Footprints in time

This report presents the results of two projects examining Indigenous Children\u27s language development.AbstractThis report presents the results of administration of the Who Am I? and the Renfrew Word Finding Vocabulary Test for the LSIC Wave 2 data collection in 2009. Who am I? is a developmental assessment that requires the child to write their name, copy shapes, write letters, numbers and words in a small booklet, with simple instructions and encouragement from the interviewer. Who am I? is not language dependent and is suitable for children with limited English. The assessment takes about 10 minutes to complete and is suitable for preschool children and children in the first two years of school. The Renfrew Word Finding Vocabulary Test assesses children’s expressive vocabulary (compared, for instance, with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, which is a test of receptive vocabulary). It assesses the extent to which pictures of objects, arranged in order of difficulty, can be named correctly. Most of the objects illustrated have no alternative names, so the responses of children can be quickly measured. The assessment contains 50 line-drawn pictures and is suitable for children aged 3-9 years. The assessments are being used as part of Footprints in Time, which is the name given to the Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children managed by FaHCSIA.. Footprints in Time works with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families from sites in Australia seeking their consent to participate in annual interviews to help better understand what impacts on their children’s lives over time. LSIC especially explores how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children can be better supported to grow up strong and resilient, regardless of location

Sarah (Sallie) Buckley Letters

MS057-201

Flesh in line with the mind : gender in Caitlin Kiernan’s The drowning girl.

This paper analyzes how Caitlyn R. Kiernan in her novel The Drowning Girl characterizes gender identity, particularly in regards to women, both transgender and cisgender. The book\u27s characterization of gender roles for cisgender men, cisgender women, and transgender women, while seeming on the surface to subvert sexist stereotypes, reproduces the pitfalls of feminist literary criticism popularized in the 1970s and 1980s. Notably, such themes include viewing women\u27s madness as a method of transcending masculine rationality, a dichotomized essentialism of masculinity and femininity, and universalizing women\u27s experience without regards to race, class, and nationality. Transgender autobiographical and literary archetypes employed in the novel, such as the trans of migration and trapped in the wrong body narratives, further demonstrate themes of gender binarism. Feminist theory, literary criticism, and transgender studies show how the cisgender protagonist Imp and the transgender character Abalyn conform to these characterizations, and the normative implications of viewing gender though this perspective

Hormonal Physiology of Childbearing: Evidence and Implications for Women, Babies, and Maternity Care

This report synthesizes evidence about innate hormonally-mediated physiologic processes in women and fetuses/newborns during childbearing, and possible impacts of common maternity care practices and interventions on these processes, focusing on four hormone systems that are consequential for childbearing. Core hormonal physiology principles reveal profound interconnections between mothers and babies, among hormone systems, and from pregnancy through to the postpartum and newborn periods. Overall, consistent and coherent evidence from physiologic understandings and human and animal studies finds that the innate hormonal physiology of childbearing has significant benefits for mothers and babies. Such hormonally-mediated benefits may extend into the future through optimization of breastfeeding and maternal-infant attachment. A growing body of research finds that common maternity care interventions may disturb hormonal processes, reduce their benefits, and create new challenges. Developmental and epigenetic effects are biologically plausible but poorly studied. The perspective of hormonal physiology adds new considerations for benefit-harm assessments in maternity care, and suggests new research priorities, including consistently measuring crucial hormonally-mediated outcomes that are frequently overlooked. Current understanding suggests that safely avoiding unneeded maternity care interventions would be wise, as supported by the Precautionary Principle. Promoting, supporting, and protecting physiologic childbearing, as far as safely possible in each situation, is a low-technology health and wellness approach to the care of childbearing women and their fetuses/newborns that is applicable in almost all maternity care settings

Trial of the Engagement Matrix: Component 1: The effectiveness of labels. Report

The Engagement Matrix (EM) was designed by the Department of Education and Children’s Services in South Australia to measure engagement levels of students enrolled in the Innovative Community Action Networks (ICAN)/ Flexible Learning Options (FLO) program once a term. Innovative ICANs work with young people (year 6-age 19), families, schools, community groups, businesses and different levels of government to encourage young people to finish their secondary education. Flexible Learning Options (FLO) was first introduced in 2006 as an enrolment option in ICAN schools which is funded by DECS. FLO is an approach that is more flexible than the traditional full-time enrolment in school to support young people most at risk to successfully complete their secondary education (DECS, 2010). In its current form, the EM is a high-level inference instrument that requires raters to provide one overall rating of a student’s engagement in (a) well-being, (b) relationships and (c) learning in five categories. These categories’ previous labels of ‘Resistant’, ‘Disinterested’, ‘Compliant’, ‘Enthusiastic’ and ‘Proactive’ have been changed to ‘Significantly disengaged’, ‘Partly disengaged’, ‘Moderately engaged’, ‘Highly engaged’ and ‘Very highly engaged’. This report describes an initiative to ascertain the effectiveness of the labels of the EM. To this end, an online survey was designed to obtain information on the levels of engagement and disengagement current and potential users of the EM associated with different labels (e.g. ‘Disinterested’, ‘Active’) and different intensifiers (e.g. ‘Very’, ‘Moderately’) as well as a combination of intensifiers and labels as currently proposed in the EM. Cognitive interviews were conducted to inform the online survey

