Class contestations and Australia’s resource boom : the emergence of the ‘cashed-up bogan’

This article examines the figure of the ‘Cashed-up Bogan’ or ‘Cub’ in Australian media from 2006 to 2009. It explains that ‘Bogan’, like that of ‘Chav’ in Britain, is a widely engaged negative descriptor for the white working-class poor. In contrast, ‘Cubs’ have economic capital. This capital, and the Cub’s emergence, is linked to Australia’s resource boom of recent decades when the need for skilled labour allowed for a highly demarcated segment of the working class to earn relatively high incomes in the mining sector and to participate in consumption. We argue that access to economic capital has provided the Cub with mobility to enter the everyday spaces of the middle class, but this has caused disruption and anxiety to middle-class hegemony. As a result, the middle class has redrawn and reinforced class-infused symbolic and cultural boundaries, whereby, despite their wealth, pernicious media representations mark Cubs as ‘other’ to the middle-class deservingness, taste and morality.

US Federal Government entrepreneurship : new enterprise structures

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to guide the formation and to determine the structure of new governmental entrepreneurial ventures based on the nature of the public goods and the need for an entrepreneurial orientation. Design/methodology/research: This paper is conceptual and is based on reviews of appropriate organizational structure and entrepreneurship, cases studies, and the authors' experiences. Findings: Public or quasi-public entities may need to change their organizational structure in order to act more entrepreneurially and to be more effective in accomplishing their missions. Propositions are raised to guide the development of new public or private enterprises and provide the basis for future research. Research limitations/implications: This paper is conceptual and needs to be tested empirically. Though other levels of government and countries were included, a major focus is on the US federal government. Originality/value: This is the first published research on the topic of new enterprise government structures based on the nature of the goods and the requisite entrepreneurial orientation. It will help governmental and quasi-governmental organizations in developing efficient and effective organizational structures.

Trust-based automated recommendation making

Recommender systems are one of the recent inventions to deal with ever growing information overload in relation to the selection of goods and services in a global economy. Collaborative Filtering (CF) is one of the most popular techniques in recommender systems. The CF recommends items to a target user based on the preferences of a set of similar users known as the neighbours, generated from a database made up of the preferences of past users. With sufficient background information of item ratings, its performance is promising enough but research shows that it performs very poorly in a cold start situation where there is not enough previous rating data. As an alternative to ratings, trust between the users could be used to choose the neighbour for recommendation making. Better recommendations can be achieved using an inferred trust network which mimics the real world "friend of a friend" recommendations. To extend the boundaries of the neighbour, an effective trust inference technique is required. This thesis proposes a trust interference technique called Directed Series Parallel Graph (DSPG) which performs better than other popular trust inference algorithms such as TidalTrust and MoleTrust. Another problem is that reliable explicit trust data is not always available. In real life, people trust "word of mouth" recommendations made by people with similar interests. This is often assumed in the recommender system. By conducting a survey, we can confirm that interest similarity has a positive relationship with trust and this can be used to generate a trust network for recommendation. In this research, we also propose a new method called SimTrust for developing trust networks based on user's interest similarity in the absence of explicit trust data. To identify the interest similarity, we use user's personalised tagging information. However, we are interested in what resources the user chooses to tag, rather than the text of the tag applied. The commonalities of the resources being tagged by the users can be used to form the neighbours used in the automated recommender system. Our experimental results show that our proposed tag-similarity based method outperforms the traditional collaborative filtering approach which usually uses rating data.

Online retailing versus traditional stores in the purchasing decision making process

Due to proliferation of online stores prior expectations that retailing would move completely online were not fulfilled. Previous research about consumers’ preference of retailing channels suggested that online sales are driven by the convenience of online shopping, or as a natural extension of online searches. This paradigm has changed over the years. Changes in consumer behaviour are indicating that while consumers are searching online using various information sources to learn about products, ultimately when purchasing, consumers are shifting between online and offline retailing channels depending on various factors. Online shopping is still considered to be a convenient way to purchase goods, but the convenience is not the key factor. This qualitative research is based on 22 in-depth interviews with shoppers in Australia.

Quantum-like non-separability of concept combinations, emergent associates and abduction

Consider the concept combination ‘pet human’. In word association experiments, human subjects produce the associate ‘slave’ in relation to this combination. The striking aspect of this associate is that it is not produced as an associate of ‘pet’, or ‘human’ in isolation. In other words, the associate ‘slave’ seems to be emergent. Such emergent associations sometimes have a creative character and cognitive science is largely silent about how we produce them. Departing from a dimensional model of human conceptual space, this article will explore concept combinations, and will argue that emergent associations are a result of abductive reasoning within conceptual space, that is, below the symbolic level of cognition. A tensor-based approach is used to model concept combinations allowing such combinations to be formalized as interacting quantum systems. Free association norm data is used to motivate the underlying basis of the conceptual space. It is shown by analogy how some concept combinations may behave like quantum-entangled (non-separable) particles. Two methods of analysis were presented for empirically validating the presence of non-separable concept combinations in human cognition. One method is based on quantum theory and another based on comparing a joint (true theoretic) probability distribution with another distribution based on a separability assumption using a chi-square goodness-of-fit test. Although these methods were inconclusive in relation to an empirical study of bi-ambiguous concept combinations, avenues for further refinement of these methods are identified.

