Setting the scene of “Bones of Contention,” Professor Colin Groves from the School of Archaeology at ANU, spoke on the discoveries of the hobbits from the Isle of Flowers. He gave an overview of the latest in human evolution and his ideas of where the little people who still exist in parts of Indonesia and Borneo fit into the overall evolutionary scheme. He showed graphic pictures of the skeletal remains that had been nearly destroyed when they had been taken from the laboratory of the finders.

As a CSI junkie, I was really looking forward to hearing about the equivalent hunks and babes who solve two murders a week at “CSI Australia.” Need less to say, the Forensics session soon put that idea to rest.
Adjunct Professor James Robertson from the Australian Federal Police and Professor Janelle Kyd, Professor of Forensic Studies at the University of Canberra, both stressed that forensics is a long term, team approach. It is more about disproving things, not proving that they were the same. It is science communication in the context of criminal activities and courts of law.
Australia has led the field, including the invention of the Polylight that is used to detect fingerprints. Australian forensic scientists helped with Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) after the Bali Bombings.
One role of the forensic scientist is to look at body parts and fluids for drugs/poisons, sometimes in very small quantities and/or in difficult matrices. The first step is to establish if you have a crime scene, then to associate defendant with crime and then to help reconstruct crime. It shows differences, not similarities.
Professor Robertson stressed that DNA tests are useful, but are so expensive that they cannot be used for every case, and need to be made affordable. – Anne Jackson

Bugs Bite Back

In 1969 the US Surgeon General said: 'It is time to close the book on infectious diseases. The war on pestilence is over.' Professor Mary Barton (Uni of South Australia), Dr Christine Phillips (ANU Medical School) and Dr Hilary Bambrick (Centre for Epidemiology & Population Health, ANU) ably demonstrated how wrong he was. They outlined how the bugs are biting back in a big way and how humanity is faced with a variety of both old and new biological threats. These include antibiotic resistance of organisms such as Staphylococcus aureus and Mycobacterium tuberculosis, zoonotic infections such as SARS, avian influenza and Hendra virus and the effect of climate change on diseases like asthma and allergy. All are the result of human activities which must be reversed if further major calamities are to be avoided – Brian Shanley

• Jill Nicholson's technical writing skills workshop (presented as part of the AMWA professional development program) was an excellent introduction to problems in technical writing. Jill began the workshop with an overview of effective communication and plain language, before discussing how to recognise and correct the ten most common grammatical and stylistic problems, including overuse of the passive voice, weak verbs, abstract nouns, faulty parallelism and verbosity. The workshop included a series of editing exercises (using examples from medical writing), which helped to reinforce the information provided in the workshop notes. Overall, the workshop was an extremely practical and comprehensive resource for technical writers, and the workshop notes provided participants with useful reference material. The emphasis on medical writing was particularly helpful – Hilary Cadman

Defamation law for medical writers workshop. Crispin Hull was an enthusiastic, excellently credentialed presenter who, from first-hand experience, understands our need to try to get stories out to our readership without running the risk of defamatory action. For me, useful take-home messages were that: "fictionalising" a story is no defence; truth is a difficult defence; and, that the best "defence" may be to give the potentially offended party an opportunity to respond prior to publication – Ann Gregory

Proffered papers

Andrea Malcolm (Pfizer) discussed the latest developments relating to transparency in the disclosure of clinical trial information. This has become a hot topic since the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) issued a statement on 1 July 2005 saying that trials reported in their journals must be registered (by either the sponsor or the principle investigator) before the first subject is recruited. The WHO is also recommending the registration of trials on a public database. One such database is the Australian Clinical Trials Registry (www.actr/org.au), which is expected to be fully operational by 2008. The ACTR has been established in conjunction with the NHMRC and is housed at the clinical trials centre in Sydney.
Hilary Cadman (Biotext) discussed how the simple concept of talking about risk (i.e. what might happen, how likely is it, how bad will it be & what we can do about it) can become bogged down by problems with terminology. While some people talk about 'risk analysis' (which implies analysing but not doing anything), the Australian/New Zealand Standard AS/NZS 4360:2004 (Risk Management) talks about 'assessing', 'treating' and 'communicating' the risk. Because some of these terms don't marry well with their actions and people use different terms to mean similar things, there is much confusion. Hilary's argument was that we need a plain English guide to risk management, so that people can put what is potentially a very useful approach into practice.
The editor-in-chief of the Canberra Times, Jack Waterford concluded this session with a provocative look at being politically correct. He covered many areas, including how to refer to indigenous (lower case 'i') groups and the importance of not categorising people by their medical condition. Newspaper editors struggle with how to refer to people who are deaf and dumb or spastic, which has resulted in dozens of different names being used for these conditions by the media over the years. Jack summed up by saying that when attempting to be PC you should 'state the facts and not set out to offend' – Tina Allen.