The Search for Virtue and the Role of Anti-Corruption Agencies : A Queensland Case Study

This paper deals with the ambiguous role played by one "heavy regulatory regime" and the complex relationships developed between this anti-corruption agency, the various governments in power after its creation and (only incidentally) with the modernisation of the police service in Queensland. The story of the modernisation of the Queensland police service is a remarkable one, involving as it does the disgrace and imprisonment of Police Commissioner Terry Lewis and - on unrelated corruption charges - several Ministers. This was linked to the disgrace of a Premier of one government linked to both events, whose party subsequently plunged to electoral defeat in 1989 after thirty years in office. More recently (February, 2001), Queensland has seen the resignation of a Deputy Premier and several Ministers of the opposing party after admitting electoral rorting associated with fraud and perjury. Apparently paradoxically, the party then went immediately to an election where it won a victory of unprecedented proportions. The common feature has been the impact of a judicial enquiry between 1987 and 1989 and the activities generated by the supervisory body created by that enquiry, the Criminal Justice Commission (CJC). This paper is in two parts: the first deals with the political context and administrative changes over the past decade; and the second focuses specifically on the operation of the Criminal Justice Commission within that context and its role in promoting modernisation of the police force

King Gough : Madness Or Magnificence? A Retrospective View Of The 1975 APSA Conference

In 2000, I chose to mark the 25th anniversary by a personal project to complement the formal conference on the topic of the Whitlam years held later in the year on the specific anniversary. As President of APSA in that momentous year, I chaired the committee which organised the conference that year, held amid damp conditions at the Canberra CAE. The conference occurred in the hothouse environment of July 1975, a period of unprecedented levels of political uncertainty. Indeed, the very title of the conference, "The First Thousand Days of Labor" devised by John Power inadvertently begged a momentous question: Would Whitlam last beyond his first thousand days? Answer - just, 1074. The attendance at the conference, over 400 including the down-town public servants, was also abnormally large. Finally, the format of the conference, squeezing all contributors into a straight-jacket of a single theme, was also an innovation - and never repeated because some vocal groups felt disenfranchised by its intellectual parochialism. These special characteristics of the conference justify this exercise in retrospectivity. It fits into a theme of reviewing Australian federalism since 1975 was such a cataclysmic year. It was a mirror of where the Whitlam government was taking the public policy agenda - towards institutional reforms in the public service, reaching into local and regional communities, creating new slants on federalism and engaging in an activist and independent foreign policy (not least with respect to East Timor). It was also engaging the scholarly attention of a wide variety of participants not normally much in evidence at APSA conferences, including senior administrators, serving politicians journalists, union officials and ministerial staff. Some of these have faded into relative obscurity or joined their ancestors, but the list of - then/now - occupations in the Appendices suggest an unusual diversity of backgrounds at the time and subsequent to the conference. I decided to send the conference contributors a copy of their original papers and respond to the questions of how much things have changed since they wrote and how accurate were any predictions and analyses they offered. What did the differences tell us about thet state of the discipline of political science then and now? The papers are arranged as they were in 1975 - in four sections : "Government, Parliament and Parliamentarians", "Machinery of Government", "Federalism" and "Public Policy". A fifth section, on international relations could not be sustained in this retrospective as few authors could be contacted who had any interest in reviewing what they had written that long ago and many had not survived. Hard copies of this retrospective were tabled at the 2000 APSA conference. The original 1975 papers were photocopied and bound into two volumes with the modest technology then available and can still be found in many university libraries which received free copies from APSA. They will be catalogued as "The First Thousand Days of Labor" perhaps with attributions to compilers Scott, Richardson, Power and Wettenhall

On Time Series Analysis of Public Health and Biomedical Data

A time series is a sequence of observations made over time. Examples in public health include daily ozone concentrations, weekly admissions to an emergency department or annual expenditures on health care in the United States. Time series models are used to describe the dependence of the response at each time on predictor variables including covariates and possibly previous values in the series. Time series methods are necessary to account for the correlation among repeated responses over time. This paper gives an overview of time series ideas and methods used in public health research

