Search

Global climate models (GCMs) are essential for investigating climate change, but their coarse scale limits their efficacy for climate adaptation planning at the regional scales where climate impacts manifest. Dynamical downscaling of GCM outputs better resolves regional climate and thus provides improved guidance for climate policy at regional scales. Being expensive to run, downscaling uses a subset of GCMs, necessitating careful GCM selection. This evaluation identifies a suitable subset of CMIP6 GCMs for downscaling over Australia by assessing individual GCMs against three criteria: (a) performance simulating daily climate variable distributions, climate means, extremes, and modes; (b) model independence; and (c) climate change signal diversity. Over Australia, GCMs are generally biased cold (warm) for maximum (minimum) temperature, with larger biases for minimum temperature. GCMs are generally wet biased, especially over the monsoonal north, but dry biased over eastern regions. Most GCMs show larger biases for temperature and precipitation over geographically complex, heavily populated eastern regions, relative to other regions. Evaluations identify a distinct group of 11 GCMs that perform consistently poorly across climate variables, statistics, and timescales with widespread, statistically significant biases, versus 13 GCMs that show consistent adequate‐to‐good performance with substantially reduced errors. Assessment of model independence highlights the lack of independence between several high‐performing GCMs, particularly from allied modeling groups, demonstrating the importance of careful ensemble selection when making selective samples of climate space. Once GCM climate signal diversity is considered, 6–8 mid‐to‐high‐performing, independent GCMs occupy the full range of the future climate space and, thus, are suitable for dynamical downscaling over CORDEX‐Australasia. Key Points: Per‐global climate model (GCM) performances varied markedly, though the best‐performing GCMs simulated consistently well across temperature variables and statisticsAssessment of model independence highlights the lack of independence between several high‐performing GCMsSix to eight mid‐to‐high‐performing, independent GCMs capturing a broad range of the future climate space are identified as suitable for downscaling [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increased incidences of academic misconduct in universities are compromising the reputation of higher education in Australia and increasing the work of academics responsible for the delivery of quality learning outcomes to students. Confronted with increasing instances of academic dishonesty in university classrooms, universities play a pivotal role in ensuring their academic staff are well-equipped with academic integrity knowledge. It is therefore important to understand academic staff perspectives about the training their workplaces could provide them on academic integrity. Specifically, this qualitative case study explores the opinions and perceptions of sessional or casual university academic staff on what content they would like to know about academic integrity, and how this knowledge could best be delivered to them. The study found that participants (N = 18) were genuinely interested in furthering their understanding of academic integrity issues, particularly in the areas of contract cheating, effective use of plagiarism detection tools, and developing a toolkit of skills that they could use to detect and deter plagiarism. In terms of the delivery of academic integrity training programs, webinars and orientation sessions were suggested as effective delivery mechanisms. Imparting knowledge about the content areas through the identified delivery mechanisms could enhance teaching faculty's understanding of student academic dishonesty and how to curb this behaviour proactively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Study design:A within-participant, double-blind, cross-over, randomised control trial.Objectives:To determine the short-term effects of bronchodilator therapy on respiratory function in people with recently acquired motor complete tetraplegia.Setting:Hospital, Australia.Methods:A total of 12 people with recently acquired tetraplegia were randomised to receive either a one-off dose of a bronchodilator followed by an equivalent dose of a placebo propellant between 1 day and 1 week later or visa versa. The three outcomes were forced expiratory volume in 1 s (FEV1), peak expiratory flow rate (PEF) and forced vital capacity (FVC). These were measured while supine by a blinded assessor 10 and 30 min after treatment. Data were analysed on 11 participants and reported as percentage of predicted.Results:The FEV1, FVC and PEF mean between-group differences (95% confidence interval) at 10 min post treatment were 7.3% (2.7-11.9%; P=0.003), 5.5% (1.6-9.4%; P=0.008) and 20.1% (1.1-40.4%; P=0.039). Similar effects were observed at 30 min for FVC and FEV1 but not for PEF.Conclusion:Bronchodilator therapy has a beneficial effect on FEV1, FVC and PEF in participants with recently acquired tetraplegia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]