Return distribution predictability and its implications for portfolio selection

The inquiries to return predictability are traditionally limited to conditional mean, while literature on portfolio selection is replete with moment-based analysis with up to the fourth moment being considered. This paper develops a distribution-based framework for both return prediction and portfolio selection. More specifically, a time-varying return distribution is modeled through quantile regressions and copulas, using quantile regressions to extract information in marginal distributions and copulas to capture dependence structure. A preference function which captures higher moments is proposed for portfolio selection. An empirical application highlights the additional information provided by the distributional approach which cannot be captured by the traditional moment-based methods.

History in the Australian Curriculum F-10: Providing answers without asking questions

Thi paper writer examines the most recent version of the Australian Curriculum: History F-10. It does so in two ways. First, it explores some of the strengths and weaknesses of this curriculum with reference to the decision to frame aspects of Australian history within the context of a world history approach. Whilst the positioning of Indigenous Histories is applauded, the curriculum’s lack of attention to the significance of the recent history of Australia’s Asian neighbours, and Australia’s relationship with them, is critiqued. This part of the paper also emphasises the need for comparative approaches and calls for greater emphasis on providing students with opportunities to critique and contest the construction of narratives about the past. Second, the paper introduces four invited articles that examine different aspects of the Australian Curriculum: History. Collectively these papers reiterate the significance of the richness of integrated and child-centred approaches and the importance of developing historical thinking, empathy and the historical imagination in the classroom.

"Fair" government contracts for community service provision : time to curb unfettered executive freedom?

All Australian governments are significantly increasing the use of contracted community service provision through not for profit (NFP) organisations. These transactions occur through grant arrangements which take the form of standard contracts or deeds rather than drawing on statutory authority. Government inquiries bodies have consistently reported and raised concerns about the fairness of such standard grant contract terms, but failed to provide any mechanism whereby fairness can be assured. The Productivity Commission has suggested that the resulting poor relationship results in inappropriate risk transfer, micro-management, disincentives to innovate and poor service provision. This paper develops and tests a fairness measure based on the principles of the Australian Consumer Law which legislates fairness protections for standard consumer contracts.  

Classification—Content Regulation and Convergent Media

On 24 March 2011, Attorney-General Robert McClelland referred the National Classification Scheme to the ALRC and asked it to conduct widespread public consultation across the community and industry. The review considered issues including: existing Commonwealth, State and Territory classification laws the current classification categories contained in the Classification Act, Code and Guidelines the rapid pace of technological change the need to improve classification information available to the community the effect of media on children and the desirability of a strong content and distribution industry in Australia. During the inquiry, the ALRC conducted face-to-face consultations with stakeholders, hosted two online discussion forums, and commissioned pilot community and reference group forums into community attitudes to higher level media content. The ALRC published two consultation documents—an Issues Paper and a Discussion Paper—and invited submissions from the public. The Final Report was tabled in Parliament on 1 March 2012. Recommendations: The report makes 57 recommendations for reform. The net effect of the recommendations would be the establishment of a new National Classification Scheme that: applies consistent rules to content that are sufficiently flexible to be adaptive to technological change; places a regulatory focus on restricting access to adult content, helping to promote cyber-safety and protect children from inappropriate content across media platforms; retains the Classification Board as an independent classification decision maker with an essential role in setting benchmarks; promotes industry co-regulation, encouraging greater industry content classification, with government regulation more directly focused on content of higher community concern; provides for pragmatic regulatory oversight, to meet community expectations and safeguard community standards; reduces the overall regulatory burden on media content industries while ensuring that content obligations are focused on what Australians most expect to be classified; and harmonises classification laws across Australia, for the benefit of consumers and content providers.

The search for individualism : Self-expression through product personalisation

This research paper explores the impact product personalisation has upon product attachment and aims to develop a deeper understanding of why, how and if consumers choose to do so. The current research in this field is mainly based on attachment theories and is predominantly product specific. This paper researches the link between product attachment and personalisation through in-depth, semi-structured interviews, where the data has been thematically analysed and broken down into three themes, and nine sub-themes. It was found that participants did become more attached to products once they were personalised and the reasons why this occurred varied. The most common reasons that led to personalisation were functionality and usability, the expression of personality through a product and the complexity of personalisation. The reasons why participants felt connected to their products included strong emotions/memories, the amount of time and effort invested into the personalisation, a sense of achievement. Reasons behind the desire for personalisation included co-designing, expression of uniqueness/individualism and having choice for personalisation. Through theme and inter-theme relationships, many correlations were formed, which created the basis for design recommendations. These recommendations demonstrate how a designer could implement the emotions and reasoning for personalisation into the design process.

