Latest Story
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Cusco & Machu Pichu – a postcard from Peru
Malcolm Crompton | December 4, 2008The historic capital of the Inca Empire, Cusco is situated 3,400 m above sea level, so you'll need at least a day of acclimatising before doing anything else.
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Voluntary Voting System
Hani Montan | December 3, 2008The current compulsory system of voting is a parody of democracy allowing the less-informed, manipulated, apathetic and emotionally motivated people to decide the outcome of elections.
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Western Tourists as Reporters
Zacha | December 3, 2008You can blog it, you can flickr it, you can Twitter it. The only difference with being in the middle of a big news story is that more people you don't know will pay attention to it.
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Growing Our Own in Melbourne: Self Sufficient Gardens Report
Daniel Moss | December 2, 2008A research project discussing sustainable, self-sufficiency gardening in Melbourne has found an increasing trend toward sustainable, self-sufficient gardening and highlights broader influences impacting on this, and uncovers a variety of community gardens and educational opportunities.
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Are you really leaving home when you travel?
Douglascomms | December 2, 2008Not all travel is good for you.
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It is another country, “through the eyes of a poet”
foggy | December 1, 2008If you love a little place in the world that may have heavy nostalgia for you, rest assured there are places like Italy that care for such corners, and will not let them be lost and swallowed up by acid rain or pollution dumps.
Italy. That is the place, somewhere in an august time setting, Joseph Addison was sent to. As was the custom in those days, for intellectual youth to do, and to make that cushy, he was granted a Pension of 300 pounds. Of course other places of Europe were on his visiting list, but the long poem, "A letter from Italy" is a record in verse of his tour of the place, along its length and breadth. It is said of him, he surveyed Italy "with the eyes of a poet". He has talked about Rome, Naples, the Tiber, Baia and Umbria. Of San Marino, there is a most amusing passage about it.
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Travel with kids
Catherine Fritz-Kalish | November 30, 2008When travelling with children, keep it simple and don’t take things too seriously.
The Holiday season is upon us and many will be looking forward to traveling somewhere different to really give them the holiday spirit. I have just finished my travels and this season will be staying put, but I have a few words of wisdom that may be helpful for you if you plan to travel anywhere with kids.
I have two sons aged 6 and 3 and we have just finished a five month stint traveling down the east coast of the USA, the UK, Israel and Italy. My husband worked for most of the trip while the kids and I explored.
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A Law for Free Speech and Freedom of the Press in Australia
Jim Staples | November 26, 2008The reputation of the Star Chamber rightly fetches condemnation in controversy nowadays, but its spirit is alive and well.
The legislatures of Australia, State, Territory and Federal, should all guarantee freedom of speech and freedom of the press by enacting a law which abolishes the crime of sedition.
The concept of sedition can be traced to the law of slander and libel developed to abate and rectify disputes in the ordinary course amongst the common people, in the community at large. It was a development under the writ of trespass, the first great writ of the law set in terms to uphold peace in the realm.
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More rational mental health funding will improve access to services for consumers
Viv.Miller | November 26, 2008A recent report on mental health funding, endorsed by the Mental Health Services Conference Inc, Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association and PwC, points the way to system reform.
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Waves of financial crisis crash on Australian shores
Joe Hockey | November 24, 2008There is no doubt that, economically, Australia is in a better position than most other countries. However, these could possibly be the most challenging times Australians have ever faced.
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What if we changed the way we delivered healthcare?
George.Margelis | November 24, 2008A system of home-based care, facilitated by modern telecommunications and information technology, will extend the reach of our primary care health workers enabling them to monitor a patient from a distance, and, more importantly, it will allows us to scale the limited clinical specialist resources we currently have.
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Wiki for Cancer
Ian.Olver | November 24, 2008Wiki technoligy can become a new, modern, fast and cost-effective way of producing evidence based guidelines for cancer care.
Clinical practice guidelines are a useful tool for promoting evidence based medical practice. They require a complete review of the available literature and usually are written by a team of experts in a field and disseminated widely for comment. Levels of evidence range from the strongest where meta-analyses of randomised trials exist, to the weakest where there is little data but a consensus of expert opinion is recorded.
The challenges of producing such guidelines are the time and cost of their production and the rapidity at which they are outdated because of the rapid emergence of new evidence.
One potential solution is to use a Wiki platform to produce guidelines.
