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Team photo-diaries: Making places, people, and power more visible
No full textAbstract
The prolonged border closures associated with the COVID‐19 pandemic have inspired novel approaches in field‐based research. In this paper, we review methodological and collaborative practice reflections on the use of a team photo‐diary activity generated by research associates working with smallholder farmers in Northwest Cambodia. Team photo‐diaries were introduced as a training tool to encourage reflexivity among Cambodian early career researchers during a household census data collection. However, in the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic, the photo‐diaries inadvertently evolved from a training tool into a methodological tool for data collection and a collaborative tool between Australian and Cambodian‐based team members. In seven months, eight research associates captured and collated 92 images, including a brief written note for each image. These were then presented in 10 fortnightly online workshops. The photo‐diaries uncovered the unseen in quantitative data collection; they emerged as an orienting device, guiding the census data collection, and as an understanding device, enabling the team to contextualise quantitative data findings and identify emerging analytical themes. As a collaborative tool, a fortnightly online team photo‐diary workshop facilitated regular interactions, connecting the lives and field experiences of team members. Using the photo‐diary activity, we reflect on the ethics of remote fieldwork and over‐reliance on local research associates for knowledge production. We argue that team photo‐diary activities can make research locations, research teams, and power imbalances in global north–south research collaborations more visible and considerable. The team photo‐diary activity underlines the challenges in navigating the ever‐present tensions and possibilities of knowledge (co)‐production
Pathways for Restoring and Connecting with Nature in Australian Cities
No full textAbstract
With increasing focus on the importance of integrating nature spaces and nature-based solutions into our cities, what are the key priorities and pathways for action in Australian cities? Australia, a highly urbanised settler colonial country, has a rich biodiversity and cultural heritage, the result of thousands of years of custodianship and care for Country by the First Peoples. Their deep cultural and ecological knowledge and ongoing care and connection with Country, including urban Country, underpins approaches to restoring and connecting with nature in Australian cities. With continuing urbanisation and urban change, as well as increasing impacts of climate change, including heatwaves, wildfires, flooding, and extreme weather, we identify four pathways for just transitions with and for urban nature in cities. The pathways focus on ways of thinking, organising, acting, and knowing for prioritising urban nature. We highlight evidence-based planning for nature (ways of knowing); inclusive governance for just transitions (ways of organising); conserving, restoring, and maintaining nature (ways of acting); and emphasising First People’s and local communities’ knowledges and practices (ways of knowing). Our pathways, or stepping stones, point to interlinked and interrelated priorities for ensuring nature is actively and effectively integrated into Australian city planning and practice
Advancing inclusive recruitment: A practice lens on navigating barriers to refugee employment
No full textScholarly interest in refugee employment often centers on the barriers faced by this group of jobseekers. This study shifts focus to employers, exploring how their practices address recruitment challenges. Our qualitative investigation of 39 Australia-based employers identifies two sets of barriers—proximal and distal—and the corresponding practices employers adopt to overcome them. We find that these barriers differ in the assumed scale, locus of influence, and the nature of impact. Through a practice theory lens, we demonstrate how employers’ responses to these barriers have the capacity to reproduce or alter the socio-structural conditions in which refugee employment takes place. While most employers focus on adaptive practices targeting proximal barriers, transformative practices aimed at tackling the distal barriers play a key role in rectifying structural disparities in the recruitment of disadvantaged groups. Our study advances refugee employment literature by demonstrating how employers’ assumptions around the barriers can deter employer engagement and limit impact. We highlight the managerial implications by demonstrating how employers can drive meaningful change in areas traditionally considered the domain of other actors, effectively addressing challenges in the employment landscape
Polyphenol-Mediated Antibody Functionalization of Titanium Peroxide Nanoparticles for Cancer Cell Targeting
No full textCell targeting would benefit various biotechnological applications such as disease diagnosis and cancer therapy. However, efficiently functionalizing nanoparticles with targeting ligands such as antibodies remains challenging. For example, poly(acrylic acid)-modified titanium peroxide NPs (PAATiOx) have shown promising radiosensitizing effects but suffer from poor tumor accumulation due to a lack of targeting. Herein, we developed a simple, one-pot process to noncovalently graft anti-CD44 antibodies onto the surface of PAATiOx NPs using tannic acid, a polyphenol that can bind to diverse surfaces and biomolecules via multiple molecular interactions. We evaluated the cellular binding, internalization, therapeutic efficacy, and biodistribution of the targeted particles. The antibody-functionalized NPs exhibited ∼2-fold enhanced binding to CD44-expressing cells compared to unmodified NPs and enhanced cellular internalization in vitro (2.4-fold in MIAPaCa-2 cells and 6.5-fold in MDA-MB-231 cells). Additionally, the NPs maintained their radiosensitizing property, significantly inhibiting the growth of CD44-expressing cells by 2-fold compared with CD44-negative cells. In vivo biodistribution studies revealed ∼2-fold greater tumor accumulation of the targeted NPs compared to unmodified NPs (p < 0.05). This polyphenol-mediated antibody coating strategy is a versatile and broadly applicable platform for enhancing nanoparticle delivery to specific cell populations, with potential for improving radiotherapy outcomes in CD44-positive tumors
Multi-Document Summarization: From Ideational to Opinionated Sources
No full text© 2025 Miao LiThe thesis alleviates research gaps in multi-document summarization (MDS) by investigating how to integrate information from both ideational and opinionated sources.
