Research note: how Muslims are perceived in Catholic schools in contemporary Australia: a national survey

This paper presents results from a large-scale national survey of attitudes of students in Catholic schools in Australia towards Muslims and Islam. Over 2232 students completed questionnaires which were obtained from students in 42 Catholic schools throughout Australia. These schools were drawn from both rural and urban areas in New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, Queensland and South Western Australia. The findings include evidence of goodwill on several indicators, with a variation in response between boys and girls, religious identifiers and ‘others’, and stereotyping of one’s own mainstream/Catholic community vs. Muslims. Positive, neutral and other stereotypical attitudes were included in the analysis. A number of negative attitudes suggest that relative recent migration to Australia contributed in large measure to a poorly informed response, while the long-standing multicultural posture of educational policy suggests otherwise.     

Rapid change in a South African tertiary institution: Implications for occupational social work

Universities, like most organisations, are in a state of continuous transformation. The past decade has seen dramatic changes taking place at universities in South Africa, which have impacted on employees, especially academics. This article focuses on the transformations at the University of Fort Hare in the Eastern Cape, and recounts the qualitative findings of a small-scale research project, conducted by the first author, which provide a flavour of the way in which UFH academics perceived and responded to a fast changing university milieu. It examines the strengths which sustained them and argues that universities should help people to identify and utilise such strengths within their organisations by employing occupational social workers. The authors, both social work trained and former practitioners, have written this article jointly under the auspices of a three-year British Council Higher Education Link Programme between the Social Work Department at the University of Fort Hare and the Community and Criminal Justice Studies Division at De Montfort University, Leicester.     

Resistance training induced increase in VO2max in young and older subjects

It is an undeniable fact that resistance training (RT) is a potent stimulus for muscle hypertrophy and strength gain, but it is less understood whether RT can increase maximal aerobic capacity (VO₂max). The purpose of this brief review is to discuss whether or not RT enhances VO₂max in young (20–40 years) and older subjects (>60 years). Only 3 of 17 studies involving young subjects have indicated significant increases in VO₂max following RT, while six of nine studies in older subjects have reported significant improvements in VO₂max following RT. There was a significant negative correlation between the initial VO₂max and RT-induced change in VO₂max. This result suggests that RT-induced increase in VO₂max is dependent upon the subject’s initial VO₂max. The RT-induced increase in VO₂max may be elicited when their initial relative VO₂max is lower than 25 ml/kg/min for older subjects and lower than 40 ml/kg/min for young subjects. Thus, RT can be expected to improve concurrently both muscular and cardiovascular fitnesses within a single mode of RT when young and old persons have initially low fitness levels.     

Social Psychopathy,Social Distress,Family Breakdown,and Custody Disputes in the 1990s: Implications for Mental Health Professionals

The decade of the 1990s will probably contain more challenges to the role of the mental health practitioner in child custody cases than ever before in history. Because of increasing social stress and family disintegration, custody disputes are destined to become more frequent, bitter, and traumatic for all parties. Mental health professionals, in particular, need to develop a coherent structure regarding their own participation in this process. Issues of moral changes among our leadership and our citizenry are examined and guidelines for the behavior of the mental health practitioner in the courtroom are formulated and illustrated as they pertain to custody decisions. Parlicular attention is paid to custody decisions as an a11 rather than a science, the role of empirical research, the need to anticipate certain unintended circumstances, the need for the application of mental health principles on an individual case-by-case basis, the nature of the mental health professional’s expertise, and the problems with the concepts of “parental unfitness” and the use of psychiatric diagnosis as a way of defining such alleged unfitness.     

Biogeographical history of northeastern Asiatic soricine shrews (insectivora, mammalia)

A hypothetical biogeographical history of northeastern Asiatic soricine shrews in the late Quaternary was developed by integrating their present distributions, fossil records, a hypothetical phylogeny, and geological investigations. First, a biological area cladogram of the northeastern Asiatic region was constructed by applying the vicariance hypothesis to the phylogeny of thecaecutiens/shinto group, a monophyletic group proposed by Ohdachi et al. (1997). Comparing the biological area cladogram with a geological hypothesis by Ohshima (1990,1991,1992), we hypothesized a geographical history of northeastern Asia. Species were then located on the dendrogram of the geographical history, referring to the present distributions, fossil records, and phylogeny of shrews. According to our hypothesis, higher species diversity of the northern region of northeastern Asia (Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and Eastern Siberia) was achieved by several series of colonizations and habitat expansion. On the other hand, the shrew communities of the southern region (Honshu, Sado, Shikoku, and Kyushu) were created by extinction and isolation followed by speciation.     

工具，时代的呈现——MATSU 铭立家具

传统木质办公家具的过气这早已是不争的事实．其实即便是所谓新概念的办公设备也正面临着一轮接一轮的更新换代。许多从事高端设计．研发的专业工作者对他们的办公家具要求越来越多功能、越来越专业化。