Offensive expression and the workplace

In this article I argue that freedom of expression is an important right even within the employment context. I contend that there should be a presumption in favour of free expression even if the expression is offensive, particularly if it involves a matter of public debate. However, the interests of colleagues and employers should be taken into account and may be decisive. Where expression takes place outside work, employees should only be subject to disciplinary action if there is a clear link between their employment and the expression. I consider the law relating to these issues in the contexts of harassment, unfair dismissal and discrimination on the grounds of religion and belief

The Australian METS Profile – A Journey about Metadata

In any journey, there's a destination but half the 'fun' is getting there. This article chronicles our journey towards a common way of packaging and exchanging digital content in a future Australian data commons – a national corpus of research resources that can be shared and re-used. Whatever packaging format is used, it has to handle complex content models and work across multiple submission and dissemination scenarios. It has to do this in a way that maintains a history of the chain of custody of objects over time. At the start of our journey we chose METS extended by PREMIS to do this. We learnt a lot during the first two stages that we want to share with those travelling to a similar destination

Report of the METS Profile Development Project

This document reports on the outcome of the APSR METS Profile Development Project. The APSR METS profile project aimed to develop: • an open, extensible and standard way of packaging metadata for digital objects which could be relevant to both Australian and broader contexts; and • a generic, repository independent metadata submission and exchange profile for use among APSR repositories. The basis for this project was the draft METS exchange profile developed by the NLA as part of the 2006 APSR-funded PRESTA project. The project undertook to test this profile against actual implementations and then to register it with the Library of Congress

Religious objections to equality laws: reconciling religious freedom with gay rights

This thesis considers how the law should manage conflicts between religious freedom and the prohibition of sexual orientation discrimination. It starts from the basis that both these rights are valuable and worthy of protection, but that such disputes are often characterised by animosity. It contends that a proportionality analysis provides the best method for resolving these conflicts. In particular, it argues that proportionality is a conciliatory method of reasoning because it provides context-dependent and nuanced answers to these issues, providing scope for re-­assessment in future cases, and because it accepts losing claims as in principle as worthy of protection. It is also argued that proportionality is advantageous because it inherently demands justification where rights are infringed. The thesis takes a comparative approach, examining the law in England and Wales, Canada and the USA to demonstrate the clash of rights and to compare how these issues have been dealt with by courts and legislatures. It considers these issues with reference to four areas of law. The first assesses how far employees with discriminatory religious beliefs should be accommodated in the workplace, including whether they should have a right not to perform aspects of their work that are contrary to their beliefs and whether they should be permitted to share their discriminatory views at work. The second considers whether and when religious organisations should be permitted to discriminate in their employment decisions. The third examines how far religious organisations should be permitted to discriminate in providing services, such as charitable services or when hiring out premises, and the fourth whether religious individuals should be allowed to discriminate in the secular marketplace

Investigating the physical properties of transiting hot Jupiters with the 1.5-m Kuiper Telescope

We present new photometric data of 11 hot Jupiter transiting exoplanets (CoRoT-12b, HAT-P-5b, HAT-P-12b, HAT-P-33b, HAT-P-37b, WASP-2b, WASP-24b, WASP-60b, WASP-80b, WASP-103b, XO-3b) in order to update their planetary parameters and to constrain information about their atmospheres. These observations of CoRoT-12b, HAT-P-37b and WASP-60b are the first follow-up data since their discovery. Additionally, the first near-UV transits of WASP-80b and WASP-103b are presented. We compare the results of our analysis with previous work to search for transit timing variations (TTVs) and a wavelength dependence in the transit depth. TTVs may be evidence of a third body in the system and variations in planetary radius with wavelength can help constrain the properties of the exoplanet's atmosphere. For WASP-103b and XO-3b, we find a possible variation in the transit depths that may be evidence of scattering in their atmospheres. The B-band transit depth of HAT-P-37b is found to be smaller than its near-IR transit depth and such a variation may indicate TiO/VO absorption. These variations are detected from 2-4.6$\sigma$, so follow-up observations are needed to confirm these results. Additionally, a flat spectrum across optical wavelengths is found for 5 of the planets (HAT-P-5b, HAT-P-12b, WASP-2b, WASP-24b, WASP-80b), suggestive that clouds may be present in their atmospheres. We calculate a refined orbital period and ephemeris for all the targets, which will help with future observations. No TTVs are seen in our analysis with the exception of WASP-80b and follow-up observations are needed to confirm this possible detection.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures, 9 Tables. Light Curves available online. Accepted to MNRAS (2017 August 25

