Working out abjection in the Panapompom bêche-de-mer fishery: Race, economic change and the future in Papua New Guinea

This is the accepted version of the following article: Rollason, W. (2010), Working out abjection in the Panapompom bêche-de-mer fishery: Race, economic change and the future in Papua New Guinea. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 21: 149–170. doi: 10.1111/j.1757-6547.2010.00076.x, which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1757-6547.2010.00076.x/abstract.This is a paper about how men from Panapompom, an island in Milne Bay Province of Papua New Guinea (PNG), understand how they relate to white people and imagine the future. Until recently, men from Panapompom understood themselves to be engaged in a project of ‘development’, in which they would become more and more similar to white people. This was a desirable future. However, changes in the way Panapompom men work for money have resulted in a very different imagination of the future—one in which Panapompom people are not getting whiter, but blacker, and hence more and more excluded from the lives to which they aspire. Men now dive for bêche-de-mer, work which they regard as being particularly hard and dangerous. Diving has profound effects on the skin, blackening and hardening it, leading Panapompom men to liken themselves to the machines that create the wealth that white people use. These ‘mechanising’ effects that diving has on the black body lead men to see white people as the sole beneficiaries of the bêche-de-mer industry, and black people as mere tools or extensions. For bêche-de-mer divers, value and desired forms of life are lodged in Australia, Europe or America, while they find themselves excluded from this future by their growing blackness.ESR

'Dog Days' Full Employment without Depreciation: Can It Be Done?

Policy Forum: The Murray Financial System Enquir

Analysis of uncertainty in health care cost-effectiveness studies: an introduction to statistical issues and methods

Cost-effectiveness analysis is now an integral part of health technology assessment and addresses the question of whether a new treatment or other health care program offers good value for money. In this paper we introduce the basic framework for decision making with cost-effectiveness data and then review recent developments in statistical methods for analysis of uncertainty when cost-effectiveness estimates are based on observed data from a clinical trial. Although much research has focused on methods for calculating confidence intervals for cost-effectiveness ratios using bootstrapping or Fieller’s method, these calculations can be problematic with a ratio-based statistic where numerator and=or denominator can be zero. We advocate plotting the joint density of cost and effect differences, together with cumulative density plots known as cost-effectiveness acceptability curves (CEACs) to summarize the overall value-for-money of interventions. We also outline the net-benefit formulation of the cost-effectiveness problem and show that it has particular advantages over the standard incremental cost-effectiveness ratio formulation

Increasing the knowledge, identification and treatment of osteoporosis through education and shared decision-making with residents living in a retirement village community

Objective: This pilot study explored whether individual goal setting in a retirement village setting could improve strategies to strengthen bones in an ageing population and help prevent osteoporosis. Methods: A two-phased osteoporosis prevention program was developed, piloted and evaluated involving a group education session followed by the development of individualised Bone Plans based upon personal understanding of individual fracture risk and lifestyle factors. Results: A significant improvement in knowledge and understanding of factors to prevent and manage osteoporosis was achieved, and changes in lifestyle behaviours were sustained at six months. Conclusion: Success was due to education by specialist medical and health personnel, flexibility of goal setting, use of group sessions and location of the program within the retirement community setting. The ‘Mind Your Bones’ program is a feasible and acceptable way to translate preventative bone health messages to a large number of people via the retirement village network

Understanding the role of performance targets in transport policy

The measurement of performance in the public sector has become increasingly important in recent years and it is now commonplace for transport organisations, and local and national governments, to publish performance goals for service supply and quality. Such commitments, when time referenced, are known as targets. This paper explain how changes in management style, consumer rights legislation, contractual obligations and other factors have combined to make management-by targets increasingly common in the public sector. The advantages and disadvantages of management-by-targets are illustrated through discussion of the processes and experience of setting transport targets in UK national transport policy. We conclude that while some of the targets have had a significant impact on policy makers, managers and their agents, the effects have not always been as intended

An Evaluation of Marine Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas in the Context of Spatial Conservation Prioritization

Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas (IBAs) are sites identified as globally important for bird species conservation. Marine IBAs are one of the few comprehensive multi-species datasets available for the marine environment, and their use in conservation planning will likely increase as countries race to protect 10% of their territorial waters by 2020. We tested 15 planning scenarios for Australia's Exclusive Economic Zone to guide best practice on integrating marine IBAs into spatial conservation prioritization. We found prioritizations based solely on habitat protection failed to protect IBAs, and prioritizations based solely on IBAs similarly failed to meet basic levels of habitat representation. Further, treating all marine IBAs as irreplaceable sites produced the most inefficient plans in terms of ecological representativeness and protection equality. Our analyses suggest that marine spatial planners who wish to use IBAs treat them like any other conservation feature by assigning them a specific protection target