Attachment and transport mechanism of Cryptosporidium parvum oocysts in subsurface environments: a multi-scale study

U.S. Department of the InteriorU.S. Geological Surve

The unraveling of South Vietnam : inflation, corruption, and the American military presence, 1965-1975

This dissertation argues that military and political decisions made by U.S. policymakers to wage war in Vietnam produced economic consequences that severely undermined the entire American objective of preserving an independent, anticommunist South Vietnam. The escalation of war in 1965 ultimately sent over two million Americans to serve in combat or support roles in South Vietnam. The overwhelming presence of Americans, which peaked at over half a million in January 1969, in turn created numerous problems for the urban South Vietnamese population. The extraordinary amount of wealth brought into South Vietnam, including in the form of commodities, foreign aid, and American soldiers’ purchasing power, disrupted South Vietnamese society and economy. Due to high levels of inflation, the sudden influx of American wealth into a small developing country created incentives for South Vietnamese to work for the Americans, who provided better compensation than South Vietnamese employers. Those who worked for the South Vietnamese state in the armed forces and the civil service received fixed incomes and could not keep pace with growing wartime inflation. The inundation of American soldiers and dollars into the country also led to widespread corruption both among Americans and South Vietnamese, which I argue was destructive to state legitimacy in South Vietnam. Oftentimes, South Vietnamese citizens had to make the morally difficult choice to engage in corrupt actions in order to support their families. The American presence thus exacerbated socioeconomic inequality in South Vietnam and contributed to eroding the national morale of those tasked with serving and fighting on behalf of their country.Histor

Open educational practices in Australia: a first-phase national audit of higher education

For fifteen years, Australian Higher Education has engaged with the openness agenda primarily through the lens of open-access research. Open educational practice (OEP), by contrast, has not been explicitly supported by federal government initiatives, funding, or policy. This has led to an environment that is disconnected, with isolated examples of good practice that have not been transferred beyond local contexts. This paper represents first-phase research in identifying the current state of OEP in Australian Higher Education. A structured desktop audit of all Australian universities was conducted, based on a range of indicators and criteria established by a review of the literature. The audit collected evidence of engagement with OEP using publicly accessible information via institutional websites. The criteria investigated were strategies and policies, open educational resources (OER), infrastructure tools/platforms, professional development and support, collaboration/partnerships, and funding. Initial findings suggest that the experience of OEP across the sector is diverse, but the underlying infrastructure to support the creation, (re)use, and dissemination of resources is present. Many Australian universities have experimented with, and continue to refine, massive open online course (MOOC) offerings, and there is increasing evidence that institutions now employ specialist positions to support OEP, and MOOCs. Professional development and staff initiatives require further work to build staff capacity sector-wide. This paper provides a contemporary view of sector-wide OEP engagement in Australia—a macro-view that is not well-represented in open research to date. It identifies core areas of capacity that could be further leveraged by a national OEP initiative or by national policy on OEP.</p

Relationships Between Social Media Exposure & Levels of Body Dissatisfaction

The digital age has resulted in major technological inventions leading to great advances; however there are also clear costs. Television allows identical picture images to be broadcasted into millions of homes, the internet is a gateway to seemingly limitless information, and the cell phone is the ultimate connection device. Each of these communication modalities have spread the thinness ideal that is prevalent in Western societies, with the Internet being ridden with pro-eating disorder websites, cell phones providing handheld excess to peer- comparison, and all mediums presenting images of the thin body as ideal. The prevalence of eating disorders is still substantial, with unprecedented growth in the last two decades with 30 million Americans currently affected. While more people may be struggling with an eating disorder or negative body image, funding for research remains low and treatment of eating disorders hardly improves. This research project sought to explore relationships between social media exposure and levels of body dissatisfaction. Social media has now become part of daily life for many people including adolescents and young adults. The most popular social networks include Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram, and they all may have an influence on the user’s body satisfaction. Studies have focused on the effect of mass media on a person; however information pertaining to the effects of social media is very limited. The current study developed a survey which included measures from the Eating Disorder Inventory, the Body Image Assessment, and the Sociocultural Attitudes Towards Appearance Questionnaire, with adjustments to relate measures to social media. The results of the study will be presented and add to the literature regarding social media and body image by presenting correlations and relationships between social media exposure and all other variables. Results provide insight towards intervention and prevention methods as well as raise consciousness about social media use

