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The global political environment in the twenty-first century is proving dynamic and challenging for Australian policymakers and political institutions. Australian Politics in the Twenty-first Century contextualises the Australian political landscape through an institutional lens. It examines the legislative and judicial bodies, minor parties, lobby groups, the media and the citizenry, providing historical and contemporary facts, explaining political issues and examining new challenges. The second edition has been updated to reflect the application of political theories in today's civic environment. New spotlight boxes highlight issues including marriage equality, COVID-19 and federalism, the inclusion of First Nations peoples in the political system, and gender equality in public policy. Short-answer, reflection, research and discussion questions encourage students to test and extend their knowledge of each topic and to clearly link theory to practice. Written in an accessible and engaging style, Australian Politics in the Twenty-First Century is an invaluable introduction to the Australian political system.

With the advent of smartphones and their ability to know their own location, there is an enormous potential to collect location data for many purposes, including travel-related research. While the ability to create smartphone travel survey applications is potentially revolutionary, the development of such applications remains sufficiently difficult to be beyond a typical transportation researcher’s ability. Of course, development of an app is only the first challenge associated with using such tools; information also needs to be inferred from collected data. The Itinerum platform was created to overcome the barriers facing the use of smartphones for transportation research. The Itinerum platform is a smartphone travel survey platform that allows researchers to customize the Itinerum app with their own questions and prompts, distribute these surveys, monitor, visualize and increasingly process collected data without a background in programming. With the platform, a customized study can be created in 10 min. Keywords: Smartphones, Travel surveys, Web platform

In an era of widespread party membership decline, there is debate over the utility, within the ‘European’ tradition, of conceptualising party membership as the locus of individual party engagement, and of maintaining membership and supportership as distinct categories in analysing party activism. This debate is particularly relevant to Green parties, which, through their particular social movement origins and emphasis on grass-roots democracy, bring into question the assumption that the activities and profile of members and supporters are functionally different. Using original data gathered from two surveys of Australian Greens party members and supporters undertaken in 2012 and 2013, the political activity, associational membership, ideological position, and demographic characteristics of these two groups are compared. While active party members are distinctive in their party-specific political activities and their ideological positioning, there is much less difference between the rest of the for...

Green parties promote decentralization as a functional organizing principle but also a normative goal. This has been most vividly realized through the creation of comparatively devolved party structures. In federations, this can assume a territorial dimension and may lead to the adoption of confederal or federal models of party organization. Surprisingly little work has been undertaken on these arrangements when they have been implemented by green parties. This article explores whether the normative commitment by green parties to decentralized party arrangements is sufficient to preserve the integrity of dispersed party structures. This is done by examining the Australian Greens. We find that there has been gradual growth of the party’s national stratum, even in spite of formal provisions which guarantee the autonomy of the state organizations. It is argued that one of the main agents driving this outcome has been the Greens’ expanding federal parliamentary wing.

The 2007 Australian federal election has been called the ‘YouTube election’ and the moniker ‘Twitter election’ applied to the 2010 British General Election due to the use of these communication mediums by the major parties. However, while the information and communication technology campaigning of major parties has clearly improved considerably, is this also true of non-major parties such as the Australian Greens? In the early 2000s the Greens were claimed to be the equals of the major parties in internet electioneering, but much has changed since the 2001 Australian federal election. This study examines the development of electronic communication and campaign tools by the Australian Greens between the 2007 and 2010 Australian federal elections, in particular the problems and hurdles the Australian Greens, as a decentralized party, faced in developing a nationally coherent electronic campaign framework. Of particular interest is the impact the existing organizational structures of the party had upon the c...

This paper presents a scalable, discreet, mobile video camera system that takes elevated video data of roadway locations for traffic safety analysis. The video is used to extract microscopic traffic parameters that include road user trajectories, lane changes, and speeds. Collected video data are processed with an open source automatic tracking tool. Trajectories can then be used to analyze road user behavior for specific locations (intersections or highway sections) or to evaluate the safety effectiveness of a treatment. The different elements of the system, including data collection and processing, are discussed. To illustrate the system's versatility, applications (case studies) illustrate the use of the video camera system and open source video-tracking and analysis tool. These studies include video-based analysis of conflict at highway ramps and behavioral analysis of pedestrians and cyclists at signalized intersections that includes red light violations.

Data on pedestrian activity, including volumes, walking speed, and trajectories, are used by transportation agencies and researchers for planning, design, and analysis. Several technologies are available for automatic collection of pedestrian data; however, all have inherent limitations in either functionality or monetary cost. Also, most technologies provide only counts. This paper proposes the use of an inexpensive motion-sensing device, Microsoft Kinect, which can track multiple people in low light conditions and can be combined with existing video-based daytime tracking. The tracking software and speed estimation methodologies are described, and indoor and outdoor studies show the system's effectiveness at determining pedestrian volumes and walking speeds. The accuracy of speed data is very satisfactory, with correlation of 98% or more for video data validation speeds. The accuracy of pedestrian volume data varies with traffic conditions; however, in low to moderate traffic conditions its performance is acceptable, with an undercounting error near 8%. The applications of the sensor and its complementarity with other sensors are discussed, as these are the first step toward a multisensor system.

Are the Australian Greens, as a political organisation, experiencing a similar transformation to green parties in Europe in moving from a movement-based party to a pragmatic parliamentary party? What are the implications of changes in the party organisation, and how key party activists respond to this? The debate surrounding party leadership, and particularly parliamentary leadership, is a central issue. As the Greens have increased their parliamentary representation, the question of access to resources, as much as access to media, has brought the leadership issue to the forefront. The resignation of Senator Bob Brown as federal leader on 13 April 2012 has sharpened that focus. This article explores the role of the ‘party organisational activist’ and, in particular, how party activists perceive and respond to issues of leadership.

We report the diagnosis and surgical management of the interesting case of a patient with a gastrointestinal stromal tumour (GIST).

The increase in identification of putative biomarkers and opportunities to develop tailored treatments are due to emergence of omics technologies. Application of pharmacogenetic knowledge with the help of quick and cheap companion diagnostics in the primary care setting is expected to deliver improved treatment and reduced heathcare costs. Warfarin and aspirin are the two most widely prescribed drugs for preventing cardiovascular diseases. Long term aspirin use has also been shown to reduce risk, recurrence and mortality from colorectal cancer. However, they both have narrow therapeutic windows and several genetic polymorphisms have been noted to influence their dose and efficacy. We therefore have launched two collaborative projects: first, to study the genetics of warfarin safety in the Gujarati Indian population and second, to identify further polymorphisms that modulates aspirin’s colorectal cancer chemopreventive efficacy. Understanding the impact of polymorphisms on dose and efficacy for these drugs would lead to development of a combined panel of markers that would predict accurate therapeutic dose with minimal risk for adverse reactions. These markers will be deployed at the point of care settings using a novel handheld genotyping device which will use disposable microfluidic cassettes and silicon nanowires currently developed by QuantuMDx. Results, future work, opportunities and barriers will be examined.

Tritium and Carbon 14 analogs of the angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitor ketoACE were synthesized and their oral absorption, metabolism and excretion in rats were investigated. KetoACE, a ketomethylene analog of the tripeptide Bz-Phe-Gly-Pro, was slowly absorbed at a 35% level upon oral administration. It is rapidly eliminated from the blood with a half-life of about 10 minutes. Its excretion is primarily via the bile duct and it is excreted as 80% unchanged drug. The only identified metabolite consisting of 5-10% of the excreted radioactivity was determined to be the reduced ketoACE in which the ketone group was reduced to a hydroxyl.