism. This term is proposed to describe methods to capture revenues on behalf of multiple stakeholders (potentially in competition with one another), and divide profits between them. There is evidence of this as an emerging revenue platform in media: Piano Media, a cross-publication model,where pooled premium content from different media outlets is set behind a paywall, initially launched in Slovenia and Slovakia. Or Blendle offering newspapers and magazines in the Netherlands on one website, reconfiguring a revenue model for journalism by making it incredibly easy to pay for separate articles. Another is Diversity, an online advertising network that pools many media sites together into one global advertising network of standard advertising formats andsizes, thus creating a potential global audience reach for advertisers. See for example Contributoria, a member-supported, crowdfunding, collaborative writing platform or the Banyan Project, a news cooperative owned by the community it covers for emerging examples of collaboration around revenues. By way of a test case study, this workshop explored the extent to which collaborative revenue capture can help to achieve a meaningful level of financial independence for media under threat. The long-term success of independent media in exile or restrictive environments, where the free flow of information is restricted and information producers are at risk, depends on financial sustainability, yet there is little scholarly research around revenue model development. These media function, for the most part, by grants from donor organisations which now run into millions of pounds justified by the fact that access to the diverse and credible journalism in countries such as Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Syria and Sri Lanka offers the opportunity to deliver much greater social and economic cohesion and political transparency. For media seeking to support the free flow of information in fragile environments, the issue of financial sustainability is complex. Both media in exile (out-of-country news outlets feeding independent information back in) and news outlets in restrictive news environments (in country providing counter information) exist in flawed market situations and often rely on grant funding. Researchers have stopped short of exploring the revenue streams of these media. Empirical data is scarce and a corresponding understanding of the funding structure of these media is lacking. One study of relevance - and from which this workshop draws its roots - fills that gap by mapping three main revenue categories of media in exile or in restrictive news environments: grant funding, earned income and donations. The major factors influencing revenue streams compared to online media startups in open markets are discussed. The author finds there is no one-size-fits-all solution and identifies the need for collaborative approaches to promote economic resilience for media under threat (Cook 2015). As such, exiled media as a vehicle for studying the potential for collaborative revenue capture could be an important indicator to the broader digital industries, which are also grappling with the possibilities for collaborative approaches. This represents an entirely new academic field approach. While the set of circumstances exiled media present are relatively unique, the approach to circumvent them - afforded by digital technologies - is highly transferable. The potential to place a stake in the greater understanding of such collaborative revenue methods showcases the UK as a leader in revenue model experimentation, an area watched with much interest globally

An investigation of synthetic body covering materials in soil burials for forensic application

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Science.During the forensic investigation of grave sites artefacts are often located and have the potential to provide valuable information about the victim or the perpetrator. Such artefacts may include body coverings used by the perpetrator to interfere with the crime scene. Polymer materials are now frequently encountered at crime scenes and given their use in bag and carpet manufacture, there was an increased likelihood that this class of materials will form part of a clandestine grave. Understanding the degradation of these materials in potential crime scene soils will provide insight into the age and nature of the burial. Previous forensic research on polymers at the crime scene has mostly focused on identifying polymer materials such as fibres and the studies that have investigated polymer degradation, examined the effect degradation had on identifying the polymer rather than the information the polymer can provide about the burial. This thesis provides a comprehensive examination of the degradation of five commonly encountered polymers with potential to be used as body coverings in a variety of soil t types. A comparison of the suitability of a range of analytical techniques to understand polymer degradation associated with burial has also been made in this thesis. The five polymers -polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP), poly vinyl chloride (PVC), polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and nylon- in the form of films and carpets were buried in a series of laboratory controlled environments that varied by soil type, moisture content, soil pH and temperature for a burial period of 24 months. Scanning electron microscopy and atomic force microscopy were utilised for the examination of changes to the morphology of polymer surface. Spectroscopic analyses, including infrared, Raman and ultraviolet-visible spectroscopies, were applied to monitor changes to the chemical structure of the polymers and their additives. Thermal analysis was also investigated as an approach to monitoring the subtle changes associated with the degradation processes. This study determined that certain soil environments enhanced the degradation of the polymers in soil, while other environments were shown to preserve the polymers. The degradation of these polymers often included the interaction of polymer additives with the soil environment. The factors that were shown to enhance polymer degradation included the availability of water and the ability of the soil environment to encourage microbial growth. In this thesis, a combination of morphological changes determined by scanning electron microscopy and the microstructural changes determined using infrared spectroscopy, and to a lesser extent, thermal changes monitored using thermogravimetric analysis, were determined to be the most powerful methods for monitoring degradation processes in the polymer systems investigated. This thesis provides new knowledge about the impact different soil variations have on the degradation of polymers that are more and more likely to be found at clandestine grave sites