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The ability to apply and measure high forces (gt;10 pN) on the nanometer scale is critical to the development of nanomedicine, molecular robotics, and the understanding of biological processes such as chromatin condensation, membrane deformation, and viral packaging. Established force spectroscopy techniques including optical traps, magnetic tweezers, and atomic force microscopy rely on micron-sized or larger handles to apply forces, limiting their applications within constrained geometries including cellular environments and nanofluidic devices. A promising alternative to these approaches is DNA-based molecular calipers. However, this approach is currently limited to forces on the scale of a few piconewtons. To study the force application capabilities of DNA devices, we implemented DNA origami nanocalipers with tunable mechanical properties in a geometry that allows application of force to rupture a DNA duplex. We integrated static and dynamic single-molecule characterization methods and statistical mechanical modeling to quantify the device properties including force output and dynamic range. We found that the thermally driven dynamics of the device are capable of applying forces of at least 20 piconewtons with a nanometer-scale dynamic range. These characteristics could eventually be used to study other biomolecular processes such as protein unfolding or to control high-affinity interactions in nanomechanical devices or molecular robots.

This project examines international models of metropolitan and regional planning, focusing on governance, spatial organisation, and connectivity, to identify drivers of economic and social outcomes. It identifies lessons for Australian practice through a review of capital city and regional planning frameworks, and interviews with planners across three levels of government.

This essay will examine an illuminating convergence in the thoughts of Pope John Paul II and the cultural anthropologist René Girard. It will be seen that this convergence is a consequence of the shared concern of both to understand the human person in terms of its relation to other persons. So while not a personalist philosopher in the strict sense, René Girard’s concern for the interpersonal brings him close to the personalism of John Paul II, who likewise understands human subjectivity in terms of the relations by which it is constituted. Both practice what might be called an “interpersonalist” personalism, which this essay will argue ought to characterize the practice of personalism in a Christian context. The essay will make this observation the basis for further reflections on the nature of personalism and its relation to the Christian intellectual tradition.

In this impressively detailed archival study, Kathleen Flanagan traces discursive shifts that underlay the comprehensive recasting of public housing policy and practice over more than half a centur...

In the 25 years since its publication, Housing and Social Theory (Kemeny 1992) has accumulated hundreds of citations, inspired and informed numerous theses (including mine), and stimulated scores o...

Community opposition to locally unwanted development is not inherently problematic, but it can be destructive where conflict between proponents and objectors escalates. This paper relates mixed-methods findings from a Sydney case-study where opposition to planned affordable housing projects was widespread but uneven. Five factors are identified that escalated individual opposition campaigns in this case: public notification procedures; sense of injustice; prejudice; strong campaign leadership; and the involvement of politicians. We argue that these factors will likely also escalate opposition to the planned development of other forms of critical social infrastructure, and that an understanding of them can help minimise destructive conflicts between proponents and host communities.

The vessels supplying the gastrointestinal (GI) tract can be involved in almost any kind of pathology. This chapter on vascular diseases of the GI tract examines the presentation, pathology, diagnosis, and management of vascular disease processes in both the upper and lower GI tracts. Given the huge variety of conditions that can affect the GI vessels, this discussion will focus on the entities most commonly encountered in clinical practice, including occlusive mesenteric ischemia, nonocclusive mesenteric ischemia, GI bleeding, visceral aneurysms, and vascular trauma. The specific characteristics of each condition, examination tools such as ultrasound and computed tomography (CT), and possible treatments such as surgery and endovascular therapies are considered.

To compare toxicity, response, and survival outcomes of patients with hepatic metastases from breast cancer who underwent transarterial chemoembolization (TACE) or radioembolization (TARE).A retrospective review was carried out of all patients who underwent TACE or TARE for liver-dominant breast cancer metastases between January 2006 and March 2016 at an academic medical center in the United States.Seventeen patients in the TACE group and 30 patients in the TARE group received 32 TACE and 49 TARE treatments, respectively. Median follow-up was 9 months. Both groups had similar background variables. More all-grade adverse events were seen in the TACE group (71% vs. 44%; p=0.02). Median overall survival in the TACE group was 4.6 months compared to 12.9 months in the TARE group (p=0.2349). Treatment type was not an independent prognostic factor.TARE is better tolerated than TACE for the treatment of liver-dominant breast cancer metastasis. There was a trend towards improved survival with TARE; however, it did not approach statistical significance. Larger studies are needed to validate these findings.