3D Scanning System for Automatic High-Resolution Plant Phenotyping

Thin leaves, fine stems, self-occlusion, non-rigid and slowly changing structures make plants difficult for three-dimensional (3D) scanning and reconstruction -- two critical steps in automated visual phenotyping. Many current solutions such as laser scanning, structured light, and multiview stereo can struggle to acquire usable 3D models because of limitations in scanning resolution and calibration accuracy. In response, we have developed a fast, low-cost, 3D scanning platform to image plants on a rotating stage with two tilting DSLR cameras centred on the plant. This uses new methods of camera calibration and background removal to achieve high-accuracy 3D reconstruction. We assessed the system's accuracy using a 3D visual hull reconstruction algorithm applied on 2 plastic models of dicotyledonous plants, 2 sorghum plants and 2 wheat plants across different sets of tilt angles. Scan times ranged from 3 minutes (to capture 72 images using 2 tilt angles), to 30 minutes (to capture 360 images using 10 tilt angles). The leaf lengths, widths, areas and perimeters of the plastic models were measured manually and compared to measurements from the scanning system: results were within 3-4% of each other. The 3D reconstructions obtained with the scanning system show excellent geometric agreement with all six plant specimens, even plants with thin leaves and fine stems.Comment: 8 papes, DICTA 201

Why A Change In Financial Behaviour Does Not Always Trigger A Change In Financial Well-Being?

“Finance, money and debt” are the most common causes of anxiety affecting mental health and well-being (Swift et al., 2014). Previous research has sought to understand financial well-being and the important factors for promoting financial well-being (FWB) for both individuals and society. The research seeks to explain why financial behaviour change matters. Financial education is considered as an important intervention to improve FWB (Brüggen et al., 2017). Nevertheless, the level of impact of financial education on financial behaviour change, capability and well-being are disputed. Behaviour change is not only influenced by education; other factors play an important role. There are constraints preventing people from changing behaviour, such as socioeconomic status, personality, financial knowledge, literacy, psychological and demographic characteristics (Hensley, 2015; Collins and Holden, 2014; Lyons et al., 2006; Bird et al., 1997). This paper investigates how behaviours influence individual FWB and how financial education can play a role in enhancing these elements. Saving and borrowing are key behaviours discussed in this paper. Some factors that might constrain people from making a change, such as financial attitudes and resources are also explored. Using data from my PhD, the efficacy of the online financial education intervention “Managing My Money” on Future Learn will be explored. The research uses a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods including surveys, financial literacy quizzes, interviews and content from online discussions. Key findings show that there is no significant change in perceived FWB before and after the intervention. From the data, it is not clear why there were some changes in influential factors such as financial behaviour, attitudes, attitudes towards making a change, knowledge and capacity, but no significant change in FWB. It might be that the level of change of these influential factors was not large enough to trigger a change in FWB. It could also be that the changes in some indicators of these influential factors are not sufficient to create a significant change in FWB. For instance, there was a positive change in saving behaviour within the financial behaviour factor, however, a positive change simultaneously in other indicators (i.e. paying off debts, retirement funds) might be needed to generate a positive change in FWB. Low response rates in post-surveys make it difficult to justify the causes of this result. The findings from the thematic analysis of the qualitative data revealed that saving and borrowing were the favourite topics in the online discussions. Learners were contemplating how their cognition, attitudes and behaviours in managing their finances had been changed over time. They asked for advice and stressed that they needed some help in managing their finances. Financial education was recognised by learners as key in achieving their financial needs and goals. The stories of their life-changing situations explained how these changes influenced their financial behaviours such as spending, saving and borrowing money. This research found that learners were at different stages of behaviour change for individual financial behaviours. Due to various circumstances, a few learners had relapsed in their saving behaviour, but over a twelve-month period were back on track. It was the limited financial resources in a specific period that prevented them from maintaining a desirable behaviour such as saving, rather than a lack of self-efficacy to maintain the change, awareness of the desirability of change or a lack of knowledge of saving for instance. These learners stressed they knew that they needed to save and to pay off debt. However, when the relapse was caused by limited financial resources, it might take longer than the one to six months cut-off periods, as suggested in five stages of behaviour change (Prochaska et al., 2002) to observe the change in behaviour after a relapse. Financial behaviour is constrained by an individual’s financial capacity, so the approach to dealing with behaviour change is distinguished from other types of behaviour change that involve purely physical and psychological factors (e.g. exercise, diet, smoking etc.). It requires a different approach and more thought to define the stages of financial behaviour change. Learners also discussed how risk attitude influenced the way they spend, save, borrow and invest their money. Risk attitude is defined as “an individual’s orientation toward taking or avoiding risk when deciding how to proceed in situations with uncertain outcomes” (Glanz et al., 2016, p.1). Financial capacity constrained the levels of risk attitude of learners. The more risk-averse attitude the learners had the more resilience they developed to resist pressure to “keep up with the Joneses”. There is not one answer that fits all, as it depends on an individual’s financial situation. Informed decision making is more important to help them make the right decision at the right time with reasonable costs or risks. This paper offers some preliminary findings on the above to inform the social marketers in designing financial education interventions that work for different segments

