404 research outputs found
Publishing and truth in the 21st Century: Truthiness and celebrity publishing
No full textBrien, DL ORCiD: 0000-0002-9005-3645Although truth and falsity have been issues of contention and debate in relation to publication for as long as works have thus been produced and circulated, discussions about postmodernism and relativity together with a series of high profile publishing hoaxes in the 20th century and early years of the new millennium ushered in new waves of anxiety around the idea of ‘truth’ in publication. These scandals underscored (and undercut) the ‘pact’ that was widely understood to exist between a published author and his or her readers – and upon which the reputation of publishers, and publishing as an institution, was largely built – that the author of a published work was who they purported to be and, when writing non-fiction, that such authors would be ‘telling the truth’ to the best of their abilities. American humorist Stephen Colbert’s 2005 re-coining of the 19th century word ‘truthiness’, which had originally been used to denote ‘truthfulness’, to signify how something could seem or be felt to be true, even if was clearly not so, encapsulates a new generation of complexity around truth in 21st century publishing, the most extreme aspects of which are perhaps best signified by the phenomena of when internet falsehoods are purposely published, and then repeatedly republished, as ‘news’ to both attract, and mislead and misinform readers. This chapter uses a case study of the publishing careers of the members of the reality television phenomena known as the Kardashian extended family, to tease out these concepts as well as the value of the terms ‘truth’, ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’ in contemporary publishing
Introduction: Writing death and dying
No full textBrien, DL ORCiD: 0000-0002-9005-3645Introduces a special issue on the topic of creative and cultural representations of death and dying. The articles in this special issue are gathered from the the second Australasian Death Studies Network (ADSN) conference in Noosa, Queensland, convened by the author
A homeopathic and conventional treatment for acute respiratory and ear complaints: a comparative study on outcome in a primary care setting
No full textBackground: the aim of this study was to assess the effectiveness of homeopathy compared to conventional treatment in acute respiratory and ear complaints in a primary care setting.Methods: the study was designed as an international, multi-centre, comparative cohort study of non-randomised design. Patients, presenting themselves with at least one chief complaint: acute (? 7 days) runny nose, sore throat, ear pain, sinus pain or cough, were recruited at 57 primary care practices in Austria (8), Germany (8), the Netherlands (7), Russia (6), Spain (6), Ukraine (4), United Kingdom (10) and the USA (8) and given either homeopathic or conventional treatment. Therapy outcome was measured by using the response rate, defined as the proportion of patients experiencing 'complete recovery' or 'major improvement' in each treatment group. The primary outcome criterion was the response rate after 14 days of therapy.Results: data of 1,577 patients were evaluated in the full analysis set of which 857 received homeopathic (H) and 720 conventional (C) treatment. The majority of patients in both groups reported their outcome after 14 days of treatment as complete recovery or major improvement (H: 86.9%; C: 86.0%; p = 0.0003 for non-inferiority testing). In the per-protocol set (H: 576 and C: 540 patients) similar results were obtained (H: 87.7%; C: 86.9%; p = 0.0019). Further subgroup analysis of the full analysis set showed no differences of response rates after 14 days in children (H: 88.5%; C: 84.5%) and adults (H: 85.6%; C: 86.6%). The unadjusted odds ratio (OR) of the primary outcome criterion was 1.40 (0.89–2.22) in children and 0.92 (0.63–1.34) in adults. Adjustments for demographic differences at baseline did not significantly alter the OR. The response rates after 7 and 28 days also showed no significant differences between both treatment groups. However, onset of improvement within the first 7 days after treatment was significantly faster upon homeopathic treatment both in children (p = 0.0488) and adults (p = 0.0001). Adverse drug reactions occurred more frequently in adults of the conventional group than in the homeopathic group (C: 7.6%; H: 3.1%, p = 0.0032), whereas in children the occurrence of adverse drug reactions was not significantly different (H: 2.0%; C: 2.4%, p = 0.7838).Conclusion: in primary care, homeopathic treatment for acute respiratory and ear complaints was not inferior to conventional treatmen
Writing Aileen Palmer back into memory. Review of Sylvia Martin's biography, Ink in her veins: The troubled life of Aileen Palmer
No full textBrien, DL ORCiD: 0000-0002-9005-3645AILEEN Palmer was a poet and author in a wide range of other genres. She was also a linguist with an advanced grasp of a number of languages—putting this to good use in sensitive translations. A political activist, she lived and worked in Australia and overseas and both her work and her name deserve to be better known. Sylvia Martin’s beautifully written and carefully researched biography of Aileen certainly makes a major contribution to that task. The title of Martin’s biography suggests that, as the eldest daughter of two important Australian writers, Nettie Palmer and Vance Palmer, its subject was born into a writing life. This other main theme of this biography is suggested in its subtitle as not only did Aileen Palmer have “ink in her veins”, she also had a “troubled life.” These dual
concerns—with her various writings and the turmoil and distresses she
experienced—make for a finely balanced and nuanced life study
Edward E. O''Brien contributions to reactive-flow turbulence
No full textProfessor Edward Ephraim O''Brien (“Ted”) has made lasting contributions to the theory and modeling of scalar mixing and reaction in turbulent flows. With a doctoral dissertation at The Johns Hopkins University in 1960, entitled “On the Statistical Behavior of a Dilute Reactant in Isotropic Turbulence, ” supervised by the legend Stanley Corrsin, and in the company of notable pioneer of turbulence, John Leask Lumley, Ted''s academic training propelled him through a prolific career. In the opening article of this Special Issue, we provide a review of some of Ted''s contributions. First, a summary is presented of his work on the examination of the failure of the cumulant discard approximation for the scalar mixing. This is followed by a highlight of his impacts on other spectral theories of turbulence including Kraichnan''s direct interaction approximation. His contributions to more modern theoretical/computational description of reactive turbulence are discussed next, including the transported probability density function (pdf) formulation, scalar-gradient pdf transport equation, scalar interfaces, and the filtered density function. Finally, some of his research on Direct Numerical Simulation of compressible turbulence is reviewed. © 2021 Author(s)
