Beyond supply and demand: addressing the complexities of workforce exclusion in Australia

Workforce exclusion is a complex and enduring problem in Australia, with some groups of job seekers more likely to be disadvantaged in the labour market than others. We identify a dominant unemployment narrative of ‘work first’ that surrounds unemployment interventions, and ignores the nature of disadvantage and its relationship to workforce exclusion, and reduces unemployment to a simple matter of labour market supply and demand. This approach privileges immediate economic productivity and exit from welfare payments over sustainable attachment to quality jobs. We examine fourteen programs for disadvantaged job seekers under one national provider network. Data was gathered from eleven semi-structured telephone interviews and eight evaluation reports and analysed using thematic analysis supported by NVivo. Our findings challenge the dominant narrative and argue that both ends of the supply and demand equation need to be examined, stressing the importance of a partnership-orientated and capacity building focus on the unemployed person, and the significance of quality employment with long term support. We identify the importance of acknowledging job seekers’ strengths, aspirations and preferences, and of job seekers having agency to determine their own pathways with support from service providers

EDITORIAL: Elusive issues of identity

The concept of the ‘indigenous public sphere’ is intended to describe the highly mediated public ‘space’ for developing notions of Indigeneity, and putting them to work organising and governing the unpredictable immediacy of everyday events (Hartley and McKee, The Indigenous Public Sphere, 2000, p. 3) One of the major conclusions of John Hartley and Alan McKee’s study is that, in the Australian media, indigenous people are central to a drama about Australian national identity. Stars rather than victims, indigenous people are caught up in a media narrative over which ‘they have little individual control, but which is nevertheless telling their story’ (p. 7). &nbsp

Flaunting it on Facebook: Young adults, drinking cultures and the cult of celebrity

Copyright © Antonia Lyons; Tim McCreanor; Fiona Hutton; Ian Goodwin; Helen Moewaka Barnes; Christine Griffin; Kerryellen Vroman; Acushla Dee O’Carroll; Patricia Niland; Lina Samu Print publication available from: http://www.drinkingcultures.info/Young adults in Aotearoa/New Zealand (NZ) regularly engage in heavy drinking episodes with groups of friends within a collective culture of intoxication to ‘have fun’ and ‘be sociable’. This population has also rapidly increased their use of new social networking technologies (e.g. mobile camera/ video phones; Facebook and YouTube) and are said to be obsessed with identity, image and celebrity. This research project explored the ways in which new technologies are being used by a range of young people (and others, including marketers) in drinking practices and drinking cultures in Aotearoa/NZ. It also explored how these technologies impact on young adults’ behaviours and identities, and how this varies across young adults of diverse ethnicities (Maori [indigenous people of NZ], Pasifika [people descended from the Pacific Islands] and Pakeha [people of European descent]), social classes and genders. We collected data from a large and diverse sample of young adults aged 18-25 years employing novel and innovative methodologies across three data collection stages. In total 141 participants took part in 34 friendship focus group discussions (12 Pakeha, 12 Maori and 10 Pasifika groups) while 23 young adults showed and discussed their Facebook pages during an individual interview that involved screencapture software and video recordings. Popular online material regarding drinking alcohol was also collected (via groups, interviews, and web searches), providing a database of 487 links to relevant material (including websites, apps, and games). Critical and in-depth qualitative analyses across these multimodal datasets were undertaken. Key findings demonstrated that social technologies play a crucial role in young adults’ drinking cultures and processes of identity construction. Consuming alcohol to a point of intoxication was a commonplace leisure-time activity for most of the young adult participants, and social network technologies were fully integrated into their drinking cultures. Facebook was employed by all participants and was used before, during and following drinking episodes. Uploading and sharing photos on Facebook was particularly central to young people’s drinking cultures and the ongoing creation of their identities. This involved a great deal of Facebook ‘work’ to ensure appropriate identity displays such as tagging (the addition of explanatory or identifying labels) and untagging photos. Being visible online was crucial for many young adults, and they put significant amounts of time and energy into updating and maintaining Facebook pages, particularly with material regarding drinking practices and events. However this was not consistent across the sample, and our findings revealed nuanced and complex ways in which people from different ethnicities, genders and social classes engaged with drinking cultures and new technologies in different ways, reflecting their positioning within the social structure. Pakeha shared their drinking practices online with relatively little reflection, while Pasifika and Maori participants were more likely to discuss avoiding online displays of drinking and demonstrated greater reflexive self-surveillance. Females spoke of being more aware of normative expectations around gender than males, and described particular forms of online identity displays (e.g. moderated intake, controlled selfdetermination). Participants from upper socio-economic groups expressed less concern than others about both drinking and posting material online. Celebrity culture was actively engaged with, in part at least, as a means of expressing what it is to be a young adult in contemporary society, and reinforcing the need for young people to engage in their own everyday practices of ‘celebritising’ themselves through drinking cultures online. Alcohol companies employed social media to market their products to young people in sophisticated ways that meant the campaigns and actions were rarely perceived as marketing. Online alcohol marketing initiatives were actively appropriated by young people and reproduced within their Facebook pages to present tastes and preferences, facilitate social interaction, construct identities, and more generally develop cultural capital. These commercial activities within the commercial platforms that constitute social networking systems contribute heavily to a general ‘culture of intoxication’ while simultaneously allowing young people to ‘create’ and ‘produce’ themselves online via the sharing of consumption ‘choices’, online interactions and activities

