Access to a Lawyer in Rural Australia: Thoughts on the Evidence We Need

NSW Law Society membership data 1988–2004 enables mapping over time of the presence and movement of private legal practice in rural NSW. The changing ratio of legal practices per 10 000 population is calculated against data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. In short, while the rural population increases, the number of legal practices decreases at a much slower rate, resulting in an overall drop in the proportion of legal practices in the population. However, although some inferences could be drawn, the data do not go very far in illustrating the nature and degree of, and reasons for, the limits on access to law in rural Australia. One way of thinking about the further research that can be done is to consider the research implications of the many different ways the issue of rural access to law is expressed, and the different dimensions that are emphasised in those formulations

Mortality from infectious pneumonia in metal workers: a comparison with deaths from asthma in occupations exposed to respiratory sensitizers

Introduction: national analyses of mortality in England and Wales have repeatedly shown excess deaths from pneumonia in welders. During 1979-1990 the excess was attributable largely to deaths from lobar pneumonia and pneumonias other than bronchopneumonia, limited to working-aged men, and apparent in other metal fume-exposed occupations. We assessed findings for 1991-2000 and compared the mortality pattern with that from asthma in occupations exposed to known respiratory sensitizers.Methods: the Office of National Statistics supplied data on deaths by underlying cause among men aged 16-74 years in England and Wales during 1991-2000, including age and last held occupation. We abstracted data on pneumonia for occupations with exposure to metal fume and on asthma for occupations commonly reported to surveillance schemes as at risk of occupational asthma. We estimated expected numbers of deaths by applying age-specific proportions of deaths by cause in the population to the total deaths by age in each occupational group. Observed and expected numbers were compared for each cause of death.Results: among working-aged men in metal fume-exposed occupations we found excesses of mortality from pneumococcal and lobar pneumonia (54 deaths vs. 27.3 expected) and from pneumonias other than bronchopneumonia (71 vs. 52.4), but no excess from these causes at older ages, or from bronchopneumonia at any age. The attributable mortality from metal fume (45.3 excess deaths) compared with an estimated 62.6 deaths from occupational asthma.Conclusion: exposure to metal fume is a material cause of occupational mortality. The hazard deserves far more attention than it presently receive

It just doesn't ADD Up: ADHD/ADD, the Workplace and Discrimination

Standard workplace conditions that are commonly perceived as neutral and reasonable can discriminate against people who find conforming to them difficult or impossible because of innate differences in neuronal and cognitive functioning. We use the example of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder to show that, for people with cognitive differences, it is necessary to seek legal protection from discrimination within a disability framework. This approach can be problematic because of the stigma that attaches to disability and because of the way that provisions of the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (Cth) are interpreted. An alternative approach is to treat cognitive and behavioural attributes within a framework that recognises different abilities, rather than starting from a presumptive position of disability, in much the same way that gender or religious beliefs are treated

XTCE. XML Telemetry and Command Exchange Tutorial

An XML Telemetry Command Exchange (XTCE) tutoral oriented towards packets or minor frames is shown. The contents include: 1) The Basics; 2) Describing Telemetry; 3) Describing the Telemetry Format; 4) Commanding; 5) Forgotten Elements; 6) Implementing XTCE; and 7) GovSat

Discerning Trends in Performance Across Multiple Events

Mass Data is a computer program that enables rapid, easy discernment of trends in performance data across multiple flights and ground tests. The program can perform Fourier analysis and other functions for the purposes of frequency analysis and trending of all variables. These functions facilitate identification of past use of diagnosed systems and of anomalies in such systems, and enable rapid assessment of related current problems. Many variables, for computation of which it is usually necessary to perform extensive manual manipulation of raw downlist data, are automatically computed and made available to all users, regularly eliminating the need for what would otherwise be an extensive amount of engineering analysis. Data from flight, ground test, and simulation are preprocessed and stored in one central location for instantaneous access and comparison for diagnostic and trending purposes. Rules are created so that an event log is created for every flight, making it easy to locate information on similar maneuvers across many flights. The same rules can be created for test sets and simulations, and are searchable, so that information on like events is easily accessible

