title: Murray-Darling basin freshwater shells: riverine reservoir effect

authors: Gillespie, Richard

subjects: carbon isotopes

abstract: We report carbon isotope measurements on pre-bomb museum samples of freshwater mussel shells collected alive from riverine locations in New South Wales, Australia. The calculated reservoir ages, ranging from -60 to +112 years, are much smaller than those for Australian marine shells and not considered significant for the radiocarbon dating of Late Pleistocene freshwater shells from the Murray-Darling Basin.

text: Murray-Darling basin freshwater shells: riverine reservoir effect We report carbon isotope measurements on pre-bomb museum samples of freshwater mussel shells collected alive from riverine locations in New South Wales, Australia. The calculated reservoir ages, ranging from -60 to +112 years, are much smaller than those for Australian marine shells and not considered significant for the radiocarbon dating of Late Pleistocene freshwater shells from the Murray-Darling Basin.

year: 2009

title: Towards understanding the root causes of outdoor education incidents

authors: Davidson, Grant S.

abstract: Outdoor education involves the interaction of people with the natural environment, often in challenging situations. Because of this there are often real risks involved that must be suitably managed. Despite efforts at managing these risks, incidents are still occurring during outdoor education experiences that sometimes culminate in serious injury and even death. While in the past these injuries and fatalities would have been considered unfortunate acts of misadventure, new attitudes in society seek to ascribe blame in the wake of an accident and those involved, or their families, seek penalties for those blamed. Recent legislation such as the Health and Safety in Employment Act make these penalties easier to apply, while the recent actions of both the police and officers of the Department of Labour show the willingness of public officials to investigate and prosecute outdoor education providers if accidents occur. 
The outdoor education sector has been poorly equipped to reply to the public in the wake of serious incidents. There are few if any statistics on incident rates in the outdoor education sector, and there is very little known about the underlying causes of those incidents. To ensure that outdoor education provision can continue into the future such information needs to be available and training programmes developed based on those findings. 
This research builds a profile of almost 2000 incidents that occurred in the years 1996 - 2000 at 12 of the 25 larger outdoor education centres in New Zealand that were invited to participate. That profile includes calculating accident rates for the group of organisations sampled and compares these to the rates of accidents occurring in outdoor centres in other parts of the world as well as those occurring in other aspects of life in New Zealand. 
Eighteen of the incidents were chosen that had potential for serious injury, and these were studied for the root causes of the incidents using a Delphi technique involving three panels of outdoor experts. From this investigation, and an in-depth review of literature from the fields of safety management and psychology, I developed a taxonomy of root causes of outdoor education incidents and suggest a new model of how these root causes can interact to result in an incident. Not all of the identified types of error in the taxonomy of root causes could easily be accommodated within the existing frameworks of outdoor decision-making. In order to provide a model that incorporated these error types, theories of cognitive psychology were combined into a new model of outdoor education decision making in hazardous situations. This shows how personality factors, attitudes and other social factors can act to bias decisions and lead to incidents occurring. 
As a result of this research, an ongoing collection of incident data in the outdoor education sector is advocated, as is the adoption of the taxonomy of root causes and model of an outdoor education incident into training programmes for outdoor instructors. Through these processes it is hoped that risk management practices will be improved, incidents reduced in frequency and severity, and therefore participation of young people in outdoor education programmes for personal development outcomes can continue to be promoted and justified. 
Suggestions for further research to build the knowledge of the processes leading to incidents in outdoor education activities are made at the end of this thesis.

text: Towards understanding the root causes of outdoor education incidents Outdoor education involves the interaction of people with the natural environment, often in challenging situations. Because of this there are often real risks involved that must be suitably managed. Despite efforts at managing these risks, incidents are still occurring during outdoor education experiences that sometimes culminate in serious injury and even death. While in the past these injuries and fatalities would have been considered unfortunate acts of misadventure, new attitudes in society seek to ascribe blame in the wake of an accident and those involved, or their families, seek penalties for those blamed. Recent legislation such as the Health and Safety in Employment Act make these penalties easier to apply, while the recent actions of both the police and officers of the Department of Labour show the willingness of public officials to investigate and prosecute outdoor education providers if accidents occur. 
The outdoor education sector has been poorly equipped to reply to the public in the wake of serious incidents. There are few if any statistics on incident rates in the outdoor education sector, and there is very little known about the underlying causes of those incidents. To ensure that outdoor education provision can continue into the future such information needs to be available and training programmes developed based on those findings. 
This research builds a profile of almost 2000 incidents that occurred in the years 1996 - 2000 at 12 of the 25 larger outdoor education centres in New Zealand that were invited to participate. That profile includes calculating accident rates for the group of organisations sampled and compares these to the rates of accidents occurring in outdoor centres in other parts of the world as well as those occurring in other aspects of life in New Zealand. 
Eighteen of the incidents were chosen that had potential for serious injury, and these were studied for the root causes of the incidents using a Delphi technique involving three panels of outdoor experts. From this investigation, and an in-depth review of literature from the fields of safety management and psychology, I developed a taxonomy of root causes of outdoor education incidents and suggest a new model of how these root causes can interact to result in an incident. Not all of the identified types of error in the taxonomy of root causes could easily be accommodated within the existing frameworks of outdoor decision-making. In order to provide a model that incorporated these error types, theories of cognitive psychology were combined into a new model of outdoor education decision making in hazardous situations. This shows how personality factors, attitudes and other social factors can act to bias decisions and lead to incidents occurring. 
As a result of this research, an ongoing collection of incident data in the outdoor education sector is advocated, as is the adoption of the taxonomy of root causes and model of an outdoor education incident into training programmes for outdoor instructors. Through these processes it is hoped that risk management practices will be improved, incidents reduced in frequency and severity, and therefore participation of young people in outdoor education programmes for personal development outcomes can continue to be promoted and justified. 
Suggestions for further research to build the knowledge of the processes leading to incidents in outdoor education activities are made at the end of this thesis.

