Product Description
Australian Cities: Continuity and Change (3 edition) expands and updates this successful introduction to Australian cities. It examines the changing nature of Australia's major cities from a geographical perspective, and discusses the current issues in urban policy. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A good primer for those learning about cities in Australia
This book is a good primer for anyone learning about urban life in Australia. The book is a quick read that uses considerable facts to back up fairly interesting comments on the urban condition. It offers a very broad and general look at the social, economic, cultural and environmental issues as well as the government policies that have affected cities. It is enjoyable to read when so many other text books on these issues can be very boring. The only draw back I had with the book is the that it often focuses on presenting facts without giving enough commentary as to why they might be important, especially in chapters 2 and 3. However the remaining chapters did provide me with what I think are some valuable starting points for further study and interest with further reading as well. I would also say that the book is not limited to the Australian experience (although it is strictly about Australia) and could provide others from other countries valuable insight into the urban condition due to similarities among the developed countries of the world.

Overall, a very intelligent book that is enjoyable to read, that introduces a vast topic to the inexperienced and with only a few minor flaws.

A complete overview of the question
The third edition of this book offers an accurate, up-to-date and illustrated analysis of all major aspects of contemporary Australian cities (their evolution, their population, the changing patterns of segregation, etc.). Aimed firstly at students, it may be read by anyone interested in "Down under" cities. ... Read more

Product Description
The problems faced by urban Australia have become more prevalent in recent years. They spring from the public cost of urban growth, the negative environmental impact of cities, the importance of global competitiveness, tensions between the three tiers of government and declining standards of living in our cities. This book, written by a team of leading authors, offers a fresh exploration of key issues in the debates about cities. Incisive and up-to-date, it will be an important contribution to discussion about urban planning and policy. ... Read more

Product Description
From Vietnam to Indonesia, Singapore to Thailand, South-East Asia's economies are growing at unprecedented rates. This book penetrates the facade of contemporary city growth, exploring the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial city. It describes the divergence in urban development under capitalist and socialist regimes, and the gradual convergence in the post-reforms era of the 1990s. And it looks at the current problems of the fast growing metropolis, from the exploitation of women in the labour force, to the overstretched infrastructure and urban environmental crisis. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from Arena Magazine, published by Thomson Gale on February 1, 2006. The length of the article is 1451 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The red river Yarra: a genuine socialist politics to the left of the Greens is the only way that poor inner-city communities will be properly represented.
Author: Steve Jolly
Publication: Arena Magazine (Magazine/Journal)
Date: February 1, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Issue: 81Page: 10(2)

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is a journal article from Chemosphere, published by Elsevier in 2007. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
Benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylenes (BTEX) are common volatile organic compounds (VOCs) found in urban airsheds. Elevated levels of VOCs have been reported in many airsheds at many locations, particularly those associated with industrial activity, wood heater use and heavy traffic. Exposure to some VOCs has been associated with health risks. There have been limited investigations into community exposures to BTEX using personal monitoring to elucidate the concentrations to which members of the community may be exposed and the main contributors to that exposure. In this cross sectional study we investigated BTEX exposure of 204 non-smoking, non-occupationally exposed people from four Australian cities. Each participant wore a passive BTEX sampler over 24h on five consecutive days in both winter and summer and completed an exposure source questionnaire for each season and a diary for each day of monitoring. The geometric mean (GM) and range of daily BTEX concentrations recorded for the study population were benzene 0.80 (0.04-23.8ppb); toluene 2.83 (0.03-2120ppb); ethylbenzene 0.49 (0.03-119ppb); and xylenes 2.36 (0.04-697ppb). A generalised linear model was used to investigate significant risk factors for increased BTEX exposure. Activities and locations found to increase personal exposure included vehicle repair and machinery use, refuelling of motor vehicles, being in an enclosed car park and time spent undertaking arts and crafts. A highly significant difference was found between the mean exposures in each of the four cities, which may be explained by differences in fuel composition, differences in the mix and density of industry, density of motor vehicles and air pollution meteorology. ... Read more

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A COLLECTION OF THUGHFUL, ELOQUENT ESSAYS BY LEADING AUSTRALIAN WOMEN ACTIVISTS AND INTELLECTUALS ON THE EFFECT ON THEIR LIVES AND CHARACTERS OR THE PLACES THEY HAVE LIVED AND WORKED IN. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from Australian Journal of Early Childhood, published by Early Childhood Australia Inc. (ECA) on September 1, 2008. The length of the article is 5514 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

From the author: MAKIN AND JONES DIAZ (2002) suggest that young children's early literacy is most strongly supported when early childhood educators, children's families and the wider community develop shared understandings about literacy--what counts, what is valued and validated, and whose voices are heard and whose voices are silent. Researchers such as Haas Dyson (1993), Kress (1997), and Stein (2003) argue that young children's literacy experiences comprise much more than developing the conventional processes of written language, but also include their use of a range of multiple semiotic symbol systems. This article will explore young children's constructions of literacy, and reveal the important role family members (e.g. parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents) and school staff (e.g. teachers, Elders, speech and language pathologists) play in mediating young children's literacy learning and development.

