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Over the past three decades, a body of research has highlighted the benefits and challenges of what might collectively be referred to as critical pedagogical approaches to Health and Physical Education Teacher Education (HPETE). This research shows that praxis facilitated through critical pedagogies can challenge dominant accountability regimes in HPETE, by animating the discourse of democracy and interrogating and denaturalizing the conditions of oppression. The aim of this study was to explore the (im)possibilities of praxis when the lead author attempted to transition to online teaching. Theoretically, we are guided by the work of bell hooks, and specifically her 'engaged pedagogy'. Participatory action research framed this study. Participants included the lead author (a teacher educator), a critical friend, and two additional teacher educators. Data collected included: (a) lead researcher observations; (b) collaborative group meetings between the lead author and the two other teacher educators; (c) meetings between the lead author and the critical friend; (d) teacher educator focus group; and (e) artefacts. Findings are discussed under two themes. First, "building relationships as a foundation to cultivating a learning community"; this theme relates to the challenges and facilitators to getting to know our 'faceless students' and building an interactive relationship with them in an online environment. The second theme constructed from the data was "commitment to a process of self-actualization that promotes teachers' and students' wellbeing"; under this theme we describe and interrogate how mutual participation, vulnerability and risk taking were cultivated in challenging university and pedagogical contexts.

Smart infrastructure is positioned as central to the liveability and viability of rural and regional towns in Australia. The Australian Government's Smart Cities Plan and Regional Connectivity Program includes Smart Investment in regional areas and the New South Wales Government has prioritised connectivity and telecommunications infrastructural development through the Regional Digital Connectivity program. And yet regional and rural communities are typically excluded from the evidence base for smart technologies and services. Local Aboriginal Land Councils are also important stakeholders in managing the digital processes associated with information and infrastructure moving across different Countries. This paper draws on data from the 'It just works!': Regional and rural consumer understandings of smart technologies in North West New South Wales project, including over 130 survey responses and interviews with shire councillors, land councillors, and consumers on smart development and Internet infrastructure in the region. In the areas surveyed, smart regional policy is variously emerging, non‐existent, or assembled from existing policy domains and regulation involving the Internet, telecommunications, regional development, First Nations, and local government. We argue that regional and rural understandings of growth and development are experienced through the infrastructuring processes of Internet quality, availability, and speed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: Studies of published clinical trials involving children have shown frequent omissions in key aspects of design and conduct, but these problems may be artefactual and due to editorial processes and space limitations. To determine actual design and conduct, we analysed the completeness of key domains in trial protocols involving children submitted to Human Research Ethics Committees.Methods: The ethics committees of all eight children's hospitals in Australia were invited to participate. De-identified trial protocols submitted for review in 2012 were evaluated using a checklist derived from Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials, the Cochrane Risk of Bias Tool and Good Clinical Practice guidelines.Results: Four ethics committees agreed to participate, and 69 protocols were analysed. The domains almost always reported were clustered around the background and trial plan (planned interventions for each group (99%), specific objectives (97%) and scientific background (96%)). Risk-of-bias domains such as random sequence generation and blinding of participants were often reported (75-90%). Domains least reported were clustered around the statistical analysis plan (66%), specified intention-to-treat analysis (54%), the justification for the proposed trial based upon a systematic review (48%) and age-specific outcomes (48%).Conclusions: Protocols of trials involving children assessed by ethics committees generally include details on background and basic design, but many key domains in trial design and conduct are not covered. Despite widespread recognition of how problems in the design and conduct of trials may lead to unreliable results, investigators still appear to be omitting key elements in trial protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a