An anthropology of the police: semantic constructs of social order

The police play an increasing role in the public construction of order and control. This thesis explores the modes of thought by which police practices are generated in pursuit of this control. A publicly proclaimed approval of social research is not supported by the analysis and academic enquiry is shown to be a binary opposite to a preferred ‘practical mastery'. This suggests the police maintain structural invisibility while appearing to be massively accessible to society. The 'insider/anthropologist' operates in a kind of extended liminality, with the potential to illuminate such hidden beliefs by a seditious interpretation. Reflexive participant observation therefore threatens and creates anti-structural possibilities for a society obsessed with conserving known and inculcated practice. This analysis of manufactured reality reveals a dramatic creation of ‘real’ and marginal policemen and villains, where the use of extreme metaphor, language and masculine symbols of status translate thought into action. Intrusion of women into this ideal world creates structural anomaly, for the world of ‘crime’ is dramatised to reinforce traditional belief in a masculine criminal justice system. An exploration of ambiguity caused by policewomen illustrates their incorrect place in the world of 'street-visible crime control’. Archetypes of feminine susceptibility are invoked, just as the archetype of 'hero‘ is attributed to the detective, 'fighting his war against crime’. However, analysis explodes the mythology surrounding the idea of 'crime', showing it to be an arbitrary police construct directed against the 'dangerous classes', manipulated and produced as a social drama. The revelation that this major structuring principle is used to preserve a known social etiquette is impossible to acknowledge and explains how research or academic enquiry into philosophies of power must be resisted. The police world has a public face, but a well-concealed private reality which this semantic exploration makes apparent

Mortality in intensive care: The impact of bacteremia and the utility of systemic inflammatory response syndrome

Background: The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of bacteremia on intensive care unit (ICU) mortality and to develop a bacteremia prediction tool using systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) criteria. Methods: Patients included those aged >18 years who had blood cultures taken in the ICU from January 1, 2011-December 31, 2013. Eligible patients were identified from microbiology records of the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, Scotland. Clinical and outcome data were gathered from ICU records. Patients with clinically significant bacteremia were matched to controls using propensity scores. SIRS criteria were gathered and used to create decision rules to predict the absence of bacteremia. The main outcome was mortality at ICU discharge. The utility of the decision tools was measured using sensitivity and specificity. Results: One hundred patients had a clinically significant positive blood culture and were matched to 100 controls. Patients with bacteremia had higher ICU mortality (odds ratio [OR], 2.35; P = .001) and longer ICU stay (OR, 17.0 vs 7.8 days; P ≤ .001). Of 1,548 blood culture episodes, 1,274 met ≥2 SIRS criteria (106 significant positive cultures and 1,168 negative cultures). There was no association between SIRS criteria and positive blood cultures (P = .11). A decision rule using 3 SIRS criteria had optimal predictive performance (sensitivity, 56%; specificity, 50%) but low accuracy. Conclusions: ICU patients with bacteremia have increased mortality and length of ICU stay. SIRS criteria cannot be used to identify patients at low risk of bacteremia

Good WIL hunting: Building capacity for curriculum re-design

In response to government, industry, student and central University calls for initiatives to enhance graduate employability as a means for improved employment outcomes, a faculty within an Australian university formulated a five-year Work Integrated Learning (WIL) strategy (2015-2019). The Faculty goal was to re-new, develop, implement and evaluate scalable and sustainable intentional WIL-focused authentic curricula across every undergraduate Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) course by the end of 2019. A ‘WIL Leadership Framework’ underpinned the whole-of-course team approach. This paper reports on the change-management processes and behaviours necessary to effect change from the bottom-up. Fostering academic staff capacity to build course-appropriate WIL curriculum has been slow and subtle and yet significant refinements to intentional and embedded WIL curriculum have occurred through a series of grounded research studies and curriculum renewal projects. WIL champions (the innovators), earmarked as change agents for enabling scalable curriculum transformation and renewal, were ‘hunted-out’ and nurtured. Their role was to influence teachers to enact context-specific and discipline-based WIL experiences into the curriculum. The main research findings to date reveal that STEM-specific WIL frameworks, concepts and assessment examples, presented as scholarly curriculum choices by WIL experts, and then actively and collegially discussed amongst the WIL champions and WIL early adopters, has been the most effective process to date for developing a WIL centred curriculum. The paper concludes by addressing the current operational goals predicated to have an impact on graduate employment for the Faculty

The Appointment of Safeguarders in the Children's Hearings System : Research Report and Action Plan