Different Phenotypic and Genotypic Presentations in Alcohol Dependence: Age at Onset Matters
No full textObjective: Several theoretical typology models have been proposed to classify alcoholism into more homogeneous subtypes using various criteria, for which age at onset of alcohol dependence is shared across many models . We investigated the evidence for the distinction between early- versus late-onset alcoholism by examining relevant phenotypic and genotypic variables. Method: Data are from 1, 248 individuals with alcohol dependence, who were interviewed to collect detailed clinical information. Early versus late onset of alcohol dependence was defined by the age at onset of 22 years. Odds ratio (OR) and Cohen's d were calculated as effect size for comparisons of clinical features between the two groups. We adjusted interviewed age and gender in logistic regression models. Case- control genetic analyses were conducted for the association between HTRIB, SLC6A4, DRD2, and OPR mu 1 genes and subgroups of alcohol dependence using a sample of 530 controls screened for alcohol problems. Results: Early-onset alcoholism exhibited significantly (p < .01) different clinical characteristics from late-onset alcoholism, including higher severity in alcohol dependence symptoms (d = 0.22) and maximum drinking quantity within 24 hours (d = 0.40), more rapid progression from regular drinking to meet alcohol dependence diagnosis (d = 1.73), higher expectancies for alcohol (d = 0.22-0.47), more comorbidity with externalizing disorders (ORs = 2.8-2.9), and greater prevalence of family alcohol use problems (d = 0.26-0.43). In addition, markers in the HTRIB and OPR mu 1 genes showed genetic associations with subgroups of alcohol dependence (ORs = 1.5-2.4). Conclusions: Our findings support that subgroups of alcohol dependence defined by onset age have phenotypic and genetic differences. The early-onset subgroup had more severe features for almost every aspect we examined. Coupled with genetic association findings, age at onset of alcohol dependence may serve as a simple but important clinical marker with implications for future etiological research and intervention
Genome-Wide Linkage Scans for Major Depression in Individuals with Alcohol Dependence
No full textMajor depression is more prevalent among individuals with alcoholism than in the general population. Twin studies have found a moderate degree of genetic correlation for alcohol dependence (AD) and major depression (MD), suggesting the existence of loci that confer susceptibility to both disorders. The aim of the present study was to conduct genome-wide linkage analyses to identify loci and to replicate prior evidence for linkage to MD, and to search for linkage regions that may confer risk to the co- occurrence of depression and alcoholism in a sample of sib- pairs affected with AD. A set of 1020 microsatellite markers (average marker spacing of 4 cM) were genotyped in 1289 subjects, which consisted of 473 informative families for analysis of depressive traits and 626 sibling pairs for analysis of symptoms of MD and AD. For univariate linkage results for depression, there were six regions (1q, 2p, 4q, 12q, 13q, and 22q) with multipoint LOD scores in excess of 1 .00; the highest peak was on chromosome 4q32.3 near marker D 4S2952 (LOD = 2.17, p = 0.0008) for symptoms of MD. Bivariate linkage analysis of symptoms of MD and AD identified only one region at 22q11.21 with LOD > 1, which overlapped with the region for symptoms of MD. Several of these regions replicate previously reported linkage results for major depression and emotion- related traits and events, such as neuroticism and suicide attempts. These identified genomic locations, together with results from prior studies, indicate potential regions of interests that may contain susceptibility loci to the risk of depression among individuals with alcohol dependence
Droplet actuator system for molecular diagnostic applications
No full textIn biological research, routine liquid handling operations require considerable human effort and manual labor. For this reason, experiments in clinical laboratories are time-consuming and thus expensive. Recently, advances in point-of-care “lab-on-a-chip” systems have allowed more efficient ways of sample handling and analysis. Such systems often operate by automated manipulation of discrete liquid droplets, and are increasing sought to improve experimental throughput. Various techniques have been developed to manipulate discrete droplets, such as digital microfluidics, surface acoustic waves, and texture ratchets. In this thesis, a novel droplet actuation system is presented that can be applied for molecular diagnostic tests. The system utilizes a motor-driven platform to manipulate droplets on a superhydrophobic surface patterned with hydrophilic symbols. The design of the system components and the various fluid-handling operations are presented, such as merging, mixing, dispensing, and splitting. A colorimetric glucose concentration assay is realized on the presented platform to measure levels of glucose in sheep serum samples. Our colorimetric experiments match favorably with the gold standard spectrophotometric method. These results indicate that the droplet actuator is a promising system for automating fluid-handling steps in biological experiments.</p
Writing our future : towards an organisational history of the Australian Association of Writing Programs
No full textAt the thirteenth annual conference of the Australian Association of Writing Programs in 2008, the author suggested that a history should mark the fifteenth anniversary of the organisation in 2011, and proposed to begin researching and writing such a history. This proposal was endorsed by the Committee of Management at that conference. This paper presents the first steps towards producing a history of the AAWP, framed by the recent calls for a ‘turn to history’ in the study of organisations (Clark and Rowlinson 2004; Üsdken, Behlül & Alfred Kieser 2004; Booth and Rowlinson 2006) and the author’s research into the practice of writing organisational history writing
- …
