Resources for improving journalists' understanding of the economic and financial parameters of Australia's agricultural and commodity producers

The research addresses how an understanding of the fundamentals of economics will better inform general journalists who report on issues or events affecting rural and regional Australia. The research draws on practice-based experience of the author, formal economics studies, interviews with news editors from Australian television news organisations, and interviews from leading economists. A guidebook has also been written to help journalists apply economic theories to their reporting. The guidebook enables reporters to think strategically and consider the 'big picture' when they inform society about policies, commodity trade, the environment, or any issues involving rural and regional Australia.

Financial Markets, Institutions and Money [3rd ed.]

"The financial system is a key influencer of the health and efficiency of an economy. The role of the financial system is to gather money from people and businesses that currently have more money than they need and transfer it to those that can use it for either business or consumer expenditures. This flow of funds through financial markets and institutions in the Australian economy is huge (in the billions of dollars), affecting business profits, the rate of inflation, interest rates and the production of goods and services. In general, the larger the flow of funds and the more efficient the financial system, the greater the economic output and welfare in the economy. It is not possible to have a modern, complex economy such as that in Australia, without an efficient and sound financial system. The global financial crisis (GFC) of late 2007–09 (and the ensuing European debt crisis), where the global financial market was on the brink of collapse with only significant government intervention stopping a catastrophic global failure of the market, illustrated the importance of the financial system. Financial Markets, Institutions and Money 3rd edition introduces students to the financial system, its operations, and participants. The text offers a fresh, succinct analysis of the financial markets and discusses how the many participants in the financial system interrelate. This includes coverage of regulators, regulations and the role of the Reserve Bank of Australia, that ensure the system’s smooth running, which is essential to a modern economy. The text has been significantly revised to take into account changes in the financial world."---publisher website Table of Contents 1. The financial system - an overview 2. The Monetary Authorities 3. The Reserve Bank of Australia and interest rates 4. The level of interest rates 5. Mathematics of finance 6. Bond Prices and interest rate risk 7. The Structure of Interest Rates 8. Money Markets 9. Bond Markets 10. Equity Markets

Peer review of teaching practice and resources : exploring new spaces to embrace cultural change

The implementation of systematic peer review as a professional development activity, and as a support for educational design activities is under-utilised in many Australian higher education institutions. This case study reports on the first stages of planning and implementation of an institution-wide project to enhance teaching and learning quality at a remote and regional university, where one of the major strategies for improvement is peer review. Through a systematic process of staff engagement in peer review, within and from outside the organisation, a substantial change in flexible learning is envisaged. A mix of new and different learning spaces are to be used in the project, including blended learning spaces for academic development. This paper describes the research framework that will guide the peer review process and examines the early findings of the design-based research. Leadership, awareness raising and development of a supportive community of inquiry are seen as key components for successful implementation of peer review. In addition, unique contextual elements add to the complexity of designing for transformative change within such a relatively new organization.

A wound management education and training needs analysis of health consumers and the relevant health workforce and stocktake of available education and training activities and resources

The goals of this project were to determine the education and training needs of health consumers and the relevant health workforce and to identify and map the available education and training activities and resources. The methods used to collect the data included online surveys and one on one interviews of relevant patients and their carers. The project manager actively sought to engage with the key wound management leaders and advanced clinicians to gain their support and views on the priority education and training issues. The response to all data collection methods was pleasing with almost five hundred responses to the general wound workforce online survey. The data supported the need for more wound management education and training and identified some particular topics of need, such as utilising wound investigations and understanding wound products, pharmaceuticals and devices. The occupational groups with the highest need appear to be those working in primary health care, such as practice nurses and GPs, and those working in residential aged care facilities. The education and training stocktake identified a wide range of activities currently available, the majority being provided in a face to face format. The next stage of the project will be to form some clear and achievable priority action areas based on the available data. An online directory of wound management education and training activities and resources will be developed and further development will be undertaken on a knowledge and skills framework for the wound management workforce. Additionally, transfer of learning factors in the general practice environment will be assessed and strategies will be developed to improve the pre-entry or undergraduate wound management training within relevant higher education programs.