For ideational sources such as news articles, we construct heterogeneous graphs to capture relationships among source documents. To incorporate the heterogeneous graph representations into pre-trained language models (PLMs), we propose a multi-task training framework with objectives for heterogeneous graph compression and text summarization. Our model achieves the state-of-the-art performances on widely-used datasets.
For opinionated sources such as product reviews, we introduce a challenging new benchmark derived from scientific reviews, characterized by explicit and complex inter-document relationships. To model these relationships, we design a baseline model that incorporates the conversational structure by manipulating Transformer attention mechanisms. Experimental results show that this simple baseline significantly outperforms other strong models. Manual analysis on the generated meta-reviews further reveals that most models cannot recognize and resolve conflicts in reviews, highlighting a promising direction for future research. In addition, we propose an aspect-aware opinion consolidation framework, inspired by strategies employed by human meta-reviewers, to enhance the quality and transparency of summarization models. Experiments demonstrate that prompting with this framework produces better meta-reviews than other competitive prompting approaches.
We further investigate decomposing the summarization process across domains by leveraging underlying aspects in opinion summarization (e.g., price and cleanliness for hotels), and examine how this decomposition framework can improve both summary quality and evaluation. Experimental results show that this approach produces higher-quality meta-reviews in most domains, with greater aspect coverage and more faithful generations than strong baselines, while remaining competitive with our prior approach in the scientific domain. Moreover, the framework generates intermediate steps that assist human meta-reviewers in producing better reviews more efficiently. Overall, this work demonstrates that incorporating reasoning traces into prompting enhances the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) in MDS
The use of finite element models for backface deformation and body armour design: a systematic review
No full textWhile injuries sustained from body armour backface deformation (BFD) have not been well-documented in military injury trauma registries, data from US law enforcement officers, animal tests and currently available data pertaining to military combatants has shown that BFD can not only cause minor injuries, but also result in serious trauma. However, the nature and severity of injuries sustained depends on a multitude of factors including the projectile type, the impact location and velocity, and the specific type of body armour worn. The difficulties involved in current measurement techniques for ballistic testing has led researchers to seek alternative techniques to evaluate the level of protection from body armour, such as the finite element (FE) method. In the current study, a systematic review of the open literature was undertaken using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses methodology. The aim was to summarise the literature pertaining to the development and application of FE models to investigate body armour BFD and behind armour blunt trauma (BABT), and included FE models representing the projectile, clay-based mediums, ballistic gelatine and the human torso. Using the keywords 'behind armour*', 'ballistic blunt trauma', 'BABT', 'backface signature', 'backface deformation', 'BFS', 'BFD', 'wound ballistic', 'ballistic impact testing', 'body armour', 'bullet proof vest', 'ballistic vest', 'Finite Element*' and 'FE', an electronic database search of EBSCOhost, Google Scholar, ProQuest, Scopus, Standards, Web of Science and PubMed was conducted, and included peer-reviewed journal articles, review papers, research reports, conference papers, and MSc or PhD theses. While this research demonstrates the potential of FE analysis for recreating realistic blunt impact scenarios and enhancing the current understanding of BABT mechanisms, a common limitation in most studies is the lack of validation. Thus, in order to address this issue, it is proposed that injury predictions from FE models be correlated with trauma data from soldiers who have sustained BABT. Consequently, pressure and energy distributions within the organs can be used to interpret the effects of non-penetrating ballistic impacts on the human torso. Bridging the gap between simulation and real-world data is essential in order to validate FE models and enhance their utility in optimising body armour design and employing injury mitigation strategies
“We Don't Want You to Be Dismissed”: Perspectives of Remediation From Surgical Education and Training Managers
No full textBACKGROUND: While education and training managers are key personnel within surgical training programs regarding management of trainee performance including remediation, there is a lack of research concerning their perspectives. For improvements in remediation at a systems level, insight to their perspectives and experiences is essential. METHODS: This qualitative study explored the perspectives of 12 education and training managers of surgical societies/associations/colleges in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. Purposive and snowball sampling was utilized for data collection in semi-structured interviews. Following an interpretivist approach, transcribed interviews were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. RESULTS: Four themes and 10 subthemes were identified: "a guiding role"; remediation is a "well-oiled machine"; remediation is "not punitive"; and room for improvement. CONCLUSION: Educational managers hold a pivotal role in guiding trainees and supervisors throughout the remediation process. From their perspective, remediation is considered well managed, with nearly all trainees successfully completing remediation. Although they recommend further resources and additional support for supervisors, their focus on improvement centers on tightening governance and reducing the risk of trainee litigation. Including the perspectives of managers in the remediation process will aid in its successful implementation
