1,720,976 research outputs found
Our smallest recession, our weakest recovery. Has Australia's potential growth rate shrunk?
No full textReserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens seems to think we should expect lower long-term growth, writes Tim Colebatch. What do the figures say
Fair enough? Watchdog acts for small changes
No full textTim Colebatch of The Age, comments on the review of the Fair Work Act.
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The review of the Fair Work Act had just two terms of reference. First, is the act operating as intended? And second, are there areas where it could be improved, "consistent with the objects of the legislation"?
Those are modest terms of reference. And it is no surprise that the review has proposed only modest changes to our workplace rules. Yes, it found, by and large, the act is operating as intended, but some minor changes would improve it.
Business, naturally, wanted big changes. WorkChoices was a blueprint that suited its needs, giving it flexibility at the cost of its workers. The Fair Work Act was meant to change that balance, and has. Business wants to change it back.
AdvertisemenFor some, it is about survival. The high dollar has turned sound businesses into marginal or unprofitable ones. At some, the workers and unions understand this. At others, they don\u27t.
For other employers, the laws create frustration. WorkChoices allowed them to lean on workers to accept individual agreements dictated by the company. The Fair Work Act instead pushes them towards collective bargaining. It allows unions to raise more issues — including management policies such as hiring contract labour — and gives them more freedom to push them.
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Image: Flickr / Chris Mar
 
Tax: what are the options?
No full textThe government faces a paradox, writes Tim Colebatch. It needs to stop the tax debate from running out of control but that means making unpopular decisions.
Malcolm Turnbull’s honeymoon with the Australian electorate has felt like a liberation; but it can’t last forever. His government, rightly, has allowed the tax debate to roam far and wide. But that freedom has allowed different interest groups to build up hopes and expectations that can’t be reconciled. The government must soon assert control by defining its goals – and once it does, it will start bleeding support.
Perhaps it has already begun doing so. Last week’s annual conference on economic and social reform hosted by the Australian and the Melbourne Institute (the economic think tank of the University of Melbourne) heard treasurer Scott Morrison insist that the government would not be using tax reform to increase revenue, a position he has since repeated. If so, then the government has already ruled out using net gains from tax reform to reduce its own deficit. That is worrying, when 10 it spends is being funded by borrowing; and the Coalition promised us at the 2013 election that it would close that gap…
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New Zealand’s conservatives take on disadvantage
No full textThe NZ government sees economic as well as social benefits in breaking cycles of poverty and imprisonment. Although the policy has its critics, it’s worth watching, writes Tim Colebatch.
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Imagine a country in which a government of the centre-right decided to make it a top priority to tackle inherited disadvantage. Where much of its limited new spending is devoted to “social investment” to reduce deprivation and increase workforce participation. And where it’s chalking up impressive results.
You don’t have to go far to find it – just across the Tasman. Taking on disadvantage is rarely a priority for conservative governments, but it has become an increasingly important theme of the second and third terms of the National Party government under prime minister John Key.
Last week finance minister Bill English took it further, bringing down a budget in which generally tight control of government spending contrasted sharply with increased welfare payments aimed at reducing the number of children growing up in hardship, especially among the least well-off New Zealanders (largely Maori), who are dependent on welfare, and often in and out of jail
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe 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
Full text link“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
Full text linkWe 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
Full text linkWe 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
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