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Intuition as a Source of Legal Knowledge
No full textLegal knowledge discovery is often depicted as a highly reflective process. However, I argue that intuitive judgements play an integral role in determining legal cases; they therefore represent an important source of legal knowledge. I begin by presenting two perspectives on the relationship between intuition and knowledge in legal decision-making—one inspired by depictions of skill in the classical Chinese Daoist text, the Zhuangzi, and the second drawing on contemporary work in social psychology. I then contend that legal intuitions have three salient characteristics with implications for how we understand the content of law. First, legal intuitions are foundational; they typically precede and therefore influence other legal knowledge discovery processes. Second, legal intuitions are holistic; they take account not only of the content of legal materials, but also of the natural, social and normative context for a legal decision. Third, legal intuitions are dynamic; they change over time as the law and its context changes. These features of legal intuitions entail a claim about legal knowledge which I call the explosion thesis. This thesis holds that there is no clear and consistent separation between legal and other forms of knowledge; all relevant propositions about the natural, social and normative world form part of the law
IGARSS 2025 - 2025 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium
No full textChinese Celtis are tree species that have, over time, become a threat to the flora and faunal habitat of native Australian species in New South Wales and Queensland. Early detection has become essential for monitoring its spread and implementing targeted management strategies for the conservation of native ecosystems. Observing the distribution of this weed is made easier by data collected and processed using remote sensing methods. Furthermore, high-resolution images are favoured since they are more likely to differentiate Chinese Celtis from other native grasses and trees. In this research project, we investigate the use of UAV-acquired very high-resolution multispectral imagery to map the spatial distribution of invasive trees in a relatively small region along the Brisbane River. The spectral details of the vegetation were emphasised by calculating vegetation indices like NDVI and NDWI, while spatial patterns were quantified by extracting texture-based features. Several machine-learning models were then trained for classification using these features as input. AutoML tool in ArcGIS Pro was employed to automate model selection and tuning, helping streamline the workflow. Metrices such as confusion matrix, precision, recall and f1-score were used for model evaluation. Among the tested models, LightGBM (Light Gradient Boosting Machine) achieved the best classification performance of 96.64%. While UAVs are limited in large-scale coverage, their use in localised or high-priority areas provides an efficient and cost-effective option for detailed ecological monitoring. Future research could combine UAV imagery with images from other sensors, like LiDAR or hyperspectral, to improve classification accuracy in case of larger regions and address similar issues occurring in the environment
From practice to pedagogy: A model of praxis-focused creative arts assessment in initial teacher education
No full textIn response to the growing need for authentic, pedagogically sound assessment in Initial Teacher Education (ITE), this study presents a model of praxis-focused Creative Arts assessment designed to integrate arts-making, critical reflection, and pedagogical theorising. Drawing on a multi-site, collaborative autoethnographic study involving six Australian universities, the research uses document analysis and thematic analysis of student survey data to identify critical characteristics that underpin effective praxis focused assessment: meaningful context, embodied arts engagement, and critical reflection, which collectively contribute to theory-practice integration. The study results in a theoretically grounded and empirically supported model of praxis-focused assessment that is affirmed as a pedagogical tool for preparing confident, competent arts educators. The model offers a framework for assessment in Creative Arts ITE, enhancing student engagement and classroom readiness while addressing contemporary challenges such as
generative AI and online learning
Understanding aged care emergency department presentations: The voices of nurses from residential aged care facilities
No full textObjective: To explore the perceptions of registered nurses and personal care workers in residential aged care facilities (RACFs) regarding factors contributing to early clinical deterioration and potentially unnecessary hospital presentations.
Background: Persistent workforce shortages, inadequate staffing levels, inconsistent care standards, and suboptimal communication in RACFs contribute to increased hospital transfers. However, many hospital presentations from RACFS are unwarranted and avoidable, and many residents could be better treated by alternative means in place.
Study design and methods: This study used a qualitative methodology in which semi-structured focus groups with registered nurses and personal care workers from two private RACFs in Queensland were used to gather in-depth accounts of experience and perceptions. Data was analysed using Braun and Clarke's reflexive thematic analysis approach.
Results: Four major themes emerged: 1) Clinical decision-making and confidence under pressure, with RNs reporting low confidence and anxiety regarding whether or not to transfer; 2) Organisational and interprofessional dynamics, with staff describing tensions with emergency and ambulance services; 3) Clinical reasoning and support structures, where staff described the value of Nurse Practitioners and clinical guidelines in decision making; 4) PCW role clarity and communication, where uncertainty about scope of practice and fragmented handover procedures were described.
Conclusion: Hospital transfer decisions in aged care are complex and heavily influenced by the experience and confidence of Registered Nurses (RNs). Less experienced RNs tend to make more cautious decisions, sometimes leading to avoidable transfers. Nurse Practitioners (NPs) help support better decisions, but organisational pressures and unclear roles, especially for Personal Care Workers (PCWs), create challenges. These factors collectively promoted risk-averse decision-making and increased reliance on hospital transfers. Improving training, clarifying roles, and fostering teamwork can reduce unnecessary transfers and improve care quality.
Implications for research, policy, and practice: There is a need to further investigate the impact of RN experience levels on hospital transfer rates. More attention needs to be given to developing effective models for integrating NPs into aged care teams. Further study the role and training needs of PCWs in early detection and decision-making
The Professional Ethics of Christian Lawyers in Australia
No full textThis chapter explores some of the ways that the personal values of Christian lawyers influence their ethical decision-making in legal practice. In doing so, it draws on empirical research conducted with a group of Christian lawyers in Australia in 2013-2015. The main theme of the paper is the lawyers’ commitment to the rule of law and the administration of justice, and the ways in which this assisted the lawyers to reconcile their own autonomy with that of their clients. More broadly, the chapter considers the extent to which this perspective might also contribute to discussions about how to balance individual autonomy, tolerance and diversity within a democratic society.
