This paper brings historical perspectives to bear on the ambivalent and contradictory position of adoption in Australian public policy. It examines the divergent histories of Australian domestic and intercountry adoption (ICA) since the mid-1970s and the impact of these histories on adoption policy in Australia. It identifies tendencies in contemporary ICA to repeat elements of pre-reform era d...

The cosmology of the Randall-Sundrum scenario for a positive tension brane in a 5-D Universe with localized gravity has been studied previously. In the radiation-dominated Universe, it was suggested that there are two solutions for the cosmic scale factor a(t) : the standard solution a ∼ t1/2, and a solution a ∼ t1/4, which is incompatible with standard big bang nucleosynthesis. In this note, w...

We review the recent status of big bounce genesis as a new possibility of using dark matter particles’ mass and interaction cross-section to test the existence of a bounce universe at the early stage of evolution in our currently-observed universe. To study the dark matter production and evolution inside the bounce universe, called big bounce genesis for short, we propose a model independent ap...

We study the phenomenology of generic supergravity models in which gravity mediation naturally competes with gauge mediation as the origin of supergravity-breaking. This class of hybrid models has been recently motivated in string inspired constructions and differs from usual gauge mediated supersymmetry breaking models in having messenger masses of order of the GUT scale. In these scenarios th...

The cosmological constant problem is how one chooses, without fine-tuning, one singular point Λeff = 0 for the 4D cosmological constant. We argue that some recently discovered weak self-tuning solutions can be viewed as blowingup this one point into a band of some parameter. These weak self-tuning solutions may have a virtue that only de Sitter space solutions are allowed outside this band, all...

Applications of Riemannian quantum geometry to cosmology have had notable successes. In particular, the fundamental discreteness underlying quantum geometry has led to a natural resolution of the big bang singularity. However, the precise mathematical structure underlying loop quantum cosmology and the sense in which it implements the full quantization program in a symmetry reduced model has no...

We propose a new approach to the model of an origin of the universe built by Oscar Klein and Hannes Alfvén. Some modifications of assumptions underlying the model result in a possible scenario of the universe creation consistent with observations. We explain the large scale structre of the universe and we estimate the Hubble constant value as well as the number of galaxies in the universe. The ...

The assumption of exact, unbroken parity symmetry leads directly to a simple pre-dictive resolution of the atmospheric and solar neutrino puzzles. This is because the existence of this symmetry implies the existence of a set of mirror neutrinos which must mix maximally with the known neutrinos if neutrinos have mass. The maximal mixing of the electron neutrino with the mirror electron neutrino ...

This study takes a second look at the “big-Wsh-little-pond eVect” (BFLPE) on a national sample of 769 gifted Israeli students (32% female) previously investigated by Zeidner and Schleyer (Zeidner, M., & Schleyer, E. J., (1999a). The big-Wsh-little-pond eVect for academic self-concept, test anxiety, and school grades in gifted children. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 24, 305–329). The rean...

1. This Paper reviews some of the critical assessments of the Bologna Process (hereafter ‘BP’), notably by Neave & Amaral (2008) and Teichler (2007). Other secondary material referred to includes: Reinalda & Kulesza (2006), Corbett (2005), and Greatrix (2005). It is arguable that the BP is part of the generally over-bureaucratic and very costly context of EU continent-wide activity, except one ...