Well-being, satisfaction and commitment : the substitutable nature of resources for maternity hospital nurses

Abstract Aims. To investigate the relationship between three types of organizational resources (job control, social support and organizational justice) and the impact of job demands on nurse’s well-being and attitudes towards their work. Background. The negative impact of work-related stress on nurse’s health and attitudes towards their work has been established. Increasingly, research is focusing on the role of organizational resources in reducing the impact of work related stress. Design. Cross-sectional survey. Method. Data collected in November 2008 from 226 Australian nurses and midwives were analysed using the full Job Strain Model with the addition of organizational justice variables. Multiple regression analyses explored the relationships among job control, job demands, three sources of social support and four types of organizational justice on well-being and work attitudes. Results. The overall regression models explained a significant amount of variance in well-being, job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Significant main effects were evident for support variables and organizational justice variables on well-being and job satisfaction. Interactions between job control and supervisor support and between job demands and supervisor support were evident for job satisfaction. Conclusions. Supervisor support and organizational justice have significant relationships with nurses’ well-being and job satisfaction. More broadly, the findings suggest that, in the triple-matching approach from a work-stressor to a resource to a work outcome, personal, supervisory and organizational resources may be substitutable. These findings provide nurse management with empirical endorsement for the development and delivery of the organization’s resources for nursing staff.

Creating efficiencies in teaching : where are the right resources when you need them?

Early career engineering academics are encouraged to join and contribute to established research groups at the leading edge of their discipline. This is often facilitated by various staff development and support programs. Given that academics are often appointed primarily on the basis of their research skills and outputs, such an approach is justified and is likely to result in advancing the individual academic’s career. It also enhances their capacity to attract competitive research funding, while contributing to the overall research performance of their institution, with further potential for an increased share of government funding. In contrast, there is much less clarity of direction or availability of support mechanisms for those academics in their role as teachers. Following a general induction to teaching and learning at their institution, they would commonly think about preparing some lecture materials, whether for delivery in a face-to-face or on-line modality. Typically they would look for new references and textbooks to act as a guide for preparing the content. They would probably find out how the course has been taught before, and what laboratory facilities and experiments have been used. In all of these and other related tasks, the majority of newly appointed academics are guided strongly by their own experiences as students, rather than any firm knowledge of pedagogical principles. At a time of increased demands on academics’ time, and high expectations of performance and productivity in both research and teaching, it is essential to examine possible actions to support academics in enhancing their teaching performance in effective and efficient ways. Many resources have been produced over the years in engineering schools around the world, with very high intellectual and monetary costs. In Australia, the last few years have seen a surge in the number of ALTC/OLT projects and fellowships addressing a range of engineering education issues and providing many resources. There are concerns however regarding the extent to which these resources are being effectively utilised. Why are academics still re-inventing the wheel and creating their own version of teaching resources and pedagogical practice? Why do they spend so much of their precious time in such an inefficient way? A symposium examining the above issues was conducted at the AAEE2012 conference, and some pointers to possible responses to the above questions were obtained. These are explored in this paper and supplemented by the responses to a survey of a group of engineering education leaders on some of the aspects of these research questions. The outcomes of the workshop and survey results have been analysed in view of the literature and the ALTC/OLT sponsored learning and teaching projects and resources. Other factors are discussed, including how such resources can be found, how their quality might be evaluated, and how assessment may be appropriately incorporated, again using readily available resources. This study found a strong resonance between resources reuse with work on technology acceptance (Davis, 1989), suggesting that technology adoption models could be used to encourage resource sharing. Efficient use of outstanding learning materials is an enabling approach. The paper provides some insights on the factors affecting the re-use of available resources, and makes some recommendations and suggestions on how the issue of resources re-use might be incorporated in the process of applying and completing engineering education projects.

