Brief review of contemporary sexual offence and child sexual abuse legislation in Australia

Abstract: This report provides an overview of the offences that an individual who sexually abuses a child in an institutional setting may be charged with in the nine Australian jurisdictions. These include contact and non-contact sexual offences, child pornography offences and offences for which institutions and/or their representatives that were aware of child sexual abuse may be charged

Expansions which introduce no new open sets

We consider the question of when an expansion of a topological structure has the property that every open set definable in the expansion is definable in the original structure. This question is related to and inspired by recent work of Dolich, Miller and Steinhorn on the property of having o-minimal open core. We answer the question in a fairly general setting and provide conditions which in practice are often easy to check. We give a further characterisation in the special case of an expansion by a generic predicate

Photo-induced changes in the Langmuir adsorption constants of metal oxide layers in self-cleaning cation sensors.

For the first time, we have used a metal oxide-coated quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) to measure Cs+ adsorption onto illuminated and un-illuminated mesoporous TiO2 (m-TiO2) films by microgravimetric means in-situ. In the simplest case, such experiments yield two parameters of interest: K, the Langmuir adsorption coefficient and mmax the maximum mass of adsorbate to form a complete monolayer at the m-TiO2-coated quartz crystal piezoelectric surface. Importantly, we have found that illumination of the m-TiO2 film with ultra bandgap light results in an increase in mmax i.e. illumination allows for greater adsorption of substrate to occur than in the dark. Our studies also show that under illumination, K also increases indicating a higher affinity for surface adsorption. The photoinduced change in mmax and K are thought to be due to an increase in surface bound titanol groups, thus increasing the number of available adsorption sites – and so providing evidence to support the notion of photoinduced adsorption processes in photocatalytic systems. These findings have implications for the development of a reversible adsorption based microgravimetric sensor for Cs+

Heuristics on pairing-friendly abelian varieties

We discuss heuristic asymptotic formulae for the number of pairing-friendly abelian varieties over prime fields, generalizing previous work of one of the authors arXiv:math1107.0307Comment: Pages 6-7 rewritten, other minor changes mad

Is Hospital in the Home as safe and effective as inpatient care?

When Activity-Based Funding (ABF) for public hospitals begins on 1 July this year, it should make it easier for hospitals to establish Hospital in the Home (HITH) services. The pricing framework underpinning the ABF system stipulates that public hospital services should be priced in a way that facilitates the timely roll-out of evidence-based innovations in the most appropriate care setting. HITH services have been operating in some Australian hospitals for nearly 20 years. However before starting up a service of their own, many hospital managers will want to know if HITH is safe, and for which patients. This paper briefly outlines the evidence on the safety, quality and costs of HITH services. A list of resources is provided for those who want to know more. What does the evidence say? Many health services provide care in patients’ homes. To qualify as a HITH service it must provide active treatment by health care professionals in patients’ homes for conditions that otherwise would require hospital in-patient care. Examples of acute treatments delivered in the home include blood transfusions, intravenous antibiotic treatments for infections, and anticoagulation for patients with deep venous thrombosis and pulmonary emboli. Some HITH services (early - discharge HITH) also provide subacute treatment such as rehabilitation at home after orthopaedic injuries and procedures. The range of conditions that are treatable at home continues to expand as technology and confidence in HITH improves. Cochrane Reviews are generally regarded as an authoritative source of research evidence. A systematic review of the evidence on HITH was conducted by the Cochrane Collaboration in 2008 (it was updated in 2011 and no changes were made to the conclusions). After searching the main medical databases, the Cochrane reviewers found 10 randomised controlled trials (RCTs) that compared HITH with inpatient care; RCTs are generally thought to produce high quality evidence. Data from five of the RCTs on admission - substitution HITH services were broadly comparable, so they were pooled and used to conduct a more high-powered statistical analysis, a meta-analysis

Conservation Auctions in Manitoba: A Summary of a Series of Workshops

Currently, the effect of human impact on the environment is becoming increasingly apparent. The encroachment of human activity has inevitably resulted in the loss or impairment of ecological goods and services (EG&S) around the globe as well as in our own backyard. EG&S include features such as wildlife habitat, biodiversity, soil renewal, or nutrient cycling. The loss of such features has become a sobering reality for Manitobans in the face of the utrophication of Lake Winnipeg as a result of practices contributing to nutrient loading into the lake. Since EG&S are very important to Manitobans, efforts are being made to explore different vehicles to encourage their provision. In order to address some of the environmental issues transpiring in Manitoba, there has been discussion on the usefulness of Market Based Instruments (MBIs). In the past, a number of programs focused on the environment in agriculture have been put forward and administered, however these have not been overly successful in incenting producers or providing significant levels of EG&S. This report will provide a summary of a series of workshops developed to bring awareness to stakeholders on an MBI known as a conservation auction (which may also be referred to as reverse auction, procurement auction, or tender).Market based instruments, Conservation auction, Tender, Wetland restoration, Environmental Economics and Policy, D44, Q20, Q57,

What Workers Say: Employee Voice in the Anglo-American Workplace

[Excerpt] This book is about employee voice in the workplaces of the highly developed Anglo-American economies: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. These are among the most economically successful countries in the world. Despite being located in three different geographic areas, the Anglo-American countries have a common language and legal tradition, have close economic and political ties, and are linked by flows of people, goods, and capital. Many of the same firms operate in each country. The unions in each pay more attention to their counterparts within the group than to unions in other countries. The Anglo-American brand of capitalism – market oriented and open to competition, with modest welfare sates and income transfer systems – differentiates the countries from countries in the “social dialogue” model of the European Union (although the United Kingdom and Ireland are part of the Union) and from the highly unionized labor system in Scandinavia

Australian healthcare services and the climate change debate

After years of highly charged political and public debate on tackling climate change, Australia started taxing carbon emissions on 1 July 2012. Under the carbon tax, Australia’s biggest carbon emitting companies will pay a fixed-price levy on their carbon emissions for three years. At the end of this period, the carbon tax will transition to an emissions trading scheme, from 1 July 2015. Healthcare services and hospitals are not directly affected by the carbon tax, as they are not among the biggest polluting companies in Australia. However, they may experience some indirect flow-on costs, in the form of higher energy prices. Though as this Policy Brief will explain, any overall increases in costs for public hospitals are likely to be minimal at most once the compensatory effects of new hospital funding arrangements are taken into account. Nonetheless, with the health sector responsible for 7 per cent of total carbon emissions from buildings in Australia,  there is significant scope for the sector to reduce its carbon footprint through greater energy efficiency measures. Of course, the health sector also has a much broader interest in the climate change debate: the impacts of climate change on human health. Climate experts now agree that the health impacts of climate change, such as the spread of infectious diseases, and illness and fatalities related to severe weather events, are significant, and pose a significant threat for the future. This Policy Brief will explore each of these issues and outline policy options and other initiatives currently in place to address them