Mining protein function from text using term-based support vector machines

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Text mining has spurred huge interest in the domain of biology. The goal of the BioCreAtIvE exercise was to evaluate the performance of current text mining systems. We participated in Task 2, which addressed assigning Gene Ontology terms to human proteins and selecting relevant evidence from full-text documents. We approached it as a modified form of the document classification task. We used a supervised machine-learning approach (based on support vector machines) to assign protein function and select passages that support the assignments. As classification features, we used a protein's co-occurring terms that were automatically extracted from documents.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The results evaluated by curators were modest, and quite variable for different problems: in many cases we have relatively good assignment of GO terms to proteins, but the selected supporting text was typically non-relevant (precision spanning from 3% to 50%). The method appears to work best when a substantial set of relevant documents is obtained, while it works poorly on single documents and/or short passages. The initial results suggest that our approach can also mine annotations from text even when an explicit statement relating a protein to a GO term is absent.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>A machine learning approach to mining protein function predictions from text can yield good performance only if sufficient training data is available, and significant amount of supporting data is used for prediction. The most promising results are for combined document retrieval and GO term assignment, which calls for the integration of methods developed in BioCreAtIvE Task 1 and Task 2.</p

Public interest litigation: making the case in Australia

Litigation is widely and appropriately recognised as an important component of the public interest advocacy \u27toolkit\u27. Yet, little attention has been paid in Australian research and scholarship to an important question: under what circumstances is public interest litigation (PIL) an effective way to bring about progressive social change? Informed by a review of the international literature on PIL, the authors of this article argue for the importance of drawing on Australia\u27s rich history with PIL to develop a solid empirical evidence base which can inform future decision about the strategic employment of PIL in campaigns to address the concerns and needs of disadvantaged and marginalised sections of Australian society

Dynamical Masses of Low Mass Stars in the Taurus and Ophiuchus Star Forming Regions

We report new dynamical masses for 5 pre-main sequence (PMS) stars in the L1495 region of the Taurus star-forming region (SFR) and 6 in the L1688 region of the Ophiuchus SFR. Since these regions have VLBA parallaxes these are absolute measurements of the stars' masses and are independent of their effective temperatures and luminosities. Seven of the stars have masses $<0.6$ solar masses, thus providing data in a mass range with little data, and of these, 6 are measured to precision $< 5 \%$. We find 8 stars with masses in the range 0.09 to 1.1 solar mass that agree well with the current generation of PMS evolutionary models. The ages of the stars we measured in the Taurus SFR are in the range 1-3 MY, and $<1$ MY for those in L1688. We also measured the dynamical masses of 14 stars in the ALMA archival data for Akeson~\&~Jensen's Cycle 0 project on binaries in the Taurus SFR. We find that the masses of 7 of the targets are so large that they cannot be reconciled with reported values of their luminosity and effective temperature. We suggest that these targets are themselves binaries or triples.Comment: 20 page

Cool Young Stars in the Northern Hemisphere: Beta Pictoris and AB Doradus Moving Group Candidates

As part of our continuing effort to identify new, low-mass members of nearby, young moving groups (NYMGs), we present a list of young, low-mass candidates in the northern hemisphere. We used our proven proper motion selection procedure and ROSAT-X-ray and GALEX-UV activity indicators to identify 204 young stars as candidate members of the Beta Pictoris and AB Doradus NYMGs. Definitive membership assignment of a given candidate will require a measurement of its radial velocity and distance. We present a simple system of indices to characterize the young candidates and help prioritize follow up observations. New group members identified in this candidate list will be high priority targets for: 1) exoplanet direct imaging searches, 2) the study of post-T-Tauri astrophysics, 3) understanding recent local star formation, and 4) the study of local galactic kinematics. Information available now allows us to identify 8 likely new members in the list. Two of these, a late-K and an early-M dwarf, we find to be likely members of the Beta Pic group. The other six stars are likely members of the AB Dor moving group. These include an M dwarf triple system, and three very cool objects that may be young brown dwarfs, making them the lowest-mass, isolated objects proposed in the AB Dor moving group to date.Comment: 41 pages, 15 figures, Accepted to the Astronomical Journa

Hubbard ladders in a magnetic field

The behavior of a two leg Hubbard ladder in the presence of a magnetic field is studied by means of Abelian bosonization. We predict the appearance of a new (doping dependent) plateau in the magnetization curve of a doped 2-leg spin ladder in a wide range of couplings. We also discuss the extension to N-leg Hubbard ladders