In defence of Victoria's Children's Court : its value and role in the child protection system

Australian child protection systems have been subject to sustained and significant criticism for many decades. As a central part of that system Children’s Courts have been implicated: three recent inquiries into the child protection system in Victoria all criticised the Family Division of the Children’s Court.1 In the resulting debate two diametrically opposed points of view surfaced about the Children’s Court and the role that legal procedures and professionals should play in child protection matters. On one side bodies like the Children’s Court of Victoria, Victoria Legal Aid (‘VLA’), the Law Institute of Victoria (‘LIV’), and the Federation of Community Legal Centres (‘FCLC’) argued that the Children’s Court plays a vital role in child protection and should continue to play that role.2 On the other side a coalition of human service and child protection agencies called for major change including the removal of the Children’s Court from the child protection system. Victoria’s Department of Human Services (‘DHS’) has been critical of the Court3 as have community sector organisations like Anglicare, Berry Street, MacKillop Family Services and the Salvation Army — all agencies the DHS funds to deliver child protection services.4 Victoria’s Child Safety Commissioner has also called for major reform, publicly labelling the Court a ‘lawyers’ playground’ and recommending abolishing the Court’s involvement in child protection completely.

Regulating journalists? The Finkelstein Review, the Convergence Review, and News Media Regulation in Australia

This paper identifies two major forces driving change in media policy worldwide: media convergence, and renewed concerns about media ethics, with the latter seen in the U.K. Leveson Inquiry. It focuses on two major public inquiries in Australia during 2011-2012 – the Independent Media Inquiry (Finkelstein Review) and the Convergence Review – and the issues raised about future regulation of journalism and news standards. Drawing upon perspectives from media theory, it observes the strong influence of social responsibility theories of the media in the Finkelstein Review, and the adverse reaction these received from those arguing from Fourth Estate/free press perspectives, which were also consistent with the longstanding opposition of Australian newspaper proprietors to government regulation. It also discusses the approaches taken in the Convergence Review to regulating for news standards, in light of the complexities arising from media convergence. The paper concludes with consideration of the fast-changing environment in which such proposals to transform media regulation are being considered, including the crisis of news media organisation business models, as seen in Australia with major layoffs of journalists from the leading print media publications.

Urban renewal, migration and memories : the affordances of place-based pedagogies for developing immigrant students’ literate repertoires

This paper reports on the new literacy demands in the middle years of schooling project in which the affordances of placed-based pedagogy are being explored through teacher inquiries and classroom-based design experiments. The school is located within a large-scale urban renewal project in which houses are being demolished and families relocated. The original school buildings have recently been demolished and replaced by a large ‘superschool’ which serves a bigger student population from a wider area. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data, the teachers reported that the language literacy learning of students (including a majority of students learning English as a second language) involved in the project exceeded their expectations. The project provided the motivation for them to develop their oral language repertoires, by involving them in processes such as conducting interviews with adults for their oral histories, through questioning the project manager in regular meetings, and through reporting to their peers and the wider community at school assemblies. At the same time students’ written and multimodal documentation of changes in the neighbourhood and the school grounds extended their literate and semiotic repertoires as they produced books, reports, films, powerpoints, visual designs and models of structures.

Collaborative research into the affordances of place for primary school children’s literacy learning

In the context of culturally diverse high poverty areas of Australia, we have conducted collaborative research with teachers and students in a primary school for more than a decade. Teachers have been exploring the affordances of place‐based pedagogies (Gruenewald & Smith, 2008) for the development of students’ spatial literacies and their understandings of the politics of places and built environments (Comber, Nixon, Ashmore, Loo & Cook, 2006; Comber, Thomson and Wells, 2001). This paper reports on a project in which the affordances of placedbased pedagogy are being explored through teacher inquiries and classroom‐based design experiments (Cobb, Confrey, di Sessa, Lehrer & Schauble, 2003). Located within a large‐scale urban renewal project in which houses are being demolished and families relocated, the original school has been replaced by a larger school that serves a population from a wider area. In this paper we draw on the study to consider the challenges of working with teachers and primary school students to study innovative ideas and practices in educational research. Specifically we consider issues raised by collaborative studies of the affordances of cross curricular projects focusing on social and environmental change to engage students in academic learning and expand their literate repertoires in a changing policy climate.

