Industry/University interaction for simulation-based process improvement

This paper describes an effort by industry and university partners to centralize manufacturing decision making through the development of generic simulation tools. This ongoing, cooperative process improvement initiative between the Industrial and Systems Engineering faculty at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) and Chrysler’s Huntsville Electronics Division (HED) permits the involved faculty to broaden their experience and technical expertise in electronics fabrication, while the industry partner benefits from the transfer of technical knowledge and advanced analysis methodologies from the university. The focus of the project is the definition of generic electronic manufacturing models that can be easily defined and implemented through common user-oriented interfaces, allowing users who are not familiar with simulation and simulation languages to address the needs of their particular functional areas.     

Florence and Rosamond Davenport Hill and the Development of Boarding Out in England and Australia: a study in cultural transmission

The adoption of boarding out by state children's departments across Australia is often attributed to the influence of English social reformers Florence and Rosamond Davenport Hill, whose visit to the colonies in the early 1870s coincided with a period of growing dis-ease with existing provisions for neglected children. However, after their return to Britain, they used their experience in the colonies to castigate English authorities for being too slow to adopt a similar course. This article complicates existing theories of cultural transmission in relation to ideas about child welfare. It analyses the ways in which the Davenport Hill sisters laid claim to their expert speaking position, and argues for the importance of informal networks in the development of child welfare policy in the years before the rise of transnational children's rights organisations.     

Maids and mothers: Domestic servants and illegitimacy in 19th-century Australia

Historically, domestic servants have been overrepresented amongst women whose ex-nuptial pregnancy became a public “problem.” Despite such apparent vulnerability, female rescue-workers also saw domestic work as the pathway to redemption for such women. Drawing on extensive Australian data on single mothers and their children in the 19th-century, this article investigates the complex relationship between domestic service and illegitimacy. While it will argue that the overrepresentation is more apparent than real, a product of the situation of the domestic servant whose workplace was her home and whose continued employment was often dependent on maintaining high moral standards, it will also contest the viability of domestic service as a “solution” for the mother compelled to work to support her child.     

Institutional Abuse: A Long History

ABSTRACT

This article explores the long history of institutions for children in Australia and of the existence of abuse within them. By examining the function that such institutions were designed to perform, and the forms and structures that were devised to best achieve such purposes, the article argues that abuse was all too often not simply inherent in, but essential to, institutional operation. It pays particular attention to the classification of children deemed to be in need of institutional “care” and shows how, through a process of “othering”, their institutionalisation too often rendered them vulnerable to abuse.     

Toward a social geography of baby farming

This paper uses a range of archival sources to undertake a case study of the people and practices encompassed by the term “baby farming” in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. It argues that baby farming needs to be located in space and time in order to reach some accommodation between its materiality and the discursive construction that continues to distort historical debate. Neither a criminal nor a compassionate practice, baby farming emerges as an economic exchange predicated on the vulnerability of single mothers, the disposability of their children, and in many cases, the desperation of poor women who see taking infants to nurse as a way of earning an income.     

Post-Hospital Medical Respite Care and Hospital Readmission of Homeless Persons

Medical respite programs offer medical, nursing, and other care as well as accommodation for homeless persons discharged from acute hospital stays. They represent a community-based adaptation of urban health systems to the specific needs of homeless persons. This article examines whether post-hospital discharge to a homeless medical respite program was associated with a reduced chance of 90-day readmission compared to other disposition options. Adjusting for imbalances in patient characteristics using propensity scores, respite patients were the only group that was significantly less likely to be readmitted within 90 days compared to those released to Own Care. Respite programs merit attention as a potentially efficacious service for homeless persons leaving the hospital.