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ABSTRACTThe criminalisation of hip-hop artists is not new. The focus of attention for police has tended to be on artists of colour (in particular) who include descriptions of violence in their lyrics. The sprawling multicultural western suburbs of Sydney Australia have become a fertile breeding-ground for a wave of drill rap artists, some of whom explore violent themes. This dynamic scene was kicked off by Pacifica group ONEFOUR. Popular internationally, ONEFOUR have been subject to prolonged police and media attention resulting in cancelled tours and untested allegations of criminality. This article uses a framework of musicriminology to explore the aesthetic and cultural elements of ONEFOUR's influence and infamy. It also places Australian drill music in its socio-historical and post-colonial context to explain why it has attracted censure. We suggest that ONEFOUR's brand of Australian drill represents a Western Sydney ‘other’; a population both under-represented (in terms a cultural voice) and over-represented (in the criminal justice system) (Ahmad, 2013). The dark aesthetic, unnerving sonics and bleak lyrics of some drill exposes the underbelly of post-colonial neo-liberalism and groups economically excluded and socially marginalised. It tells stories abhorrent to moral gate-keepers and creating an atmosphere of geo-spatialised and sonically-informed danger.

Sinéad O'Connor was well known for her deeply emotional voice, her outspoken stance on political issues - especially her critique of the Catholic Church - and her explorations of spiritualism and religion, but what I want to talk about, mostly, was her extraordinary songwriting. O'Connor went on to make eight more very diverse albums, including interpretations of traditional Irish folk music and classic roots reggae music. Captivating and cathartic, a visionary and a truth-teller: playing Sinéad O'Connor's music was my education. [Extracted from the article]

Music as a crime The criminalisation of rap and hip-hop is not new, as it has long been perceived as a threat to social order and public safety. The Royal Easter Show and the NSW Police recently announced a ban on "rapper music" following the murder of Pacific young person, Uati "Pele" Faletolu last year. No, music doesn't cause crime - not even "drill rap". [Extracted from the article]

With Windows 8 now firmly on the horizon - thanks to a public beta release and an explosion of activity in the IT world is likely to ensue. Having major [...]

Contemporary Australian country music is marked by a fascination with the past — both its own and the nation’s. This paper will examine how that fascination grew with the construction of the NSW regional town of Tamworth as ‘Country Music Capital’ from 1973 to 2010. It will argue that the city — and by extension country music culture — began to see itself as the repository of an authentic Australian rural culture. In particular, Tamworth has sought to preserve what it saw as a stylistically pure and distinctive musical form: the bush ballad. It has done this in a variety of theatres: museums, awards for ‘bush ballads’ and ‘heritage’ songs, halls of fame and in the songs of popular performers.This article will examine how the past has been interpreted by country music in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It will ask whether country music interrogates or celebrates the past. It will also ask whose and what heritage does country music respect. In doing so, it will consider the role of patriotism in country music and the place of alternative narratives, particularly Aboriginal narratives, within this patriotism.This article has been peer reviewed.

In this review, we outline interventions that can be used with children to prepare them for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and to limit their motion during medical imaging procedures. Children, especially those diagnosed with a developmental disability or other mental health challenges, may have difficulty remaining still for long periods of time. Children also experience fear, anxiety and curiosity in the MRI environment due to the noise, size of the machines, and overall overwhelming experience. These difficulties can affect the ability of researchers and other professionals to perform clinical tests such MRI, which require the child to remain motionless for the duration of the scan. A few studies have described methods used to prepare children for the MRI environment and train them for successful completion of the MRI scans. These include standard operating procedures as used in clinical scanning, such as appropriate information dissemination, standard physical restraint procedures and sedation. Other motion reduction techniques range from low-cost nontechnical but people heavy approaches, such as mock scanner training sessions, systematic desensitization and guided imagery techniques to more technical engineering type approaches, such as behavior feedback methods and the use of postprocessing motion correction algorithms.

We examined the relationship between three discrimination skills (visual, visual matching-to-sample, and auditory-visual) and four stimulus modalities (object, picture, spoken, and video) in assessing preferences of leisure activities for 7 adults with developmental disabilities. Three discrimination skills were measured using the Assessment of Basic Learning Abilities Test. Three participants mastered a visual discrimination task, but not visual matching-to-sample and auditory-visual discriminations; two participants mastered visual and visual matching-to-sample discriminations, but not auditory-visual discrimination, and two participants showed all three discriminations. The most and least preferred activities, identified through paired-stimulus preference assessment using objects, were presented to each participant in each of the four modalities using a reversal design. The results showed that (1) participants with visual discrimination alone showed a preference for their preferred activities in the object modality only; (2) those with visual and visual matching-to-sample discriminations, but not auditory-visual discrimination, showed a preference for their preferred activities in the object but not in the spoken modality, and mixed results in the pictorial and video modalities; and (3) those with all three discriminations showed a preference for their preferred activities in all four modalities. These results provide partial replications of previous findings on the relationship between discriminations and object, pictorial, and spoken modalities, and extend previous research to include video stimuli. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has shown that performance on the Assessment of Basic Learning Abilities(ABLA) test correlates with language assessments for persons with developmental disabilities. This study investigated whether performance on ABLA Level 6, an auditory-visual discrimination, predicts performance on a receptive language task with persons with severe developmental disabilities. Five participants who passed ABLA Level 6, and five who failed ABLA Level 6, were each tested on five 2-choice discriminations that required them to point to pictures of common objects after hearing their names. Four of the five participants who had failed ABLA Level 6 failed all of the receptive name recognition tasks. All five participants who had passed ABLA Level 6 passed all of the name recognition tasks. The practical implications of these results are discussed.

The single-stimulus (SS) preference assessment procedure has been described as more appropriate than paired stimulus (PS) procedure for "lower functioning" individuals, but this guideline's vagueness limits its usefulness. We administered the SS and PS preference assessment procedures with food items to seven individuals with severe or profound developmental disabilities who scored at level 2 of the Assessment of Basic Learning Abilities (ABLA) and seven who scored at ABLA level 3. Thirteen of the 14 participants also received assessments (PS and SS), with non-food items. The two procedures were about equally effective for both groups, and with both types of stimuli, although the PS procedure produced more refined preference hierarchies. Most participants showed moderate to high correlations in preference scores between the two procedures for both and non-food items. These results suggest that, for individuals who score at either ABLA level 2 or ABLA 3, the SS and the PS procedures are equally likely to identify preferred stimuli. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several letters to the editor are presented in response to the previous articles including the profile for Formula One driver Mark Webber in the March 2009 issue, the contribution of Dan Mitchell to the "Comebacks" section in the March 2009 issue regarding Aaron Scott's article "What's Not To Like?," and "Giant Jack," by Merv Collins in the January 2009 issue.