1,720,957 research outputs found
The entitlement of age
Get PDFThis paper argues that Australia\u27s current retirement income system is inadequate for meeting the longevity challenge, does not allow people to sufficiently manage longevity risk, and promotes financial inequality.
Introduction
Out of the myriad of issues that relate to increased life expectancy and ageing, money looms large. Will people have sufficient private savings to stretch across longer lives? Will governments be able to pay for rising health and welfare expenditure? The prevailing feeling is of uncertainty, not least because people recognise that they are likely to live longer, but also because they don’t have a gauge of just how long tha t is likely to be.
This report is concerned with incomes in later life and securing a minimum baseline standard of living for people in that phase. It stems from a normative position that all people in our society are entitled to a good quality of life across longer lives, with a minimum income that keeps them out of poverty.
Australians are living much longer than either they or the policy-makers ever contemplated. Not a couple of years longer, but whole decades longer. Private savings and public benefits have to stretch further.
For some Australians the prospect of longer lives won’t matter too much. They will float along into retirement as if nothing much changed; their lives will look much the same as they did before. In fact, from their vantage point things look very good indeed.
For a whole other group of Australians, the changing conditions are keenly felt. Although the social compact promised them a decent standard of living across their lives, things just didn’t work out that way.
This class of Australians is the most financially vulnerable in later years. They are the women who have had children, carers, the long-term unemployed and those who are in part-time, casual or contract work. Their income has been patchy and, when they are earning, it is often below the average wage, meaning that their superannuation payments are sporadic and low. At various times during their lives they have been paid no superannuation at all. They are the people who are more likely to have rented property rather than being homeowners and, while they would have liked to have worked into their 60s or later, they struggle to retain or find work.
Unsurprisingly, the amount of superannuation savings which this section of society retires on is not enough to provide an adequate standard of living. Even when you take into consideration that the superannuation system will mature and private savings will accrue across whole working lives, the nature of their circumstances during working life prevents them from saving enough.
The result of inadequate private savings is a lower standard of living. But what does this mean in human terms, in the experience of everyday life? It means putting on the heater for only an hour a day in the middle of winter. It means saying no to the invitation to go out for dinner, or to see a film. It means only buying meat or fish once a month. It means putting off that doctor’s appointment, again.
This paper argues that the current retirement income system is inadequate to meet the longevity challenge. It does not allow people to sufficiently manage longevity risk and it promotes financial inequality. It is manifestly unfair that people who do not need public money should receive it, through either the age pension or superannuation tax concessions, when others who are more needy are struggling.
So, what of it? What does it matter that certain people have less in retirement, when these are the same people who are most likely to have had less all their lives? It matters because our retirement income system was established so that all Australians would have enough for a modest standard of living in retirement.
It matters that the system is not fulfilling its aims. A second reason, which informs the former, is that there is a moral basis for saying that vulnerable people should be able to live their later years with a decent standard of living. This is a question of ensuring that all people age with dignity
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
The head, the heart & the house: health, care and quality of life
No full textThis paper recommends a government reimbursement scheme for home retrofits.
Executive summary
This is a paper about older Australians and their homes. Homes are bricks and mortar and more. What they are and what they represent is not sufficiently captured by the labels “primary residence” or “owner-occupied dwellings.” It is only when we understand this that we can develop policies around housing for later life.
The starting point is to let go of the idea that rational policies and financial incentives are the only way to influence older people about where and how to live. This approach has not worked.
In a kind of rational policy nirvana older people might all downsize and ‘free up’ housing for younger generations. However the reality is that many people, particularly current older cohorts, will choose to age in their current homes for a variety of reasons.
We therefore need a policy mix that adapts the current housing stock to longer lives while also developing new housing, particularly for the vulnerable aged.
Per Capita recommends a government reimbursement scheme for home retrofits. Based on our research on the psychology around housing, and lessons we have learned from behavioural economics, we recommend that the government assists people to plan for later life housing (‘Living Plans’). The government should also invest in a review of previous initiatives such as the Housing Help for Seniors Pilot Scheme with a set of questions on the psychological impediments to uptake.
In the area of technology, the government should invest in research about the ways that technological innovations can be promoted, marketed and implemented so people can live better at home. We also recommend that the new Home Care Packages (HCPs) be evaluated to include a qualitative assessment of technology people have taken up as part of the scheme.
Wealthier Australians should contribute more to their own care through the use of home equity. We recommend a modification to the Pension Loans Scheme for this purpose, whereby people with wealth over a certain threshold make a greater contribution to their care via a loan against their property. We also recommend that people working in the aged care field have mandated higher training and education levels, and better pay conditions. All aged care workers should have to undertake a minimum level of education such as the Certificate III in Aged Care, with compulsory units in gerontology and dementia built into that course.
Finally, it is self-evident that the home cannot be a place which gives you any quality of life if you don’t have one. Anglicare research has shown that only 6% of Australian rentals are affordable and appropriate for couples on the age pension; this goes down to 1.5% for single pensioners. We propose that housing bonds be used to develop affordable renting housing stock, designed using the Liveable Housing Design Guidelines. We also recommend socially inclusive planning schemes and a review of the adequacy of Commonwealth Rent Assistance for the vulnerable aged. These recommendations relate to current older cohorts but are also very relevant for future generations of older Australians, given the declining rates of home ownership
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