Evaluation of the Victorian Community Crime Prevention Program: final report

This evaluation finds that the Community Crime Prevention Program is a highly valued contribution to the Victorian community crime prevention and community safety field. Abstract The Community Crime Prevention Program (CCPP), established by the Victorian Government, aims to enhance communities’ capacity to deliver local solutions to crime. It is part of a broader suite of initiatives to reduce the impact of criminal behaviour on Victorians. The Community Crime Prevention Unit (CCPU) is a business unit within the Department of Justice (DOJ) to administer the CCPP. The mainstay of the CCPP is a competitive grants program available to a wide variety of community organisations and local government authorities. Bodies that comply with the qualifying criteria are able to apply for funding in the allocated funding rounds. DOJ commissioned the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) to conduct an evaluation of the Victorian CCPP. In order to assess the strategic appropriateness and efficacy of the CCPP the AIC, in consultation with the CCPU and the Regional Directors forum that operates across the DOJ, developed a program logic model and evaluation framework. This informed the development of a comprehensive methodology combining qualitative and quantitative research methods. This included: consultation with key stakeholders; online survey of local government and community organisations; review of CCPP-sponsored interventions; and analysis of administrative data and program documentation relating to the operation of the CCPP. The project was undertaken between February and September 2014

Mechanisms of trauma at a rural hospital in Uganda

Introduction: Trauma is an increasing cause of mortality worldwide with road traffic accidents (RTAs) causing 1.3 million deaths annually with 90% of this mortality occurring in low and middle income countries. The rise in trauma deaths has been neglected with infectious diseases taking precedence. More research needs to be conducted in resource poor countries to establish the main causes of trauma and find better solutions to the rising trend in mortality. Much of the trauma research in resource poor countries has focused on urban areas. This study aims to find the leading causes of trauma at a rural Ugandan hospital. Methods: A retrospective case note review was performed on all adult patients admitted to Kuluva Hospital with trauma related injuries in 2007. Kuluva Hospital is a rural 250 bed hospital in North-West Uganda. Results: 490 trauma patients were admitted in 2007 accounting for 9.4% of admissions. 70.2% (n=344) were males and 29.8% (n=146) were females. The mean age of patients was 31.3 years and the mean length of stay was 7.4 days. In 2007 9 patients died following trauma, 6 from RTAs, 2 from burns and one after an assault. RTAs were the leading cause of trauma with 64.2% of admissions (n=315), followed by assaults with 16.5% (n=81) of admissions. Soft tissue injuries with 28.4% (n=149) and lacerations with 27.3% (n=143) were the most common diagnoses after trauma with fractures making up 18.7% of injuries (n=99). Conclusion: RTAs were an important cause of morbidity and mortality in a rural Ugandan hospital as they also are in urban areas. Low cost initiatives to reduce speed, prevent alcohol impaired driving, improve public education and wider access to high quality trauma care are vital to reducing the mortality and morbidity caused by RTAs in Africa

Foreign body causing perforation of the appendix in an African boy

Foreign bodies in the appendix are a rare but well described clinical entity and may cause perforation. Presented here is the case of a 13yr old Ugandan boy who had features of acute appendicitis, was sent for appendicectomy and during the operation was found to have perforation of the appendix due to a seed. The boy was treated with broad spectrum antibiotics and made an uneventful recovery

Technology that enhances without inhibiting learning

Technology supported information sharing could be argued to both enhance and inhibit learning. However, social and affective issues that motivate learners' technology interactions are often overlooked. Are learners avoiding valuable learning applications because of privacy fears and trust issues? Will inaccurate technology assumptions and awareness inhibit information sharing? Do learners need control over technology enhanced safe creative spaces or can they be motivated to overcome badly designed systems because sharing is 'valuable' or 'fun'. This presentation details a model of privacy and trust issues that can be used to enhance elearning. Several OU case-studies of multimedia, mobile and elearning applications (conducted within IET, KMI and the Open CETL) are evaluated using this model. The model helps to identify trade-offs that learners make for technology enhanced or inhibited learning. Theories of control, identity, information sensitivity and re-use are discussed within the context of these elearning examples

That Unexpected Margin of Capital

For many years, a weapon in the armory of those advocating for Eric Williams’s thesis that the profits from slavery helped finance the Industrial Revolution in Britain has been a speech made by Winston Churchill making that very point. Williams himself referred to the speech in 1942, as did George Padmore in 1953, but neither provided chapter and verse. Subsequently, a whole raft of commentators has followed suit, but always only via a reference to Williams or Padmore. This research note provides the original date and context for Churchill’s words

American Tropics

American Tropics: Towards a Literary Geography was a project based in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex between 2006 and 2011. It involved seven people—three academics, a post-doctoral researcher, two PhD students, and an administrator—and was funded by the UK Art and Humanities Research Council. The results of the project are still in the process of being published. The participants all came from a literary background and the thrust of the pro..

Monuments and Promise: Maya Ruins and the Death of Felipe Carrillo Puerto

In 1923 the peripheral state of Yucatán saw an unusual confluence of personalities and interests. The new governor, Felipe Carrillo Puerto, was putting a radical socialist experiment into practice, while trying to impress upon the Maya campesinato the glories of their underrespected heritage. The liberal New York magazine Survey Graphic was putting together a special issue that would highlight that experiment. The local upper classes were awakening to the possibilities of cultural tourism. US archaeologists were beginning a major investigation and restoration project at the Maya city of Chichén Itzá. A Californian woman journalist was accompanying the archaeologists, in the process both learning about earlier US depredations at Chichén Itzá and falling in love with the new governor. This paper disentangles these threads in the interest of illuminating a key moment of cultural production in the American periphery

Optimal diagnostic tests for sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease based on support vector machine classification of RT-QuIC data

In this work we study numerical construction of optimal clinical diagnostic tests for detecting sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD). A cerebrospinal fluid sample (CSF) from a suspected sCJD patient is subjected to a process which initiates the aggregation of a protein present only in cases of sCJD. This aggregation is indirectly observed in real-time at regular intervals, so that a longitudinal set of data is constructed that is then analysed for evidence of this aggregation. The best existing test is based solely on the final value of this set of data, which is compared against a threshold to conclude whether or not aggregation, and thus sCJD, is present. This test criterion was decided upon by analysing data from a total of 108 sCJD and non-sCJD samples, but this was done subjectively and there is no supporting mathematical analysis declaring this criterion to be exploiting the available data optimally. This paper addresses this deficiency, seeking to validate or improve the test primarily via support vector machine (SVM) classification. Besides this, we address a number of additional issues such as i) early stopping of the measurement process, ii) the possibility of detecting the particular type of sCJD and iii) the incorporation of additional patient data such as age, sex, disease duration and timing of CSF sampling into the construction of the test.Comment: 32 pages, 12 figures, 1 tabl