The Journey to R4D: An institutional history of an Australian Initiative on Food Security in Africa

Internal Revie

Loving Neighbor as Self: Translating the Study Abroad Experience into Cross-Cultural Friendships on the Home Campus

Higher education focuses significant attention on internationalization in an effort to prepare graduates for the global marketplace. As a result, institutions engage more students in study abroad programs and expand international student enrollment. However, scholarship has yet to consider the essential role returned study abroad students may play in meeting the friendship needs of international students. The present research aimed to determine if study abroad experiences have any impact on friendships between study abroad participants and international students who study on the domestic campus. The study maintained the goal of identifying key factors that either enhance or constrain intercultural relationships between study abroad participants and international students. The study also uncovered experiences that facilitate authentic friendships between domestic and international students at a medium-sized, faith-based, college in the U.S. Midwest. The researcher interviewed returned study abroad student focus groups, international student focus groups, and key administrators using a qualitative phenomenological approach. Focus group participants also responded to a brief survey. Four basic themes emerged: exercising intercultural competencies; empathy toward internationals; friendships between study abroad students and international student; and institutional contributions. A key finding of the study also revealed that institutions do not teach study abroad students to utilize their study abroad experience in fostering empathetic friendships with international students upon returning to campus. Instead, study abroad debriefing sessions typically focus on helping domestic students “get back to normal” or dealing with reverse culture shock. International students reported that study abroad participants demonstrated growth in intercultural competencies but still struggled to move beyond shallow friendships with internationals on campus. Findings suggest the need to incorporate notions of how the experience can more effectively contribute to building friendships with international students

'Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place': Anti-discrimination Legislation in the Liberal State and the Fate of the Australian Disability Discrimination Act

This article offers a critical analysis of some of the practical implications for disabled people of the Disability Discrimination Act of 1992. Specifically, it raises questions about politics and the role of the law as an instrument of social change?taking greater account of the interests of disabled people?on the one hand, and of the reliance of the social model of disability on a strategy based upon legal rights on the other. The article also suggests that the constraining effects of Australia's constitutional protections of rights and its federal system of government hinder the mildly progressive elements of the Disability Discrimination Act. To illustrate this, the paper employs empirical evidence to suggest that these effects have been exacerbated by the passage of the Human Rights Legislation Amendment Act in 1999

Improving Predictions for Helium Emission Lines

We have combined the detailed He I recombination model of Smits with the collisional transitions of Sawey & Berrington in order to produce new accurate helium emissivities that include the effects of collisional excitation from both the 2 (3)S and 2 (1) S levels. We present a grid of emissivities for a range of temperature and densities along with analytical fits and error estimates. Fits accurate to within 1% are given for the emissivities of the brightest lines over a restricted range for estimates of primordial helium abundance. We characterize the analysis uncertainties associated with uncertainties in temperature, density, fitting functions, and input atomic data. We estimate that atomic data uncertainties alone may limit abundance estimates to an accuracy of 1.5%; systematic errors may be greater than this. This analysis uncertainty must be incorporated when attempting to make high accuracy estimates of the helium abundance. For example, in recent determinations of the primordial helium abundance, uncertainties in the input atomic data have been neglected.Comment: ApJ, accepte

Simulation of Lablab Pastures

The potential of legume-based pastures to address declining soil nitrogen on marginal cropping soils is increasingly recognised in northern Australia, as such there is a need for cost benefit analysis of pastures and crops in a mixed farming system. In highly variable rainfall environments, biophysical modelling may be the best way of identifying and quantifying interactions with mixed crop-livestock systems on a seasonal basis. This paper describes a case study where both animal productivity and lablab pasture production is simulated. Lablab (Lablab purpureus) is an annual tropical legume widely used as a short-term legume phase in crop-pasture rotations, providing high quality forage for animal production and a low risk nitrogen input for crop production

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio