Book Review: "Below the Line: Producers and Production Studies in the New Television Economy by Vicki Mayer", Duke University Press, 2012

Vicki Mayer’s book is unusual in that, despite its title, it is not about television producers at all, or at least not in the sense that scholars and the television industry itself have traditionally understood the role. Rather than referring to those in creative, managerial or financial control, or those with substantial intellectual input into a program, Mayer uses the term in a deliberately broad sense to mean, essentially, anyone ‘whose labor, however small, contributes to [television] production’ (179).

Making trouble: Ethnographic designs on ruling relations for students and teachers in non-academic pathways

Since 2009, all Australian states require young people to be ‘earning or learning’ until age 17. Secondary schools and vocational colleges now accommodate students for whom the conventional academic pathways of the past were not designed. The paper reflects on a project designed to explore the moral orders in these institutional settings for managing such students in extended compulsory schooling. Originally designed as classroom ethnographies, the project involved observations over three to four weeks and interviews with teachers and students in five sites in towns experiencing high youth unemployment. The project aimed to support teachers to work productively in such classrooms with such students, under the assumption that teachers orchestrate classroom interactions. However, it became clear events in these classrooms were being shaped by relations and parties above and beyond the classroom, as much as by those present. Teachers and students were observed to both comply with, and push against, the layers of policy and institutional processes regulating their behaviours. This paper re-thinks the original project through the gaze and resources of institutional ethnography, to better account for the layers of accountabilities and documentation practices that impacted on both teacher and student behaviours. By tracing the extended webs of ‘ruling relations’, it shows both how teachers and students could make trouble for the institutional moral order, and then be held accountable for this trouble.

Experimental and statistical investigation of Australian native plants for second-generation biodiesel production

This work explores the potential of Australian native plants as a source of second-generation biodiesel for internal combustion engines application. Biodiesels were evaluated from a number of non-edible oil seeds which are grow naturally in Queensland, Australia. The quality of the produced biodiesels has been investigated by several experimental and numerical methods. The research methodology and numerical model developed in this study can be used for a broad range of biodiesel feedstocks and for the future development of renewable native biodiesel in Australia.

Reflections and encounters: Exploring awareness in an academic environment

Earlier work within the CSCW community treated the notion of awareness as an important resource for supporting shared work and work-related activities. However, new trends have emerged in recent times that utilize the notion of awareness beyond work-related activities and explore social, emotional and interpersonal aspects of people’s everyday lives. To investigate this broader notion of awareness, we carried out a field study using ethnographic and cultural probe based methods in an academic setting. Our aim was to study staff members’ everyday activities in their natural surroundings; understand how awareness beyond work-related activities plays out and how it is dealt with. Our field study results shed light on two broad and sometimes overlapping themes of interaction between staff members: 1) self-representations and 2) casual encounters. We provide examples from the field illustrating these two themes. In general, our results show how awareness is closely associated with people’s everyday lives, where they creatively and artfully utilize ordinary resources from their environments to carry out their routine activities. Using the results of our field study, we describe the design of a situated display called Panorama that is meant to support non-critical, non-work-related awareness within work environments.

Applying digital product memories in industrial production

Industrial production and supply chains face increased demands for mass customization and tightening regulations on the traceability of goods, leading to higher requirements concerning flexibility, adaptability, and transparency of processes. Technologies for the ’Internet of Things' such as smart products and semantic representations pave the way for future factories and supply chains to fulfill these challenging market demands. In this chapter a backend-independent approach for information exchange in open-loop production processes based on Digital Product Memories DPMs is presented. By storing order-related data directly on the item, relevant lifecycle information is attached to the product itself. In this way, information handover between several stages of the value chain with focus on the manufacturing phase of a product has been realized. In order to report best practices regarding the application of DPM in the domain of industrial production, system prototype implementations focusing on the use case of producing and handling a smart drug case are illustrated.

Funding the academic library: An ethnographic study

This thesis is an ethnographic study of social psychological theories of influence and persuasion in higher education decision making processes. It focuses on the academic library and the budget allocation process in one study site. The findings show that influence tactics such as liking, reciprocity and social proof are important elements in the interpersonal relationships which impact decisions. The researcher was able to determine and propose practical applications for academic library administrators and library and information science educators.

Visual demands of modern primary classrooms and the impact of refractive anomalies on academic performance

This research investigated the visual demands in modern primary school classrooms and also the impact of common refractive anomalies on a child's ability to perform academic-related tasks. The results showed that relatively high levels of visual acuity, contrast demand and sustained accommodative-convergence are required to perform optimally in the modern classroom environment. It was also demonstrated that relatively low magnitudes of uncorrected refractive error may have a detrimental impact on children's ability to perform academic-related activities at school, with sustained near work further exacerbating this effect. These findings have important implications for both eye care practitioners and education authorities.

International regulatory framework for food production and diversity

Stakeholders commonly agree that food systems need to be urgently reformed. Yet, how food systems should be reformed is extremely contested. Public international law and regulations are uniquely placed to influence and guide law, policy, programmes and action at regional, national and local levels. Although plenty of international legal instruments intersect with food-related issues, the international regulation of food systems is fragmented, understudied and contested. In order to address these issues, this paper maps and analyses the public international regulatory aspects of food production with a view to providing recommendations for reform. Accordingly, this paper brings together a variety of binding and non-binding international regulatory instruments that to varying degrees and from a range of angles deals with the first activity in the food system: food production. The following paper traces the regulatory tools from natural resources, to the farmers and farm workers that apply skill and experience, and finally to the different dimension of world trade in food. The various regulatory instruments identified, and their collective whole, will be analysed against a rights-based approach to food security.