This article brings Lefebvre's Right to the City thesis into conversation with Bauman's notion of the flawed consumer to account for the neoliberal colonisation of public tenant organising in urban redevelopment. Drawing on a case study of public housing redevelopment from Sydney, Australia, we show that neoliberal community building and the emergence of professional community builders obviate the self-organising efforts of tenants. In this case tenants’ rights were attenuated when the housing authority invited private capital to not only rebuild the physical fabric but also remake the social relations around public tenancy within the trope of consumerism. We argue for a revival of tenant self-organising as a collective political project that might counteract the individualisation of tenants’ rights under neoliberal community building regimes. Such a political project needs to be extended beyond the boundaries of the local neighbourhood or ‘housing estate’ to expose the strategies at work in public housin...

This paper explores the issue of territorial stigmatisation through tenant-driven research chronicling the experiences of social housing tenants as they examined and reflected upon the Australian television series Housos . The television series aired on an independent, part publicly funded, television station in 2011 and depicts the lifestyles of fictional tenant characters on an imaginary social housing estate. The series presents satirical and exaggerated parodies about everyday life on the estate, drawing on a range of stereotypes of social housing tenants. Tenants are portrayed as feckless and antisocial individuals who engage in a range of irresponsible and sometimes criminal behaviour in order to avoid work and whose family and other relationships are dysfunctional. Public tenants are far from passive victims of stigmatisation and conducted the analysis presented in this study. They reveal a sophisticated understanding of how stigma operates through the media, various agencies, and the nonresident community. While economic and political forces, and changing modes for governing poverty, have resulted in geographical confinement of residents on estates, tenants reflected on their own ‘real-life’ experiences and provide accounts of deliberate and self-conscious use of ‘negative’ social status to produce positive collective identities. Alternatively, nontenant participants repeated common prejudices about public housing, and reflected on their belief that the system was not effectively preventing welfare cheats and ‘bludgers’ from loafing at their (taxpayers’) expense. Keywords: territorial stigmatisation, social housing estates, media, television, images of the poor, stigma, neighbourhood reputation

Global city discourses rearticulate the relationships between the state, urban space and the global economy. At the local level, global city reconfigurations stamp the mark of a global economic order onto local citizenship practices. Public housing is a legacy of specific national (welfare) states where citizenship rights arose from territorially bound constitutional discourses, and is incompatible in its current form with the consumer-based rights and responsibilities of a global economic order. At the same time, property markets in high-value areas of cities like Sydney, Australia, see not only increasing presence of international investment but fundamental changes in planning and governance processes in order to facilitate it. Global market-oriented discourses of urban governance promote consumer “performances of citizenship” and a graduated approach to the distribution of rights, including the right to housing. In this article we explore what is new about neoliberal approaches to public and social housing policy, and how public tenants respond to and negotiate it. In Australia tenants’ right to participate in local-level democracy, and in housing management, must be reconsidered in light of the broader discourses of consumer citizenship that are now enforced on tenants as a set of “responsibilities” to the market and state.

This article provides an international context to the We Call These Projects Home report by describing how, despite marked differences in form and location of housing and in the socio-cultural makeup of the tenant community, deconcentration and dispersal of public tenants has become a central concern of housing authorities in Australia. This comparison brings into relief several important elements of the deconcentration agenda which help to explain the vigour with which it is pursued despite continuing debate concerning the claimed benefits for tenants. In contrast to the high density, and culturally homogenous US projects, in Australia much of the focus of redevelopment activity has been either in low-density outer-suburban housing estates, or in higher density inner urban areas where land value is high and gentrification pressures are already evident. Nonetheless, a similar cultural theory of ‘neighbourhood effects’ has been deployed to justify intervention. This paper will argue that the diffusion of this policy without regard for actual local conditions exposes the ideological nature of the deconcentration agenda which has the effect of, at once, making former state assets available for private speculation and capital accumulation, and also demonising those who benefit from state subsidised housing but do not participate as private consumers in the housing market. The paper also considers the ways in which conventional policy-driven research on neighbourhood social conditions has effectively excluded the situated knowledge of public housing tenants, compounding their relative powerlessness, and how the political rhetoric associated with deconcentration has added to the stigma of public housing and the cultural exclusion of tenants. More recent attempts to involve tenants in consultation on redevelopment plans serve to illustrate further the political and economic interests at stake, despite some tenant groups’ continued attempts to mount an alternative agenda. A cross-national project currently being undertaken in Australia and the US is described which attempts to provide tenants with the means to develop their own research and policy agenda.