The chapter includes a detailed description of the methodology of semi-structured interviews that was used for the research, and refers to key studies of lawyers of faith in a comparable jurisdiction. Although the chapter provides an Australian perspective to the reconciliation of faith and legal practice, the topic is not unique to Australian lawyers, and may be of interest to readers beyond Australia
Passport Photo [Original Work in 'Previous Owner' Exhibition]
No full textPassport Photo (2025) is an original postcard-sized artwork featuring a Polish passport with red thread hand stitching and a photograph of my mother and myself as a five-year-old child. The original artwork offers novel crafting of personal familial narratives that engage in broader critical discourses of immigration and intergenerational trauma of WWII within contemporary art contexts.. Passport Photo (2025) was shown in the group exhibition Previous Owner (2025) where upon the completion of the exhibition each artist would be returned another artist’s work rather than their own. The exhibition was held at the University of Southern Queensland A Block Gallery, Toowoomba and online and was comprised of 208 local, national and international artists, with a total of 634 artworks on display. Previous Owner is the third instalment of an annual postcard exchange and exhibition curated by Rhiannan Johnson and Peta Berghofer. Leveraging print exchange traditions and deploying these in a broader context, this project involves both an exhibition and an artwork exchange component. This project engages with notions of community dialogue, creative connectivity, and inclusive arts practice. It is open to artists of all ages and all levels of experience and serves as a platform for storytelling and building community connections
LG-Umer: UNet-like Network Integrate Local-Global Feature with Novel Attention for Road Extraction from Remote Sensing Images
No full textRoad extraction from remote sensing images is a key research area in smart city development. While deep learning techniques have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in this domain, existing approaches exhibit limitations: convolutional neural network (CNN)-based methods struggle to capture global contextual information for long-range road networks, vision transformer (ViT)-based methods fail to adequately extract multiscale local features, and hybrid CNN–ViT architectures overlook the synergistic guidance between local and global features. To address these challenges, we propose LG-Umer, a UNet-like network that integrates Local-Global features with a novel attention mechanism, combining the complementary strengths of CNNs and ViTs within an encoder–decoder framework. Specifically, the encoder employs a multiscale strip deformationalmodule, which utilizes deformable convolutions to adaptively extract topological structures and variable-shaped local road features. In the decoder, a multistage gate unit module is introduced, incorporating a novel attention mechanism to model long-range dependencies by leveraging local features as attention operators for global feature refinement. Extensive experiments on three public benchmarks demonstrate the superiority ofLG-Umer. It achieves IoUscores of 70.4%, 71.2%, and 68.7% on the Massachusetts Road, DeepGlobe Road, and CHN6-CUG datasets, respectively, surpassing recent state-of-theart methods by 1.2%, 0.9%, and 1.1%. These results validate the effectiveness of our approach in balancing local detail preservation and global contextual modeling for road extraction tasks
University of Southern Queensland Centre for Health Research Research symposium 2025
No full textCultural safety and First Nations health are important components of health-related university programs. Many programs have accreditation requirements which mandate standalone courses on these topics. Having an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person teaching this type of course seems to make sense; however, many factors are not being considered when this decision is being made. Australian tertiary institutions are underpinned by Eurocentrism, that is, Western forms of knowledge, power and practice frameworks dominate. In deciding that a First Nations academic should teach Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health courses, consideration is not always given to: · The individual’s area of expertise · The impact on their well-being of teaching about the shocking treatment of your own people · The individual’s own knowledge of colonisation · The impact colonisation has had on the individual’s family and community – intergenerational trauma Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are not one homogenous group and so have varied experiences and understanding of colonisation. Not all First Nations health professionals have worked significantly with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. These and many other issues were explored by the presenters and their co-author, Ms Lee Lingwoodock, a Gubbi Gubbi and Mandandanji woman in a manuscript being published in AlterNative
Advancing tertiary statistics education: A threshold framework and predictive modelling for enhancing student success and achieving consistent fundamental learning
No full textTeaching statistics has become increasingly complex as educators strive to engage diverse learners while addressing persistent gaps in mathematical confidence and understanding. Educators also face the additional challenge of effectively teaching statistics to online students who are often studying part-time and are geographically isolated from their fellow students and educators. This thesis by publication addresses these challenges through three interrelated studies, each focusing on various aspects of curriculum design, assessment, and predictive modelling to support student success in studying statistics. The first research publication investigated the challenges faced by students achieving a Pass-grade (50-64%) in a large first-year introductory tertiary statistics course through the use of innovative techniques such as consistency of learning, combination analysis, and heatmaps to evaluate performance across learning modules, identifying problems with fragmented student learning of core statistical knowledge. These novel evaluation approaches provided a clearer picture of student knowledge upon course completion. The second research publication introduced the Threshold/Expanded Competencies Curriculum (TECC) Framework, developed to address curriculum design concerns to improve student fragmented knowledge, engagement, motivation, progression, and overall success. The third research publication focused on the application of predictive modelling to examine engagement and success of online statistics education, identifying at-risk students early in the teaching period. Overall, this complete study has established a comprehensive approach to enhancing student engagement and performance in introductory statistics courses. By addressing the variability in student knowledge when achieving a Pass-grade, developing a robust curriculum and assessment framework, and leveraging predictive modelling, the research provides practical recommendations for educators and Higher Education Institutions. These insights are crucial for improving the quality and effectiveness of teaching practices in online tertiary statistics education, ultimately fostering student success by ensuring a cohesive understanding of foundational statistical concepts and providing both students and educators with a clear grasp of the knowledge acquired by students upon course completion