Safeguarders may be appointed by children’s hearings or courts in cases where it is thought necessary in the interests of the child. Their primary role is to make an independent assessment of what plans and arrangements are in the child’s best interests and to provide a report based on that assessment to assist decision-making. Since the introduction of safeguarders to the hearings system three decades ago, they have made a valued contribution. Some concerns were voiced by a number of local authority professionals to the CELCIS Permanence and Care team (PaCT) in 2013 about safeguarder appointments in relation to the permanence process. These included stated views that, in some cases, involvement of safeguarders may lead to ‘unnecessary delays’ and hamper the timely placement of looked after children with a permanent family. The present study was carried out by the PaCT researcher to explore this further, to assessreasons for the appointment of safeguarders by the hearings and to examine the impact of their involvement on subsequent decisions about recommendations by panel members1 . Whilst the research emanated from concerns about the permanence process, it explored perceptions of strengths and concerns in relation to the appointment and practice of safeguarders more generally. The study took place at a time of significant changes to the way in which safeguarders are recruited, trained, appointed and managed with the introduction of new Regulations and the creation of a national Safeguarders Panel

Global P wave tomography of Earth's lowermost mantle from partition modeling

Determining the scale-length, magnitude, and distribution of heterogeneity in the lowermost mantle is crucial to understanding whole mantle dynamics, and yet it remains a much debated and ongoing challenge in geophysics. Common shortcomings of current se

Accessible Home Environments for People with Functional Limitations: A Systematic Review

The aim of this review is to evaluate the health and social effects of accessible home environments for people with functional limitations, in order to provide evidence to promote well-informed decision making for policy guideline development and choices about public health interventions. MEDLINE and nine other electronic databases were searched between December 2014 and January 2015, for articles published since 2004. All study types were included in this review. Two reviewers independently screened 12,544 record titles or titles and abstracts based on our pre-defined eligibility criteria. We identified 94 articles as potentially eligible; and assessed their full text. Included studies were critically appraised using the Mixed Method Appraisal Tool, version 2011. Fourteen studies were included in the review. We did not identify any meta-analysis or systematic review directly relevant to the question for this systematic review. A narrative approach was used to synthesise the findings of the included studies due to methodological and statistical heterogeneity. Results suggest that certain interventions to enhance the accessibility of homes can have positive health and social effects. Home environments that lack accessibility modifications appropriate to the needs of their users are likely to result in people with physical impairments becoming disabled at home

Exploratory accross-stimulus studies in event-related potentials

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were evoked by visually presented words in a number of experimental paradigms. The question of which linguistic factors, if any, underlie differences between visual word ERPs was addressed. These studies identified 3 factors as predictors of ERF variance. Studies of ERPs in language processing tasks are selectively reviewed, and methodological problems associated with ERPs evoked by non-identical stimuli are discussed. The importance of an understanding of the linguistic factors which underlie ERP differences is outlined, and a methodology for approaching this issue is set out. The statistical procedure necessary to address the question is developed and described in Chapter Two. This procedure was a quantitative modelling strategy, based on multidimensional scaling and PROCRUSTES rotation. Five quantitative modelling studies were undertaken. These experiments involved two experimental tasks, a passive exposure task in which the subjects attended but did not respond to the stimuli (experiment 1) and a category membership decision task (experiments 2 to 5). Words drawn from two semantic categories were employed. ERPs were evoked by individual members of the category of colour names (experiments 1 to 3) and by members of the category of furniture terms (experiments 4 and 5). The results of these studies suggested that word length was the important factor in the early part of the post-stimulus epoch and that this factor was followed by semantic similarity. A late positivity was present in the decision task ERPs whose modulation was related to word frequency. These results were validated by two conventionally analysed experiments which examined the relation between word length and repetition and that between word frequency and repetition. It is concluded that three factors underlie ERP variance in the experimental paradigms employed. These factors are word length (physical extent was not dissociated from length in letters), word frequency and semantic similarity. These results may inform issues of experimental control in future studies of ERPs and language processing, may suggest some reassessment of existing studies in which control was not effected for these factors and may have provided a method of wider utility in cognitive neuroscience. The results suggest that systematic information can be derived about the linguistic characteristics of individual words from single word ERPs

Assessment-led reform: creating a sustainable culture for WIL

This paper describes a process of assessment reform designed to enhance Work Integrated Learning (WIL) approaches for two science courses at an Australian university. The project used a mixed-method approach involving online surveys, interviews, focus groups and workshops to gather student, industry and course team knowledge and understanding of WIL approaches to curricula. The investigation centred on the perceived value of collaborating with industry to facilitate enhancements in authentic assessment and on the barriers to, and challenges in, achieving successful outcomes. The action-research project, WIL-on-Campus (WoC), found that assessments oriented toward the inclusion of authentic tasks and processes, that contribute to the employability learning and job-readiness of students, is deemed important to students, industry and academics. However, reforms to assessment practice and process are required. For greatest impact, this study found that assessment reform processes require two critical interdependent factors: the socialisation of the shared institutional value of embedded WIL approaches to assessment, and the provision of top-down support to enable academic course teams to implement the ‘imposed’ changes. Further to this, while academics viewed the changes in approach to assessment design as challenging, they also noted that a shift is timely and believed that a course-wide WIL approach is possible and advantageous