This paper focuses on what happens when accountability regimes, represented in calculative planning processes, migrate onto situated, sociomaterial practices. Specifically, the article investigates what happens when the practices of results-based accountability (RBA) are translated into the social justice practices of locally-based community organizations. Based on the tenets of contemporary practice theory and a three-year participatory action research project with community organizations in Australia, the study illustrates that performance measurement and accountability frameworks such as RBA are not technologies that peer and measure innocently and disinterestedly from a distance. Rather, RBA, as a bundle of material-discursive practices, is part of the performance measuring apparatus creating differences that include some things and exclude others. We articulate some of the organizing practices of social justice in a locally-based community organization, follow their translation into RBA planning practices and then return to analyse the introduction of RBA practices into the daily work of an organization. In this way, we demonstrate how situated and ongoing practices begin to unravel through intra-action with RBA boundary-making practices and its redrawn relations of accountability.

Despite differences in the history, form, and tenant populations, housing authorities in the UK, USA and Australia have embarked on similar redevelopment projects designed to address social exclusion by replacing areas of concentrated public housing with “mixed‐income” developments. Drawing on examples from Australia, this paper analyses the discourse which supports these redevelopment projects. Elements of the discursive strategy revealed include: the construction of public tenancy as a disadvantage in itself; the creation of particular research categories and objects (such as “estates”) based on selective use of statistics and scale; the generation of binary narratives concerning community life; and constrained forms of consultation and participation. The analysis demonstrates that while purporting to be an anti‐poverty measure, policy directed at de‐concentration of public housing and “mixed income” development forms part of a neo‐liberal agenda of housing reform and fails to address the demonstrated c...

This article explores the changing relationship between government and The Salvation Army, as manifested in the development and implementation of employment policy in Australia between 1998 and 2007. This exploration focuses on the introduction of market discourse throughout the contracting process, in particular how this discourse seeks to reconstruct service users as ‘consumers’, and the Salvation Army’s response to this. By studying the ways in which this religiously and socially motivated non-profit organization sought to mediate neo-liberal discourses of competition and consumerism, we seek to shed light on the processes and pressures affecting faith-based and other non-profit organizations that increasingly find themselves acting as agents of government policy under the principles of New Public Management (NPM).

Direct visualization of the bile ducts and gall bladder via cholangioscopy is very useful both in treatment of complex stone cases and the assessment of indeterminate strictures or masses. It allows use of instruments that cannot be used safely with fluoroscopic guidance alone. It also increases procedural efficiency and decreases radiation doses. Careful selection of access routes is critical to ensuring successful cholangioscopy. Tract dilation to accommodate the access sheath should be deferred for several weeks after the initial drainage procedure. This allows clearance of infected material plus allows the tract to mature. Allowing time for tract maturation decreases the chances of bleeding complications. Overall complications occur in about 20% of cases, with major complications occurring in around 8%. Most complications are bleeding or infectious and the majority relate to tract dilation, with a minority being due to the cholangioscopy itself. Successful stone removal can be achieved in about 90 to 95% of cases. Successful diagnosis of indeterminate stricture can be accomplished through a combination of visual inspection and endoscopic-guided biopsy. For intraluminal masses the accuracy of endoscopic biopsy is close to 100% but for periductal metastatic lesions or mural strictures (as with primary sclerosing cholangitis) diagnostic accuracy is significantly lower.

The relationship between place and disadvantage, and particularly the question of whether, and how, geographical concentration of disadvantaged households exacerbates disadvantage is of growing concern to social science and urban policy. Despite many calls for a subtle and complex approach to constructing knowledge about these issues, a positivist approach based on statistical indicators, appears to dominate policy making. This approach reifies place and distracts attention from strategies which might effectively address disadvantage at the local level. This article describes two examples of small area redevelopment where such an approach has been used to suggest that redevelopment and dispersal of public housing concentrations are in the interests of current residents, whose lives would be improved through replacement of existing housing forms with more diverse, or at least tenure-mixed, suburbs. Yet the process by which this improvement will occur is yet to be explicated or even adequately theorised by ...

