What job, which house?: Simple solutions to complex problems in indigenous affairs

In a recent paper, former Keating government minister Gary Johns advocates a ‘no job, no house’ policy for remote Indigenous communities. Johns’ proposal is the latest in a line of offerings from conservative politicians and commentators on Aboriginal affairs. What arguments and evidence support such proposals? What do they say about the state of Indigenous politics in Australia? Will they work

The structure of the accretion disk in NGC 4258 derived from observations of its water vapor masers

A wealth of new information about the structure of the maser disk in NGC 4258 has been obtained from a series of 18 VLBA observations spanning three years, as well as from 32 additional epochs of spectral monitoring data from 1994 to the present, acquired with the VLA, Effelsberg, and GBT. The warp of the disk has been defined precisely. The thickness of the maser disk has been measured to be 12 microarcseconds (FWHM), which is slightly smaller than previously quoted upper limits. Under the assumption that the masers trace the true vertical distribution of material in the disk, from the condition of hydrostatic equilibrium the sound speed is 1.5 km/s, corresponding to a thermal temperature of 600K. The accelerations of the high velocity maser components have been accurately measured for many features on both the blue and red side of the spectrum. The azimuthal offsets of these masers from the midline (the line through the disk in the plane of the sky) and derived projected offsets from the midline based on the warp model correspond well with the measured offsets. This result suggests that the masers are well described as discrete clumps of masing gas, which accurately trace the Keplerian motion of the disk. However, we have continued to search for evidence of apparent motions caused by ``phase effects.'' This work provides the foundation for refining the estimate of the distance to NGC 4258 through measurements of feature acceleration and proper motion. The refined estimate of this distance is expected to be announced in the near future.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, to appear in proceedings of IAU Symposium 242 "Astrophysical Masers and their Environments", held in Alice Springs, March 200

Funding Indigenous organisations: improving governance performance through innovations in public finance management in remote Australia

This review explains the context and past experience of public finance reform and its effects on governance in remote Indigenous communities. Preamble The poor development standards experienced by Indigenous Australians, especially in places remote from urban areas, are regularly characterised in public and academic discourse as a crisis, with calls for ‘new approaches, new thinking and new commitment’. This paper focuses on the modalities used to manage the conversion of public financing of Indigenous organisations into activities designed to impact on these standards. By modalities we mean the policies and instruments that structure and govern how funding is delivered and aligned with government priorities, including administrative, financing and accountability mechanisms. In this review, block funding was identified for its potential to reform the public finance system to create enabling conditions for enhanced Indigenous governance. Building a devolved accountability framework around the organisation, rather than the centralised grant program, is a sensible alternative to multiple grants and ineffective cycles of grant risk management and attendant accountability measures. As block funding has never been explicitly trialled in Australia, there is a lack of evaluations and other evidence for its efficacy in remote Indigenous contexts. In comparison, the international development literature documents a wealth of experience of the success and shortcoming of generically similar financing modalities. The paper therefore considers the circumstances under which block funding could be usefully adapted to the unique context of remote Indigenous communities in Australia. This review examines the literature and evidence from two principal sources. First and foremost, lessons are distilled and the context defined from a wide array of experience over the past two decades across remote Australia. This is then compared with the evidence from similar contexts abroad; that is, countries and regions that are remote from centres of economic wealth and political power, where populations are generally relatively isolated, scattered and highly diverse. These are often poorly served by administrative and service delivery arrangements due to the impost of great distances and high costs. In these settings, whether abroad or in Australia, local authorities are often referred to as being ‘fragile’ and ‘weak’. Two quite different approaches to handling public finances can be found in these contexts: One is to centralise responsibilities to govern public finances and to institute a host of compliance and reporting obligations on local authorities to manage perceived risks to fiduciary standards. This approach can be an effective way to respond to crises in the short term, but over time, this response tends to corrode local capability and introduce perverse incentives to ‘break the rules’ and ‘game the system’ to respond to local needs and demands. A second, contending approach has developed, particularly in the past decade. This approach shifts responsibility in the direction of local authorities and organisations for a specific range of services and functions. It also negotiates mutually acceptable agreements about the conditions under which public monies can be used and how performance will be jointly assessed. This paper synthesises Australian and international experiences, then suggests avenues for future engagement, including both new experimentation and upscaling of already promising precedents

The Educational Program in the United States Bureau of Prisons

Not AvailableMark Roland Moran.Not ListedNot ListedDegree Not ListedDepartment Not ListedCunningham Memorial Library, Terre Haute, Indiana state University.isua-thesis-1943-moran.pdfMastersTitle from document title page. Document formatted into pages: contains 80p. :ill. Includes bibliography

Female impersonation as an alternative reproductive strategy in giant cuttlefish

Out of all the animals, cephalopods possess an unrivalled ability to change their shape and body patterns. Our observations of giant cuttlefish (Sepia apama) suggest this ability has allowed them to evolve alternative mating strategies in which males can switch between the appearance of a female and that of a male in order to foil the guarding attempts of larger males. At a mass breeding aggregation in South Australia, we repeatedly observed single small males accompanying mating pairs. While doing so, the small male assumed the body shape and patterns of a female. Such males were never attacked by the larger mate-guarding male. On more than 20 occasions, when the larger male was distracted by another male intruder, these small males, previously indistinguishable from a female, were observed to change body pattern and behaviour to that of a male in mating display. These small males then attempted to mate with the female, often with success. This potential for dynamic sexual mimicry may have played a part in driving the evolution of the remarkable powers of colour and shape transformation which characterize the cephalopods

Evolutionary history of the ADRB2 gene in humans

No abstract available

A Framework to Investigate the Role of Mobile Technology in the Healthcare Organizations

The technology acceptance model (TAM), and the modified technology acceptance model (MTAM) will be evaluated to measure the acceptance of mobile technology in a healthcare scenario. Based on the results of the study, a user behavioral model in regard to mobile technology adoption in healthcare will be proposed

The effects of density and bleach concentration on efficiency and resolution in phase holograms

None provided