Connecting nursing cohorts in authentic learning activities through a redesigned pharmacology curriculum
No full textBackground Deficits in pharmacology knowledge are a common cause of medication errors among nurses. Building adequate understanding across cohorts that vary in their clinical and theoretical expertise can be challenging. A pharmacology subject redesign supported connections and knowledge transfer across multiple nursing cohorts and embedded authentic (real-world, relevant) learning activities to meet 21st century nursing workforce needs. Innovation Our revised curriculum with embedded scenario-based online modules, interactive learning activities, self-check assessments, case scenario group discussion in synchronous workshops, reflections on case study group discussion after the workshop and discussion boards, allows students to build their pharmacology knowledge within the context of medication management. Implications Additional asynchronous elements supported peer-to-peer learning and knowledge exchange in the redesigned curriculum, whilst online modules foster students’ skills in authentic scenario-based learning relevant to their future clinical practice. Conclusions Our revised curriculum was intended to enable multiple nursing cohorts to better build comprehensive pharmacology knowledge to inform their future clinical practice. Further work is required to evaluate the impact of this new curriculum design
The phospholipid composition of artificial lipid droplets enhances their deliverability and facilitates a broad Biodistribution in vivo and in vitro
No full textArtificial lipid droplets (aLDs) provide a useful tool to explore the multiple functionalities of intracellular lipid droplets (LDs). In this study we explored the dynamics and potential multidisciplinary applications of these lipid particles. We have optimised construction of fluorescently labelled aLDs to allow their tracking in various in vitro and in vivo models. Modifying the phospholipid membrane of aLDs achieved enhanced delivery efficiency to a broad range of cells with various origins leading to a wide biodistribution of aLDs to organ systems in both mice and zebrafish models. The broad targeting and stability of this new generation of aLDs holds promise to now utilise aLDs as a novel delivery system as well as offering a toolset for further investigation on intracellular LD dynamics and function. STATEMENT OF SIGNIFICANCE: Artificial lipid droplets (aLDs) are a novel nanoparticle tool for biomedical research, consisting of a phospholipid monolayer with a neutral core interior. They offer new opportunities for the delivery of lipids and proteins in vivo; however, the ability of aLD lipid composition to drive enhanced cellular delivery remains unexplored. Here, we demonstrate that enhancing aLD phospholipid complexity significantly increases in vitro cellular delivery across multiple cell types and offers broad organ biodistribution, including delivery to the brain, in both mice and zebrafish. These findings highlight aLDs as potential vehicles in both basic biological studies and therapeutic interventions. Additionally, increasing the complexity of phospholipids into alternate nanoparticles such as LNPs may enhance organ biodistribution, thus opening the field up to new opportunities for cargo to reach previously undeliverable areas
Metabolite profiling reveals distinct changes in C-and N-metabolism of lentil (Lens culinaris Medik.) under CO2 enrichment in two contrasting growing seasons in the field
No full textElevated atmospheric [CO2] (e[CO2]) may alleviate the effects of water stress on plants. It is unclear however whether this results exclusively from changes in stomatal conductance and water savings or also reflects changes in metabolic pathways triggered by the extra carbohydrate supplies under e[CO2]. To help address this knowledge gap, metabolite patterns were analysed in leaves and nodules of lentils grown in a Free-Air CO2 Enrichment facility in a water limited agro-ecosystem over the course of two contrasting growing seasons, one with high (well above average), and one with low (well below average) rainfall. Metabolomic analyses of tissues sampled at flowering showed contrasting responses to e[CO2] in the contrasting seasons. In the high rainfall season, e[CO2] was associated with more pronounced signatures of active energy and amino acid metabolism in leaves as well as in nodules, and particularly increased abundance of proteinogenic amino acids in leaves and nodules, which suggested strong stimulation of nodule N2-fixation and N supply to leaves. In the low rainfall season, e[CO2] was associated with high abundance of stress responsive metabolites, including putative osmo-protectants such as sugars and polyols as well as some N-containing compounds (proline, γ-aminobutyric acid, putrescine), while the concentration of proteinogenic amino acids in leaves was reduced. In nodules, e[CO2] was linked to lower concentrations of sugars, polyols and most proteinogenic amino acids, along with higher concentrations of N-containing stress metabolites. However, there was little evidence that e[CO2] enhanced energy and amino acid metabolism in the low rainfall season. This study suggests that e[CO2] amplifies rather than mitigates the effect of different seasons on lentil metabolism. Whilst in a high rainfall season e[CO2] intensified metabolic patterns related to active growth and N-fixation, in a low rainfall season e[CO2] strengthened stress response signatures