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Portrait of Wayne Chamley for the Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants oral history project [picture].
No full textAcquired in digital format; access copy available online.; Part of the collection: Portraits taken during interviews for the Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants oral history project.; Title devised by cataloguer.; Mode of access: online.; Wayne Chamley interviewed by Madonna Grehan for the Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants oral history project; Located at; National Library of Australia Oral History collection ORAL TRC 6200/138
Still waiting for the detailed plan
No full textThe policies needed to underpin water savings in the Murray-Darling Basin still haven\u27t been announced, writes WAYNE CHAMLEY
IN MID AUGUST the Water Bill 2007 was passed by federal parliament. The legislation proposes new management powers and statutory arrangements over the Murray-Darling Basin, as well as new roles for the Bureau of Meteorology and the Australian Competition and Consumer Council.
The environment and water minister, Malcolm Turnbull, claims that the legislation is necessary to enable the commonwealth government to implement the prime minister’s ten-point National Plan for Water Security, which was supported by the governments of Queensland, NSW and South Australia. The government of Victoria has always been opposed to the plan and has yet to indicate whether it will challenge the new legislation in the High Court of Australia.
Even today very little detailed information is available about the government’s intentions, beyond what was released by the prime minister when he launched the plan in January this year. Other data about water in the Murray-Darling Basin has been published by the consultants CapitalAG, who were engaged by the Murray-Darling Basin Commission some five years ago to provide detailed options for making water savings. It’s interesting to compare the consultant’s published data and the information in the prime minister’s plan.
Essentially the actions proposed in the prime minister’s plan aim to achieve an increase in water efficiency within the Murray-Darling Basin in four sectors of agricultural production: pastures, cotton, cereals and rice. These sectors account for about 93 per cent of the area irrigated and 92 per cent of all the water used in the basin. In 1999-2000 this was about 9000 billion litres of surface water and 2000 billion litres of groundwater.
Using Australian Bureau of Statistics data and mathematical modelling, the consultants identified substantial potential water savings if four actions were taken across the basin:
Low-cost, on-farm investments: These investments would aim to lift a substantial number of irrigators to world best practice. If just 50 per cent of the irrigators adopted new practices over ten years, the saved surface water would be around 900 billion litres. Changes in irrigators’ practices would be brought about through their participation in activities such as online education, TAFE courses and mentoring; ramping up advisory services about irrigation; and demonstration farms, field days and a yearly program of farm tours. While not costed in detail, if between 500 million were allocated then the unit cost for the expected water savings would be between 500 per million litres.
High-cost, on-farm investments: This action requires investment in available technologies, as well as an ability and interest by the user in operating the technology to get maximum performance. The consultants calculated that if 50 per cent of the irrigators adopted this scenario, the saved surface water would be about 1240 billion litres.
The prime minister’s plan indicates that this action or something close to it will be promoted. But the plan does not make clear who will pay for the technologies and how irrigators will be educated about their use. No estimate is given for the number of irrigators who must make these investments so that the water savings are realised. It so happens that the figure for saved water in the prime minister’s plan (1200 billion litres) is very close to the figure calculated by the consultants (1240 billion litres).
In the Murray-Darling Basin there are 20,884 farms involved with irrigated crops and pasture. Although water-saving technologies have been available for at least twenty years, only about 15 per cent of all the irrigators in Australia use them. Government ministers and bureaucrats are being very optimistic if they believe that over ten years or so, some 10,000 farmers are suddenly going to go “high tech”.
Refurbishing and modernising irrigation infrastructure: The consultant’s report and the prime minister’s plan are in agreement on this proposed action. From the consultant’s work it can be calculated that moving from an average water loss figure of 25 per cent to 20 per cent will achieve a water saving of about 300 GL, and that savings double with every further 5 per cent reduction in water loss. Reducing losses from say 25 per cent to 10 per cent would therefore save about 1200 billion litres. The prime minister’s plan identifies an investment of 2000 per million litres saved.
Getting the policy settings right: This scenario is the least developed by the consultants and will usually turn out to be the most dangerous for any government. What is required here is a major change in government policies and, as a consequence, practices both on and off the farm. Policy changes would have to be linked to major structural change in some sectors of the irrigation industry and the government would have to be prepared to:
• close off taxation loopholes and regulate some forms of corporate investment,
• clarify the national objectives in relation to trading in water entitlements,
• inquire into the introduction of differential water pricing,
• link taxation incentives to environmental targets and objectives,
• define the opportunities for legitimate carbon emissions trading by rural enterprises,
• overall, present a better policy environment which provides greater investment security.
The prime minister’s plan avoids any mention of policy changes and instead proposes a buy-back of over-allocated water entitlements. It can be expected that most of this proposed purchasing will go on in NSW, if irrigators agree to sell. The target must be about 300 billion litres and this action is costed at 10,000 per million litres.
As with all behavior change, the extent of the savings realised will depend on the level of participation and the degree of compliance, as well as the dollars that might have to be spent by the irrigators, in addition to the proposed government spending. Whether all of this achieves any level of water security remains to be seen. •
Wayne Chamley works as a consultant in the areas of environment and health. He is a member of the Watermark Australia Project and co-author of its report, Our Water Mark: Australians Making a Difference in Water Reform.
Photo: Susie Harders/iStockphoto.co
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
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