Emergent particle-hole symmetry in spinful bosonic quantum Hall systems

When a fermionic quantum Hall system is projected into the lowest Landau level, there is an exact particle-hole symmetry between filling fractions $\nu$ and $1-\nu$. We investigate whether a similar symmetry can emerge in bosonic quantum Hall states, where it would connect states at filling fractions $\nu$ and $2-\nu$. We begin by showing that the particle-hole conjugate to a composite fermion `Jain state' is another Jain state, obtained by reverse flux attachment. We show how information such as the shift and the edge theory can be obtained for states which are particle-hole conjugates. Using the techniques of exact diagonalization and infinite density matrix renormalization group, we study a system of two-component (i.e., spinful) bosons, interacting via a $\delta$-function potential. We first obtain real-space entanglement spectra for the bosonic integer quantum Hall effect at $\nu=2$, which plays the role of a filled Landau level for the bosonic system. We then show that at $\nu=4/3$ the system is described by a Jain state which is the particle-hole conjugate of the Halperin (221) state at $\nu=2/3$. We show a similar relationship between non-singlet states at $\nu=1/2$ and $\nu=3/2$. We also study the case of $\nu=1$, providing unambiguous evidence that the ground state is a composite Fermi liquid. Taken together our results demonstrate that there is indeed an emergent particle-hole symmetry in bosonic quantum Hall systems.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, 4 appendice

An observational study of spectators' step counts and reasons for attending a professional golf tournament in Scotland

Background Spectators at several hundred golf tournaments on six continents worldwide may gain health-enhancing physical activity (HEPA) during their time at the event. This study aims to investigate spectators' reasons for attending and assess spectator physical activity (PA) (measured by step count). Methods Spectators at the Paul Lawrie Matchplay event in Scotland (August 2016) were invited to take part in this study. They were asked to complete a brief questionnaire with items to assess (1) demographics, (2) reasons for attendance and (3) baseline PA. In addition, participants were requested to wear a pedometer from time of entry to the venue until exit. Results A total of 339 spectators were recruited to the study and out of which 329 (97.2%) returned step-count data. Spectators took a mean of 11 589 steps (SD 4531). Fresh air' (rated median 9 out of 10) then watching star players', exercise/physical activity', time with friends and family' and atmosphere' (all median 8 out of 10) were rated the most important reasons for attending. Conclusion This study is the first to assess spectator physical activity while watching golf (measured by step count). Obtaining exercise/PA is rated as an important reason for attending a tournament by many golf spectators. Spectating at a golf tournament can provide HEPA. 82.9% of spectators achieved the recommended daily step count while spectating. Further research directly assessing whether spectating may constitute a teachable moment', for increasing physical activity beyond the tournament itself, is merited.</p

A cell lineage analysis of segmentation in the chick embryo

We have studied the lineage history of the progenitors of the somite mesoderm and of the neural tube in the chick embryo by injecting single cells with the fluorescent tracer, rhodamine-lysine-dextran. We find that, although single cells within the segmental plate give rise to discrete clones in the somites to which they contribute, neither the somites nor their component parts (sclerotome, dermatome, myotome or their rostral and caudal halves) are `compartments' in the sense defined in insects. Cells in the rostral two thirds or so of the segmental plate contribute only to somite tissue and divide about every 10 h, while those in the caudal portions of this structure contribute both to the somites and to intermediate and lateral plate mesoderm derivatives. In the neural tube, the descendants of individual prospective ventral horn cells remain together within the horn, with a cycle time of 10 h. We have also investigated the role of the cell division cycle in the formation and subsequent development of somites. A single treatment of 2-day chick embryos with heat shock or a variety of drugs that affect the cell cycle all produce repeated anomalies in the pattern of somites and vertebrae that develop subsequent to the treatment. The interval between anomalies is 6-7 somites (or a multiple of this distance), which corresponds to 10 h. This interval is identical to that measured for the cell division cycle. Given that cell division synchrony is seen in the presomitic mesoderm, we suggest that the cell division cycle plays a role in somite formation. Finally, we consider the mechanisms responsible for regionalization of derivatives of the somite, and conclude that it is likely that both cell interactions and cell lineage history are important in the determination of cell fates