A quantum information retrieval approach to memory

As computers approach the physical limits of information storable in memory, new methods will be needed to further improve information storage and retrieval. We propose a quantum inspired vector based approach, which offers a contextually dependent mapping from the subsymbolic to the symbolic representations of information. If implemented computationally, this approach would provide exceptionally high density of information storage, without the traditionally required physical increase in storage capacity. The approach is inspired by the structure of human memory and incorporates elements of Gardenfors’ Conceptual Space approach and Humphreys et al.’s matrix model of memory.

Principles of taxation law (4th Edition)

Taxation law can be an incredibly complex subject to absorb, particularly when time is limited. Written specifically for students, Principles of Taxation Law 2011 brings much needed clarity to this area of law. Utilising many methods to make this often daunting subject achievable, particular features of the 2011 edition include: • seven parts: overview and structure, principles of income, deductions and offsets, timing issues, investment and business entities, tax avoidance and administration, and indirect taxes; • clearly structured chapters within those parts grouped under helpful headings; • flowcharts, diagrams and tables, end of chapter practice questions, and case summaries; • an appendix containing all of the up to date and relevant rates; and • the online self-testing component mentor, which provides questions for students of both business and law. Every major aspect of the Australian tax system is covered, with chapters on topics such as goods and services tax, superannuation, offsets, partnerships, capital gains tax, trusts, company tax and tax administration. All chapters have been thoroughly revised. Principles of Taxation Law 2011 is the perfect tool to guide the reader from their initial exposure to the subject to success in taxation law exams. [from publisher's website]

Principles of taxation law 2012

Taxation law can be an incredibly complex subject to absorb, particularly when time is limited. Written specifically for students, Principles of Taxation Law 2012 brings much needed clarity to this area of law. Utilising many methods to make this often daunting subject achievable, particular features of the 2012 edition include: * seven parts: overview and structure, principles of income, deductions and offsets, timing issues, investment and business entities, tax avoidance and administration, and indirect taxes; * clearly structured chapters within those parts grouped under helpful headings; * flowcharts, diagrams and tables, end of chapter practice questions, and case summaries; * an appendix containing all of the up to date and relevant rates; and * the online self-testing component mentor, which provides questions for students of both business and law. Every major aspect of the Australian tax system is covered, with chapters on topics such as goods and services tax, superannuation, offsets, partnerships, capital gains tax, trusts, company tax and tax administration. All chapters have been thoroughly revised. Principles of Taxation Law 2012 is the perfect tool to guide the reader from their initial exposure to the subject to success in taxation law exams.

A requirements framework for semantic business process modelling

The emergence of semantic technologies to deal with the underlying meaning of things, instead of a purely syntactical representation, has led to new developments in various fields, including business process modeling. Inspired by artificial intelligence research, technologies for semantic Web services have been proposed and extended to process modeling. However, the applicablility of semantic Web services for semantic business processes is limited because business processes encompass wider requirements of business than Web services. In particular, processes are concerned with the composition of tasks, that is, in which order activities are carried out, regardless of their implementation details; resources assigned to carry out tasks, such as machinery, people, and goods; data exchange; and security and compliance concerns.

When There's Love

This work is an installation featuring three video projections, music and mirror balls. The three projections fill the walls with scrolling text borrowed from love song lyrics. Headphones in the gallery space allow you to hear a male voice sing the same words to an impromptu tune. Mirror balls send fragments of light spinning around the room while The Righteous Brothers’ Unchained Melody plays on repeat. This work emphasizes fragmentary, repetitious and spatio-temporal experiences of language in order to question the symbolic conventions of romance. By exaggerating and mixing hackneyed symbolic elements, this work extends on some of Nicolas Bourriaud’s theoretical insights into the creative and critical strategies of ‘postproduction’. In particular, it toys with the intersections between popular culture and inter-subjective experiences.

The GST Compliance Costs Of Nonprofit Organisations

On 2 December 1998, the Federal Government tabled their policy paper entitled Regulation Impact Statement for the Introduction of a Goods and Services Tax (RIS) in the House of Representatives. The Federal Government predicted that total gross GST compliance costs to Australian businesses in the first year of implementation would be approximately $1,912 million (or $1,195 per firm). Furthermore, it is estimated that the recurrent net compliance costs will be much lower at $131 per firm. Whilst the government made brief references to charitable organisations in their analysis, it stated that the compliance costs faced by nonprofits would, in substance, be no different to the compliance costs faced by businesses or government departments. This paper examines the RIS process in relation to nonprofit organisations in the context of recent taxation legislation affecting nonprofit organisations. It argues that the assumption that nonprofit compliance costs are similar to government and business costs is flawed and makes a case for the RIS process to be reformed to include more appropriate assessments of the impact of legislation on nonprofit enterprises.