Summary Information and communication technology (ICT) usage in contemporary child welfare practice reflects dominant managerial interests rather than those of the profession, and, importantly, of service users. Explicit use of ICT in the interests of service users remains embryonic, and professionals have been slow to capitalize on the communication potential of new technologies. This contrasts with technology uptake in other areas of human services. Unless this situation changes, client participation and power may decline further and managerial interests increasingly dominate. ICT has the potential to strengthen interaction between families and workers and change the conditions of initiation, distribution and use of spoken and written ‘texts’ in social work practice. This could significantly affect the ability of service users to be heard and to influence decision making. However, the opportunities and limitations of computer-mediated communication are a relatively new area of study—their application to child welfare requires considerable care. Social workers should explore the advantages that ICT offers service users and challenge the digital divide which still affects significant pockets of service users, and reflect on our own role in this. Here, we ask why social work has been has been slow to capitalize on new approaches to its core business: communication.

Introduction & Aim. The role of age as a predictor of mortality after transjugular intra hepatic portosystemic shunt (TIPS) is controversial. Age has been found to be an important predictor of post-TIPS mortality in some, but not all, studies and is not a component of the MELD score. The purpose of this study was to compare the 90-day survival of subjects with cirrhosis age ≥ 70 years with younger subjects undergoing TIPS.Material and methods. A database of adult with cirrhosis undergoing TIPS from 2003-2011 was analyzed. The primary endpoint was survival 90-days post-TIPS. Survival was analyzed by the Kaplan-Meier method and proportional hazard modeling.Results. 539 subjects met study criteria. 474 (88%) were between the ages of 24-69 and 65 (12%) were age 70-89 years. The groups were similar with respect to the indication for TIPS, mean MELD score and distribution of MELD score. Survival 90-days post-TIPS was 60% in the older cohort compared with 85% in the younger cohort (p < 0.001). Proportional hazards modeling controlled for comorbidities identified age ≥ 70 and MELD score as predictors of early post-TIPS survival. The hazard ratio associated with age increased monotonically, became significant at age ≥ 70 years (HR 3.22; 95% CI 1.81-5.74; p < 0.001) and exceeded the effect of MELD on survival.Conclusions. Age ≥ 70 was associated with reduced survival within 90 days following TIPS. The findings from this study indicate that age is a relevant consideration in assessing the early mortality risk of TIPS.

This article presents the findings of a study examining the rationale and practices of stock transfer from state housing authorities to community housing associations in three Australian states--Victoria, New South Wales and Tasmania. It begins with an analysis of the policy context that has informed debates about housing management and supply options in Australia. The main section of the article draws on written documentation and interviews with policy actors and tenants in each of the case studies to highlight the conflicts and tensions that surface in moves to reconfigure the management of public housing. Alongside a brief discussion about the policy themes that emerge from the findings, it is suggested in the conclusion that the continuing contestation and uncertainty about the stock transfer process is symptomatic of the national 'policy vacuum' about the future direction of public housing in Australia.

Finding and establishing access into the portal vein remains one of the more challenging aspects of transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunt (TIPS) procedures. Numerous methods to localize the portal vein have been described. Wedge venography remains the noninvasive technique that most consistently shows the portal vein anatomy. Attention to a few procedural details improves both the safety and efficacy of wedge venography. The full spectrum of invasive and noninvasive localization techniques are reviewed.

Recent developments in Australian social housing policy encompass a larger role for non-government housing providers. The new emphasis is mediated and supported by the discourse of 'community' housing. 'Community' is invoked as an ideal by liberal critics of the centralised state, and conversely, by critics of liberalism who pose it as an alternative to individualism and the abstract formalism of the liberal state. Much of the rhetoric of community housing in Australia has emphasised its claimed potential to demonstrate ways in which social housing management can be made more accountable and responsive, as well as more equitable and efficient, but the evident contradictions in the discourse raise questions concerning the reasons for, and likely outcomes of, state sponsorship of community housing. This paper employs 'textually oriented discourse analysis' to examine key policy documents which have informed the development of community housing policy in Australia, and demonstrates linkages between these discourse samples, and the international tendencies in the societal order of discourse identified by Fairclough as 'democratisation', 'commodification' and 'technologisation'.

Venous thoracic outlet syndrome (VTOS) requires imaging to confirm the diagnosis and assess the extent of involvement and chronicity. In patients who present with acute effort thrombosis, thrombolysis is typically the first step. Tools for performing pharmacomechanical thrombolysis and strategies for their use will be discussed. Angioplasty and occasionally stenting are important techniques for managing residual stenoses after operative decompression of the thoracic outlet.