SMS Spam Filtering: Methods and Data

Mobile or SMS spam is a real and growing problem primarily due to the availability of very cheap bulk pre-pay SMS packages and the fact that SMS engenders higher response rates as it is a trusted and personal service. SMS spam filtering is a relatively new task which inherits many issues and solu- tions from email spam filtering. However it poses its own specific challenges. This paper motivates work on filtering SMS spam and reviews recent devel- opments in SMS spam filtering. The paper also discusses the issues with data collection and availability for furthering research in this area, analyses a large corpus of SMS spam, and provides some initial benchmark results

PISA in brief : highlights from the full Australian report : PISA 2012 : how Australia measures up

PISA is a survey that measures the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds, who are near the end of compulsory schooling in most participating education systems. PISA in Brief summarises the results from the PISA 2012 assessment of students’ mathematical, scientific and reading literacy skills. It tells us about how students performed in the assessment and describes some wider findings about what lies behind their results

Attachment style and depression: an investigation into interpersonal factors and processes

Introduction: Depression is one of the most dominant universal mental health disorders and has a high rate of persistency and recurrence. Interpersonal theories posit that it is interpersonal, or relational, factors that serve to cause and maintain depression, which is supported by a growing evidence base. CBASP is an interpersonally-focused psychotherapy specifically designed for the treatment of chronic depression and employs a variety of cognitive, behavioural and interpersonal techniques within the therapeutic relationship to help individuals evaluate their interpersonal exchanges and consider the implications. Research has highlighted the effectiveness of CBASP for this client group, however there is limited research investigating therapist and client factors that contribute to positive outcomes. Attachment style and mentalization are two such factors that are theoretically and empirically linked to an individual’s way of relating to others but have not been investigated in relation to outcomes in CBASP. Aims: A systematic review aimed to identify and evaluate significant social and interpersonal mediators that account for the relationship between attachment style and depressive symptoms. An empirical study then explored the role of therapist and client attachment style, mentalisation, and therapeutic alliance on clinical outcomes in CBASP. Methods: A systematic search of the literature exploring social and interpersonal mediators between attachment style and depressive symptoms was conducted in order to identify and evaluate mediators. The empirical study used a longitudinal case series design where both therapist and client attachment style, mentalization and the therapeutic alliance were assessed, and clinical outcomes were measured at each session to allow evaluation of change over time. Results: The systematic review provided evidence that specific social and interpersonal variables mediate the relationship between attachment and depressive symptoms, specifically social support, social anxiety, social self-efficacy, relationship satisfaction, interpersonal negative events, and interpersonal dependency. Two studies failed to find mediating effects of social support and social self-efficacy. The findings of this review are interpreted with caution as there contained several methodological limitations that affect the ability to generalize to other populations and infer causation. Findings from the empirical study provided evidence for the role of therapist attachment style and mentalization in relation to the therapeutic alliance and clinical outcomes in chronic depression in CBASP. Client attachment style and mentalization were not found to have a significant impact on the process of change but did account for some variance in symptoms of depression. Findings should be cautioned due to the small sample size and lack of statistical power to detect smaller effects. Discussion: The findings of this thesis suggests that there exist social and interpersonal factors that mediate the relationship between attachment style and depressive symptoms, and this has clear socio-political and clinical implications. However more research using robust methods of design and statistical analysis are needed in order to provide clarity in this field. The empirical study provided rich and novel data that suggests that therapist attachment style and mentalization, more so than client factors, are important in developing the therapeutic alliance and promoting symptom reduction over the course of treatment. Further research utilizing a larger sample size could provide more robust evidence for this association

Species' traits predict phenological responses to climate change in butterflies

How do species' traits help identify which species will respond most strongly to future climate change? We examine the relationship between species' traits and phenology in a well-established model system for climate change, the U.K. Butterfly Monitoring Scheme (UKBMS). Most resident U.K. butterfly species have significantly advanced their dates of first appearance during the past 30 years. We show that species with narrower larval diet breadth and more advanced overwintering stages have experienced relatively greater advances in their date of first appearance. In addition, species with smaller range sizes have experienced greater phenological advancement. Our results demonstrate that species' traits can be important predictors of responses to climate change, and they suggest that further investigation of the mechanisms by which these traits influence phenology may aid in understanding species' responses to current and future climate change

Enzymatic synthesis of L-pipecolic acid and L-proline

This article does not have an abstract