Principles of taxation law [2nd Ed.]

"With its clear and concise explanations of taxation law concepts, Principles of Taxation Law 2009 is the ideal text for students studying this complex subject. It covers all major topics underpinning the Australian tax system, including income, deductions, capital gains, tax accounting, international issues, fringe benefits, tax administration, goods and services tax and, in this new edition, offsets and superannuation. Importantly, the book commences with a special chapter on how to study tax law and succeed in taxation law exams."--Publisher description.

Advance pricing arrangements : an Australian Tax Office success or a legislative failure?

Australia’s domestic income tax legislation and double tax agreements contain transfer pricing rules which are designed to counter the underpayment of tax by businesses engaged in international dealings between related parties. The current legislation and agreements require that related party transactions take place at a value which reflects an arm’s length price, that is, a price which would be charged between unrelated parties. For a host of reasons, it is increasingly difficult for multinational entities to demonstrate that they are transferring goods and services at a price which is reflective of the behaviour of independent parties, thereby making it difficult to demonstrate compliance with the relevant legislation. Further, where an Australian business undertakes cross-border related party transactions there is the risk of an audit by the Australian Tax Office (ATO). If a business wishes to avoid the risk of an audit, and any ensuing penalties, there is one option: an advance pricing arrangement (APA). An APA is an agreement whereby the future transfer pricing methodology to be used to determine the arm’s length price is agreed to by the taxpayer and the relevant tax authority or authorities. The ATO views the APA process as an important part of its international tax strategy and believes that there are complementary benefits provided to both the taxpayer and the ATO. The ATO promotes the APA process on the basis of creating greater certainty for all parties while reducing compliance costs and the risk of audit and penalty. While the ATO regards the APA system as a success, it may be argued that the implementation of such a system is simply a practical solution to an ongoing problem of an inherent failure in both the legislation and ATO interpretation and application of this legislation to provide certainty to the taxpayer. This paper investigates the use of APAs as a solution to the problem of transfer pricing and considers whether they are the success the ATO claims. It is argued that there is no doubt that APAs provide a valuable practical tool for multinational entities facing the challenges of the taxation of global trading under the current transfer pricing regime. It does not, however, provide a long term solution. Rather, the long term solution may be in the form of legislative amendment.

Documentary as history, memory, dream and film

A century ago, as the Western world embarked on a period of traumatic change, the visual realism of photography and documentary film brought print and radio news to life. The vision that these new mediums threw into stark relief was one of intense social and political upheaval: the birth of modernity fired and tempered in the crucible of the Great War. As millions died in this fiery chamber and the influenza pandemic that followed, lines of empires staggered to their fall, and new geo-political boundaries were scored in the raw, red flesh of Europe. The decade of 1910 to 1919 also heralded a prolific period of artistic experimentation. It marked the beginning of the social and artistic age of modernity and, with it, the nascent beginnings of a new art form: film. We still live in the shadow of this violent, traumatic and fertile age; haunted by the ghosts of Flanders and Gallipoli and its ripples of innovation and creativity. Something happened here, but to understand how and why is not easy; for the documentary images we carry with us in our collective cultural memory have become what Baudrillard refers to as simulacra. Detached from their referents, they have become referents themselves, to underscore other, grand narratives in television and Hollywood films. The personal histories of the individuals they represent so graphically–and their hope, love and loss–are folded into a national story that serves, like war memorials and national holidays, to buttress social myths and values. And, as filmic images cross-pollinate, with each iteration offering a new catharsis, events that must have been terrifying or wondrous are abstracted. In this paper we first discuss this transformation through reference to theories of documentary and memory–this will form a conceptual framework for a subsequent discussion of the short film Anmer. Produced by the first author in 2010, Anmer is a visual essay on documentary, simulacra and the symbolic narratives of history. Its form, structure and aesthetic speak of the confluence of documentary, history, memory and dream. Located in the first decade of the twentieth century, its non-linear narratives of personal tragedy and poetic dreamscapes are an evocative reminder of the distance between intimate experience, grand narratives, and the mythologies of popular films. This transformation of documentary sources not only played out in the processes of the film’s production, but also came to form its theme.

Renegades on the frontier of innovation: The shanzhai grassroots communities of Shenzhen in China's creative economy

Two Australian researchers specializing in China's creative industries examine recent developments in southern China commonly associated with the shanzhai phenomenon (e.g., production and sale of cheap local facsimiles of globally branded goods). While shanzhai is often condemned as the embodiment of China's "knock-off" industries, the authors argue that it might be more appropriately viewed as an instance of China's emerging creative economy and an example of rapid prototyping. The paper traces the evolution of shanzhai mobile phones and the materialization of the shanzhai ethos in popular culture. In arguing that shanzhai provides inputs into creative industries, the paper describes the fuzzy boundary between formal and informal culture and notes the interaction between three spheres of activity: official culture, the market, and grassroots culture.