Love, politics, time

Featuring the musical compositional techniques of phase, repetition and pulse, with the sounds of New York recorded from a 16th floor hotel window, this sonic poem is a plea for the intimately spoken word. As cockatoos rise in the white siren sky, two lovers confront love and time in a halting conversation inside a placeless shelter.
This performance work is a poetic and musical experimentation with ideas from the philosopher Alain Badiou. The intersection of political and amorous truth procedures thought to form the subject matter of many novels is extended upon by presenting such an intersection via the crossing of genres of music, sound art, poetry, prose and theatre. This collaborative venture forms a continuing experiment with the idea that music does not simply form a corollary with words and their representation in sound, but rather explores ways in which music can form an antagonistic relationship to the spoken word.
'Conversation in an air raid shelter' was originally presented as a live performance at Double Dialogues Conference: 'The 21st century - The Event, The Subject, The Artwork', Fiji, 2012 and the audio recording appears in Double Dialogues Issue 16, Spring 2013 with an accompanying discursive article 'Love, Politics, Time'. It is available on CD and Youtube. It was also performed at the Torquay Literary Festival in 2013. A discussion of its process by Josephine Scicluna features on a video currently in production by Deakin University for a new unit on creativity in the Bachelor of Arts program.

Prioritization of psychological well-being in the care of diabetes: moving beyond excuses, bringing solutions

Jones and colleagues recently made a plea for the prioritization of psychological well-being in diabetes care [1]. Such calls to action began over 20 years ago with the 'St Vincent Declaration' guidelines [2]. A 'plea' two decades later emphasizes that this paradigm shift is a long, slow burn. In the 21st century, people with diabetes are now adding their powerful voices via social media, advocating for better psychological support, as active consumers (and constructive critics) of health care [3]. We can learn considerably from organizations such as Cancer Voices (www.cancervoicesaustralia.org) - they demonstrate how consumer representation and involvement in research agendas, policy and service provision play an integral part in shaping holistic health care. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Nash Demand Game and the Kalai-Smorodinsky Solution

We introduce two new variations on the Nash demand game. One, like all known Nash-like demand games so far, has the Nash solution outcome as its equilibrium outcome. In the other, the range of solutions depends on an exogenous breakdown probability; surprisingly, the Kalai-Smorodinsky outcome proves to be the most robust equilibrium outcome. While the Kalai- Smorodinsky solution always finishes on top, there is no possible general ranking among the remaining solution concepts considered; in fact, the rest of the solution concepts take their turns at the bottom at various bargaining problems, depending on the specifics of the bargaining setup.

Opting only in: Contractarians, waiver of liability provisions, and the race to the bottom

This paper will test the core claim of scholars in the nexus of contracts tradition—that private ordering as a process of bargaining creates optimal rules. We do this by analyzing empirical evidence in the context of waiver of liability provisions. These provisions allow companies to eliminate monetary damages for breach of the duty of care through amendments to the articles of incorporation. With all states allowing some form of these provisions, they represent a good laboratory to examine the bargaining process between management and shareholders. The contractarian approach would suggest that shareholders negotiate with management to obtain agreements that are in their best interests. If a process of bargaining is at work as they claim, the opt-in process for waiver of liability provisions ought to generate a variety of approaches. Shareholders wanting a high degree of accountability would presumably not support a waiver of liability. In other instances, shareholders might favor them in order to attract or retain qualified managers. Still others would presumably want a mix, allowing waiver but only in specified circumstances.Our analysis reveals that the diversity predicted by a private ordering model is not borne out by the evidence with waiver of liability provisions for Fortune 100 companies. All states permit such provisions and in the Fortune 100, all but one company has them. Moreover, they are remarkably similar in effect, waiving liability to the fullest extent permitted by law. In other words, one categorical rule was merely replaced by another, dealing a significant blow to the contractarian thesis.

City-level auditor industry specialization, economies of scale, and audit pricing

We examine the effects of city-level auditor industry specialization and scale economies on audit pricing in the United States. Using a sample of Big N clients for the 2000-2007 period, and a scale measure based on percentile rankings of the number of audit clients at the city-industry level, we document significant specialization premiums and scale discounts in both the pre- and post-Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) periods. However, the effects of industry specialization and scale economies on audit pricing are highly interactive. The negative effect of city-industry scale on audit fees obtains only for clients of specialist auditors. By contrast, clients of non-specialist auditors obtain scale discounts only when they enjoy strong bargaining power, suggesting that auditors are "forced" to pass on scale economies to clients with greater bargaining power.

Identifying the characteristics of child sexual abuse cases associated with the child or child's parents withdrawing the complaint

Most child sexual abuse cases do not result in a full trial or guilty plea; rather, case attrition occurs at earlier stages of the criminal justice system. One reason for the attrition of these cases is the withdrawal of complaints, by children or their caregivers. The aim of the current study was to determine the case characteristics associated with complaint withdrawal in child sexual abuse cases by the child or his or her parents once a report has been made to authorities. All child sexual abuse incidents reported to authorities in one jurisdiction of Australia in 2011 were analyzed (N=659). A multinomial logistic regression was used to predict the following case outcomes: (1) withdrawn by the child or his or her parents, (2) exited for other reasons (e.g., the alleged offender was not identified, the child refused to be interviewed), and (3) resulted in a charge. Five predictors significantly added to the prediction of case outcome: child age, suspect gender, suspect age, child-suspect relationship, and abuse frequency. These results should contribute to the design of interventions in order to reduce complaint withdrawals if these withdrawals are not in the child's best interests.