Citation Details
Title: A collaborative approach to literacy: inner-city preschool children, families and the school community.(Report)
Author: Jodi Streelasky
Publication: Australian Journal of Early Childhood (Magazine/Journal)
Date: September 1, 2008
Publisher: Early Childhood Australia Inc. (ECA)
Volume: 33Issue: 3Page: 27(7)

Article Type: Report

Distributed by Gale, a part of Cengage Learning ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

This is more a description of the book than a review since amazon does not provide much info
From the inside cover:In this book Ronald Wild has made an ambitious attempt to interpret community studies from the perspective of three models of community, place Australian community studies within the traditions established in the United States and Britain and take the analysis of community beyond the confines of a particular locality.In theoretical terms the study outlines three models which encompass most expressions of community - the localised social system, community formation, and closure, and community, communion and society.A methodology section emphasises community research as a social process through time during which the experiences of the sociologist play a central part in the ongoing dialectical relationship between theory and data.In chapters on the mpirical tradition of community studies in the United States, Britain and Australia Professor Wild establishes their common foundations, discusses the background of the project and the difficulties encountered in fieldwork and interprets the results in terms of the three models.Two further chapters attempt to extend the traditional notion of the community study.The first does this through examining three approaches to cross-community comparisons.The second applies the community, communion society framework in analyses of local government and resident action politics, Italian immigrants and the commune movement.The author, Ronald Wild is prof. of sociology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, and Australia's leading expert in the study of Community.He is author of the classic study Bradstow - A Study of Status, Class and Power in a Small Australian Town and the standard text Social Stratification in Australia. ... Read more

Product Description
At present over 80 percent of Australia's population lives in urban areas. This percentage is likely to increase as cities expand in an attempt to keep up with the growth in population. Australia is not unique in this situation. Increasing urbanization is the prognosis for countries all over the globe. Despite their youth, Australian cities share many characteristics and problems with cities elsewhere, along with a localized set of difficulties that requires specific solutions. Urban development in Australia has had a major impact on surrounding biophysical environments, and this can sometimes adversely affect the health, welfare and lifestyle of urban residents. Urban Biophysical Environments provides an assessment of current and emerging environmental problems from a physical point of view. The authors take a multidisciplinary approach to understanding and managing the impact of cities on the atmosphere, climate, surfacewater and groundwater, soil, flora and fauna, and ecosystems of Australia. By emphasizing the depth and range of potential problems, this book makes an ideal text for students in environmental, geographical, or atmospheric sciences. ... Read more

Product Description
This book provides a fascinating study of a community of scientists at the prestigious Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Science in Melbourne, Australia.These scientists are mainly concerned with investigating the immune system, which enables us to cope with the many bacteria and viruses that invade our bodies.The Hall Institute scientists are part of a distinctive subculture, with its own myths and rites of passage, which can be investigated in much the same way as anthropologists investigate 'primitive' cultures.The volume shows how scientific programs and methods are shaped by cultural factors, including social, political, and economic constraints, and by the Institute's setting and the ethos of the new biology.The emphasis is on how science is actually done in concrete situations as distinct from what scientists say they do, and what philosophers and historians and sociologists of science theorize about what they do. Life Among the Scientists will be of great interest to scientists, students of the philosophy, history, and sociology of science, anthropologists and social scientists, and the general reader who wants to know what the scientific life is really like. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Malfunctioning scientists: Hamlet without the Prince
This is an ambitious book, written by four researchers at work over five years. The immediate focus is upon the activities of scientists at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne in order to explore the way that these activities are shaped by social, political, financial and intellectual influences.

Part One, 'The life-world of the Institute', sketches the recent history of ideas in immunology, the field where the Institute gained world renown when its Director, Macfarlane Burnet, shared a Nobel Prize with Sir Peter Medawar. Part Four is written in the same descriptive vein with a broader geographical scope, detailingsome of the intellectual and political elements of the worldwide quest to find a vaccine for malaria. Part Two, 'The subjective side of science' includes a chapter on 'The myth of objectivity' which lays the foundation for the major purpose of the whole work - to challenge received views on the philosophy and methodology of science. Part Three, 'The mode of scientific production' closely examines the way that scientists approach their daily tasks, with the central image being the laboratory as a factory to produce data.