Review essay : Crime, risk and money : "The Currency of Justice : Fines and Damages in Consumer Societies" and "Crime and Risk", both by Pat O'Malley

Sharing some closely related themes and a common theoretical orientation based on the governmentality analytic, these are nevertheless two very different contributions to criminological knowledge and theory. The first, The Currency of Justice: Fines and Damages in Consumer Societies (COJ), is a sustained and highly original analysis of that most pervasive yet overlooked feature of modern legal orders; their reliance on monetary sanctions. Crime and Risk (CAR), on the other hand, is a short synoptic overview of the many dimensions and trajectories of risk in contemporary debate and practice, both the practices of crime and the governance of crime. It is one of the first in a new series by Sage, 'Compact Criminology', in which authors survey in little more than a hundred pages some current field of debate. With this small gem, Pat O'Malley has set the bar very high for those who follow. For all its brevity, CAR traverses a massive expanse of research, debates and issues, while also opening up new and challenging questions around the politics of risk and the relationship between criminal risk-taking and the governance of risk and crime. The two books draw together various threads of O'Malley's rich body of work on these issues, and once again demonstrate that he is one of the foremost international scholars of risk inside and outside criminology.

Biobanking of blood and bone marrow : emerging challenges for custodians of public resources

The Australian Bone Marrow Donor Registry (ABMDR) is a publicly funded company that is part of an international network that facilitates unrelated bone marrow transplantation. This role means that the ABMDR has access to a large biospecimen repository, therefore making it a highly valuable research resource. Recognising the potential value of these biospecimens for research purposes, the ABMDR is in the process of determining whether, and how, to share its biospecimens with other biobanks. While this would undoubtedly be of value to the scientific community, and ultimately to the wider community, it would also inevitably transform the role of an institution whose primary role is therapeutic, and would compromise the degree of control that a custodian has over donated material. This article describe the challenges confronting the ABMDR, and organisations like it, in balancing their duties to donors, patients, researchers and the general public. These problems have led inevitably to the use of "property" rights language in the discussion of these issues but notions of gift, ownership, trusteeship and transfer might also be considered.

English in the urban environment : resources for 21st century readers

Where teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) once observed a paucity of authentic language input, public displays of written English are now proliferating. Ideas for capitalising on this abundance can be drawn from two strands of pedagogic thought: a psycholinguistic approach to conventional literacy long established in foreign, second and first language education (e.g., Teng, 2009), and a more recent and critical approach informed by diverse theoretical understandings of the ‘linguistic landscape’ (e.g., Rowland, 2013). In this paper I draw from these two approaches to suggest ways of helping EFL learners use environmental print to develop knowledge and skills required of English readers in the twenty-first century: (1) fluency in breaking the codes of English and other languages of publicly displayed text; (2) facility with making meaning as the English of these texts becomes ever more diverse in cultural, historical and contextual implication; (3) use of environmental English in contexts that range from the local to the transnational; and (4) critique of the presence of English and attendant worldviews in the urban environment (Chern & Dooley, forthcoming). The psychological concept of motivation and the complementary sociological concept of investment are at the heart of my deliberations here: realisation of the pedagogic potential of environmental print to develop literate resources requires consideration of sources of motivation in the classroom learning situation (Dörnyei & Ushioda, 2011), as well as learner investment in literate practices in English (Norton, 2010).

Using cost-effective multimedia to create engaging learning experiences : Resources Manual

A guide to utilising multi-media for teaching and learning.

Boken, berättelsen, pengarna I den digitala tidsåldern [The book, the story and the money in the digital age]

År 2012 är distribution av litteratur via internet inte längre en framtidsvision, utan ett etablerat format vid sidan av traditionella format som exempelvis pocketboken, den inbundna boken och ljudboken (AAP 2011; Amazon 2011; PaidContent 2011). Men den digitala tekniken etablerar inte enbart ett nytt format, utan förändrar också grundförutsättningarna för litterära konstformer och marknader. Detta kapitel behandlar en betydelsefull aspekt av denna förändring, nämligen hur den digitala tekniken påverkar relationen mellan läsare och författare och ökar läsarens inflytande över den kreativa processen. I den digitala tidsåldern är det möjligt att skapa berättelser online i en interaktiv process som involverar både läsare och författare. Kapitlet presenterar modeller för hur sådan “samproducerad e-litteratur” förändrar marknaden för litteratur och hur den påverkar den traditionella litteraturen.