Output and labor productivity in organized manufacturing: a panel cointegration analysis for India

One of the policy puzzles faced in India during the last two and half decades has been the weak association between output and labor markets, particularly in the manufacturing sector. In this research, we investigate the long-run relationship between output, labor productivity and real wages in the case of organized manufacturing. We adjust the measure of labor productivity incorporating bottlenecks, such as lack of infrastructure, access to external finance, and labor regulations, which all may influence labor market outcomes. Using panel data from seventeen manufacturing industries, we establish long-run dynamics for the output-labor productivity-real wages series over a period of nearly three decades. We employ recently developed panel unit root and cointegration tests for cross-sectional dependence to incorporate heterogeneity across industries. Long-run elasticities are generally found to be low for labor productivity compared to real wages due to the changes in manufacturing output. There are variations across industries within the manufacturing sector for the effects of the labor market on manufacturing output. In some industries, lower wages are associated with higher output, and the reason for the positive relationship in other industries could be due to workers' bargaining power.

'A dark / Inscrutable workmanship:' Shining a ‘scientific’ light on emotion and poiesis

Max Nordau’s physiognomic study of criminality, Degeneration (1895), notably dedicated to the Italian pioneer of criminal anthropology Cesare Lombroso, labels poets and other artists—alongside criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and lunatics—as ‘degenerates’. The Symbolist poets come under particular scrutiny in Nordau’s pseudo-scientific study. Paul Verlaine is described as ‘a repulsive degenerate subject with asymmetric skull and Mongolian face’ (1920 [1895]:128), while Stéphane Mallarmé is said to have ‘long, pointed, faun-like ears’ (131). The emotional and metaphorical intensity of their poetry, for Nordau, is another reflection of their alleged degeneracy. These poets write ‘twaddle’ (116), engaging in a ‘babbling and stammering’ (119) resonant of children and animals, which only ‘imbeciles and idiots’ profess to understand. While the Symbolists are viewed as avant-garde, Nordau is at pains to demonstrate that their irrational use of language actually exposes them as atavistic. Nordau proclaims: ‘clear speech serves the purpose of communication of the actual’ (118). By contrast, the Symbolists, ‘so far as they are honestly degenerate and imbecile, can think only in a mystical, that is, in a confused way… their emotions override their ideas.’

Identified by Nordau as one of the fin de siècle’s degenerates, Oscar Wilde evoked Nordau’s book in a petition for clemency when he was imprisoned in 1896, arguing that Nordau’s findings proved he required medical rather than punitive intervention. His plea was not successful, with Wilde later quipping: ‘I quite agree with Dr Nordau’s assertion that all men of genius are insane, but Dr Nordau forgets that all sane people are idiots’ (cited in Hitchens 2000: 18).

Understanding employment relations

The text addresses workplace governance under the Fair Work Act 2009, as well as the role oftrade unions, employer associations, collective bargaining processes, and various laws pertaining to contracts of employment, equal opportunity and ...

Interference-aware coordinated power allocation in autonomous Wi-Fi environment

Self-managed access points (APs) with growing intelligence can optimize their own performances but pose potential negative impacts on others without energy ef ciency. In this paper, we focus on modeling the coordinated interaction among interest-independent and self-con gured APs, and conduct the power allocation case study in the autonomous Wi-Fi scenario. Speci cally, we build a `coordination Wi-Fi platform (CWP), a public platform for APs interacting with each other. OpenWrt-based APs in the physical world are mapped to virtual agents (VAs) in CWP, which communicate with each other through a standard request-reply process de ned as AP talk protocol (ATP).With ATP, an active interference measurement methodology is proposed re ecting both in-range interference and hidden terminal interference, and the Nash bargaining-based power control is further formulated for interference reductions. CWP is deployed in a real of ce environment, where coordination interactions between VAs can bring a maximum 40-Mb/s throughput improvement with the Nash bargaining-based power control in the multi-AP experiments.

The impact of external forces on cartel network dynamics: direct research in the diamond industry

This paper describes the impact of external environmental forces on cartel networks. Using a case research approach, this report examines two leading business networks within one industry, over time. The results suggest that (a) bargaining power of intermediaries increases with the advent of new and powerful actors, (b) process activities that cartels previously controlled are being outsourced to new actors sometimes based in developing countries, (c) other actors are acquiring resources once dominated by a cartel, (d) external forces triggered by the illegal diamond trade, such as international regulatory constraints, no longer favour cartels like De Beers, and (e) over time, these and additional environment factors are forcing actors like De Beers who perform rigid process activities to become more flexible. For example, forces are moving cartels which relied previously on hand-picked intermediaries in highly controlled networks to market their products to adopt a flexible market-focused expansion of operations in retail contexts.