Residential Aged Care Policy in Australia – Are We Learning from Evidence?

The residential aged care industry in Australia will expand rapidly over the next 10 years leading to substantial increases in government expenditure. Recent and future reforms are likely leading to changes in the structure of the industry with a potential impact on quality of care. The purpose of this paper is to stimulate broader public debate, based on the available evidence, about the preferred structure of this important industry. It examines the literature on the impact structure has on the quality of services and compares this with a fresh analysis of current trends. The paper argues that future policy should be evidence based and explicit about the structure of the industry that will emerge from current policy reforms.     

Maladies of our souls: identity and voice in the writing of academic international relations

Drawing primarily, but not exclusively on the work of Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes on language, writing, and ‘the subject’, I examine the issue of identity and writing in international relations. I argue that what has come to be labeled ‘critical’ or ‘radical’ constructivism rather insistently points in the direction of opening up spaces for discussing our own writing and exploring our own voices in what we write, though this has not been actively pursued. Sociologist Avery Gordon uses the phrase ‘making common cause’ to argue that our encounters with the social world ‘must strive to go beyond the fundamental alienation of turning social relations into just things we know and toward our own reckoning with how we are in these stories, with how they change us’. It seems to me that this is not possible without giving attention to the issue of voice, specifically the voice we use when we write about international relations. To speak of voice is to raise many interesting and important questions, to ponder our use of language, our locations within our stories and the discourses we create, and perhaps most importantly to give recognition to the presence of desire in language and in the writing of international national relations.     

Microbial metagenome profiling using amplicon length heterogeneity-polymerase chain reaction proves more effective than elemental analysis in discriminating soil specimens

The combination of soil's ubiquity and its intrinsic abiotic and biotic information can contribute greatly to the forensic field. Although there are physical and chemical characterization methods of soil comparison for forensic purposes, these require a level of expertise not always encountered in crime laboratories. We hypothesized that soil microbial community profiling could be used to discriminate between soil types by providing biological fingerprints that confer uniqueness. Three of the six Miami-Dade soil types were randomly selected and sampled. We compared the microbial metagenome profiles generated using amplicon length heterogeneity-polymerase chain reaction analysis of the 16S rRNA genes with inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy analysis of 13 elements (Al, B, Ca, Cu, Fe, K, Mg, Mn, Na, P, S, Si, and Zn) that are commonly encountered in soils. Bray-Curtis similarity index and analysis of similarity were performed on all data to establish differences within sites, among sites, and across two seasons. These data matrices were used to group samples that shared similar community patterns using nonmetric multidimensional scaling analysis. We concluded that while chemical characterization could provide some differentiation between soils, microbial metagenome profiling was better able to discriminate between the soil types and had a high degree of reproducibility, therefore proving to be a potential tool for forensic soil comparisons.