Weighty matters and dense arguments: CSF versus real experience

This paper argues that the Victorian Curriculum Standards Framework (CSF II) sequencing is unhelpful for teachers of primary mathematics. 'Density' and 'speed', for example, become sensible concepts for young minds years before the CSF gives them any learning outcome status. While the CSF and its levels of outcomes should not be ignored, they need to be strengthened by teachers who should be guided by the everyday experience of students; teachers should aim to build on students' first hand experiences in real situations. The paper discusses the CSF benchmarks from year 1 to year 6, and provides a number of supermarket investigation learning activities.

Teaching soft issues in strategic management with films : arguments and suggestions

Strategic matters are extraordinarily complex and involve many different and interlinked processes and influences. This makes the subject difficult for students lacking managerial experience as they are unaware of the intricacy of the problems being discussed. Strategy requires not just a theoretical understanding of the subject, but also a practical feel for business and organisation. We argue that films can help the instructor because they offer elaborate multidimensional and multi-layered contexts which mirror the reality of business. Moreover, their powerful narratives aid the retention of ideas and encourage engagement with issues. To illustrate the appropriateness of films in teaching strategic management, we review the strategy curriculum, highlight some of the teaching difficulties and show how using films could help students’ learning.

Journalism ethics : arguments and cases

Journalism Ethics : Arguments and Cases provides a framework for students of journalism and media studies to examine the role that ethical dilemmas play in determining editorial content. Ethical practice is discussed in relation to newsroom operations, the economics of the news industry, and society's expectations of the news media

Journalism ethics : arguments and cases

Situating modern ethical dilemmas in a social and historical context, this text encourages students to think critically about the theory and practice of journalism ethics. It has been fully updated in every chapter with new examples and cases taken from 'yesterday's headlines'.

Psycho-social, ethical and legal arguments for and against the retrospective release of information about donors to donor-conceived individuals in Australia

In the February 2011 report on its inquiry into the past and present practices of donor conception in Australia, the Australian Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee called for the introduction of legislation to regulate donor conception in all jurisdictions that do not have it in place "as a matter of priority". It further called for the establishment, "as a matter of priority", of a national register of donors to enable donor-conceived individuals to access identifying information about their donor. The Senate Committee left open the question as to whether the legislation and central register should have retrospective effect. This article focuses upon that question. It shows that arguments concerning the privacy, confidentiality and anonymity of some donors who may wish to remain anonymous are outweighed by the manifest injustice faced by donor-conceived individuals who are denied access to such information, as well as their families and donors who wish to exchange this information.

The political and economic arguments in contemporary classroom teacher effectiveness research and inquiry

This paper outlines in broad detail the specific political and economic parameters that influence public education. In doing so, the paper examines the policy-making debate within Australia centred on effective classroom teaching practice instruction. The paper implies that significant and global political and economic considerations invariably force governments to act thus exerting influence and control over educational matters including classroom teaching practice. To this extent, public education policy-making must grapple with prevailing political and economic considerations in so far as they involve and require an educational response. 

Three arguments against ‘soft innovation’: towards a richer understanding of cultural innovation

This paper critiques recent research on innovation in the cultural and creative industries. In particular, this paper examines Paul Stoneman’s idea of ‘soft innovation’ as a jumping off point for discussing theories of cultural innovation more broadly. Three critiques are advanced. Firstly, soft innovation is a theoretical perspective that has developed from neoclassical economics, and is therefore vulnerable to criticisms levelled at neoclassical explanations of economic behaviour. Secondly, the theory of soft innovation can be criticised for being contin- gently inaccurate: the observed reality of cultural industries and marketplaces may not reflect the theory’s premises. Thirdly, because soft innovation defines the significance of an innovation in terms of marketplace success, it implies that only high-selling cultural products are significant, a difficult claim to substantiate. This paper concludes by arguing that our understanding of innovation in the cultural sphere can benefit from a multi-disciplinary approach grounded in the full gamut of human creativity.

Transcendental arguments about other minds and intersubjectivity

This article describes some of the main arguments for the existence of other minds, and intersubjectivity more generally, that depend upon a transcendental justification. This means that our focus will be largely on ‘continental’ philosophy, not only because of the abiding interest in this tradition in thematising intersubjectivity, but also because transcendental reasoning is close to ubiquitous in continental philosophy. Neither point holds for analytic philosophy. As such, this essay will introduce some of the important contributions of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Karl-Otto Apel, all of whom use transcendental reasoning as a key part of their analyses of intersubjectivity, and we also consider the work of Peter Strawson who does likewise in the analytic tradition.

Extension of bivariate means to weighted means of several arguments by using binary trees

ABSTRACTAveraging aggregation functions are valuable in building decision making and fuzzy logic systems and in handling uncertainty. Some interesting classes of averages are bivariate and not easily extended to the multivariate case. We propose a generic method for extending bivariate symmetric means to n-variate weighted means by recursively applying the specified bivariate mean in a binary tree construction. We prove that the resulting extension inherits many desirable properties of the base mean and design an efficient numerical algorithm by pruning the binary tree. We show that the proposed method is numerically competitive to the explicit analytical formulas and hence can be used in various computational intelligence systems which rely on aggregation functions.