national survey of witnessing racism, ten per cent of respondents reported an event where they perceived a white Australian had been the target of racism. We discuss the social and political context in which claims of anti-white ‘racism’ have come to the fore. The paper introduces three analytical entry points from which to approach the problem of anti-white ‘racism’: an individual analysis, an analysis of power and its effects, and a historical and structural analysis. These entry points cascade into each other, revealing both divergence in how these reported experiences might be understood and the tensions between different ways of approaching the analytical problem of claims of anti-white ‘racism’. We explore the characteristics of those who report witnessing anti-white ‘racism’ and examine the contexts within which anti-white ‘racism’ is perceived to have occurred. The racialised incidents reported are analysed in their specificities; we attend to the individuals involved and their social positioning, the historical context and how the event relates to structures and histories of domination. The paper highlights the asymmetry of claims to race based victimhood, emphasising the differences between anti-white ‘racism’ and other experiences of racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among incidences of everyday racism, offensive jokes are writ large as a way of establishing and maintaining social norms and policing the boundaries of the social body. Yet humour's possible deployment toward anti-racist ends constitutes an under-researched problem. This paper examines an incident of supposedly humorous blackface performance on an Australian family variety television show. The incident was notable as an occasion where humour was used with racist effects but also to anti-racist ends. Literature on anti-racist action commonly assumes that responses to racism should have the gravity commensurate to the problem. We argue that humour enables actors to take a ‘decommitted’ relationship to their actions, creating the perception of distance between themselves and the action. While this capacity to decommit enables racist actions to masquerade as ‘just a joke’, it may also form the basis of a less confrontational, but potentially powerful, form of anti-racist action. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Australian megachurch, Hillsong, is as well known for its music and spectacle as it is for the content of its religious ideas. This is largely due, as Connell argues in his geography of Hillsong, to the peculiar mix of the theological and the modern that a highly globalised and mediatised context can today produce. This paper re-examines the phenomenon of Hillsong through the theory of affect, which has gained notable analytical purchase in geography in recent years. More specifically, it uses the concept of 'affective labour' to analyse the specific ways in which bodies are put to work in the spaces of Hillsong worship. We demonstrate the way that Hillsong produces and mobilises affect in order to attain the collective experience of the spectacle, which is so crucial to Hillsong's visibility as a social phenomenon and also to its recruitment of the individual member into the logic and ethos of the church as a whole. We indicate the importance for the success of Hillsong of producing particular kinds of subject, namely, subjects who are at once comfortable, enthusiastic and loyal. By recruiting its followers as affective labourers towards a shared evangelical cause, the embodied and vaguely felt sense of potential of members is mobilised towards the spectacular phenomenon that is the Hillsong church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In early 2009 Keith Windschuttle, an Australian historian and editor of the conservative journal Quadrant, was caught out having accepted for publication a fraudulent piece of academic research, a hoax which aimed to reveal the hypocrisy of Windschuttle’s public stance on standards of scholarship. Over 10 years after the Sokal affair, the Windschuttle hoax raises in a new way the question of the relationship of social science to the problem of truth. We argue that, through its transgression of the rules and norms of social scientific practice, the hoax can draw our attention to those very rules and norms, affirming our commitment to them. In pursuing this argument, we consider what it means for social science to play its particular ‘language game’, highlighting the similarities and differences between the hoax’s and social sciences’ efforts to ‘seem true’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Electricity generation is one of the major contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions. Transitioning the World's energy economy to a lower carbon future will require significant investment in a variety of cleaner technologies, including renewables and nuclear power. In the short term, improving the efficiency of fossil fuel combustion in energy generation can provide an important