A review of the scope of scientific studies relating indoor environment and student performance

In 2006-7 the Australian government will invest $9.3 billion in state government and nongovernment educational facilities (DEST 20061). One area of particular interest to both government and school designers is maximising this investment through providing students with healthy and
productive indoor learning environments. The lack of post-occupancy evaluations carried out in schools (Lackney 2001) means that designers are reliant on “best practice” indoor environment quality guidelines developed primarily from scientific studies. The problem with scientific evaluation is that often the complexity of the influences upon student performance is simplified in order to gather information, rather than necessarily providing a more holistic and realistic explanation of any improved outcomes. This paper examines the scope of various studies of classroom indoor environment qualities that have thus far contributed to current understanding of their impact on student learning outcomes. The review demonstrates the lack of comprehensive research into the full range of influences on student performance and offers a better understanding of the limitations of knowledge about indoor environment qualities. This information provides valuable input to research development and post-occupancy evaluation that can better integrate the full range of influences upon students of school facilities and test the assumptions made about “best practice”.

Culture-based fisheries in non-perennial reservoirs in Sri Lanka: production and relative performance of stocked species

In Sri Lanka, there is a great potential for the development of culture-based fisheries because of the availability of around 12 000 non-perennial reservoirs in the dry zone (<187 cm annual rainfall) of the island. These reservoirs fill during the north-east monsoonal period in October to December and almost completely dry up during August to October. As these non-perennial reservoirs are highly productive, hatchery-reared fish fingerlings can be stocked to develop culture-based fisheries during the water retention period of 7–9 months. The present study was conducted in 32 non-perennial reservoirs in five administrative districts in Sri Lanka. These reservoirs were stocked with fingerlings of Indian (catla Catla catla Hamilton and rohu Labeo rohita Hamilton) and Chinese (bighead carp Aristichthys nobilis Richardson) major carps, common carp Cyprinus carpio L., genetically improved farmed tilapia (GIFT) strain of Nile tilapia, Oreochromis niloticus (L.) and post-larvae of giant freshwater prawn, Macrobrachium rosenbergii De Man, at three different species combinations and overall stocking densities (SD) ranging from 218 to 3902 fingerlings ha⁻¹, during the 2002–2003 culture cycle. Of the 32 reservoirs stocked, reliable data on harvest were obtained from 25 reservoirs. Fish yield ranged from 53 to 1801 kg ha⁻¹ and the yields of non-perennial reservoirs in southern region were significantly (P < 0.05) higher than those in the northern region. Naturally-recruited snakehead species contributed the catches in northern reservoirs. Fish yield was curvilinearly related to reservoir area (P < 0.05), and a negative second order relationship was evident between SD and yield (P < 0.05). Chlorophyll-a and fish yield exhibited a positive second order relationship (P < 0.01). Bighead carp yield impacted positively on the total yield (P < 0.05), whereas snakehead yield impact was negative. Bighead carp, common carp and rohu appear suitable for poly-culture in non-perennial reservoirs. GIFT strain O. niloticus had the lowest specific growth rate among stocked species and freshwater prawn had a low return.

The dimensionality of self-rated employee performance : an integrated view

This study addresses the debate in the literature regarding the dimensionality of the job performance construct. The sample comprised 647 public servants from a state-based law enforcement organisation. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses delineate a four:factor structure, consisting of in-role behaviour, organisational citizenship behaviour directed towards (1) individuals or (2) the organisation, and a distinct latent variable deemed counter-productive work behaviour (CWB). The pattern of correlations among the four performance dimensions and between the performance dimensions and attitudes support the construct and discriminant validity of the four performance dimensions. Further, the .findings propose that CWB is a core, not discretionary, dimension of performance.

Are workers with a disability less productive or less understood? An empirical investigation from an entrepreneurial business planning perspective

This study investigated selected work-performance data of a large call centre using the entrepreneurial business planning paradigm as a theoretical framework and tested the hypothesis that levels of productivity would be different for each group between workers with a disability and workers without a disability. On five measures of productivity, no significant differences were discernible but on a sixth measure, length of employment, it was found that disability workers remained in employment significantly longer. These results strongly refute the ‘intuitive wisdom’ that workers with a disability are less productive. The results support a growing body of corporate experience and descriptive research indicating that workers with a disability perform as well as or better than their non-disability colleagues. Yet workers with a disability remain disproportionately under-employed. The key to translating the growing evidence of this research into higher levels of employment of workers with disabilities will depend upon employers adopting an entrepreneurial approach to the planning of human resource management.

