Effectiveness of national elite sport policies : a multidimensional approach applied to the case of Flanders

While the results of nations in international sport competitions are most often used as an evaluation of effectiveness of elite sport policies, they do not take into account the long-term duration of an athletic career, nor the many confounding variables influencing international success. This paper argues that output evaluation is a one-sided approach to policy assessment. It applies a multidimensional approach to the measurement of the effectiveness of elite sports policy evaluation (meso-level) by examining a four-year cycle of elite sport policies in Flanders. This study endeavors to advance the development of a framework to assess effectiveness of elite sport policies of nations. Data were collected at multiple points of the input-throughput-output and feedback cycle. It was found that in spite of the increasing elite sport expenditures in Flanders (inputs), and notwithstanding the development of the throughputs (processes), this has not as yet lead to acceptable results (outputs) at an international level.

Opportunity lost? Victorian Labor's enactment of community development 1999-2006

The idea of community development has been evoked by Australian governments over many decades. The expressions of community have differed widely, often as a result of politics rather than informed policy. In 1999, after seven years of radical neo-liberal restructuring in Victoria, the Bracks government found itself unexpectedly elected to power. They faced new challenges such as a diminished public sector, growing social inequality and climate change. The first two terms of Victorian Labor were a seminal period in terms of the role they would invoke for ‘community’. Did grass roots participation take a central place, or did rhetoric rule over substance? The evidence points to a government maintaining a neo-liberal trajectory, and thereby losing an opportunity to enable an active citizenry.

Healthy public in all policies

The introduction of the notion of ‘Healthy Public Policy’ in the Ottawa Charter is considered a relevant response to the emerging social-political context of the 1970s and 1980s. It also remains an important, yet volatile, argument for the consideration of policy impact on health. In our analysis, however, those that continued to argue for Healthy Public Policies and those who should develop them have remained naı¨ve about the profound political dimensions of this exercise. Applying insights from the political sciences, we argue that greater levels of connectedness and commitment across civil society, and governance integration between sectors and levels of politicking and action are required for the further success of health integrated policies. The role of communities and the key communicative drivers of the Ottawa Charter (enable, mediate and advocate) need to be strengthened in more astute strategies.

Interpretation — appropriation : (making) an example of labor process theory

In this article, the author explores ethically problematic relations that may be reproduced within a genre of interpretive organizational research: namely, (U.K.) labor process theory (LPT). Although the author endorses LPT’s critical and explicitly antioppressive values, he argues that interpretive practices employed by core authors contradict the genre’s value base and function to silence and appropriate challenging empirical elements to affirm LPT’s valued interpretive schema. The author draws out deeply problematic implications of such appropriation through highlighting parallels between interpretation, appropriation, and colonization. The author ends by considering the nature of, and possibility for, more ethical “critical” interpretive organizational research.

Software developer policies : economics and s 46 of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010

This article considers the impact of developer policies that hinder or restrict cross platform application development. We suggest that policies that hinder or restrict cross platform development have the potential to erode competition within the market for smartphones. The article also considers the relevance of dominance measures in software markets, arguing that conventional economic approaches may not be applicable. Furthermore, while most monitoring activities tend to focus primarily on protection of consumers, the article points out that modern electronic/information technology markets are multi-sided and there is a need for monitoring of practices designed to attract and retain the favour of developers. While the article is written in the context and application of the applicable Australian legislation, this being s 46 of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (Cth), our findings are equally relevant to other jurisdictions.

Victorian Labor and the environment : a legacy to be proud of?

From October 1999 through to November 2010, Victoria was governed by Australian Labor Party (ALP) led governments. The ALP‟s defeat at the November 2010 election provides the opportunity to take stock of their policy achievements in the environmental domain, with a particular focus on how the concept of sustainability was considered in the strategic directions pursued and policy and institutional reforms introduced. In assessing their performance, the context within which the ALP governed is considered, an account of the policy trajectory of their three terms in government provided, and the adequacy of this trajectory assessed. While the analysis is focused on Victoria, the lessons drawn may have wider relevance.

On the recognition of abstract Markov policies

Abstraction plays an essential role in the way the agents plan their behaviours, especially to reduce the computational complexity of planning in large domains. However, the effects of abstraction in the inverse process – plan recognition – are unclear. In this paper, we present a method for recognising the agent’s behaviour in noisy and uncertain domains, and across multiple levels of abstraction. We use the concept of abstract Markov policies in abstract probabilistic planning as the model of the agent’s behaviours and employ probabilistic inference in Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBN) to infer the correct policy from a sequence of observations. When the states are fully observable, we show that for a broad and often-used class of abstract policies, the complexity of policy recognition scales well with the number of abstraction levels in the policy hierarchy. For the partially observable case, we derive an efficient hybrid inference scheme on the corresponding DBN to overcome the exponential complexity.