This chapter critiques some of the dominant discourses of place and disadvantage as well as their epistemology. The current attention given to neighbourhood effects is seen as part of a larger ‘spatial turn’ in social science, which attempts to explain the disadvantage of poor households concentrated in poor neighbourhoods. The chapter critiques the ‘culture of poverty explanation’ of disadvantage and the associated policy response of de-concentrating poverty through the creation of mixed income neighbourhoods. It is argued that if there is little evidence in support of neighbourhood effects in the first place, then creating mixed neighbourhoods will lead to little benefit for the neighbourhood residents, a large proportion of who will be displaced as a result of the policy. The chapter further critiques quantitative research for ignoring the voice and perspectives of neighbourhood residents. It distances itself completely from positivist epistemology by proposing an alternative approach based on phenomenological epistemology and participatory action research. This alternative approach is based on a ‘collaborative university – community research’ design to understand residents’ perspectives of their neighbourhood and concentrated public housing and the policy proposals for mixed housing in Australia.

Local vascular reconstructions frequently require the use of vein grafts to bridge arterial or venous defects. Most previous studies on the use of cryopreserved veins have used relatively large caliber vessels. There have been few studies on the effectiveness of cryopreserved micro- or small-venous allografts. Here, we tested two types of cryopreserved venous allografts: (1) 1.5- to 1.9-mm diameter microvenous grafts (MVG); and (2) 4- to 5-mm diameter small venous grafts (SVG). Cryopreserved MVG allografts were placed into saphenous arteries of six experimental dogs and SVG cryopreserved allografts were placed into femoral arteries of six experimental dogs for 3 to 6 weeks. Two fresh MVG autografts were also transplanted into experimental dogs as controls and autografts were transferred to the contralateral side in SVG dogs as controls. None of the six cryopreserved MVG grafts retained patency but three/six cryopreserved SVG allografts were patent at harvest. Histological examination of grafts revealed control autografts were undergoing arterialization with an intact intima. Experimental cryopreserved allografts showed extensive medial fibrosis, significant lymphocytic infiltrates, and sporadic areas of intact intima for both patent and nonpatent grafts.

Housing processes and products provide an invaluable contribution to understanding the city. The form, location and condition of its dwellings are a key feature of Sydney, reflecting its historical development, household and social structure, economic conditions and response to climate. Four aspects of Sydney’s housing - type, tenure, cost and location - provide indispensable insights into the city’s social makeup, its economic foundations and cultural identity. Unfortunately, as in most large cities around the world, a proportion of Sydney’s residents are unable to secure housing of any kind.

Behavior development in normal children is greatly facilitated by peer modeling. Unfortunately, autistic children do not typically imitate their normal peers. The present study was undertaken to identify variables that facilitate the acquisition of peer imitation and promote setting generality of imitative skills once they have been acquired. We selected a common preschool activity (Follow-the-Leader) as the vehicle for studying modeling effects. Four preschool children with autism took part in an intervention in which a normal peer demonstrated and, if necessary, physically prompted a variety of actions and object manipulations that defined the activity. Following training, all four children generalized their imitative skill to a new setting involving new actions and object manipulations. Results are discussed with respect to the potentially important role that the use of multiple training objects and/or responses play in enhancing attention to the model and facilitating setting generality as well as the role that intrinsically reinforcing activities may play in maintaining acquired peer imitation.

Severe hypertension and stenosis of the right renal artery developed in a 21 year old male, 14 years after completion of inverted Y radiation (4000 rads) for abdominal Hodgkin's disease. Transluminal angioplasty resulted in improvement of the right kidney function, and normalization of the blood pressure for one year. Subsequently, the patient required only minimum medical therapy for blood pressure control. Transluminal angioplasty may be effective immediately in the treatment of radiation induced renal artery stenosis, although long term success remains uncertain.

Brown and Taylor's implicit assumption in this issue of Australian Social Work, that Social Work is a discreet category of occupational activities, of which Local Government Community Work may or may not be a part, is challenged in this reply. Each requires practitioners to use certain knowledge, skills and attitudes which clearly have much in common but Community Work is not a subset of social work, rather social workers are a subset of community workers, especially in the Local Government context. This paper argues that community work is based on values which may be seen to conflict with the dominant mode of bureaucratic professional-client relations and with the current movement towards ‘corporate management’. The essentially political nature of all social welfare jobs, and not just Local Government community work demands that students be exposed to political, economic and administrative analysis if these are to be relevant to their future needs.