Calling time: How to remove fossil fuel sponsorships from sports, arts & events

Sports, arts and major events are deeply embedded in the Australian way of life. Weekend matches, concerts and festivals bring us together - to cheer, to share pride and excitement, to feel connected to each other and to keep building our national story. When we barrack for our beloved teams, discover the work of a new local artist or laugh until our cheeks hurt at a comedy show, we are taking part in a ritual that has shaped social and cultural life in Australia for generations. Climate change – driven by burning coal, oil and gas – is putting all of this at risk. From flooded festivals, to concerts cancelled by bushfire threats and unsafe heat disrupting play at the tennis, footy and more, climate change is wreaking havoc on the activities and events we love..

Neurocognitive and psychiatric markers of network disease in epilepsy

© 2015 Dr. Genevieve RaynerPeople with epilepsy frequently experience debilitating memory and mood difficulties. Autobiographic memory impairments are a vulnerability factor for developing and maintaining unipolar depression in the psychiatric population, yet despite the wealth of research examining cognition and behaviour in epilepsy, the links between them remain unclear. This thesis aimed to profile the autobiographic memory and mood function of patients with focal epilepsy relative to healthy controls, and characterise how these functions may be interlinked. Three behavioural studies were conducted to achieve these objectives. Participants were prospectively recruited from the Comprehensive Epilepsy Programme at Austin Health, Melbourne, between 2010-2014. The cognitive and psychiatric functioning of 85 adults with chronic focal epilepsy was compared to that of 72 sociodemographically-matched controls largely recruited from the patients’ families (N=157). Gold-standard psychometric measures assessed depressive symptoms and cognitive function. Study One was an initial qualitative exploration of the relationships between cognitive impairment and depression in a form of focal epilepsy not typically linked to memory disorder, to assess the effects of seizures and pathology on those functions. A well-characterised case series of nine patients with frontal lobe epilepsy (FLE) was contrasted to 24 matched controls. Results suggested that FLE can selectively interrupt the integrity of the autobiographic memory/cognitive control networks versus the affective network. Study Two aimed to quantitatively delineate the effects of seizure chronicity on impaired autobiographic memory in a large cohort of patients (n=85) relative to healthy controls (n=72), and the potential links between poor autobiographic recall and mood. This revealed that chronic seizures beginning in childhood dysregulate cognition-related networks important for autobiographic recall, while autobiographic memory impairments in patients with a more recent disease onset are largely linked to depressive symptoms, perhaps reflecting maladaptive psychological adjustment to the onset of epilepsy as an adult. Together, the first two studies show that autobiographic memory difficulties are only related to depression in certain epilepsy syndromes. Finally, Study Three comprised a data-driven investigation into the existence of a cognitive phenotype of depression in epilepsy. Results showed that of the 21 (25%) patients currently meeting criteria for a formal depressive disorder, 15 (71%) had a ‘Cognitive’ phenotype of the disorder, while six (29%) presented with a ‘Somatic’ phenotype. These findings are congruent with phenotypes of depression found in other populations, and suggest that different presentations of depression in epilepsy may uniquely index dysregulation of selected brain networks. Moreover the lack of seizure-related correlates to the Cognitive phenotype discounts the widespread assumption that cognitive and affective network dysfunction in epilepsy is a side-effect of seizures. The results of this thesis suggest that epilepsy can selectively disrupt large-scale brain networks important to cognition and affect, and that behavioural disturbances in people with epilepsy may be primary manifestations of the network disease

Psychometric properties of the Neuropsychiatry Unit Cognitive Assessment Tool (NUCOG) in patients with epilepsy

The Neuropsychiatry Unit Cognitive Assessment Tool (NUCOG) is a brief psychometric screening tool developed for use in neuropsychiatric populations. The aim of this project is to evaluate the psychometric performance of the NUCOG in patients who underwent prolonged video electroencephalographic monitoring (VEM)

Do CFG-Based Language Models Need Agreement Constraints?

this technically counts as a reduction of the semantic error rate, it is obviously of little practical importance. After eliminating all examples of the above type, we were left with a residue of 47 utterances where one grammar was right and the other wrong; of these, the tight grammar was correct in 37 cases and the loose one in the remaining 10. A more realis- tic estimate of the absolute reduction in seman- tic error rate for the OOH system as a result of correctly modelling agreement would thus be (37-10)/3511, or 0.7%, giving a relative reduction of about 5%. Although undramatic, this margin is significant at the 0.05% level according to the McNemar sign test (McNemar, 1947). The following examples show typical instances of the tight grammar (T) outscoring the loose one (L

Intersecting factors lead to absolute pitch acquisition that is maintained in a 'fixed do' environment

The skill of absolute pitch (ap) has been proposed as an ideal paradigm for investigating the complex relationships that exist between the genome and its expression at a cognitive and behavioral level (the phenotype). Yet despite this, we still have limited understanding of the early conditions that might be necessary or sufficient for development of this skill, and the influence of the current music environment has not been explored. To investigate these issues we undertook a detailed characterization of the early and current music environment of 160 musicians, and then identified factors predictive of varying extent of AP ability. The results demonstrate a similar contribution of past and present environmental influences, with a combination of factors (rather than any given factor) most salient in AP musicians. The novel finding for the role of the current environment suggests that auditory processing models emphasizing plasticity effects are relevant to AP ability