Innovative design : developing strategies to improve developer attitudes to sustainable housing

The literature advocates more widespread adoption of a particular type of house – a manufactured high performance green house and/or house components (MHPGH) and this is the focus of the research proposal outlined in this conceptual paper. The aim of the current paper is to outline a robust program of work to improve adoption of MHPGH. The contribution of houses to climate change is investigated, the conservatism of the construction industry is documented, a conceptual framework through which to understand the problem is presented; a program of research to bring about change is outlined; and the benefits of doing so are summarised. The contribution of the paper is the presentation of novel theory and methods to address sustainability problems in the construction industry. Future work will involve execution of the proposal. A limitation of the paper is that the effectiveness of the proposed theory and methods are yet to be tested.

Brighter lights on Capital Hill? Speculations upon federal framing and policy analysis of Indigenous issues

Postwar Australian social policy has occurred within neoliberal, social-conservative and social democratic ideational frameworks. Recent perceptions vary from concern about high levels of public spending, through disquiet about cultural change, to fear that government inaction is ignoring community needs and creating fractious and unhealthy social conditions. this paper examines these alternate ideological influences as they could affect Indigenous Australians with a focus on the values and approaches that might lead logically to desirable outcomes. effective policy requires clarity and compatibility between government thinking and the social values of Indigenous people. At issue is how the objectives of policy for Indigenous citizens might be determined.

A robust optimization approach for index tracking problem

Index tracking is an investment approach where the primary objective is to keep portfolio return as close as possible to a target index without purchasing all index components. The main purpose is to minimize the tracking error between the returns of the selected portfolio and a benchmark. In this paper, quadratic as well as linear models are presented for minimizing the tracking error. The uncertainty is considered in the input data using a tractable robust framework that controls the level of conservatism while maintaining linearity. The linearity of the proposed robust optimization models allows a simple implementation of an ordinary optimization software package to find the optimal robust solution. The proposed model of this paper employs Morgan Stanley Capital International Index as the target index and the results are reported for six national indices including Japan, the USA, the UK, Germany, Switzerland and France. The performance of the proposed models is evaluated using several financial criteria e.g. information ratio, market ratio, Sharpe ratio and Treynor ratio. The preliminary results demonstrate that the proposed model lowers the amount of tracking error while raising values of portfolio performance measures.