Socially critical pedagogy and the 'production of skilled performers': Further considerations of teaching and learning in physical education

The growing call for physical educators to move beyond the bounds of performance has been a powerful discourse. However, it is a discourse that has tended to be heavy on theory but light on practical application. This paper discusses recent work in the area of skill acquisition and what this might mean for pedagogical practices in physical education. The acquisition of motor skill has traditionally been a core objective for physical educators, and there has been a perception that child-centred pedagogies have failed in the achievement of this traditional yardstick. However, drawing from the work of Rovegno and Kirk (1995) and Langley (1995; 1997), and making links with current work in the motor learning area, it is possible to show that skill acquisition is not necessarily compromised by child-centred pedagogy. Indeed, working beyond Mosston's discovery threshold and using models such as Games for Understanding, can provide deeper skill-learning experiences as well as being socially just.

A network DEA quantity and quality-orientated production model: An application to Australian university research services

The motivation for this analysis is the recently developed Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) program developed to assess the quality of research in Australia. The objective is to develop an appropriate empirical model that better represents the underlying production of higher education research. In general, past studies on university research performance have used standard DEA models with some quantifiable research outputs. However, these suffer from the twin maladies of an inappropriate production specification and a lack of consideration of the quality of output. By including the qualitative attributes of peer-reviewed journals, we develop a procedure that captures both quality and quantity, and apply it using a network DEA model. Our main finding is that standard DEA models tend to overstate the research efficiency of most Australian universities.

ACE Research Vignette 043: Can academic entrepreneurship research identify and explain the next Apple, Google, or (even) Halfbrick studios?

This series of research vignettes is aimed at sharing current and interesting research findings from our team of international entrepreneurship researchers. This vignette, written by Professor Per Davidsson, reports findings on the extremely skewed distributions of entrepreneurship outcomes and other key variables of interest to entrepreneurship research and practice, as well as what this means for what and how we can learn through academic research.

A perfusion fMRI investigation of thematic and categorical context effects in the spoken production of object names

The context in which objects are presented influences the speed at which they are named. We employed the blocked cyclic naming paradigm and perfusion functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the mechanisms responsible for interference effects reported for thematicallyand categorically related compared to unrelated contexts. Naming objects in categorically homogeneous contexts induced a significant interference effect that accumulated from the second cycle onwards. This interference effect was associated with significant perfusion signal decreases in left middle and posterior lateral temporal cortex and the hippocampus. By contrast, thematically homogeneous contexts facilitated naming latencies significantly in the first cycle and did not differ from heterogeneous contexts thereafter, nor were they associated with any perfusion signal changes compared to heterogeneous contexts. These results are interpreted as being consistent with an account in which the interference effect both originates and has its locus at the lexical level, with an incremental learning mechanism adapting the activation levels of target lexical representations following access. We discuss the implications of these findings for accounts that assume thematic relations can be active lexical competitors or assume mandatory involvement of top-down control mechanisms in interference effects during naming.

Top-down influences on lexical selection during spoken word production: A 4T fMRI investigation of refractory effects in picture naming

Spoken word production is assumed to involve stages of processing in which activation spreads through layers of units comprising lexical-conceptual knowledge and their corresponding phonological word forms. Using high-field (4T) functional magnetic resonance imagine (fMRI), we assessed whether the relationship between these stages is strictly serial or involves cascaded-interactive processing, and whether central (decision/control) processing mechanisms are involved in lexical selection. Participants performed the competitor priming paradigm in which distractor words, named from a definition and semantically related to a subsequently presented target picture, slow picture-naming latency compared to that with unrelated words. The paradigm intersperses two trials between the definition and the picture to be named, temporally separating activation in the word perception and production networks. Priming semantic competitors of target picture names significantly increased activation in the left posterior temporal cortex, and to a lesser extent the left middle temporal cortex, consistent with the predictions of cascaded-interactive models of lexical access. In addition, extensive activation was detected in the anterior cingulate and pars orbitalis of the inferior frontal gyrus. The findings indicate that lexical selection during competitor priming is biased by top-down mechanisms to reverse associations between primed distractor words and target pictures to select words that meet the current goal of speech.

Perfusion fMRI evidence for priming of shared feature-to-lexical connections during cumulative semantic interference in spoken word production

The speed at which target pictures are named increases monotonically as a function of prior retrieval of other exemplars of the same semantic category and is unaffected by the number of intervening items. This cumulative semantic interference effect is generally attributed to three mechanisms: shared feature activation, priming and lexical-level selection. However, at least two additional mechanisms have been proposed: (1) a 'booster' to amplify lexical-level activation and (2) retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF). In a perfusion functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) experiment, we tested hypotheses concerning the involvement of all five mechanisms. Our results demonstrate that the cumulative interference effect is associated with perfusion signal changes in the left perirhinal and middle temporal cortices that increase monotonically according to the ordinal position of exemplars being named. The left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) also showed significant perfusion signal changes across ordinal presentations; however, these responses did not conform to a monotonically increasing function. None of the cerebral regions linked with RIF in prior neuroimaging and modelling studies showed significant effects. This might be due to methodological differences between the RIF paradigm and continuous naming as the latter does not involve practicing particular information. We interpret the results as indicating priming of shared features and lexical-level selection mechanisms contribute to the cumulative interference effect, while adding noise to a booster mechanism could account for the pattern of responses observed in the LIFG.