1,720,968 research outputs found
The state of affairs in health
No full textAngela Beaton and Lesley Russell introduce their analysis of the 2009-10 state and territory health budgets
THE GLOBAL financial crisis has been good for health in the sense that it has provoked the state and territory governments to inject capital into health infrastructure. But this major investment needs to be balanced with provisions to ensure that needed health services are there for the vulnerable and disadvantaged groups that are feeling the pinch in this economic downturn. Generally speaking, the marked investment in health infrastructure in all state and territory budgets, which includes the development and upgrade of metropolitan and regional hospitals, emergency departments, and the purchase of various bits of high-tech medical equipment, will help to improve health care services for many Australians. While there is a clear emphasis in all of the state and territory budgets on creating and sustaining jobs, provisions for prevention and indigenous health services seem to be secondary considerations. This is surprising given the increased emphasis on these issues and the national partnerships between the Commonwealth and state governments that are now in place to address them. These partnerships require that the states and territories provide funds for preventive health and Indigenous health ($772 million over four years). It is not at all clear that these funds have been committed and their expenditure is underway. Services for disadvantaged groups and issues around prevention surely become even more important at a time when people may be forced to choose cheaper, less nutritious foods and when a visit to the dentist is well down on the list of a family’s priorities. This highlights the importance of achieving real change in these areas by taking a more integrated and comprehensive approach, facilitated by the national partnerships, and backed up by shared accountability, better performance reporting and greater budget transparency. • An analysis of state and territory health commitments against the National Partnership commitments agreed through the COAG process is available from the Menzies Centre for Health Policy website. Angela Beaton is a researcher at the Menzies Centre for Health Policy, University of Sydney / Australian National University. Lesley Russell is the Menzies Foundation Fellow at the Menzies Centre for Health Policy, University of Sydney / Australian National University, and a Research Associate at the US Studies Centre, University of Sydney. She is currently working in Washington DC.
Photo: Andrew Jeffrey 
Chewing the fat
No full textHow many of the government’s health policies have been implemented? Angela Beaton and Lesley Russell look at the record
WHILE the Rudd Government has delivered on quite a few of its pre-election commitments, obesity and dental health are two of the stand-out issues yet to be addressed in any depth. Australia is one of the most overweight countries and both childhood and adult obesity are on the rise. Let’s not forget the range of worrying co-morbidities associated with overweight and obesity, including diabetes and heart disease, and the social, economic and health costs of these largely preventable conditions.
Dental disease worsens these chronic conditions and the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission (NHHRC), in its interim report, A Healthier Future for All Australians, estimated that there were 50,000 avoidable hospital admissions arising from preventable dental conditions in 2004–05.
There has been some progress in tackling these issues. In late 2007 the Minister for Health, Nicola Roxon, attended a summit aimed at tackling childhood obesity in Australia, and outlined the new government’s commitment to making obesity prevention a National Health Priority Area. In addition, obesity was identified as a key issue at the ‘2020 Summit’. On dental health, while the NHHRC supports the principle that dentistry should be included in Medicare, the government has failed to gain the support needed in the Senate to pass legislation for the Commonwealth Dental Plan.
Last month, the Standing Committee on Health and Ageing tabled its report on the inquiry into obesity in Australia, Weighing It Up: Obesity in Australia. It focuses on future implications for Australia’s health system and complements the National Preventative Health Taskforce process. In addition to the recently released NHHRC report, a number of other major reports are expected to be released in coming weeks, including those of the National Primary Health Care Strategy External Reference Group and the Preventative Health Taskforce. The government’s response to these reports will have a significant impact on how prevention issues will be tackled and how health care services will be delivered.
These reports might also provide the impetus for the Australian government to deliver on further important election commitments to combat obesity and the poor oral health status of many Australians. Real health care reform will require a concerted, long- term and well-resourced commitment to both obesity prevention and treatment and better and more affordable dental health care.
A frequently updated analysis of the federal government’s pre- and post-election health commitments is available at the Menzies Centre for Health Policy’s Election Scorecard.•
Angela Beaton is a researcher at the Menzies Centre for Health Policy, University of Sydney / Australian National University. Lesley Russell is the Menzies Foundation Fellow at the Menzies Centre for Health Policy, University of Sydney and Australian National University, and a Research Associate at the US Studies Centre, University of Sydney. She is currently working in Washington DC.
Photo: Sean Locke/ iStockphoto.co
Understanding Temporal Changes in Snow Water Equivalency in the Kootenay Boundary Region
Get PDFIntegrated Environmental PlanningSnow and ice are highly important elements in the cryosphere (Earth's frozen water component) as they are a vital source of stored freshwater (Langlois et al. 2009). It stores freshwater through the winter months are release [sic] water into our ecosystems in the spring as spring freshet, and in the warmer drier months of summer (PyneK, Callegari G 2019). The water that is stored as snow and ice is what hydrologists call Snow Water Equivalency (SWE). It is this SWE that is of primary importance for climatological and hydrological processes (Langlois et al. 2009)
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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