In search of self : the hospitalisation experiences of children with cancer : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology at Massey University

Cancer is the second most common cause of death in children in the Western world. The diagnosis and treatment process is painful and distressing, and is carried out in the hospital environment. This environment is foreign to most children, and influences children's coping with the experience of having cancer. Research in this area has focussed on assessing coping responses, and designing interventions for the pain, distress and anxiety associated with the medical procedures. There have also been studies which have measured the prevalence of emotional and behavioural difficulties in children with cancer. No studies have been conducted into children's experiences of hospital expressed in their own terms. The aim of the present study was to elicit the hospital experiences of children with cancer. Interviews were conducted with seven children, aged 5 - 15 years, who had completed treatment for cancer within the previous two years. An interpretive phenomenological design was utilised in order to gain and analyse accounts of the participants' perceptions and experiences. Findings suggest that the experiences can be interpreted in terms of two themes underlying the experiences of children with cancer, and their coping responses. The first theme is 'Retaining a sense of self-as-normal', which describes efforts to 'Maintain links with familiar people' and 'Becoming 'at home' in hospital'. The second theme is 'Incorporating multiple selves', which are 'Self-as-body-in-pain', 'Self-as-confined', 'Self-as-patient' and 'Self-as-survivor-living-with-cancer'. Success in retaining a sense of self-as-normal both affects, and is influenced by, the incorporation of multiple selves. Implications of these themes for practice in terms of the assessment of coping responses, design of interventions, and the measurement of outcomes, are suggested

Australian Aboriginal students in higher education

One of the striking features of Australian higher education over the last ten years has been the marked increase in participation by Indigenous Australians. In a National Review of Education for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, carried out in 1994, it was noted that the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students had more than doubled between 1988 and 1993 (National Review of Education for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, 1994:28-29). Indigenous Australians constitute 1.6 per cent of the population of Australia and in 1993 some 5,578 indigenous people were attending Australian public universities, which is 1.3% of all Australian students in percentage terms. Edith Cowan University, in 1995, had an overall student population of 18,058 and an Aboriginal student population of 359 (2% of the total). In some ways, however, these encouraging figures are deceptive. A majority of the Aboriginal students enrolled in the university (64%) are engaged in bridging courses which were set up to prepare them for entry to university degrees. Like the degree students, some of these are on campus, some in regional centres and some are enrolled as external students, coming to the university twice a semester for a week\u27s intensive tuition. The population of Indigenous Australians in higher education also differs from the non-Indigenous population in that they are more likely to have gained entry through special provisions: they are older when commencing university and they are under-represented in many areas of study, particularly science, technology and the more prestigious professional areas such as medicine, law and engineering

Murray Darling Basin Regional Economic Diversification Program: a review of equity capital investment in the development of high value horticulture