The rapid dispersal of low-mass virialised clusters

Infant mortality brought about by the expulsion of a star cluster's natal gas is widely invoked to explain cluster statistics at different ages. While a well studied problem, most recent studies of gas expulsion's effect on a cluster have focused on massive clusters, with stellar counts of order $10^4$. Here we argue that the evolutionary timescales associated with the compact low-mass clusters typical of the median cluster in the Solar neighborhood are short enough that significant dynamical evolution can take place over the ages usually associated with gas expulsion. To test this we perform {\it N}-body simulations of the dynamics of a very young star forming region, with initial conditions drawn from a large-scale hydrodynamic simulation of gravitational collapse and fragmentation. The subclusters we analyse, with populations of a few hundred stars, have high local star formation efficiencies and are roughly virialised even after the gas is removed. Over 10 Myr they expand to a similar degree as would be expected from gas expulsion if they were initially gas-rich, but the expansion is purely due to the internal stellar dynamics of the young clusters. The expansion is such that the stellar densities at 2 Myr match those of YSOs in the Solar neighborhood. We argue that at the low-mass end of the cluster mass spectrum, a deficit of clusters at 10s of Myr does not necessarily imply gas expulsion as a disruption mechanism.Comment: 11 pages, accepted to MNRAS. Updated to match accepted version: title changed, one new subsection, some new figure

Diversity of methyl halide-degrading microorganisms in oceanic and coastal waters

Methyl halides have a significant impact on atmospheric chemistry, particularly in the degradation of stratospheric ozone. Bacteria are known to contribute to the degradation of methyl halides in the oceans and marine bacteria capable of using methyl bromide and methyl chloride as sole carbon and energy source have been isolated. A genetic marker for microbial degradation of methyl bromide ( cmuA ) was used to examine the distribution and diversity of these organisms in the marine environment. Three novel marine clades of cmuA were identified in unamended seawater and in marine enrichment cultures degrading methyl halides. Two of these cmuA clades are not represented in extant bacteria, demonstrating the utility of this molecular marker in identifying uncultivated marine methyl halide-degrading bacteria. The detection of populations of marine bacteria containing cmuA genes suggests that marine bacteria employing the CmuA enzyme contribute to methyl halide cycling in the ocean

A 700 year record of Southern Hemisphere extratropical climate variability

Annually dated ice cores from West and East Antarctica provide proxies for past changes in atmospheric circulation over Antarctica and portions of the Southern Ocean, temperature in coastal West and East Antarctica, and the frequency of South Polar penetration of El Niño events. During the period AD 1700–1850, atmospheric circulation over the Antarctic and at least portions of the Southern Hemisphere underwent a mode switch departing from the out-of-phase alternation of multi-decadal long phases of EOF1 and EOF2 modes of the 850 hPa field over the Southern Hemisphere (as defined in the recent record by Thompson and Wallace, 2000; Thompson and Solomon, 2002) that characterizes the remainder of the 700 year long record. From AD 1700 to 1850, lower-tropospheric circulation was replaced by in-phase behavior of the Amundsen Sea Low component of EOF2 and the East Antarctic High component of EOF1. During the first phase of the mode switch, both West and East Antarctic temperatures declined, potentially in response to the increased extent of sea ice surrounding both regions. At the end of the mode switch, West Antarctic coastal temperatures rose and East Antarctic coastal temperatures fell, respectively, to their second highest and lowest of the record. Polar penetration of El Niño events increased during the mode switch. The onset of the AD 1700–1850 mode switch coincides with the extreme state of the Maunder Minimum in solar variability. Late 20th-century West Antarctic coastal temperatures are the highest in the record period, and East Antarctic coastal temperatures close to the lowest. Since AD 1700, extratropical regions of the Southern Hemisphere have experienced significant climate variability coincident with changes in both solar variability and greenhouse gase

The Disintegration Process in Microcrystalline Cellulose Based Tablets, Part 1: Influence of Temperature, Porosity and Superdisintegrants.

Disintegration performance was measured by analysing both water ingress and tablet swelling of pure microcrystalline cellulose (MCC) and in mixture with croscarmellose sodium using terahertz pulsed imaging (TPI). Tablets made from pure MCC with porosities of 10% and 15% showed similar swelling and transport kinetics: within the first 15 s, tablets had swollen by up to 33% of their original thickness and water had fully penetrated the tablet following Darcy flow kinetics. In contrast, MCC tablets with a porosity of 5% exhibited much slower transport kinetics, with swelling to only 17% of their original thickness and full water penetration reached after 100 s, dominated by case II transport kinetics. The effect of adding superdisintegrant to the formulation and varying the temperature of the dissolution medium between 20°C and 37°C on the swelling and transport process was quantified. We have demonstrated that TPI can be used to non-invasively analyse the complex disintegration kinetics of formulations that take place on timescales of seconds and is a promising tool to better understand the effect of dosage form microstructure on its performance. By relating immediate-release formulations to mathematical models used to describe controlled release formulations, it becomes possible to use this data for formulation design. © 2015 The Authors. Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. and the American Pharmacists Association J Pharm Sci 104:3440-3450, 2015.S.Y. would like to thank the U. K. Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for a studentship. J.S. and J.A.Z. would like to acknowledge the EPSRC for funding (EP/J007803/1).This is the final version. It was first published by Wiley at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jps.24544/abstract