Exploring the change across a generation: First-year Physics students’ conceptions and study approaches between 2002-2018

It is often not contested that students’ performance in STEM disciplines is declining. As well as the more recent results from standardized testing of younger students, it is not uncommon to hear university STEM professors anecdotally report of the failure of more recent cohorts to live up to the standard of their predecessors. However, it is rare to find studies which address the purported declining standards amongst students entering university STEM studies using the same instruments over an extended time period.  This repeated cross-sectional study examines how students upon entry into university physics studies respond to an established conceptual survey on mechanics as well as two surveys probing epistemological beliefs. A total of 2448 first-year undergraduate students were surveyed at an Australian research-intensive university from 2002 to 2018. Our findings show that students' conceptions of the structure of physics knowledge and their study approaches, remain remarkably stable. In the measures of physics conceptual understanding, students in the later cohorts return significantly higher scores over the study period. We discuss the backdrop in which this study has occurred and argue that these findings offer a unique insight into similarities and differences of a narrow band of student cohorts over more than a decade

Survey of Occupational Therapy Students\u27 Attitudes, Knowledge and Preparedness for Treating LGBT Clients

Members of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual (LGBT) populations are sexual and gender minorities and are at risk for significant health disparities compared to heterosexual populations. This study examined occupational therapy students’ and recent graduates’ (n=435) basic knowledge, clinical preparedness and attitudinal awareness for working with LGBT clients using the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Development of Clinical Skills Scale (LGBT-DOCSS; Bidell, 2017). Students in the study generally rated themselves low (between three and four on a seven-point scale) on questions related to clinical preparedness, indicating they felt they did not have adequate training relative to working with LGBT clients. Both basic knowledge and clinical preparedness for working with LGBT populations was positively influenced by hours of curriculum content related to sexual minority populations. However, 21% (n=91) of participants reported the topic was not covered in the curriculum, while an additional 68% (n=295) reported less than two hours of time developed to LGBT topics. It is suggested that education focus on terminology, health disparities, an examination of personal and societal attitudes that affect outcomes, important health and psychosocial needs, culturally sensitive communication, creating inclusive practice setting and clinical practice and communication unique to this population

Survey of Occupational Therapy Students\u27 Attitudes, Knowledge and Preparedness for Treating LGBT Clients

Members of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual (LGBT) populations are sexual and gender minorities and are at risk for significant health disparities compared to heterosexual populations. This study examined occupational therapy students’ and recent graduates’ (n=435) basic knowledge, clinical preparedness and attitudinal awareness for working with LGBT clients using the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Development of Clinical Skills Scale (LGBT-DOCSS; Bidell, 2017). Students in the study generally rated themselves low (between three and four on a seven-point scale) on questions related to clinical preparedness, indicating they felt they did not have adequate training relative to working with LGBT clients. Both basic knowledge and clinical preparedness for working with LGBT populations was positively influenced by hours of curriculum content related to sexual minority populations. However, 21% (n=91) of participants reported the topic was not covered in the curriculum, while an additional 68% (n=295) reported less than two hours of time developed to LGBT topics. It is suggested that education focus on terminology, health disparities, an examination of personal and societal attitudes that affect outcomes, important health and psychosocial needs, culturally sensitive communication, creating inclusive practice setting and clinical practice and communication unique to this population