Policing our ocean domain: Establishing an Australian coast guard

This paper calls for the establishment of a new statutory authority, the Australian Coast Guard, out of the current Border Protection Command that is directly responsible to a Minister for the assessment of intelligence, planning and implementation of operations and future improvements to maritime border security

Monitoring of stimulated cycles in assisted reproduction (IVF and ICSI)

Acknowledgements: We are grateful to Marian Showell for her help in updating the search strategy and carrying out the literature search; to Anne Lethaby for translating the Spanish paper and extracting data; and in particular to Helen Nagels and Jane Marjoribanks for their editorial assistance, help with GRADEpro, general co-ordination and assisting with teleconferences among authors. We also thank Helen Nagels for her help in translating the French paper and extracting the data. The review authors had no specific funding for this reviewPeer reviewedPublisher PD

The Use of iPads to Enhance Joint Attention Skills in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)

Background: iPads are increasingly used in primary schools with reported benefits in communication, independent learning and creativity. Children with autism spectrum disorder have an affinity with mobile technology, which is recognised by the autism research community with many studies emerging in this field. Joint attention (JA) is an essential life skill which can indicate the later development of social communication and language acquisition. It is usually absent or impaired in children with autism, which means that they often find it difficult to share attention with an adult or peer about a toy or activity by keeping eye contact and pointing, but also showing interest to the other person. Research on the use of iPads to develop JA skills in autism is still in infancy.Objectives: This qualitative study aims to explore primary school teachers’ and parents’ perspectives and experiences of developing JA skills in children with autism using iPads.Methods: Semi structured interviews with 16 school staff members and nonobtrusive observations of 12 pupils interacting with their teacher using iPads were held in three UK schools. Also, parents of children with autism aged 4-11 years old are currently being interviewed to investigate parents’ practice of developing JA beyond school hours and exploring the iPad’s benefits in promoting JA in different contexts.Results: All teachers used teaching strategies to promote JA on a daily basis but a few used iPads in their classroom. Participants expressed different opinions about the effectiveness of teaching strategies and iPad use in developing JA. The observations showed that teachers used a variety of evidence based strategies to engage their pupils with autism in JA opportunities but that there was little use of iPads. The iPad was mainly used as a reward, a motivator to direct and sustain pupils’ attention, to practice turntaking and waiting skills and to teach the curriculum. Preliminary findings derived from the semi structured interviews with parents have shown that parents use a variety of social activities to boost their child’s joint attention skills. Their views though were contradictory regarding the iPadTM’s contribution in developing JA skills, with a few parents mentioning that the iPad can be a solitary device that can further isolate their child from daily human interactions while other parents have mentioned that the iPad is a motivating tool used to grasp their child’s attention and teach them JA. Parents have also mentioned that they wish to have stronger links with their child’s school.Conclusions: The research concludes that schools would benefit from teacher training and dissemination of good practice on how to use iPads for JA purposes. Parents are also interested in discovering how they can best address their children’s needs in cooperation with the schools. To that end, the future steps of this research include creating guidelines about the way to develop JA opportunities at home and school with the use of the iPad as an engaging educational device

Relating cell shape and mechanical stress in a spatially disordered epithelium using a vertex-based model

Using a popular vertex-based model to describe a spatially disordered planar epithelial monolayer, we examine the relationship between cell shape and mechanical stress at the cell and tissue level. Deriving expressions for stress tensors starting from an energetic formulation of the model, we show that the principal axes of stress for an individual cell align with the principal axes of shape, and we determine the bulk effective tissue pressure when the monolayer is isotropic at the tissue level. Using simulations for a monolayer that is not under peripheral stress, we fit parameters of the model to experimental data for Xenopus embryonic tissue. The model predicts that mechanical interactions can generate mesoscopic patterns within the monolayer that exhibit long-range correlations in cell shape. The model also suggests that the orientation of mechanical and geometric cues for processes such as cell division are likely to be strongly correlated in real epithelia. Some limitations of the model in capturing geometric features of Xenopus epithelial cells are highlighted.Comment: 29 pages, 10 figures, revisio

Mechanical characterization of disordered and anisotropic cellular monolayers

We consider a cellular monolayer, described using a vertex-based model, for which cells form a spatially disordered array of convex polygons that tile the plane. Equilibrium cell configurations are assumed to minimize a global energy defined in terms of cell areas and perimeters; energy is dissipated via dynamic area and length changes, as well as cell neighbour exchanges. The model captures our observations of an epithelium from a Xenopus embryo showing that uniaxial stretching induces spatial ordering, with cells under net tension (compression) tending to align with (against) the direction of stretch, but with the stress remaining heterogeneous at the single-cell level. We use the vertex model to derive the linearized relation between tissue-level stress, strain and strain-rate about a deformed base state, which can be used to characterize the tissue's anisotropic mechanical properties; expressions for viscoelastic tissue moduli are given as direct sums over cells. When the base state is isotropic, the model predicts that tissue properties can be tuned to a regime with high elastic shear resistance but low resistance to area changes, or vice versa.Comment: 9 figure

Pictures are necessary but not sufficient: Using a range of visual methods to engage users about school design

It has been argued by both educationalists and social researchers that visual methods are particularly appropriate for the investigation of people's experiences of the school environment. The current and expected building work taking place in British schools provides an opportunity for exploration of methods, as well as a need to establish ways to achieve this involvement of a range of school users, including students. This article describes a consultation that was undertaken in a UK secondary school as part of a participatory design process centred on the rebuilding of the school. A range of visual methods, based on photographs and maps, was used to investigate the views of a diverse sample of school users, including students, teachers, technical and support staff and the wider community. Reported here is the experience of using these tools, considering the success of different visually-based methods in engaging a broad cross section of the school community and revealing useful information. Using a range of visual methods allows a complex, but coherent, understanding of the particular school environment to be constructed and developed. It is further argued that such a range of visual and spatial methods is needed to develop appropriate understanding. The study, therefore, contributes to knowledge about specific visual research methods, appreciation of the relationship between tools, and a general methodological understanding of visual methods' utility for developing understanding of the learning environment

Analytic Calculation of Noise Power Robbing, NPR, and Polarization Isolation Degradation

Three Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) R transponders (services) required analysis and measurements to develop an accurate link budget. These are a) Search and Rescue transponder which suffers from power robbing due to thermal uplink noise, b) the Data Collection Platform Report which suffers from degradation due to NPR (Noise Power Ratio), and c) GOES Rebroadcast transponder which uses a dual circular downlink L band for which there was no depolarization data. The first two services required development of extended link budget to analytically calculate the impact of these degradations which are shown to have a significant impact on the link budget. The third service required measurements of atmospheric L band CP depolarization as there were no known previous measurements and results are reported he