Clinical audit, guidelines and standards : a productive relation for managing clinical practices

This paper contributes to the knowledge about the process of standardisation within the domain of medicine. Standardisation has become an important form of governance and co-ordination, and there is limited empirical knowledge about its nature and consequences (Brunsson et al., 2000). This paper aims to explore the development, circulation and standardisation process of a specific clinical audit programme: the Scottish Hip Fracture Audit. This audit started as a local initiative and now has developed into a sophisticated arena (Sahlin-Andersson, 2000) which provides Scottish hospitals with monthly ‘real-time reports’ outlining their performance against Scottish government targets. The paper argues that the interrelation between clinical audit and evidence-based medicine (EBM) can become a ‘productive relation’ (Mykhalovskiy, 2003), that opens up spaces of intervention, in which the clinical communities engage with processes of change of clinical procedures, and in these spaces, clinicians and managers are in a position to refine clinical practice and service organisation, to reflect upon their own actions and to allow insight into the rationalities of their work (Berg, 1997).

The challenges and risks of measuring performance in a social learning system

This submission draws attention to the challenges of modelling and measuring teacher performance and the risks associated with the measurement of student and teacher performance. The first premise of this submission is that all such performances are strongly contextual, and that therefore valid modelling and measurement must take the effective dimensions of this context into account. The second premise of this submission is that this performance-context nexus operates as a system and that one of the properties of such systems is continuous feedback looping. The submission draws attention as well to an important entailment of this argument, which is that invalid modelling and measurement may lead to a distortion of the productive functioning of learning systems. This submission accordingly urges the Commission to commit to developing an econometric model which reckons with the contextual determinants of student and teacher performance, and the pursuit of system-wide productivity increases on the basis of the school learning system as the basic unit of analysis. The Commission is also urged to investigate the suggestion that performance measurement regimes which take the basic units of measurement as individual student and teacher performance rather than the school pose a risk to the productivity of schools as learning systems and innovation in the Australian economy as a whole in the longer term.

Performance evaluation of multi-tier ensemble classifiers for phishing websites

This article is devoted to large multi-tier ensemble classifiers generated as ensembles of ensembles and applied to phishing websites. Our new ensemble construction is a special case of the general and productive multi-tier approach well known in information security. Many efficient multi-tier classifiers have been considered in the literature. Our new contribution is in generating new large systems as ensembles of ensembles by linking a top-tier ensemble to another middletier ensemble instead of a base classifier so that the top~ tier ensemble can generate the whole system. This automatic generation capability includes many large ensemble classifiers in two tiers simultaneously and automatically combines them into one hierarchical unified system so that one ensemble is an integral part of another one. This new construction makes it easy to set up and run such large systems. The present article concentrates on the investigation of performance of these new multi~tier ensembles for the example of detection of phishing websites. We carried out systematic experiments evaluating several essential ensemble techniques as well as more recent approaches and studying their performance as parts of multi~level ensembles with three tiers. The results presented here demonstrate that new three-tier ensemble classifiers performed better than the base classifiers and standard ensembles included in the system. This example of application to the classification of phishing websites shows that the new method of combining diverse ensemble techniques into a unified hierarchical three-tier ensemble can be applied to increase the performance of classifiers in situations where data can be processed on a large computer.

Urban agriculture up-scaled: economically and socially productive public green space

'Space is fundamental in any form of commnunal Life; space is fundamental in any exercise of power' (Foucault & Rabinow, 1984: 252). Public green space has the potential to provide one our last remaining free sources of access to open land, clean air, vegetation, water and soil within the urban realm. In most developed countries, this space - due to complex, interconnected legacies of enclosure, privatisation, population growth, urbanisation and 'modernisation' - typically exists as controlled, contrived, scenic picturesque landscapes, unavailable for forms ofcivic, productive and generative activities at scale, such as public urban agriculture. Narrow assessment of green space's on-going financial and maintenance costs fail to recognise wider gains (such as physical and psychological wellness, increased property value , decreased crime rates) (Maller, 2002· Woolley, 2004; Sherer, 2006) and despite attempts, studies that present financial benefits of green spaces have not yet managed to stem the tide of budget cut and reduced spending. Perhaps more importantly, income-generating strategies within public green spaces have not been sufficiently explored. Such approaches could help to develop more convincing arguments analogous with the measurement metrics and quantitative language threatening green space's optimisation and survival. By 'up-scaling' public green space's productive capacity within an ethical framework, we have the potential to greatly enhance social and environmental performance - shifting the existing paradigm from passive to active, consumptive to generative and centralised to collective.