contribution. Availability of life cycle GHG intensity data will allow decision-makers to move away from overly simplistic assertions about the relative merits of certain fuels, and focus on the complete picture, especially the critical roles of technology selection and application of best practice. This analysis compares the life-cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) intensities per megawatt-hour (MWh) of electricity produced for a range of Australian and other energy sources, including coal, conventional liquefied natural gas (LNG), coal seam gas LNG, nuclear and renewables, for the Australian export market. When Australian fossil fuels are exported to China, life cycle greenhouse gas emission intensity in electricity production depends to a significant degree on the technology used in combustion. LNG in general is less GHG intensive than black coal, but the gap is smaller for gas combusted in open cycle gas turbine plant (OCGT) and for LNG derived from coal seam gas (CSG). On average, conventional LNG burned in a conventional OCGT plant is approximately 38% less GHG intensive over its life cycle than black coal burned in a sub-critical plant, per MWh of electricity produced. However, if OCGT LNG combustion is compared to the most efficient new ultra-supercritical coal power, the GHG intensity gap narrows considerably. Coal seam gas LNG is approximately 13--20% more GHG intensive across its life cycle, on a like-for like basis, than conventional LNG. Upstream fugitive emissions from CSG (assuming best practice gas extraction techniques) do not materially alter the life cycle GHG intensity rankings, such is the dominance of end-use combustion, but application of the most recent estimates of the 20-year global warming potential (GWP) increases the contribution of fugitives considerably if best practice fugitives management is not assumed. However, if methane leakage approaches the elevated levels recently reported in some US gas fields (circa 4% of gas production) and assuming a 20-year methane GWP, the GHG intensity of CSG-LNG generation is on a par with sub-critical coal-fired generation. The importance of applying best practice to fugitives management in Australia's emerging natural gas industry is evident. When exported to China for electricity production, LNG was found to be 22--36 times more GHG intensive than wind and concentrated solar thermal (CST) power and 13--21 times more GHG intensive than nuclear power which, even in the post-Fukushima world, continues to be a key option for global GHG reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past decade has seen considerable attention being given to advertising and the elderly in Australia. With the older population growing in size and influence, this attention has come from commercial interests as well as from governments and non-government organisations that are addressing the welfare of older Australians. Also, the relationship between advertising and the elderly has been the focus of a range of criticisms and concerns. This interest in the older consumer accompanies two other significant developments. Advertising and the media in general have undergone radical developments, primarily but not exclusively through the impact of digitisation with online advertising proliferating. Also, the notion of the elderly as a social category and an identity has undergone dramatic transformation. This paper examines these developments by focusing on advertisements for 'retirement homes'. Due to the uniquely special place of 'home' in the individual's life and, importantly, to shifts in the notion, experience, and commodification of 'home', this specific focus provides a valuable site for unravelling complex issues around advertising and the older Australian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on the use of humor and satire in the political climate of former Australian Prime Minister John Howard's administration. As the government attempted to quell dissent, humor was used to engage the public, critique politics and politicians, and highlight the absurd in Australia. The article discusses the stunts performed by performance group The Chaser and the pranks pulled on the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). Information is also provided on civil society, civic engagement, neo-liberalism, and moral geography.

Presents a study that examined the success of urban riparian revegetation projects using remnant vegetation as a reference community in Australia. Assessment of the effectiveness of restoration projects in the country; Application of the stream channelization process in the study; Information on the results of the Non-Metric Multidimensional Scaling ordinations of the project.

Deals with the Australian film, 'Looking for Alibrandi,' by Kate Woods. Crucial differences between each generation of migrants; Representation of food at the beginning and the end of the film; Target demographics; Ghassan Hage's study of the consumption and the symbolism of ethnic foods; Issues of identity and gender.

