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Objective: To assess depression literacy, help-seeking and help-offering to others in members of the police force in the state of Victoria, Australia. Methods: All staff in police stations involved in a cluster randomised controlled trial of an integrated workplace mental health intervention were invited to participate. Survey questions covered sociodemographic and employment information, recognition of depression in a vignette, stigma, treatment beliefs, willingness to assist co-workers with mental health problems, help-giving and help-seeking behaviours, and intentions to seek help. Using the baseline dataset associated with the trial, the paper presents a descriptive analysis of mental health literacy and helping behaviours, comparing police station leaders and lower ranks. Results: Respondents were 806 staff, comprising 618 lower-ranked staff and 188 leaders. Almost 84% of respondents were able to correctly label the problem described in the vignette. Among those who had helped someone with a mental health problem, both lower ranks and leaders most commonly reported ‘talking to the person’ although leaders were more likely to facilitate professional help. Leaders’ willingness to assist the person and confidence in doing so was very high, and over 80% of leaders appropriately rated police psychologists, general practitioners, psychologists, talking to a peer and contacting welfare as helpful. However, among both leaders and lower ranks with mental health problems, the proportion of those unlikely to seek professional help was greater than those who were likely to seek it. Conclusion: Knowledge about evidence-based interventions for depression was lower in this police sample than surveys in the general population, pointing to the need for education and training to improve mental health literacy. Such education should also aim to overcome barriers to professional help-seeking. Interventions that aim to improve mental health literacy and help-seeking behaviour appear to be suitable targets for better protecting police member mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Building adaptive reuse plays a critical role in emissions reduction and supports global climate protection. Thus, the designing of future buildings with embedded adaptive reuse potential is a useful criterion for sustainability. This paper describes the development of a new rating tool known as adaptSTAR, which offers holistic and unified design criteria suitable for assessing the adaptive reuse potential of future buildings. The findings show that criteria can be identified and weighted according to physical, economic, functional, technological, social, legal and political categories to calculate an adaptive reuse star rating. In addition, this paper reports on the first stage of the research methodology used in the initial development of the rating tool and concludes with some preliminary observations from 12 selected successful case studies in New South Wales (NSW) and Melbourne, Australia. The use of adaptSTAR in designing future buildings will lead and help promote low carbon built environments. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: Yield plays a central role in the processes, practices, management and operation of urban water supply systems. Improved accuracy of the yield estimate is important and can be obtained by improving knowledge of important variables. Yield is typically estimated via computational simulation using the entire sequence of available historic climate data. Sensitivity analysis provides a framework and many techniques that can identify important variables in a computational model. Using the Morris method, this paper investigates the importance of input variables used in the estimation of yield of urban water supply systems. The Barwon urban water supply system in Australia is used as the case study. Using a number of climate scenarios of various lengths, sensitivity analysis showed that the security criteria of the Barwon system was the most important to the yield estimate. The upper restriction rule curve also showed notable importance. Significantly the results showed that the use of a single climate sequence for estimating yield would produce misrepresentative results for another climate scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drought is a natural phenomenon, and has widespread and significant impacts on the world's economy, environment, industries and the wider community. Early detection of droughts helps to implement drought mitigation strategies and measures before they occur. Therefore, drought forecasting plays an important role in the planning and management of water resources systems, especially during dry climatic periods. However, drought assessment and forecasting are not always easy tasks. In this paper, an approach that was developed and tested for drought assessment and forecasting is presented together with a case study on the Yarra River catchment in Victoria (Australia). An evaluation of existing drought indices was first conducted in this study, which led to the development of a new non-linear aggregated drought index (NADI). The NADI defines a broad perspective of dryness within the catchment rather than the traditional individual meteorological, hydrological and agricultural subcategories. Thereafter, a novel drought forecasting modelling approach was developed using the NADI time series. The results show that the developed forecasting models are capable of forecasting drought conditions well up to 6 months ahead forecasts which were statistically significant at 1% level. The outcomes of this study will be useful for water resources managers to assess droughts effectively and forecast future drought conditions, which will allow them to plan ahead the future water management activities especially during drought periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tourism in ski resorts depends on snow cover which is expected to decline with climate change. This paper explores hypotheses about demand side responses to climatic change by analyzing patterns of visitation in recent years with differing snow cover. Snow cover and visitation patterns to six resorts which differ in altitude and size in Victoria, Australia, were compared between a slightly warm and much drier year (2006, +0.6°C and -50% precipitation to longer-term averages) to a more typical year (2007) and to nine earlier years. Snowmaking partly offset declines in natural snow cover in 2006, although there were still fewer days with snow on the ground. The number of visitor days was much lower in 2006 than the previous nine years for the three lowest-altitude resorts (-69%), while it actually increased (+10%) in the highest altitude resort where there were fewer visitors (-17%), but they stayed longer. Snowmaking is already critical for ski resorts in low snow years. With warmer conditions, lower-altitude resorts may not receive enough income due to reduced visitation to offset snowmaking costs, while higher-altitude resorts may have a short-term gain, but become uneconomical in the longer term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the extent to which ESL teachers' understanding of their work as literacy educators has collective resonance with other practitioners in the same professional space. In so doing, it seeks to identify what aspects of individual knowledge stand the test of professional consensus (Wise, 2005), and thus give greater credence to practitioner-generated expertise that has become increasingly marginalised in the move towards more 'scientific', evidence-based paradigms for educational research (Harper & de Jong, 2009). While not arguing that professional consensus is, in itself, sufficient for defining best practice, it does argue of the need to recognise teacher expertise as one significant element in shaping understandings of pedagogy. The data emerges from a larger study of what it means to 'teach literacy' when working with ESL learners that initially focused on three teacher case studies. The second phase, presented here, surveyed a larger body of teachers in Victorian high schools to elicit their response to statements extrapolated from case study interviews. Following an overview of literacy within current Australian curriculum discourse and a summary of the first phase findings, I then present an analysis of the survey results from phase two. I conclude by arguing what insights these findings offer current understandings of literacy, and the implications they begin to raise for teaching literacy to ESL learners in the Australian middle years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drought indexes (DIs) have commonly been used to quantify drought conditions around the world. Most DIs are developed for specific regions and, therefore, may not be directly applicable to other regions because of the inherent complexity of drought phenomena, different hydroclimatic conditions, and different catchment characteristics. A few studies in which the suitability of some of the existing DIs was evaluated for different parts of the world have been cited in the literature. However, no such study has been conducted in Australia, where droughts are more frequent than elsewhere in the world. In this paper, five DIs, namely, percent of normal (PN), deciles, Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), Surface Water Supply Index (SWSI), and Aggregated Drought Index (ADI) were evaluated for the Yarra River catchment in Victoria, Australia. The evaluation was conducted to determine how well these indexes modeled historical droughts. Five decision criteria, namely, robustness, tractability, sophistication, transparency, and extendability, were used to compare the performance of these DIs. The results showed that the ADI was superior to other indexes for drought management within the Yarra River catchment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper examines the complex politics of gay/lesbian belonging through a case study of Daylesford, Victoria, an Australian country town. It contributes to two research bodies: gay/lesbian rural geographies and the politics of belonging. Daylesford hosts ChillOut, Australia's largest rural gay/lesbian festival, which provides a telling context for investigating gay/lesbian belonging in rural Australia. We use qualitative data from the 2006 ChillOut Festival, including interviews with local residents, newspaper commentaries, and visitors' surveys, to explore how Daylesford has been constructed, imagined, and experienced as a 'unique' site of gay/lesbian belonging in rural Australia. We find that ChillOut crucially contributes to its wider reputation as a gay-friendly country town, but also, we argue, to the contested nature of gay/lesbian belonging. This was most powerfully demonstrated by the local council's refusal to fly the gay-identified rainbow flag on the Town Hall during the 2006 Festival and its subsequent banning of the display of all festival flags from that key public building. Because ChillOut was the catalyst for this protocol, the resolution was viewed as homophobic. Indeed, the homophobic and heterosexist rhetoric that ensued in the Letters to the Editor section of the local newspaper revealed some residents' underlying antagonism towards ChillOut and the local gay/lesbian community. Moreover, appealing to a shared 'Australian identity' and associated normative 'family values', these letter writers deployed a multi-scalar politics of belonging, where a sense of gay/lesbian belonging to Daylesford at the local scale was contested by the assertion of a 'more meaningful' national scale of allegiance fashioned by heteronormativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]