This report is part of the Murray Darling Basin Regional Economic Diversification Program - Queensland. The Agricultural Value Chains and Food Systems group at the University of Southern Queensland was commissioned by Queensland Department of Agriculture and Fisheries to review capital investment for the development of high value horticulture in the Queensland Murray Darling Basin (QMDB). The research has three objectives: - To better understand the capital needs of Queensland Murray Darling horticultural producers in supporting their expansion, diversification or infrastructure development plans; - To provide information relevant to QMDB producers on partnering with investors; and - To overview investment opportunities for the QMDB region and how economic diversification of the region might be progressed through investment of capital from outside of the region. The methodology used for this report involves a qualitative ‘multi-stakeholder analysis’ using in-depth interviews with stakeholders across the horticulture investment chain. First, we interviewed producers in the Murray-Darling region involved in establishing new ventures for their views on capital raising. The producers were established horticultural producers or other crop growers (e.g. cotton) looking to diversify into horticulture or new horticultural crops. The region’s main attribute is a secure water supply and dry sub-tropical climate. Suitable infrastructure for cold storage, packing and/or processing of horticulture produce is limited. These interviews indicated that the region’s producers are interested in capital raising beyond bank loans, but they had little to no understanding of the process and the requirements involved. Most had made a start at a new venture but were still some time away from production supply to a market. Second, we interviewed agricultural investment professionals as well as producers from other regions that have had positive and negative experiences in equity capital raising. Our results indicate that there are substantial differences in the perspectives of producers and investors. Cultural change is needed for producers and investors to work together. Agricultural investment professionals have an important role to play in educating both parties about the other and bringing them together. Potential investors and their motivations are diverse. They include institutional investors such as superannuation funds and private equity funds, private investors such as family offices and high net worth individuals, and corporate investors seeking access to supply of produce for their business. Investment in horticulture to date has focused on perennials where risks can be more easily mitigated compared to annual crops that are subject to weather, volatile markets and rapid changes in supply. Investment in other horticulture products is evolving and may be linked to export market opportunities. Producer options include: Expansion - Entering into an agreement with an external equity investor, pooling resources with strategically aligned businesses or leasing additional land Exit - Selling the farm and possibly staying on as a manager or in a lease-back arrangement Business as usual or steady growth/diversification utilising traditional sources of finance. Some investors are interested in the first option (investing and becoming a business partner) as well as buying farms outright. Sometimes multiple farms are purchased by investors and aggregated into a large farming enterprise. Investors interested in sharing in an existing business look for large, profitable farming enterprises; skilled and experienced farm management; access to a secure water supply; business and financial proficiency of the owners; a comprehensive business plan outlining future growth strategies; and a good fit with their needs and motivations – the right partner. The main reason to consider taking an equity investor is to enable a growth strategy. This could involve overcoming constraints associated with bank finance or partnering with a strategic investor to add value to both businesses. However, the process of becoming ‘investment ready’ is a long road and likely to be many years in development. It will require some rethinking of the way the business is operated and presented, which would generally benefit from some professional advice. There is a need to help producers to build the required finance and business skills. Producers wishing to introduce external equity capital into their farming enterprise need to have a clear business plan for the future and a strategy for how to achieve it. They need to understand what they want from an investor and what they will need to give in return. Potential impacts of taking external equity investment include dilution of returns, potential loss of control and the complexity associated with dealing with a third party. In most cases operational control of the business remains with the producer while the investor is involved in strategic decisions, regardless of whether the investor owns more or less than 50% of the business. We conclude that the region’s high value horticultural production is in an early stage of development and will require considerable effort and capital over a period of time. Investment from outside the region will be needed to drive the majority of development. Investment is needed to develop and increase the scale of high value horticulture production and related infrastructure such as storage, packing and processing facilities. While some of this may be undertaken by the region’s existing producers, it is expected that investors from outside the region will drive the majority of this development. These investors are likely to include large or corporate horticultural producers investing in the region as a strategic move to increase and/or diversity their production and packing operations. Other investors are unlikely to have expertise in horticulture production and will need to recruit farm managers with the necessary experience and expertise to manage large scale production. QMDB growers wishing to participate in the development of high value horticulture could consider partnering with investors from outside the region through external equity finance or a joint venture arrangement

Tackling talk : teaching and assessing oral language

Tackling Talk was a collaborative research project sponsored by several bodies: the English Teachers Association (ETA), the Australian Literacy Educators\u27 Association (ALEA) through Quality Teacher Program funding and the Association of Independent Schools of WA (AISWA). A team of researchers from the Centre for Applied Language and Literacy Research (CALLR), Edith Cowan University, guided teachers from the public and independent sectors through an action research program involving online/ electronic materials, professional development sessions and personal mentoring. Some 49 teachers from 28 schools from both metropolitan and regional districts of Western Australia were involved in the project

Is there cultural safety in Australian universities?

This paper examines the cultural safety offered to Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students within their university environments. In the context of this paper, cultural safety includes cultural competency, as recently subscribed by Universities Australia and ‘extends beyond (to) cultural awareness and cultural sensitivity (Bin Sellik, 2003, p. 210) and includes putting in place explicit measures to address racism of all types. Informing this study were interviews and an online survey conducted with Aboriginal students and staff members of Aboriginal centres which formed part of a larger study investigating the Transition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Students into Higher Education (Oliver et al., 2013a; 2013b). Their responses provided evidence suggesting overt and covert experiences of racism, exclusion and cultural isolation indicating that there is still much to be done before cultural safety is truly attained in our universities. As such our findings support recommendations stemming from previous research indicating that cultural safety is an issue that needs to be brought to the attention of governing bodies within our higher education sector

Addressing the language and literacy needs of Aboriginal high school VET students who speak SAE as an additional language