Measuring Stellar Radial Velocities with a Dispersed Fixed-Delay Interferometer

We demonstrate the ability to measure precise stellar barycentric radial velocities with the dispersed fixed-delay interferometer technique using the Exoplanet Tracker (ET), an instrument primarily designed for precision differential Doppler velocity measurements using this technique. Our barycentric radial velocities, derived from observations taken at the KPNO 2.1 meter telescope, differ from those of Nidever et al. by 0.047 km/s (rms) when simultaneous iodine calibration is used, and by 0.120 km/s (rms) without simultaneous iodine calibration. Our results effectively show that a Michelson interferometer coupled to a spectrograph allows precise measurements of barycentric radial velocities even at a modest spectral resolution of R ~ 5100. A multi-object version of the ET instrument capable of observing ~500 stars per night is being used at the Sloan 2.5 m telescope at Apache Point Observatory for the Multi-object APO Radial Velocity Exoplanet Large-area Survey (MARVELS), a wide-field radial velocity survey for extrasolar planets around TYCHO-2 stars in the magnitude range 7.6<V<12. In addition to precise differential velocities, this survey will also yield precise barycentric radial velocities for many thousands of stars using the data analysis techniques reported here. Such a large kinematic survey at high velocity precision will be useful in identifying the signature of accretion events in the Milky Way and understanding local stellar kinematics in addition to discovering exoplanets, brown dwarfs and spectroscopic binaries.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in Ap

Seasonal Analyses of Air Pollution and Mortality in 100 U.S. Cities

Time series models relating short-term changes in air pollution levels to daily mortality counts typically assume that the effects of air pollution on the log relative rate of mortality do not vary with time. However, these short-term effects might plausibly vary by season. Changes in the sources of air pollution and meteorology can result in changes in characteristics of the air pollution mixture across seasons. The authors develop Bayesian semi-parametric hierarchical models for estimating time-varying effects of pollution on mortality in multi-site time series studies. The methods are applied to the updated National Morbidity and Mortality Air Pollution Study database for the period 1987--2000, which includes data for 100 U.S. cities. At the national level, a 10 micro-gram/m3 increase in PM(10) at lag 1 is associated with a 0.15 (95% posterior interval: -0.08, 0.39),0.14 (-0.14, 0.42), 0.36 (0.11, 0.61), and 0.14 (-0.06, 0.34) percent increase in mortality for winter, spring, summer, and fall, respectively. An analysis by geographical regions finds a strong seasonal pattern in the northeast (with a peak in summer) and little seasonal variation in the southern regions of the country. These results provide useful information for understanding particle toxicity and guiding future analyses of particle constituent data

The half-filled Landau level: the case for Dirac composite fermions

In a two-dimensional electron gas under a strong magnetic field, correlations generate emergent excitations distinct from electrons. It has been predicted that “composite fermions”—bound states of an electron with two magnetic flux quanta—can experience zero net magnetic field and form a Fermi sea. Using infinite-cylinder density matrix renormalization group numerical simulations, we verify the existence of this exotic Fermi sea, but find that the phase exhibits particle-hole symmetry. This is self-consistent only if composite fermions are massless Dirac particles, similar to the surface of a topological insulator. Exploiting this analogy, we observe the suppression of 2k_F backscattering, a characteristic of Dirac particles. Thus, the phenomenology of Dirac fermions is also relevant to two-dimensional electron gases in the quantum Hall regime