year: 2005

title: Te Tuhirau i Rehu i Ringa: Translating Sacred and Sensitive Texts: An Indigenous Perspective

authors: Tipene, Jillian

subjects: translation

abstract: This thesis centers on translator cognition. Through a series of interviews and think-aloud protocols (Chapters 3 – 5), it explores the ways in which a sample of translators (both Māori and non-Māori) negotiate the complex issues involved in translating between a local, Indigenous language (Māori) and an international one (English) and, in particular, how they approach the definition and translation of texts that could be regarded as being ‘sacred’ and/or ‘sensitive’. In their definitions of ‘sacred’ texts and ‘sensitive’ texts, all of the participants exhibited a peculiarly postmodern positioning, focussing primarily on perspective rather than on any absolute concept of truth or reality. With the exception of the Māori participants’ traditional definition of, and approach to texts deemed to be ‘tapu’ (see Chapter 3), all of the participants expressed beliefs about the translation process which were largely structurally-orientated. They emphasized the importance of respecting the cultural context out of which texts emerged and of attempting, in translation, to reflect the meanings deemed to reside in the source texts by virtue of the intentions of their authors. As witnessed in their think-aloud protocols, however, when involved in the actual process of translation the translators did not always adhere to the views expressed in their interviews, with translation procedures ranging from one that was primarily modernist and structural in orientation (but also reflecting the careful attention to co-text and cohesion that is characteristic of much recent research on discourse analysis) to one that was primarily postmodern and post-structural in orientation, being highly personal, autonomous and individualistic.  

In the absence of any clear agreement about translation theory in the literature on translation (see Chapter 2), and at a time when pre-modern, modern and postmodern positioning and structural and post-structural perspectives vie for acceptance, each of the participants in this research project appears to have found his or her own way of traversing the complex terrain of translation practice without necessarily being fully aware of the way in which the decisions they made positioned them theoretically. What this suggests is the need for a type of training that introduces novice translators in an explicit way to a variety of theories about human language and communication and the ways in which they can impinge upon translation practice, thus creating a context in which translators are able to make critically informed decisions about how they will proceed in any particular instance, why they will proceed in these ways, and what is required in order to ensure that their beliefs about translation are in accord with their actual practices. Critical awareness of these issues is likely to be particularly important in the case of those involved in translating between international languages such as English and more localized, Indigenous languages such as Māori, where discontinuity in the transmission of the language has occurred and where, therefore, texts that are deemed to be of particular significance would otherwise be unavailable to those for whom the texts form part of their cultural heritage.

text: Te Tuhirau i Rehu i Ringa: Translating Sacred and Sensitive Texts: An Indigenous Perspective This thesis centers on translator cognition. Through a series of interviews and think-aloud protocols (Chapters 3 – 5), it explores the ways in which a sample of translators (both Māori and non-Māori) negotiate the complex issues involved in translating between a local, Indigenous language (Māori) and an international one (English) and, in particular, how they approach the definition and translation of texts that could be regarded as being ‘sacred’ and/or ‘sensitive’. In their definitions of ‘sacred’ texts and ‘sensitive’ texts, all of the participants exhibited a peculiarly postmodern positioning, focussing primarily on perspective rather than on any absolute concept of truth or reality. With the exception of the Māori participants’ traditional definition of, and approach to texts deemed to be ‘tapu’ (see Chapter 3), all of the participants expressed beliefs about the translation process which were largely structurally-orientated. They emphasized the importance of respecting the cultural context out of which texts emerged and of attempting, in translation, to reflect the meanings deemed to reside in the source texts by virtue of the intentions of their authors. As witnessed in their think-aloud protocols, however, when involved in the actual process of translation the translators did not always adhere to the views expressed in their interviews, with translation procedures ranging from one that was primarily modernist and structural in orientation (but also reflecting the careful attention to co-text and cohesion that is characteristic of much recent research on discourse analysis) to one that was primarily postmodern and post-structural in orientation, being highly personal, autonomous and individualistic.  

In the absence of any clear agreement about translation theory in the literature on translation (see Chapter 2), and at a time when pre-modern, modern and postmodern positioning and structural and post-structural perspectives vie for acceptance, each of the participants in this research project appears to have found his or her own way of traversing the complex terrain of translation practice without necessarily being fully aware of the way in which the decisions they made positioned them theoretically. What this suggests is the need for a type of training that introduces novice translators in an explicit way to a variety of theories about human language and communication and the ways in which they can impinge upon translation practice, thus creating a context in which translators are able to make critically informed decisions about how they will proceed in any particular instance, why they will proceed in these ways, and what is required in order to ensure that their beliefs about translation are in accord with their actual practices. Critical awareness of these issues is likely to be particularly important in the case of those involved in translating between international languages such as English and more localized, Indigenous languages such as Māori, where discontinuity in the transmission of the language has occurred and where, therefore, texts that are deemed to be of particular significance would otherwise be unavailable to those for whom the texts form part of their cultural heritage.

year: 2014