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    Robert Louis Stevenson and German Sāmoa
    Coleman, D (Informa UK Limited, )
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    “Embronzed with the African Tint”: Racial Color-coding and Intergenerational Inheritance in Jamaica, St. Domingo and England in the Age of Abolition
    Fernandes, S ; Coleman, D (Informa UK Limited, 2024-01-01)
    In eighteenth-century fiction and drama, race appears as a mutable characteristic, with skin color conditioned by culture and environment. Increasingly, and especially in the Romantic period, race came to be regarded as an inherent facet of a person’s identity in certain contexts. Racialized color-charts emerged for the express purpose of generating a taxonomy of mixed-race peoples; a symptom of the vogue for classification in the natural sciences. These charts encoded a vocabulary of gradation, hybridity, and racial inheritance. Such vocabulary was mapped on charts such as those that appear in Edward Long’s The History of Jamaica (1774), where racial inheritances are depicted as neatly linear. Other historians of the Caribbean islands, such as J. B. Moreton in his West India Customs and Manners (1793), betray an underlying instability. The instability of such categories only increases within late eighteenth-century literary sources and especially in the lexicon imported back into England and appropriated by novelists, many of whom held abolitionist sympathies. This paper investigates the influence of West Indian color-chart vocabulary on the representation and construction of race in John Thelwall’s The Daughter of Adoption; A Tale of Modern Times (1801) and the anonymously published Woman of Colour; A Tale (1808).
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    XBRL and the qualitative characteristics of useful financial information
    Birt, JL ; Muthusamy, K ; Bir, P (Emerald, 2017-05-02)
    Purpose eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is an internet-based interactive form of reporting language that is expected to enhance the usefulness of financial reporting (Yuan and Wang, 2009). In the UK and the USA, XBRL is mandatory, and in Australia, it is voluntarily adopted. It has been reported that in the not too distant future, XBRL will be the standard format for the preparation and exchange of business reports (Gettler, 2015). Using an experimental approach, this study assesses the usefulness of financial reports with XBRL tagged information compared to PDF format information for non-professional investors. The authors investigate participants’ perceptions of usefulness in relation to the qualitative characteristics of relevance, understandability and comparability. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses an experimental approach featuring a profit-forecasting task to determine if participants perceive XBRL-tagged information to be more useful compared to PDF-formatted information. Findings Results reveal that financial information presented with XBRL tagging is significantly more relevant, understandable and comparable to non-professional investors. Originality/value The authors address a gap in the literature by examining XBRL usefulness in Australia where XBRL adoption will be mandated within the not too distant future. Currently, the voluntary adoption of XBRL by preparers and users is low, possibly, because of a lack of awareness about XBRL and its potential benefits. This study yields significant implications for the accounting regulators in creating more awareness on the benefits of using XBRL and to create an impetus for XBRL adoption.
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    Terrestrial Lidar Reveals New Information About Habitats Provided by Large Old Trees
    Holland, A ; Gibbons, P ; Thompson, J ; Roudavski, S (Elsevier, 2024)
    Large old trees have been described as keystone habitats for several species. However, current research does not fully explain why these species show a preference for such trees. In this study, we combined field observations of birds with terrestrial lidar scans and computational feature-recognition to describe habitats provided by trees at an unprecedented level of detail. We conducted field observations of birds at 62 trees and used parameters including branch angle, branch diameter, branch state (living or dead), and trunk diameter at breast height (DBH) to develop a generalised linear mixed model (GLMM) that could predict which types of branch birds are more likely to visit. We then quantified angles, diameters, and states of 78,006 branch objects representing the complete canopies of 16 trees. By combining these two models we predicted that large trees (>80 cm DBH) contained, on average, 383 m of branches that were highly suitable for birds (i.e., the predicted probability of observing a bird was ≥0.5), which was more than seven times the average length of highly suitable branches provided by medium trees (51–80 cm DBH). Only one of the sampled medium trees contained highly suitable branches. Small trees (<50 cm DBH) contained none. Our analysis provides new knowledge about characteristics that make large old trees disproportionately attractive to birds and presents a novel method of assessment that can apply to other complex habitat structures.
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    Pencil or Keyboard? Boys’ Preferences in Writing
    Sze, J ; Southcott, J (Nova Southeastern University, )
    Handwriting is an important subject in primary schools, especially in the Early Years. The importance of writing skill is now seen as a debate with the increasing demand on children to learn technology skills to help them with 21st Century learning—how to write on the keyboard effectively. The topic is important because handwriting is an essential life skill to have with or without technology. In this study, I looked at the importance of both in the context of the qualitative case studies in three schools in Melbourne, Australia. The aim of the research is to explore how do students understand the learning of handwriting and keyboarding in schools? This qualitative case study employed a Thematic Analysis approach in which the central intention was to understand the lived experience of six Year 6 boys across three schools and their attitudes to writing and technology. In this article, I addressed the importance of teaching handwriting to primary school students, especially in the first four years of their school life from Foundation to Year 3. The findings suggest that teachers should continue explicitly teaching handwriting to their students despite the heavy reliance on technology in today’s lifestyle.