Vocational Education and Training (VET) in high schools has had positive effects on the retention of Indigenous students, providing important pathways into further education and the workforce. However, low-level literacy (and numeracy) skills can make successful completion difficult, especially for students who speak Standard Australian English as an additional language or dialect. This article describes research undertaken to inform the development of a second language and literacy needs analysis model designed for high school VET teachers to address the needs of Indigenous students. The study draws on second language acquisition research, which demonstrates the value of using tasks as the basis for language teaching syllabus design, with needs analysis as a fundamental aspect of this. The project centred on Aboriginal high school VET students from remote and rural communities in Western Australia, who speak English as an additional language/dialect. Data collected included: individual and focus group interviews, training materials, and observation field notes on the language and literacy practices in classrooms and workplaces. The major findings focus on the development of oral language (for both job-oriented and social interactions in the workplace) and literacy skills, as well as the need to overcome ‘shame’ and develop confidence for speaking to non-Aboriginal people

Robust Brain-computer interface for virtual Keyboard (RoBIK): project results

Special issue : ANR TECSAN : Technologies for Health and AutonomyNational audienceBrain-ComputerInterface (BCI)is a technology that translatesthe brain electrical activity into a command for a device such as a robotic arm, a wheelchair or a spelling device. BCIs have long been described as an assistive technology forseverely disabled patients because they completely bypass the need for muscular activity. The clinical reality is however dramatically different and most patients who use BCIs today are doing so as part of constraining clinical trials. To achieve the technological transfer from bench to bedside, BCI must gain ease of use and robustness of bothmeasure (electroencephalography [EEG]) and interface (signal processing and applications).TheRobustBrain-computerInterface for virtual Keyboard (RoBIK) project aimed atthe development of aBCIsystemfor communication that could be used on a daily basis by patientswithoutthe help of a trained teamofresearchers.To guide further developments cliniciansfirst assessed patients' needs.The prototype subsequently developed consisted in a 14 felt-pad electrodes EEG headsetsampling at 256Hz by an electronic component capable of transmitting signals wirelessly. The application was a virtual keyboard generating a novelstimulation paradigm to elicit P300 Evoked Related Potentials(ERPs) for communication. Raw EEG signals were treated with OpenViBE open-source software including novelsignal processing and stimulation techniques

Minimizing Single-Usage Cache Pollution for Effective Cache Hierarchy Management

Efficient cache hierarchy management is of a paramount importance when designing high performance processors. Upon a miss, the conventional operation mode of a cache hierarchy is to retrieve back the missing block from higher levels and to store the block into all hierarchy levels. It is however difficult to assert that storing the block into intermediate levels will be really useful. In the literature, this phenomenon, referred to as cache pollution, is often associated with prefetching techniques, that is, a prefetched block could evict data that is more likely to be reused in a near future. Cache pollution could cause severe performance degradation. This paper is typically concerned with addressing this phenomenon in the highest level of cache hierarchy. Unlike past studies that treat polluting cache blocks as blocks that are never accessed (i.e. only due to prefetching), our proposal rather attempts to eliminate cache pollution that is inherent to the application. Our observations did indeed reveal that cache blocks that are only accessed once - single-usage blocks - are quite significant at runtime and especially in the highest level of cache hierarchy. In addition, most single-usage cache blocks are data that can be prefetched. We show that employing a simple prediction mechanism is sufficient to uncover most of the single-usage blocks. For a two-level cache hierarchy, these blocks are directly sent from main memory to L1 cache. Performing data bypassing on L2 cache maximizes memory hierarchy and allows hard-toprefetch memory references to remain into this cache hierarchy level. Our experimental results show that minimizing single-usage cache pollution in the L2 cache leads to a significant decrease in its miss rate; resulting therefore in noticeable performance gains

Towards more user-friendly education for speakers of Aboriginal English

The project reported on here set out, on a basis of cooperation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal investigators working in university, educational system and classroom contexts, to lead to understandings which would enable a more accessible ( userfriendly ) education to be provided for students in primary and secondary schools who are speakers of Aboriginal English. Specifically, in the context of schools of the Education Department of Western Australia, the project sought to: 1. extend knowledge and understanding of Aboriginal English and its areas of contrast with standard Australian English; 2. provide clarification in the following under-researched areas of Aboriginal English: a) semantic fields; b) functions of language use in relation to form; c) genres; d) particular registers; e) codes. 3. relate Aboriginal ways of approaching experience and knowledge to: a) curriculum; b) student outcome statements; c) pedagogical strategies to support two-way learning..