A Commonwealth Religious Discrimination Act for Australia?

There have been a number of attempts to create a constitutional bill of rights in Australia, but all have failed. The most recent exploration of the idea of a constitutional bill of rights by the Rudd government in 2010 stalled because of church opposition. Yet Australia has embraced international norms outlawing racial and sexual discrimination passed as ordinary legislation using the Commonwealth’s external affairs power. This paper discusses whether religious freedom is a norm sufficiently well established in international law that it could also be passed as ordinary legislation in Australia. It then investigates what an Australian religious freedom law might look like and whether it could be crafted so as to allay the church opposition which has shut down previous attempts to create a constitutional bill of rights

Book Review: Religion in a New Key

A review of M. Darrol Bryant\u27s Religion in a New Key

Slow Diffusive Gravitational Instability Before Decoupling

Radiative diffusion damps acoustic modes at large comoving wavenumber (k) before decoupling (``Silk damping''). In a simple WKB analysis, neglecting moments of the temperature distribution beyond the quadrupole, damping appears in the acoustic mode as a term of order ik^2/(taudot) where taudot is the scattering rate per unit conformal time. Although the Jeans instability is stabilized on scales smaller than the adiabatic Jeans length, I show that the medium is linearly unstable to first order in (1/taudot) to a slow diffusive mode. At large comoving wavenumber, the characteristic growth rate becomes independent of spatial scale and constant: (t_{KH}a)^-1 ~ (128 pi G/9 kappa_T c)(rho_m/rho_b), where "a" is the scale factor, rho_m and rho_b are the matter and baryon energy density, respectively, and kappa_T is the Thomson opacity. This is the characteristic timescale for a fluid parcel to radiate away its thermal energy content at the Eddington limit, analogous to the Kelvin-Helmholz (KH) time for a massive star or the Salpeter time for black hole growth. Although this mode grows at all times prior to decoupling and on scales smaller than the horizon, the growth time is long, about 100 times the age of the universe at decoupling. Thus, it modifies the density and temperature perturbations on small scales only at the percent level. The physics of this mode is already accounted for in the popular codes CMBFAST and CAMB, but is typically neglected in analytic studies of the growth of primordial perturbations. This work clarifies the physics of this instability in the epoch before decoupling, and emphasizes that the universe is formally unstable on scales below the horizon, even in the limit of large taudot. Analogous instabilities at yet earlier epochs are also mentioned. (Abridged)Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, emulateapj, comments welcom

Fail-safe numerical control

System provides duplicate set of control logic circuitry. Comparators insure that the same data is present in both circuits. If any discrepancy is found, the machine is automatically stopped, before damage can occur

Practices of Nurse Practitioners in Screening for Hepatitis C

Presented to the Faculty of the University of Alaska Anchorage in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF SCIENCEThe purpose of this project was to determine both hepatitis C virus (HCV) screening rates and the percentage of cases diagnosed among adults born between 1945 and 1965 in a general practice clinic staffed by nurse practitioners (NPs). A descriptive study was conducted using a chart review of all patients born between 1945 and 1965 seen by NPs in a primary care clinic during a three month period of time. Data was collected on the total number of patients in the target group, those born between 1945 and 1965, as well as each patient’s gender, birth date, if screened for HCV, result of screening, and the reason for screening. Findings revealed that screening rates were suboptimal, with only six out of 178 patients in the target group having been screened for HCV. Age and gender did not appear to be a factor in whether or not a patient was screened