• Blue gum plantations can increase koala habitat but harvest is a threat to koalas. • We monitored koalas through harvest using a BACI design and GPS monitoring. • Koalas responded to harvest by moving into adjacent habitat. • Impacts of harvesting can be minimised by 'spotting' koalas and retaining trees. Plantation forests are increasing worldwide and generally have lower biodiversity value than surrounding native vegetation. However, when established on previously cleared land, they can provide important habitat for some wildlife species and have positive conservation outcomes. In southern Australia, the establishment of southern blue gum (Eucalyptus globulus) plantations on cleared land has expanded the area of koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) habitat; however, koalas are at risk of injury, death and displacement when plantations are harvested. Consequently, an understanding of the response of koalas to harvesting is vital for developing management strategies that allow for plantation harvest while also improving welfare outcomes for koalas. We used GPS tracking and a before-after-control-impact (BACI) design to investigate the impact of blue gum plantation harvest on koala survival, body mass, reproduction, and movements. A total of 44 koalas (17 males, 27 females) from two plantations (one harvested, one unharvested) were monitored for 8 months encompassing before (5 weeks), during (11.5 weeks) and after (15.5 weeks) harvest. Survival was high with only two koalas (harvested plantation) dying of unknown causes but neither considered to be a direct result of harvesting. Harvesting did not have any detectable impact on body mass and pouch young production and only a minor effect on the amount of time koalas spent moving. By the end of the study period, 79% of the koalas originally living in the harvested plantation had moved to the surrounding plantations, while the remainder stayed within the harvested area in unharvested trees. In the unharvested plantation, 18% moved out and 82% remained. We attribute the high survival during harvest to active searching by koala 'spotters' ahead of harvesting machinery and subsequent retention of each koala's tree and the surrounding eight trees. We suggest that the proximity of the harvested plantation to adjacent plantations facilitated safe dispersal of koalas out of the plantation, increasing the probability of survival and reducing the energy and movement distances. Our findings suggest that the plantation harvesting can result in minimal impact on resident koalas but that the influence of landscape context around harvested plantations should be the subject of future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: To explore Australian hospital pharmacy services provided to clinical drug trials in 2007; and to compare the results with data from similar surveys conducted in 1989 and 1994. Method: Questionnaires were sent to pharmacy managers of 301 public and private Australian hospitals. Results: 164 hospitals responded to the survey. The response rate (55%), demographics and number of hospitals conducting clinical drug trials (75%) did not differ significantly in 1989, 1994 and 2007. However, the number of hospital pharmacies reporting 30 or more clinical drug trials had more than tripled between 1989 (n = 11) and 2007 (n = 38). From 1994 to 2007 there was a 300% increase in the number of pharmacy departments who reported spending 20 hours/week or more on clinical trials. In 1994 and 2007, pharmacy departments with 30 or more clinical trials reported that they had a dedicated clinical trials pharmacist. By 2007, most hospital pharmacies (70%) were funded for over 50% of their clinical trials; a significant increase from 5% in 1989 and 32% in 1994. Most hospital pharmacies (78%) dispensed more than 75% of the investigational drugs within their hospitals. Pharmacist involvement in the review of trial protocols by membership of institutional human research ethics committees had tripled between 1989 (n = 14) and 2007 (n = 43). Conclusion: Specialisation and expertise to conduct clinical drug trials by hospital pharmacists is recognised by their increased involvement with human research ethics committees, increased funding to pharmacies, more specialist clinical trial pharmacists, and pharmacists dispensing drugs for clinical trials conducted in hospitals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Human immunodeficiency virus self-testing (HIVST) is a promising approach to improve HIV testing coverage. We aimed to understand HIV testing preferences of men who have sex with men (MSM) to optimize HIVST implementation.Methods: Discrete choice experiments (DCEs) were conducted among HIV-negative MSM living in Australia and aged ≥18 years. Men completed 1 of 2 DCEs: DCETest for preferred qualities of HIV testing (price, speed, window period, test type, and collector of specimen) and DCEKits for preferred qualities of HIVST kits (price, location of access, packaging, and usage instructions). Latent class conditional logit regression was used to explore similarities (or "classes") in preference behavior.Results: Overall, the study recruited 1606 men: 62% born in Australia, who had an average age of 36.0 years (SD 11.7), and a self-reported median of 4 (interquartile range 2-8) sexual partners in the last 6 months. The respondents to DCETest was described by 4 classes: "prefer shorter window period" (36%), "prefer self-testing" (27%), "prefer highly accurate tests" (22%), and "prefer low prices" (15%). Respondents to DCEKits were described by 4 classes: "prefer low prices" (48%), "prefer retail access (from pharmacy or online stores)" (29%), "prefer access at sex venues" (15%), and "prefer to buy from healthcare staff" (12%). Preferences varied by when someone migrated to Australia, age, frequency of testing, and number of sexual partners.Conclusion: A subset of MSM, particularly infrequent testers, value access to HIVST. Expanding access to HIVST kits through online portals and pharmacies and at sex venues should be considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]