The book operates at several levels, from high journalism and science criticism to the ecology of excellence and the philosophy and methodology of science. As a piece of high quality reporting it is impressive in its scope and depth, though a hostile insider (Leon Wolpert) described it as 'mere' journalism.This unfair because the writers achieve a standard of science writing that will provide a challenge to all comers.

The major and overwhelming defect of the book is the failure to engage, or even mention, the most robust and fruitful body of ideas in the field. This is a striking example of the phenomenon they describe as 'socially structured forgetting' or 'structural amnesia' (p 101). They have neatly excised Karl Popper's theory of conjecture and refutation from their account of the philosophy and methods of science. But Popper's work surely represents either the orthodox view of scientific method (as accepted by a number of eminent scientists who took their philosophy seriously such as Medawar, Eccles, Monod and Einstein), or a formidable rival to the traditional form of Baconian induction, still championed by David Stove.

An amazing revelation appeared recently when the senior author wrote a review of the reissue of David Stove's critique of Popper and others. He reported that Popper was the only philosopher of science who was held in any regard by the members of the Institute. This evidence would have refuted their major, though unstated, thesis, that Popper does not count in the real world of science.Apparently that particular evidence was regarded as superfluous when it came to writing up the research. Of course scientists discard data when they think that the experimental apparatus was malfunctioning. In this case it appears that was the scientists were considered to be malfunctioning!

Life Among the Scientists is located in the tradition of the 'social construction of science', a form of thought that thrives in the intellectual wasteland created by the popular reception of T. S. Kuhn's work on the diffusion of scientific innovations. To their credit the authors fall short of the strong form of relativism that is common in this tradition and this may indicate that their interest in science is strong enough to resist the debilitating effect of their theoretical framework. The popularity of the 'social construction' view and its serious limitations raise two questions. What is going on in academic departments of philosophy and the social sciences to account for their structural amnesia regarding Popper? And is there any way that philosophers or other metascientists can provide assistance to scientists?

The answer to the first question awaits further anthropological studies, though Bartley throws out some clues in his contribution to In Pursuit of Truth (ed P. Levinson, Humanities Press, 1982).As to the second question, philosophers may have nothing to offer at the tactical level of science where the major requirements are better data and new or revised descriptive theories. However there are times when progress is blocked by problems at a higher (or deeper) strategic level and attention needs to be paid to the unstated assumptions and metaphors that guide the formulation of problems and determine the kind of solutions that are sought. For example the immune reaction by the body to foreign matter was supposed to involve a mechanism of instruction from the invaders to the immune system to produce the appropriate antibodies. Burnet followed a hint from Jerne to demonstrate that the mechanism at work is one of selection among a range of responses generated initially by the immune system. A similar shift of focus, from a mechanism of instruction acting on an essentially passive or reactive organism, to one of selection among trials generated by the organism, has important implications in epistemology and evolutionary theory. Popper has drawn out some of these in his critique of inductive and Lamarckian thinking in his intellectual autobiography, Unended Quest.

In conclusion, Life Among the Scientists succeeds in some of its objectives despite the problems at its conceptual heart. It is a good read for the most part provided that one is not distracted by the potentially irritating device of the first person narrative. It probably deserves a place in the bookcase (though not on the same shelf) with Medawar's Pluto's Republic, Koestler's The Sleepwalkers and Barzun's Science: The Glorious Entertainment. ... Read more

Product Description
A substantial backyard has long been considered an iconic feature of the Australian suburb. Nevertheless, since the mid 1990s, substantial backyards have largely disappeared from new suburban houses in Australia. Whatever the size of lot, the dwelling now covers most of its area. The minimal backyard is not just a matter of higher densities in existing urban areas; it is at its most extreme in the new outer suburbs.

The loss of the backyard has serious ecological implications, notably for biodiversity, microclimate and drainage, a trend rendered permanent by the changes to the housing stock. It appears to be the physical expression of the way that Australian lifestyles are changing for the worse, in particular longer working hours. This in turn raises issues about health and wellbeing, especially for children.

This book discusses the nature, uses and meaning of the traditional backyard, presents an understanding of the changes that have been happening and suggests possible remedies.

Key Features:
* Investigates the backyard as a physical expression of the way that Australian lifestyles
are changing
* Highlights issues about health and wellbeing, especially for children
* Discusses that while planning policy does not promote the death of the backyard, it does nothing to prevent it ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from Journal of Australian Studies, published by University of Queensland Press on March 1, 2004. The length of the article is 8575 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Develop the north: aborigines, environment and Australian nationhood in the 1930s.
Author: Russell McGregor
Publication: Journal of Australian Studies (Refereed)
Date: March 1, 2004
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Issue: 81Page: 33(16)

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more