Games for change and transformative learning : an ethnographic case study

This thesis aims to contribute to a better understanding of how serious games/games for change function as learning frameworks for transformative learning in an educational setting. This study illustrates how the meaning-making processes and learning with and through computer gameplay are highly contingent, and are significantly influenced by the uncertainties of the situational context. The study focuses on SCAPE, a simulation game that addresses urban planning and sustainability. SCAPE is based on the real-world scenario of Kelvin Grove Urban Village, an inner city redevelopment area in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. The game is embedded within an educational program, and I thus account for the various gameplay experiences of different school classes participating in this program. The networks emerging from the interactions between students/players, educators, facilitators, the technology, the researcher, as well as the setting, result in unanticipated, controversial, and sometimes unintended gameplay experiences and outcomes. To unpack play, transformative learning and games, this study adopts an ecological approach that considers the magic circle of gameplay in its wider context. Using Actor-Network Theory as the ontological lens for inquiry, the methods for investigation include an extensive literature review, ethnographic participant observation of SCAPE, as well as student and teacher questionnaires, finishing with interviews with the designers and facilitators of SCAPE. Altogether, these methods address my research aim to better understand how the heterogeneous actors engage in the relationships in and around gameplay, and illustrate how their conflicting understandings enable, shape or constrain the (transformative) learning experience. To disentangle these complexities, my focus continuously shifts between the following modes of inquiry into the aims „h To describe and analyse the game as a designed artefact. „h To examine the gameplay experiences of players/students and account for how these experiences are constituted in the relationships of the network. „h To trace the meaning-making processes emerging from the various relations of players/students, facilitators, teachers, designers, technology, researcher, and setting, and consider how the boundaries of the respective ecology are configured and negotiated. „h To draw out the implications for the wider research area of game-based learning by using the simulation game SCAPE as an example for introducing gameplay to educational settings. Accounting in detail for five school classes, these accounts represent, each in its own right, distinct and sometimes controversial forms of engagement in gameplay. The practices and negotiations of all the assembled human and non-human actors highlight the contingent nature of gameplay and learning. In their sum, they offer distinct but by no means exhaustive examples of the various relationships that emerge from the different assemblages of human and non-human actors. This thesis, hence, illustrates that game-based learning in an educational setting is accompanied by considerable unpredictability and uncertainty. As ordinary life spills and leaks into gameplay experiences, group dynamics and the negotiations of technology, I argue that overly deterministic assertions of the game¡¦s intention, as well as a too narrowly defined understanding of the transformative learning outcome, can constrain our inquiries and hinder efforts to further elucidate and understand the evolving uncertainties around game-based learning. Instead, this thesis posits that playing and transformative learning are relational effects of the respective ecology, where all actors are networked in their (partial) enrolment in the process of translation. This study thus attempts to foreground the rich opportunities for exploring how game-based learning is assembled as a network of practices.

Sex trafficking and moral harm : politicised understandings and depictions of the trafficked experience

This paper explores notions of harm in sex work discourse, highlighting the extent to which essentialist ideas of ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ sex have pervaded trafficking policy. In a comparative examination of Australian Parliamentary Inquiries and United States Congressional Hearings leading to the establishment of anti-trafficking policy, we identify the stories that have influenced legislators, and established a narrative of trafficking heavily dependent upon assumptions of the inherent harm of sex work. This narrative constructs a hierarchy of victimisation, which denies alternative discourses of why women migrate for sex work. We argue that it is not sexual commerce that is harmful, but pathological, systemic inequalities and entrenched disadvantage that are harmful. A narrow narrative of trafficking fails to adequately depict this complexity of the trafficked experience.

Supermassive

“Supermassive” is a synchronised four-channel video installation with sound. Each video channel shows a different camera view of an animated three-dimensional scene, which visually references galactic or astral imagery. This scene is comprised of forty-four separate clusters of slowly orbiting white text. Each cluster refers to a different topic that has been sourced online. The topics are diverse with recurring subjects relating to spirituality, science, popular culture, food and experiences of contemporary urban life. The slow movements of the text and camera views are reinforced through a rhythmic, contemplative soundtrack. As an immersive installation, “Supermassive” operates somewhere between a meditational mind map and a representation of a contemporary data stream. “Supermassive” contributes to studies in the field of contemporary art. It is particularly concerned with the ways that graphic representations of language can operate in the exploration of contemporary lived experiences, whether actual or virtual. Artists such as Ed Ruscha and Christopher Wool have long explored the emotive and psychological potentials of graphic text. Other artists such as Doug Aitken and Pipilotti Rist have engaged with the physical and spatial potentials of audio-visual installations to create emotive and symbolic experiences for their audiences. Using a practice-led research methodology, “Supermassive” extends these creative inquiries. By creating a reflective atmosphere in which divergent textual subjects are pictured together, the work explores not only how we navigate information, but also how such navigations inform understandings of our physical and psychological realities. “Supermassive” has been exhibited internationally at LA Louver Gallery, Venice, California in 2013 and nationally with GBK as part of Art Month Sydney, also in 2013. It has been critically reviewed in The Los Angeles Times.

Tranquility falls

“Tranquility Falls” depicts a computer-generated waterfall set to sentimental stock music. As the water gushes, text borrowed from a popular talk show host’s self-help advice fade in and out graphically down the screen. As the animated phrases increase in tempo, the sounds of the waterfall begin to overwhelm the tender music. By creating overtly fabricated sensations of inspiration and awe, the work questions how and where we experience contemplation, wonderment and guidance in a contemporary context. “Tranquility Falls” contributes to studies in the field of contemporary art. It is particularly concerned with representations of spirituality and nature. These have been important themes in art practice for some time. For example, artists such as Olafur Eliasson and James Turrell have created artificial insertions in nature in order to question contemporary experiences of the natural environment. Other artists such as Nam Jun Paik have more directly addressed the changing relationship between spirituality and popular culture. Using a practice-led research methodology, “Tranquility Falls” extends these creative inquiries. By presenting an overtly synthetic but strangely evocative pun on a ‘fountain of knowledge’, it questions whether we are informed less by traditional engagements with organised religions and natural wonder, and instead, increasingly reliant on the mechanisms of popular culture for moments of insight and reflection. “Tranquility Falls” has been exhibited internationally at LA Louver Gallery, Venice, California in 2013 and nationally with GBK as part of Art Month Sydney, also in 2013. It has been critically reviewed in The Los Angeles Times.