Transdisciplinary and arts-centred approaches to stewardship and sustainability of urban nature.

This paper explores case studies of how artists working with scientists and land managers affiliated with the Urban Field Station Collaborative Arts Program (UFS Arts) are fostering new relations of care with urban nature and thereby informing landscape decisions. The 'wicked' problems related to sustainability demand novel, holistic approaches to transformation that engage multiple ways of knowing. We present 4 examples from UFS Arts by triangulating data across programmatic documentation, evaluation, and ethnographic materials from 2016-present. Matthew López-Jensen's Tree Love and Nikki Lindt’s Underground Sound Project sensitise us to the capacities of trees and forests through image and sound. Mary Mattingly’s Swale is a floating food forest that enacts new forms of community stewardship. The exhibition Who Takes Care of New York? maps the stories and practices of civic environmental groups. Three themes in these works suggest opportunities for transformation throughout the knowledge production cycle: posing novel questions, engaging multiple methodologies, and communicating ideas with the public. Through these transdisciplinary works, we learn things we could not have learned via traditional disciplinary or interdisciplinary work and assert that stewardship offers a pathway towards sustainability transforming management practices and landscape decisions by reshaping our relationships to community and the land

A framework for deriving semantic web services

Web service-based development represents an emerging approach for the development of distributed information systems. Web services have been mainly applied by software practitioners as a means to modularize system functionality that can be offered across a network (e.g., intranet and/or the Internet). Although web services have been predominantly developed as a technical solution for integrating software systems, there is a more business-oriented aspect that developers and enterprises need to deal with in order to benefit from the full potential of web services in an electronic market. This ‘ignored’ aspect is the representation of the semantics underlying the services themselves as well as the ‘things’ that the services manage. Currently languages like the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) provide the syntactic means to describe web services, but lack in providing a semantic underpinning. In order to harvest all the benefits of web services technology, a framework has been developed for deriving business semantics from syntactic descriptions of web services. The benefits of such a framework are two-fold. Firstly, the framework provides a way to gradually construct domain ontologies from previously defined technical services. Secondly, the framework enables the migration of syntactically defined web services toward semantic web services. The study follows a design research approach which (1) identifies the problem area and its relevance from an industrial case study and previous research, (2) develops the framework as a design artifact and (3) evaluates the application of the framework through a relevant scenario

Poor food and nutrient intake among Indigenous and non-Indigenous rural Australian children

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The purpose of this study was to describe the food and nutrient intake of a population of rural Australian children particularly Indigenous children. Participants were aged 10 to 12 years, and living in areas of relative socio-economic disadvantage on the north coast of New South Wales.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>In this descriptive cross-sectional study 215 children with a mean age of 11.30 (SD 0.04) years (including 82 Indigenous children and 93 boys) completed three 24-hour food recalls (including 1 weekend day), over an average of two weeks in the Australian summer of late 2005.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A high proportion of children consumed less than the Australian Nutrient Reference Values for fibre (74-84% less than Adequate Intake (AI)), calcium (54-86% less than Estimated Average Requirement (EAR)), folate and magnesium (36% and 28% respectively less than EAR among girls), and the majority of children exceeded the upper limit for sodium (68-76% greater than Upper Limit (UL)). Energy-dense nutrient-poor (EDNP) food consumption contributed between 45% and 49% to energy. Hot chips, sugary drinks, high-fat processed meats, salty snacks and white bread were the highest contributors to key nutrients and sugary drinks were the greatest <it>per capita </it>contributor to daily food intake for all. <it>Per capita </it>intake differences were apparent by Indigenous status. Consumption of fruit and vegetables was low for all children. Indigenous boys had a higher intake of energy, macronutrients and sodium than non-Indigenous boys.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The nutrient intake and excessive EDNP food consumption levels of Australian rural children from disadvantaged areas are cause for concern regarding their future health and wellbeing, particularly for Indigenous boys. Targeted intervention strategies should address the high consumption of these foods.</p

A population-based investigation into inequalities amongst Indigenous mothers and newborns by place of residence in the Northern Territory, Australia

BACKGROUND: Comparisons of birth outcomes between Australian Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations show marked inequalities. These comparisons obscure Indigenous disparities. There is much variation in terms of culture, language, residence, and access to services amongst Australian Indigenous peoples. We examined outcomes by region and remoteness for Indigenous subgroups and explored data for communities to inform health service delivery and interventions. METHODS: Our population-based study examined maternal and neonatal outcomes for 7,560 mothers with singleton pregnancies from Australia’s Northern Territory Midwives’ Data Collection (2003–2005) using uni- and multivariate analyses. Groupings were by Indigenous status; region (Top End (TE)/Central Australia (CA)); Remote/ Urban residence; and across two large TE communities. RESULTS: Of the sample, 34.1% were Indigenous women, of whom 65.6% were remote-dwelling versus 6.7% of non- Indigenous women. In comparison to CA Urban mothers: TE Remote (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] 1.47, 95%CI: 1.13, 1.90) and TE Urban mothers (aOR 1.36 (95% CI: 1.02, 1.80) were more likely, but CA Remote mothers (aOR 0.43; 95% CI: 0.31, 0.58) less likely to smoke during pregnancy; CA Remote mothers giving birth at >32 weeks gestation were less likely to have attended ≥ five antenatal visits (aOR 0.55; 95%CI: 0.36, 0.86); TE Remote (aOR 0.71; 95%CI: 0.53, 0.95) and CA Remote women (aOR 0.68; 95%CI: 0.49, 0.95) who experienced labour had lower odds of epidural/ spinal/narcotic pain relief; and TE Remote (aOR 0.47; 95%CI: 0.34, 0.66), TE Urban (aOR 0.67; 95%CI: 0.46, 0.96) and CA Remote mothers (aOR 0.52; 95%CI: 0.35, 0.76) all had lower odds of having a ‘normal’ birth. The aOR for preterm birth for TE Remote newborns was 2.09 (95%CI: 1.20, 3.64) and they weighed 137 g (95%CI: -216 g, -59 g) less than CA Urban babies. There were few significant differences for communities, except for smoking prevalence. CONCLUSIONS: This paper is one of few quantifying inequalities between groups of Australian Indigenous women and newborns at a regional level. Indigenous mothers and newborns do worse on some outcomes if they live remotely, especially if they live in the TE. Smoking prevention and high-quality antenatal care is fundamental to addressing many of the adverse outcomes identified in this paper.Malinda Steenkamp, Alice Rumbold, Lesley Barclay and Sue Kilde