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    In Jen’s Shoes – Looking Back to Look Forward: An Autoethnographic Account
    Sze, J ; Southcott, J (Nova Southeastern University, )
    This paper discusses the monumental events in my life that have shaped my two professional identities, teacher and researcher. I used autoethnography as a research methodology to traverse my personal life narratives across two different countries: Vietnam and Australia to seek and to examine my dual cultural identities, and how they shaped me. I am a passionate teacher who believes that teaching can change the world through the causes that I care about such as anti-racism and equity in education for students from all backgrounds. In this case study, data were collected by semi-structured interview and reflection on journals. Data were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. The findings are reported under four themes that reflected the stages of my life: designed in Vietnam, made in Australia was the first phase, growing up in Australia, my schooling years and professional years. By making sense of the narratives and involved, it helped me to understand myself better, who I am as a teacher and the causes that I believe in. As an Australian with hybrid cultural identities, I am the norm in contemporary culture.
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    A Global Tuberculosis Dictionary: unified terms and definitions for the field of tuberculosis
    Garcia-Basteiro, AL ; Ehrlich, J ; Bonnet, M ; Calnan, M ; Graham, SM ; Hermans, S ; Jarrett, A ; Lewa, R ; Mandalakas, A ; Martinez, L ; Migliori, GB ; Ong, CWM ; Otero, L ; Rangaka, MX ; Raviglione, MCB ; Seaworth, B ; Ssengooba, W ; Theron, G ; Trajman, A ; Behr, MA (Elsevier BV, 2024-03)
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    PI3K activation in neural stem cells drives tumorigenesis which can be ameliorated by targeting the cAMP response element binding protein
    Daniel, PM ; Filiz, G ; Brown, DV ; Christie, M ; Waring, PM ; Zhang, Y ; Haynes, JM ; Pouton, C ; Flanagan, D ; Vincan, E ; Johns, TG ; Montgomery, K ; Phillips, WA ; Mantamadiotis, T (OXFORD UNIV PRESS INC, 2018-10)
    BACKGROUND: Hyperactivation of phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) signaling is common in cancers, but the precise role of the pathway in glioma biology remains to be determined. Some understanding of PI3K signaling mechanisms in brain cancer comes from studies on neural stem/progenitor cells (NSPCs), where signals transmitted via the PI3K pathway cooperate with other intracellular pathways and downstream transcription factors to regulate critical cell functions. METHODS: To investigate the role of the PI3K pathway in glioma initiation and development, we generated a mouse model targeting the inducible expression of a PIK3CAH1047A oncogenic mutant and deletion of the PI3K negative regulator, phosphatase and tensin homolog (PTEN), to NSPCs. RESULTS: Expression of a Pik3caH1047A was sufficient to generate tumors with oligodendroglial features, but simultaneous loss of PTEN was required for the development of invasive, high-grade glioma. Pik3caH1047A-PTEN mutant NSPCs exhibited enhanced neurosphere formation which correlated with increased Wnt signaling, while loss of cAMP response element binding protein (CREB) in Pik3caH1047A-Pten mutant tumors led to longer symptom-free survival in mice. CONCLUSION: Taken together, our findings present a novel mouse model for glioma demonstrating that the PI3K pathway is important for initiation of tumorigenesis and that disruption of downstream CREB signaling attenuates tumor expansion.
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    Investigating Neural Stem Cell and Glioma Stem Cell Self-renewal Potential Using Extreme Limiting Dilution Analysis (ELDA)
    Mantamadiotis, T ; Nguyen, H ; Daniel, P ; Filiz, G (Bio-Protocol, 2018)
    Glioma stem cells (GSC) grown as neurospheres exhibit similar characteristics to neural stem cells (NSC) grown as neurospheres, including the ability to self-renew and differentiate. GSCs are thought to play a role in cancer initiation and progression. Self-renewal potential of GSCs is thought to reflect many characteristics associated with malignancy, including tumor recurrence following cytotoxic therapy due to their proliferative dormancy and capacity to allow for the development of resistant tumor cell sub-clones due to mutations acquired during their differentiation. Here, we demonstrate that using extreme limiting dilution analysis (ELDA), subtle differences in the frequency of sphere-forming potential between PI3K-mutant oncogenic NSCs and non-oncogenic NSCs can be measured, in vitro. We further show how ELDA can be used on cells, before and after forced differentiation to amplify inherent differences in sphere-forming potential between mutant and control NSCs. Ultimately, ELDA exploits a difference in the ability of a single or a few seeded stem cells to self-renew, divide and form neurospheres. Importantly, the assay also allows a comparison between genetically distinct cells or between the same cells under different conditions, where the impact of drugs or other novel cancer stem cell therapies can be tested.