The Limited Benefit of Prison in Controlling Crime : On the Threshold of a Political Shift

In 2012 the New Zealand government spent $3.4 billion, or nearly $800 per person, on responses to crime via the justice system. Research shows that much of this spending does little to reduce the changes of re-offending. Relatively little money is spent on victims, the rehabilitation of offenders or to support the families of offenders. This book is based on papers presented at the Costs of Crime forum held by the Institute of Policy Studies in February 2011. It presents lessons from what is happening in Australia, Britain and the United States and focuses on how best to manage crime, respond to victims, and reduce offending in a cost-effective manner in a New Zealand context. It is clear that strategies are needed that are based on better research and a more informed approach to policy development. Such strategies must assist victims constructively while also reducing offending. Using public resources to lock as many people in our prisons as possible cannot be justified by the evidence and is fiscally unsustainable; nor does such an approach make society safer. To reduce the costs of crime we need to reinvest resources in effective strategies to build positive futures for those at risk and the communities needed to sustain them.

Primary control level of parallel distributed energy resources converters in system of multiple interconnected autonomous microgrids within self-healing networks

To minimise the number of load sheddings in a microgrid (MG) during autonomous operation, islanded neighbour MGs can be interconnected if they are on a self-healing network and an extra generation capacity is available in the distributed energy resources (DER) of one of the MGs. In this way, the total load in the system of interconnected MGs can be shared by all the DERs within those MGs. However, for this purpose, carefully designed self-healing and supply restoration control algorithm, protection systems and communication infrastructure are required at the network and MG levels. In this study, first, a hierarchical control structure is discussed for interconnecting the neighbour autonomous MGs where the introduced primary control level is the main focus of this study. Through the developed primary control level, this study demonstrates how the parallel DERs in the system of multiple interconnected autonomous MGs can properly share the load of the system. This controller is designed such that the converter-interfaced DERs operate in a voltage-controlled mode following a decentralised power sharing algorithm based on droop control. DER converters are controlled based on a per-phase technique instead of a conventional direct-quadratic transformation technique. In addition, linear quadratic regulator-based state feedback controllers, which are more stable than conventional proportional integrator controllers, are utilised to prevent instability and weak dynamic performances of the DERs when autonomous MGs are interconnected. The efficacy of the primary control level of the DERs in the system of multiple interconnected autonomous MGs is validated through the PSCAD/EMTDC simulations considering detailed dynamic models of DERs and converters.

An examination of the critical resources and internet capabilities for leveraging global performance in international entrepreneurial firms

This PhD research investigates the critical resources and Internet capabilities utilized by firms for leveraging global performance in entrepreneurial firms. Firm resources have been identified as important firm assets, which contribute to the firm's competitive global position. The Internet is a critical resource for a new generation of small and medium sized enterprise (SME) in pursuing international opportunities. By facilitating international business, the Internet has the ability to increase the quality and speed of communications, lower transaction costs, and facilitate the development of networks. Despite the increasing numbers of firms utilizing the Internet to pursue international opportunities, limited research remains. Adopting multiple case study methodology and structural equation modelling, the research identified the firm-level resources, which coincide with capabilities in a model predicting how international performance in firms is achieved.

Genomic resources notes accepted 1 December 2013 - 31 January 2014

This article documents the public availability of (i) transcriptome sequence data, assembled and annotated contigs and unigenes, and BLAST hits from the Queensland fruit fly, Bactrocera tryoni; (ii) 75 single-nucleotide variants (SNVs) from 454 sequencing of reduced representation libraries for Phalangiidae harvestmen, Megabunus armatus, Megabunus vignai, Megabunus lesserti, and Rilaena triangularis; and (iii) expressed sequence tags from 454 sequencing of the lepidopterans Lymantria dispar and Lymantria monacha.