An open-source deep learning algorithm for efficient and fully-automatic analysis of the choroid in optical coherence tomography

Purpose: To develop an open-source, fully-automatic deep learning algorithm, DeepGPET, for choroid region segmentation in optical coherence tomography (OCT) data. Methods: We used a dataset of 715 OCT B-scans (82 subjects, 115 eyes) from 3 clinical studies related to systemic disease. Ground truth segmentations were generated using a clinically validated, semi-automatic choroid segmentation method, Gaussian Process Edge Tracing (GPET). We finetuned a UNet with MobileNetV3 backbone pre-trained on ImageNet. Standard segmentation agreement metrics, as well as derived measures of choroidal thickness and area, were used to evaluate DeepGPET, alongside qualitative evaluation from a clinical ophthalmologist. Results: DeepGPET achieves excellent agreement with GPET on data from 3 clinical studies (AUC=0.9994, Dice=0.9664; Pearson correlation of 0.8908 for choroidal thickness and 0.9082 for choroidal area), while reducing the mean processing time per image on a standard laptop CPU from 34.49s ($\pm$15.09) using GPET to 1.25s ($\pm$0.10) using DeepGPET. Both methods performed similarly according to a clinical ophthalmologist, who qualitatively judged a subset of segmentations by GPET and DeepGPET, based on smoothness and accuracy of segmentations. Conclusions :DeepGPET, a fully-automatic, open-source algorithm for choroidal segmentation, will enable researchers to efficiently extract choroidal measurements, even for large datasets. As no manual interventions are required, DeepGPET is less subjective than semi-automatic methods and could be deployed in clinical practice without necessitating a trained operator. DeepGPET addresses the lack of open-source, fully-automatic and clinically relevant choroid segmentation algorithms, and its subsequent public release will facilitate future choroidal research both in ophthalmology and wider systemic health.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, 3 tables. Currently in submission to ARVO TVST (Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology, Translational Vision Science & Technology). GitHub link to codebase provided upon publicatio

Geometric confinement is required for recovery and maintenance of chondrocyte phenotype in alginate

Human articular chondrocytes lose their native phenotype when expanded in traditional monolayer cultures. As a consequence, hydrogel encapsulation has been investigated as a means to maintain the natural phenotype. Alginate has been widely used for cartilage engineering as it has been shown to enable the recovery of a native collagen type II expressing chondrocyte phenotype. This study has evaluated whether the capacity of the materials to maintain/revert the phenotype is due to the composition of the material or the physical entrapment provided by the gel. To achieve this, an alginate “fluid gel” (a shear-thinning structured gel system) was produced of identical chemistry to a traditionally gelled alginate structure. Both were seeded with passaged primary human articular chondrocytes. Chondrocytes in quiescent alginate showed the recovery of the native phenotype and a spherical morphology. Chondrocytes in alginate fluid gel were unable to maintain the recovered phenotype despite having a spherical morphology and were shown to have a lower level of entrapment than those in quiescent alginate. These findings indicate that geometric entrapment is essential for the maintenance of a recovered chondrocyte phenotype in alginate

The mTORC1 inhibitor everolimus prevents and treats Eμ-Myc lymphoma by restoring oncogene-induced senescence

MYC deregulation is common in human cancer. IG-MYC translocations that are modeled in EμMyc mice occur in almost all cases of Burkitt lymphoma as well as in other B-cell lymphoproliferative disorders. Deregulated expression of MYC results in increased mTOR complex 1 (mTORC1) signaling. As tumors with mTORC1 activation are sensitive to mTORC1 inhibition, we used everolimus, a potent and specific mTORC1 inhibitor, to test the requirement for mTORC1 in the initiation and maintenance of EμMyc lymphoma. Everolimus selectively cleared premalignant B cells from the bone marrow and spleen, restored a normal pattern of B-cell differentiation, and strongly protected against lymphoma development. Established EμMyc lymphoma also regressed after everolimus therapy. Therapeutic response correlated with a cellular senescence phenotype and induction of p53 activity. Therefore, mTORC1-dependent evasion of senescence is critical for cellular transformation and tumor maintenance by MYC in B lymphocytes